MID-SOUTH MEMORIES
25 years ago — 1997
In the historic spot where Pee Wee’s Saloon once stood, it’s said that ghosts wander the halls. Not anymore. Now it’s the spirit of rock and roll. The Hard Rock Café opened its famous doors last week on Beale Street and celebrated Sunday with a double-bill extravaganza that included a free rock concert outside and an invitation-only party inside. The $75 per ticket party benefited the National Civil Rights Museum and the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.
50 years ago — 1972
Plans for an estimated $62 million enclosed shopping mall stretching along Interstate 240 between Getwell and Perkins were announced yesterday by developers Stanley H. Trezevant Jr. and James C. Bridger. Shopping-center zoning for the 90-acre project south of the expressway and Nonconnah Creek was requested from the Memphis and Shelby County Planning Commission. If approved as planned, the mall would become the largest of three such commercial facilities in the city.
75 years ago — 1947
JERUSALEM – Five hundred Jewish illegal immigrants managed to slip through the British blockade Saturday night in a sailing schooner disguised as a fishing boat, it was disclosed Sunday, but another group of 794 aboard a second vessel was intercepted at sea and deported to Cyprus. The refugees beached their small, jam-packed craft on the Palestine shore just north of the Jewish colony at Nahariya, five miles south of the Lebanese border.
100 years ago — 1922
“Start your fund with this $20,” said a friend of the Memphis Zoo to Wayne Cullen, who is in charge of the big animal family in Overton Park yesterday when he was told that the bargain of the zoo’s lifetime is awaiting it in the east. So today, but $680 is needed to complete the sum that will provide a pair of mandrills, rare red, white and blue-faced monkeys, one big drill, a brother to the baboon, and a fine collection of variegated curasaws. Ellis S. Josephs, the noted African and Asiatic animal trader and connoisseur, will be in Memphis tomorrow.
125 years ago — 1897
The meeting of citizens held for the purpose of considering plans for sewering the outlying suburbs of Memphis, which assembled in the Cotton Exchange directors’ room Saturday afternoon, will again consider the matter in hand today. At the first meeting, the conference appointed a committee of citizens and lawyers to look into ways and means of bringing the outlying suburbs into the city for the purpose of sewering them and putting them in a better sanitary condition, and instructed it to report to the meeting this afternoon.