MID-SOUTH MEMORIES

25 years ago — 1999

LITTLE ROCK – Arkansas senators voted Tuesday to charge drivers $1.50 to cross the Helena Bridge over the Mississippi River. The toll, charged traffic in both directions, could capture $6 million a year from Mississippi-bound gamblers and finance a new interstate highway from the Mississippi River to Brinkley.

50 years ago — 1974

In 1968 Milk Producers Inc., forerunner of the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, actively supported Hubert H. Humphrey in his bid for the presidency. Very actively, in fact. The cooperative now known as Associated Milk Producers Inc. contributed heavily to Humphrey’s campaign.

75 years ago — 1949

It’s the E.H. Crump Bridge, if a majority of the members of the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge Commission feel as they do now when the time comes to vote on the question. While State Legislatures of both Arkansas and Tennessee have adopted resolutions suggesting “Memorial Bridge” and independent groups have suggested “Robert E. Lee Bridge,” two attorneymembers of the Bridge Commission are of the opinion that naming the structure is a function of the commission.

100 years ago — 1924

Billy Sunday came to Memphis yesterday, took off his coat, broke a chair leaped upon a table, pounded the ceiling with his fist and dared the devil to seven weeks’ combat in an open field. Twenty-five thousand people crowded into the tabernacle for the first three sermons of his campaign and heard his crushing assaults on modernism, evolution, pacifism, Bolshevism, mummified churches, ecclesiastical crooks, the renaissance of jazz and junk and the general deviltry of the world.

BRAD VEST/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL March 25, 2016: Ben Young, head groundskeeper at Autozone Park, edges the outfield grass along the warning track. “We’re restricted by the weather so we can’t start until it’s nice outside,” Young said about his busy schedule preparing the field before the season.