At 8:00, we all boarded the bus for a full day tour of Memphis.As we started out, Joyce McBride, who is from Tennessee, gave us a narration about all of the well-known businesses that originated in Tennessee, At the conclusion, she handed everyone a mini Moon Pie!
At 8:15, we stopped at the Welcome Centre and picked up a tour guide who took us along Adams Avenue which is in the Victorian Village District. We passed by several beautiful mansions. One was the Mallory-Neely House which was built around 1852 in the Italianate style as an early Victorian villa.
At 9:00 we arrived at Sun Studio for a personal tour. Sun Studio is a recording studio opened by rock-and-roll pioneer Sam Phillips at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis on January 3, 1950. It was originally called Memphis Recording Service, sharing the same building with the Sun Records label business.
Our young tour guide was very energetic and knowledgeable. He explained how the first recording of Elvis was made by Marion Keisker, who was Sam's secretary. (Sam was away at the time!) And the rest is history!
On December 4, 1956 an impromptu jam session among Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash took place at Sun Studio. During the session Phillips spotted an opportunity for some publicity and called a local newspaper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Bob Johnson, the newspaper’s entertainment editor, came over to the studio accompanied by a UPI representative named Leo Soroca and a photographer.The following day, an article, written by Johnson about the session, was published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar under the title "Million Dollar Quartet". The article contained the now-famous photograph of Presley seated at the piano surrounded by Lewis, Perkins and Cash. Then we were back on the bus, and toured the waterfront, passing by the Hotel Chiska, where Dewey Phillips broadcast Elvis' first recording. Calls and telegrams flooded the studio as Dewey blasted Elvis over the airwaves repeatedly that evening, introducing the soon-to-be megastar to Memphis and forever changing modern American music.
Our next stop was the Peabody Hotel, to see the Peabody Ducks Parade. Back in the 1930's Frank Schutt, General Manager of the Peabody, and a friend, Chip Barwick, returned from a weekend hunting trip to Arkansas. The men had a little too much Tennessee sippin' whiskey and thought it would be funny to place some of their live duck decoys (it was legal to use live decoys) in the beautiful Peabody fountain. Three small English call ducks were selected as "guinea pigs" , and the reaction was nothing short of enthusiastic. Thus became a Peabody tradition which was to become internationally famous.
We went up to the roof to see where the ducks live in their "castle" . Can you believe that???
When "off duty", the ducks live in their Royal Duck Palace on the hotel's rooftop. The $200,000 structure is made of marble and glass and features its very own fountain with a bronze duck spitting water. It also includes a small house- a replica of the hotel - where ducks can nest with a soft, grassy "front yard"
Then it was on to the St. Jude Pavilion.
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, founded in 1962, is a pediatric treatment and research facility focused on children's catastrophic diseases, particularly leukemia and other cancers. The hospital costs about $2.4 million a day to run, and there is no cost to the patient to be treated It is located in Memphis, and is a nonprofit medical corporation. All medically eligible patients who are accepted for treatment at St. Jude are treated without regard to the family's ability to pay. St. Jude is one of a few pediatric research organizations in the United States where families never pay for treatments that are not covered by insurance, and families without insurance are never asked to pay. In addition to providing medical services to eligible patients, St. Jude also assists families with transportation, lodging, and meals. Three separate specially-designed patient housing facilities— Tri Delta Place for short-term (up to one week), Ronald McDonald House for medium-term (one week to 3 months), and Target House for long-term (3 months or more)—provide housing for patients and up to three family members, with no cost to the patient. These policies, along with research expenses and other costs, cause the hospital to incur more than $2.4 million in operating costs each day.
After that thought-provoking visit, we passed by the "Pyramid" which was originally built for
basketball, but is now a huge Bass Pro Shop.
The Memphis Pyramid has not been regularly used as a sports or entertainment venue since 2004. In 2015, the Pyramid re-opened as a Bass Pro Shops "megastore", which includes shopping, a hotel, restaurants, a bowling alley, and an archery range, with an outdoor observation deck adjacent to its apex. The Pyramid was built in 1991. Is 321 feet (98 m) , 32 stories tall and has base sides of 591 feet (180 m)
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| Patiently waiting? |
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| The spread |
Our last stop of the day was at the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. We toured the National Civil Rights Museum, which is a complex of museums and historic buildings; its exhibits trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the 17th century to the present. The museum is built around the former Lorraine Motel, which was the site of the assassination of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Thus ended a very busy day!
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