With the end of football season and the beginning of colder weather, there began to be announcements of indoor events and parties. Bartlett High School really didn't have fraternities and sororities, but there were social clubs, not officially recognized by the school, but rather known in the rural Black communities. One of them, the Guys and Dolls, announced a party to be held at Jessie Yancey's house on November 18th after the first basketball game of the season against Raleigh-Egypt. Jessie's sister Tammy was a member of the club, and I would have liked to have attended, but I didn't have transportation out there. A week later, a club called the Sophisticated Gents announced a party to be held on Ellis Road, and that one I did make it to. About 100 people attended, and it had really just started to jump off when I had to leave at midnight, and a lot of my friends were there, including Rhonda Holloway, LaGrant Kearney, Freida Cross, Randy Mickens, Junior Becton, Earnest Greenleaf and Vicki McCrary. That was the earliest occasion I can remember being aware of K-97 radio station in Memphis. I know it existed before that, but I don't recall knowing about it before that.
November also brought an end to the Memphis Press-Scimitar, our city's venerable afternoon newspaper. I had been faithfully keeping up with our Bartlett Panthers football team in both the morning Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar, and was shocked and saddened by the sudden closure. Little did I know back then that afternoon papers were failing from one end of the country to the other. The advent of radio news and television news was making newspapers seem old and obsolete. Yet newspapers made people dig deeper and think harder about events than the fast-paced shallowness of TV news. Nowadays, we can get headline news 24 hours a day from cable sources. But we are all a little poorer and more ignorant from the transition.
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