Conaway: A life chock-full
On Saturday, there will be a memorial service for Norman Blackley – “Cap” to so many – at the Memphis Botanic Garden. The place will be chock-full of stories. And gratitude.
Dan Conaway
Columnist
Dan Conaway is a lifelong Memphian, fascinated and frustrated with his city, but still in love. A columnist since 2010, his distinguished advertising career has branded ribs in the Rendezvous and ducks in The Peabody, pandas in the zoo and Grizzlies in the NBA. Stories in Memphis tend to write themselves. He’s helped a few along. Two book collections of his columns have been published.
There are 321 articles by Dan Conaway :
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January 2020
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Bonds and toilet seats
A University of Tennessee fraternity brother invited me to lunch the other day, he said, to share my experience writing a column with his son. Instead, he turned to me and opened with, “Tell him the toilet seat story.”
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Christmas was a piece of cake
This is about respect for time-honored process in a short-cut world, about pride in completion, about creating something for others. As chef Hallie said, “Baking is hard.”
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Dan ConawayConaway: The us of us
We contain multitudes.
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December 2019
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Dan Conaway Conaway: There is space for hope at the zoo
The zoo parking versus Overton Park Greensward debate has come full circle in four years. Now the bulldozers and chainsaws – along with the fate of 200 trees – are on hold.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Christmas time
In a small town outside of London, in a pub known only to locals, I found myself standing next to someone I was in the third grade with at Memphis State Training School.
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Dan ConawayConaway: Promise
This is and always has been a city of promise, and a city that fails to live up to it time and time again.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Another one lost, with none to lose
A tribute to one of the great guys: The ones who knew you – not just your political beliefs or your fandom or your kids’ names or your tells in a poker game – you.
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November 2019
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Guest Columnists Conaway: Look for the wonder. Repeat
My family has been visited by death, near death and deadly threat, by deceit and heartbreak, ... But we’ve also been visited by each other, by shared experience and gained appreciation, by children and grandchildren, by a lot of friends and a lot of delightful silliness.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: A few more of us
Here are a handful of Memphians who've altered our music, our food, our landscape and the game of golf.
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Dan ConawayConaway: A few of us
What these people have in common is Memphis – a place from which seemingly ordinary people send extraordinary things to the world.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: A taxing lesson
On Oct. 3, we voted in a half percent sales tax increase, raising our sales tax to nearly 10%. The police and fire unions campaigned to get the issue on the ballot, promising to restore benefits cut in 2014, but other city employees would be cut out of the tax increase windfall.
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Dan ConawayConaway: They took his balls; we’d like them back
When they were building FedExForum, they had to put up protective bollards around the plaza, and Andy Dolich came up with the idea of painted balls: basketballs, baseballs, tennis balls, soccer balls.
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October 2019
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Dan Conaway Conaway: New incentive, old-school pork
Raymond James, headquartered in St. Petersburg, gets in a fight with their landlord Jacob Sofer, headquartered in New York, over elevators in their Downtown Memphis office building, and the next thing you know, EDGE has given Raymond James $3,238,440 of your and my money to move to East Memphis.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: A note on my birthday
A conversation on a library loading dock between two Memphians inspires thoughts on the 'different cities in the same city.'
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Read local
Kroger serves as a good corporate citizen in its many communities, and its generous support of the Mid-South Food Bank here is one example. However, Kroger can be truly tone deaf about truly local connections.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Your papers?
How many of the people around me in waiting rooms at the driver’s center and the SSA office can find all the things they need to get their driver’s licenses, or their benefits, or the REAL ID required by October of 2020?
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September 2019
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Dan Conaway Conaway: It’s all connected
Now United Way requires the agencies it funds to connect with each other, and to guarantee that connection in their funding requests. In turn, United Way nurtures and facilitates those connections.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Facing Shelby County’s infamous history of lynching
As people are being shot while shopping and praying and driving because of what they might or might not believe, or just because of what they look like, it serves us well to remember that we have plenty of homegrown terrorism in our history.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: A Memphis life, saved in India
This country has the best medical care in the world, and only money and insurance makes it readily available, with few and far-between exceptions like St. Jude.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: The extraordinary ordinary
Finches in a Memphis bird feeder conjure memories of a trip years ago to Alaska.
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Dan ConawayConaway: The Tasteful List 2019
A Memphian’s ninth annual list of his favorite local dishes.
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August 2019
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Hope in place
The poet, farmer and environmental activist Wendell Berry understood that our hope is founded in our place.
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Spirit of Memphis Conaway: Memphis still amazes. It just amazed me.
A tour bus of folks from Toledo hits the highlights: from the site of the first Piggly Wiggly, to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, to The Peabody. A Memphian along for the ride finds fresh cause for wonder.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Building better boxes
We are just a president’s cruel tweet away from Baltimore, a look in the mirror at a majority-minority city reclaiming its historic buildings, its downtown swimming in development and promise while the city struggles with how to share that promise with so many drowning in poverty.
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