Conaway: The extraordinary ordinary
Finches in a Memphis bird feeder conjure memories of a trip years ago to Alaska.
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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September 2019
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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: 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: 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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October 2019
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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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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: 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: 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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November 2019
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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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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: 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 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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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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December 2019
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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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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: 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 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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January 2020
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Dan ConawayConaway: The us of us
We contain multitudes.
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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 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: 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.
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February 2020
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Spirit of Memphis Conaway: An architect gives Memphis shape, from AutoZone Park to FedExForum
You may not think you know Rob Norcross, but you do. He was the architect for the most acclaimed minor league ballpark in the country, and for the home of grit and grind.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: The mean in Tennessee is mean
It’s just flat mean of the Tennessee Legislature to continue to deny even basic health insurance to some 300,000 working Tennesseans just to make a political point.
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Dan Conaway Conaway: Two cities, one beat
“Memphis has always been racially-fractured, and I don’t know where we’d be without the greatest duct tape and Gorilla Glue in the world ... music.”
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Dan ConawayConaway: Wolfschmidt and a lifetime
My second date with Nora Ballenger was a college rush party in 1967 at the top of the King Cotton Hotel, where the Raymond James/TBD building stands today. Accompanying us was a bottle of Wolfschmidt Vodka. Nora drank Tab. I drank the Wolfschmidt. All of it.
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