The Early Word: Three firings and a Shelby Farms buffalo origin story
Monday greetings, Memphis. It’s March 31, and the Shelby County Commission will be talking about ethics, xAI’s gas turbines, the proposed state takeover of Memphis-Shelby County Schools and more.
Tonight, the Taylor Jenkins-less Memphis Grizzlies play the Boston Celtics. (More on that Jenkins stuff below.) For a look ahead, check out This Week in Memphis.
Memphis Grizzlies head coach Taylor Jenkins was fired on Friday, with just nine games left in the regular season. Grizzlies players were apparently just as shocked by the news as everyone else, and Memphis Grizzlies general manager Zach Kleiman later said the decision was “mine and mine only.”
Jenkins wasn’t the only big name fired last week. The Memphis Area Transit Authority confirmed Friday that former interim CEO Bacarra Mauldin has been fired, three weeks after being put on leave for questionable charges on her company credit card. The suspicious charges on her company card totaled $144,000 and included transactions on Paypal and Venmo, Amazon and Best Buy. And it turns out this wasn’t the first time Mauldin has been fired from a transit agency.
This must be the “you’re fired” edition of The Early Word, because here’s another story about a termination. Reagan Fondren, acting U.S. Attorney for Western District of Tennessee and a Biden Administration appointee, was fired last Thursday in a one-line email from the White House. President Donald Trump announced the next day that veteran federal prosecutor Joe Murphy will be appointed to the interim role. Murphy is no stranger to the office; he served in the same interim role in February 2021. As for Fondren, her firing was handled differently than with past acting U.S. attorneys who were let go.
If you’ve ever wondered why there are buffalo in Shelby Farms Park (and haven’t we all?), you’ll want to read the latest story in our Ask the Memphian series. In it, our own Jody Callahan shares the tale of how a safari park offloaded its bonus buffalo (which are actually bison, but who’s counting?) in one of the largest urban parks in the U.S. Back then, the buffalo were kept behind a flimsy fence, so it’s no surprise that one got out and chased down a runner one day. Thankfully, that runner lived to tell the tale.
Plus, the City of Memphis is spending big on contracts, the Showboats are off to a slow start and we look at why it takes so long to open a restaurant.
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Bianca Phillips
Bianca Phillips is a Northeast Arkansas native and longtime Memphian who’s worked in local journalism and PR for more than 20 years. In her days as a reporter, she covered everything from local government and crime to LGBTQ issues and the arts. She’s the author of “Cookin Crunk: Eatin’ Vegan in the Dirty South,” a cookbook of vegan Southern recipes.
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