History and legend can inform the present.

At the beginning of my career, the little ad agency I worked for pitched and won the Memphis Chamber of Commerce account.

Their office was in a Downtown hotel.

City of Memphis wants to buy Downtown Sheraton for $22M

The next year, 1974, I did a radio campaign based on a jingle for a sandwich. Easily the most famous campaign of my career, “two all-beef patties” was how it started, and before it was over, people across the country were singing and saying it.

Many of you reading this can recite the ingredients of a Big Mac to this day. Many of you are also probably wondering why I haven’t done anything that famous since. Me, too.

The first radio spot in that campaign, which featured Memphians of all kinds and colors trying to say what’s in a Big Mac in four seconds or less, was 60 seconds long. It had 32 spliced edits in it. Each one involved a razor blade and tape.

That spot and all the spots in that campaign were created at a radio station in the basement of that same Downtown hotel. The radio station, WREC-AM 680, shared the basement with the CBS affiliate, WREC-TV (now WREG-TV), Channel 3.

Just a year later, I saw several mice run across the floor during a lunch meeting in that hotel. At another meeting, one corner of a raised dais collapsed, sliding several people off the end like losers in a dunk tank.

Why the City of Memphis is trying to buy a hotel

Rather than fix the beautiful but inoperable marble drinking fountains, the hotel’s owner simply installed cheap metal drinking fountains next to them on the wall beneath flaking paint. The Chamber was gone by that time, as were the radio and TV stations, as were the guests, as was the hotel’s storied reputation.

The Downtown hotel closed. The mice remained. Downtown itself was on a downhill slide like the people on the end of that dais.

The Downtown hotel was The Peabody Memphis, and the owner and the soiled flag was Sheraton.

Déjà vu, anybody?