Down, Out & About

The Blacksmith

Jim Lee explains it most eloquently: “People come to me with ideas, and I beat them into iron.” That’s what his father, who helped build the gates of Graceland, did for Elvis, and that’s what Jim Lee did for The Oxford American—used the fine and almost-forgotten craft of the blacksmith to create something lasting and beautiful.

Like Elvis, The OA needed stylish security. And like Elvis, we knew to go to a blacksmith to get it. Jim Lee happily obliged the request. On the third of October, he installed a wrought iron door to protect The OA's many trade secrets. While not as elaborate as the gates to Graceland, our new door is undeniably handsome and hefty.

The OA's entrance, of course, isn’t as sturdy as the famed Graceland portal, but it doesn’t have to be. Elvis lovers were terrifically persistent, often wielding hacksaws in the early morning hours in order to make off with durable souvenirs. Then there was the time Jerry Lee Lewis turned sour. “I guess he was going to try to whup Elvis,” Jim Lee explains. “He drove his Cadillac right through the gates. It was kind of sad, because Elvis wasn’t even home that weekend.”

Whenever Jim Lee’s father went to Graceland to repair the damaged wrought iron, fourteen-year-old Jim Lee would usually go with him. He and Elvis became friends. Elvis would invite him to go inside the manse where they would indulge a mutual passion for ice cream. They rode motorcycles together, too—Elvis, the gang of Elvis’s friends known as the Memphis Mafia, and Jim Lee.

On one occasion, Jim Lee accompanied Elvis and his date to a drive-in restaurant. The woman was the most beautiful he had ever seen, and to this day, Mr. Lee is pretty sure she was Natalie Wood. But what Mr. Lee remembers most about Elvis was his kindness and his sense of propriety. “I just saw Elvis as a nice country boy—that’s really what I think he was. Here he was, the biggest entertainer in the world, but whenever he’d come out and talk to my daddy, it would be ‘Yes sir’ and ‘No sir.’ He was always very polite and genuine.”

Such demonstrations of respect had to be important to a young Cherokee. Mr. Lee’s entire family is Native American, except for one great-grandfather who was German. A doctor and a blacksmith, he immigrated to the States and married a Cherokee. There has been a blacksmith in the family ever since. “I was born on a piece of iron,” Mr. Lee says. He smiles broadly. His eyes are narrow and playful. He is a tall man with powerful arms, high cheek bones, thin lips accentuated by a dark moustache and short black hair now peppered with gray. “My daddy taught me to be a blacksmith, but he forgot more than I’ll ever know.”

Jim Lee was born in 1945 in Cherokee, North Carolina, on the Qualla Indian Reservation. When he was five years old, the family moved to Memphis, where his father would eventually own the largest fencing company in the city. One of Mr. Lee’s great-grandfathers, a full-blooded Cherokee, worked for General Robert E. Lee as a point scout. He took Lee for a family name and died under the General’s command.

Jim Lee’s father served in World War II and was wounded near the Rhine. “My family has always been very patriotic. I was taught that this country was the greatest thing next to God.”

When Jim Lee graduated from Frazier, then a sleepy rural high school near Memphis, he joined the Air Force. The speed with which he did this is noteworthy. He walked across the stage in Ellis auditorium, shook hands with the principal, received his diploma, dumped his cap and gown into a box and loaded onto a recruit bus. That same night he arrived at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and was standing in formation by five o’clock the next morning.

Mr. Lee accomplished three tours of duty in Vietnam, operating the big machine gun on a UH 1 helicopter. The choppers were known as Hueys, and Jim Lee was a door gunner. “You sat on your helmet to keep from getting shot in the ass,” he explains. “A lot of your door gunners were Indians because Indians aren’t afraid of heights. White boys didn’t usually like being up there near that open door, but for an Indian, I don’t know, maybe it was the sense of adventure. I stayed in Vietnam as long as I could.”

He was finally sent home when his chopper went down due to enemy fire. Before troops located him, Jim Lee lay in a rice paddy for two days, his right leg riddled with shrapnel. According to the doctor who treated him after he had been found, if it had not been for the leeches that had attached themselves to arteries around the wound, he certainly would have bled to death. Every six months or so, a bit of his knee will rot, and he will have the shrapnel removed. What he finds is always surprising. He has discovered small pieces of brass, aluminum and copper. He once turned some of the metal into a ring. Mr. Lee is a blacksmith after all.

There aren’t many blacksmiths anymore. They have become as unappreciated as poor Hephaestus. When he used his unsurpassed skills as a blacksmith to ensnare his wife Aphrodite in the act of adultery, fellow Olympians only laughed at him. There were other indignities, but Hephaestus never quit his craft.

For blacksmiths—Mr. Lee refers to them sometimes as smitties—plying the trade is in the blood. It takes a long time to learn the art of metal working, and once a person has mastered it, there is always the urge to seize a piece of iron and through an intense alchemy of fire, sweat and hammering, produce a work that will endure.

Heat and beat work—that is how Mr. Lee describes the method used by blacksmiths for thousands of years. “We call it ‘heat and beat’ because you heat up the metal and beat it into the shape you want. When I was a boy working with my daddy, my job was to pump the billow—the billow forces air into the forge to keep the fire hot.

“It takes a long time to make something the old way, but it lasts. If I make a stove, it’ll weigh about five hundred pounds. One you’d buy in a store’ll weigh, maybe, a couple hundred. But my stove will outlast your house. I’ve got pictures of where houses have burned to the ground and there’s my stove, just as good as the day it was made, except the brass fixtures have melted down.’’

The difference between casting work and heat and beat work puts one in mind of the difference between a Wendy’s grilled chicken sandwich and chicken cordon bleu. In casting work, a machine pours the chosen metal into a cast, it dries, end of story. Casting work is the way of our age, and our age builds things that end up in dumpsters or in junk yards within the year. Actually, casting work will last longer than a year, but it doesn’t get Mr. Lee’s one hundred percent unconditional guarantee. “Anything I do, I guarantee forever,” as he puts it.

There’s no craftsmanship involved in casting work, either. Smitties hammer and perspire, fashioning each piece carefully, putting into every project a fair amount of heart and soul. Mr. Lee’s projects often take hundreds of hours to complete. He once crafted an elaborate headboard featuring a wrought iron peacock with its feathers spread, an effort which required 2,000 hours. And smitty hours are hot hours.

There is only one thing that has prevented hard-working, iron-willed Jim Lee from practicing his craft full time—a smallish market. But heat and beat work, he believes, is making a comeback, even if the new admirers have some peculiar notions. “Your old blacksmiths considered it a point of pride to produce a work where you couldn’t see the hammer marks. That represented great mastery. But today, people look for the hammer marks as a sign of authenticity. They want it rugged.”

Said another way, they want it rigged—faux heat and beat. Someone, somewhere, is undoubtedly at this very minute constructing a machine that will produce work which resembles the efforts of an amateur blacksmith. But every true piece of heat and beat work, rugged or not, bears the signature of the blacksmith’s style. Each smitty has his own unique touch. Two cast pieces will look identical. Two pieces made by a blacksmith will have slight variations. For a lover of true artisanship, the differences are sublime indications of the presence of the artist.

If casting is about molds and machines, heat and beat is about ideas and dreams. We are fortunate to have begun our new venture into the difficult world of magazine publishing with the help of an able blacksmith graced with the good instincts of the Native American, an enviable Southern lineage, and personal connections to the King.

 

1912 Grease

Paul writes in Philippians, “Everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” When they come out of noon mass at Sacred Heart Church in Memphis, Sonny Gower and Bob Fielder are full spiritually but physically famished. They go to Dyer’s Hamburgers on Cleveland Street to order three double doubles between them, Fritos and Cokes. A double double is a burger with double beef and double cheese. “You double up on your cholesterol,” says Mr. Gower.

The two men, in their sixties, are robust. Their arms are taut and tanned, their faces ruddy—evidence of years of labor. Mr. Gower owned a steel fabricating company much of his life; Mr. Fielder worked in the construction business. They have been customers at Dyer’s for twenty years now, making a trip every week after mass. Any superfluous visits, they confide, must be kept secret from their wives. “Guys in our age bracket have to be careful,” says Mr. Fielder.

Dyer’s, established in 1912, deep-fries its burgers in grease that reportedly has not been changed since the restaurant’s inception. “We strain it three or four times a day and change the skillet, but we don’t change the grease,” says Jeff Bradley, a part-owner of the Cleveland Street store, who manages and cooks there seven days a week. Dyer’s regulars are loyal. Some of them have been around since the ’30s, says Jeff. He insists there are men in their seventies in perfect health who were born, raised and have grown old on a Dyer’s burger a day. Jeff is twenty-four and started flipping burgers with the older men when he was sixteen. Most of the men have retired now—“I guess flipping burgers half a century is enough to make anybody tired”—and Jeff sees himself as a torchbearer. What he does, he says, he does in the name of respect for the old men like Kahn Aaron, who owned the restaurant from about 1935 to 1986, turning burgers all the while.

Jeff’s store on Cleveland is not the original Dyer’s—that restaurant stood southwest from the present location in a clearing now occupied by a Hardee’s billboard. The first Dyer’s was small, with just a counter and a few stools. Most people stood at the counter, says Mr. Gower, who used to get a burger there afternoons when he was a teenager. “Mr. Dyer had what you call a single-minded approach,” he says. All Dyer’s did then was burgers with onion and pickles on the bun—no lettuce, tomato, no fries. He did sell Cokes, though.

“I went to Catholic high school up the road, and there was the South Bowling Lanes and the pool hall, and of course, Sacred Heart, the all-girls high school,” Mr. Fielder explains. He says he and friends would devour a bagful of Dyer’s hamburgers between school and the pool hall. “With the all-girls school right there, you can imagine why we would want to stick around,” he adds. And then there were drive-ins. Dyer’s was a drive-in at one time, says Mr. Fielder, but the largest was Shoney’s. He used to take his five kids there on Tuesdays for Double Big Boy night. “That was a while back though. Now I’ve got six grandkids: five boys and one girl who’s three months. I’m the first person she ever reached for.”

“He is,” says Mr. Gower. “And when we come to Dyer’s, we talk about two things—God and our grandkids.”

The present Dyer’s is much larger than the original store but still no bigger than a two-car garage. There is a counter and stools, as well as several tables, some functional chairs and a few booths along the wall. Jeff says his mother and father helped him decorate the place. An old tin kettle sits on a shelf above the condiments, along with pieces of Mr. Dyer’s marble counter, which, at half a century old, finally broke last spring. The old skillets and spatulas hang reverently on the store’s east wall. And on the north wall, a picture of the original Dyer’s with its separate entrances for black and white customers hangs alongside portraits of the old men who used to cook there. There is also one photograph of three Shelby County deputies who in 1986 escorted an armored vat of the grease from Cleveland Street to a second location on Stage Road.

The publicity surrounding the transfer of the 1912 grease is the only significant media attention Dyer’s has ever received, says Jeff. Over the years, Dyer’s has never advertised. “The old guys just didn’t care to. They came in every day and did their thing and that was that,” he explains. Dyer’s has always been a neighborhood place. People who know about Dyer’s are the people who hear about it from friends and family.

Jeff has seen fit to make a few changes in the business. He introduced fries to the menu, for one, just six months ago. Everything is fresh, he explains, pointing out bread, onions, potatoes and beef. There is no freezer on the premises. Jeff also added a little something else to the menu: hot dogs, Polish sausages and fried bologna sandwiches, all cooked in the redoubtable grease. They may have company, but the burgers are done like they’ve always been done. Here’s how: rolls of beef, “whacked out” into patties with a mallet and heavy spatula, are thrown into the skillet for two minutes, unless you want yours rare. The skillet has been known to hold twenty-plus burgers at a time. Then you flip the patties around in the grease, before sticking them in Wonderbread buns, lined with mustard, pickles and onion slices, just like in old Dyer’s days.

Something else from old Dyer’s days: Jeff takes care to arrange the prep materials exactly as they were arranged years and years ago. The bags of fresh buns, the prepped buns, the wax paper, all of it sits on a marble-topped counter to the right of the stove, just as it always has. Jeff explains he wants the old regulars to be able to come in and see what they’re accustomed to seeing.

He says the double double is the all-time favorite item on the menu, but there are those customers who stray from the menu’s very narrow path and create their own diversions. One older man, for instance, likes a hot dog and hamburger fried up together and put on the same bun. Jeff knows what all the regulars like. He says he has about a hundred people’s lunchtime orders in his head now. Among these is Mr. Gower and Mr. Fielder’s order.

Recently, Mr. Gower says he tried to indoctrinate his five-year-old grandson into the Dyer’s routine. “He refused the onion and the bread, but he ate the meat. And, by the way, I think people should stop calling God Father and call him Granddaddy, because that’s the greatest relationship in the world.”

 

Flowchart/Feedback

In the law offices of Tubb, Stevens and Morrison, located in three pastel-colored row houses across the street from the courthouse in West Point, Mississippi, Josh Stevens confided late one fall afternoon his plans for the following week: first, a trip to the Memphis Liberty Bowl to watch his son’s band, Blind Melon, open for the Rolling Stones on Tuesday night; then a flight to D.C., where a stretch limo would meet him and pack him off to Friday night’s Pittsburgh show.

Mr. Stevens is accustomed to traveling from local “club to sleazy club” to watch the band and his son, lead guitarist Rogers, perform; but this sort of highbrow maneuvering is not something the attorney normally engages in. With his son’s music career taking off, however—Blind Melon will release its second album in March; the first went gold and platinum in the U.S. and Canada—he could very well come to call a life of travel and hobnobbing ordinary.

Mr. Stevens, who hunts and plays golf at the Old Waverly Club less than a mile from his twenty-seven acres on Old Waverly Road, embraces his son’s career as a grunge musician with something like exhilarated bemusement. He tries his best (with a touch of self-irony) to couch the phenomenon in language he can understand. In the conference room at his law office on shady Court Street, Mr. Stevens, a large man with a large, rubicund face, explained what always defies explanation—overnight success—using a pen and legal pad and a businessman’s lexicon.

“You see, here, in late September 1992,”—Mr. Stevens drew a line on the legal pad, labeling it 1992—“Blind Melon was only selling 2,000 records a week. Record sales were at what I call a slow burn. At this point, Capitol Records decides it’s spending too much money on young bands, has a stormy board meeting and drops twenty of twenty-two so-called developing acts. Blind Melon makes the cut.”

Mr. Stevens diagrammed the band’s record sales after the release of its hit “No Rain” video. In hardly any time at all, he said, the numbers rose from 2,000 units sold per week to 107,000 units. Mr. Stevens looked up from his page in disbelief: nothing—not the retelling, nor the outlining of Blind Melon’s financial success—could demystify the fact that his son is a star.

As Mr. Stevens sketched and interpreted figures, his secretary, Betty, came and went, each time leaving a particular article or photograph of Rogers on the conference table as Mr. Stevens requested it. Capitol Records sends him every article that mentions Blind Melon, as well as video copies of television interviews with the band.

Once Betty interrupted, announcing that Rogers himself was on the telephone. Rogers was calling to discuss some financial matters with his father. “He’s very conservative with his money,” Mr. Stevens assured me after hanging up.

Rogers averred this was true over the telephone from his hotel room before the Tuesday night Memphis concert; but, otherwise, he added, he did not care for conservative living. Rogers’s grandfather operated a large antique business in Macon, Mississippi, and the house on Old Waverly Road is full of multifarious antiques, including a Chippendale grandfather clock and a Steinway piano. “But if I had that house,” said Rogers of his West Point home, “I would do some things differently—something with art nouveau, some oddness. I don’t know; just say I’d like to live in a weird shape, a concrete structure with catwalks everywhere.”

The Voodoo Lounge, the Rolling Stones’ stage set, located Blind Melon in a pixilated world: an enormous, industrial-style serpent coiled around the stage, its long neck forming an arc above the musicians. When the Stones came out, the serpent, illuminated with eyes aglow, breathed fire into the Memphis sky. But the set, which did include a sort of catwalk in front of a large video screen, was dim, more like an actual lounge, when Blind Melon played its hour-long set. Rogers, who is tall and thin with blond hair cropped close to his head in a dramatic fashion, stormed about the stage with a confidence aesthetically affirmed by a veil of cigarette smoke, which seemed to separate him from everyone else.

Backstage at the Liberty Bowl, with a room full of Mississippians—bassist Brad Smith and drummer Glen Graham are from West Point and Columbus, Mississippi—Mr. Stevens introduced this or that guest to his son and the other boys, all of whom were very polite. Though Mr. Stevens gave assurance that he was accustomed to the whole production—seeing his son play in front of all of those people, strolling past the requisite battalion of security guards with an entourage of Mississippi Blind Melon enthusiasts in tow, mingling with the boys, now imbibed with a certain power, in a smoke-filled, narrow room backstage—though he said he was “used to it,” Mr. Stevens’s pride as a father instantly gave way to a sort of enchantment when he went to embrace Rogers. His eyes flashed a child’s pure delight.

When Rogers left West Point at age nineteen with Brad Smith to make a go of the music scene in Los Angeles, Mr. Stevens said Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” came to mind. “He was going to the city where one half of one percent of the bands make it, and I thought to myself, ‘Rogers, you’re on the wrong road.’

“But the thing about these boys, is that there they were out there living in the flophouse, starving to death. They could have had all this here at home, but I’ll tell you what, they bet the ranch. The call of the wild got them. Now Rogers is doing something fulfilling and making a living at it. I’ll tell you, I wish I could play golf for a living—not that I’m any good at golf, but you see what I mean.”

 

Ratite Raising

While the cowboy is still America’s most famous icon, the ’90s, in its fashion, proffers an updated version: the emu rancher. Instead of the laconic, rugged cowboy atop his steed, brandishing a lasso or aiming a Winchester, imagine the emu rancher stealthily approaching his flightless birds from behind to procure blood samples in order to ascertain their sex. Instead of the cowboy of yore keeping watch through the night for unshaven rustlers, picture the emu rancher, peaceful in front of the VCR, having implanted microchips in his emu to ensure against theft.

The emu rancher is kind to his herds, as groups of emu are called, and savvy about the health needs of a nation watching its waistline. Ron Cain of Emerald C. Emu Ranch in Lafayette County, Mississippi, is one of a growing number of emu ranchers in the state dedicated to the possibility of a world that chooses the low-fat filet of emu, which, by all reports, is every bit as tasty as red meat. The trick, according to Mr. Cain, aside from convincing people to eat emu, is getting the birds to mate and produce offspring. This task requires an almost romantic devotion on the part of the would-be emu rancher.

“I named him Abraham and her Sarah because I wanted their seed to multiply like the sands by the ocean, just like God blessed Abraham,” says Mr. Cain of two emu on his ranch.

Fall is the season of love for the emu. At two years, they are usually ready for their first season of ritual courtship. Males strut about the pen emitting porcine cries with increasing frequency, while hens sit back and decide which cock has the best walk.

Sarah, however, does not get to choose her mate. Because she and Abraham proved compatible in their pen, Mr. Cain has paired them, barring some unforeseen circumstance, for life. “See, normally, after she lays her first clutch of eggs, she would run off and take up with some other male,” says Mr. Cain, who has been raising emu since 1993 (which is seasoned by Mississippi emu-breeder standards).

His birds are six feet and an inch or two, well able to stick their flat beaks over the chain link fence that encircles their thirty-by-sixty-foot home. Their bodies are large and egg-shaped, and emu can weigh as much as one hundred and fifty pounds. Though Abraham paces the beaten path of his pen, Mr. Cain gives assurances the bird will not attack. They are even-tempered, he says.

An average clutch for an emu numbers eight emerald-colored eggs, each slightly smaller in circumference than a grapefruit, but reminiscent in texture of an avocado. “In the wild, it’s the male’s job to sit on the eggs until they hatch.” Mr. Cain spreads straw on the earthen floor of the three-sided wood and siding shelter where, in a few months, Abraham and Sarah may or may not begin fulfilling his expectations for them.

So far, things do not look promising, at least not to the untrained eye. When Abraham lowers his head and grunts like a hog, the very thing that is supposed to woo Sarah toward a more amorous mood, Sarah seems uninterested. Arching her willowy, blue neck over her back, she preens her heavy mop of gray-brown feathers. Occasionally she will release her own call, a heavy thumping, which sounds as if someone is beating the side of an empty fifty-five-gallon drum with a stick.

Mr. Cain explains that determining the sex of an emu is one of his most difficult tasks. Male and female adult emu are basically the same size and color. Aside from the distinct noises they make, it is virtually impossible to tell one from the other. Emu sexual organs are internal, so it is often necessary to acquire a sample of their blood for DNA testing. “The big ones are really powerful, so you have to sneak up on them gentle from behind,” Mr. Cain says, demonstrating with Abraham the procedure he uses to take blood samples from the fleshy vestigial wing. His hands cross the bird’s chest, pulling the animal straight up to attention. Abraham’s skinny, down-covered head periscopes about in alarm. “Don’t take my picture when I’m like this,” Mr. Cain says.

People have been raising ratites (flightless birds) in Texas and the far western states for about fifteen years, and the industry is fast becoming one of the most popular small livestock investments in Mississippi. Membership for the Mississippi Emu Association now stands at more than 350 registered breeders. Although ostrich ranching has been in place in the United States for much longer, it is expected that emu ranching will outpace ostrich production in the next few years, mainly because emu are easier to raise.

“Ostriches are kind of stupid,” says B.A. Teague, owner of Triple T Farms a few miles north of New Albany in Union County. Mr. Teague has made the Triple T home to impressive herds of ostrich and emu, as well as to longhorn and shorthorn cattle. “Ostriches will eat anything, dirt, rocks, grass. Before you know it, you’ve got a dead bird. If you put them on the ground right away when they are young, they will start eating dirt. But if they can watch another bird doing it the right way for a while they get the hang of it. Monkey see, monkey do.”

Though emu succumb to the same antics, their digestive tracts are short and not likely to become impacted as a result. “Anything you feed an emu in the morning, you will see again by that afternoon,” Mr. Teague says, pointing out a scene in the young emu herd’s pen. A curious, yellow yard dog backs up in dismay. “One of the boys I know raising emu was treating his birds for diarrhea. I just had to tell him that’s the way they are."

Ratite ranchers have found a use for almost every inch of the emu, from his horny toes (jewelry) to his luxuriously feminine eyelashes (false eyelashes). Emu can also provide static-free feathers and thin, supple leather as well as natural oils that are becoming prized in the cosmetics and medical industries.

As for emu economics, a pair of chicks goes for $3,000. The chicks are sold in pairs because emu get lonely and are likely to die without a companion of their own kind. A rancher hopes that he can nurture the birds to breeding maturity and the big payoff.

Adult emu are more expensive, at up to $16,000 for a single breeder, which is considered more valuable than a bird that hasn’t been tried yet, so to speak.

Stakes are high on the emu market and, as a result, so are the steaks: currently, a single pound of emu meat costs twenty-seven dollars.

Oblivious to their fate, some adolescent emu dance and leap about the Triple T pen and good naturedly chase one another. “I’ve seen them jump up in the air and pull their legs up under them and then they’ll hit the ground. It sounds just like you dropped a book flat on the floor,” Mr. Teague says, slapping his hands together. “They land right on that breast bone, but it doesn’t seem to hurt them none.”

Mr. Teague enters the pen holding some of his eight-month-old birds. He bends over to give one of the youngsters a hug. Another emu cautiously walks up and pecks at the bill of Mr. Teague’s white cap.

“Don’t peck on my hat,” Mr. Teague tells the bird gently. The bird pulls back a short distance, pauses, then leans forward and pecks again.

 

The Killer’s Neighbors

An exit sign about fourteen miles south of Memphis, Tennessee, along Interstate 55, points to Nesbit Road, which leads into Nesbit, Mississippi, a tiny gathering of homes, small businesses and about six hundred souls, one of whose is Jerry Lee Lewis’s. Mr. Lewis opened his Nesbit house to tours last August when IRS demands for back taxes became too much for even a piano-stomping rock 'n’ roller to ignore. While Mr. Lewis resides east of the interstate, the bulk of the town is west of the road, and the peaceful folk there know little of the legend in their midst.

Auto Wholesale, a used car lot, sits on Highway 51. Twenty or so cars in various states of ability and repair sit on an asphalt parking lot in front of the cinderblock building smothered in a thick coat of white paint. Jerry Hamilton, owner of the lot, presents his business card with the motto “You Work, You Ride!” inscribed on it. Mr. Hamilton is a commuter from Memphis, traveling to Mississippi daily to run the shop that came his way two years ago when the former owner couldn’t keep up the payments. Mr. Hamilton has a tired, baggy-eyed face and chainsmokes Vantage cigarettes. He claims ignorance on the subject of Mr. Lewis and his ranch but manages to opine on the rocker’s life.

“I think he’s trying to straighten out,” Mr. Hamilton said of Mr. Lewis. “He’s sponsoring baseball teams and such. He’s lived a hard life; he’s kind of dissipated. I think he decided to straighten out.

These thoughts put Mr. Hamilton in a philosophical mood, and between breaks to answer phone calls, he likens the insights he has gained to those he thinks Mr. Lewis and the rest of the world share.

“Here’s the worst thing about dying,” he says. “You spend all your life acquiring this knowledge, then you die and no one can use it.”

The television sets stand waist-high in Hal Jones’s TV and VCR Service, a small shop next door to Mr. Hamilton’s car lot that occupies an almost identical white cinderblock building. Mr. Jones says he opened the repair business in 1991 when he tired of the trucking industry. Though he has never met Mr. Lewis or Mr. Lewis’s wife, Kerrie, he has worked on their appliances. His most recent job for the Lewises was last August when a workman brought in a VCR damaged from a lightning strike. Mr. Jones says although the VCR belonged to the Lewises, the worker put it in his name to avoid the possibility of being overcharged.

“He said when people see the name ‘Jerry Lee Lewis’ the price automatically doubles. They figure he’s loaded,” Mr. Jones explains. While Mr. Jones says his desire to hold onto a customer’s business would keep him from padding a charge, he understands the precaution.

Paul “Weasel” Milam runs Weasel’s Pawn Shop and trades guns regularly with Mr. Lewis. “He likes ’em pretty,” Mr. Milam says of Mr. Lewis’s preferences in firearms. Engraved Smith & Wessons and Brownings are his favorite brands, while his taste in caliber runs toward .44 Magnums. Mr. Milam says he doesn’t know if Mr. Lewis collects the guns or if he fires them for sport.

Traffic in the pawn shop has increased since Mr. Lewis’s house opened for tours—so much so that Mr. Milam tore out a sheet of notebook paper one day and drew a map of the route from his store to the front gate of the ranch. Photocopies of that map are handed out regularly.

Visitors to the Jerry Lee Lewis Ranch find a modest one-story brick house sitting on a thirty-acre piece of land with meandering, green hills. It could be the home of a dentist or a fairly successful lawyer who likes to leave the work at the office. What it doesn’t look like is the home of a rock legend. The only clue that Mr. Lewis lives there is offered by the front gates, which have wrought iron pianos as part of their design. Also, a sign next to the entrance gate offers the caveat: “The Jerry Lee Lewis Ranch Not Responsible For Loss Or Injury.” The house is open Wednesday through Saturday, and tours tend to start at ten a.m, noon and two p.m. The grounds are closed to the public for the winter, but tour guide Melody Holmes says visitors will be welcomed again in the warm months of 1995, when better publicity and larger crowds are hoped for. Tours are five dollars per visitor.

Now fifty-nine, Mr. Lewis has a new album scheduled for release in January, his first in twelve years. Also, an autobiography, The Killer, is due in the first half of 1995. Meantime, there is his life in Nesbit, where a neighbor of Mr. Lewis’s, who identifies himself as Bubba, works in a convenience store called the Bridgetown Market, though he doesn’t own it. (“No way. I don’t want that kinda headache.”) Bubba says his land abuts the Lewis ranch, but he’s never heard a peep out of the hot-blooded rocker.

“I been waiting on him to call the law on me,” Bubba admits. “I shoot guns all the time.”

DeSoto County Deputy Keith Combes, whose province is Nesbit, says Mr. Lewis is a strange guy, sure, but is, for the most part, a peaceful citizen. “I never had no trouble out of him,” Deputy Combes says. He says it used to be common practice for Mr. Lewis to hire deputies to work parties at the estate. The jobs were decent after-hours money, but the celebrations weren’t quite as raucous as the casual guesser would’ve imagined. Deputy Combes says, “They were just parties.”