An Afternoon with Barbara & Pitt Hyde

He founded AutoZone; she leads the Hyde Family Foundation. Their fingerprints are indelible in Memphis. But what are they like?

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When Barbara Hyde glides into the lobby of the Hyde Family Foundation, my attention is on a large Derek Fordjour painting, and I am contemplating — aloud — sticking my fingers into the art. Fordjour, who was raised in Memphis and attended Central High School, specializes in large works that use, instead of stretched canvases, layers of remnant material — pages from periodicals, shards of corrugated cardboard. After assembling the strata, Fordjour slices into them, making evident what lies beneath the surface: fluttered paper, swoops of glue and paint, sharp canyons of inviting texture. Hearing my ill-timed remark, Hyde exclaims, “Go ahead — touch it!” This painting (Double Horn Trot, 2023) is in her collection, after all, and she decides who has permission to sully its surface. (I do run my index finger along one jagged edge, but tentatively, feeling very much like I’m about to get in very big trouble.)

A few minutes later, sitting on a couch in Barbara’s office, overlooking Tom Lee Park and the Mississippi River beyond, I realize that the painting on the wall directly behind my head is a Carroll Cloar. I make a mental note not to lean back too abruptly and ram my cranium into the canvas (Joe Goodbody’s Ordeal, 1962). Considerations like these — touching one (museum-quality) painting, inadvertently smushing another — are foreign to most of us. But Pitt and Barbara Hyde are not most people. As we walk from the lobby to Barbara’s office, someone stops her to ask if she’s still tired. Tired from what? Oh, climbing Kilimanjaro, a feat she completed two weeks earlier with her son, Alex. Like I said: not most people.

If you’ve lived in Memphis for any length of time, or even paid attention to the city from afar, chances are that you’ve interacted with an amenity that bears the Hydes’ fingerprints. J.R. “Pitt” Hyde III, of course, is the founder of AutoZone, a Fortune 300 company which today employs more than 100,000 people, roughly 2,000 of those in Memphis. Barbara, his wife of 32 years, is the CEO of the Hyde Family Foundation, and someone who knows how to make things happen. (One gets the distinct sense that Barbara Rosser Hyde would win 100 percent of staring contests she entered.)

In your mind’s eye, zoom above the roofs and treetops of Memphis and imagine that the projects touched by the Hydes are all suffused with one unifying color — goldenrod, say. The aerial view would seem to glow yellow, from the AutoZone headquarters overlooking the Mississippi River to AutoZone Park a few blocks away, from Tom Lee Park to Shelby Farms, the new Memphis Art Museum project Downtown to TONE in Orange Mound, from the Grizzlies (the Hydes are part-owners) and their den at FedExForum to education- and leadership-focused nonprofits, to charter schools, to the National Civil Rights Museum.

For all their impact and influence, though, the Hydes are relatively quiet about their personal motivations and predilections, and so when we sat down in mid-October, I hoped to learn more about the why behind all that goldenrod-yellow on the Memphis map.

Barbara and Pitt Hyde grew up in different times and in different worlds. Pitt was born in 1942 and raised in Memphis, the scion of the family behind Malone & Hyde, a grocery wholesaler started by his grandfather in 1907. The third J.R. Hyde in his family, Pitt acquired his nickname so early he’s not sure where it came from: “I don’t really know the origin,” he laughs. “Everybody has their own theory.” Barbara chimes in: “I keep thinking you should make up a great story.” This is their dynamic: playful, admiring, collaborative. When one interrupts another — an inevitable occurrence in a dual interview, or simply in a 32-year marriage — they apologize.

Just blocks from the Foundation’s offices, Pitt shares, stood the very first Malone & Hyde warehouse — right on the river bluffs, he says. In those days, though, the riverfront was not much more than industrial functionality. “We turned our back on the riverfront,” he comments, because “it was all cotton warehousing and processing, and merchants and shipping on all the paddle-wheelers and the boats.”

Looking out the windows now, a green expanse beckons, but a century ago, this city was using our bluffs as a dumping ground — literally. Trash cascaded down the slope into the river, stench rising for blocks. Today, the Hydes have been involved in a number of developments along the banks of the Mississippi River (from the AutoZone headquarters on Front Street to the pedestrian walkways behind the University of Memphis law school, from the National Civil Rights Museum to Tom Lee Park), with an overarching goal of building a more vibrant, walkable, urban core, which locals and visitors can experience as one integrated ecosystem.

Young Pitt — who attended MUS and then the University of North Carolina — never really envisioned options for his future besides the family business. He tells of visiting Malone & Hyde-run supermarkets with his grandfather at just 5 years old, and he remembers the subtle-but-ever-present pressures: “Okay kid, you’ve got this opportunity, this obligation, and you’ve got to do this better than your grandfather and your father.”

Barbara Hyde’s childhood was less financially privileged, and less defined by family legacy and expectation. She was born in 1961 in California, “but I was only there for five minutes,” she says, because her father was in the Navy. After moving around for a few years, the family settled in Atlanta, where she spent the years from second grade through high school graduation. She describes her upbringing as “solidly middle-class, and when my parents divorced, lower-class.” She received a need-based scholarship to a private high school, and then a prestigious Morehead scholarship to the University of North Carolina. She cites “very specific times in my growing-up experience where I benefited from someone else’s generosity,” and draws a connection from those times to the work she does now at the Foundation, fostering generosity for others.

Barbara reminds Pitt that she knew he was serious about her “when we were dating and you consulted me on that Marsden Hartley [an American modernist painter]. I thought, ‘Oh, he’s serious about you. He’s asking you about a painting.’” Pitt responds with a chuckle, “I was serious about you and the painting.”

The two met in 1990 when she was a development officer for the College of Arts and Sciences at their mutual alma mater, UNC, and was sent to Memphis to ask him for a contribution to the school. “I always say, well, it’s good news and bad news,” says Pitt. “The bad news was that, having graduated 25 years earlier, they discovered me as a potential donor. The good news was that they sent Barbara to call on me.” He adds: “You can’t say no to Barbara.” Today, the two share three children — Susannah, Claire, and Alex Hyde — in addition to Pitt’s two older children, Margaret and Bo Hyde.

Rewind to when J.R. Hyde III was 26 years old and underwent what he calls a “baptism by fire” when his father, J.R. Hyde Jr., grew ill — and young Pitt took charge of Malone & Hyde. He says it was fortunate that he was raised in “a family of entrepreneurs who talked about the business all the time.”

All that business chatter prepared Pitt to pivot away from the family grocery business and toward auto parts. He happened to be serving on Sam Walton’s Walmart board in the early days of that company, and says, “I always say it reminds me of Lenin’s statement about how the capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with.” (A Lenin quote from Pitt Hyde was not on my bingo card.)

Much of the Malone & Hyde business was in small towns, and Walmart’s expansion consolidated that business away from the smaller grocery stores. Malone & Hyde had been designing the grocery sections of early Walmart stores, and even supplied their wares for the first few years. But soon enough, Hyde realized “the writing was on the wall” for non-Walmart grocery stores in smaller American towns. This realization led him to thoughts of diversifying his business. He considered sporting goods and other avenues before settling on auto parts.

“The only common denominator,” he recalls, is that auto parts stores were growing rapidly — but he was confident that he could outpace the competition with attention to superior customer service and cleaner outlets. (And no, Pitt Hyde is not a DIYer himself. Just a savvy businessman.) The new auto-parts business operated at first as a spin-off from Malone & Hyde, but before long, Pitt sold Malone & Hyde to focus on the newer venture. Initially known as AutoShack (before a blessing-in-disguise lawsuit from RadioShack), AutoZone opened four stores in 1979, three in Memphis and one in Forrest City, Arkansas.

The rest, as they say, is history. Hyde retired as AutoZone CEO in 1997, after a bout with prostate cancer, and retired from the company’s board in 2018. Cancer research, by the way, is another area that Hyde has funded over the past several decades.

Auto parts aside, art was always (forgive me for this) part of the picture. Pitt Hyde’s mother, Susan Hightower Hyde, was an artist herself. She assembled a sculpture of a sea bird, now displayed outside Pitt’s office, using objects found on a beach. She was also “a great student of European modernism,” according to her son, whom she took to art museums in New York and any other major city the family visited. So it was natural for Pitt, when he was running Malone & Hyde and later AutoZone, to fill his companies’ offices with art. Composed of about 300 pieces, he says, and “all contemporary art,” the collection was enhanced by its location in Memphis, which at that time was home to Memphis College of Art and the generations of professional artists who were affiliated with that now-defunct institution. He specifically cites artists Dorothy Sturm and Carroll Cloar. And Pitt Hyde’s collection has long been interwoven with the Brooks Museum — when he retired from AutoZone, the company decided to donate the art he had helped amass to the Brooks.

Art has long been part of the picture for Barbara and Pitt Hyde as a couple, too. She reminds him that she knew he was serious about her “when we were dating and you consulted me on that Marsden Hartley [an American modernist painter]. I thought, ‘Oh, he’s serious about you. He’s asking you about a painting.’” Pitt responds with a chuckle, “I was serious about you and the painting.”

They’re serious about art on its own terms, but they’re also serious about art’s transformative properties — which brings us to the Hydes’ latest high-profile cultural involvement, the Brooks Museum’s move to the very river bluff that once housed that Malone & Hyde warehouse.

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art — originally called Brooks Memorial Art Gallery — was founded in 1916 by Bessie Vance Brooks as a tribute to her late husband, Samuel Hamilton Brooks. Brooks, like the Hydes, amassed some of his fortune in the grocery business, along with the cotton industry. Before his death, in 1912 while traveling to Baltimore, he had expressed a desire for Memphis to have our own art gallery, but according to Vance Lauderdale, writing for this magazine in 2021, “That’s as far as he got with it. The credit for turning that dream into reality goes to his wife, Bessie Vance Brooks.”

And Bessie, like Pitt Hyde’s mother, was not just an art collector but an artist in her own right, having studied her craft in Paris. Upon her husband’s death, Bessie appears to have written a check for $100,000, plenty in those days to endow an entire museum. The white Georgia marble structure, designed by New York architect James Gamble Rogers and originally measuring only 90 by 100 feet, was erected in the heart of Overton Park, where it stands to this day.

They say they want this to be not just the “Memphis Art Museum,” but “Memphis’ Art Museum,” emphasis on the possessive. The goal is that the space will be for everyone to enjoy, with some areas free to visit.

Over the past 107 years, the Brooks structure has been expanded — and complicated. The more modern addition, constructed in the 1970s, is problem-prone, with a flat roof that leaks and a Frankensteinian HVAC system. Atmospheric irregularities are, of course, especially problematic for art. Museum leadership has long known that something would need to be done: either a reinvestment in the existing complex, or a new facility altogether.

When the Brooks was constructed, all those years ago, Overton Park would have been broadly recognizable to contemporary eyes, but with fewer cars and no golf course. Parking would not have been a concern for the jewel box of a museum, as it has become over the intervening decades. No one would have paused to worry whether vibration from the Shell performances would “rattle the art,” as Pitt Hyde says it does now (adding a caveat that he and Barbara are supporters of the Shell, too; nothing personal).

When Barbara, a Brooks board member, brought the facility concerns to Pitt, six or seven years ago, he started thinking bigger than just shoring up the existing museum, which would have cost $50-60 million. The Hydes had been working with the Kresge Foundation’s Civic Commons initiative around the same time, and were thinking about the riverfront, about the need for art and connectivity in a thriving Downtown, and about the potential economic impact of enticing more locals and visitors to Memphis’ cultural heart. The National Civil Rights Museum, which Pitt Hyde helped to found, was drawing more than four times the visitors each year as the Brooks, and most of those visitors were spending money on Downtown hotel rooms and entertainment besides. Could the effect be multiplied if the city’s oldest and largest art museum were situated within walking distance of the Civil Rights Museum, the attractions of South Main, FedExForum, the Orpheum, the river?

“What makes this work even more special is that many of these institutions are led by and serve Black and brown communities. It is inspiring to witness the incredible impact these organizations have in forging new legacies for our city.”

— Rachel Knox, Hyde Foundation

Time will tell. The museum’s new Front Street location is slated to open in 2025, under a new name: Memphis Art Museum. The Hydes are not the only major donors to the museum’s relocation effort, but they are, so far, the highest-dollar contributors, having pledged a total of $40 million through their Foundation — a sum significant enough to grant them naming rights. But we won’t be wandering through the Hyde Art Museum, and that’s intentional, according to Pitt and Barbara Hyde. They say they want this to be not just the “Memphis Art Museum,” but “Memphis’ Art Museum,” emphasis on the possessive. The goal is that the space will be for everyone to enjoy, with some areas free to visit.

Zoe Kahr, Brooks executive director, has worked closely with the Hydes throughout the process of envisioning the new space. She says, “What differentiates the Hydes from other philanthropists is that they invest in relationships and build community.  I landed in Memphis and was instantly welcomed into a network of incredibly committed people focused on making this city better.”

Rachel Knox, senior program officer for the Hyde Foundation, comments, “One of the most meaningful aspects of my time at the Foundation has been the opportunity to fund the next generation of arts and culture institutions in Memphis. What makes this work even more special is that many of these institutions are led by and serve Black and brown communities. It is inspiring to witness the incredible impact these organizations have in forging new legacies for our city.”

“We’re in a position to give back, and to scale the impact we’ve been able to have in our city. It’s just the right thing to do.”

— Pitt Hyde

No one who has spent time on the internet should be surprised that preliminary online chatter about the name change, this October, was less than enthusiastic. Commenters on local news articles about the shift claimed to find it disrespectful to the Brooks family’s legacy, among other criticisms. Asked about these sentiments, Barbara Hyde says she’s taking the long view — and that she knows better than to spend time in the comments section.

Drive down to Front and Union now, the designated home of that museum, and you’ll find, well, plenty of red dirt. Earlier this year, demolition crews razed the fire station and parking garage that once occupied that plot of earth, and over the summer and fall, the excavation and leveling began in earnest. The dirt has been moved around considerably over the past few months, with different elevations — eventual stories of the museum — emerging.

On a movie-set-perfect October afternoon, Pitt and Barbara Hyde stand on Fourth Bluff next to the newly reopened Cossitt Library, and survey the construction site. Pitt crosses his arms and turns his dusky blue eyes to the earth-moving equipment grinding and growling below. Barbara, her chestnut hair a nimbus in the wind, drapes herself along the length of her husband’s side. The sun glints off the river and their faces. They are watching their vision unfold.

Tom Lee Park, newly revamped and reopened, is part of that vision (and benefited from over $6 million of Hyde funds). Perched together on a bench overlooking the shaded basketball courts and walking paths, the birch grove and ice-cream kiosk, the Hydes talk about the park as an essential component of what Downtown Memphis can become. Tom Lee is “part of knitting it all together,” says Barbara, part of their decades-long attempt to “reinvigorate Downtown and deliver a Downtown core that’s safe, walkable, vibrant, connected, inviting, accessible.”

The obvious question: Will it work? Again, that depends on whether you put more faith in the internet chatter or in the real-life mood of folks in the park. Memphians on the internet seem to see the park as a waste of money, and a punch in the face of Memphis in May, whose Beale Street Music Festival will not continue there in 2024. Memphians in the park? Well, they’re smiling, shooting hoops, walking their dogs, watching their kids cavort on the playground’s giant river otter. They appear to be … happy. Connected. Vibrant.

Ted Townsend, leader of the Greater Memphis Chamber, puts it this way: “Their collective consciousness, of what Memphis promises to be, can be, is, has created a belief system in who we are as a community, and what can be accomplished if only we come together. It’s not about just investment. It is about creating this expectation of greatness for our city, so that everyone can participate. It’s not exclusive to a certain demographic. All these things can come to reality, and be shared by everyone.” Townsend talks about the Hydes’ work as “taking inventory of what Memphis deserves.”

“When I hear you [Pitt] reflect on your life, obviously you’re proud of AutoZone, proud of what the company has accomplished. But whenever I hear you talk about what’s really meaningful in life, it’s been the complementary amount of energy, time, money that you’ve put into the philanthropy and into the city.”

— Barbara Hyde

I wait until near the end of the hours I spend with the Hydes to ask them explicitly about privilege. To put it bluntly, these two people have amassed more wealth — even leaving aside the funds they’ve given away — than most of us could fathom earning if we lived 1,000 years.

Both Pitt and Barbara choose to invert the question, and talk instead about the privilege of being able to foster progress. “Privilege in the best sense of the word,” says Barbara. “We’re in a position to give back, and to scale the impact we’ve been able to have in our city,” says Pitt, adding, “It’s just the right thing to do.” Barbara comments to Pitt, “When I hear you reflect on your life, obviously you’re proud of AutoZone, proud of what the company has accomplished. But whenever I hear you talk about what’s really meaningful in life, it’s been the complementary amount of energy, time, money that you’ve put into the philanthropy and into the city.”