A version of this story originally appeared in the June 1981 issue of Memphis magazine.
A vintage photograph from the hotel archives captures the spirit of The Peabody. Photograph courtesy The Peabody.
Cotton Carnival Friday that year dawned with the air full of moisture, left over from a rainstorm the day before that had forced a three-hour postponement of the eighth annual Cotton Carnival Parade. Had the sun been able to poke through the clouds, it would have found the usual assortment of early risers sitting in the big leather chairs in the lobby of the Hotel Peabody, dressed in spite of the weather in their newest tropical-worsted suits and straw hats, leafing through their morning newspapers, waiting to “take their breakfasts” in one of the dining rooms scattered throughout the hotel.
On the front page of that morning’s paper, there was troubling news from Europe. But this was Carnival Week in Memphis, springtime in the South, and the Continent seemed a long way away. Mae West had just concluded a triumphal four-day engagement at The Orpheum, capped off by a visit to the courtroom of her “old friend,” Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley. The two of them had sat on the bench side-by-side on Monday afternoon, and had heard several cases together. On Tuesday the Cotton Carnival Barge landed in the evening amid all of the usual panoply and gaudiness, and Queen Elizabeth Farnsworth and King Chester Lowrance had been crowned by the light of fireworks over the river.
No matter how engrossed they were in the morning newspaper, as the hands of the clock arranged themselves in the 7 o’clock position, none of the early risers would have been able to ignore the little ceremony that was about to take place by the fountain. Even if they had seen it two dozen times before, they would have folded their papers and gotten up to watch the beginning of the day at the Hotel Peabody.
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At precisely 7 a.m., the 30 or so bellmen and porters of the day shift lined up in rigid formation — two rows, facing each other. Their lines stretched north from the fountain to the elevators. Alonzo Locke, the venerable and austere headwaiter, dressed in his immaculate white linen jacket, made his way carefully down each row, pausing to inspect the bellmen and porters’ uniforms — white gloves clean, gold braid in place, shoes shined — satisfying himself that the day shift was presentable.
After this inspection, Alonzo turned aside and straightened to attention at the head of his “troops.” One of the elevator doors then slid open, and out waddled three jaunty looking but sleepy mallard ducks. The ducks made their way between the two lines of bellmen and porters to the big marble fountain in the center of the lobby, where they paused only slightly before hopping deftly onto the ledge of the pool at the base of the fountain. Then, without testing the water, each one promptly plopped himself into the pool. The day had officially begun.
Meanwhile, the rest of the day shift was filing in through the back doors of the hotel, punching the time clock, and hurrying to get to their own stations on time. Scores of laundry workers, maids, boiler-room attendants, front-desk workers, and all the rest were mindful that their own day began not with the ringing of bells or the blowing of whistles, but with the waddling of ducks, and maybe an occasional quack or two.
The Venetian Room at The Peabody was the ne plus ultra location for fine dining, and if one could reserve it for a private party, then one had, indeed, arrived.
Photograph courtesy The Peabody.
After watching the procession of webbed feet, the early risers in the lobby wandered off to either the Basement Grill (a coffee shop affair, featuring food for those on the run or watching their pocketbooks) or the Venetian Dining Room at the east end of the lobby (linen table cloths, real silverware, china, flowers in tulip vases on each table, and all of the other trappings of a “sit-down” meal). While both of these places featured food cooked to order at breakfast, the difference in ambience was as pronounced as that between filet mignon and hot dogs. Those who went downstairs were treated to a “good” breakfast in the usual, diner-ish fashion. But those who made their way to the Venetian Room were, well, feted.
They were met at the door this morning, as every morning, by Alonzo Locke — tall, with hair already gone white, and high cheekbones set into a face that was practiced in conveying expressions of both kindness and deference. If they had been to the Venetian Room for a meal before, even if only once a long time ago, Locke would greet them by name, as if they were old friends.
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Normally, the hours just after breakfast were “check-out time” at The Peabody. But with the Cotton Carnival in town, there was scant activity at the front desk this Friday. The 625-room hotel was filled to capacity and would stay that way through the weekend.
Meanwhile, a convention-type group, the Cotton Research Foundation, had set up camp in the hotel. At 9:30, they assembled several-hundred-strong in the lobby before setting out on their “Cotton Industrial Tour,” where those attending were shown many of the latest innovations in cotton production machinery. An hour later, they were back, to view the foundation’s exhibits on the third floor of the hotel, featuring such items as fine jewelry, salted nuts, a new form of deadly poison, and synthetic fibers — all made from various parts of the cotton plant.
There was hectic activity of another sort altogether going on in the back of the hotel. All five kitchens were busy sending down their requisitions for the supplies that they were going to need for lunch and dinner. For two hours or so after breakfast, the freight elevators made dozens of trips from the stockrooms up to the kitchens, laden with sides of beef, racks of fresh fruit and vegetables, big sacks of flour and sugar, and whatever other provisions were called for. The amount of kitchen supplies that purchasing agent Arthur Schoembs was called upon to provide each week was staggering — 2,000 pounds of sugar, 1,400 pounds of coffee, 14,000 eggs, 10 gallons of horseradish, 50 tons of ice, and more than 175 pounds of bacon. And most of that was just for breakfast.
Today, there was extra scurrying in the back of the hotel due to the fact that there was to be a special luncheon in the huge Continental Ballroom. The annual Cotton Carnival Mid-South Mayors Luncheon, which would draw perhaps 500 guests from throughout the region, was considered bigger and more important than most — the reputation of the hotel, which relied heavily on trade from residents of the Mid-South, was on the line before all of these important visitors from around the region.
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At 11 a.m., while the Mid-South mayors were arriving at The Peabody and registering in one of the meeting rooms, Chef Gilbert Blanc, master of the kitchens and a culinary perfectionist, was preparing the meal. In his pastry kitchen, Helmut Vogel, who had come to The Peabody a year earlier after serving his apprenticeship at the Court of the Grand Duchess in Luxembourg, was putting the finishing touches on his centerpieces for the tables — all of them made of marzipan, and all quite edible.
At 12:45, the precisely appointed time, Locke and maitre d’hotel Ernest Vollrath assembled the white-jacketed waiters and began the service in the Continental Ballroom. Locke directed the hotel’s waiters with all of the precision and control of a symphony conductor. None of the 500 or so VIPs attending the Mid-South Mayors Luncheon on May 12, 1939, had to wait for a dish to be served. None had to ask for more water or butter. After dessert, there was a program for the dignitaries. King Chester and Queen Elizabeth, Cotton Carnival royalty, were presented. The Cromwell Sisters, backed by Mack Rae and His Orchestra, sang. Mayor Watkins Overton pontificated about the status of business in the Mid-South.
After the luncheon, many of the assembled guests went downstairs to the lobby to join the crowd gathering around the fountain. At 3 p.m. every afternoon, there was a reversal of the ceremony by which the day had begun. Five minutes before the hour — precisely — the ducks in the fountain began to get antsy; they would squawk, bat their wings, and begin hopping out of the water and onto the floor of the lobby, a signal to the bell captain that he had better get his act together and get them out of that fountain, because their eight-hour shift was finished, and they were ready to go home for the evening.
Instead of the lines of bellmen and porters, there was a red carpet that was rolled out in the afternoon to mark the path the ducks would follow to the elevators. And right on cue, to the strains of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” played through hi-fi speakers, the ducks waddled their way through the spectators’ gauntlet to the elevator waiting to whisk them up to their rooftop duck-house on the Second Street side of the roof.
While the morning appearance of the ducks signified the beginning of another working day at The Peabody, their afternoon departure spoke not of the end of the day but of a change in atmosphere, a shift in direction in the daily life of the hotel. It was a change from luncheons and formal teas to lavish dinner parties replete with cocktails, champagne, and dancing. It was a change from the puffed-up oratory of politicians to the smooth sound of woodwinds intoning some Gershwin ballad. It was the difference between day, with all of its concerns of business and propriety, and night, which was of the winsome and romantic moonshine that had become a part of the national psyche during the Thirties.
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Dinner that evening was held in the several dining rooms around the mezzanine that were added in 1927 to accommodate the overflow crowds that had been barraging the Venetian Dining Room every night. Normally, general manager Frank Schutt, who made his home in a suite of rooms in the hotel, took his dinner at 5 p.m. sharp each evening at “his table” by the door at the Venetian Room, where he could both eat and greet guests. But not so tonight. The Venetian Room was reserved for a private wedding party — as usual, The Peabody bent over backwards to oblige the party-givers and scheduled dinner in the other dining rooms.
The two immensely popular lunch spots in The Peabody — the Basement Grill (which became a “nightclub” called the Poodle Dog Grill after dark) and Mrs. Frayser’s Soup Kitchen (on the Third Street side of the hotel) — were closed in the evenings, save when something extraordinary was going on. So was the Peabody Tea Room. If a person wanted to have dinner at The Peabody, he had to be prepared for a bit of opulence, for a “sit-down” meal. Locke, who seemed to be everywhere at once in the hotel, presided over dinner with Vollrath, and the two of them saw to it that what they referred to as “European hospitality” was offered to all dinner guests, be they out-of-towners or local residents.
On Cotton Carnival Friday, Locke was also called upon to orchestrate the wedding party in the Venetian Dining Room. Afterwards, the party-goers were to join the crowd at The Peabody’s newest attraction, the incredibly popular Skyway, completed just three months earlier, up on the roof.
With the addition of the Skyway, and with the numerous rooms that The Peabody made available to private parties, both small and large, there was no need to leave the hotel in order to find a good time.
Photograph courtesy The Peabody.
After dinner, most guests and local visitors to The Peabody, though, would be faced with a wide variety of ways to entertain themselves on this Friday evening. New films were at nearby theaters, a Cotton Carnival street dance was over on South Court, and judging of the Miss Memphis pageant was happening at the Claridge Hotel.
But with the addition of the Skyway, and with the numerous rooms that The Peabody made available to private parties, both small and large, there was no need to leave the hotel in order to find a good time. Indeed, this point was used by The Peabody’s Convention Board, which traveled the country trying to drum up convention business for the hotel; there was no real reason, they argued, why the best time of all could not be had without even leaving the hotel.
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For the past few years, conventions had responded to this offer with alacrity. It seemed in the late Thirties as if the hotel was always playing host to some group of high nabobs from here or another group from somewhere else. As a rule, conventioneers were given not only “European hospitality,” but a lot of leeway as to how far they could go in indulging in their typical out-of-town-and-away-from-the-wife hijinks.
Despite the fact that he was an extremely mild-mannered individual who rarely found reason to lose his temper, Schutt could, however, be pushed too far. Like the time the Rotary Club International held its big national convention at The Peabody a couple of years earlier, a time when Schutt was president of the Rotary Club and gave his group the virtual run of the hotel. One evening, Sam Barrett, head of the receiving room and keeper of the hotel time clock, came upon four of the Rotarians gleefully coaxing an enormous gray mule into one of the freight elevators. Barrett went to Schutt’s office. “Mr. Schutt,” he said, “four of your boys done brought a mule in here.”
Immediately, the two of them began the search for the animal and its Rotarian escorts. Schutt and Barrett caught up with them on the fifth floor. This time, Schutt did lose his temper. “Don’t you ever let me catch you bringing that damned mule into this hotel again,” he hollered, forgetting for once the sanctity of silence normally observed on guests’ floors. Schutt ordered one of the Rotarians to follow along behind the mule with a tin washtub that one of the porters had produced, holding the tub just south of the mule’s tail in case the beast decided to commit an indiscretion on the carpet of the hotel.
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During the late Twenties and early Thirties, the roof of the Hotel Peabody — called the Marine Roof — was one of Memphis’ favorite nightspots. But there was, on the night of May 12, 1939, something new about the roof, something that even the well-trained and meticulous staff had not quite gotten used to. With the wild rise in popularity of swing music in 1937 and 1938, Schutt had realized that the time had come to build the modern nightclub that he considered the only thing lacking in the hotel. He wanted the kind of place that Memphians were used to seeing in the movies — cool and sleek and sophisticated and oh-so-modern. On January 31, 1939, when the Skyway opened, he had just what he wanted.
With light-blue walls and gold-and-silver trim, the Skyway’s round dance floor was capped by a deep-blue domed ceiling imitating the twilight sky. Floor-length mirrors were interspersed with huge picture windows through which the lights of Memphis glimmered like an ocean of colored stars. Tables were set on terraces around the dance floor, separated only by a silver filigree rail. The Skyway was the epitome of what was expected of a nightclub in the late Thirties — mushy romance mixed with gaudy futurism, with a hint of well-heeled propriety thrown in for good luck.
On May 12, 1939, dinner was served in the Skyway at 7:30. By the time the wedding party concluded in the Venetian Dining Room and its participants made their way up to the Skyway, the Griff Williams Orchestra had already been through its first set of the evening. The room was filled to capacity; during its brief history to date, the Skyway had never opened to less than a capacity house.
Being a “hotel band,” the orchestra would have been called upon to play not only the new swing tunes that the youngsters in the crowd wanted to hear, but also the old standbys that would find a sympathetic ear with the older patrons. So the band alternated snappy numbers like “Goody-Goody” with “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” At 10:30 the orchestra stopped playing, and the crowd was asked to pipe down for a moment while the WREC announcer went through the lead-in for the nightly radio program from The Peabody: “Coming to you this evening from the Skyway Room, high atop the beautiful Hotel Peabody in Downtown Memphis, one of the South’s finest, one of America’s most ...”
On Monday nights for the past year and a half, CBS had picked up the WREC/Peabody show from its local “feed,” broadcasting it nationwide, from either the Marine Roof (weather permitting) or the Continental Ballroom. For an hour, people all over the country on Monday nights had gotten used to tuning into Memphis and partaking of the rhythms and atmosphere at The Peabody.
This being Friday night, the crowd in the Skyway was treated to a long and especially tight series of performances from the band, lasting well into Saturday morning’s wee hours.
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And that was that. The Peabody had lived through Cotton Carnival Friday, 1939, and survived. All that was left was to see to it that the Skyway patrons found their way somewhat rockily to their guest rooms or out to their cars for the tipsy drive home through the quiet streets of early morning Memphis.
The ducks slept and the night shift tended to business, and as sure as the sun would rise, The Peabody would be ready to face Cotton Carnival Saturday.
