The eighth magazine in the Dusty Mags archive is the first Black-owned publication in the collection, and the oldest issue we have ever scanned. BEALE Vol. 1, No. 1 from August 1968 is the debut issue of a Memphis men's magazine published by a 26-year-old Vietnam veteran named Curtis "Curt" Holloway, who started the magazine four months after Dr. King was assassinated five blocks from where he was working as a bouncer at Club Paradise on East Georgia Avenue.
This is a different kind of magazine than anything else in the collection. Kudzu is cheap. Split Rail is scrappy. Hardwood is earnest. BEALE is all of those things, but it is also angry and proud and deeply anchored in a specific city at a specific moment in American history. August 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. The sanitation workers have just won their strike. Otis Redding has been dead for eight months and his posthumous records are still charting. The National Guard has gone home but nobody has forgotten why they came. And a man who came back from Vietnam with a Purple Heart and two thousand dollars in combat pay is betting everything he has on a magazine that costs sixty cents and is printed on the cheapest newsprint in the mid-South.
Every other magazine in this collection was published by a white man. Dale Whitfield in Portland. Rick Lozano in Huntington Beach. Buck Callahan in Austin. Bud Kessler in Milwaukee. Earl Tackett in Beckley. Del Crenshaw in Abbeville. All white, all small-town or suburban, all publishing for a white audience. BEALE is the first one in the collection published by a Black man, for a Black audience, in a Black city, at a Black moment in history. That changes everything about how the magazine reads.
Curt's publisher letter is not folksy. It is not self-deprecating. It is not trying to charm you. It opens with him coming home from Vietnam and ends with him explaining, in plain terms, that nobody is going to tell the story of Black Memphis but Black Memphis, and that if BEALE doesn't exist then in fifty years there will not be a single honest answer in the library about what it was like to be a Black man in this city in 1968. He was right about that. And here we are, scanning the magazine he made, fifty-six years later.
The two feature articles are the heart of the issue. "Inside Stax" by Curt's cousin Bobby Holloway (writing as "Reverend Bobby") is a 3,000-word love letter to the McLemore Avenue recording studio that produced the Memphis Sound. Bobby grew up visiting the studio, knows the building intimately, and writes about Otis Redding, Booker T., Isaac Hayes, and the four Bar-Kays who died in the Lake Monona plane crash with the authority of someone who was there. The piece ends with a description of moonlight catching the broken glass in the Stax parking lot that is one of the most beautiful passages in any magazine in this collection.
"What's Left of Beale Street" by C.H. Holloway (Curt's serious pen name) is the political piece. The city of Memphis is demolishing Beale Street under a federal urban renewal program, and Curt walks the street documenting what's been torn down: the Hippodrome, Pee Wee's Saloon where W.C. Handy wrote "Memphis Blues," Lansky Brothers where B.B. King and Elvis bought their clothes. He notes that the city has displaced over 6,000 Black residents and 400 Black-owned businesses and has not yet built a single thing to replace them. The piece ends with Curt sitting on a bench in Handy Park looking at the W.C. Handy statue, which is now looking at empty lots.
The cover girl is Earlene Calloway, 27, a lounge singer at Club Handy who showed up to the shoot with her own pool cue and ran the table on the photographer twice before they shot a single frame. Brenda Mae Jefferson, 24, is a Stax Records background singer from Holly Springs, Mississippi, who keeps a Bible her grandmother gave her on her nightstand and does not drink. Pearl Octavia Brimmer, 22, crossed the Mississippi River from West Memphis, Arkansas, in January with two suitcases and a cardboard box of her mother's records, and works an industrial Singer sewing machine at Ramsey Manufacturing for ninety-eight cents an hour. Their bios, written in the voice of "Slim Tatum" (one of Curt's pen names), are among the most vivid character sketches in the entire Dusty Mags collection.
This copy is in fair condition. The newsprint has browned heavily (Memphis humidity accelerates lignin oxidation), the ink has rubbed off in spots on the denser text pages, and the staples at the saddle stitch have rusted through. There is a water stain on the back cover (Kool cigarettes ad) from what appears to be a 1980s storage flood. The pages are intact. The cover image of Earlene with the pool cue at Club Handy is the best-preserved page in the issue, probably because someone kept it face-up on top of the stack.
Scanned on a consumer flatbed at approximately 150 DPI equivalent. Browning and foxing preserved.