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wearing a flattering white blouse, stylish green shorts, beautiful golf shoes with a splash of green to match her shorts, and a white sun visor on her head. Years later, my father said to me, “I would watch her walking off the golf course, and she looked so cute the way her head wagged from side to side with each step.”
    I remember Ridgeway Country Club as the place where I could sit at the pool bar and order endless Dr Peppers and Coca-Colas and charge them to my parents’ account. I could find wayward golf balls in the bushes and tall grass and, as I got older, ogle the beautiful daughter of the club manager as she floated around in her snow-white bathing suit.
    It was at Ridgeway that Morrie Kahn got so drunk one night that he mistakenly slipped into the car with Missy Nelkin—who, also drunk, didn’t realize that the man slumping next to her wasn’t her husband and drove all the way home with him. No one knows what happened next, but neither party contacted the outside world for over an hour. Missy’s husband, Howard, was so engrossed in a card game that he didn’t even notice his wife had departed the club. Morrie’s wife, Barbara, meanwhile, searched high and low for her mate and eventually called the police. “Mild-mannered Barbara never did believe that her husbandhad gone home with Missy by accident and went after Missy with a crochet needle.”
    Hubert Lewis, the heaviest drinker of the group, threw his two iron into the fifth-hole pond one day after twice failing to hit over it. Next he threw in his driver and putter, then finally his entire set of clubs. After which he retired to the clubhouse, drank three Kentucky bourbons, and declared he’d had a “marvelous day.”
    On Wednesday nights, Cousin Abi orchestrated a men-only poker game. “A long night of solemn recreation,” Abi called it. At 9:00 p.m., Abi would have corned beef sandwiches and cold beer served from the club kitchen. Then cookies and petits fours. At midnight, after the kitchen had closed, he ordered pizza and beer from Garibaldi’s on Yates Road. Everyone routinely overate. In the wee hours of the morning, bloated and ill, too embarrassed to call their wives, the card players would stumble into the men’s locker room and sleep on piles of towels.
    Many of the civic and cultural leaders of Memphis were members of Ridgeway. These included people like Dr. Morton Tendler, president of the Memphis Surgical Society; P. K. Seidman, president of both the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and the Memphis Little Theater; Will Gerber, attorney general of Shelby County; Lenore Binswanger, the first woman to lead a campaign division of United Way; and Abe Plough, then building a huge drug company that would eventually turn into the philanthropic Plough Foundation. Not to mention my grandfather M.A., who was president of half a dozen philanthropic organizations and on the board of every institution that had a bank account.
    Everyone was Jewish, of course. The other social clubs in Memphis, such as the Hunt and Polo Club, the Memphis Country Club, the University Club, and Chickasaw, strictly barred Jews from membership. In retaliation, the Jewish crowd stuck together and formed their own. Marriage, or even dating, betweenJews and Gentiles was discouraged. A sprawling oak tree on the grounds of Central High School, one of the oldest schools in Memphis, was called “the Jew tree” because all the Jewish students would congregate there during lunch break. “You were just more comfortable being with your own.” Attempts at rapprochement were made. The president of one of the leading universities in Memphis ended his commencement speech by exhorting the new graduates to “be nice to Negroes and Jews.”
    The majority of the Jewish population in Memphis was of the Reform branch, the most liberal version of Judaism. My own rabbi, an extraordinary man named James Wax, once told me that “God needs man more than man needs God.” My family, and all the