Trakkin on Main St. - Episode 1

Downtown Memphis, it was decided many years ago, could and should become a tourist mecca. Never mind that the shopping centers and the moneybags left it in the 50's and 60's for points east. The only people left were the cops, lawyers and office people who could bring themselves to a job on the skyline. In the midst of this, Main Street became a pedestrian mall with a trolley down the middle. Bill Cosby came by and said we'd built a mall for the poor people, because very few high, or even medium, dollar shops were to be found there. In more recent years, downtown residency has picked up, and there's always Beale Street. The last effort at high dollar shopping, Peabody Place, has indicated an intention of becoming a mall of outlets. So, nowadays, what mostly peoples Main Street is tourists, lawyers, and residents walking their dogs.

Put in the midst of this a condo construction project, complete with building materials everywhere, construction workers everywhere, trolley stations, trolley wire poles, and the noonday lunch crowd, and you have a very exciting place to park a Skytrak. Getting materials into the area required moving some 8-10' diameter planters designed to look like large flowerpots. Enter Skytrak. Just push em up the hill with the forks, and hope they slide. We were very lucky. They did.
Non-skewered planters being thus removed, we now had a place to bring in flattbeds with re-bar, decking, forms, and whatever other long bundles we needed.

The flatbed driver had to be cautioned to park in a certain place so the trolleys could get by. Unloading was easy as pie, just get sideways with the flatbed, spread out the forks, center on the load, lift it, back up (but not into the trolley station!), turn sideways to go down the street, miss the trolley wire pole in the middle between the tracks, and park the re-bar up the hill by the hole that was soon to be filled by a building. And, oh yes, the delivery was usually just ahead of lunch. Thus was the life of a Skytrak operator in downtown Memphis! What a blast!