Stout, glad-handed Park Commissioner John B. Vesey of Memphis, wanted his city to have 1) the largest zoo in the U.S., 2) an eye-catching art collection. With the zoo the Commissioner was doing splendidly. But last week his art boom had the mange. He had spent some $25,000 in good taxpayers' cash for "old masters." There were some 38 paintings, all from the collection of Warner S. McCall, retired St. Louis public-utilities developer, a man who was wont to tread on rare Tabriz rugs and drink from cut glass goblets said to have been fingered by mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Some of McCall's paintings bore such signatures as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck, Sir Thomas Gainsborough. But certain Memphis newsmen were not impressed. They called on fastidious Dr. Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Valentiner's thudding opinion: the City of Memphis had been stung.
Park Commissioner Vesey did not take this lying on the grass. Ripped he: "If we had the opportunity to make the same purchase tomorrow, I would certainly do it." The controversy gathered momentum, spilled over into local editorial columns (under such puzzling title-lines as "Art, or Beauty, or Both?"). Dr. Valentiner thought a Rubens in the collection, "all right, but not very interesting," worth $6,000 to $8,000. To John B. Vesey the Rubens was tremendously interesting and worth at least $25,000. Besides, it was "valuable because it was painted in Italy, with Italian costuming."
At week's end Memphis politicians and art lovers kept watching their daily papers.