Overnight Memphis: From doughnuts to bail bonds, a snapshot of our city while we sleep [The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn.]

Dec. 28--EDITOR'S NOTE: We're marking the passing of one year and the approach of another with eight pure-Memphis stories -- eight snapshots of the larger picture that is the Bluff City, told by some of our finest writers.

It's closing in on 3 a.m. one recent morning at Gibson's Donuts in East Memphis, and Rita Jeffers, the night manager for the past 15 years, is asked just how many of the sweet rings of doughy goodness the well-known shop serves a day.

"Five hundred dozen yesterday," she says.

In walks a cliche -- a police officer, one with a familiar face. She greets him, smiles and hands over some doughnuts. It's an unstated deal: The officers come by to check on her, to make sure everything's all right. Sometimes, they bring the paper. Always, they leave with a Gibson's doughnut.

"Now on the weekends," she says, returning to the original question, "we do a lot more than that."

The shop's prodigious output is thanks in no small part to her and her three-man night crew, and their doughnut-making prowess when the rest of the city is sleeping. We are a 24-hour city, after all, from the 2 million or so packages that are sorted by FedEx at its massive Memphis International Airport hub, to the all-night Krogers and Walgreens, to the hundreds of policemen and firemen who keep us safe, to the truckers who zoom through on the interstate, making sure we're America's Distribution Capital in the wee hours, too.

On the overnight hours of Dec. 19-20, a Commercial Appeal reporter and photographer criss-crossed the city, capturing snapshots of what goes on in Memphis while most of us are asleep. Here are some highlights:

12:20 a.m., Beale Street

Omar Ali sits idling in his taxi at the corner of Beale and Third, waiting for a fare. His day begins around 6 p.m., and depending on the flow of traffic, can go into the wee hours. But he's already considering moving on as the wind whips through a nearly vacant Beale, even though a late Grizzlies game kept fans here until about 11 o'clock.

"It's slow," he says. "It's slow."

A handful of couples bounce from bar to bar and a couple of Grizzlies fans who celebrated a win over Milwaukee are soon to leave. Otherwise, the wind is the most prominent resident of Beale this night, which isn't uncommon for a weekday, especially this close to the holidays.

Outside King's Palace Cafe on the north side of Beale, 30-year-old Curtis Hines stands guard. He's the doorman, working the late hours four or five nights a week in addition to his usual job at AT&T. Hines looks the part of a bouncer, but says it's not like what you see on TV. He rarely has to break up a fight or see violence. To him, it's part-job, part-amusement.

"I love it, man," he said. "It's never a boring day. I love people watching."

12:45 a.m., 200 Poplar

Across the street and an address digit off from his more famous neighbor, the Shelby County Jail, 30-year-old Corey Taylor is the lone man working the night shift -- 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. -- at All Out Bonding Company. It's been a slow night thus far; a regular evening may produce five or six people who may be in need of his services.

It works like this: Get arrested, get your one phone call, find a bail bond company on a list by the phone, call Taylor to find family that can come to the office and start the process of securing a bond.

At least that's how Taylor thinks it works. He, fortunately, has never had to go through the process, at least from the other side of Poplar.

Taylor is a dreamer. The bail bond job is only there to help pay the bills as he nurtures that dream -- Lions Den Records, a recording studio in Bartlett, where he produces music.

He'll head there during the day.

"Not a lot of sleep involved," he said, smiling, as an old rear-projector, big-screen TV plays sports highlights in a room that smells like old Marlboros.

2:30 a.m., Gibson's Donuts

The cases are largely bare of doughnuts at Gibson's, the longtime occupant of a slot in a small strip at 760 Mendenhall, but the customers trickle in through the small hours.

"All I've got is cake doughnuts right now," Jeffers says to one man who stumbles in with his friends.

"Good," he says, sarcastically overeager. "That's what we want."

Another young man walks in casually with an empty cognac glass cupped in one hand, no big deal.

"Usually it's every weekend," Jeffers says, smiling, of the inebriated doughnut-eaters, "but now that it's the holidays, they're all out."

Jeffers plays along. She's used to it, after all these years on the overnight shift. She is a California native, but moved to Memphis after visiting friends here following a nasty divorce back home. She loved it and nabbed this job, and now she has a family full of Memphians. Wouldn't trade anything for it.

In the back, the doughnut-making operation is in full swing, manned by veteran employees Dave Cummings and Travis Reed and a relative newcomer, Ed Turner. The dough is pressed under a machine that cuts it into the shape of doughnuts; Turner swiftly plucks out the doughnut holes for later use.

The infant doughnuts spend 30 minutes in a case so they rise before taking a bath in grease. They spend 45 seconds or so on each side before heading to the glazer and then, eventually, to the cases out front or some of the many special orders.

Soon, she'll start to see workers getting off their shifts at FedEx. After that, the hunters. And by sunrise, the regular crowd.

3:35 a.m., Democrat Road

On the walkway that connects the guts of the FedEx World Hub to the employee parking lot on the north side of Democrat Road, employees are streaming like herds to their cars. It has been another busy night at the World Hub, which takes in packages from FedEx planes coming from across the world and sorts them to make their connecting flights, so to speak. The numbers are staggering: Two million packages typically zoom through 42 miles of conveyor belts over 800 acres. Some 9,000 employees staff the hub overnight, sorting packages between some 150aircraft.

The truck stops on nearby Lamar are full of trucks with sleeping drivers, but there are still enough on the road to make Lamar typically slow-as-molasses, even at this hour. Two cars occupy the parking lot of a strip club. The giant BNSF intermodal facility, which transfers cargo to and from trucks to one of Memphis' many rail lines, is largely silent.

Memphis International Airport is essentially barren, though that one recording -- smoking is prohibited, except for at the Blue Note Cafe in the passenger concourse between terminals A and B -- occasionally breaks through the morning silence.

4:20 a.m., WMC studios

This is Lindsey Brown's fourth week as an anchor on the overnight shift at the local NBC affiliate, which requires no small amount of adjusting. WMC's morning show starts at 4:30 a.m., then speeds on for two and a half hours straight before yielding to Matt Lauer. For the 29-year-old Brown, that means a 2:30 a.m. alarm and an arrival to the studio at 3:30 to get makeup and prep for the show's content.

For it to be 10 minutes out from the start of a 150-minute show, the studios are barren at 4:20, with Brown breaking the silence to check with meteorologist Ron Childers -- whose tie and pressed white shirt just seem odd to encounter, at least in person and not on camera, at such an early hour -- to see if the front moving through meant severe weather. It might command some added attention, he says, but not wall-to-wall coverage.

Co-anchor Kym Clark and a cameraman arrive a few moments later, and at 4:30, the show's opening credits roll. They open with teases of stories about the EPA ruling that Shelby County violates air-quality standards and the recent fundraising effort for the family of fallen Memphis police officer Martoiya Lang.

"And the wind is really kicking right now," she says, transitioning to Childers, who has since put on his suit jacket, "and we are in for a wet morning commute."

On rain-slicked Union Avenue, a few more cars are out. A few patrons occupy chairs at the nearby coffee shop. The morning's first runner on Mud Island's winding trail jogs alongside a dog.

Memphis is waking up after another lazy, slow overnight, hardly knowing what's been happening while it snores.

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(c)2012 The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.)

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