Danny Thomas

St. Jude began as a promise. Shortly before his first child was born, a struggling actor named Danny Thomas vowed to build a shrine to St. Jude Thaddeus if he found success. In the early 1950s he and his wife toured the country raising money, and in 1952 he recorded Arabic folk songs for a St. Jude fundraiser. Born in 1912 in Deerfield, Michigan, to Maronite Catholic immigrants from Bsharri, Lebanon, he followed Bishop Samuel Stritch's advice to put the hospital in Memphis, and founded St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in 1962 with Dr. Lemuel Diggs and Anthony Abraham.

What the plaque says

Danny Thomas Thanks to entertainer Danny Thomas, who founded St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital in Memphis, this road bears the name Beale Street. Created as an avenue in 1841, locals began calling it Beale Street after the African-American blues legend W.C. Handy, who wrote Beale Street Blues in 1917. By 1955, Memphis changed the names of east-west streets to avenues. Unhappy with the decision, Thomas recorded a song, Bring Back Our Beale Street, as an appeal to Mayor Frank Tobey to keep the streets name. 2000 copies of the record were distributed to jukeboxes and proceeds from the song benefited St. Jude, where families never receive a bill for services. Because of Thomas' efforts, Mayor Tobey changed the name back to Beale Street. In 1960, when Thomas was in town to lay the cornerstone for St. Jude, he visited Beale Street for the Handy statue dedication and played a few notes from his song on Handy's trumpet. In 1962, St. Jude opened a mile from Beale street, on a road later renamed Danny Thomas Boulevard, in honor of its founder.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — steps away
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 0.5 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• Sun Studio — 0.8 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Ida B. Wells — steps away
• Pee Wee's Saloon — steps away
• Hooks Brothers Photography Established in 1907 — steps away
• Rufus Thomas, Jr. — steps away