Home Equipment Company

The Home Equipment Company, an appliance store at 2529 Summer Avenue, gave Johnny Cash a job he was bad at and a patron who helped keep him in music. Cash came to Memphis in 1954 out of the Air Force, married, with a child on the way, and studying on the GI Bill to be a radio announcer. His brother Roy drove him to see the company's president, George Bates, who took him on as a door-to-door salesman. Cash later called himself a great radio operator and a terrible salesman. His daughter Rosanne wrote that he once talked a customer out of a refrigerator on the grounds that it was too expensive. Bates kept him on anyway. While the job went badly, Cash spent his spare hours with two mechanics from an auto dealership on Union Avenue, Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins, and his family rented half a duplex within walking distance of the store. He kept afloat by borrowing from his father-in-law and from Bates, who also gave the band work: a Home Equipment advertisement is logged from a KWEM broadcast of May 21, 1955, by which time Cash was recording for Sam Phillips at Sun. Cash did not forget it. He later walked into the office with money he had saved and paid Bates every penny he owed him, and in his autobiography he wrote of Bates as one of those angels who appear in a person's life. The store stood on Summer Avenue, then the main highway out toward Nashville.