Taco Bell Tuesday Club: Old friends swap reminiscenses, tall tales at weekly gathering

Lifestyle feature for The Commercial Appeal

April 14, 2011

If you have stopped for lunch at the Taco Bell at Estate and Poplar in East Memphis recently, odds are you’ve encountered a group of raucous, overgrown boys eating and reminiscing.

What you have wandered into is the Taco Bell Tuesday Club.

“We were always sitting in here on Tuesdays, and it started out as a joke, ‘Hey, why don’t we start a club?'” said 60-year-old Stanley Rogers.

That was eight months ago, and the five founding members — Ernie Vescovo, a broker with First Horizon; Ronny Birmann, a retired traveling salesman; Ernie Barrasso, a retired casino executive and disco owner; Bud Cowgill, owner of Cabinet Services, and Rogers, who works in IT — have grown into a roster numbering more than 60.

The average age is about 65 (the oldest member, at 85, is Albert Caccamisi), and the parameters of the club are loosely defined, though members do have identification badges on lanyards and matching baseball caps with the bold letters “TBC” (Taco Bell Club) and a likeness of a taco embossed across the front.

It’s difficult to discern a leader of this party. Indeed, walking among them, the ringmaster of this circus seems to change from conversation to conversation, from colorful anecdote to anecdote … (read more)