The Dixie Greyhound Lines (called also Dixie or DGL), a highway-coach carrier, was a Greyhound regional operating company, based in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, from 1930 until 1954, when it (along with the Teche Greyhound Lines) became merged into the Southeastern Greyhound Lines, a neighboring operating company. Origin The Dixie Greyhound Lines (GL) began in 1925 in Memphis (on the Mississippi River and in the southwest corner of Tennessee) as the Smith Motor Coach Company, when James Frederick Smith, a former (and successful) truck salesman, received a used truck as a gift from his previous employer (John Fisher, a dealer, who owned the Memphis Motor Company). Smith removed the truck body, built a 12-seat bus body instead on the chassis, and started driving the vehicle himself, first between Memphis and Rosemark, northeast of Millington, in the north end of Shelby County (of which Memphis is the seat), about 25 miles from downtown Memphis to the north-northeast on state road 14 (an alternate route to Brownsville), and soon also between Memphis and Bolivar, about 66 miles to the east on US highway 64, on the way to Chattanooga. James Frederick Smith was the son of Captain James Buchanan "Jim Buck" Smith, who commanded steamboats on the rivers Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland – for several owners, including the Ryman Line, the property of Captain Tom Ryman, who in 1892 gave the funds for the construction of the Union Gospel Tabernacle in Nashville (which became renamed as the Ryman Auditorium after the benefactor died in 1904, and which served as the home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 until 1974). Early in his life (before age 20) young Smith discarded his first name, strongly preferring to be known as Fred or Frederick. In late 1909, after a devastating downturn in the waterborne trade, both the father and the son worked temporarily for Clarence Saunders, the famous wholesale grocer in Memphis, the inventor of the concept of self-service retail grocery stores, the builder and the owner of the Pink Palace mansion (later and now a museum), and the man who made and lost a fortune as the founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery-store chain.] Development By the end of his second year in business, Smith owned and ran 25 coaches; by the end of his third year, he had 60. [In the early years Fred operated in Memphis his own plant in which