Robert "Prince Mongo" Hodges appears here under the category of "Fun People".  I apologize for that in advance.  Mongo is more "fun to speculate about" than he is "fun to live next door to".  A constant fixture for many years in Memphis, Robert Hodges who refers to himself as "Prince Mongo" (later this morphed into King Mongo and later Saint Mongo) held a significant segment of the Memphis imagination, especially between the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s.  Hodges received a good deal of press later but it was less endearing.

Somewhere around 1980 I lived in midtown Memphis.  Mongo, already a talking point among the twenty-something crowd lived in a house nearby.  One of my rituals was to take my female friends on a motorcycle ride by Mongo's house so we could view his "yard art".  At that time he had his yard so full of garbage, junk, comodes and things that were so wholly uninteresting that we were frankly disappointed that we were not seeing the skulls and other pseudo-occult trappings we had come to expect.  What we really saw was a house where the owner appeared to be very openly attempting to vex his neighbors by creating what could most charitably be called an eyesore and, worst case, a health hazard.

On the other hand there was the mythological Mongo that kept us all tied in.  Possibly in the end it was the fact that Mongo never became boring that kept him in the public imagination.

I began to hear the street talk and urban mythology about Mongo around 1976.  I was only 16 and this type of story held a great deal of fascination for me.  There were two stories about Mongo's genesis.  Both stories could be true, or neither, but they appeared to compete.  The most prevalent story by far was that Hodges had taken out insurance against the loss of his mental faculties.  He then pretended to be insane.  The insurance company paid off in the millions, but in order to keep the money Robert "Prince Mongo" Hodges must continue to come across as, at least, eccentric.

The second urban legend is simpler.  The story is that Hodges brother is filthy rich and gives him whatever he wants.  The idea that Robert Hodges himself may have inherited money has never been explored in my presence and I don't know the answer to that question.

Regardless of where he gets the money he seems to have plenty of it.  He owns a $2 million home in Fort Lauderdale as well as his home in Memphis.  The rest of the story is less clear.

Hodges first impressed himself on the Memphis public in the mid to late 1970s.  He owned a pizza place in midtown called simply "Prince Mongo's".  It was there his reputation began to grow.  It became well known that the curly haired owner that never wore shoes was the self-styled prince of a planet named Zambodia.  Referring to everyone as "Spirit" Hodges could not get enough of the public eye.  He may have hit the peak of his popularity when he finished third in a race for county mayor some twenty years ago.  Even then however there was a dark side to Mongo.  In the midtown neighborhood where he lived the front yard remained constantly piled full of junk.  I don't mean that he was messy.  I mean he intentionally piled every imaginable and objectionable thing one might imagine (including toilets) into his front yard.  The main effect of this was to make his neighbors angry, thus gaining publicity for himself.  It always seemed to work.

After fighting with his midtown neighbors for a number of years Prince Mongo announced that he was moving his "sacred relics" downtown.  He opened a bar just off Beale Street and named it (what else?) Prince Mongo's Planet.  Over the years he owned the bar it changed names twice becoming King Mongo's Planet (he was promoted when his father, King of Zambodia died) and later Saint Mongo's Planet.  The claim to sainthood was even more tenuous than his claim to the throne as his bar became notorious for selling alcohol to minors.  Mongo moved his operation to a building called Ashler Hall which is adjacent to a large residential area.  Always the bad neighbor Mongo did nothing to stop his patrons from lining the streets (sometimes standing and sometimes passed out) and loudly irritating the surrounding community.  When Mongo's Planet lost its beer license it was learned that one of his employees was the "owner of record".

In 2002 Mongo was once again in the news for not cleaning up a front yard.  I can tell you first hand though that this house was not nearly as bad as the one twenty years previous (a photo of the 2002 house is shown below.  After complaints from neighbors the Shelby County General Sessions Court ordered him to remove a number of objects from his front yard including toilet seats, patio furniture, mannequin heads and beach umbrellas.  He challenged the order and was sent to jail for ten days (this after appearing in court in a green cape with goggles and a rubber chicken.  He was fined almost $14,000 for the incident.  Ultimately, two years later, he pled guilty and paid a $500 fine.

Prince, King or Saint Mongo is able to turn sober as a judge at a moments notice and can appear quite lucid when there is a profit to be made.  He does also appear to have some genuine eccentricities (he really does not wear shoes even in the Winter), but a large percentage of his antics appear to be the disrespectful and often illegal pranks of a middle-aged boy who never had to really work for his living.

He is continuing to spend larger amounts of time in Florida now.  There is no longer a business in Memphis that bears his name.  He is, and will remain, the most alternately loved and hated figure in Memphis since Crump.