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Bobby Thomson and Red Nelson

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Bobby Thomson died Monday night.

He was at his home in Savannah, Ga. Thomson was 86 years old and had been in failing health for several years. He had moved to the South about five years ago to be closer to one of his daughters.

Those of us who love the game of baseball never really tire of hearing Russ Hodges’ call of The Shot Heard Round the World.

“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

Yes, he said it four times. It was October 1951.

Thomson’s three-run home run off Ralph Branca in the bottom of the ninth inning secured the pennant for the Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds. It will forever be one of the most famous moments in baseball history.

“I never thought it was going to be that big,” Branca told The Associated Press. “Hell no. When we went into the next season, I thought it would be forgotten. I’ll miss him. I mellowed over the years, and we became good friends. I enjoyed being around him.”

There’s an outstanding book by Joshua Prager titled “The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World.”

Prager, a former Wall Street Journal writer and a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, says he made literally thousands of phone calls while researching and writing that book.

As it turns out, one of those calls was to my parents’ house in Arkadelphia.

Here’s the story:

My father joined the Army Air Forces as it was known at the time in 1943 following his freshman year of college at Ouachita. He was sent for training to Saint John’s University, an all-male Catholic school in central Minnesota that’s surrounded by thousands of acres of forests, prairies and lakes. It was not unusual for college campuses to be used for training during World War II. George Wallace, for instance, received his training on the Ouachita campus in Arkadelphia long before becoming the governor of Alabama and a presidential candidate.

It was quite a change of scenery for my dad, a poor boy from Benton whose family had no money to travel during the Great Depression.

He occasionally would mention how beautiful it was there. He saw more snow than he had ever seen. Unable to return home for Christmas, he accompanied a fellow recruit to the family home in South Dakota for the holidays. He remembers more snow, seeing pheasants for the first time and staying at the house to watch young children while his friend and the other adults attended midnight mass (my dad is Baptist).

Beyond that, however, Dad never talked much about that time and certainly would never have dreamed of bragging about any personal accomplishments. As I’ve written on this blog before, he truly is part of the Greatest Generation, one of those silent men who did their duty during World War II and then returned home to raise families and build businesses.

By the time the call from Josh Prager came, my dad’s hearing was such that he was unable to carry on a telephone conversation.

Here’s what my mother remembered: A nice man called from New York, said he was working on a book about a famous baseball player and wanted to confirm that this was the home of the Red Nelson who had spent time at Saint John’s in Minnesota during World War II.

Mom confirmed that he indeed had the right Red Nelson but told him my dad was unable to do a telephone interview.

Prager, in turn, told her that he initially had been under the impression that Thomson had been voted “most athletic” among that group of Air Force recruits. In interviewing someone who was there, however, he was told that the “most athletic” was not Bobby Thomson. It was a guy named Red Nelson from Arkansas.

I anxiously waited for the book to come out so I could buy my father a copy. His name wasn’t mentioned. After all, there was no reason for Prager to mention any awards Thomson didn’t win. Still, Dad enjoyed reading the book, and our family had a great story to tell.

Dad had remembered a Bobby Thomson. He said he had just never made the connection that it was that Bobby Thomson.

I asked him why he had never mentioned being “most athletic.” He said he saw no reason to mention it.

The more I’ve read about Bobby Thomson since his death Monday, the more I’ve become convinced that he and my dad were a lot alike.

Prager wrote this earlier today at www.tnr.com, the website for The New Republic: “Bobby Thomson did not recognize his own renown. No matter that the home run he had hit in a Harlem horseshoe on Oct. 3, 1951, remained 49 years later the unsurpassable high point of a national pastime, a life marker for a generation of Americans who remembered where they were when the Giants won the pennant (the Giants won the pennant!) as vividly as they did the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the assassination of Kennedy. And so, after we agreed over the phone to meet at his New Jersey church, he was sure to tell me, lest I not recognize him, what he looked like.”

Prager said Thomson told him, “I’m tall and thin and I wear glasses.”

Thomson’s late wife had once said of him, “He’s sensitive and humble to a fault with a tendency to play himself down.”

Thomson was a three-time All-Star who hit .270 with 264 career home runs and 1,026 RBIs in a career that spanned from 1946 until 1960. He often would call himself “the accidental hero.”

It later was revealed that the Giants had a system that season for stealing signals from opposing catchers. Thomson always insisted he did not know what pitch was coming when he hit The Shot Heard Round the World.

Prager, who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times, says Thomson later admitted that he had made use of stolen signs in his first three at-bats that day but not the last.

Thomson had been born in Glasgow, Scotland, and named after an uncle who died in World War I. He came to this country in 1926 when he was just 3 as his family settled in Staten Island. He signed a contract with the Giants in 1942 but ended up spending three years in the military.

Prager writes that Thomson’s father, a cabinetmaker, “ingrained in Bobby and his five older siblings the importance of reserve.”

“We were brought up to be seen and not heard,” he told Prager.

After his famous hit, Thomson told the Daily News of New York: “It was a pitch that Musial or any other good hitter would have taken. It was high and inside. I didn’t deserve to do a thing like that.”

My father will turn 86 on Oct. 14, which incidentally will be my 21st wedding anniversary.

The dementia is such now that I can’t really carry on a conversation with him. If I could, though, I’m sure he would continue to maintain that he never knew it was the famous Bobby Thomson he beat out for “most athletic” all those years ago in the woods of Minnesota.

And even had he known, he wouldn’t have felt it was anything worth mentioning to his son.

Yes, they raised them differently back in those days.

Posted in Baseball, Memories | 3 Comments »

Bring back Browning’s, dang it!

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

I was out of town for much of last week and therefore am late commenting on the closure of that Little Rock icon, Browning’s Mexican Food.

Much has been written about the Heights institution since it closed on Tuesday night of last week. There was a wonderful editorial in Saturday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, for instance.

The comments sections of the Arkansas Times’ Arkansas Blog and the Eat Arkansas blog were filled with input from people who loved (and hated) Browning’s.

My thoughts: A spot on Kavanaugh Avenue in one of the most affluent sections of the state’s largest city — a spot that has held a restaurant since the 1940s – can only be described as a great location.

Also, nostalgia sells. If you don’t believe it, reference my post from earlier this week about the retail success of Dick’s on Main Street in Branson.

When it comes to a restaurant, nostaglia and location aren’t enough. The food and service, of course, matter a great deal.

Here’s my advice for the savvy investor: Bring back Browning’s. Stick as closely as you can to the Ark-Mex menu for fans of the old Browning’s (I count myself among those fans). Keep up the breakfast that had been added by the new owners. Serve it six days a week. Make it, quite simply, the best breakfast in town. In a city that lacks for independent restaurants that serve a full breakfast, there’s a market here. At lunch, have the top plate lunch in town (Browning’s was once known for its lunch specials) for those who don’t want Ark-Mex.

Next, have the most efficient service in the city. Period. I liked to have breakfast meetings at Browning’s but often found the service (or lack thereof) maddening.

Finally, make the restaurant spotless. There’s nothing wrong with old. But it must be clean.

There are few professions that require longer hours than running a restaurant correctly. The owners were quick to say there were some management problems. They suggested that a lack of business wasn’t the major problem. And it appears the tax man was on the way.

So have a top-notch business manager. Location, nostalgia, Little Rock’s best breakfast, great plate lunches, Ark-Mex in the evening, outstanding service, cleanliness and hard work should add up to a profitable enterprise.

I didn’t grow up in Little Rock. But like a lot of Arkansans, my family made frequent trips to the city. So I ate at Browning’s as a child. And when I moved to Little Rock immediately following graduation from college, I became a regular at Browning’s on my nights off (I was a sportswriter and my hours were from late in the afternoon until late at night).

I agree with those who say that the Ark-Mex at Browning’s is an acquired taste. My wife, who was raised in far south Texas and knows good Mexican food, hated the place the first time I took her there. I tried to explain that despite the sign out front that said Browning’s Mexican Food, this wasn’t really Mexican food. It wasn’t even Tex-Mex. It was Ark-Mex. In my family, we referred to it as the platter of orange and brown goo, and I loved it.

Sometimes when my wife would say, “You’re on your own for dinner,” I would drop by Browning’s. If you saw me there at supper, I was usually eating alone. I would get the red punch and the Summer Plate (taco, guacamole salad, cheese dip) whether it was summer or not. If I were still hungry, a scoop of sherbet would serve as dessert. I left satisfied.

Given the strong outpouring of public sentiment since Browning’s closed, I think the foundation is there to keep the place alive.

And if there is no rebirth?

Well, it will serve as a lesson. If we truly love the old places, we have to do more than talk about them. We have to spend money there. I was having lunch recently with two prominent commercial real estate developers, and we began listing the truly old-line restaurants in Little Rock. The list was short — Franke’s, Bruno’s, Browning’s, Lassis Inn. I love them all. And I spend (or spent in the case of Browning’s) money at all of them.

We can take nothing for granted.

I’m reminded of that each time I drive down U.S. Highway 49 and pass the closed Shadden’s barbecue joint near Marvell, the wreath still on its door. When I would make that drive every week during my years of working for the Delta Regional Authority, I took for granted that Shadden’s would always be there. Then Wayne Shadden died and the place closed, likely to never open again.

The Shadden’s legend, however, will live on. I received a nice note yesterday from Liz Williams, the president of the Southern Food & Beverage Museum in New Orleans. She reported that she had read on this blog about the closing of Shadden’s and was able to obtain the sign.

That sign will now be a part of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. It also will help shine a spotlight on the Arkansas barbecue culture, which has never received the national recognition that I feel it deserves.

The next time you’re in New Orleans, you need to drop by the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. It opened in June 2008 and is in the Riverwalk Marketplace, along the Mississippi River adjacent to the city’s enormous convention center.

Here’s how the museum’s website (www.southernfood.org) describes this exciting, relatively new addition to New Orleans’ inventory of attractions: “The Southern Food and Beverage Museum is a nonprofit living history organization dedicated to the discovery, understanding and celebration of the food, drink and the related culture of the South. … While based in New Orleans, the museum examines and celebrates all the cultures that have come together through the centuries to create the South’s unique culinary heritage. It brings all races and ethnicities to the table to tell the tale, from the farmer and the homemaker to the line cook and the celebrity chef.

“The Southern Food and Beverage Museum celebrates, interprets, investigates, entertains and preserves. A collaboration of many, the museum allows food lovers of all stripes — Southerners and non-Southerners, locals and tourists, academics and food industry insiders — to pull up their chairs and dig into the food and drink of the South.”

In addition to the food and drink, the museum focuses on:

– The many ethnicities that have combined to create Southern food and drink traditions.

– The farmers, fishermen, hunters and gatherers who have produced the food.

– The processors, inventors, chefs and business people who run the restaurants and stock the stores.

Liz, who has been involved in several major economic development projects in New Orleans, is also a lawyer who writes about the legal aspects of food. She’s working on a book about obesity lawsuits and other food-related litigation.

Maybe somebody at the museum can tackle that strange subculture of Ark-Mex enthusiasts. At any rate, the museum is open from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. each Monday through Saturday and from noon until 6 p.m. on Sundays. Pay a visit on your next trip to New Orleans.

Posted in Little Rock, Memories, Restaurants | 2 Comments »

Spanning the Big Muddy

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

In March 2003, retired Air Force Col. Joe Pope wrote this on the website www.greenvillebridge.com from his home at Fair Oaks Ranch in Texas: “In February 1943, shortly after the Greenville Bridge opened, we moved to Montrose, where my mother and father lived until their deaths in the 1980s. I graduated from high school at Lake Village in 1951, the U.S. Naval Academy in 1956 and spent 22 years in the armed services. During these years, I crossed the bridge many times visiting my parents and even ‘bombed’ it electronically several times when I was a navigator on B-52s at Columbus, Miss., in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“In 1989, my wife and I moved back to Lake Village and lived there until 2001, when we moved back to Texas for family health reasons. I know firsthand how much the old bridge has meant to generations of people on both sides of the bridge and to millions of travelers who have used the bridge through the years. When we left, we sold our home on Lake Chicot to the project engineer for the new bridge. I am sure he is overseeing the building of a fine and unique new bridge that will serve many more generations of local residents and travelers. May God bless their endeavors.”

On Monday, that “fine and unique new bridge” will be dedicated between Lake Village and Greenville.

On Wednesday, traffic will begin crossing it on U.S. Highway 82.

The old bridge will be demolished. A contract in the amount of $22.4 million was awarded in January to Granite Construction Co. to remove the bridge. Demolition is scheduled to be complete by Sept. 21, 2012. At that point, the 1940 Greenville Bridge will be nothing but a memory. But what a story it was as Delta leaders worked during the Great Depression to find the money needed to build a bridge between Arkansas and Mississippi.

“The bridge was intimidating and fascinating to me,” Dr. Clyde Brown of Memphis wrote in 2002. “I always thought of it as a powerful steel horse perched in the Delta sky. When I got my driver’s license, my parents trusted me enough to drive them across the bridge to Lake Village. I must say that this experience was as unnerving as landing an F-16 on an aircraft carrier at night.”

In the comments section of an earlier post I wrote about Greenville, Jack Rhodes recalled the day in 1951 that a jet from nearby Greenville Air Force Base, which is no longer in operation, struck the bridge and exploded. The pilot was killed, and there was a large fire. The crash caused $175,000 in damage, a huge amount at the time, but the bridge was reopened to traffic after 22 hours.

Greenville, known as the Queen City of the Delta, was a booming place in the 1930s, but Mayor Milton C. Smith knew there needed to be a bridge to Arkansas rather than just a ferry for growth to continue. He joined forces with John A. Fox, the secretary of the Washington County Chamber of Commerce, and spent weeks at a time in Washington during 1937-38, lobbying for congressional funding.

According to the history posted at www.greenvillebridge.com: “The two spent so much time at their efforts, Smith’s Queen City barrel hoop business would eventually go bankrupt from his continued absence. The first order of business was to get Congress to pass a law authorizing the bridge. Fox, whose national network of friends reached all the way to the nation’s capital, wrote to Mississippi Congressman W.M. Whittington about the matter in May 1937 and was told the timing of his request was not good.

“While considering what to do next, Fox was agreeably surprised to pick up the newspaper days later and read that Congressman Wade Kitchens of Arkansas had introduced a bill requesting permission for the bridge. Fox worked Capitol Hill with Kitchens, Whittington and other friends, including Sen. Pat Harrison of Mississippi and Sen. Joe. T. Robinson of Arkansas. The governor of Arkansas, Carl E. Bailey, had been an ally from the early days of the bridge campaign.”

Fox met with chambers of commerce from Birmingham in the east to Lubbock in the west, explaining what the bridge would mean for the South. Everywhere he spoke, he urged people to send telegrams to members of Congress. The bill authorizing bridge construction was approved in August 1937 and signed by President Roosevelt.

“With all permissions granted, Smith and Fox turned their focus to financing,” the website history states. “How much would a new bridge truly cost? Smith and Fox hired Ash Howard Needles & Tammen of Kansas City, an engineering consultant with a large portfolio of major bridges, to conduct a study and make the estimate. The consultant determined that Warfield Landing, the site used by the Greenville fairy, was not a suitable site for a bridge. Their recommendation was to build the bridge downstream, below Lake Chicot on the Arkansas side, in a straight stretch of the river with stable banks. The new location meant long and expensive approaches to the bridge would be needed. The new estimate for construction: $4.25 million.

“Where Fox succeeded as a master of politics, Mayor Smith succeeded as a master of finance, and during the year that followed, the mayor’s skills would be tested to the fullest. A survey of traffic volume, commissioned to satisfy possible investors, concluded there wouldn’t be sufficient income from tolls to warrant construction of a $4.5 million bridge and that the project merited only $2.55 million in financing. The Reconstruction Finance Corp. would lend the $2.55 million, but this left Smith and Fox some $2 million short.”

In September 1938, Smith and his city attorney, S.B. Thomas, went to Washington to seek money from the Works Progress Administration. They had to make the case to the WPA that construction of a bridge would create lots of jobs for men who otherwise would be unemployed in the Delta. They made that case successfully.

On Sept. 21, Smith and Thomas sent a telegram to Greenville stating that the trip had been a success and that “we can now look forward to the actual materialization of our fondest dream, the construction of the mammoth bridge.”

The Delta Democrat Times reported, “And so it was that exactly at 11:30 a.m. on that day, Greenville received the joyful news with the blasting of every steam whistle in the city, a prearranged signal.”

On Oct. 2, 1940, the bridge was officially opened to traffic. It was named for former Congressman Benjamin G. Humphreys of Greenville, a co-author of the Ransdell-Humphreys Flood Control Act of 1917 that established a national flood control program along the Mississippi River. His granddaughter, Mildred “Maury” McGee, had cut the ribbon during the earlier dedication ceremony in September.

Humphreys, who was born in 1865 and died in 1923, was known as Our Ben to his constituents. His father, Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, had been a Confederate general who fought at Gettysburg and served as Mississippi’s governor from 1865-68. His great-grandfather, Ralph Humphreys, was the colonel of a Virginia regiment in the American Revolution. When Ben Humphreys married Louise Yerger, the daughter of Greenville’s mayor, Jefferson Davis was one of the guests at the wedding.

Ben Humphreys was elected to Congress in 1902 and was determined to make the folks in Washington aware of the flood problems along the lower Mississippi River. A paper he wrote in 1914 advanced the notion that the river was, in essence, the drainage canal for the nation and a federal responsibility. That paper swayed public opinion. Members of the new House Flood Control Committee toured the region in 1916 so they could see the problems for themselves. The act passed the following year, giving the federal government the responsibility of flood control along the Mississppi River.

The Delta Democrat Times later would write of the 1940 bridge, “It seems appropriate that the massive structure of steel and concrete which links two sides on the great river he loved should be dedicated to his memory. His life work had been the conquest of that river beside which he now sleeps.”

Beginning next week, there will be no traffic on that bridge for the first time in seven decades.

Posted in Memories, Mississippi, Traveling Arkansas | 3 Comments »

The Carnegie libraries

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

When you think about the classic facilities we have abandoned, neglected or torn down in Little Rock through the decades, you just want to cry.

A current example is Ray Winder Field, widely recognized on websites that cover sports facilities as one of the most historic old ballparks in the country. No one associated with City Hall ever lifted a finger to save this facility for use as a high school and college ballpark, perhaps one that included a baseball museum.

What a jewel that would have been in Little Rock’s crown. Soon, it will be gone.

In a few years, once the UAMS bulldozers have done their job, all we will have are photos of this historic facility.

The same fate befell Little Rock’s Carnegie Library. We didn’t save it.

It was one of only four Carnegie libraries in the state. A grant of $88,100 from the Carnegie Foundation of New York in 1906 allowed planning to begin.

The library was opened on Feb. 1, 1910. That library continued to be utilized until 1964 when it was torn down and replaced by the ugly building that now serves as some kind of computer center. There are still tables from the Carnegie Library in use at the Main Library in the River Market District and the adjacent Cox Creative Center. Original shelving from the library is still used at River Market Books & Gifts.

And Bobby Roberts, the director of the Central Arkansas Library System who is a historian by training, found four stone columns that were part of the original library. Roberts rescued them from a scrap yard, and they now stand proudly in front of the Main Library.

The people of Fort Smith, Morrilton and Eureka Springs were wiser than those in Little Rock. Those three cities saved their Carnegie libraries, though Fort Smith’s building has long been used as a studio and office complex for KFSM-TV.

The beginnings of what’s now the Fort Smith Public Library can be traced back to the formation of something called the Fortnightly Club in October 1888. It was a women’s literary and social organization. Mrs. Isaac C. Parker, the wife of the famous federal judge, was a charter member and the organization’s first president.

The ladies in the club organized the Fortnightly Club Library Association and sold shares for $5 each to help pay for a library. That library was opened in the Belle Grove school building with 1,100 books on the shelves. The Fort Smith Public Library website says the opening was in July 1892. The University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections (where the Fortnightly Club papers are housed) website says it was the summer of 1889.

At any rate, it was the largest public library in the state by 1902.

The Fortnightly Club played a key role in obtaining a Carnegie grant for $25,000 in March 1906. Construction took place during 1907 and the building opened in January 1908 on North 13th Street on the site of the house in which Judge Parker had died.

Construction of a new library on South Eighth Street began in 1969 and was completed in 1970 with the Carnegie library becoming part of the television operation soon afterward.

“I grew up in the Carnegie Library in Fort Smith,” Brian D. Johnson wrote on his blog “Context & Continuity” a couple of years ago. “I remember the wooden floors, the enormous wooden rails on the stairs leading up to the children’s room and the fact that it was so convenient that the Dr. Seuss books were shelved so that I could easily reach them. … My library card was pale blue with rounded corners, and there was a metal tag affixed to it. I can remember exactly how the library smelled.”

There’s that special library smell again, something mentioned in the previous post.

Johnson went on to write, “Andrew Carnegie was a wicked man in many respects, but I can’t help but second the person who called him the patron saint of the library. I would not be me it it weren’t for the Carnegie Library and the Fort Smith Public Library. It’s impossible for me to calculate how many hours, days I spent there. For my mother, it was a combination of child care and a priceless gift that created. . . me.”

In Morrilton, a women’s club known as the Pathfinder Club was established in 1897. Like the women’s group in Fort Smith, the ladies collected books and began raising money for a library.

A town meeting was called in 1914, and community members pledged to help the club build and maintain a library. Funds were solicited to purchase the Old School Presbyterian Church. The club’s books were moved to that building once shelves were added. Those in town who were sponsored by a club member could use the library for a small charge.

W.S. Cazort of Morrilton purchased a collection of more than 1,000 rare books from a reclusive Chicago engraver named William Porter. Cazort, in turn, transferred the books to the Pathfinder Club for what was described as a modest sum. Using the rare book collection as a bargaining chip, the Pathfinder Club applied to the Carnegie Foundation for a grant. A $10,000 grant was received in September 1915, and Morrilton soon became one of the smallest cities in the South with a Carnegie Library.

Of the grant, $7,500 was used to build a 3,628-square-foot facility. The rest of the money was used to buy furniture and coal for heating. The building opened in October 1916. The top floor held the books. The lower floor had a meeting room, kitchen, furnace and coal bin.

In Eureka Springs, meanwhile, a board of trustees was organized in 1910 and plans for a library building were sent to Carnegie. A grant was received for $12,500 and construction began.

We’ll let the website for the Eureka Springs Carnegie Public Library take it from here: “The original site for a stone structure designed by St. Louis architect George W. Hellmuth was not suitable, and the new site on Spring Street was a solid stone cliff. The new site was donated by R.C. Kerens, a Eureka Springs investor. Eventually, the site was excavated but because of delays, bad weather and the additional costs of excavation, B.J. Rosewater, the president of the library board of trustees, petitioned — and petitioned repeatedly — Carnegie for additional funds to complete the project.”

The Carnegie Foundation finally agreed to send an additional $3,000 to Eureka Springs. The building opened in 1912. When the city turned down a request for $1,250 annually to operate the library, Rosewater went to the people. Memberships were sold for $1 per year. Books and furniture were donated.

In the winter of 1916, the library closed due to insufficient funds for fuel and staff. Funds were later raised to reopen the facility. By 1921, it was open six days a week. The building, constructed of locally quarried stone, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.

The library in Eureka Springs is now celebrating the centennial of the original Carnegie gift.

“The people of Eureka Springs cherish their history,” says Lynn Larson, a centennial committee member. “One of the most remarkable aspects of that history is the Eureka Springs Carnegie Public Library. How it came to be here in our little town and how it has continuously served the community is worthy of recognition and honor. It is a fulfillment of Andrew Carnegie’s belief that knowledge should be freely available to all, regardless of financial means or station in life. We are proud to carry on the legacy, providing materials and resources that bring the world of information to every patron free of charge.”

Events such as book fairs, teas, garden parties and lectures are being held every month this year.

Hats off to the people of Morrilton and Eureka Springs for still operating libraries in their historic Carnegie buildings.

As for Little Rock … well, it was Little Rock just being Little Rock. Take a long look at sad old Ray Winder Field for proof of how things work in the state’s largest city.

Posted in Memories, Traveling Arkansas | 1 Comment »

A summer day at the library

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

They’re about to open a new library at Helena.

It’s a nice location downtown in what was the Save-A-Lot grocery story. There’s even a local architectural connection: The lead architect in the redesign was Thad Kelly III of the Little Rock-based company Cromwell Architects Engineers Inc.

His father, the late Thad Kelly II, was a mayor of Helena. Thad Kelly Pocket Park was named in the former mayor’s honor.

The building that will house the library was built as a Kroger store in the 1950s, and the younger Kelly remembers the excitement surrounding the opening of that store. Renovation costs for the facility on Columbia Street were $1.6 million. The 13,000-square-foot facility will have three times the space of the current library. There will be a children’s room, a computer lab, a genealogy room and a community room.

The project was funded with a $300,000 grant from Southern Bancorp Capital Partners’ Delta Bridge Project, a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a $50,000 grant from the Carl B. and Florence E. King Foundation and locally raised money.

The planned opening of a new library brought back a flood of memories for Helena native A.B. Naylor (who was nice enough to bring me a couple of bottles of Shadden’s barbecue sauce last week).

“I spent many a summer day in the old library,” he wrote. “I always checked the sign-out card in the back to see if perhaps I was reading a book that my dad had read as a kid. I never ran across one. It was an unfulfilled treasure hunt. The old library was what a library is supposed to be — dark in the corners, cool air, quiet, a little mysterious and the wonderful smell of books (in retrospect, I hope it wasn’t rotting paper).

“The limit on the number of books a kid could check out was three. I would read a book or two a day. They must have gotten tired of seeing me. They finally let me check out as many books as I could read in the two-week loan period. I would take as many as 10 sometimes. Some of the books were more fragile or special or who knows what. They were kept in glass cases, accessible only to the librarians. I would peer through the glass to see what they had. One of the books was ‘Animal Farm.’ I thought I wanted to read it, so I checked it out. That was in the early 1980s. No one had borrowed it in at least 25 years. That’s the one I was sure I had a chance of spying my dad’s name on the card. It wasn’t there.

“The one thing that stuck out the most was the smell. Several years ago, National Geographic had an article on how scent was the sense that invoked the most memories. I can almost smell the library while I’m typing this. I wanted to get down and check it out before they moved, but I’m not going to make it. If you happen to be over that way, stick your head in the door and take a whiff for me.”

A.B.’s note brought back memories for me. I too spent many summer days in my hometown library. It was in downtown Arkadelphia, just behind my father’s store. The library is still in the same building it has been in since 1903. It’s a wonderful old building.

Like A.B., I remember the smells.

My favorite part of the Clark County Library was called the Arkansas Room. It contained all sorts of books, newspaper articles, magazine articles, photos and manuscripts about our state. My favorite items were the special editions the Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat put out in 1936 to celebrate the state’s centennial. Whole summer afternoons were spent reading the articles in those special issues.

Both the old library building at Helena and the library at Arkadelphia are well worth a visit.

What was known as the Helena Library and Museum was built in 1891 and is the oldest public building still standing in the city. The museum will continue to operate out of the building. The library was a center of civic life in Helena in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It was used for receptions, dances and club meetings. School classes and religious services even took place in the building from time to time. The main room was not used exclusively for library purposes until 1914.

The museum wing was added in 1929 to display Civil War relics, Native American artifacts and items having to do with the history of Phillips County. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

In Arkadelphia, efforts to build the library began in November 1897 when a group of about 30 women formed the Woman’s Library Association. The association began to collect books from area residents, and the books were stored in the association president’s home. Those books later were moved into a rent-free space downtown. By 1899, the association was forced to rent space for its book collection. A fund to build a library was established that same year.

The website for the Clark County Library System tells the rest of the story: “Through money-raising events such as oyster suppers, bazaars, spelling bees and fiddlers’ contests, about $1,000 was raised. In 1903, a loan was secured and construction of a library building began. During the 10 years following its opening, money-raising activities continued to pay off the library building loan. The most significant event occurred in 1905 when William Jennings Bryan gave a benefit lecture for the library. By 1913, the debt was fully paid.

“Designed by architect Charles L. Thompson of Little Rock, the library was built by James Pullen. An oversized portico with ionic columns mark the facade of this one-story red brick structure. The Clark County Library was completed in 1903 and remains intact today as an example of early 20th century institutional architecture in Arkansas.

“Throughout its history, the Clark County Library has served more than just the academic needs of the Arkadelphia community. It has often been used by recitals, by church and civic groups and for public meetings. During World War I, it was converted to a Red Cross workshop filled with cutting tables and sewing machines.

“From its 1903 opening until 1939, the library was owned and operated by the Woman’s Library Association. In 1939, the building and its contents were donated to the city. In 1974, the deed was transferred to the Clark County Library Board, enabling the library to better serve the entire county. It was added to the National Rgister of Historic Places in 1974.”

If you love old buildings, you owe it to yourself to visit these buildings in Arkadelphia and Helena.

While you’re at it, you should visit the Carnegie libraries at Morrilton and Eureka Springs.

Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated money to fund the construction of 2,509 libraries between 1883 and 1929. There were 1,689 of these libraries built in the United States, 660 in Great Britain and Ireland (Carnegie was a native of Scotland), 123 in Canada and a few others elsewhere.

Eureka Springs received a grant of $15,500 to build a library that opened in 1912. Morrilton received a grant of $10,000 to build a library that opened in 1916. More to come in a later post on those two libraries and what happened to the Carnegie libraries in Little Rock and Fort Smith.

Do you have any favorite Arkansas libraries and library memories?

Posted in Memories, Traveling Arkansas | 5 Comments »

Summer in Arkansas

Friday, July 9th, 2010

The July issue of Arkansas Life magazine (www.arkansaslife.com) is out, and there’s a nice series of essays about summer in Arkansas.

For those of us who love summer, the essays bring back plenty of memories.

Here’s the introduction: “That first sweet bite of watermelon. The waxy-fine feel of a ripe tomato in the palm of your hand. Slapping your skin over and over, hoping the pesky mosquitoes will find another host. These are the staples of an Arkansas summer. But the soul of the season hides in the most unusual places and moments. For there is magic in a pre-dawn bike ride, a float down the Buffalo River or a cold mojito sweating in your hand. There is pure joy found in the eyes of children as they swat at lightning bugs or watch the fireworks sizzle in the sky before falling into the lake.”

During the summer, for instance, I simply cannot get enough of Arkansas tomatoes and peaches.

I plan to drive tomorrow to Clarksdale, Miss., for part of the Oxford American’s Most Southern Weekend On Earth event. On the way home, I hope to stop at the fruit and vegetable stand on U.S. Highway 70 at Biscoe to buy peaches, tomatoes and perhaps a big cantaloupe.

My friend Kane Webb, the executive editor of Arkansas Life, asked me to contribute a couple of short pieces. I addressed two subjects I’ve written about on this blog before — eating outside at the Dairyland Drive-In just off the Prothro Junction exit off Interstate 40 in North Little Rock, and getting my fill of vegetables at Franke’s in the Regions Center in downtown Little Rock.

I visited Dairyland at 1 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday. There were two other people eating outside. That left me two of the four small picnic tables from which to choose.

A steady stream of traffic wound slowly down Arkansas Highway 161 — big, loud trucks; cars with the windows open and their radios playing full blast. Don’t expect a quiet dining experience at the Dairyland Drive-In.

You can sit facing the traffic or you can sit with your back to the highway, facing an old shed and a dilapidated mobile home with boxes piled high on the added-on wooden deck. The lunch special was a hamburger, fries and a drink. With tax, the total came to $4.42. And there were enough fries to feed two. These aren’t the mass-produced, frozen version, either. They’re fresh cut and fried to a golden brown. It costs an extra 40 cents if you want cheese on the burger.

There’s a full selection of milkshakes, malts, sundaes, floats and banana splits. I ordered a milkshake to take back to the office with me. It was as good as any milkshake you can find in this state.

On the day I visited Franke’s for the magazine story (I’m in the same building; I’ve already visited twice for lunch this week), my choice for a salad was the marinated tomato and cucumber salad. Vegetables? I went that day with turnip greens and Franke’s famous eggplant casserole. The entree was the stuffed bell pepper. I added a cornbread muffin. A piece of egg custard pie is de rigueur for dessert when you visit Franke’s.

There’s a Franke’s out on Rodney Parham in west Little Rock that’s open seven days a week, serving lunch and dinner. The downtown location is only open from 10:45 a.m. until 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, still overseen by a member of the founding family, Kristin Franke. The demographics vary greatly between the two locations. Out west, it tends to be an older crowd — retired folks, people from out of town who have doctors’ appointments. Downtown, it’s more of a business crowd — good suits, well-shined shoes (I’m the exception; my shoes badly need a shine. Can someone suggest a good place to get a shine?).

The July edition of Arkansas Life also includes short pieces by:

– Christopher Irons on cycling at dawn

–Kyle Brazzel on Fourth of July fireworks

– Tammy Keith on drive-in movies and on peaches

– Werner Trieschmann on mosquitoes

– Steve Straessle on snow-cone shacks

– Nancy Elizabeth Dement on Lake Ouachita

– Kane Webb on baseball

– Sean Clancy on driving through the Delta with bugs hitting the window (I will no doubt experience some of those bugs on the way back from Clarksdale tomorrow)

– Bobby Ampezzan on summer heat

– Keith Sutton on fishing the oxbow lakes in the White River National Wildlife Refuge

That one brought back memories of summer evenings spent fishing with my dad on an oxbow in the Ouachita River bottoms south of Arkadelphia. We were always the only boat on the water. It was quiet, eerie even.

The talented Sutton writes: “Bass live in the emerald waters of the oxbows, and catfish and bluegills and crappie — lots of them. Yet anglers don’t visit often. The lakes are remote and it can be difficult to launch a boat. One might fish a lake for days without seeing another soul. But you can drop in a cricket or minnow, cast a crankbait or spinner, and catch fish after fish.

“Watch, and you will see flashes of yellow in the cypress trees — stunning prothonotary warblers, gleaning insects for their young. Breathe deeply, and you will smell the evergreen fragrence of cypress needles and the redolence of rich, bottomland earth and fertile water. Listen, and you will hear the haunting calls of barred owls — Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? — and the sonorous hum of summer cicadas. Relax, and you will feel your cares melt away. Senses stir every minute you are there.”

It’s nice writing, and it brings back nice summer memories.

What things, places and events define an Arkansas summer for you?

Posted in Dairy bars, Memories, Restaurants | 7 Comments »

Election Night

Monday, May 17th, 2010

I’ve always loved Election Night.

I capitalize “Election Night” because it’s an “event” for a political junkie like me — kind of like the Super Bowl or the Final Four.

On Tuesday evening, at the end of one of the most interesting primary seasons in years , I’ll be on KUAR-FM, 89.1, the NPR affiliate in Little Rock.

KUAR does an outstanding job covering Arkansas news. I’m honored to be a part of the station’s Election Night team. Ron Breeding, John Brummett and I will go live at 8 p.m. Tuesday and stay on the air as long as necessary. I hope you have a chance to tune in.

I’m glad I received the invitation to be in the KUAR studios. Frankly, I’m not sure what I would do if I had to sit at home on an Election Night. It has been a long time since I wasn’t busy on an Election Night.

My father wasn’t a political animal. Far from it. He always voted, but his interests were his business, his family, sports, hunting and fishing. I, however, had been bitten by the political bug. When I was a boy, he would answer my pleas and take me down to the Clark County Courthouse to listen to Mr. Jim Gooch, the chairman of the Clark County Democratic Central Committee, read the box-by-box returns.

“Amity Box A. . .

“Whelen Springs. . .

“Curtis. . .”

It was exciting, those Democratic primary nights. All of the action, of course, was in the Democratic primary. I only knew one Republican in Clark County when I was a boy. There were no local races in November.

The local races were where the action was. And there were some great names running for office in those days — Jack Daniels, Shine Duce, Edgar Ball.

Once in the courtroom of the 1899 courthouse, I would look up at the judge’s chair and see John Riggle sitting there, anchoring the live coverage on KVRC-AM, 1240. I remember thinking how much I would love to do that one of these days — sit in that big chair, knowing that people all over the county — from Gurdon to Alpine — were listening to your voice. That was the media big time, my friend.

By the spring of 1978, my senior year in high school, I was working at KVRC. I anchored Election Night coverage from the studio (which was situated in a pasture just south of town), and Mr. Riggle still handled things from the big chair down at the courthouse. That was the year of the titanic Democratic Senate primary that saw our governor (David Pryor) and two of the state’s four members of the U.S. House of Representatives (Ray Thornton in the 4th District and Jim Guy Tucker in the 2nd District) all going for the late John L. McClellan’s seat.

All the county returns were in on primary night, and Mr. Riggle had left the courthouse for home.

I, however, kept the station on the air as we waited to determine who would be in the Senate runoff against Gov. Pryor. We normally signed off at 11 p.m. but could stay on the air when necessary.

I dipped in and out of the coverage being supplied by the Arkansas Radio Network while also reading stories off The Associated Press wire.

Well after midnight, the phone in the studio rang.

It was Mr. Riggle.

“Why are you still on the air?” he asked.

“I was waiting to see whether it would be Thornton or Tucker in the runoff,” I answered.

“Go ahead and sign that mother goose off and get some sleep,” he ordered.

I did as I was told, signing off with these words: “Based on the latest returns I have available, it looks like it will be Pryor vs. Thornton in the runoff.”

I woke up the next morning to discover it was Pryor vs. Tucker.

Thirty-two years later, I serve on boards with both Sen. Pryor and Gov. Tucker. Yes, Arkansas is a small world.

By November 1978, I was a college freshman at Ouachita. My favorite course that first semester of college was taught by Jim Ranchino, who at the time was the state’s most noted political pollster and analyst in addition to being a political science professor. Those of us who were true political junkies would hang out in his office after class. As always, he would be spending Election Night on KATV, Channel 7, in Little Rock with Steve Barnes. But Ranchino also had a private plane leased to take him after KATV had completed its coverage to what he said would be a victory party for an out-of-state campaign on which he was working.

“How do you know it will be a victory?” I asked him that morning.

“I’m working for them, aren’t I?” he replied with a smile.

I was back in the KVRC studio that Election Night when a bulletin printed out early in the evening on the AP wire. It read that Jim Ranchino had died of a massive heart attack while walking onto the set at KATV.

I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to think the AP had made a huge mistake.

I called the KATV newsroom to confirm the report. The person who answered the phone said it was true.

I slowly hung up the phone. I turned on my microphone and, through my tears, read the sad news on KVRC, the station in the town that Jim Ranchino called home. The rest of that evening — the night Bill Clinton was first elected governor — was a bit of a blur.

In 1980, my childhood wish was granted. Mr. Riggle informed me that he had grown weary of anchoring the box-by-box returns from the courthouse. He asked me to handle the task. So during the primary and the general elections, someone other than John Riggle got to sit in the judge’s chair. It was me. And it was a thrill for a 20-year-old who had grown up spending election nights in that courtroom.

In November of that year, as the county results rolled in, we kept hearing that Clinton was in trouble. He wasn’t in trouble in reliably Democratic Clark County, of course. But statewide, it was a different story.

Surely this Republican named Frank White couldn’t beat Clinton.

Surely not.

It has been fun being back on the radio for Election Night in recent years. Live radio is great fun.

During the 2008 and 2006 elections, I was in the KARN studios as an Election Night analyst.

For the elections of 1996-2004, when I was on the staff of Gov. Mike Huckabee, I was wherever the governor was on Election Night. If he were on the ballot, it meant being at the site of his election night party. In November 1998, when I was his campaign manager, that was the Embassy Suites in west Little Rock. In 2002, it was the Clear Channel Metroplex.

Even though we knew we were going to win in 1998, Election Night was particularly maddening since I had served as the campaign manager. As campaign manager, you worry about everything. I had devoted eight months of my life to the project and was determined that we receive an overwhelming percentage of the vote. As it turns out, we finished with almost 60 percent, the highest percentage ever received by a Republican gubernatorial nominee in Arkansas.

Huckabee wasn’t on the ballot in 2000 or 2004 but was in high demand for media interviews on those presidential election nights.

In November 2000, we operated from a suite at what was then the Excelsior Hotel (now the Peabody) since the Bush-Cheney party was downstairs. I answered the phone at one point, and it was Karl Rove. He was calling from Austin and asking for the governor. The television networks, skittish after having had to pull back on their initial projections that Al Gore had won Florida, would not yet call Arkansas. Huckabee assured Rove that Arkansas was firmly in the Bush camp. Without Arkansas’ six electoral votes, of course, Florida wouldn’t have mattered. Al Gore would have been elected president by carrying either Bill Clinton’s Arkansas or Gore’s home state of Tennessee. He carried neither.

On that wild night, I couldn’t pull myself away from the television. I finally left the hotel at 3:30 a.m. to make the short drive home, where I continued to watch the vote count in Florida until time to go to work. I never went to bed that evening.

Four years later, we had a suite at the Holiday Inn Presidential in downtown Little Rock. I stayed there watching network coverage of the George Bush win over John Kerry until 4 a.m.

In 1992, 1994 and for the primary in 1996, I was tied to my desk at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, writing the lead story in my job as political editor for the next day’s editions. Clinton’s election in November 1992, of course, remains the most memorable of those Election Nights.

Knowing that the next day’s front page would be one of the most famous newspaper front pages in Arkansas history, I decided to take the approach that The New York Times had taken when man first landed on the moon in 1969. The event was so momentous that there would be no need to embellish the lead paragraph.

John Noble Wilford began his July 21, 1969, story this way: “Men have landed and walked on the moon.”

The story about the first Arkansan to ever be elected president should get straight to the point, I decided. Our executive editor agreed.

Thus the lead paragraph in the lead story of the Nov. 4, 1992, edition read: “Gov. Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States on Tuesday.”

More than 17 years after the fact, I still think it was the correct lead sentence.

In 1984 and 1990, I had worked on campaigns (both losing campaigns, as it turned out), so Election Night found me doing the ol’ “still waiting on more results” routine during radio and television interviews.

In 1988, as Washington correspondent for the Arkansas Democrat, I made the trip to Houston to be at George H.W. Bush’s headquarters on the night he was elected president. Two years earlier, I had stayed in Washington, gathering comments on the 1986 midterm elections from both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.

I’ve gone on too long. It’s just that the Election Night memories always come flooding back.

Please share your favorite Election Night memories.

And remember to vote Tuesday. Then, join Ron, John and me on 89.1 FM at 8 p.m. as the returns start coming in. We’ll have fun.

Posted in Memories, Politics | 7 Comments »

Ike and the Greatest Generation

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Now that I’ve reached the age of 50, I find myself going to funerals more often.

I suppose that’s a good sign. It shows, I hope, that my family’s deep Arkansas roots have allowed us to make many friends across this state.

But it also shows that we’re losing the men and women of my parents’ generation on a regular basis now.

With my own father in a nursing home and unable to travel, I sometimes find myself sitting where he should have been sitting. Such was the case today as I sat with the honorary pallbearers at a memorial service for Charles Marshall “Ike” Sharp. I shared the pew mostly with men of my father’s generation, but I always appreciate the opportunity to fill in for my dad. I like nothing better than being recognized as Red Nelson’s son.

The man we had come to honor was always Mr. Sharp or Coach Sharp to me. For this post, though, let’s call him what my dad called him — simply Ike.

More than once in recent months, I’ve found my dad either calling me Ike or asking for Ike as the dementia takes hold. Their friendship spanned the decades. It also spanned the miles since the Sharp family lived more than 1,000 miles away in Douglas, Ariz., for 27 years before returning to Arkansas in 1983.

I now count the youngest of the three Sharp children — David, the athletic director at Ouachita Baptist University — among my closest friends. I’ve also known David’s sister Jane and his older brother Paul since they were Ouachita students. 

I stepped outside last night during the funeral home visitation to visit with Paul. We determined that our fathers’ stories are remarkably similar. You know, they really were part of the Greatest Generation.

Both were raised in Arkansas during the Great Depression. Both came from relatively poor families. Both were given the opportunity to attend college at Ouachita and play football. Both met the loves of their lives at Ouachita, women to whom they would remain married for more than half a century. Both became high school coaches when they graduated from college. Both had two sons and one daughter. Both continued to love the sport of football and love Ouachita.

During today’s service, Paul said a perfect day for his father would likely be a fall Saturday when Ouachita won, the Razorbacks won and “that team across the street” (with all due respect to my many friends from Henderson) lost.

Ike was born south of Warren in the Bradley County community of Vick. He was the youngest of three children. His sister was 12 years older and his brother was 14 years older.

“His father had a man who worked with him who had been taken in by the family,” Paul said. “He was about 50 years old at the time of dad’s birth, and he had never been married or had any children. He was a big man, 6-4 and weighing about 350 pounds. He immediately took a liking to my dad. He would bounce him on his knee and take him for walks after work. He was known as Big Ike, and he started calling my dad Little Ike.

The Ike stuck.

By the time Ike started school, his brother and sister had married and moved out. So he was pretty much raised as an only child. However, his dad had seven siblings and his mom had five siblings. Those 12 sets of aunts and uncles would produce 77 first cousins. Paul said his father could name all of them and the families to whom they belonged.

Ike’s father died when Ike was just 7. He was raised by his mother. Life in rural Arkansas was tough during the Depression. It was even tougher with no father at home. Paul said Ike could remember living in 13 places as the mother bounced from job to job. He once attended three schools in the same school year.

“This would make an impact on him at an early age,” Paul said. “It inspired my dad. He knew that when he grew up and had his family, he wanted to find a place to settle down and stay there.”

Paul said two of the happiest years of his father’s childhood were when he was in the eighth and the ninth grades. That’s because his mother had found a job as a cook at an orphanage in Monticello and was allowed to live at the orphanage. That meant plenty of playmates for Ike.

“He saw his first football game in the ninth grade and immediately fell in love with the sport,” Paul said. “He also played in the first game he ever saw. He remembered that they beat Dermott by a score of 6-0.”

During Ike’s senior year at Warren High School, a Warren resident contacted her brother-in-law, who happened to manage the bookstore at Ouachita. She sold her brother-in-law on Ike’s athletic and academic abilities. So it was that Ike Sharp ended up on the Arkadelphia campus in the fall of 1947.

“Dad was able to get a summer job at the lumber mill,” Paul said. “For the first time in his life, he had a little money in his pocket. Toward the end of the summer, he went to his boss at the mill and told him he had decided not to go to college. He instead just wanted to keep working. His boss said, ‘Ike, that’s fine, but where are you going to work?’ He told his boss he wanted to continue to work at the mill. The boss let him know in no uncertain terms that he needed to go to college. Dad was forever grateful for that persuasive talk.”

The similarities with my own father are almost eerie.

As I’ve written before, my father was given a chance to play football at Ouachita for legendary coach Bill Walton. But during the summer, my dad worked for the Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. as it built an aluminum plant near Bauxite. World War II was in progress, and the need for increased aluminum production was considered a national security issue. Dad was paid union wages and suddenly found himself making more than his own father, who doubled as the street superintendent and a fireman for the city of Benton.

My father was offered the chance the continue working for Chicago Bridge & Iron on construction projects around the world. It sounded exciting to him. He had never traveled far from Saline County.

My grandmother, however, had other ideas. She wanted him to earn that college degree. She saw to it that Coach Walton drove him to Arkadelphia for “a visit” and then refused to bring him home to Benton. Stuck in Arkadelphia without the money for a train ticket or a bus ticket, my dad decided he might as well enroll in school and play football.

Dad returned to Ouachita after two years of serving in the Army Air Corps and met my mother after the war. He also met Ike Sharp, who was a freshman football player when my dad was a senior. When my father accepted a coaching job at Newport High School the next summer, it was Ike who found a pickup truck and helped my parents move their few possessions from Clark County to Jackson County.

Ike was introduced to Billie, who would become his wife, on the steps of the Ouachita bookstore. He asked her out on a Friday night. Being quite the romantic, Ike took her to an Arkadelphia High School Football game.

She had agreed to that first date on the condition he would attend church with her on Sunday. Ike had to play a football game that Saturday against the Muleriders from Magnolia A&M and cracked two ribs during the game.

“But on Sunday morning, my dad dressed up in his suit,” Paul said. “He was in pain, but he went to church.”

They went to the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Arkadelphia, the same place where today’s memorial service was held. After teaching and coaching in Mountain Home and Prescott, Ike took the job in Arizona. It’s the place where he would raise his family.

Strangely enough, he would discover after moving there that one of those 77 cousins also lived in Douglas.

Ike and Billie Sharp returned to their Arkansas roots in 1983, and Ike worked with my father at Southwest Sporting Goods Co. in Arkadelphia. The Sharps later would serve as dorm parents at Ouachita for a dozen years. They were known by the students as Mom and Pop Sharp.

“Mom helped many a young man with class assignments, and my dad helped keep those Baptist boys in line,” Paul said.

Several of Ike’s former players came all the way from Arizona for today’s service. I’m reminded anew of the impact great teachers and coaches can have on young people.

My father left coaching in 1952 to enter the sporting goods business. But 58 years later, some of his former players still call my home to ask me how he’s doing. One of those former Newport Greyhounds, a doctor in Camden, called just the other night.

They were raised in small Arkansas towns during the Great Depression, but they overcame adversity. They influenced young people in a positive way and raised their own children with a combination of discipline and love. They remained loyal to their wives, loyal to their schools, loyal to their friends and loyal to their churches through the decades.

They truly were part of the Greatest Generation.

If I can be half the man that Ike Sharp and Red Nelson have been, I will consider my life a success.

Posted in Favorite Arkansans, Memories | 14 Comments »

Mac

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Most of all, I’ll remember the laugh.

It was infectious. And it was loud. Real loud.

The sound of that laugh coming from down the hall always made me smile.

Mac Sisson of Arkadelphia died Monday morning of a heart attack at the far-too-young age of 62. He was a mentor. He was a friend. He was one of those salt-of-the-earth people who make me glad to live in Arkansas.

Mac, a Crossett native, was a fixture for years at my alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University. He directed the news bureau, the sports information department, the photo lab and more. Mac was a man who seemingly wore 100 hats. But he did it all with a smile on his face and a genuine concern for the students. Mac was, in fact, one of the main reasons I attended Ouachita.

When I was in high school in Arkadelphia, I was hired as the sports editor of the Southern Standard, a weekly newspaper that no longer exists. It was a dream opportunity for someone who wanted nothing more at the time than to be a sports journalist. With Arkadelphia being a two-college town, I would be able to cover college sports on a regular basis. I would, however, have to farm out the coverage of the high school football team since I was actually playing in those games.

Mac immediately made me feel important even though I was just 17. He treated me as professionally as he treated the full-time writers who would come down from Little Rock to cover the Ouachita games for the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette. Yes, Mac was a pro, and he made me feel like one.

During my senior year in high school, I decided I was going to be different. You see, everyone in town assumed I would attend Ouachita. I had grown up just down the street from the school. My father had graduated from Ouachita. My mother had graduated from Ouachita. My sister had graduated from Ouachita. I was going to go against the grain, though, and attend either Vanderbilt or Ole Miss.

Mac never put any pressure on me. He just quietly made the point that if I were to decide to stay in Arkadelphia and attend Ouachita, I would be his student assistant and broadcast Ouachita games on the radio. He also worked behind the scenes to get me the sports editor’s job at the city’s daily newspaper, the Daily Siftings Herald, and the sports director’s job at radio stations KVRC-KDEL.

For someone wanting to become a sports journalist, the practical experience would prove invaluable. I would spend my college years as a daily newspaper sports editor, a radio sports director and a student assistant sports information director — all at the same time. It was thanks to Mac Sisson. Fortunately, I didn’t need much sleep back in those days.

Many hours were spent sitting on that old couch in Mac’s office, comparing notes, discussing stories and making plans. Like Mac, I talked loudly and laughed loudly. Agnes Coppenger, the saint who had the office across the hall where she served as Ouachita’s director of alumni affairs, would often walk over to say: “You don’t have to scream at each other. You’re in the same room.”

At some point during my days as a student, Mac became much more than a mentor. He became a close friend. I can never remember us having an argument.

My wife, who grew up in a huge state (Texas) and went to a huge school (Texas State at San Marcos), is constantly amazed by all the “Ouachita people” I run into everywhere we go.

“What’s the enrollment of that school again?” she will often ask.

“About 1,500,” I’ll reply.

“It seems more like 150,000,” she will shoot back.

I believe that in a small state and at a small school, the personal relationships tend to be deeper. So it is that I’ve spent much of this Monday fielding phone calls and answering e-mails from fellow members of the Ouachita family.

The memories have come flooding back.

– Memories of long van trips through the night as we returned from Ouachita football games (which I’m still broadcasting after more than three decades along with dear friend Jeff Root) in Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Mississippi and elsewhere. To keep us awake on the drive home, we would tune the AM radio to WWL in New Orleans to listen to the LSU game with John Ferguson or to WSB in Atlanta to listen to Larry Munson call the Georgia game. If it were really late, there was always the midnight replay of the Iowa game on WHO in Des Moines. How I loved those trips.

– Memories of Mac’s reputation for never driving over the speed limit. Often, long after I had graduated, his student assistants would ask, “Mac, are you sure you aren’t getting tired? Don’t you want Rex to drive?” In other words, Rex drives a lot faster and will get us home more quickly. I’ll never forget the sheer delight of everyone in the vehicle when Mac received a speeding ticket one day in Oklahoma. We never thought we would see the day.

– Memories of Mac’s love of local diners, aka greasy spoons. Mac and I made it a point never to eat at a chain restaurant. We wanted to try out the local fare in places such as Durant, Okla., and Seguin, Texas. We used to love afternoon games against East Central University in Ada, Okla., so we could do what we called “the double J.D.” That meant we would have lunch before the game at a placed called J.D.’s and supper after the game at the same spot. If the parking lot was filled with pickup trucks — and there were always plenty of pickups at J.D.’s — Mac wanted to give it a try. He also would drive us by the local attractions such as the World’s Largest Peanut in Durant and the World’s Largest Pecan in Seguin. There actually were street signs in Durant that simply said “Big Peanut.”

I drove to Mac and Donna’s home on the June 2008 Saturday when they learned that their son, Alan, had been killed in an automobile accident at the age of 33. Alan, who was an Army sergeant, had survived a tour of duty in Iraq in 2006-07. How sad and how ironic that after surviving Iraq, his life would end in Killeen, Texas.

On that day, Mac was the strongest man in the house. His faith in God had never been more evident. Mac never had to wear his Christian values on his sleeve. That’s because he lived them.

One last story: My wedding was on a Saturday in October 1989. I’m not sure what I was thinking to let my wife schedule our wedding on a college football Saturday. Did she not realize that fall Saturdays are high holy days for those of us who love college football?

At any rate, it seems to me that every Baptist church has a little ol’ lady who runs the weddings. She acts as a drill sergeant of sorts. The First Baptist Church of Corpus Christi had one of those drill sergeants. I sat in a room with my groomsmen late on that Saturday afternoon, awaiting the early evening start of my wedding. And, yes, I was nervous.

The drill sergeant walked into the room.

“You just received a phone call from Arkansas,” she said matter of factly. “I told them you were not to be bothered, but he insisted I pass along the message.”

It scared me at first. Was someone in my family seriously ill?

The drill sergeant then gave us the message.

“It was a Mr. Mac Sisson,” she said. “He wanted you to know that Ouachita defeated UAM this afternoon.”

She rolled her eyes, turned around and exited the room.

The tension was broken. My groomsmen and I cheered. I did a “Tiger roll” (you will have to ask one of the groomsmen to describe that).

Early this afternoon, my wife called. I had informed her this morning of the sad news.

“Guess what?” she said. “You have a large envelope in the mail from Mac Sisson.”

I haven’t been home yet to open it. But he was thinking of me still.

I know I will bask in the warm glow of memories like these in the years to come. But it’s still too fresh. My body aches on this Monday afternoon. Writing this has been somewhat of a catharsis I guess, but I want more than memories. I want to talk to Mac. I want to hear that laugh.

I don’t want to be selfish in my grief. There are a lot of people hurting today. I do know his family is hurting more now than we can realize.

Donna and Stephanie, we love you and are praying for you. Mac loved you dearly.

It was too soon to go, Mac. Way too soon.

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A winter night at Baptist

Friday, February 12th, 2010

It has been more than a quarter of a century since my paternal grandfather died. This much I remember — I was working at Arkadelphia radio stations KVRC-KDEL when I got the news, and it was snowing and sleeting outside.

Later that week, with snow and ice still covering the ground, I held my grandmother’s arm tightly to make sure she didn’t slip as we walked gingerly through a cemetery in Benton for the graveside service. I always loved my grandfather’s name — Ernest Ezra Nelson. You no longer hear names like that. When he was born late in the 19th century, it wasn’t an uncommon name, I suppose.

Less than a decade later, my first son was born. Again, it was snowing and sleeting. I was the political editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at the time, and things could not have been busier that day. It was Feb. 24, 1993. As political editor, I supervised both the newspaper’s Washington bureau and its state Capitol bureau in Little Rock.

In Washington, Bill Clinton had been in office for exactly five weeks. There seemingly was a fresh controversy/crisis every day during those early weeks of the Clinton administration, and we had three aggressive reporters (Randy Lilleston, Jane Fullerton and Terry Lemons) turning out hundreds of inches of copy each afternoon that I had to edit.

In Little Rock, meanwhile, the Arkansas Legislature was in session, Jim Guy Tucker was still new in the governor’s office and there were at least five of our reporters at the Capitol sending me additional stories to edit. I had planned to work until at least 9 p.m. that day.

At 6:40 p.m., Melissa called from our home in west Little Rock. She was scared. Our son was not scheduled to arrive for another month. But her water had broken while she was exercising, and her doctor had advised her to head to the hospital. So much for our well-laid plans of spending the next month getting ready for the baby.

I told my supervisor, Ray Hobbs, that he would have to edit the remaining stories. I threw on my coat and headed downstairs. As I made the journey west from the newspaper offices downtown to Chenal Parkway, traffic was barely moving on Interstate 630 due to the winter weather. On the exit leading up to Baptist Health Medical Center, there were wrecks. I was nervous, and I was frustrated that it was taking me so long to get home.

I finally made it. Melissa was waiting at the door with a bag in her hand. Our departure was delayed for several minutes when the neighbor’s dachshund charged through the open door into our house. We headed to Baptist after removing the dog, and fortunately the wrecks had been cleared along the way.

Austin Nelson arrived at 2:48 a.m. on the morning of Feb. 25, 1993. Eddie Phillips, the doctor who delivered him, had driven on the slick streets and made it on time. During the wait for Austin to arrive, I remember staring out at the window to watch what weathermen here like to refer to as a “winter weather event.”

Yesterday, I sat in a fifth-floor room at that same Little Rock hospital on another cold February night. I looked out across the beautiful snow-covered hills of west Little Rock and reflected back on that other wintry day 17 years earlier. The task was different this time. Rather than waiting on a new life to enter the world, I was keeping watch over my 85-year-old father, who had been admitted to the hospital that morning with a serious infection and perhaps pneumonia.

My father’s name is Robert. Austin’s middle name is Robert. As I listened to my father’s labored breathing and thought about my son doing homework a few miles away at home, the winter night in 1993 and this winter night in 2010 seemed tied together in a strange way. Then, my thoughts went back do the winter day I heard my grandfather had died.

As had my grandfather in the years before his death, my father suffers from dementia. I wonder on this long night at the hospital if that will be my fate. And I wonder if when I am old and sick and in the hospital, one of my two sons will be sitting there — reading, watching, looking out the window, thinking of those who came before them.

My dad turned 65 on the day Melissa and I were married. He was healthy back then – still working, quail hunting, bass fishing, cooking for us on his grill. We surprised him with a birthday cake at the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding, and everyone sang to him.

Two decades take their toll.

So as I wait for the Thursday night snow that will never arrive (which is fine; Monday’s seven inches were quite enough), I think of those rare days when there is snow on the ground in Arkansas — the day my grandfather was buried, the night my first son was born and this night of helping care for my father.

It’s the middle of February, it’s dark and I’m thinking about four generations of Nelson males — Ernest, Robert, Rex and Austin — as the various medical devices grind and click in the background. Suddenly, I’m very cold. I reach for a blanket and attempt to grab a few minutes of sleep.

Posted in Memories | 12 Comments »

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