The University of Arkansas Press released a book earlier this year titled “Season of the Gar.”

I had written in an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette column last summer about my fascination with alligator gar. That fascination dates back to long summer days spent at my grandparents’ home in Des Arc on the White River. I enjoyed walking a block from their house on Erwin Street to the fish market on Main Street to watch the commercial fishermen bring in the day’s catch.

When I was a boy, commercial fishing seemed like an exciting, exotic occupation. I didn’t comprehend just how hard these men worked for very little money.

While hanging out in the fish market, I would become almost mesmerized by the black-and-white photos on the wall of the alligator gar that had been pulled out of the White River through the years.

“Season of the Gar” was written by Mark Spitzer, who teaches writing at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway and is the managing editor of the Exquisite Corpse Annual, one of two award-winning literary publications (the other being the Oxford American) housed on the UCA campus.

“They are a true mystery fish, whose histories have been confused by sloppy scholarship, unchecked science, prejudicial journalism and generations of fishermen who think they know the facts,” Spitzer writes in his preface to the book. “Another message in this book is that gar aren’t as destructive to other fish as they’ve been made out to be, and that they serve a valuable function in providing ecological balance. Plus, contrary to popular belief, gar do not destroy gamefish populations or eat their own weight (or twice their own weight) in other fish per day. As studies have shown, gar cut down on populations of carp, shad, drum, buffalo and other fish that can be destructive to nesting habitats, therefore leaving the smaller members of the minnow family for bass, pike, catfish, trout, crappie, etc.”

The book contains some wonderful old photographs. The first is of a White River gar that weighed 230 pounds and was 7 feet, 8 inches in length. The photo by Johnnie Gray appeared on postcards in the late 1950s, and it began Spitzer’s own lifelong fascination with the fish.

“It was those pictures in fish books I saw as a kid,” he writes. “Particularly that one of two guys in Arkansas, posing beside a ferocious, steely alligator gar longer than themselves. According to Maynard Reece’s “Fish and Fishing” (1963), their hook was rigged to a piano string; but according to my imagination, what they used for bait was a whole chicken. So that’s why I wanted to get a gar.”

Other vintage alligator gar photos include one taken in Little Rock in 1928 and one taken on Moon Lake in Mississippi (just across the river from Helena) in 1910. It’s pointed out in the caption to the 1910 photo that some experts challenge the legitimacy of the 10-foot Moon Lake gar because the stomach seems more slack than usual and the fins and tail are unnaturally flared.

At any rate, the photo made me anxious to do something I’ve long enjoyed on my trips to the Delta — make an afternoon drive along Moon Lake followed by one of those superb seafood dinners at Uncle Henry’s Place in the old Moon Lake Club (a place Tennessee Williams included in some of his work).

Spitzer addresses the rod-and-reel style of fishing for alligator gar that was popular in Arkansas in the 1940s and 1950s.

“Back then, various publications touted the state as a gator gar mecca, where anglers from around the world could use deep-sea tackle to catch furious, leaping goliath-fish weighing well over 100 pounds,” he writes. ”Such publicity was effective, especially on the lower White, Cache, Mississippi, Arkansas, Red, L’Anguille, Ouachita and St. Francis rivers, where word-of-mouth as well as newspaper and magazine articles brought steady business to local guides.

“Most of these alligator gar were caught on piano wires and finished off with bullets, shotgun slugs and arrows through the skull. The big ones were plentiful for a while, and landing seven-footers was much more common than it is today.”

I’m also fascinated by several other fish that can be found in Arkansas waters.

I had mentioned in an earlier post paddlefish (often called spoonbill catfish by Arkansans), and how the eggs of this fish are harvested for freshwater caviar. I can remember taking a photographer into George’s Fish Market at Marvell one day to watch the eggs being removed from paddlefish.

“Get yourself a plastic spoon and have some,” one man said.

I thus sampled the freshwater caviar from a huge spoonbill that had been swimming in an Arkansas river only hours before. It was wonderful.

According to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s guide to Arkansas fish, paddlefish belong to the Polyodontidae family. Amazingly, the other other living member of this family is the Chinese sturgeon of the Yangtze River in eastern Asia.

Yet another native Arkansas fish that fascinates me is the chain pickerel. That’s because chain pickerel would scare me to death when they would hit our topwater lures on a tupelo-gum slough in the Ouachita River bottoms where my father and I often fished. That slough also held a sizable alligator population.

My father would always return the pickerel (which he called “pike”) to the slough. According to him, they weren’t good to eat. The bass and crappie we caught were for the table. But those pickerel sure were fun to catch.

According the Game and Fish Commission guide, “Only one other pike, the grass pickerel, is native to Arkansas. Muskellunge and northern pike (and tiger muskies, a hybrid of the two), have been introduced.”

A visit yesterday to the remote White County community of Georgetown on the White River (there’s one way in and one way out as Arkansas Highway 36 comes to an end there) had me thinking about Arkansas fish such as alligator gar, paddlefish and chain pickerel. Just the drive to Georgetown was like a step back in time.

At the boat ramp on the White River, there were a number of trucks and trailers. People were out there fishing on a perfect spring day. I wished I could join them.

What a wild, wonderful state we call home.

In his wonderful new book “Arkansas/Arkansaw,” Brooks Blevins quotes from one of my favorite “Saturday Night Live” skits.

It was one of the series of skits the program aired in 1992 to lampoon the presidential debates between Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot.

Kevin Nealon played the role of debate moderator Sam Donaldson of ABC News.

And here’s what the moderator had to say: “Gov. Clinton, let’s be frank. You’re running for president, yet the main streets of your capital city, Little Rock, are something out of ‘Lil’ Abner,’ with buxom underage girls in cut-off denims prancing around in front of Jethro and Billy Bob while corncob-pipe-smoking, shotgun-toting grannies fire indiscriminately at runaway hogs.”

Next, the Perot character played by the talented Dana Carvey calls the Clinton character “cracker boy” and adds this: “Why are we talking about Arkansas? Hell, everybody knows all they got down there is a bunch of ignorant, inbred crackers, peckerwoods, catch me? Now, can we talk about the deficit? While we have been here jabbering, the deficit has increased by half a million dollars. That’s enough to buy a still and a new outhouse for every family in Little Rock.”

I thought the skit was funny at the time. I still think it’s funny.

It didn’t bother me as I sat watching in my den in Little Rock. I’ve tried my best through the years to escape our inherent Arkansas inferiority complex. During the four years I lived in Washington, D.C. (prior to Clinton becoming president), I learned an important lesson.

We spend far too much time as Arkansans worrying about what others think about us. We’re afraid people are looking down on us. Here’s what I learned: They aren’t looking down on us. They aren’t looking up at us, either. They just aren’t looking at us at all. We’re a state that rarely registers on the national consciousness.

And that’s just fine with me.

Blevins, who once worked at Lyon College in Batesville, is now the endowed associate professor of Ozark studies at Missouri State University in Springfield. He has done the best job yet examining the image of Arkansas and our aforementioned inferiority complex.

In the introduction to the book, published by the University of Arkansas Press, he writes: “Time and time again the Arkansawyer has been portrayed as a backwoods buffoon or a rugged individualist or some combination thereof. … In an overly simplistic yet useful dichotomy, these perspectives might be described as romantic versus progressive, with the former often cherishing the very Arkansaw characteristics condemned by the latter.

“It is my contention that the portrayals of the Arkansawyer, romantic or fantastic they may be, have been positive ones as often as not. For many a romantic or radical observer, as we shall see, Arkansaw has provided an antithesis to a variety of American illusions: the idea of American exceptionalism, the blind faith in ‘progress,’ America’s starring role in some cosmic, providential plan. In this rendering of the Arkansaw image, the Arkansawyer becomes a nonconformist who consciously or unconsciously rejects the tenets of an American narrative found in the Puritan-through-Progressive continuum.”

Blevins uses the spelling “Arkansaw” when referring to the state’s image and “when invoking the mythical place conjured by the various stereotypes and caricatures. This is not to suggest that Arkansaw represents some bizarro-world mirror image, an antithesis to the real Arkansas, but that Arkansaw stands for the complex mixture of fact, legend and stereotype that is summoned from the depths of the American consciousness at the mention of the word Arkansas.”

I remember vividly when the national media picked up on the fact that Gov. Mike Huckabee and his family would be moving into what the industry likes to call a manufactured home (still known by most Arkansans as a mobile home or a house trailer) while the Governor’s Mansion was being renovated.

It was the summer of 2000, and we were at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. I was Huckabee’s communications director at the time and was suddenly inundated by media calls.

For the following week, we booked appearances on all three of the major network morning shows along with a taped interview by Jay Leno for NBC’s “Tonight Show.”

The move into the mobile home was an effort to save the taxpayers money. It might also have been a way for the governor to thumb his nose at some snooty Little Rock residents.

I still smile at the thought of the liberal doyennes (including some in the Governor’s Mansion neighborhood who had put huge “Bill Bristow For Governor” signs in their yards two years earlier) who got their panties in a wad over this supposed blow to our state’s image. Not to be sexist. There were plenty of males expressing their righteous indignation. You don’t think it had anything to do with Huckabee being a Republican, do you? Surely not.

They had always considered the Huckabees to be redneck interlopers from Hope who wouldn’t drink with them at CCLR, didn’t eat with them at whatever was the “in” restaurant that year and didn’t attend an Episcopal  or some other church that “proper people” attended.

Goodness folks, our state’s national image had been pretty well determined prior to this.

At any rate, here’s what the governor told Leno: “One of the things we want to do is to show that people in Arkansas aren’t all that sensitive about people making light of us. We know who we are.”

At a news conference later in the week, he said: “Let the people laugh. I think the difference between an Arkansan and some uptight, wound-up Northerner is that … we’re laughing with you because we like the way we live.”

Blevins writes: “Huckabee knew full well that there were a good many Arkansans who took exception to their state’s reoccurring role as the butt of national jokes and that more than a few resented his decision to knowingly invite derision with his triplewide plan. Finally, Huckabee’s ultimate decision to subject his state to stereotyping and mirth-making in order to save taxpayers a few dollars reflected the old spirit of nonconformity that had inspired admiration for the natural Arkie.”

No, I don’t worry too much these days about what some fellow in Iowa, New Jersey or Idaho thinks of Arkansas. It used to bother me more. Now, I rather spend my time enjoying all this state has to offer.

What about you?

How concerned are you about the “Arkansas image?”

What do you think accounts for our collective inferiority complex?

I would love to know what you think.