NATE POWELL ON PARENTING AND PROTEST | THE ARTFUL HOME | REPRO RIGHTS ADVOCACY, UNCLOAKED
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APRIL 2021
HOT SPRINGS THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF SPA CITY. BY DAVID HILL
SAVVYKIDS:
AUTISM AWARENESS
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A NEW LEVEL OF EXCITEMENT
R A C I N G • C A S I N O • H O T E L • S PA • E V E N T C E N T E R • D I N I N G
THIS IS LILY. LILY LIKES BLOWING KISSES AND SENDING POSTCARDS SIGNED ‘BEST FISHES!’ HOW WILL YOU DO HOT SPRINGS?
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22 ‘SAVE IT FOR LATER’
Nate Powell’s latest graphic novel grapples with parenting, justice and disinformation. By Nate Powell and Austin Bailey
31 HEYDAY, INTERRUPTED
How Hot Springs raced to become the country’s top tourist resort — and lost to Vegas. By David Hill
8 THE FRONT
Q&A: With Caroline Morgan, the protesting “handmaid” championing reproductive rights at the State Capitol. The Big Pic: Trees of Arkansas. The Inconsequential News Quiz: The Space Burger Edition.
14 THE TO-DO LIST
Pharoah Sanders’ latest, Arkansas Symphony’s “Peter and the Wolf,” Mohsin Hamid at Hendrix College, a Dunbar Garden plant sale and more.
18 NEWS & POLITICS Arkansas’s complicated relationship with voting rights.
41 HOMING IN
After a homebound year, experts offer advice on how to rethink your abode. By Katherine Wyrick, Caroline Millar and Leslie Newell Peacock
61 FOOD & DRINK
On the Central Arkansas condiment scene, and the people who keep it spicy. By Rhett Brinkley
66 CANNABIZ
Even as attitudes toward medical marijuana become more relaxed, possession arrests mount.
BRIAN CHILSON
FEATURES
By Griffin Coop
74 THE OBSERVER A cat problem.
GETTING DOLLED UP: Seasoned estate sale shoppers share with us their finds, like these paper dolls of ‘40s movie star June Allyson, found at an estate sale in the Park Hill neighborhood of North Little Rock.
By Ernest Dumas
51 SAVVY KIDS
News & Notes: Easter egg hunts, art discoveries, daffodils and more. Feature: Parenting a child with autism. Meet the Parent: Lee Ann Small
4 APRIL 2021
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ON THE COVER: Vintage Hot Springs, where politics, religion and organized crime shaped a booming tourism industry. Photo illustration by Mandy Keener.
making memories since 1958.
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A FAMILY PRACTICE The Russell Doctors and the Evolving Business of Medicine,1799–1989
PUBLISHER Alan Leveritt EDITOR Lindsey Millar
A Family Practice is the sweeping saga of four generations of Russell physicians and surgeons, all seeking innovative ways to sustain themselves in Arkansas and the American south from the early 19th to the latter twentieth century.
$34.95 hardcover, available from the University of Arkansas Press at uapress.com, by calling 1-800-621-2736, or by shopping wherever great books are sold.
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Mandy Keener SENIOR EDITOR Max Brantley MANAGING EDITOR Austin Bailey ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Stephanie Smittle ASSOCIATE EDITOR Rhett Brinkley CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Mara Leveritt PHOTOGRAPHER Brian Chilson DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL STRATEGY Jordan Little ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR Mike Spain GRAPHIC DESIGNER Katie Hassell DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Phyllis A. Britton ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Brooke Wallace, Lee Major, Terrell Jacob and Kaitlyn Looney ADVERTISING TRAFFIC MANAGER Roland R. Gladden IT DIRECTOR Robert Curfman CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Jackson Gladden CONTROLLER Weldon Wilson BILLING/COLLECTIONS Charlotte Key PRODUCTION MANAGER Ira Hocut (1954-2009)
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THE FRONT Q&A
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ADVOCATE CAROLINE MORGAN, UNCLOAKED TRUST THE WOMEN OF ARKANSAS, MORGAN SAYS.
Pocahontas native Caroline Jackson Morgan fled for bluer pastures a few years ago, moving her family to Rhode Island for an East Coast reprieve from the South’s rightward march. While there, Morgan successfully lobbied to codify the legal right to abortion in the state. In 2020 Morgan came back, bringing a rack full of red robes and her fire for reproductive justice with her. A dedicated full-time volunteer, Morgan spends a lot of her time at the Arkansas Capitol, protesting against and bearing witness to the right’s attacks on reproductive freedom. What made you decide to skip town in 2017 and move to Rhode Island? After Trump got elected, I thought, “I can’t do this down here. I just can’t.” My husband’s corporate gig was on the East Coast, and it’s easier to do the work when you live there. So we bolted. Rhode Island is the smallest, loveliest, beautiful, diverse, eclectic, weird, just phenomenal place. I made some really, really good friends there.
It takes a lot of bravery to stand up for reproductive rights at this particular point in time in Arkansas. Why do you do it? Because — unless something changes drastically — we are heading down the road to “The Handmaid’s Tale” coming true, and that scares the hell out of me. Rich white ladies are still going to be able to leave the state and get an abortion. Any bans will adversely affect women of color and those without the resources to travel out of state. That’s why I’m such a fan of the Arkansas Abortion Support Network. I like grassroots volunteer groups because they’re wily. Realistically this ban that they passed isn’t going to go. The ACLU isn’t going to let this happen. We’re going to spend about $100,000 to fight it in court. It’s a waste of time, energy and money in a poor state that has so many other issues we need to work on.
Religion is all up in the Arkansas Capitol this session, especially in talks about abortion So why did you come back? access and transgender rights. How do you HOMETOWN: Pocahontas We came home for family. COVID just kind push back when people invoke Christianity as of realigns your thinking on what’s important, the reason behind what they’re doing? CHILDREN: Jessica, 22, and and family is important. All my family is in These conservative Christian groups are giving John David, 16 Arkansas, so we came home. Jesus a bad name. I consider myself a fairly spiritual person. My spiritual being is loving and BOOK RECOMMENDATION: You moved to Little Rock in September of inclusive and supporting and forgiving. I don’t “Our Time Is Now” by Stacey 2020. What have you been up to since then? know what’s going on with their Jesus. Abrams I’m a full-time volunteer. My job is to show up When the senator from Bigelow, the bullying to the Statehouse to promote body autonosenator — I don’t even want to say his name, my and equality, to show up for the people he’s so awful — when he screams about 62 who are working. The Capitol does not make million dead babies, it’s hard to come back at it easy for folks to show up, in more ways than one, with parking, with that. But I want to come back with reproductive justice and reproducwhat time of day things are happening, limiting testimony to two mintive freedom. Arkansas is at the top of the list for maternal mortality utes. It’s the people’s house, but it’s not. rates and infant mortality rates, but at the bottom for health care? He’s talking about dead babies, but I’m going to talk about dead babies, too. You’ve been known to appear at the Capitol in red robes, and you’ve And dead mamas, especially Black dead mamas, because Black women got a rack of red robes in your hallway. What’s that all about? are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth. So we need to There’s a national organization called the Red Cloaks [based on Marframe it differently, with body autonomy and reproductive freedom. garet Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”], and I learned Trust the women of Arkansas. about the Little Rock Red Cloaks right about the time I moved home to Little Rock. I had been showing up at the Rhode Island Statehouse in Did you anticipate how extreme this session would be? Providence with The Womxn Project as their volunteer lobbyist. We got I knew it was going to be bad. I didn’t realize how truly hateful, cruel and Roe v. Wade codified in 2019 after 26 years of trying to get it done. So closed-minded it was going to be. It’s like Arkansas is stuck in almost a Rhode Island didn’t need the red cloaks anymore, so I told the Womxn 1950s, “Father Knows Best” horror TV show where males are large and Project, “Hey, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to use these down in charge and women, especially LGBTQ women and women of color, in Little Rock.” Now I show up here with the red cloaks. I usually bring have no representation. And they’re running my beloved home state extras. They’re for sale, $25 each, and the money goes back to support into the ground and I’m not having it. The Womxn Project in Rhode Island. They’re not fun to wear. They’re hot, they limit your sight and what you What’s your plan to stop it? can hear and what you can say. So they’re very much like how reproduc- My goal is to get more women elected in Arkansas. I think the General tive justice is being stamped down in Arkansas. The cloaks just embody Assembly is 22 percent women, and that’s not enough. all of that. — Austin Bailey 8 APRIL 2021
ARKANSAS TIMES
AGE: 53
I am a St. Vincent Nurse. DeeDee is a BSN, RN with the CHI St. Vincent Heart Institute in Little Rock. “Healthcare process improvement is often nurse driven. Working as an RN Quality Management Coordinator monitoring the care and outcomes of acute heart attack patients, I see areas to strengthen or rework to promote higher levels of quality care. We’re constantly striving to rise above the national averages in evaluation, intervention and outcomes of multidisciplinary patient-centered care.”
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THE FRONT BIG PIC
THE OVER AND UNDERSTORY “Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Arkansas” is an essential guidebook.
It’s springtime, which means you’re probably spending some time outside gazing at the green glory of The Natural State. A delightful new book published by The Ozark Society will help you gaze eruditely. “Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Arkansas,” authored by several preeminent plant experts in the state — Johnnie Gentry, Jennifer Ogle and Theo Witsell — is the essential field guide to trees in Arkansas (or technically and more broadly of woody plants, including trees and other perennials with durable shoots that survive winter). It’s 536 pages, but relatively compact, so it’ll easily fit in a backpack. Buy it at ozarksociety.net or at WordsWorth in Little Rock. My 10-year-old son is obsessed with trees, so we own many tree guides, but none is as comprehensive or as thoughtfully arranged as this book. Each species gets a granular description — of bark, twig, fruit, flower — along with info on its habitat, a small state map that shows its county-level distribution and multiple pictures. That’s another thing that sets this guide apart: There are more than 1,500 photos, which greatly aid in identification, no matter the season. The book is invaluable from a practical perspective if you, for instance, want to be able to distinguish between white and red oaks. In 10 APRIL 2021
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my house, it answered a long family debate, mostly between my son and himself, of whether our backyard tree is a northern red oak or its close cousin, Shumard oak (it’s the latter). But for those who want to go beyond identification, the authors provide invaluable context on ecoregions, habitats and basic botany. Spend some time with this book and you’ll soon be able to predict the sorts of trees you’re likely to find depending on where in Arkansas you are. Here are some sample tidbits from the guide: • Cypress trees are Arkansas’s largest woody plant. Many live to be more than 1,000 years old. • Diospyros, the genus that persimmon trees (Diospyros virginiana) are part of, loosely translated means “fruit of the gods.” The tree’s ripe fruit is prized by man and beast, but, according to the authors, “unripe fruit is highly astringent, and getting unsuspecting people to bite into one is a favorite trick among pranksters of all ages, especially dads.” • Speaking of fruit, the book describes the flavor range of the pawpaw as “sweet, tangy,
luscious, or nauseating.” Pollinating flies and beetles are drawn to pawpaws by flowers, “which resemble decaying flesh in both color and fragrance. Commercial pawpaw growers sometimes hang dead animals among the trees to draw in more potential pollinators.” • The leaves of the beauty-berry, a shrub that produces pink to pale purple flowers and is found across the state aside from parts of Northwest and Northeast Arkansas, repel mosquitoes when rubbed on your skin. • The thorns of the honey locust, which can grow to more than 15 inches in length, are thought to have developed to protect it from long extinct Pleistocene megafauna, such as ground sloths. • A sampling of the poetry of some of the names, or common names, of species you’ll find in the book: leatherleaf mahonia, bottomland dewberry, Grancy gray-beard, maiden bush, bladdernut, Carolina moonseed, climbing dogbane, frost grape, Chinese flame tree, hairy frosted hawthorn, heartsa-bustin’-with-love, hop-hornbeam, clammy locust, bastard oak, bog-raisin, sweet autumn virgin’s bower, toothache tree. — Lindsey Millar
I am a St. Vincent Nurse. Dan is a Medical ICU RN with CHI St. Vincent. “I came to CHI St. Vincent looking for an opportunity to work through my career, but I found a second home. Our leadership listens to nurses, which allows us to better serve our patients. Everybody works together to make sure we can enact new policy changes quickly. If anything, COVID-19 taught us how to work together even more effectively.”
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THE FRONT
INCONSEQUENTIAL NEWS QUIZ
TO OBESITY AND BEYOND! EDITION PLAY AT HOME WHILE TRYING TO IMAGINE WHAT’S BAD ENOUGH TO SCARE HILLARY CLINTON.
1) Former Arkansan, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently announced a new venture she hopes will debut in October. What was the announcement? A) She’s starting a baking company called Hillary’s Old-Fashioned Can We Shut The Fuck Up About How I Was a “Flawed Candidate” Now? Cookies. B) She denied being the Machiavellian puppet master behind every GOP fever dream from pizza parlor covens to serial grave robbery and reaffirmed her commitment to being a retired grandmother living quietly in upstate New York, as she has been every moment of the past four years. C) She’s taking up competitive bass fishing, sponsored by Walmart. D) Partnering with the novelist Louise Penny, she’s planning to write a thriller called “State of Terror” about a secretary of state who works to stop a series of terrorist attacks. 2) Something strange happened at exactly 8:17 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24, in Central Arkansas, and researchers are now asking the public for video of the event from dashcams, security cameras and doorbell cameras. What was it? A) In a rare moment of clarity, Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Merkin Fork) briefly considered if — by being such an unmitigated ass all the time — he might actually be driving people away from Christianity. B) After a full year of isolation, hordes of newly vaccinated older people took to the streets in a night of mayhem that included multiple flaming bags of dog poop left on the doorstep at the Governor’s Mansion. And yes, Asa fell for it every time. C) The last anti-masker in Pulaski County realized that he was being a selfish, childish,
sociopathic, attention-hungry dick and put a mask on. D) A large meteorite blazed across the sky, and researchers are hoping that by triangulating multiple videos of it, they can locate where it fell. (Got a video? Report it to the American Meteor Society at amsmeteors.org). 3) Heiress Alice Walton recently announced plans to build something new in Bentonville with her near-unlimited Walmart Bucks. What is she planning? A) The Crystal Hot Sauce Museum of American Sandwiches. B) A cross-town expressway with inflatable rubber guardrails so people can drive drunk any time they want. C) The world’s first hovering Walmart store. D) The Whole Health School of Medicine and Health Sciences, a nonprofit medical school that she hopes to open by 2024. 4) A recent hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Patricia Harris in Little Rock concerning a man charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm went off the rails to the point Harris ordered the defendant, Tommy Windell Wright, 24, jailed until things could be sorted out. What was the issue? A) Due to courtroom mask mandates, the prosecutor on the case briefly lost track of who was who. B) After a large cabinet Wright uses in his magic act was introduced as evidence, he stepped inside and disappeared into thin air. C) Wright’s emotional-support chicken, Lady Regina Pinchbottom, wouldn’t stop clucking. D) Investigators told the judge that Tommy Windell Wright is the identical twin brother of Tony Windell Wright — who is not charged in the case — and Tony sometimes uses his brother’s name when questioned by police,
with Tommy Wright’s defense attorney claiming the arrest was actually a case of mistaken identity. 5) In more consequential news, Marlon Marbley Jr., 21, was recently arrested and charged in the March 7 shooting death of a 32-year-old woman from White Hall. What, according to investigators, was remarkable about where the murder occurred? A) It happened online. B) It happened at a 102-year-old woman’s funeral. C) It happened in the parking lot of the Little Rock Police Department. D) It happened outside the North Little Rock outlet of Chuck E. Cheese, where Marbley’s 2-year-old son was having a birthday party. 6) Minute Man CEO Perry Smith, who is helping give the storied charcoal-grilled burger chain a new lease on life by franchising restaurants and fielding a Minute Man food truck, said the company recently acquired another food-dispensing vehicle that may be surprising to some when it debuts later this year. What’s special about Minute Man’s new mobile burger-slinger? A) It’s a former U.S. Army tank, modified to shoot burgers directly into a customer’s mouth. B) It’s a 2017 Ram 3500 dually with a fiberglass body that makes it look like a giant burger. C) It’s powered solely by people pedalling exercise bikes to work off the burgers they just ate. D) It’s a 39-foot-long kitchen-on-wheels, made from the fuselage of a Douglas DC-3 passenger plane and styled to resemble the Space Shuttle. ANSWERS: D, D, D, D, D, D
12 APRIL 2021
ARKANSAS TIMES
I am a St. Vincent Nurse. Delia is a Clinical Supervisor with CHI St. Vincent in Hot Springs. “I incorporate the values of my culture in leading my team, and I consider my team as my family. I connect with them with respect and understanding that each member has something to offer and contribute to the success and growth of the hospital. Each nurse is supported in achieving his or her aspirations.”
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the TO-DO list BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE AND RHETT BRINKLEY
LISTEN TO PHAROAH SANDERS’ ‘PROMISES’
LUAKA BOP/JULIE MEHRETU
LISTENTOPROMISES.COM. $14-$27.
Even if the minds behind this record had simply said, “Hey, let’s put Pharoah Sanders in a room with violinists and a harpsichord player and see what happens,” it would have been a notable experiment. And, in a way, that’s sort of what British composer Sam Shepherd did for this 46-minute, nine-movement piece, out in late March on David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop. The Little Rock octogenarian and free jazz legend’s saxophone is the piece’s protagonist voice, soaring above and around Shepherd’s ethereal backdrop of celeste, harpsichord and electronics, underpinned by strings courtesy of the London Symphony Orchestra. As it stands, Sanders and Shepherd have made the best meditation album of the year, though it’s just as suitable if your meditation takes the form of trout fishing or biking the trails at Northwoods or Allsopp Park. Order the album at listentopromises.com. SS
‘PETER AND THE WOLF’: A CHILDREN’S CONCERT
THURSDAY 4/1. 10 A.M. VIRTUAL, ARKANSASSYMPHONY.ORG/ASO-CHILDRENS-CONCERT. FREE. If there’s anything we’ve learned from Bob Dorough and Fred Rogers, let it be that what is good for children is usually good for all of us. So it is with this spring concert from the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, presented virtually and with free admission. Streamed from the Robinson Center Performance Hall in downtown Little Rock, the program features Prokofiev’s 1936 symphonic fairy tale for children, which Prokofiev biographer Harlow Robinson called “a subtly subversive tract, encouraging children to rely on their wits and not on the greater experience
14 APRIL 2021
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(and inertia) of their elders.” (Was there ever a more appropriate year for such a thing?) Vocalist LaSheena Gordon narrates the piece. The second of this brief program is familiar and beloved territory: Vivaldi’s “Spring” from his weather-lovin’ (and groundbreaking) suite “The Four Seasons,” featuring violinist Samuel Garcia. Paired together, the two pieces are a sprightly introduction to the orchestra’s many colors and an affirmation of all the reasons humans choose to tell stories through music. Register at arkansassymphony. org/aso-childrens-concert. SS
I am a St. Vincent Nurse. Nancy has been a nurse for 30 years and continues to choose CHI St. Vincent as her work family. “I’m St. Vincent strong because I have found a place I can call part of my family. I truly love my work and being a part of the CHI St. Vincent vascular team has been the most rewarding position of my career so far!”
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COURTESY OF HENDRIX-MURPHY PROGRAMS
the TO-DO list
MOHSIN HAMID
THURSDAY 4/8. VIRTUALLY, VIA HENDRIX COLLEGE’S EVENTS CHANNEL. 7:30 P.M. FREE. A student of Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, Mohsin Hamid is best known for employing the novel as a medium for reckoning with complicated phenomena like immigration and war, as he did in his decorated novels “Exit West” and “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” both titles that landed on “best novels” lists from BBC and Entertainment Weekly. In a 2016 interview for the New Yorker, Hamid attributed our global political crisis as a failure to dream up “plausible desirable futures. We are surrounded by nostalgic visions,” he said, “violently nostalgic visions. Fiction can imagine differently.” For this virtual visit, Hamid speaks as a guest of the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language; email hendrix-murphy@hendrix.edu to register for the talk. SS
ARTS, CRAFTS AND DUNBAR PLANT MARKET SATURDAY 4/17. DUNBAR GARDEN, 1720 S. CHESTER ST. 10 A.M.-3 P.M. FREE.
Dunbar Garden, the 2-acre outdoor classroom that serves students from Gibbs International Magnet Elementary School and Dunbar Magnet Middle School, is throwing a spring shindig, COVID-cautionary style. The garden’s critters will be out and about (leave your own pets at home), along with plant experts to help you choose and purchase plants from Dunbar’s greenhouse that will work best for your home and diet. Capacity will be limited to 66 percent of the garden’s occupancy, a mask mandate will be in place, and no restroom will be available; plan accordingly. SS
SYMPHONY OF FLAVORS
THURSDAYS 4/8, 4/15, 4/22, 4/29. VIRTUAL, AT ARKANSASSYMPHONY.ORG/FLAVOR. 7 P.M. $75-$200. Following the wisdom of the adage “The way to a person’s heart is through their stomach,” the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Guild has created “Symphony of Flavors,” an online fundraiser for the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra featuring virtual cooking demonstrations from local chefs. Set for four Thursday nights in April, the fundraiser will support the ASO’s music education efforts. Ticket buyers will be invited inside local chefs’ kitchens to watch and learn how to prepare gourmet meals with step-by-step instructions. Viewers will also be able to enjoy musical interludes by some of ASO’s musicians and groups. Ticket 16 APRIL 2021
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prices include “delivery of goodies, wine and recipes curated by each night’s featured chef.” Participants will receive the recipe and menu the day before the airing, so they can have the option to cook along with the chefs. Videos of the demonstrations will be available to ticket buyers online for two weeks following each event. Participating chefs are Capi Peck of Trio’s, April 8; Ricardo Rincón of Kemuri, April 15; Eric Isaac of Ristorante Capeo, April 22; and Clark Trim and Henrik Thostrup of Colonial Wines and Spirits, April 29. Tickets are on sale at arkansassymphony. org/flavor or by calling 501-258-6149. RB
I am a St. Vincent Nurse. Barbara is an orthopedics and neurology Nurse Manager with CHI St. Vincent in Hot Springs. “People of all backgrounds, genders, ages and different personalities bring their talents to the table along with their unique work and life experiences. We are a nursing team from different backgrounds, but our common goal is to carry out our mission as healthcare providers to serve those in need of our care.”
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BRIAN CHILSON
NEWS & POLITICS
THE PRESIDENT WHO CRIED FRAUD: Under the guise of deterring voter fraud, Republican lawmakers in Arkansas and acoss the country are clamoring to build barriers to the ballot box.
THE PARTY R OF VOTER SUPPRESSION LIMITING DEMOCRACY IS THE GOAL OF REPUBLICANS IN ARKANSAS AND BEYOND. BY ERNEST DUMAS
18 APRIL 2021
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ev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his antecedent of a century earlier, Rev. Theodore Parker, were optimistic that the “arc of the moral universe,” while awfully long, bent toward justice. But it turns out they misjudged what a desperate political party would do when the long march for human rights threatened its hegemony. Actually, Parker said “my eye reaches but little ways” across the moral universe but his conscience told him that equal justice for all Americans, including the most fundamental right of all — voting — would some day prevail. After the old Unitarian abolitionist uttered his famous adage in 1853, for the next hundred years it was the Democratic Party, or at least its Southern appendage, that sought to thwart justice for Black people by barring or discouraging them from voting. Meanwhile, the Whigs, who gave birth in Parker’s day to the Republican Party, were only trying to impair the cultural and political influence of immigrants with undesirable languages and habits. Neither man imagined that in the 21st century it would be the party of Abraham Lincoln that decided democracy had gone way too far when only once in 30 years a Republican candidate for president (George W. Bush in 2004) got more votes than the Democrat. Republicans then set out to suppress voting by the sort of people who favored Democrats. It actually had begun in 2000 when Republican electioneers in Florida had to cheat a lot of people, mainly Blacks and seniors, out of their votes to engineer a presidency for Bush, who lost the election to Al Gore by 550,000 votes but got to be president anyway owing to the screwy Electoral College. Five times in American history, the winners of the national vote — all of them Democrats — lost the presidency to less popular men, including Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016, because the Electoral College assigned extra votes to a score of unpopulated states like Wyoming and Alaska. If it were not for the Electoral College’s irrational or long-outmoded mechanics for calculating state results, we would have had a real democratic
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election for the presidency in 2020. There would have been no screaming about fraud, there would have been no armed effort to overthrow the government of the United States on Jan. 6 and no effort now to curtail voting in solidly red Arkansas and nearly all Republican-controlled states. Although elections in Arkansas are thoroughly controlled by the Republican Party and Republicans from Donald Trump to county tax assessors win handily in nearly every statewide, regional and local contest, the state legislature, in near panic, is enacting bill after bill to erect hurdles to voting, all with the defense that they are needed to deter voter fraud, of which there has been no evidence in modern times, at least since the abolition of the poll tax in 1964. Across the country, 33 states with Republican legislatures are passing laws to restrict access to the ballot with tougher voter-identification requirements, limited absentee and mail voting, more cumbersome registration procedures and timetables, or more aggressive purging of voter rolls. All of it is in response to Trump’s fraudulent claims of massive fraud that he said accounted for his lopsided defeat — by 7 million votes — nationally and his narrower losses in six swing states that decisively flipped the Electoral College. The ballot-fraud campaigns have two focuses: Black, Hispanic and Asian voters who traditionally are more easily discouraged from voting but who turned out in big numbers in 2020, and mail and early voting, which were expanded in most states last year owing to fear of the coronavirus at crowded polls. Mail and early voting favored Democrats who, unlike Trump voters, were not going to line up at crowded polling places during a pandemic. Trump protested all the expanded mail voting — except in states like Utah that voted heavily for him by mail — and enlisted his postal administrator to try to sabotage mail voting, particularly in Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Arkansas and in swing states like Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan and in Deep South states, so-called “election reform” is aimed at suppressing Black voting through tougher registration, voter ID specifications, sharply truncated early voting and centralized election administration under Republican officials. Arkansas already has a lower voter turnout than most states, and we should be shooting for higher, not lower, voter participation, which is a good measure of functioning democracies. We should remember what this is all about: the most fundamental of human rights in the great American democratic experiment, voting. In a government of the people, by the people, for the people, the right of everyone to vote is central to the whole equation. America has spent two centuries of war and executive, judicial and legislative evolution to perfect those rights. A little local history of vote suppression might be in order. When Arkansas became a 20 APRIL 2021
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state, all you needed to vote in Arkansas was to be a white man, a citizen and an Arkansas resident for six months. The first known lynching in Arkansas occurred in the first election in 1836, when a Black man was lynched for trying
The state legislature, in near panic, is enacting bill after bill to erect hurdles to voting, all with the defense that they are needed to deter voter fraud, of which there has been no evidence in modern times. to vote. The great battles during Reconstruction and its aftermath were over voting. Male Re-
publicans and former slaves could vote during Reconstruction but Confederates and their sympathizers — all Democrats — could not, until Reconstruction ended in 1877 and citizenship was restored to the seditionists. Briefly, Arkansas paupers of any race were barred from voting but citizens from other countries could vote. The Ku Klux Klan and whitecappers waged fierce war to discourage Blacks from voting. Republicans and Democrats alike committed fraud on a massive scale, tossing whole boxes of ballots in the river to destroy evidence. A Republican candidate for Congress, a brother of the governor, was murdered when he went to Conway County to find out what happened to all his votes there. Democrats in the legislature settled matters for good in the 1890s with a spate of laws that erected the Jim Crow society. It required men wishing to vote to pay a poll tax every year in a state where the average annual wage was only $548. A poll tax receipt had to be shown to vote. Landowners threatened sharecroppers and farm laborers to keep them from voting, but eventually landowners and other leaders simply bought poll taxes for Blacks and cast their votes for them. But the poll-tax system made little difference because the Democratic Party declared its primaries, where all issues were settled, to be for white voters only. The courts said that was fine. In 1917, Arkansas allowed white women to vote in primaries, although Republicans rarely held them, and after Arkansas ratified the 19th amendment in 1919, women were given suffrage in all elections. During the Jim Crow era, Arkansas did not follow the regimen of Deep South states that erected barriers, such as literacy tests, to keep Blacks from the polls altogether. All-white primaries and the poll tax were sufficient to render the Black vote virtually meaningless, so why bother making Black voters who came to the polls recite the Preamble to the Constitution? After World War II and the election of Gov. Sid McMath, Arkansas invited Blacks into the Democratic primaries. That left the poll tax. In 1964, Democratic reformers led by state Rep. Hardy W. Croxton of Rogers, Dr. Dave Luck of Arkadelphia and Cal and Brownie Ledbetter of Little Rock fashioned a constitutional amendment that abolished the poll tax and established a system that allowed people to register one time to vote for the rest of their lives. The legislature had refused to refer the amendment to the ballot because it specified that the legislature could never impose any other requirement to vote beyond the registration. Behind the scenes was Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, who mainly bankrolled the ratification campaign and who believed that racial repression was Arkansas’s and the South’s most grievous problem. Even Gov. Orval E. Faubus shrugged that the voter-registration law would be all right, and it was ratified. So it was that in 1965, when the Democratic Congress, with the votes of a number of north-
ern Republicans but not a single Arkansan, enacted the Voting Rights Act, Arkansas was not among the states subjected to an automatic federal review of any voting changes, owing to its recent record of permissive Black voting. Forty-five years later, Arkansas was still forced by the federal courts to reapportion state legislative seats because racial gerrymandering diluted the voting strength of Blacks. It produced a few more minority legislators. The passage of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws in the 1960s by a Democratic president and Congress started the most seismic change in two centuries of American politics. White conservatives in the South and Midwest left the old Democratic Party and settled, uncomfortably at first, into the Republican Party — a shift that became complete with racial and nationalist taunts in 2010 and beyond of a new Republican showman, Donald Trump. George Bush’s narrow election in 2000, thanks to voter suppression in Florida, sent a message to the party. Even marginal vote suppression can make a critical difference in a big election like the presidential race, and also in local elections here and there. So after Republicans gained majorities in state legislatures — after 2010 in Arkansas — they began to tinker with voting procedures, notably by requiring voters to present an official photo identification at the polls to prove that they were the person whose registration they were using, although not a single instance of such fraud was cited. It was a real problem for lots of people — the elderly, the disabled and Black women, who most often did not have cars and had no official ID. Alternate procedures — provisional ballots — would be allowed but the process was confusing, embarrassing and too daunting for many. It was easier to just stay home. The Arkansas legislature in 2013 passed such a law and then overrode the veto of Gov. Mike Beebe. The bill clearly violated Arkansas’s voter-registration law by enacting a new requirement for voting, and the Arkansas Supreme Court said so. (Full disclosure: A group I founded helped initiate the suit.) No problem. The legislature came back the next year and sent a constitutional amendment to the voters, who perfunctorily ratified the Republican amendment requiring official ID to vote. Now, at the urging of Donald Trump and the Party of Lincoln and Rockefeller that Trump now owns, the legislatures of Arkansas and at least 32 other states are back at the wheel, grinding out more barriers to voting in the 2022 and 2024 elections. It is depressing but mainly because a once-idealistic party seeks to undermine the very foundation of democracy. Here is the good news: The suppression they are engineering will have only a negligible effect because the targeted and once-cowed citizens are newly invigorated. Also, when we all go to the polls again, with a little grace, voters will not face the perils of a raging virus.
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THE PANDEMIC ADVENTURES OF NATE POWELL, COMIC-WRITING DAD
HIS NEW BOOK, ‘SAVE IT FOR LATER,’ CONFRONTS THIS POLITICAL ERA. BY AUSTIN BAILEY
N
orth Little Rock native Nate Powell recently loaded up his daughters, ages 6 and 9, and drove the 555 miles from Bloomington, Indiana, to visit his newly vaccinated parents. It would be a short trip with a loose agenda to catch up on family time lost to COVID-19 restrictions and to show the girls some of the places they hear about when their dad recounts tales of childhood: the Old Mill, Emerald Park, the almost certainly haunted Woodson Lateral. “I’m taking the stories I’ve embedded in them about my life growing up and showing them the physical locations, showing them it’s part of a real, interconnected world,” he said. “As each of my kids grows and gets more literate and interested in the world, it’s been awesome.” Sharing these formative scenes with a new generation is part of a conversation that, for Powell, spans both the personal and the professional. As he unspools a dialogue with his daughters about a shifting world lately gone so awry, Powell has been capturing with paper and ink what it’s like to be in the generation sandwiched between truebelieving baby boomers and the skeptical youngsters who knew American exceptionalism was a myth all along. “Save It For Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest” is an autobiographical yarn by a parent hoping to right some wrong turns on an arc of the moral universe his generation always expected to shoot toward justice. Powell created his first comic book at age 14, and is now up to 40 or 45 in all if you count those early models. His most well-known is “March,” a three-piece anthology about civil rights icon John Lewis. Topics varied for Powell through the decades, but this vegetarian punk rocker of ’90s Soophie Nun Squad fame never strays far from social progress and justice, themes he took to heart as a kid while reading the entire X-Men canon. You’ll find no bodysuits or superhuman acrobatics in “Save It For Later,” which comes out April 6. This book is about the work of parenting, which is arguably just as hard. But it’s not meant to be instructive, as Powell makes clear in his introduction. “Let’s get something outta the way, so we can better get in the way: This is not a parenting book or an activist guide — that isn’t my place.” Instead,
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Powell said, he’s sharing his own experience in solidarity with others he knows have felt confused and lost in recent years. “One powerfully damaging effect of living through this era of disinformation and authoritarianism is doubt quietly cast over our own memories, our senses, our critical thinking, even trusting our emotional response to that darkness. You’re not alone. None of us are. My family’s experience likely echoes some of yours.” Powell lives in a Midwestern college town now but the social challenges he and his family grapple with in his new book, and in real life, aren’t much different than they would be if they lived in Arkansas. “It’s very hard for me to get rid of the notion that this place where I haven’t lived in 17 years is not my home. Arkansas is my home, I’ll tell it to anyone,” Powell said. And his time spent living outside the region where he grew up helped him realize a lot of the struggles he thought were unique to the South can be found throughout the country. For example, he said, the nominally progressive college town where he lives has a significant Nazi problem. “There’s a reason why the South is always sold as the backward, racist part of America. It allows much of the country to continue what it’s doing, with the South as the scapegoat.” If you’re a Gen X parent with an uncontainable streak of progressive zeal, “Save It For Later” will call you out. Have you ever taken your kids to a protest, or tried to explain to them that a lot of the people running the show around here aren’t good guys? Have you ever wobbled on that parental highwire balancing act between self-righteous blowhard and negligent philistine, and erred on tipping to the left? If so, you will find yourself in these pages. Powell marked off the next six months or so on his calendar for talking about his new book, but has a couple of next big things already in the works. One is “an interdimensional time-hopping relationship story that centers on a punk band in the 1990s,” that will explore the “changing dynamics of friendship and creative collaboration.” Another project, which he can’t yet say much about, is a graphic adaptation of what Powell described as an influential book about the teaching of U.S. history.
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THE BOOM THAT GOT AWAY
LOOKING BACK: In the 1940s and 1950s, oddsmakers would have seen Hot Springs as more likely to emerge as the country’s top gambling destination than Las Vegas.
HOW POLITICS AND RELIGION HANDICAPPED HOT SPRINGS IN THE RACE TO BECOME AMERICA’S CHIEF GAMBLING RESORT. BY DAVID HILL
“On behalf of your children and yourselves, remove this cancer
from your county!” Dr. William Brown was a 75-year-old retired preacher, but on that Sunday in 1964 he was very much in his element, preaching from the pulpit of the Grand Avenue Methodist Church in Hot Springs. As executive secretary of the Christian Civic Foundation, the successor to the Temperance League of Arkansas, Brown had shifted his focus from alcohol to what he saw as the new scourge among the weaker-willed of his humble state: gambling. “A wave of gambling is sweeping across America with all the fury of a prairie fire and in an infinite number of manifestations. God save us from a Las Vegas in the heart of Arkansas!” Brown had good reason to be worried. At the time of his sermon, gambling was the main industry in Hot Springs, despite the fact that it was illegal in the state of Arkansas. So much so, in fact, that all around the Grand Avenue Methodist Church that day stood more than $18 million worth of towering hotel construction projects, hurriedly being erected to receive what by then numbered more than 5 million visitors to Hot Springs per year. Over the previous decade Hot Springs was locked in a de facto arms race with the city of Las Vegas over who would be the beneficiary of a flood of investment in the gambling industry. That money flowed from two main sources: the investments made by organized crime into the gambling industry of Cuba now orphaned by the revolution, and the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, which had invested more than $120 million in real estate projects, and was prepared to invest double that into casino projects alone. This, too, surely worried Brown because both of these sources were controlled by organized crime. My book “The Vapors: A Southern Family, ARKANSASTIMES.COM
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the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice,” tells the story of how Hot Springs nearly won that arms race and, if not for a couple of nefarious bombs and a couple of elections that went the wrong way, nearly became America’s undisputed gambling resort. By 1964, however, much of that battle was already lost, and the gamblers of Hot Springs weren’t so much fighting to become Las Vegas as they were fighting to keep up. Internecine struggles between rival gambling factions in Hot Springs in the early 1960s allowed Las Vegas to get the upper hand. While Hot Springs locals battled each other, they also began to shun the involvement of outsiders who had once connected the town to the broader gambling infrastructure, and instead rejected their help. When mob boss Frank Costello flirted with moving to Hot Springs to quell the warring factions and take over as “Boss Gambler,” the governor of Arkansas, Hot Springs native Sid McMath, publicly warned him to stay out. Even Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, who invested Central States Pension loans into high-profile luxury hotel projects in Hot Springs like the Jack Tar Hotel and the Aristocrat Manor, was once closely connected to the leaders of Hot Springs. But Dane Harris, who as the owner of the city’s flagship gambling club, The Vapors, became the town’s Boss Gambler in the 1960s, had his differences with Hoffa. Contemporaries of Harris told me that until his dying day he blamed Hoffa for every bad thing that ever happened to Hot Springs. (The conspiratorial among you might find it interesting that after Hoffa vanished in 1975, the FBI spent two weeks searching for his remains near Hot Springs and questioning gambling leaders.) But the likeliest obstacle to attracting the hundreds of millions of dollars that would rain down in the desert of Las Vegas in the coming decades was that, unlike in Arkansas, gambling in Nevada was legal. This was why William Brown was preaching in Hot Springs that morning. He had helped start an organization called Churches United Against Gambling to combat the gambling leaders of Hot Springs’ final effort at catching up with Las Vegas: a statewide ballot initiative to pass Constitutional Amendment 55, which would make casino gambling legal in Garland County. The message of CUAG was simple: Las Vegas was a sinful, crime-ridden city. The
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group’s advertisements claimed that legal gambling was “a stark picture of moral wrong, economic wastefulness, political corruption, social destructiveness and educational deception.” The ministers would have their way. Amendment 55 was defeated 247,978 to 166,626. Vapors owner Harris had invested much of his time and money in the campaign to pass the amendment. He was proud of the industry that he and his partners had helped build in the little resort town, and felt that Hot Springs presented to the rest of America a different version of Arkansas than one might have expected: a place that was rarefied, cultured and cosmopolitan. He saw legal gambling as the key to growing Hot Springs’ quasi-clandestine gambling operation into America’s own Monte Carlo, a place that — unlike the desolate and inhospitable desert valley of southern Nevada — the whole world could come and comfortably enjoy the best America had to offer. The failure of Amendment 55 all but killed any hope of expanding the city’s gambling business, which had already grown too large to contain in willful violation of the law anymore. Harris expressed his disappointment after the vote by lamenting “We’re 49th and 50th in everything. I guess we’ll just stay that way. Proud but poor.” As Hot Springs spent the next five years slowly winding down its gambling operation, Las Vegas was already well on its way to building the desert metropolis we all know today. The transformation was truly remarkable, and unparalleled in modern American history. In the 1940s, Hot Springs was booming, and Las Vegas was barely a town at all, let alone a tourist destination. In those days, despite it being legal in Nevada, gambling took place in dingy saloons and pool halls. In 1940 fewer than 10,000 people lived there. But by 1960 the city had more than 130,000 residents and nearly 10 million tourists who collectively gambled $100 million a year and spent over $150 million more. In 1963, while Arkansans debated whether or not gambling was sinful, the governor of Nevada sent a delegation of 37 business and civic leaders on a threeweek barnstorming tour of Europe to solicit foreign investment in the state and particularly in Las Vegas. The McCarren Airport was expanded to accommodate jet travel. Nevada was the fastest-growing state in the country. The only thing holding Las Vegas back, other than the challenges presented by
its extreme climate and living conditions, was that the growth and development was being funded by criminals. In 1962 the Supreme Court even threatened to shut down gambling in Nevada because of the prevalence of organized crime figures in the gambling business. At that time, gambling was a business that had been illegal everywhere in America other than Nevada, so it made some sense that it would be largely controlled by the mob. In fact, gambling was the mob’s single biggest source of revenue. The problem was that anyone in America who knew how to run a gambling operation was likely involved with organized crime in one way or another. And the only people willing to fork over the eye-popping sums of money required to develop casino resorts in Nevada were people with mob ties. The Teamsters Central State Pension Fund, which not only funded casino construction but even hospitals and other civic projects, was a crucial source of money for Las Vegas’ early development, and the loans from the fund were being directed by not only Hoffa but mob leaders, giving organized crime significant power and influence in the rapidly growing city. But what choice did Las Vegas have? Few banks would loan money to casino projects in those days. And few people outside the gambling underworld were interested in going into the legitimate gambling business. What allowed Las Vegas to begin to break free of its mob connections were two Nevada laws passed in 1967 and 1969 that allowed for corporate ownership of casinos. Once the Las Vegas experiment began to take root and flower in the desert, deeper pockets started paying attention to the potential for profits, and legitimate money started moving in. Slowly but surely, corporate investment was able to dilute the influence of organized crime. And corporate investments helped build massive casino resort projects that would employ more than 40,000 people to wait on, deal to and clean up after tens of millions of yearly visitors. In 1971 one of those corporations, Hilton Hotels, purchased the International Hotel in Las Vegas and renamed it the Las Vegas Hilton. Five years later, 43% of Hilton’s revenues from all of its 163 hotels around the world came from Las Vegas alone. At that time, 300,000 people lived in the Las Vegas area, a community that 20 years before barely had a working sewer. Hot Springs struggled to find its footing in the years following the end of casino
Dane Harris was proud of the industry that he and his partners had helped build in the little resort town, and felt that Hot Springs presented to the rest of America a different version of Arkansas than one might have expected: a place that was rarefied, cultured and cosmopolitan.
VISIT HOT SPRINGS
HOFFA: The notorious president of the Teamsters Central State Pension Fund (right) invested in luxury projects in Hot Springs, and when he disappeared in 1975, the FBI spent two weeks in Hot Springs looking for him and interviewing gambling leaders. The Southern Club (below) was one the city’s prominent gambling halls.
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VISIT HOT SPRINGS
IN THE HEYDAY: Vapors owner Dane Harris was given an opportunity to invest in a casino in Las Vegas in 1959, but turned it down. He thought Hot Springs was the surer play.
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gambling. Still dependent on tourists to fill its many hotel rooms and patronize its many service and entertainment establishments, it tried to reinvent itself as a family-friendly resort. During the 1970s a visitor to Hot Springs could spend a day at a new 118-acre amusement park, visit a new $7 million science museum, or even visit the famous Southern Club, once a popular and rollicking casino, now a wax museum for the whole family. While the rehabilitation of the city’s image was working, the economy struggled without the revenue gambling created — or at least the revenue casino gambling created. Gambling on horse racing was still alive and well, and was a desperately needed lifeline for the economy of both Hot Springs and the entire state of Arkansas. The tourists who traveled to Hot Springs to gamble at Oaklawn Park spent more than $200 million each year in Garland County, money that created over 5,000 jobs. In 1983 Oaklawn set all-time attendance records, but those numbers fell in each subsequent year as tourism began to fall. A combination of technology and a proliferation of legal forms of gambling in states across the country contributed to a decline in the number of tourists traveling to Hot Springs for the race meet each season, and the town’s various hotel housekeepers, restaurant servers, bartenders, shop owners and even the folks who parked racetrackers’ cars in their front yards in the neighborhoods around Oaklawn all took a hit to their pocketbooks. By the end of the 1980s, with a national unemployment average at about 5%, the lowest in 15 years, Arkansas’s sat at 8%, and had been as high as nearly 10% during 1986, when the state’s Employment Security Division said that Oaklawn, even with its declining attendance, had saved the state’s employment numbers and “had a major impact on the economy.” Las Vegas struggled in the 1980s as well. At long last another state challenged Nevada’s monopoly on legal gambling, and in 1978 Atlantic City, New Jersey, opened the first of what would grow to become 11 casino resorts along the boardwalk on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. The proximity to the population centers of the East Coast peeled a significant number of customers away from Las Vegas, and during the early 1980s there was very little new development. Many of the Las Vegas casinos languished, its mid-century Rat Pack charm grew dated and uncool, and the city lost a bit of its step. In 1986, all of that would begin to change. A developer named Steve Wynn, backed by Michael Milken’s junk bonds, planned to build the biggest and most expensive hotel in the world in Las Vegas. His $630 million, 3,000-room resort was
called The Mirage, and it opened in 1989 to great fanfare. What was unique about The Mirage, beyond its size and price tag, was that it intended to make money from more than just its gambling tables. The Mirage was a full-scale luxury resort with world-class restaurants, shopping and a 1,500-seat showroom. Wynn would court conventioneers over weekend gamblers, and the other casino owners in Las Vegas quickly followed his lead. Convention and exposition business wasn’t attractive to the old-school gambling leaders of Las Vegas, because conventioneers didn’t come to town to gamble, and spent little money. But the bet that Wynn was making was that convention business would bring fewer gamblers to Las Vegas but more tourists overall. In a few short years, Las Vegas overtook Chicago as the top convention destination in America, and has held that top spot ever since. And gambling revenue at casinos on the Las Vegas strip went from just under 60% of total revenues in the years before The Mirage opened to less than half of total revenues by the end of the decade. Today the number is roughly one-third. In 2013, MGM CEO James Murren said 70% of their income came from nongambling revenue, including 7 million show tickets sold in one year alone. Las Vegas was transforming from “sin city” to America’s premier resort destination — precisely the kind of place Hot Springs aspired to be. But rather than throwing out the slot machines and burning them, Las Vegas was using the gambling revenues to build stately showrooms, ritzy shopping malls, lush swimming pools and water parks, and telling visitors to bring the entire family. Twenty-five years on, and Dane Harris’ dream for Hot Springs was coming to life in Las Vegas. The Mirage inspired more mega-resorts. The 1990s saw a massive building boom in Las Vegas, with old casinos being demolished and replaced with newer, larger, more luxurious resorts, each one trying to top the last. And each of these massive casinos required a workforce equal to its size. By the end of the decade, the typical Las Vegas casino resort employed 3,000 to 5,000 workers. A couple even topped 10,000 employees. People were moving to the desert in greater numbers than ever before. In 1996, the population of Las Vegas eclipsed 1 million. It was once again the fastest-growing city in America, with 7,000 new arrivals every month. The boom in Las Vegas wasn’t just good for the corporations that owned the casinos. In the 1990s, the hotels and casinos created over 100 new jobs every month, and although those jobs were mostly entry-level service jobs — among the lowest paid jobs
in America — in Las Vegas the hotel and casino workers made some of the highest wages in the country. That’s because Las Vegas, going all the way back to its early days when it was built by union loans, had always been a union town. And the city’s main union, the Culinary Workers Local 226, had been a part of the city’s history from the very beginning. The man who built that union, an Arkansan named Al Bramlet, helped grow Las Vegas by literally driving through Arkansas recruiting sharecroppers — and anyone else looking for work — and bringing them to the thenlargely uninhabited Las Vegas to work in the new casinos. The result was that the earliest establishments were union shops, and remained union as the businesses grew through the decades. As the industry boomed in the 1990s, the union fought hard to make sure that workers would get their fair share of the profits. Just like in the 1940s, the casinos were once again desperate for a stable and well-trained workforce, and they were willing to agree to higher wages and better working conditions in exchange for the welltrained and experienced members of Local 226. By that time the union’s membership numbered in the tens of thousands, and the local ran workforce training schools, so that members could take classes and work their way up from the lower-paid, less-skilled jobs to the higher-paid, highly skilled ones. Courses were offered on high-end table service, sommelier training or bartending. Some union hospitality jobs paid as much as $90,000 a year. And the union members had free top-of-the-line health care and a defined-benefit pension plan. Thanks to the union, Las Vegas was a town where cocktail waitresses and housekeepers were able to buy their own homes, put their children through college, and retire with a pension. Las Vegas wasn’t a city without problems, however. There were more people moving to Las Vegas than there were good jobs, which created high levels of inequality. That inequality in turn beget crime, homelessness, inadequate schools and unaffordable housing. And because Las Vegas, like Hot Springs, depended so heavily on tourism, it was susceptible to boom-andbust fluctuations. The booms and busts of the last two decades have stretched Las Vegas like a rubber band. In the years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Las Vegas experienced a sharp decline in tourists. The financial crisis of 2008 also took a toll on the city. Today, with COVID-19 restrictions in place, unemployment in Las Vegas is the highest among all large metropolitan areas. The once-perpetually bustling Las Vegas strip has sat nearly empty for the past ARKANSASTIMES.COM
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year. Experts believe it may take three years for Las Vegas to recover from the financial hit the coronavirus pandemic has delivered to the city. Still, in mid-March, as casinos and hotels were allowed to lift their capacity limits from 35% to 50%, and hotel and restaurant workers were moved up on the vaccination priority list, visitors desperate to escape lockdown flocked to the city, and the Las Vegas strip was once again crowded with tourists — for better or for worse. While Las Vegas adapted to the myriad curveballs thrown at it throughout the 2000s, Hot Springs tried to keep its head above water — first with “instant racing machines,” which looked and quacked like slot machines but operated off of databases of historical horse races in order to qualify under existing state laws governing horse racing, and then with “electronic games of skill,” legalized by the state legislature in 2005. The addition of these crypto-slot machines to Oaklawn led to the construction of a modest casino on one end of the racetrack. It bore no resemblance to the plush gambling dens of the Spa’s heyday, to say nothing of the opulence and
have been impossible in 1959 to imagine the herculean degree of ingenuity, engineering and gumption (not to mention untold billions of dollars) it would take to transform the desert outpost into what it is today. Even the simple task of providing water to the city was likely akin to Egyptians building the pyramids. Hot Springs, on the other hand, would have required a far less steep learning curve to get from 25,000 to a million people. And when the time came to figure out how to lure visitors for more than just gambling, Hot Springs with its lush landscape of mountains and lakes would have been better suited for that as well. If you had told a visitor to both cities in 1959 that one of them would one day have over 1 million residents, the largest hotels on Earth, visitors from around the world and billions of dollars of investments, they would have surely handicapped Hot Springs as the odds-on favorite. In fact, when Dane Harris visited Las Vegas in 1959 with his family and was offered the chance to become a partner in the Frontier casino, he turned down the offer. He couldn’t imagine Las Vegas was a better bet than Hot Springs.
I also believe there is no contradiction in sincerely loving the one you’re with, while secretly lamenting the one you let get away. After the shutdown of gambling in Hot Springs, Dane Harris tried his hand at running a casino in Istanbul, of all places, only to run afoul of religious objections to gambling again — Muslims this time, rather than Southern Baptists. He died in 1981. His 28-year-old son, Dane Harris Jr., refused to surrender his father’s fight. In 1984 the younger Harris led a coalition of Hot Springs business and civic leaders to try once more to legalize casino gambling in Arkansas with yet another statewide ballot measure. The same forces of Southern Baptists and Methodists reorganized to fight them, rebranding from Churches United Against Gambling to Citizens United Against Gambling. Dane Jr. sounded just like his father from 20 years prior as he campaigned in support of the measure, arguing that gambling would help lift the ailing city (and the rest of the state as well) out of poverty: ‘’People are tired and embarrassed of being 48th, 49th and 50th in this state, with other people saying, ‘You’re
Neither the Hot Springs of past nor present has ever seen anything quite like the $100 million Oaklawn casino and hotel expansion, and hopes are riding high that the city’s own Las Vegas strip-style resort isn’t 57 years too late. excess of the modern Las Vegas strip resorts. But in 2018, more than a half-century after the defeat of Amendment 55, voters in Arkansas finally passed a constitutional amendment legalizing casino gambling, and Oaklawn is now in the final stages of a $100 million expansion that includes a luxury hotel, convention center and casino. Even Governor Hutchinson, who opposed the gambling measure, praised it as one of, if not the largest, tourism-related projects in state history. Neither the Hot Springs of past nor present has ever seen anything quite like it, and hopes are riding high that the city’s own Las Vegas strip-style resort isn’t 57 years too late. A question I am often asked by readers of my book is whether I truly believe Hot Springs could have been the kind of city Las Vegas is today. To most, it seems an unlikely proposition. After all, Las Vegas has become one of America’s truly quintessential cities, and Hot Springs is but a speck in that grand shadow. But I do believe it could have been otherwise. Today we have come to accept the current incarnation of Las Vegas as a fact of our lives. But without the benefit of hindsight, it would 36 APRIL 2021
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It’s tempting, however, to think gambling itself would have been a bad bet. Look at the example of other cities who dipped their toe in the gambling waters after Las Vegas made it look so easy: from Atlantic City to Tunica, Mississippi, to Detroit, many cities that turned to gambling to help ease their economic woes didn’t fare so well. But the fact remains, today there is some form of casino gambling in 40 states, and Las Vegas reigns as America’s leisure capital. Even now, at arguably its lowest point, it’s still a city visited and beloved by people all over the world. Clearly there was something to be said for being first to market in this particular instance. Casinos today are a dime a dozen. They come and go. Las Vegas, however, is permanently woven into the fabric of America. It isn’t a perfect city, and it’s possible that residents of Hot Springs may feel they would never want to trade places with Las Vegas, billions of dollars and millions of visitors be damned. This, I feel, is a reasonable position. Hot Springs is a quiet and eclectic community, with an abundance of charm and character. Rare is the visitor who doesn’t leave pleasantly surprised. But
from where? You mean you wear shoes?’ ” Opponents argued that Las Vegas was one of the most violent, crime-ridden cities in America and that gambling would bring that criminal element to Hot Springs. Everything old is new again. Despite 64% of Hot Springs residents believing the local economy to be in bad shape, the measure was opposed by the mayor of Hot Springs, Jim Randall, who said, “I love this community and I don’t want to see it destroyed.” Then-Gov. Bill Clinton, a former son of Hot Springs, whose own mother was a regular fixture at The Vapors in the gambling days, said, “I know we’d make a lot of money, but it would not create the climate or image we want here.” After a bruising fight, the amendment failed 561,000 to 236,000. It even lost in Garland County. As the dust settled, the victorious local Baptist clergy prepared to attend the upcoming annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. As the roughly 15,000 delegates from across the South planned where to hold their convention, there were only a few cities with enough hotel rooms and exhibit space to accommodate them. Naturally, they chose Las Vegas.
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ECHOES OF A BOOM TOWN: Visit the grave of gangster Owney Madden (bottom right) at Greenwood Cemetery (top) on a tour inspired by Hill’s book, or the ornate wooden bar at the storied Ohio Club (bottom left).
‘THE VAPORS’ TOUR
The Vapors (315 Park Ave.) Dane Harris’ storied casino, which gives Hill’s book its name, was bombed in 1963 and closed as a gambling hall the following year. It continued years after as a nightclub, then a disco and, for a while, a church. Since 2020, it’s operated as The Legendary Vapors, a venue that hosts tribute acts. Owney Madden’s house (506 W. Grand Ave.) New York gangster Owney “The Killer” Madden, one of Hill’s main characters, “retired” to Hot Springs upon his release from prison in 1933. He married the postmaster’s daughter, Agnes Demby, at this house, and the couple later hosted at their home the likes of Frank Costello, who had a bowl of spaghetti dumped on his head by Agnes after Costello insulted her cooking. Owney Madden’s grave, Greenwood Cemetery (701 Greenwood Ave.) Madden, who died in 1965, spent more than half his life in Hot Springs. You’ll find the gravestones of he and Agnes near the archway entrance on Greenwood Avenue. The Southern Club (250 Central Ave.) A prominent club and casino during the gambling era, the building now houses the Josephine Tussaud Wax Museum. 38 APRIL 2021
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VISIT HOT SPRINGS
David Hill’s book “The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice” belongs in the pantheon of great Arkansas books. Weaving in his own family’s history in Hot Springs, Hill tells the story of Hot Springs’ gambling heyday, flashy nightlife and criminal underbelly. To take advantage of the book’s popularity, Visit Hot Springs, the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau, assembled a self-guided “Vapors” tour. Find it at hotspringsblog.com/thevapors. Several of the stops would already be on any Hot Springs tourist’s list: The Arlington, where famed mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano was once arrested; Oaklawn, which led the author’s horsetraining great-grandfather and grandmother to town; and Bathhouse Row. Here are others from the tourism guide, with a few bonus stops suggested by Hill. The Ohio Club (336 Central Ave.) and Maxine’s Live (700 Central Ave.). Today, these are essential Spa City watering holes, and Maxine’s is one of the city’s top music venues. The Ohio Club, opened in 1905, bills itself as Arkansas’s oldest surviving bar. For years, it operated a backroom casino, which was the last in town to close, in 1969. Maxine’s was the top brothel during Hot Springs’ gambling heyday. Hill describes the brothel’s namesake, madam Maxine Jones, driving her ladies around town propped up in the back of her pink Cadillac convertible. FROM HILL: National Baptist Hotel (501 Malvern Ave.) This was once one of the most important hotels and meeting spots for African Americans from all across the country. It was the site of many important meetings and gatherings as well as musical performances by big-name stars. Across the street at 508 Malvern is the site of the former Cameo Club, owned by Bubba Page, and the epicenter of nightlife on Black Broadway. Dane Harris home (100 Trivista Circle) This was the location of the home that Dane Harris and his family lived in that was bombed in 1966.
The Aristocrat Manor (240 Central Ave.) Built in 1963 by Samuel Kirsch, a local businessman and a leader in the city’s Jewish community, the hotel was one of a number built in anticipation of the legalization of gambling, and was partially funded by money from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. It was decked out in mid-century modern style, and its most talked about feature was its glassbottomed pool on a deck just over the lobby, where visitors looked up at the ceiling into the pool above them. After the gambling measure failed in Hot Springs, the Teamsters quickly called in their loan and took possession of the hotel and offered it for sale to whoever would buy it. Location of the lynching of Will Norman (Intersection of Central and Ouachita) In this spot in 1913, now the location of a controversial Confederate monument, future judge and gambling boss Floyd Babe Huff allegedly participated in the lynching of a young Black man who worked for his family and was suspected of murdering his sister. Babe Huff was 10 years old.
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ARKANSAS TIMES
the artful home Tips, treasures and trends.
Trapped at home for an undetermined duration, Arkansans have been looking around at their four walls and noticing the cracks. Home improvement projects quickly became a favorite COVID-era hobby. “The things people said they would get around to eventually, they’re finally getting around to it,” said Colton Koehler, who works at Kraftco in Little Rock and said the store stays busy with call-in orders and curbside pick-ups. We tapped some local experts for advice on how best to get in on this home improvement trend. Want to start an art collection or learn how to score the best treasures at estate sales? Thinking of investing in renovations, but not sure where to start? Gallery owners, art collectors, treasure hunters and contractors share their secrets here. And Northwest Arkansas superstar designer Chris Goddard talks about stylistic evolution and what it was like to compete on the HGTV show “Design Star: Next Gen.”
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lights, camera, design! Arkansas designer Chris Goddard shines on HGTV.
COURTESY OF DISCOVERY+
‘DESIGN STAR’: Springdale’s Chris Goddard.
BY KATHERINE WYRICK
C
hris Goddard, designer and principal of Goddard Design Group in Springdale, is one of eight contestants on HGTV’s “Design Star: Next Gen.” After three decades of design work, Goddard’s known in the Northwest Arkansas area as much for his personal aesthetic (Goddard spoke in a TV broadcast this year about a return to “comfort and quality,” sporting red plaid and royal blue glasses frames against a gold and crimson Oriental folding screen) as he is for being able to shape the look of a space in his clients’ image. Now, he’s taking that balancing act to the six-episode reality competition series for a chance at $50,000 and his own TV show. Inspired by the original “Design Star,” “Next Gen” features dancer/influencer Allison Holker Boss as host; renowned interior designer Jonathan Adler as head judge; and cameos from a handful of celebrity guests. All six episodes are available on Discovery’s streaming service, discovery+. (The show concluded after our print deadline.)
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You’re an established designer, you’ve been doing this for 30 years, you work all over the world, but the other people on the show were a bunch of young upstarts. How was that? It was a little tricky at first because, you know, we walked into this blind. When they called at the beginning of the pandemic, I was like, sure, that sounds great. So we went to spend a month and a half in California in this wonderful, safe bubble of design and creativity. I was like, sign me up! And then I got there and kind of panicked like, “Oh, my God, I actually have to do this! And people are watching, and everybody here is so much younger.” You know, when I started my business, I taught myself how to do everything. When I’m dealing with contractors and people, I know what they’re talking about, and we can speak the same language. But I haven’t done that in years because my firm is so big that most of my time is spent designing and managing and being creative. But it’s funny because your fight-or-flight kicks in, and all that stuff from my 20s came right back to me. It’s funny how you never forget that.
One thing that impressed me so much is that here you are with all this experience and this global brand, but you came into the show with such modesty and humility. My big deal is that we’re always growing and we’re always learning, and the reason I am successful is because I surround myself with people who can teach me things. ... The only way to evolve is to educate yourself and be open. That was another big reason I went on the show. The design industry can be a little snobby, and I wanted to kind of break the image of that. I wanted to show that no matter how successful you are, you can get down and get dirty and paint and do whatever. You know, at the end of the day, none of us is too good to do any of that. So I think it’s really important to show it. No matter what age you are, you can do anything. No matter where you are in your career, you can’t forget where you came from.
That sounds like a sound strategy for remaining successful and relevant. The biggest problem you can have is to get in a rut. I always tell people — when I give talks or when we bring in new designers or interns — if you’re doing the same thing you were doing three years ago, you’re doing something wrong. And if you have one look or one style, you’re not going to make it very long. Your taste can evolve as long as your brand is the same, and mine is quality and timeless elegance. So I believe you should invest in a few quality things a year and build a home over time. Rooms need to look like they’ve evolved over time, not overnight. You’ve said that, “The key to being a great designer is designing for your client and not yourself.” But it seems like some designers are more concerned with leaving their “stamp” on a project. The biggest compliment I get is when someone comes in, and it looks like I was never there, and they say, “Wow, this room looks just like me.” ... I’m creating their home. My stamp is creating something of quality, something that’s new and different. I also read that, for instance, if you use a certain fabric, you’ll remove the swatch from the fabric catalog book so you never use it again. We don’t ever do the same thing twice. We don’t use the same fabric or wall covering twice, which is really nice because you’re not replicating what your neighbor has. A lot of people think there’s safety in numbers, but why do you want to be like your neighbor? Why not be yourself? This has worked for me for 30 years, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. At this point, I just keep throwing things in there to have fun. I was interested in something you said about clients not wanting their parents’ style, but their grandparents’. Can you explain? I always find that nobody wants what their parents had. They want what their grandparents had. I think it’s because kids rebel against what they grow up with. We’ve all done it. And now I work for families where I’ve worked for three generations. And it’s funny because the youngest generation wants their homes to look like their grandparents’ homes because that’s where the best memories were. It’s the reason, for instance, that you’re seeing a return of brown furniture ... and it was funny on the show because all the younger ones are obsessed with the ’80s. I realized that I’m now at the age where [the styles] from my childhood are trending again. It ebbs and flows. That’s just the cycle of design — and life.
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the art of collecting Who does it and how.
POWER OF THE PAINTING: Treopia Bryant (right) talks about Louise Mandumbwa’s “Marie” with Garbo Hearne.
T
he Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying that happiness doesn’t come from collecting things “outside of yourself,” but from “removing things from inside of yourself,” and he usually gets things right. But who among us can’t help collecting things outside of ourselves? It is a human instinct to collect things: seashells, rocks, teacups, species of cacti, doorknobs, yellow cats — the things that satisfy a need to possess what we love. Collecting art is no different, three gallery owners told the Times, yet some of us pause outside the gallery door, hesitant to acquire, thinking we have to have a college degree, or know mysterious terms of art like “scumbling” or be able to name a famous Fauve before trading dollars for art. “When people say they don’t know enough about art, it makes me chuckle,” said Cindy Huisman, co-owner of the venerable Cantrell Gallery, in business since 1970. “I think they think there is this air of snootiness, and they aren’t in the club, and they don’t know what they are supposed to do. … If we could lower the intimidation factor, that would be awesome,” she said. Cantrell Gallery opened on Seventh Street downtown selling art prints but responded to demand in the 1980s for work by local artists. Over the years, Huisman and family learned there is no right or wrong when it comes to choosing good art. Running a gallery is “such an interesting business,” she said, “because art is so subjective.” Sometimes, the gallery will have a work by an artist she and her husband, Clarke,
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and mother, Helen Norman, might “think is the best thing the artist has ever done” and expect it to fly off the wall — yet it sits in the gallery unsold. And vice versa: A piece that isn’t a favorite of the gallery owners will sell right away. Which means, if you ask, “Is this a good work of art?” the answer is whatever you think it is. There is no right or wrong. And the more you look at art, the more you’ll know, said Garbo Hearne, who with her husband, Dr. Archie Hearne, owns Hearne Fine Art. Like most gallery owners, Hearne makes it possible for her buyers to meet artists at openings and lectures, which intensifies a connection to their work and lends confidence in choosing what will make the buyer happy for a long time. You also don’t have to be rich to collect art, though depending on your tastes it might help. For example, Boswell Mourot Fine Art in SoMa sells work priced from $500 to $20,000; Hearne has work priced at half a million. If a piece you can’t live without is a stretch, Boswell, Hearne and Cantrell Gallery will let you pay out over time. (Huisman of Cantrell Gallery calls it “hang-away,” a phrase coined by her father and original owner, the late Norman Scott). Kyle Boswell, who owns his gallery with his husband, Jon Mourot, said many Arkansas art collectors are inspired by a visit to the annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (recently known as the Arkansas Arts Center), a juried show featuring work, from the pastoral to the outlandish, of Arkansas and regional artists. The gallery’s stable includes national and international artists. Keep in mind, the gallery owners said, there’s
nothing wrong with buying artwork because it fits the color scheme of the living room. The pandemic has been a tough time for galleries and their customers; openings that have been good for sales have been limited. But Huisman said she thinks people, their activities limited and their homes turned into work spaces and occupied 24/7, are thinking more about art, and Hearne predicted a boom in art sales once people can again safely mingle and meet artists. *** Treopia Bryant, who has purchased art from Hearne Fine Art for years, recalled her first visit to the gallery, which represents both African American artists of national renown and Arkansas-linked artists, in the late 1980s. She and an older cousin stopped in after attending a performance by Alvin Ailey dancers at UA Little Rock and she was taken with a work that had a price tag of $500. When she told her aunt she was going to ask about the work, her aunt said, as she recalled, “Sweetheart, you can’t afford that.” “I thought to myself, OK, you don’t know who you are talking to,” Bryant, an employee of Southwestern Bell at the time, said. “My folks said, ‘If you want something, you work hard and you get it.’ ” Unfortunately, the piece was already sold. “I think about that to this day,” Bryant said. Bryant became an art lover as a young girl, thanks to her seventh grade art teacher at Dunbar High. Mae Emma Gettis showed her classes slides of famous African American artists, and Bryant remembers learning about sculptor
BRIAN CHILSON
BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK
Edmonia Lewis (1884-1907), the first professional African American sculptor (whose work “The Old Arrow Maker” is in the collection of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), and Henry O. Tanner, the first African American painter to enjoy fame at home and abroad. (Hearne Fine Art showed works by Tanner and other 19th century Black artists in 2010 and has some for sale.) Gettis’ teaching was “very rich,” Bryant said. The first piece she bought was by a folk artist, a work she saw in a craft shop in Blytheville. “It spoke to me,” she said. The work depicted an African American carrying a cotton sack. “I never knew what a cotton sack looked like,” she exclaimed. “Those things are 9 feet long.” Since then, she and her husband, Hubert, have filled their home with many fine works from Hearne and other galleries. Artworks hang from floor to ceiling in the hallway; there’s art in every room, “including the bathroom,” she said. A portrait by emerging artist Louise Mandumbwa, who came to Arkansas from Botswana to study at the University of Central Arkansas and received almost immediate acclaim, hangs in Treopia Bryant’s bedroom. In all, the couple own 34 works of art, including four commissioned works and two on loan to
a family member. It all “tells a story,” Treopia Bryant said; her connection to a portrait may be so personal she’ll rename it after the family member it brings to mind. On one wall of Hearne Fine Art is a quote by Samella Lewis that points to the value of art as the depiction of the times in which it is made: “Art is not a luxury as many people might think — it is a necessity. It documents history — it helps to educate people and stores knowledge for generations to come.” *** While “you don’t buy art to sell it,” Hearne said, the gallery has promoted the acquisition of art as a way to pass down wealth. For example, in 2012 it curated an exhibition named “The Power of Art: Establishing Generational Wealth,” featuring such powerhouse names as Benny Andrews, Dr. John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett and Clementine Hunter. A banner hanging outside says the gallery is “Where Aesthetics Meets Investment.” And if that collection will be handed down to children, Hearne has advice: Document the work. Make sure the provenance — who it’s by, where it was purchased, whether it has hung in an art show — that explains its value is handed down. That way, it won’t end up in the garbage.
GAZING: Sculpture at Boswell-Mourot Fine Art in SoMa.
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IN THE GALLERIES:
BOSWELL-MOUROT FINE ART, 1501 S. Main St. No exhibit scheduled at this time. Represents Diana Ashley, Michael Warrick, Ray Parker, Alice Andrews, Brad Cushman, Susan Chambers, Winston Taylor, Carla Davis and more. CANTRELL GALLERY, 8208 Cantrell Road. “Maurice’s Musings,” work by N. Scott. Represents (in addition to those listed above) Kae Barron, Becca Bennett, Catherine Burton, Paul Caldwell, Daniel Coston, Patty Criner, Debie Deaton, Megan Lewis, Barry Lindley, Judd Mann, David Mudrinich, Laura Raborn, N. Scott, Rebecca Thompson and John Wooldridge.
HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave. On exhibit: “The Art of Resistance,” work by Phoebe Beasley, Kevin Cole, Adger Cowans, Frank Frazier, Samella Lewis, Bryan Massey, Melverue Abraham, Tafa, Rex Deloney, and more. Represents (in addition to those listed above) Marjorie Williams-Smith, Kennith Humphrey, Kadir Nelson, Wayne Hampton and more. M2 GALLERY, 1300 Main St. On exhibit: Works by C.C. Mercer. Stable also includes Melverue Abraham, Zina al-Shukri, John Allison, David Bailin, Selma Blackburn, Warren Criswell, Neal Harrington, James Hayes, Lisa Krannichfeld, Milkdadd, LaDawna Whiteside and more.
CONSIDER BOSWELL MOUROT FOR YOUR FINE ART PURCHASES. Open Wed.-Fri. 10-5; Sat. 11-3 and by appointment. 501.664.0030 501.454.6969
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APRIL 2021 45
finders, keepers
Scores from the estate sale scene. BY KATHERINE WYRICK
S
TREASURE SEEKERS: Costume designer and artist Missy Lipps shares some of her finds, including this two-pound knife, a gift from her husband, John.
MICKEY-GO-ROUND: My aunt Katherine Downie, a social worker and art teacher, poses with her beloved Mickey Mouse Ferris wheel.
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DISCOVERIES AND REDISCOVERIES: I rediscovered this long-forgotten portrait of my mama (sold decades earlier) at one of Roy Dudley’s sales. He waved me back to the storage room and showed me where it had been hanging for years and then, graciously, gave it to me. It was painted on a hot summer day in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1959 when she was 18.
BRIAN CHILSON
everal years ago, murmurs began circulating a few weeks before a certain Roy Dudley estate sale. Word had it that a secluded house in midtown — yes, it being secluded was part of the allure — held untold treasures. And that’s how I found myself on a spring day careening down a busy, steep street, crouched low, a fierce grip on the spongy handles of my son’s scooter. The car was in the shop, and the sale was starting, so … In this day and age, of course, you can find almost anything on the internet, but then you miss out on the thrill of the hunt. It’s a full-body, sensory experience: the feel of sifting through ephemera of days gone by, the not unpleasant musty smell (I can detect a good sale within seconds on scent alone). And then there’s the voyeuristic delight of exploring someone else’s space and listening to the story their possessions tell. My heartbeat quickens at the thought. There are also the characters who frequent these sales; if you go, you know the regulars. Depending on the nature of the sale, the quality of stuff ranges from the kitschy to the refined. (My tastes lean toward the former, but I appreciate the latter.) It also ranges from the mundane to the extraordinary. A gently used bottle of nail polish remover? I’ll pass. But I will wrestle that vintage schnauzer hologram out from behind that dusty water heater. There are a lot of estate sale companies in the game. Here are some of the main players: Roy Dudley, Pennsylvania Trading Co., Bob Birchfield, ReHome, Betty Bogart, Caring Transitions, Rook Antiques and Grassroots Estate Sales. Sign up for ashleysfinds.com, the source for estate sale info. Here, some veteran shoppers share their spoils:
favorite finds
PREDATOR POSE: A ceramic prowling panther.
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home remodeling Tips from the experts. BY CAROLINE MILLAR
D
onna Thomas and her business partner, Jennifer Carman, have been rehabilitating historic houses in Little Rock’s Central High School neighborhood for well over a decade. As can be expected with rehab projects in older homes, some of them in such poor shape as to have been condemned, they’ve come across a lot of unforeseen challenges. For instance, they once found 12 inches of bat guano piling up a 19th century attic and five layers of shingles on a single roof. Small surprises bring joy to the experience, too, like the tiny hand and footprint Thomas discovered while patching up a concrete porch, or a pair of boots hidden in a ceiling. With Thomas’ expert carpentry skills and Carman’s refined design aesthetic, this well-matched duo offers the do’s and don’ts of home renovation.
HOW TO GET STARTED Your mentality when rehabilitating your home should be: My mom is moving into this house. When looking for a contractor, do not hire one who asks for payment before doing any work. A lot of people want to be paid in advance and then don’t ever show up to your house. WHERE NOT TO CUT CORNERS Design and material choices that take a house to the next level are windows, flooring and trim. New houses have the cheap contractor trim or maybe a 1-by-4 around the doorways. Choose real hardwood floors that are only 2 inches wide. If you are financially able, splurge on good quality light fixtures with an aesthetic that you love. The right lights make or break a space, and too many people treat this as an afterthought. Buy the best caulk you can afford for any application that requires caulk. Never buy the cheapest dishwasher. Ever.
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MADE-OVER MARVEL: We speak to the experts behind the meticulous remodel of the historic MillsDavis House in downtown Little Rock.
WHERE TO CUT CORNERS Do not spend all your money on kitchen appliances. We have installed $8,000 kitchen stoves as well as their $800 counterparts, and both of them make equally tasty meals. In fact, the cheaper the stove, the fewer repairs it is likely to need. Choose cheaper tiles over expensive ones. Though there are some low-quality tiles out there, there is truly an abundance of options that won’t break the bank. Use the money you save on tile to afford better treats elsewhere. For countertops, consider wood before devoting yourself to marble or granite or factory-made solid surfaces. Not only are they timeless and beautiful and surprisingly durable, but they have a more modest environmental impact than blasting our way to more granite. The secret to choosing paint colors is to find a color you like and then try to find a dirtier, muddier, more neutral version of the color. Humans are intuitively drawn toward “believable” colors that feel aesthetically connected to the tones of the natural world. So many of the pigments that drive today’s color options are laboratory concoctions that are too bright and electric to resonate with us.
Do not buy the cheapest toilet or the most expensive toilet. Mid-range is what you want. The best toilets are $150 to $200. Never cut corners with safety. Hire qualified and licensed specialists when it comes to electricity, plumbing or HVAC. Two essential renovation tools: the chop saw and the sawzall [reciprocating saw]. “I can’t imagine trying to cut angles all the time with a skill saw or a hand saw,” Thomas said. The only inhabitants we’ve ever had to evict were the bats in the attic of a 19th century home. They are tenacious and won’t go without a fight. We worked closely with a local wildlife removal company to help us humanely rehome them. The process is called exclusion, and it essentially amounts to performing a very high-quality repair to the attic perimeter such that there are no openings or slits or holes, until you narrow their egress down to only one entrance/exit. You then install a one-way exclusion device that allows them to fly out but through which they cannot get back inside when they try to return. [Carman’s] dad also built bat houses so they’d have some new digs to move into when they were evicted.
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REGISTRATION FOR THE 2021-2022 school year is open for Pulaski County Special School District. In addition to registration for current PCSSD students, the district participates in Arkansas school choice. The Arkansas School Choice program enables a student in kindergarten through grade 12 to attend a school in a nonresident district. PCSSD’s mission is to provide equity and excellence for all students through rigorous college and career readiness instructional strategies. We serve Sherwood, Maumelle, North Little Rock, and Little Rock with 27 school locations - 16 elementary schools, five middle school campuses, five high school campuses and, in 2021-2022, an online K-12 school. “PCSSD is the place to be because we take your child’s education personally,” said Dr. Janice Warren, Assistant Superintendent for Equity and Pupil Services. “We focus on all children and how to prepare them for success.” Schools within PCSSD strive to prepare students for life, cultivate future leaders, strengthen our communities, and drive innovation in the classroom. Every school within the district focuses on AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) and PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports).
DRIVEN is a two-part platform within the district that includes the School of Opportunity and the Virtual
AVID prepares every student with a mindset of Academy. The DRIVEN concept engages students in college potential. PBIS focuses on teaching behavioral online and in-person learning to meet students where expectations, just as teachers teach about other sub- they are and allow them to work at their own pace. jects. PBIS changes the focus to prevention instead of
Applications will be accepted through May 1. If
punishment. This aims to improve school safety and you have specific questions related to registration promote positive behavior with the understanding that and school choice within PCSSD, please contact the kids can only meet behavior expectations if they know Office of Equity and Pupil Services at 501-234-2021. the expectations.
REGISTER NOW
pcssd.org/register
501.234.2000ARKANSAS TIMES 50 APRIL 2021
ABOUT PCSSD
Pulaski County Special School District spans more than 600 square miles in central Arkansas and requires highly skilled and passionate personnel to adapt educational policies and personalization to 25 schools. Every school is accredited by the Arkansas State Board of Education. PCSSD has served schools across Pulaski County since July 1927. PCSSD is committed to creating a nationally recognized school district that assures that all students achieve at their maximum potential through collaborative, supportive and continuous efforts of all stakeholders.
News & Notes 52 | Parenting and Autism 54 | Meet the Parent 58
MEET THE MAGNIFICENT MAX PHOTO BY BRIAN CHILSON
& HIS LOYAL SIDEKICK
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NEWS & NOTES APRIL, 2021 MUSIC TO OUR EARS APRIL 5
Summer 2021 The Wildwood Academy of Music and the Arts is a summer camp designed for students ages 6–18. WAMA students learn and perform alongside professional faculty. Registration opens April 5! Visit wildwoodpark.org.
ZOO NEWS APRIL 16-17
The Angolan colobus and serval are having a housewarming party of sorts to show off their new exhibits at the Little Rock Zoo. The weekend-long celebration will begin with a members-only preview event from 5-7 p.m. Friday, April 16, that will include an early look at the new exhibits while animals enjoy enrichment. This will be followed by a private reception in the Civitan pavilion where members will enjoy enrichment — in the form of food and refreshments. The party continues on Saturday, April 17, with an opening for the public that will include keeper chats. (Not to be outdone, the lesser spot-nosed guenon is also getting new digs.) Later in the month, April 24, the zoo will host Party for the Planet, a special Earth Day celebration. Visit littlerockzoo.com.
DAFFODIL DAYS & TULIP EXTRAVAGANZA THROUGH APRIL 15
Garvan Woodland Gardens, 550 Arkridge Road, Hot Springs Price: Free for Members | $15 adults | $5 ages 4-12 | Free ages 0-3 Celebrate the end of winter at the Gardens during Daffodil Days & Tulip Extravaganza! There are thousands of beautiful blooms, including more than 150,000 brilliant Dutch tulips. In addition, spring annuals and azaleas will be blooming, making it the biggest display of color between Dallas and Memphis all season. For up-to-date photos and peak bloom times, check the Garvan Woodland Gardens’ Facebook page.
WOO PIG!
APRIL 9 10 a.m.
PAINT + STORYTIME
Younger kids love Paint + Storytime at the Painted Pig, where they hear a story and then make a coordinating simple project. All kids are welcome, but this is geared toward toddlers and kids up to age 5. Limit one adult per child. If these dates don’t work for you, book your own private storytime class with friends. Cost is $16 plus tax, which covers the cost of the project. Storytime is a prepaid event. For other classes, check out paintedpigstudio.com.
GET BACK IN THE ACT!
Argenta Community Theatre has announced an exciting lineup of virtual classes for kids and teens this month, followed by the return of in-person summer arts camp ACTing Up. The ninth annual Children’s Theater Summer Camp will feature two sessions to allow for smaller classes, spacing and other COVID-19 safety measures. Each day has four periods for each grade level in theater movement/dance, acting, music and film. The curriculum for each session is identical. Session one will be held June 7-18. Session two will be held July 1223. The program costs $250, though need-based scholarships are available. For more information, please email Laura Grimes at lgrimes@ argentacommunitytheater.org. For info on the spring mini sessions, visit argentacommunitytheater.org 52 APRIL 2021
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SAVVY kids PUBLISHER BROOKE WALLACE | brooke@arktimes.com
EDITOR KATHERINE WYRICK | katherinewyrick@arktimes.com SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE LESA THOMAS ART DIRECTOR KATIE HASSELL
Make a World of Difference
We have more events than we can pack into one day, so we’re making April Earth Month at CALS. #GoGreenwithCALS THE LIBRARY, REWRIT TEN.
E N V I R O N M E N TA L I S M TECHNOLOGY CL ASSES | MUSIC | AUDIOBOOKS | EBOOKS GENEALOGY RESOURCES | STORY TIMES | MAGAZINES
CALS.org ARKANSASTIMES.COM
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FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, ANNA, MAX, BERT, PRINCE AND PAIGE ENJOY A WALK IN THE PARK.
THE POWER OF PRESENCE
The joys and challenges of parenting a child with autism spectrum disorder. BY KATHERINE WYRICK PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON
I
t’s a mild, overcast day when we meet the Reynolds family at the park — Paige (mom), Bert (dad), Anna (17), Max (10) and Prince (service dog). Max’s bright smile and Prince’s shiny black coat stand out against the dull skies. Paige is an English professor at the University of Central Arkansas, writer and actor; her husband, Bert, is a minister; Anna is a junior in high school (virtual). It’s clear that they’re a close-knit family and protective of Max, who has autism spectrum disorder. But their attentions are gentle rather than coddling. Autism spectrum disorder refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, autism affects an estimated 1 in 54 children in the United States today and is the fastest-growing developmental disorder. Paige’s eloquent, tender essay about Max recently appeared in the popular New York Times column Modern Love. It deserves a read — or two — and sheds some much-needed light on autism spectrum disorder and parenting in general. 54 APRIL 2021
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MOM and DAD:
What resources have helped along the way? Max has an amazing team — from medical professionals and therapists to educators and encouraging friends and family members. Max has a service dog, Prince, who has been such a delightful and helpful addition to our family. We have also found conversations with other parents in similar situations is a great way to find inspiration, support, resources and understanding. It is with this in mind that we are in the process of creating a company (HumanKind Supply, coming soon) through which we aim to promote acceptance and celebrate diversity, including neurodiversity. Did you decide to do mainstream schooling and why? We decided to do mainstream schooling for a couple of reasons. We like the chance for Max to have as many social and educational opportunities with various peers his age as much as possible for as long as possible. We appreciate the team working with Max at his school. For several years, his sister was at middle school across the street, and her presence before and after school brought him a great deal of pride and comfort. Since late fall of 2019, Max has had a modified school week, which allows some flexibility in his schedule for therapy outside of the school setting. This has been such a fantastic fit for him, and it’s a great reminder to us and others that creative solutions are always possible.
“Follow your instincts when it
comes to your child — even when met with opposition, obstacles or doubt. Nobody knows your child in the ways you do. I believe that knowledge can be trusted. — Paige Reynolds
5 THINGS
YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT PCSSD The Pulaski County Special School District provides opportunities to central Arkansas students to prepare them for life beyond high school through equity and excellence in education. With nearly 12,000 students and more than 2,000 employees, PCSSD spans across central Arkansas to serve residents in the county. Here are five things you probably didn’t know about PCSSD: has 27 campuses with four feeders 1 PCSSD to cover more than 600 square miles. in 2021-2022 school year, PCSSD is 2 Starting offering a completely virtual K-12 school. (Advancement Via Individual Determination) 3 AVID increases student engagement while activating a deeper level of learning in the classroom.
integration of PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions 4 The and Supports) highlights good behavior in all PCSSD schools by teaching behavioral expectations, just as teachers teach about other subjects.
PCSSD seniors earn an average of $16 5 Graduating million in academic scholarships annually.
REGISTER FOR THE 2020-2021 SCHOOL YEAR pcssd.org/register
”
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MAX: (answers written as dictated to his mom)
What are some activities you enjoy? I like playing with my dogs. I like playing with my connecting blocks. What’s one of your favorite movies or games? Smash Brothers is my favorite game. I kind of love to watch Avengers movies. My favorite Avenger is — it’s a tough one because they’re all so good — Iron Man is awesome. Favorite food? I love pizza. What is Prince like and how does he help you? He’s a black lab. He’s a very good boy. He helps me fall asleep and helps me calm down. Please tell us about Hearts and Hooves. This year I started riding a new horse and his name is Frank. He’s a very good horse. He wears a saddle. We do exercises on the horse, like airplane arms and hands to the sky. The barn is taking a break [for the winter months], and I miss riding my horse with my therapist. MAX AND THE REYNOLDS FAMILY’S BLACK LAB, PRINCE .
MOM and DAD continued: How has parenting Max changed as he’s gotten older? Are there new challenges? When Max was younger (and smaller), if trouble erupted, especially in public, we could scoop him up and whisk him off to an environment more suitable for his needs. That’s impossible to do now, and I guess this is just a common challenge of parenting as a child gets older — providing that sort of protection is harder, so in some situations, we may feel more helpless. We are always exploring new ways to best support him as he grows, as well as how to best empower him toward independence. It’s easier now to ask him what he needs, and this is a wonderful thing. What advice can you give other families who are raising a child with autism? Every child is unique, and every family situation is different. We can only speak from our own story and perspective. For us, the learning curve at the beginning of this experience was steep and frequently felt pretty isolating. Sometimes we felt that isolation more profoundly when trying to share with others who didn’t seem to understand — not because they lacked compassion, but just because they lacked awareness. So, forming a team of support as quickly as we could was incredibly helpful to our family — we needed folks who knew Max, knew us and knew a little something about our daily experiences and the kinds of decisions we were making. I would also encourage parents: Follow your instincts when it comes to your child — even when met with opposition, obstacles or doubt. Nobody knows your child in the ways you do. I believe that knowledge can be trusted. 56 APRIL 2021
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How did having a child with autism change your life? Having Max has made our lives richer (as having our daughter before him has). I know that I am much better at practicing presence — my son is so good at being fully invested in any given moment, and I have learned a lot about the power of presence from him. Even when worries about the future could become overwhelming, I’m reminded to stay grounded in the here and now. Naturally, we have concerns that are specific to Max’s autism (and to his epilepsy) — those things have changed our lives in practical ways. Mostly, though, Max has changed our lives by bringing us joy, expanding our awareness and reorienting our priorities in positive ways. We have learned better to see and celebrate diversity around us. Similarly, we have grown in extending grace to others, realizing there is so much we do not know about their lives or experiences.
Parenting Max has opened our eyes to a bigger world “ of wonderful, courageous and caring people — those with various disabilities, families and friends who love and journey with them, and professionals
who dedicate their careers to helping them. — Paige Reynolds
Are there questions not to ask a parent of a child with ASD? From our perspective, any kind, sincere and open questions from others are welcome. We are always eager to inform others and advocate for those with ASD based on our experience. We will share what we feel comfortable sharing and withhold what needs to be private. We speak only from our experience and understanding, not presuming that our answers are the only answers, and not speaking on behalf of anyone other than ourselves. Questions that are not helpful are those which are dehumanizing of others or diminishing of their stories and experiences. What have you learned from raising Max? There are unquestionable challenges, but we have also learned that there is much to celebrate in the beauty of diversity, including neurodiversity. Parenting Max has opened our eyes to a bigger world of wonderful, courageous and caring people — those with various disabilities, families and friends who love and journey with them, and professionals who dedicate their careers to helping them.
”
ANNA:
How is your life different from those of kids who don’t have a sibling with autism? Having a sibling with autism didn’t inherently change my life; it’s the social expectations and stereotypes surrounding autism that affect it. Max would probably be different if he wasn’t on the spectrum, but every kid who grows up having a sibling doesn’t usually question why that person does certain things. It’s just who they are, and as little kids we just accept it. The thing that truly differs in my life is the knowledge that if I’m out in public, I need to try my best to not instigate a meltdown, because if I do, everyone around us is going to judge us. Of course, having Max as a sibling has probably changed my life — in ways I’ll never fully understand myself — but I do know that the most obvious differences between my life as his sibling versus the life of a sibling of a neurotypical brother are not different things about Max, but the different reception society can have towards him and our family because of his autism.
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Meet the Parent:
LEE ANN SMALL
The irony isn’t lost on them — the Small family is anything but. With four kids and a menagerie of animals, parents Lee Ann and Jeff have their hands full. They manage, however, to meet life’s challenges with grace and positivity — no small feat. This creative, artistic bunch enjoys spending time together and shares a love of the performing arts. They’ve even been known to break out in song when inspiration strikes. Here we offer a backstage peek at this multifaceted family. Please tell us a little about your family and any pets. I’ve been married 21 years to my husband, Jeff Small. We have four children: Whitley (19), Melody (16), Noelle (15) and John Isaac (10). We have two dogs, both rescues. Mango is a Lab mix, and Willoughby is a long-haired Dachshund. We also have two ducks, Ghirardelli and Duck Van Dyke (DVD), that live on the pond in our front yard. Melody also has a bearded dragon, Jiminy Cricket, and Noelle has a fish named Princess. What does school look like for you guys? I homeschooled my children for years and one by one sent them to school. In the fall of 2019, my oldest went to college, and we sent the other three to school. It was the first time I hadn’t had anyone home with me during the day since I became a mother. In March they all four came back home. Whitley is back at college, but my other three are home. Melody and Noelle have been doing school virtually, and John Isaac is homeschooled again — hopefully just for this year.
(TOP) LEE ANN AND JEFF ON A JOYRIDE FOR THEIR 20TH ANNIVERSARY. (BOTTOM) JOHN ISAAC, NOELLE, WHITLEY AND MELODY.
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What are your favorite “family time” activities? Before the pandemic, we spent a lot of time in local theater. Two of our children, Melody and John Isaac, love to act. If they weren’t in a show, we could be found watching our friends in one. Many of our closest friends are “theater family,” and we’ve missed them terribly. Even at home, much of our family time has been centered around karaoke or watching our kids put on skits or plays. All four of them love to sing. Whitley plays the piano by ear, and her siblings usually join her in singing. When they’re all grown up I know that’s one thing I’ll miss the most. In the summer, we love to swim and cherish our occasional lake days. I love the water, and I’m thankful that all of our kids do, too. Name three things that have helped or are helping your family make it through the pandemic. We’ve been really careful with the pandemic. It’s been the hardest on our youngest, John Isaac. He’s incredibly social and loves
meeting new people. He’s not meeting new people, and that’s been hard on him. We’ve tried to make sure he has plenty of play time outdoors with neighbors, and we’ve emphasized that this is temporary. We have so many things to look forward to that we know we’ll appreciate in a new way when all of this is over. We’ve tried to take this time to focus inward as a family on our relationships with each other. With my oldest in college now, I know how quickly the years fly by. In that regard, it’s been a hidden gift to have extra time together. Melody spends a lot of time video chatting with her friends and stays connected that way. Noelle loves seeing her classmates on her daily Zooms and spends more time doing puzzles and crafts. We also have wonderful neighbors who’ve also been home all year, and our kids play outside together. It has definitely been a different year, but my kids are troupers. They really haven’t complained. They’ve grown closer in their sibling relationships and have learned to be more thankful for the simple pleasures in life.
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ARKANSAS TIMES
FOOD& DRINK
GOT SAUCE?
THE MOVERS AND SHAKERS OF THE CENTRAL ARKANSAS CONDIMENT WORLD. BY RHETT BRINKLEY AND LINDSEY MILLAR PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON
SWEET HEAT: Keith Tucker Jr.’s Truth Sauce is barely a year old and already a local favorite.
A
co-worker brought up La Hacienda’s verde salsa in conversation recently — a spicy, fresh, wonderfully flavored green salsa that is unmatched in our opinion. A different coworker (and fellow fan of the Hot Springs-born Tex Mexish institution) said: “It’s really more of a dip.” The rest of us nodded, not in agreement or disagreement, but because we really didn’t know. So what makes a condiment a condiment? And what disqualifies it? Macmillan Dictionary’s blog defines the word condiment as “something such as salt, pepper or a sauce that you put on food at the table to make it taste better.” By that definition, one could probably make a case for anything. There’s no shortage of popular locally made condiments here in Central Arkansas: Fischer’s Honey in North Little Rock, Whole Hog Cafe’s six different barbecue sauce varieties, Cavender’s Greek seasoning, U.S. Pizza’s creamy Italian. We’ve highlighted a couple of Central Arkansas classics and some sauces that are new to the flavor scene.
TRUTH SAUCE
One name kept popping up when we asked Arkansas Times Facebook followers for condiment recommendations: Truth Sauce, a sweet heat sauce that’s relatively new to the scene. Created by Little Rock native Keith Tucker Jr., Truth Sauce was established in January 2020 and can now be found in more than 30 stores, including Drug Emporium, Uncle-T’s Food Mart, Fire Dancer BBQ and Boss’s Chicken. When I spoke with Tucker on March 9, he’d just signed a contract with Edwards Food Giant that day for the grocery store chain to carry Truth Sauce at all of its locations statewide. Certified Pies, the first Black-owned pizzeria in Little Rock, located at 9813 W. Markham, spotlights the sauce on its Certified Truth Wings. Tucker, who worked as head chef at the UAMS Cancer Institute for over a decade, created Truth Sauce in his home kitchen. “I’m a chef by nature,” he said, “So I was playing around in the kitchen, of course, and found a hit.” Tucker said he was just trying to make a good all-purpose sauce that would “complement a little bit of everything.” He started out bottling Truth Sauce himself and selling it to friends and family. Since then, he said, it’s “taken a life and legs of its own. It started out just me being at the house.” Now, he said, he’s at 32 stores and counting. “I’m blessed.” Where do you use Truth Sauce in the kitchen? Wings, ribs, pork chops and even eggs and cornbread. Demand has grown so much that Tucker can no longer do it alone. It’s now a two-man operation with his 15-year-old son Keith Tucker III. “He’s played a vital part and he doesn’t get recognition,” Tucker said. Order Truth Sauce online at truthsauceinc.com. RB
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THREE FOLD’S NO. 1 SAUCE
UMAMI: Lisa Zhang’s pepper relish is a staple at Three Fold, and now you can bring home a jar for yourself.
If you’ve had the bun at Three Fold Noodles and Dumpling Co., you might recognize the pepper relish as the piquant soul of the restaurant’s Chinese equivalent of a barbecue sandwich. It’s got a curious tang with a deep umami flavor. Last year, owner Lisa Zhang began bottling and selling it by the Mason jar as No. 1 Sauce, and it quickly became my No. 1 condiment. If you correctly believe that hot sauce makes everything better, No. 1 sauce kicks things up a notch. Looking to liven up scrambled eggs? Want to make a hot dog fancy? Tired of dipping your chip in salsa or queso? No. 1 Sauce is the ticket. Zhang, a native of northern China, is committed to sharing authentic Chinese cuisine with Central Arkansas diners, but she concedes that the No. 1 Sauce isn’t very traditional. She dreamed it up years ago for a friend who liked jalapeño peppers. The ingredients are simple: jalapeño, herbs, green onion, ginger, soy sauce, oil. The
secret, Zhang said, is in the preparation. Bottling and selling No. 1 Sauce — along with the also excellent No. 2 Sauce (a chili paste that she uses at Three Fold to flavor noodles) and No. 3 Sauce (chili flakes in oil, known as the “poison” dumpling dipping sauce at the restaurant) — has long been in the plans as part of Zhang’s vision to get her cuisine into home kitchens. During the pandemic last year, she began rolling out reheat-and-eat versions of most of Three Fold’s dishes, and she’s already planning ways to improve the packaging of the sauces. Initially, she considered making instructional videos to help Arkansans get a sense of how to use the sauces, but after hearing anecdotes of customers using them in unexpected ways, she’s hoping the Chinese sauces find purchase in American cuisine in ways she would never imagine. Three Fold’s sauces are available at 611 Main St. or 1509 Rebsamen Park Road and can be ordered in advance at 3foldonline.square.site. LM
PIZZA CAFE HOUSE RANCH
‘A THING OF RANCH’: Pizza Cafe’s most popular condiment is all about the “shake.”
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We don’t know when it started or where, or how widespread it is, but somehow, ranch dressing became a very popular pizza condiment. Some people dip their pizza slice in it. Some like to drizzle the ranch all over the slice. And for some, not having it is a dealbreaker. Working in pizza restaurants for an amount of time I’d rather not think about, I’ve heard more than one person tell me how much trouble they would be in if they got home with pizza but didn’t have the ranch. When Richard Harrison was developing the menu at Pizza Cafe on Rebsamen Park Road in 1991, he knew he wanted a house dressing. “I thought that was really important,” he said. Harrison knew other pizza restaurants used ranch seasoning packets, but he wanted to do something that was a little different. But before Harrison and his crew got started on the house dressing, they developed a seasoning for the pizza called the “shake.” Made up of mostly parmesan cheese, granulated garlic,
oregano and some other spices, it’s used to dust the pizzas before they go into the oven. While trying to develop a unique ranch using Hidden Valley Ranch powder as a base, they started adding parmesan cheese and eventually the shake itself. “It just gave it a great taste, and it’s been that way for 30 years,” Harrison said. The shake and the ranch are also used in Pizza Cafe’s honey mustard recipe, which is one of the most original honey mustard flavors I’ve ever tried. It’s sweet and creamy and just a tad spicy. It goes on all the sandwiches at Pizza Cafe, and some people opt for a side of honey mustard to dip their pie in rather than the house ranch. “It’s funny,” Harrison said, “people would ask how we make it, and I don’t hide things, but they’d ask, ‘How do you make your honey mustard?’ And I’d go, ‘It’s impossible to tell ya.’ ” Pizza Cafe’s ranch is plentiful at both locations at 1517 Rebsamen Park Road and 14710 Cantrell Road. If you want more than just a couple of sides, order a “Party House” in a 20-ounce to-go cup. RB
Roxane with One N THU | APR 29 | 6:30 PM
Betsey Wright Program Roxane Gay’s books include Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body and Bad Feminist. Her work as an author and cultural critic garners international acclaim for its no-holds-barred exploration of feminism and social criticism. Roxane was the first Black woman to ever write for Marvel, a comic series called World of Wakanda.
VIRTUAL AUTHOR SESSION TECHNOLOGY CLASSES | MUSIC | AUDIOBOOKS | EBOOKS GENEALOGY RESOURCES | STORYTIMES | MAGAZINES REGISTER FOR THIS FREE SESSION AT
cals . org /s peaker -s eries
Quality Care Rooted in Arkansas
hope Is The Foundation. recovery Is The Journey.
In response to the growing needs of our community, The BridgeWay has expanded its continuum of care for substance use disorders. The acute rehabilitation program will provide hope and recovery for adults struggling with substance use disorders. Led by Dr. Schay, and a Board Certified Psychiatrist and Addictionologist, the Substance Use Disorder Rehabilitation Program is for adults at risk of relapse. Rehabilitation requires the supportive structure of a 24-hour therapeutic environment. To learn more about our continuum of care for substance use disorders, call us at 1-800-245-0011. Physicians are on the medical staff of The BridgeWay Hospital but, with limited exceptions, are independent practitioners who are not employees or agents of The BridgeWay Hospital. The facility shall not be liable for actions or treatments provided by physicians.
Dr. Schay
Medical Director Of Substance Use Disorders & Patriot Support Program
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Arkansas Farm Bureau, known throughout the state for supporting agriculture and issues important to rural communities, is now partnering with Arkansas PBS on community programming and other local projects. The new monthly segment “Good Roots” will explore rural community life, agribusiness and how these things are evolving through modern advances. In the first segment, host Logan Duvall visits the Ralston family, who operate a sixth-generation family farm near Atkins. He learns about farming techniques they use to protect the soil, how the process works and what it could mean to other farmers in the state. Tune in to “Arkansas Week” Friday, April 16, at 7:30 p.m. on Arkansas PBS, and livestream at myarpbs.org/watchlive. Starting in May, the segment will air on the second Friday of each month.
®
myarkansaspbs.org/goodroots
Major funding for “Good Roots” is provided by Arkansas Farm Bureau
A $15.5 MILLION RECIPE: Sims’ barbecue sauce.
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SIMS BAR-B-QUE SAUCE
When I started to talk to Ron Settlers, owner of Sims Bar-B-Que, about the revered restaurant’s barbecue sauce, I said, “I know you can’t tell me the recipe … ” “Yes, I can,” Settlers said. “Oh.” “First let’s agree to something,” he said. “Give me $15.5 million and I’ll tell you the recipe.” Joking aside, Settlers did let me in on a little bit of the recipe. Made with vinegar, sugar, mustard, ketchup and other spices, the barbecue sauce at Sims is thin and tangy, nothing like the thick, hearty stuff you get on the grocery store aisles. Settlers specified that it’s not a cooking sauce, it’s an eating sauce to be used on the meat (or soaked up with white bread) after it’s been cooked. Settlers said that back in the day, kids used to come into the original location on 33rd Street and buy a bag of potato chips and eat them with Sims sauce. On Oct. 2, Settlers will have owned the barbecue restaurant for 45 years. It was originally opened as Sims Cafe in 1937 by Allen and Amelia Sims. “It was really a cafe turned into a beer joint that sold good barbecue,” Settlers said. At first, he said, Sims just had three meats: ribs, pork and beef. Settlers has added chicken, smoked meats, bologna and vegetables like green beans, potato salad and coleslaw. What makes Sims unique, he said, is “We cook over an open flame pit and the sauce has always been the boss.” Sims barbecue sauce can be purchased in pint, quart, half gallon or gallon jugs at any of its locations: 2415 Broadway, 7601 Geyer Springs Road and 1307 John Barrow Road. RB
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CANNABIZ
DUAL SYSTEMS
MEDICAL MARIJUANA THRIVES BUT POSSESSION ARRESTS CONTINUE BY THE THOUSANDS. BY GRIFFIN COOP | ARKANSAS NONPROFIT NEWS NETWORK
M
edical marijuana has become a major industry in Arkansas, where nearly 70,000 people are now permitted to use it legally. But arrests for minor marijuana offenses are booming, too. Between 2010 and 2018, marijuana arrests in Arkansas rose by nearly 50%, according to a report published last year by the American Civil Liberties Union. Law enforcement agencies in the state made over 10,000 arrests for marijuana offenses in 2018 alone, 90% of which were for possession. The ACLU also found Black people in Arkansas were arrested for marijuana offenses at more than twice the rate of white people, though the national disparity was even larger. Crime data published by the Arkansas Crime Information Center, which counts offenses somewhat differently than does the ACLU report, shows a similar trend since 2010. The ACIC data shows a small decline in marijuana possession offenses from 2018 to 2019, however, from 11,639 to 10,616. In 2019, medical marijuana first became available to patients in the state. David Couch, the Little Rock lawyer who authored the medical marijuana amendment approved by voters in 2016, said he was not 66 APRIL 2021
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surprised by the modest dip in offenses. A significant number of people who once risked arrest by obtaining marijuana on the black market have now moved to the medical system, he said. But the state still needs to reform its criminal laws regarding marijuana, Couch added. The arrest trends described by the ACLU report, he said, are “outrageous.” State Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) has introduced a bill that would decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. Under current state law, possession of less than 4 ounces is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year of incarceration and a fine of up to $2,500. Senate Bill 499 would eliminate the misdemeanor charge for possession of less than an ounce, instead making it a “violation” that would carry a maximum $200 fine and could not be counted as a prior conviction. Tucker said the prosecution of minor marijuana offenses is an inefficient use of the state’s limited resources and does not serve the goals of the criminal justice system. “Are we really keeping Arkansans safe by incarcerating someone that’s in possession of a small amount of marijuana?” he said. “Would that money be better spent in other ways?”
Overly punitive marijuana laws can work against public safety, Tucker argued. “Once a person has that conviction on their record, their chance of committing additional crimes in the future goes way up,” he said. “Their ability to get a job, get housing and lead a normal and productive life goes way down.” In practice, attorneys say, most defendants do not see jail time for minor marijuana possession charges in the absence of other, more serious crimes. But the consequences of a conviction for marijuana possession can still be severe, including the loss of a job, a professional license, a driver’s license or child custody. A fine of a few hundred dollars can create spiraling financial hardships for some defendants. Probation or parole can be revoked after a positive drug test for marijuana in some cases. “These consequences are real and tangible and they happen to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people annually,” said Paul Armenato, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), an advocacy organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. Mike Kaiser, a Little Rock criminal defense attorney and former public defender, said the
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APRIL 2021 67
otherwise be a simple misdemeanor marijuana charge. Also, if you fail to appear in court, a judge will issue a warrant for your arrest.” Possession of larger amounts of marijuana can bring more serious charges. Possession
effects of marijuana enforcement are multigenerational. Even a misdemeanor conviction can reduce a parent’s earning potential, Kaiser said, impacting the lives of children and grandchildren. PULL W
In Crawford County, Black people are 9.1 times more likely to be arrested than whites. In Pope County, they are 5.3 times more likely, and in Craighead County they are 4.9 times more likely.
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ARKANSAS TIMES
“If your parents’ capacity decreases, studies show, so does yours,” he said. “There’s less inherited wealth. There’s more inherited debt. Parents likely aren’t able to go as far with their education.” Andrew Thornton, a deputy public defender in Pulaski County, said first-time offenders caught in his jurisdiction with a joint and nothing else are typically given a citation and released without bail. An offender with no criminal history can typically avoid a conviction if he or she doesn’t commit another offense for a certain period of time, Thornton said. In that case, the offender will typically still receive a civil penalty, such as a fine of $500 to $800. Fines are levied at the discretion of the judges and vary from court to court, but Thornton said he has never seen anyone fined the maximum $2,500. Someone with a previous drug conviction or who has previously struck such an arrangement would be less likely to get another deal. In addition to a fine and court costs, an offender would receive a mandatory six-month suspension of his or her driver’s license, later paying $100 to have it reinstated. While people in Pulaski County aren’t usually sent to jail for a misdemeanor marijuana charge, Thornton said, they may face additional charges for failing to pay fines or show up in court. Those secondary charges sometimes do result in jail time, he said. “Jail is always a possibility,” Thornton said. “Not on the first sentencing, usually, but if you get behind on your payments, it’s a very common way to end up in jail on what would
of more than 4 ounces is a Class D felony punishable by up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. If a person has had four previous drug convictions, possession of 1 to 4 ounces is also a Class D felony. DISPARITIES AND DISCRETION Marijuana laws are also not enforced evenly, according to the ACLU report, which noted racial disparities vary from county to county. In Crawford County, Black people are 9.1 times more likely to be arrested than whites. In Pope County, they are 5.3 times more likely, and in Craighead County they are 4.9 times more likely. Tucker said his bill was motivated in part by the disparate impact that marijuana prohibition has had on the Black community. “I think we need to be doing everything we can to be breaking down the racial barriers that have been constructed over the generations in our state and in our country,” he said. Holly Dickson, director of the ACLU of Arkansas, said law enforcement agencies and courts exercise a great deal of discretion in the enforcement of marijuana laws. The consequences of a minor offense vary depending on where an offender lives, what law enforcement officer they encounter, what prosecutor gets the case and what judge hears the case, she said. “Like all things criminal justice-related, it depends on the people who have the power to enforce those laws,” Dickson said. Larry Jegley, the prosecuting attorney in Pulaski County, said he draws a sharp distinction between individuals caught with a
small amount of marijuana for personal use and drug traffickers who are caught transporting pounds of marijuana along with scales, weapons and cash. “It’s just not worth putting the resources of the police, the prosecutor and the courts to bear on a minor and growingly acceptable thing in our community,” Jegley said. Kaiser, who battled with the prosecutor’s office over its pursuit of low-level marijuana charges when he worked as a public defender, disagreed. “No one in this county has more power over how we prosecute marijuana cases than Mr. Jegley,” he said. “If he truly believes that, he wouldn’t file any.” Prosecutorial discretion can reduce the severity of harsh laws. But leaving it up to prosecutors whether to pursue or discard charges can create its own set of problems, Kaiser said. “It is ripe for discrimination … It tends to vest in a manner that benefits people that look like me and not people of color,” he said. “The easiest thing in criminal law is defending a cop. The second easiest thing is a white college kid.” In theory, Fayetteville has taken a more lenient approach to marijuana since 2008, when voters passed an ordinance making misdemeanor marijuana offenses the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. But in 2019, a group of activists published a report showing that the city was actually making more marijuana arrests, not fewer. In 2008, according to the report, the Fayetteville police arrested 50 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession alone, meaning there were no other charges at the time of arrest. In 2018, the number was 192 — almost four times as many. After the report was released, the Fayetteville Police Department required all of its officers to review the ordinance. Arrests for marijuana possession fell from 113 in 2019 to 16 in 2020, according to statistics provided by Anthony Murphy, a spokesman for the department. Citations for marijuana possession fell from 16 to 1 over the same period. Murphy said Fayetteville officers frequently give warnings rather than citations or arrests for marijuana possession and did so even before the 2008 ordinance. But, he said, officers still must follow the law if they see something “egregious.” Murphy said shootings are often tied to marijuana and other drugs. “People that are using misdemeanor amounts of marijuana are a huge part of that problem,” he said. “Marijuana does contribute to the violent crime that we are seeing here in Fayetteville.” It’s uncommon for Fayetteville police to arrest someone for simply possessing a joint, Murphy said. Usually, an officer will seize the marijuana for destruction and give the offender a warning. Although the offender would not face criminal consequences, the incident would be logged as
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a warning in the police department’s computer system and would be visible to other officers in the future. POLICY REFORMS Some of the people being arrested for minor marijuana offenses may be using the drug for medicinal purposes, just as cardholders do. But not everyone can afford a card, which requires paying up to $250 to doctors for a certification and another $50 application fee to the state. That’s “extremely unjust,” Kaiser said. “Who is more likely to be able to get a card? People with means, people with knowledge,” he said. “It’s almost like we have created a system where you can buy out of criminal liability for this thing that a large number of people do.” Meanwhile, medical marijuana has become big business in Arkansas. Even Little Rock billionaire Warren Stephens is investing: Late last year, Stephens and two of his sons joined a long list of owners of Good Day Farm LLC, which is among eight licensed cultivators vying to supply the state’s market. Since the state’s first dispensary opened in 2019, more than 39,000 pounds of product have been sold, at a cost to consumers of more than $250 million. The sales have produced more than $26 million in state tax revenue that supports the medical marijuana program and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Cities and counties also levy local sales taxes. Armento of NORML said the best way to reduce charges for marijuana possession is to legalize it for adults, or at least decriminalize it. Under adult-use legalization (often called recreational use) marijuana possession would not be subject to criminal or civil penalties, and commercial activities (such as sales, cultivation and trafficking) would be regulated and permitted. Under decriminalization, minor marijuana possession would still be illegal but would be treated as a civil offense rather than a criminal offense — similar to a speeding ticket. Fifteen states have legalized marijuana for adult use. Those states and 10 others have fully or partially decriminalized marijuana, reducing the penalties for possession. Of Arkansas’s neighbors, Missouri and Mississippi have partially decriminalized marijuana, but offenders still risk jail time beginning with a second offense. Tucker said his bill was an effort to move Arkansas on a similar path. “We can see the direction the country is moving on this,” he said. “I think recreational marijuana will most likely be legal everywhere in the country within a decade.” But the bill faces an uphill battle in the conservative state legislature. It is nearly
identical to a 2019 measure sponsored by former Rep. Charles Blake (D-Little Rock), which died in committee last legislative session without coming up for a vote. The most likely route for marijuana reform is through the voters, rather than the legislature. Melissa Fults, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas chapter of NORML, said the group will attempt to get adult-use legalization on the 2022 ballot through a constitutional amendment. The organization tried to get a similar measure on the 2020 ballot but the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to collect the required signatures. Couch, the attorney who led the push for the medical marijuana amendment in 2016, said he has also been exploring the possibility of a ballot measure in 2022 to either legalize or decriminalize marijuana. Couch said he’s been doing preliminary polling on behalf of a client but declined to give further details. The chances of a reform measure appearing on the 2022 ballot are “better than even,” he said. The 2016 amendment passed with the support of 53% of voters, but many people remain opposed to loosening restrictions on marijuana. Arkansas Surgeon General Greg Bledsoe, who is running for lieutenant governor, was a vocal opponent of the medical marijuana amendment in 2016 and remains so today. “There are a lot of people, a lot of young people especially, who believe there’s no risk to it and that it’s actually healthy,” he said. “They are proceeding down that path not having all the information, and I am concerned they are going to be harmed by it.” While Bledsoe said he would be against a legalization effort in 2022, he said he does not plan to make the issue a cornerstone of his campaign. “I think that marijuana, if it were legalized in Arkansas, would be a hurdle that we would have to overcome as opposed to being a benefit — but I’m not going to spend all my waking hours trying to overturn the will of the people if they vote to have it legalized,” he said. Even legalization or decriminalization would not be enough, ACLU Director Dickson said, considering thousands of Arkansans still face the consequences of past convictions. She cited a measure passed in Illinois that expunges state sentences for some marijuana convictions. “This whole war on drugs has devastated American lives,” Dickson said. “We’ve got to stop doing that and start doing sensible things that honor and respect our human resources and Arkansans.” This story is courtesy of the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network, an independent, nonpartisan news project dedicated to producing journalism that matters to Arkansans.
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1. LIFE IS JUST A BOWL OF CHERRIES! It’s a cherry pillow. Box Turtle, 501-661-1167, Shopboxturtle.com. 2. LET THE SUNSHINE IN This cute sunshine bag is perfect for your sunnies, lotion, chapstick and other items to hit the lake or pool this spring. Rhea Drug, 501-664-4117. 3. ARKANSAS MADE “Arkansas Made, Volumes 1 & 2: A Survey of the Decorative, Mechanical, and Fine Arts Produced in Arkansas through 1950.” The work of the artisans documented here has been the driving force of Historic Arkansas Museum’s mission to collect and preserve Arkansas’s creative legacy and rich artistic traditions. By Swannee Bennett, William B. Worthen and Jennifer Carman WordsWorth Books, 501-663-9198, wordsworthbookstore.com. 4. BLUE DREAM You need this pottery by Winston Taylor. Find it at Boswell Mourot, which represents fine art by local, national and international artists for the established and emerging collector. Boswell Mourot Fine Art Gallery, 501-664-0030, boswellmourot.com. 5. SMELLS LIKE SPRING Thymes products are designed to give you a fresh start to your day, a boost when you need it most, and calm to help inspire rest. Cynthia East Fabrics, 501-299-9199, cynthiaeastfabrics.com. 72 APRIL 2021
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A special advertising section
MARKETPLACE AVAILABILITY OF FUNDS ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE OFFICE OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL SERVICES OVERVIEW: IGS Application 2021 Offered By: Office of Intergovernmental Services IGS Application Availability Dates: 02/26/2021-04/09/2021 IGS Application Period: 10/01/2021-09/30/2022 IGS Application Due Date: 04/09/2021 Description: The State of Arkansas, Department of Finance and Administration, Office of Intergovernmental Services (DFA/IGS) is pleased to announce the availability of grant funds from the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), Stop Violence Against Women Act (STOP) and Family Violence Prevention Services Act (FVPSA). The Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) of 1984 was passed by Congress to assist states in providing high quality services that are directly related to the emotional healing and recovery of crime victims. Federal STOP grant funds are to support projects statewide that develop and strengthen effective law enforcement and prosecution strategies and victim services in cases involving violent crimes against women. Federal FVPSA grant funds are to support programs and projects statewide that establish, maintain and expand programs and projects to prevent family violence and to provide immediate shelter and related assistance for victims of family violence and their dependents. Please see http://www.dfa.arkansas.gov/offices/intergovernmentalServices/ grants/Pages/rfp.aspx for more information about this opportunity and full Requests for Proposals.
To advertise in this section, call Luis at 501.492.3974 or send email to Luis@arktimes.com
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APRIL 2021 73
THE OBSERVER
CAT PROBLEMS
T
he Observer has a cat problem. You see, whether because of where The Observatory is located — though we haven’t noticed any new canneries or fish markets springing up along Maple Street — or because some felines live to make a nuisance of themselves, The Observatory has been besieged by alleycats of late. Let us begin at the beginning ... Remember back during the blizzard we had here in Arkansas a few months or weeks or days ago? Time runs funny here in Quarantine, but we’re positive the state we are currently living in got 15 inches of snow awhile back, though it’s possible we dreamed that. Anyway, there were already a lotta “outdoor cats” hanging around this part of town, but as the Snowpocalypse bore down on Little Rock like a trucker sliding on black ice toward a hunnert-car pileup, The Family Observer made two mistakes: 1) Spouse started putting food out for them. If you’ve ever been in a place with a lotta unaccompanied cats, you know feeding strays is something like that scene in “Jaws” where Chief Brody says: “Why don’t you come down here and chum some of this shit?” just before the Great White reveals himself in full. Or, for a more accurate comparison, it’s like getting Gremlins wet. They were everywhere, man. We fully expected to look out there one snowbound night and see an escaped tiger from the Little Rock Zoo among them. But that is Spouse: the Lady of the Manor, distrustful of horses and mall kiosk salespeople, but kind to children, drunks, musicians and all the little creatures of the field. Or, in this case, the little creatures of the now clover-strewn backyard of The Observatory. 2) In response to Junior and Spouse worrying that all the outside kitties were going to become hair-flavored popsicles during Snowmageddon, The Observer said: “I’ll leave the door to the crawlspace under the house open. That way, they can get under there and stay warm and dry.” 74 APRIL 2021
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That, we see now, was a big mistake. Here’s the thing about cats: They either can’t or won’t speak English, and even if they did, they wouldn’t give a shit about anything you said to them. That includes: “Snow’s over! Time to leave!” and “Hey, stop fighting under the house so I can get to sleep. It’s 3 in the morning!” They say no good deed goes unpunished, and that is definitely the case if you allow a herd of rangy feline hippies to seek shelter under your home during a snowstorm. As we write this, it’s 71 degrees outside, the snow is gone and the little birds are singing, but — and we wish we were making this up — as we type these words, what sounds like two full-grown panthers are in a death-duel directly underneath our feet, scratching and flipping and yowling to the point that they are thumping the floorboards. At least, we hope they’re fighting. Lord knows we don’t need any more gatdamn cats under there, and they say that’s also how little kitties are made. We can’t even think about what they’ve done to the ductwork. Nothing good, probably. We feel better knowing they’ll be cool under there this summer, though. Short of throwing a can of tear gas under there or installing a one-way cat-door into the foundation with a fish-shaped neon sign over it that says: “FREE FOOD THIS WAY!,” The Observer is kind of at a loss on how to get them out. That said, there are scattered times, usually when we’re not trying to sleep, that we don’t want to. Despite the letter you were probably about to write to the editor, excoriating Yours Truly for even THINKING about tear-gassing or otherwise harming a single hair on the head of a furry little snugglepuss, The Observer is a cat lover of some renown, too lazy to walk a dog every night but still in constant need of a someone who will listen intently to our problems and never offer half-assed “solutions” as long as we keep scratching her ears. Given that, we’ll
probably at least try chumming in the driveway with Meow Mix to lure them out before we resort to that microwave gun the Army uses to break up riots. Since The Observer started laboring exclusively from home on March 16 last year (!), we’ve been working in the back room of The Observatory, which was called “The Room of Requirement” before J.K. Rowling turned out to be a transphobic nut, and is now just called “The Back Room” again. Along one wall of The Back Room are three large windows that look out on the backyard, which is currently buzzing with life, little flowers popping up all over and the irises soon to emerge from winter sleep like women in beautiful gowns. Amongst all that is a rock: a wool-gray boulder the size of a wheelbarrow that the plumbers excavated, rolled out and left where it fell when they replaced The Observatory’s decrepit, unflushable sewer line with cast iron some 18 years ago. On warm and sunny days, the cats take turns on that rock in the afternoons, seen so often that we have named them now: Big Gray, Patchy Tom, Son of Ascot and Halloween, a lithe black cat so dark that he looks like a solar eclipse until he fixes you with his squash-yellow eyes. Sometimes, when we’re supposed to be working, The Observer stares out at whoever has claimed the rock for the hour, sitting zenlike in the sun, shipwrecked among the sharp iris leaves and clover, and we manage to catch a little shred of their calm here in the Apocalypse. That’s nice. They don’t speak English, so they don’t know it, but The Observer thinks it for them: It’s good that there are still kind ladies down on Maple Street willing to do what it takes to keep even the least of us from dying. That gives us some peace as we sit here, waiting for our second dose, waiting to get on with the first day of the rest of our life. Ten more days.
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