DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS
THE MAN WITHOUT SHOES: Jimmy Haney in one of the show’s main promotional images.
HARDLY
HARDY
Small town Arkansas gets caricatured in ‘Clash of the Ozarks,’ locals welcome it. BY WILL STEPHENSON
O
ne morning last summer, Dennis Horton, the longtime owner of Horton’s Music in the town of Hardy, population 772, heard a strange noise coming from outside his shop. Like a “weed eater or something,” he said. He put aside the guitar he was fixing to step outside, and was stunned by what he found: a helicopter drone affixed with a camera, hovering over the sidewalk. “Flying back and forth up and down Main Street,” he said, “under the power lines. I thought, ‘What in the heck is that?’ ” A few doors down from Horton’s, Ron and Susan Wolfe run a cluttered antique store called Memories on Main Street. Ron loves talking to customers, and keeps a guest book behind the counter for people to sign. “I talk to everybody who comes in here,” he said. “So I find out where they’re coming from.” Around the time of Dennis Horton’s run-in with the drone, Ron noticed an influx of customers from major cities. He was stumped. “One little lady was from New York and one was from California,” he said. “I told ’em, ‘Man, you all are lost.’ ” They weren’t. They had come to Hardy to film a television show, a six-episode series for Discovery Channel titled “Clash of the Ozarks,” that began airing in late CONTINUED ON PAGE 18
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ISAAC ALEXANDER
www.arktimes.com
MARCH 20, 2014
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