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Grand+Waldron
Out of the Ashes A UAFS student salvages history from the fires at Fort Chaffee
ZACK THOMAS
TO JOEY CHASTEEN, a senior History major who also serves as Museum Coordinator for the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority, the devastation that remained after fire destroyed the historic Fort Chaffee medical complex in August looked sadly familiar. A year before Chasteen first came to Chaffee as an intern in early 2009, another fire had destroyed more than 150 vacant barracks at the old Army base, and it fell to him to search the burned-out shells for items of historical significance. Working two jobs and going to school at the time, Chasteen spent months, mostly by himself, combing the charred barracks. “We knew there was a lot of history in those buildings,” he says, “and nobody else really had the time to focus on that.” Much of what Chasteen found is now on display in the Chaffee Barbershop Museum, including a revealing collection of items he
UAFS senior Joey Chasteen runs the Chaffee Barbershop Museum, where Elvis Presley got his famous military buzz-cut in 1958.
discovered in the barracks’ air ducts, many of them hidden there since the 1940s—love letters, photos, drawings, liquor bottles, whittled wood, mess hall cups, cigarette packs, pinup magazines. “Going through those air ducts,” he says, “you’d find a letter from 1947 and then right next to it a Pepsi can from 1980 when the Cuban refugees were here. It was amazing.” But Chasteen never got the chance to scour the creaking, labyrinthine old hospital; he had only made a quick sweep of every building, picking up whatever he could carry.
Searching for the bright side, though, he says at least he can now devote the time he would have spent in the hospital to restoring the barracks building Elvis stayed in after getting his famous haircut at the barbershop. That barracks will eventually become a more extensive museum. “We’ve run out of space here,” says Chasteen, looking around the single, long room that now holds his entire collection. “There’s so much I don’t have on display. But all this and more will go over in the barracks.”
SNAPSHOT
IT WAS A COMPLETE SURPRISE TO ASSISTANT ENGLISH professor Dr. Kevin Jones when former First Lady Rosalynn Carter called him and his family into a church office after
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BELL TOWER fall/winter 2011-12
Sunday school in July. “I thought I was in trouble,” says Jones. He had recently defended his doctoral dissertation on presidential memoirs, which examined President Carter’s 1982 memoir, Keeping Faith, along with two other presidential autobiographies, and, by way of congratulations, Carter’s staff had invited him to Plains, Georgia to sit in on the Sunday school class taught by the former president. But he certainly wasn’t expecting to be led to that back office, where the former First Lady said to Jones, his wife Maggie Janes Jones ’86-’88, and their son Patrick, “Come on in. This is Jimmy, and I’m Rosalynn.” For about 10 minutes, the Joneses and the Carters talked about Jones’s dissertation—a copy of which will be housed in the Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta—and about the Carters’ writings. “I think the Carters are both the same people they were before they left Plains,” Jones says. “They just travel with eight Secret Service people now.”