Arkansas Times | March 2019

TOP TORTILLERIA | A 'SUPER' CRYSTAL BRIDGES SHOW | THE FORGOTTEN RACIAL ROOTS OF THE LR CITY MANAGER SYSTEM

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By Leslie Newell Peacock

DANCE, IDENTITY AND THE MYTH OF THE GANGBANGER

By Frederick McKindra

MARCH 2019

2 MARCH 2019

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MARCH 2019

34 FEATURES

9 THE FRONT

By Leslie Newell Peacock

Q&A: Doris Wright The Inconsequential News Quiz: Mountain lion edition The Big Picture: Legislative dolls Orval: The Lord’s work

22 STEPPING INTO

34 CULTURE

16 FRAMING THE ARTS

The Windgate Foundation brings dollars to arts institutions statewide.

MANHOOD

Dance teacher C. Michael Tidwell’s dance instruction had impact beyond the barre.

By Frederick McKindra

Nichols & Simpson’s pipe organs make joyful noise in churches across the U.S.

By David Koon

The super ‘Men of Steel, Women of Wonder’

By Leslie Newell Peacock

42 THE TO-DO LIST

“No Tears Suite,” “Urinetown: The Musical,” Esther Rose, Valley of the Vapors; Q&A: Iris Dement; Artnotes

50 50 FOOD & DRINK The Martinez family has the monopoly on fresh tortillas, tostados and chips.

By Rachael Borné

57 TRAVEL

Unusual places to lay your head.

By Stephanie Smittle

67 HISTORY

The elite pushed the city manager system to ward off black power.

By Michael Pierce

74 CANNABIZ

Legislature won’t expand medical qualifiers; dispensaries profiled and mapped.

By Leslie Newell Peacock and Rebekah Hall

80 CROSSWORD 82 THE OBSERVER The Escape ON THE COVER: Concera Davis. Photo by Rett Peek.

4 MARCH 2019

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THE FRONT

Q&A

Doris Wright Says Little Rock Needs the Leadership of a Strong Mayor You represent the John Barrow area. What impact have you seen from the area’s rebranding itself as West Central Little Rock?

You don’t even hear the name John Barrow anymore. You hear West Central. West Central doesn’t have the connotation that John Barrow has. I know the history of John Barrow: I know he was a legislator. I know that he and his wife, Katherine, platted that land, and that they sold to African Americans back during a time when people were being lynched. I know all of that, but all anybody else ever associated with that name was crime. Blight.

Negative. West Central does not have that connotation, so that means that we have successfully taken back our narrative, and we are able to say who we are.

What kind of changes are you hoping to see under new Mayor Frank Scott?

What I’m hoping to see is that we have a real conversation about race relations. I just want us to have a conversation where we understand that we are different. There are different cultures. People are different.

People tend to attack you as a person if they disagree with you, and I don’t understand that.

I grew up chopping cotton in Chicot County. I know what it means to work. I know what it means to get that little black bank book and take your money to the bank and put it in there. … How can you disrespect your elders? There’s no respect and there’s no honor.

Mayor Scott has been vocal about figuring out a new structure for at-large directors. What is your opinion on at-large directors? Do they serve a purpose?

I think they serve a purpose because wards can get very territorial, and then you’ve got some at-large people that can come in and work with you, where you can get some things done and move the needle without a lot of infighting because people don’t always get along. But I also think the wards are too large. There are 28,000 people in Ward 6. With 28,000 people, 24 different neighborhoods, 423 streets, that’s a lot. I can see us having an all-ward system with 10 directors.

Are you feeling encouraged by Scott’s taking a strong mayor role? Do you feel it will help you get done the things you want done as a city director?

Yes, I supported the strongmayor form of government under Mayor Stodola [and] he chose not to [pursue it]. Yes, I think it’s time, and I’m glad that [Scott] has taken his position and the leadership role because that’s what we needed. We needed a person to make the tough call that can state to us as board members, “OK, this is how I want things to flow.” And as I expressed to him, “I know how to lead. I know how to follow, and I know how to get out of the way when it’s necessary.”

I’m not a person who’s going to be offended by him taking the leadership role. I may not always agree with the decision that he makes, but he was elected by the people to be able to make those decisions.

Name: Doris Wright, Ward 6 City Director Birthplace: Birthplace: Lake Village Age: 59 Job: Retired program manager for the Department of Human Services Volunteer jobs: Founder of and volunteer for the West Central Community Center Hobbies: Historical research, going to Marvel movies, shopping antique malls

What do you feel are some of the most pressing citywide issues?

Some of the issues that I feel are the most pressing are so systemic they can’t be taken care of right away. The perception of how young black males feel and are treated — I don’t know how you change that overnight.

There’s a responsibility on each side. I believe in personal responsibility. I believe you need to comport yourself in a way that you’re not going to cause yourself a problem. I want people to be responsible for themselves, but I also want to make sure we have a fair process, a fair system. I don’t want people to feel that they are targeted. I don’t want people to feel that as a result of this targeting, “I’m singled out, and you’re going to treat me worse than you’re going to treat another person that doesn’t look like me.”

In this social media age, what’s your preferred platform, and why?

I’ve got my Instagram. I’m a big New Edition fan, so I’m in the fan club. That’s the only reason I got on social media, and I think I do have a Facebook page, but I don’t do much on it.

— Rebekah Hall ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 9

THE FRONT

INCONSEQUENTIAL NEWS QUIZ

CHEAP ASS WEAVE EDITION

PLAY AT HOME, JUST BEFORE BEING ATTACKED

BY A RAVENOUS MOUNTAIN LION! 1) Mac’s Cash Saver, a small grocery store chain with stores in South Arkansas and North Louisiana, recently published a sales circular that included a message with a rightwing bent. What was it?

A) “The only thing we hate more than women having control over their own bodies are high prices!”

B) “Build The Wall … in your pantry! Pict Fresh lima beans, now just 59 cents each! (limit three)” C) “Do you and your friends Squee and PJ like beer? Do you sometimes have too much beer? BEER BEER BEER? Try Milwaukee’s Best, now only $8.99 a case!”

D) “Heaven has a wall, a gate and a strict immigration policy. Hell has open borders. Let that sink in.”

2) A recent study by the University of Maryland predicts some pretty radical changes for America’s climate map by the year 2080 because of global warming.

According to the study, which of the following will be true a little over 60 years from now?

A) The climate of New York City will resemble the current climate of Jonesboro.

B) The climate of Washington, D.C., will resemble the current climate of Paragould.

C) The climate of Little Rock will resemble the current climate of Hammond, La. — just north of New Orleans — including winters that average 10.5 degrees warmer and 38.3 percent wetter than they are in Central Arkansas now.

D) All of the above.

3) Travis Kauffman, 31, formerly of Mountain Home, was trail running near Fort Collins, Colo., in February when he was attacked by a mountain lion. What happened next?

A) He instantly regretted his November 2016 protest vote for the Mountain Lions Eating People Party.

B) He and the mountain lion tussled for a bit, found a grudging admiration for each others’ strength, and were surprised by love.

C) He started telling the mountain lion about how he got into Ultimate Frisbee and successfully bored it into walking away.

D) Despite wounds to his face that required 20 stitches, Kauffman managed to strangle the big cat to death with his bare hands.

4) Arkansas-based Tyson Foods recently recalled 36,000 pounds of chicken nuggets.

Why were the nuggets recalled?

A) They’re chicken nuggets. Duh. B) The United Nations recently declared chicken nuggets a hate crime.

C) The percentage of iguana meat was just a smidge too high.

D) Some customers reported finding pieces of “soft, blue rubber” inside their nuggets.

5) Jackson County Judge Jeff Phillips advised some residents in the Northeast Arkansas county to evacuate in mid-February. Why was the order issued?

A) Phillips just enjoys watching people flee.

Don’t try to explain it.

B) Donald Trump tweeted that a caravan of Central American migrants, Middle Eastern terrorists and rogue FBI agents had been spotted moving slowly toward Newport.

C) There had been a sighting of the rare Arkansas Spotted Gowgrow in the area.

D) Heavy rains had dangerously eroded a levee on the White River near Newport and a breach would inundate surrounding areas.

Okurr

r!

6) A call went out in Fayetteville last month for people to appear on a nationally televised TV show, with tryouts to be held April 13.

What’s the show?

A) “True Defective.”

B) “America’s Next Top Meth Addict.”

C) “The Not-So-Great British Baking Show.”

D) ABC’s “Shark Tank,” in which entrepreneurs pitch their ideas and inventions to a panel of business people in hopes of getting their proposals funded.

7) A University of Arkansas law professor took to Twitter recently to complain about his treatment on a Delta Airlines flight.

According to the prof, what happened?

A) His tiny peanut bag was filled with Tyson chicken nuggets.

B) He was forced to fly in the cargo hold while locked in a large dog kennel.

C) After both the pilot and co-pilot got food poisoning from tainted fish, the PTSD-stricken former fighter pilot was able to successfully land the plane despite his crippling … no, wait. That’s the plot of “Airplane.”

D) After he complained about being forced to give up his seat, he claimed, the captain grabbed him by the neck and shouted at him in front of other passengers on the jetway before calling police.

8) State Sen. Jason Rapert (R-eally The Absolute Worst Spokesperson For Christianity Ever) called for a boycott of Little Rock’s Vino’s Brewpub. Why did Rapert call for a boycott?

A) Pizza is Satan’s Delicious Playground!

Under His Eye. B) The shape of pizza always makes him think of those round birth control pill cases.

C) His bluegrass version of Cardi B’s hit “Cheap Ass Weave” got him booed off the stage.

D) A flyer distributed to promote the May 24 appearance by New Orleans sludge metal band Eyehategod featured a Photoshopped picture of Rapert eating a baby.

ANSWERS: D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D

10 MARCH 2019

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. . l E L a B e I R S s i S e O l P g s i g Y u R r E t V S e Th nd RECO a

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MARCH 2019 11

THE FRONT

1 DE FEBRERO  14 DE ABRIL ENTRADA GRATIS FEBRUARY 1  APRIL 14 FREE ADMISSION Fotografiando Frida: Retratos de Frida Kahlo/ Photographing Frida: Portraits of Frida Kahlo is organized by the Arkansas Arts Center in collaboration with Throckmorton Fine Art, New York, New York.

Sponsored by (at time of printing):

JC Thompson Trust Judy Fletcher, In Memory of John R. Fletcher Belinda Shults Laura Sandage Harden and Lon Clark Holleman & Associates, P.A. Barbara House Rhonda and Tim Jordan

9TH & COMMERCE 5013724000 ARKANSASARTSCENTER.ORG Nickolas Muray, American (Szeged, Hungary, 1892 – 1965, New York, New York), Frida Kahlo on White Bench, New York (2nd Edition) (detail), 1939, color carbon print, 19 x 14 ½ inches.

Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York, New York.

12 MARCH 2019

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MARCH 2019 13

THE FRONT THE BIG PICTURE

STYLE YOUR SENATOR

ILLUSTRATIONS: PHILLIP HUDDLESTON

Tired of cardboard-cutout politicians manipulating voters? Turn the tables with our legislative paper dolls! Match wits with Sen. Joyce Elliott (D-Little Rock), the former teacher and onetime congressional candidate who keeps the torch burning for Arkansas’s beleaguered liberals! Butt heads with Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway), the fiddle-playing pastor boycotting Vino’s over a metal show flyer that depicted him eating a baby! There’s something here for everyone, whether your priorities are to improve the state’s public schools and protect civil rights … or to erect the Ten Commandments at the state Capitol and require transvaginal probes of women en route to an eventual total ban on abortion.

Church & State: Standing tall together until the inevitable court decision!

Joyce says: Equity for all!

42nd in education is not OK!

Rapert says: Hold the olives, please — and the babies!

The Vagi-Probe 2000!

Now with 2-Petawatt Invasion Rays!

14 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

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MARCH 2019 15

Designs on The Windgate Foundation draws attention to the arts, its benefits, in Arkansas.

ON THE HENDRIX COLLEGE CAMPUS: The Miller Creative Quad, shown here in an artist's rendering, will include the Windgate Museum (left) when it opens in 2020.

16 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

COURTESY HENDRIX COLLEGE

By LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

Arkansas

Where Northwest

Arkansas once claimed more than its share of philanthropic dollars going to the arts, thanks to the Walton Family Foundation and others, the Windgate Charitable Trust has become the Johnny Appleseed of Arkansas arts education, planting multimillion-dollar art and design facilities on campuses across the state. The foundation is grafting the limbs of arts education in Jonesboro, Conway, Hot Springs, Little Rock — even Stuttgart — to sturdy producers, universities it trusts will take good care of their programs.

The latest to be announced: the Windgate Center for Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. Windgate is putting up $20 million in matching funds for the university’s $45 million project. The gift is so significant — the highest in UCA history — that the university kept it secret until it could make a grand announcement to students and faculty in January. The ballroom in McCastlain Hall and the hallway outside were packed to the gills; one person estimated 700 attendees, eager to hear what the fuss was about. The announcement of the gift was met with faculty high-fives and tears from the art teachers, art department chair Bryan Massey Sr. said. “It was a long time coming,” the 31-year veteran of UCA’s art department said.

UCA’s students were “whooping and hollering,” John Brown III, the former director of and now senior adviser to the foundation, said. “It was very moving.”

It may have been the arts faculty that wept, but Windgate’s promotion of arts education across the state is not just about turning out painters. ____________________________ Like the Walton Family Foundation, Arkansas has Walmart to thank for the Windgate Foundation. Dorothea Hutcheson of Fort Smith created the Windgate Foundation in 1993 with Walmart stock proceeds from the 1978 sale to Sam Walton of Hutcheson Shoe Co., which her husband and son, William Hutcheson Sr. and Jr., operated in Northwest Arkansas. The sale came at a time when Walmart, which began trading on the

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 17

ENDOWED WITH WINDGATE DOLLARS: The Fort Smith Regional Art Museum.

New York Stock Exchange in 1972, was scal- by Giving USA ranked gifts to arts, culture ing up from a regional operation to become and the humanities at ninth annually, bea national company; “Hutch” Hutcheson Jr. hind such categories as religion, education, was made a vice president of Walmart’s shoe health and human services. Arkansas is a division and later became vice president of bit more generous, according to a study by the company. The Hutcheson family hired Brown, who had retired as president from John Brown University, which his grandfather founded. “They called to see if I had an interest,” Brown, who just last year retired as head of Windgate, said, “and it took me about two seconds to say yes.”

Brown had been a fundraiser for the university; now, he said, “I got to switch hats and help get the foundation started and work with the family, who were humble and gracious and wanted to take the accumulation of wealth that came with the partnership of Sam [Walton] for 20 years” and put it toward charity. (Brown, a Republican, also served in the Arkansas legislature for two terms, from 1995 to 2002.)

In 2013, Mary E. Hutcheson added $79 million to the foundation, and Windgate moved into fourth place as the largest grantmaking foundation in Arkansas.

Now headed by Pat Forgy and operating in Little Rock rather than Siloam Springs, Windgate is the third-largest family-run foundation in Arkansas, behind the behemoth Walton Family Foundation and the Walton Family Charitable Trust. (Brown LONG TIME COMING: Bryan Massey Sr. says once called Windgate “the Walton Family UCA has long needed an all-arts building.

Foundation’s little brother.”) Windgate’s net assets at the end of 2017 were $358 million; Philanthropy Southwest of 2014 data: The the foundation handed out $84 million in arts and humanities ranked fifth. The Walgrants that year. About half of Windgate’s ton Family Foundation has concentrated its dollars go to Arkansas organizations; it arts investments in Crystal Bridges Museum makes grants to entities in 47 states. of American Art, which it’s endowed with The arts have always been on the low end around $1 billion. Though Windgate — inof philanthropic giving; a national study tentionally named after nobody and which 18 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

initially made gifts only of stock shares to protect the privacy of the donors — initially worked behind the scenes, its gifts to the arts made it the “best known anonymous donor in the state of Arkansas,” Brown said he’s told his board. Big gift announced at the Arkansas Arts Center? Surely Windgate.

Something new coming to UCA? Bank on Windgate.

Over the life of the foundation, Windgate has made grants to numerous causes in and outside Arkansas worth $302.8 million.

John Brown University has received $40 million in grants since 1993. But, thanks to the artistic bent on its board of directors — including its chairwoman, Robyn Horn, the granddaughter of Dorothea and William Hutcheson Sr. and a wood sculptor — Windgate has given millions of dollars to visual and performing arts institutions both in Arkansas and elsewhere (including the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tenn.). Brown said the board’s mix of “left-brain and right-brain trustees” was good and “very much interested in giving back.”

In the past several years, Brown said, the trustees began thinking more about grantmaking that would have a long-range impact and directing more of its assets to Arkansas. “That matured first with the Fort Smith building project and UALR,” Brown said.

UA Fort Smith’s $15.5 million Windgate Center for Art and Design opened in 2016.

UA Little Rock’s $20 million Windgate Center for Art and Design opened in 2018. Both projects followed 20-year relationships with the institutions, Brown said; they weren’t just plopped down. Windgate had supported UA

COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS/BRIAN CHILSON: HORN & MASSEY/FORT SMITH REGIONAL ART MUSEUM

HIGH-FIVES AT UCA: Musicians (from left, standing) Stephen P. Cohen, Cole Cavanah and Dr. Gail Robertson cheer the the announcement of the Windgate matching grant of $20 million to UCA. Robyn Horn (right), chairman of the foundation board, is influential in its giving.

Little Rock’s earlier initiative to expand its applied arts programs, such as furniture design and metal working, and was impressed by its faculty and ardor for the arts.

The foundation did, however, light a fire under the UA Little Rock project. A feasibility study suggested that the university would need to build a constituency over six to eight years to raise enough money to bring the various disciplines, scattered across campus, into a new arts facility. But rather than wait for years, Brown said, “The feeling was, we’ll just step out there and do it.

“I wouldn’t say we’ll build it and people will come, but people will understand as the program expands and see it as something the community can be proud of.” The foundation is helping the university spread the word: It recently awarded it a grant to establish art workshops that will expose high school students from all over Arkansas to the university’s wide array of offerings in a stateof-the-art facility.

At the Windgate Center groundbreaking in 2016 at UA Little Rock, a reporter asked what Brown described as a “combative” question: Why should Windgate care about art? What impact would it have on business? “My response was, ‘Let me give you two words: Crystal Bridges.’ ” Alice Walton’s decision to build Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville “has made people realize that the arts can have an economic impact,” said Horn, the chairman of the board at Windgate.

“That’s what [people are] looking for, something concrete that can be measured, and Crystal Bridges has done that.

So we’re augmenting the interest they have developed.”

Bentonville's claim to fame was once that it was the headquarters of Walmart. Now it’s also known as an arts mecca, with a world-class museum, a spruced-up downtown, new restaurants (newly serving alcohol), new public parks and bike trails for the new, young incomers. It’s the fastest growing city in Arkansas. ____________________________ “When you say you’re majoring in art history, people say, ‘Oh, you’ll be a waitress,’ ” Cassy Christ, 20, a sophomore art history major at UA Little Rock, said.

But Christ knows better. She’s seen the success of her own teachers at UA Little Rock, and a trip she made to Germany with art history professor Lynn Larsen proved “life changing.” The trip opened her eyes, she said, to the many directions a degree in art could take. “You are learning about research methods, visual analysis, empathy through the arts and art history,” Christ said.

In her first semester at UA Little Rock, Christ was in a building shared by the music and art department. When her art history classes moved to the Windgate Center, which

encompasses studios for metalworking, furniture making, ceramics, graphic arts, printmaking, photography and painting, all under one roof, she “was blown away. … I saw this is an opportunity I have to take advantage of, that’s how good it was.” She signed up for 3D design and has decided to minor in studio art.

“The building really makes you feel like you’re going to art school. It validates everyone for pursuing” a major in the arts, she said.

Or outside the arts. Former Windgate director Brown quoted one of his “art faculty friends”: “I don’t think the world needs to be filled with artists, but I do think it needs to be filled with creative people.”

Brown’s successor, Pat Forgy, says Windgate’s gifts to the arts are “about helping students. You learn such valuable skills: critical thinking, how to figure out problems, how to deal with failure, how to collaborate. They’re skills you can use once you graduate, whethARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 19

RETT PEEK

SCULPTING WITH CLAY: Student Spenser Jacob works on a bust with sculpture teacher Michael Warrick at UA Little Rock.

"Having a place of our own makes a huge difference," Warrick said of the Windgate gift.

er you’re an artist or an engineer.”

Schools get it. When the Windgate grant was announced at UCA, Forgy said, “it was electric” in the room.

For artists and art teachers, the impact has been sensational.

Michael Warrick has taught sculpture at UA Little Rock for 28 years. “I’ve always felt strongly about being here because we have great people, dynamic talent. But having a place of our own … it makes a huge difference.”

Warrick’s sculpture studio is almost triple the size of his studio in the old Fine Arts Building, and his advanced students have their own work areas. There’s a foundry for bronze and aluminum, in a space large enough, and safe enough, for 50 people to observe and learn. But that’s not the whole picture: “I’m in a 3D area with metalworking and blacksmithing, woodworking, furniture, ceramics, and the connectivity is phenomenal. It’s amazing what it can accomplish for our students.” The cross-pollination that happens when all the arts disciplines are under one roof “transforms what we can teach and how we can teach and how well we can teach. … It’s made it a lot more energizing and exciting to be here.”

Thanks to Windgate and its expansion of access to the arts, there are children who are more successful in school, students and adults inspired by something they’ve seen in a museum or watched in a theater, aspiring artists who have been able to afford college studies because of scholarships.

Horn, asked for an anecdote about feedback she’s received from students touched by Windgate’s largesse, said she’s been told, not once but many times, “You’ve saved my life.” ____________________________ Windgate’s largest single grant for the arts was its $40 million gift in 2017 to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville for the Windgate Art and Design District, which includes the 20 MARCH 2019

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Hill Avenue Sculpture Complex that opened in 2016. It followed the $120 million gift from the Walton Family Charitable Foundation to create the UA School of Art. “We’ll be doubling our student body over the next five to 10 years,” interim UA School of Art Director Mathew McConnell said. “Windgate plays very much into that objective, and we can’t do it without those facilities; those foundations work hand-in-hand to give us a brighter future.”

The physical space provided students is important to their work, McConnell said. “I’ve traveled a lot as a visiting artist and I’ve seen how buildings can really impact the work that is produced. I think that what’s vital for students is a little bit of excess space. There’s a correspondence to the way we can think freely. Drawings move through space, extend much further than the bounds of a table. … [a large work space] leads to broader thinking, more experimental work and collaboration.”

When Robyn Horn made a trip to Arkansas State University in Jonesboro for a show of her sculpture and works on paper in the Bradbury Gallery, she toured the campus and took in the sculpture studio, located in a retrofitted gymnasium. “It was horrible,” she said.

The small space was shared by sculpture and woodworking classes and their equipment.

Horn said she went to John Brown and told him the foundation should consider getting involved.

Arkansas State University sculpture professor John Salvest, who is nationally known for his installation work, and his wife, ASU Bradbury Museum Director Les Christensen, wrote the grant proposal. Windgate, which had contributed $1 million to the transformation of the Bradbury Gallery to the Bradbury Museum, announced last September it would give ASU $6.7 million to create the Windgate Center for Three Dimensional Arts.

The new building, expected to open in fall 2020, will be at least four or five times larger than the sculpture studio is now, Salvest said.

“The great thing about working with Robyn on a project like this is because she’s a sculptor herself, she’s so aware of the needs of a facility like this,” he said.

But it takes more than need to get a Windgate grant. The foundation wants a commitment from the arts institutions it supports that they will continue to invest in the facility, programming, faculty and students.

UA Little Rock Chancellor Andrew Rogerson, a microbiologist who also paints (he described himself as “an insecure artist” but “an arrogant scientist”), said, “It’s on us now to make [the Windgate Center] the place to come.”

The gift to UA Little Rock and other arts organizations “I think will be transformative for the whole state,” Rogerson said. “We’re becoming a real destination for people who want to appreciate art, with Crystal Bridges and the Arts Center here in Little Rock. Supplemented by institutions that can put on top-class art programs, it all comes together.” ____________________________ The Arkansas Arts Center has received a total of $24 million in grants from Windgate in the past 26 years. Brian Lang, chief curator and the Windgate Foundation Curator of Contemporary Craft, and Ann Wagner, the Jackye and Curtis Finch Curator of Drawings, were hired more than six years ago thanks to a grant from Windgate. The grant came at a time when the Arts Center was recovering from financial hardship. Windgate’s impact has been “immeasurable,” Lang said.

“I think first and foremost the support they’ve given to the curators and the stability of securing those positions, it really gave the Arts Center the opportunity to move forward,” Lang said.

Lang rattled off several programmatic gifts from Windgate: Support to conserve drawings given the Arts Center by John Marin and for 2018 exhibition of those drawings, “Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work.”

Support for the 2016 show “Little Dreams in Glass and Metal.” Support for the 2013 retrospective “Ron Meyers: A Potter’s Menagerie” and the exhibition catalog. The foundation has “really allowed the Arkansas Arts Center to undertake serious scholarship which will have a lasting influence on museums,” Lang said. Windgate also funds a ceramic residency in the Museum School of the Arts Center, a program that gives teaching experience to recent graduates.

“Apart from Walton, there is no other grantmaker as supportive of art in the state as Windgate,” Lang said. Thanks to Windgate’s museum-quality gallery space on university campuses, he added, the Arkansas Arts Center is “better poised to share the works from our collection with other institutions around the state.”

Last year, Windgate invested in the Arts Center’s future in another way, with a $4 million

large part of what we’ve been doing with A+ schools,” John Brown said.

Windgate funded a pilot A+ project in Arkansas in 2003; the Thea Foundation of Little Rock took off and ran with it. Thea Foundation Director Paul Leopoulos had seen how art classes had helped his daughter, a previously indifferent student in her academic classes, excel at Central High School.

The A+ curriculum is based on the understanding that some students learn better by hands-on work and creative inspiration: At KIPP school in Helena-West Helena, students have made paper quilts to learn geometry and written short plays about something they’ve read. Sometimes, A+ serves as an example for teaching outside the arts: A teacher at an A+ school in Judsonia was inspired to use a dead tarantula. Her students researched tarantula life, learned about the Day of the Dead, even designed a coffin for the arach-

er $1 million for scholarships. In December, Windgate granted the Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas in Pine Bluff a $2.2 million grant to renovate a building on Main Street for the ARTSpace for Creative Thinking and Entrepreneurship.

“I originally spoke to John Brown to create a community space to provide more outreach and engagement beyond the museum setting,” Rachel Miller, the arts center director, said. “Brown liked that idea and encouraged me to develop and seek community support” for the space, she said.

The arts center will collaborate with UA Pine Bluff ’s economic incubator to use the space to show “how to use the arts as workforce readiness,” Miller said. The two-story ARTSpace will also work with schools to provide teaching resources they may not have and commercial gallery space for the community and regional artists.

Despite the challenge of running the small arts center, Miller said it’s “a really wonderful place to work.

You have to have your heart in public service. … You have to love working for your community.”

Miller is “a force to be reckoned with,” Horn said. “That’s what we’re looking for, somebody with such dedication that can make things happen.”

Other Windgate grants to the arts: A $12 million grant for programming and the endowment of the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum. A $1 million challenge grant to the Arkansas Repertory Theatre to help it out of its financial hole that darkened the theater last year. (Little Rock rose to the challenge, and the lights will go up once more at The Rep for its production of “Chicago” that opened Feb. 22.) Also: The Eureka Springs School of the Arts. Emergent Arts and The Muses in Hot Springs. The Arts Center of the Grand Prairie in Stuttgart. DeltaARTS in West Memphis. The Center for Art and Education in Van Buren. The Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville. And so on.

It’s a lot easier, Brown said, to talk about arts philanthropy these days. There is more understanding of how the arts contribute to quality of life.

But Horn said the Windgate and Walton foundations can’t do it all. “We need other people to contribute to the arts. Whether a university or a small nonprofit, get involved in it to where you know the people. That will convince you.”

UA Little Rock’s Windgate Center

for Art and Design ‘really makes you feel like you’re going to art

school. It validates everyone for pursuing’ a major in the arts.

—Cassy Christ, sophomore

gift to the capital campaign to build a new Arkansas Arts Center, slated to open in 2022. Horn declined to say whether there would be more going to the campaign, because it has yet to go public. ____________________________ Next year, Hendrix College will open the Miller Creative Quad, which will include the Windgate Museum of Art. Windgate made a grant of $10 million to Hendrix to help build and endow the museum. Museum director and curator Mary Kennedy will develop interdisciplinary studies to bring students to the arts. “If you’re a student in mathematics or literature, we’re going to find a way to get you involved in the museum,” Kennedy said. For example, she said, she’s working with Hendrix-Murphy Program Director Hope Coulter on a project that would create an intersection between Coulter’s class on James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and an exhibition on Depression-era photographs.

The recognition that art is not a discipline that involves only artists is expressed in another Windgate-backed program: the Arkansas A+ arts-infused curriculum for grades K-12. “Democratizing the arts is a

nid. The program not only serves to expose children to the arts and creative thinking, it’s proven to raise test scores and erase discipline problems. A+ is now under the aegis of the University of Arkansas, which is training teachers in the method. Twenty-three schools have used the A+ curriculum; seven are active now.

John Brown calls Leopoulos “our staff evangelist for A+.” Leopoulos says “generosity doesn’t describe” Brown and Windgate. “Kindness, caring, empathy about your community and young people and the arts — there’s no one like those people.”

Thanks to the A+ program, Windgate’s funding for Thea scholarships in performing and visual arts for high school students, Windgate’s new arts and design centers and its funding for artists in residence, it’s possible that there are children who’ve been raised on Windgate grants. ____________________________ Some of Windgate’s smaller grants are having huge impacts and promise more. UA Pulaski Technical College received $1.5 million to furnish its Center for the Humanities and the Arts, which includes a 452-seat theater, art gallery and classroom space, and anoth-

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By connecting classical dance to a broader history of black movement, C. Michael Tidwell influenced generations of teenagers.

By Frederick McKindra

BRIAN CHILSON

I

TIDWELL TODAY: At the Centre for the Dansarts, which he founded in 1994.

n the late 1990s, at the intersection of University Avenue and 12th Street, behind a Brandon House furniture showroom that once sat just off Interstate 630, a strip mall of offices housed a one-room dance studio helmed by C. Michael Tidwell. To me and dozens of other black teenagers in Little Rock then, Tidwell symbolized a kind of worldly glamour. A well-traveled former professional dancer who had returned to his hometown to teach, he showed us an ideal version of black masculinity in stark relief to the narrow and corrosive popular notions of the era.

Behind the studio’s tinted facade sat a waiting area, where I took a seat most Saturdays throughout my adolescence, closed my eyes and listened for what was escaping the wall supporting my head, behind which the class before mine was finishing up.

If the record — most often something up-tempo from a catalog of ’70s black disco and funk soon to be sampled by a hip-hop producer for a bass line — scratched, it meant things weren’t going well. Sometimes there’d be the murmur of a stern talking-to, signaling Tidwell’s disappointment.

Worse was hearing the sole of a shoe thud against the floor or thwack against the drywall at my back, making me flinch.

We liked fearing him in this way, I think, spinning stories about his temper to flatter ourselves, our real fear being that our hold on his regard might slip. A stare from Tidwell could feel like an embrace back then, a reprimand serve as confirmation that he remembered your name.

As dancers from the preceding class filed out, I’d watch their faces, surprised at their relative calm and resenting their ease. When my classmates and I entered the studio, we’d typically find the room empty, the back door left open a crack, Tidwell having escaped to the alley to collect himself with a smoke. The studio would be humid with the same urbane energy that billowed from Tidwell like his cologne. Even entering the room put us on edge, the floor becoming unwieldy, my black Capezio jazz shoes loosening my flat feet from the glossy wood floor like roller skates. ____________________________ This was just after that boogeyman of my boyhood, the gangbanger, had taken his leave. But his aura persisted, such that I spent more time reckoning with the myth of gangsterism in Little Rock than confronting the thing itself.

The spike in Little Rock’s per capita murder rate, the highest in the nation in 1993, had left a permanent mark on the city’s collective psyche. There were hotly disputed, widely distributed statistics about young black men that generated national hysterics: More black men would be

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KINDRED SPIRITS: Debbie Rawn, Michael Tidwell and Jana Beard "danced everywhere there was to dance" in the 1970s.

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YOUNG MEN OF HONOR: The club, founded by Tidwell, performs a salute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

locked up or killed than would attend college, we were told, and most of us would not live to the age of 21. The histrionic tone of that narrative embarrassed me (and still does today), but that did not free me from feeling anxious over it.

And there was the popular media about gangbanging that swallowed every young, black person, men and boys especially, and reduced us to a profile. “Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock” corroborated the messaging from urban black films of the era (“Boyz n the Hood” “Menace II Society”) and gangsta rap remained ambivalent on whether it intended to inform the public of conditions in under-resourced urban communities (Ice Cube’s contention) or shock and titillate (Geto Boys’).

My two visible identities were under siege, by a city too quick to consign its own black youth off to a rumored criminality.

In my head, three narratives vied to define black life at that moment. One came from outside Little Rock’s black community and defined black space as perilous and imperiled. The white world drew a crude image of black Little Rock that derived from the city’s historic geographic segregation and economic disenfranchisement, even as it feigned amnesia over their institutional origins. A second narrative, which came from within that black community, cast the fervor as nothing more than a fabricated crisis of racist origins — summoned from the rankest nightmares about black manhood to stoke black youth to further unrest. That idea, though more 24 MARCH 2019

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plausible, nevertheless failed to account for the very real jailing of men I knew and the occasional spats of violence I witnessed from the window of my two-parent home. And then there was the third narrative, in my gut — the me who surreptitiously practiced gang signs with my friends on the playground. Enticed by the glamour of the national media scrutiny and eager for the cred that “being hard” could bestow on a pubescent boy, we cast our circumstances as harrowing both to ourselves and others. That’s the legacy of the ’90s in Little Rock for me: gangsterism as a monster with three heads, each of which had to be dealt with.

But the ascendance of the black male gangbanger in Little Rock’s collective conscious converged in the early ’90s with that of another black adolescent figure, the male Tidwell Dancer, a black boy of similar age, performing classical dance on concert stages across the city. That such disparate types existed in proximity, sometimes in the same body, indicates the elasticity of black masculinity and reveals the constraints that society’s archetypes sometimes impose on black men — who we imagine we’re allowed to be.

Tidwell remembers the disaffectedness he observed in the city’s youth in the ’90s as stemming from the dissolution of familial networks — nuclear, extended, even fictive kin. “We were having so many young men killed. What was different is that they didn’t have much of a home life. As poor as I was as a black male, there was still a family unit.

There was still someone guiding you. And through history, black males have always had that thing where they have not felt equal enough, or that they weren’t on a level playing field.

“I always knew I had to give something beyond dance. The percentages are very low of those kids who will leave and dance. My first thing was to save them, give them something else to do, something to grab them — when you perform and get standing ovations. Most people don’t expect it, the curtains open and there are 20 black males dancing in a group.

That within itself, especially at that time, was astonishing.” ____________________________ A native of Little Rock, Clarence Michael Tidwell began dancing at age 16 with Manolo Agullo, a dance instructor at the Arkansas Arts Center. He left the city to study on scholarship with Gus Giordano in Evanston, Ill., then waited tables and wrapped gifts at Macy’s while auditioning and taking class around New York. He joined the Buddy Simpson Dancers in Dallas and toured East Asia and the southern United States before returning home and joining Ballet Arkansas.

Much of his earliest work in Central Arkansas involved creating an audience for classical dance — deconstructing ideas about who went to the ballet. “In the beginning, dance was so stereotyped,” Tidwell said, describ-

TIDWELL DANCERS: Justin Gatlin and Sean Porter of the Tidwell Dance Project Ensemble, perform (left); Tidwell performs with Ballet Arkansas.

ing Little Rock’s dance scene in the mid-’70s, when he returned home. “I’m old enough to remember Ballet Arkansas doing a show in Pine Bluff where I partnered [with] a white girl and half the audience walked out. The idea was, if I still wanted to dance, I was going to have to leave again. But I loved Little Rock. I’m comfortable here. I’m more artistically creative, because I’m not dealing with the stress of big cities and the competition.”

Along with kindred spirits Debbie Rawn and Jana Beard, he worked to push the accepted bounds of dance in Central Arkansas.

“We danced everywhere there was to dance.

We danced on concrete slabs, we danced at any club meeting. Anywhere that we could try to show dance in a different light.”

Tidwell also believed in the importance of exposing black audiences to classical dance.

Through outreach work and grant programs, he introduced dance to public school students in Little Rock and North Little Rock before he made a full-time commitment to teaching in 1988. That year, the Little Rock School District began offering dance programming as part of its magnet initiative, which was designed to combat white flight by offering more electives.

He began that year as a last-minute substitution. A month before school started, the district’s head of fine arts called to encourage him to interview for the job. There was no curriculum in place. Tidwell began the year with 85 girls — evenly divided racially, though only one dancer of color had received

enough private training to enter his advanced class — and no boys. Horace Mann, formerly a segregated black high school in East Little Rock, sat at the juncture of two historically black neighborhoods — the South End and East End. The school’s location, originally intended to discourage integration efforts in the late ’50s by estranging black residents from whiter parts of town, placed Tidwell’s program on a potentially combustible fault line.

Tidwell insisted young men be a part of his educational efforts from the inception.

“Dr. [Marian] Lacy came on as principal my second year at Mann. She was the one person who believed in my vision for the future,” he said. “I told her that if you didn’t have guys in the dance program, then you really didn’t have a dance program. You just had a drill team, or a dance team. Without men, the classics are out of reach. So she allowed me to recruit.”

That Tidwell’s programming began in a junior high school, when young men first take up the mantle of masculinity, distinguished his early success. He enlisted boys by relying on relationships forged during his nomadic years in the public schools, conscripting former pupils to fill his ranks. He’d taught at nearby Booker Arts Magnet Elementary, so the grade school students he knew from those days were prime candidates to join his class at Mann.

One of those boys from Booker, Zhiva Brown, now a pharmacist in North Little Rock

and father of five, remembers Tidwell first relying on pop music and his long history with the community to convince him to join a class of female dancers in elementary school.

“When I heard that he was playing Michael Jackson, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going.’ ” Tidwell also revealed that Brown’s mother was an old acquaintance. “I didn’t know many people who knew my mom and here’s a guy who says, ‘Yeah, I grew up with her on Cedar Street.’ ” Tidwell later asked Brown, though not a dance student his first year at Mann, to recruit some guys to partner with his female students for the school’s first spring recital.

“It was such a good time that I said, ‘I might be on the science track, but I’m taking dance.’

I think the number of guys started growing exponentially after that,” Brown said.

Tidwell altered the traditional classical dance classroom, substituting sweatpants for black tights. “Did I have to change things up a little bit? I did,” he said. “I knew there was no way in the world I was gonna get a guy from the East End to step into a studio in front of a room full of girls in a pair of tights.” He forfeited technical terminology for language that engaged the sports and activities students brought into the space. And he began with movement generated by the students themselves.

“I had to work in the classroom to get as much technique as I could. A lot of times I had to come from what they were familiar with. I would take what they were doing, look at the technique in it, and figure out how I ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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AT UALR: Tidwell (above and left) taught at the university for a time after his return to Little Rock.

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could make it into a modern move — try to transpose it into the artform of dance.

“That was my teaser, giving them a whole dance that felt familiar, and then I would show them how we would change those moves to make them more artistic, why you needed to be at the barre, and why you needed to be on the floor, and why you needed to do across-the-floor combinations.”

Courtney Peeples, a business owner in Prosper, Texas, and father of seven, remembers Tidwell seeking him out in his first year at Mann.

“Tidwell came to me on the football field and asked me what I thought about dance,” Peeples said. “I was like, ‘No, I’m not gonna do that.’ I was a street guy, playing ball. He heard from the grapevine that I was one of the popular guys, so he came and talked to me. One thing he told me was that it would help me on the football field. And then I’ll be honest with you, I was in the seventh grade.

It was the girls.”

Peeples remembered his gradual introduction to the artform, but also emphasized the rigor Tidwell brought to dance instruction.

“It was baby steps. When we first started, we thought we were gonna go in there and be gangsta walking and cabbage patching and doing our thang. We got in there and had to learn first position, second position, pliés, grande rond de jambes.

“Tidwell was very honest, very hard, and he was very thorough. He had more respect than the football coaches. Tidwell cared about me outside of dance. I was a person. I wasn’t just a dancer. Coming from where we come from, it was football, and it was the streets. You meet someone who genuinely cares about your grades, cares about how you feel, about what you’re doing.

That maneuvered us into becoming different men, made us think in a different manner. It expanded what I thought was possible, what I thought I’d never do.”

Like Brown and Peeples, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott was motivated to learn dance from Tidwell because of its potential to improve his agility in football. He, Brown and Peeples looked to idols like Rashaan Salaam and Herschel Walker, who had translated dance into football greatness. For Scott, the experience helped him grow up.

“I was a shy kid. In that way, Tidwell was a deciding factor in my life. He helped me come out of my shell to learn how to be an extrovert,” Scott said.

Dance offered the same community as athletics, but performing it in class and on stage subverted the traditional gender dynamic of a junior high school, with males offering themselves to be observed and critiqued, where otherwise they might have only claimed status as big men on campus.

“When it came to technique, I got a female partner and started dancing with girls, and I wanted to learn more,” Peeples said. “Most of it was the girls. They taught us things they already knew how to do. They loved us. We could do no wrong. We were dancing, we were football players. We were street guys, but they didn’t look at us as street guys, they looked at us differently. Once they saw me dancing, I wasn’t Courtney the street guy all the time.”

Brown echoed this. “We were so limited in what was presented in front of us as young black men. It was always just sports. And so being able to express yourself through dance … it helped give black males another outlet. I think that when girls found out that you were a guy taking dance, all of a sudden you became a more caring-type guy, you were more sensitive. … You were OK with your emotional side, you would listen, you’d write a note in between classes, and so I guess their popularity with girls went up.”

Chivalry and courtship informs much of classical dance instruction, and Tidwell embedded these lessons into his own pedagogy.

He served as the faculty adviser of Mann’s Young Men of Honor club, and later the Gentlemen’s Club at Parkview High School. His emphasis on presentation translated to lessons on etiquette and dress.

a father figure. “My dad didn’t teach me to tie a tie; Tidwell did,” Scott said. “I learned to tie a bow tie from Tidwell, and that if you’re gonna wear brown shoes, wear a brown belt.

He was a father to the fatherless, all the while teaching us culture, etiquette and how to be a man.” ____________________________ If many of my classmates were safe from the trope about gay boys and dance, I wasn’t.

That’s who I was back then: black, gay and closeted, my sexual orientation a predicament not afforded much sympathy at the time. Sometimes I still resent those gangbangers, all the air they sucked out of the room, all the energy that had to be deployed in saving them. My bookish reserve, and my two-parent household often meant suffering the presumption that I was OK, when I was not. I lacked an understanding of my sexual orientation and visible models of out, self-assured black gay men, but my pristine academic record and model extracurricular schedule were read as evidence of well-adjustment and a guarantee of safe passage into successful, heteronormative Black Achievement.

A scene from the dance film “Centerstage” (2000) captured my attitude then about clas-

'When we first started, we thought we were gonna go in there and be gangsta walking and cabbage patching and doing our thang. We got in there and had to learn first position, second position, pliés, grande rond de jambes.'

-Courtney Peeples “Tidwell was a big-time male figure in my life,” Peeples said. “My mother was a single mother, but once I got to junior high school, Tidwell was my father figure. He introduced me to dance, he taught me how to treat a woman. He changed our style of dress. We were walking around in Dickies and T-shirts, Converse and sagging jeans. He made us put that stuff up and put us in slacks and Tommy Hilfiger, and ties. To me, that whole wave was because of Tidwell: Polo boots and Cole Haans.”

Being a member of the Gentlemen’s etiquette club at Parkview became “the cool thing to do because C. Michael Tidwell was leading it,” Scott said. “He showed us how to tie a tie. We all had our Polo boots. He had his own style. It was different because he was different. He was cultured in an era when we didn’t know what culture was.”

Scott said he was blessed to have a father who worked a lot while he was growing up.

Nonetheless, for him and others, Tidwell was

sical dance and its relationship to the community. The character Erik Jones, a black, gay man, is seated in conversation with a fellow black ballet dancer, an urban landscape at his back and jazz playing in the background. “Jody [the choreographer] has all these theories about making ballet for the people,” Jones says. “I do ballet ’cause it has nothing to do with the people. Give me tiaras and boys in tights any day.” I remember this sentiment crystallizing my thoughts about dance as an escape hatch from the pressures of black masculinity and black community at the time.

Even though I followed Zhiva Brown’s model seven years later — another black, male dance student elected student body president at Mann — my body existed in a kind of self-imposed paralysis then. That’s what it felt like to be 12 or 13 and attracted to my own sex, terrified by what my own body might tell on itself. When people talk about dance as a language, an expression, that’s what I think

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AT CENTRE FOR THE DANSARTS: Zhiva Brown (picture at left, first row, far left, kneeling) and the author (first row, far right, kneeling) were in Tidwell's Teen Jazz Class; Brown, Chris Jackson, Cory Scott and Courtney Peeples (picture at right) were members of the Tidwell Project Dance Ensemble.

of, my body unfurling like a tongue, able to speak for the first time its forlornness and desire. That’s what I felt in my arms’ port de bras, in the rigidity of my neck and chin, my épaulement — the expression of my want of things in life, things I could not see myself having in Little Rock.

Fortunately, dance required enough attentiveness to free me of my own self-consciousness. Expressiveness or a femme manner weren’t flaws that required hypervigilance.

I could see in the studio that strength and athleticism were not attached solely to machismo or aggression, that those qualities could also be deployed to say something. I wanted to relieve my black maleness of these burdens anyway. My body wanted to express its vulnerability, its emotional depth, its aptitude for precision and rigorous intention.

Tidwell’s studio became the place where I began negotiating my own masculinity and offered me a place to do this where I did not have to flee broader black community.

Dance was the first time I got to say something performatively with my whole body. I feel its phonics even now when I’m writing, the theatricality that imbues my syntax, the effort I inflate things with, wanting to make them mean. I did that first with my body, before I’d learned how to do so on the page.

It’s exhilarating, how gay that can all feel sometimes, the mannered speech and sharp opinions, when all those things align, a true expression of my interior, my physical com28 MARCH 2019

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portment and gesture, the sounds and words I make, and even more abstracted, the symbols I compose on paper. All of them hopefully contain the same elemental stuff.

For me, the appeal was that dance collapsed the binary entirely, made male and female identities expressible through one body, an idea that classical dance still grapples with. “If you didn’t know much about classical ballet, you might think it’s an obvious home for queer artists and narratives, but it’s more complicated than that,” David Ebershoff wrote for T Magazine in 2018. “Ballet, of course, has always had gay dancers and choreographers and homoeroticism, but it’s an artistic discipline shaped by tradition. … To have a public queer identity, or to be perceived as too effeminate, can still affect a dancer … . It’s one of ballet’s ironies — the outside world has long viewed the male dancer as the antithesis of conventional masculinity, yet the culture inside ballet can still be somewhat bro-y.”

Queerness and one’s ability to orient at any point along that spectrum became the keyhole through which I could discover myself.

Martial arts had given me the same body conditioning and precision but had deployed it to violent ends. Football blunted all of that, made me into an instrument of force, less than sentient. Tidwell worked to communicate to his young men that dance could serve their athletic ambitions, but through the artform offered me something competi-

tive sports did not, a chance to disprove the assumptions saddled onto my blackness and my manhood. ____________________________ Mann’s dance program, with Tidwell at its center, established a loop in the city’s broader black popular culture, exerting an influence on social behaviors and street style throughout Little Rock. Tidwell’s classroom sampled dance styles from outside the classroom, while also informing them. A male soloist in Mann’s annual spring recital might segue into a section of footwork, mined from the foot gliding technique of gangsta walking, a street dance style originating three hours from Little Rock in Memphis and popularized by the rap/dance group G Style. The tribal associations of neighborhoods, and schools, gangs even — a means of social networking teens knew from the street — informed a citywide dance culture. “Cliques” met at teen dance parties at venues throughout the city. G Style’s 1993 video “Gangsta” records the atmosphere of these parties, with black men dressed identically in prep styles, moving in and out of formations, performing intricate choreography across caricatured urban landscapes.

“Back in the day, my group was PBC, Players By Choice,” Peeples said. “Then you had Naughty By Nature, you had 304, you had Freaks By Nature, you had a lot of different cliques at the time. Dance took off. We threw parties, we went to parties every Friday at the

ENSEMBLE DANCERS: Chris Jackson, Harold Marshall and Eldridge "Pop" Howard (photo at left); Altee Tenpenny (third from left), the late football star who played at the University of Alabama, also took dance from Tidwell.

Big Apple, The Armory, Billy Mitchell Boys Club. It was a time where dance really kept us busy, kept us from fighting, shooting, selling drugs. We took it from the streets to the party.”

Dancers from cliques appeared on Tidwell’s stage, then repurposed the choreography for local parties. Tidwell himself emphasized exposing black audiences to dance, performing annually at events like the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame Gala and the Martin Luther King Convention, a statewide gathering exploring themes of social justice that attracted black teens from throughout the city.

“It really took off in the ’90s,” Peeples added.

“The Tidwell Project (Tidwell’s touring performance group) would always perform at the King Convention, and with a couple of us being street guys, all of the older OGs came out to see us on stage. And they loved it. They’d be like, ‘Oh, look at my YGs. They up there getting’ it.’ The girls were hollering, so they loved it. That was one weekend in the city where there was no violence. Everybody came together, East, South and West. We were all there.”

Though Tidwell most prized exposing his audience to modern and jazz dance forms, he also worked to present the breadth of black experience, setting modern dances to traditional gospel and incorporating street dance vocabularies into his work.

“Regardless of what you think about religion, the church has been the backbone of black community,” Tidwell said. “I choreographed ‘Oh Mary Don’t You Weep’ [a staging of the biblical story of

Lazarus rising from the dead, set to Aretha Franklin’s performance of the eponymous song from 1972’s “Amazing Grace”] intentionally, because I knew it would get me in the door. I knew if I wanted the black community, then I would have to go through the churches. We danced anywhere, basements, meeting halls, and then the Black Hall of Fame heard about it. Then they were calling for us. I said, ‘Here’s my key to the city.’ ” The access won by his early success grew Tidwell’s programming from leading Mann’s two-instructor dance program alongside the late Traci Presley, to serving as owner and creative director of the Centre for the Dansarts on 12th Street, and leading the Tidwell Project Dance Ensemble, a touring company that performs throughout the state. Three decades since his first days at Mann, he now leads the dance program at Parkview High School, where he moved to establish courses for upper grades. He’s mentored teachers that facilitate programs at Mabelvale Middle School, Pulaski Heights Middle School, Horace Mann Middle School and Parkview High School, four of the six sites where dance training is offered in the district.

And his influence has always extended in both directions, to the street, and toward Little Rock’s black professional ranks. “One of the things about Tidwell’s dance program came about through his adult class,” Brown said. “It was an outlet for older African-American people in the community who also wanted to dance but didn’t have an

outlet like that. When he started getting lawyers and doctors and other community leaders into those classes, that helped expose a lot of youth to those professions. Being able to see that many people that were on a professional level right there in a dance class just like you are in dance class was really good. I hadn’t ever been around that many black physicians or black lawyers or black professionals in one setting. To be able to say you had a connection to those people felt like you had a better connection to black leaders in the community.”

A lesson Tidwell perhaps meant for me finally, that becoming my full self did not require I defect from something as multifaceted as black community, that I did not have to seek accommodation for my sexual orientation in historically privileged, white spaces that appeared more cultured.

An aspirational quality pervades much of the collective memory of Tidwell’s studio, inside the blank blue of those three walls, before the derisive stare of its mirror, peering out at us dancers the way he always did. That’s what we sought from him all along, I think, a way of envisioning ourselves as urbane and expressive.

In Tidwell, and the community he engendered, blackness could be both funky and expensive, could sweat and also possess dignity, authority, a sense of high self-regard. Watching ourselves mimic his movement, we hoped to see our own black, male bodies not as threats or haints, but as fine things, costumed and seen, and possessed of something to say.

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MARCH 2019 29

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CULTURE

SINCE 1983, LITTLE ROCK’S NICHOLS & SIMPSON ORGANBUILDERS HAS BUILT A REPUTATION FOR UNCOMPROMISING EXCELLENCE. IT’S ALL ABOUT SWEATING THE DETAILS AND NEVER, EVER CUTTING CORNERS.

By DAVID KOON Photography by BRIAN CHILSON

THE SOUND THAT 'PUTS MONEY IN THE PLATE': Wayne Simpson of Nichols & Simpson examines the pipes from within a pipe organ it built (left); Joe Nichols and Duane Vanderpluym (right) fit together pieces that are part of a new project in the workshop.

34 MARCH 2019

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T

he organ pipes are mute when they come in the door of Nichols & Simpson Organbuilders of Little Rock. It’s up to Wayne Simpson to make them sing.

Using a trained ear and a small knife to literally carve the tune-producing flute into each soft metal pipe, Simpson will work away until each is acoustically perfect, whittling tiny, careful nicks into the edge of each tuned slit to streamline and quiet the wind flowing through it for a clear, pure tone.

During a visit with a reporter, he demonstrated a reed-like pipe, thinner than a pencil and less than a foot long, with a tone so high it was almost a dog whistle. “From a 32-foot pipe to that,” Simpson said. “It all adds up to make a musical instrument. There’s a reason they call it The King of Instruments.”

In the voicing room of Nichols & Simpson, which is outfitted with a keyboard and a low-pressure blower that allows for quick mockups and testing of pipes, Simpson sat at a keyboard, made a few adjustments, then played a stirring chord that filled the room, sound layered on top of sound until it was almost thick in the air.

“Hear how it comes alive?” he said. “It just moves through the room like blue smoke. That puts the money in the plate.”

Simpson and Joe Nichols have been on a near-lifelong quest to create the finest pipe organs in America, no matter the cost or time involved, and they have customers all over the country.

Since their founding of the company in 1983, the men have completed over 30 pipe organs for buyers as far flung as Kalamazoo, Mich., and Abilene, Texas. The design, construction and installation of each one is a massive undertaking that requires years of intense focus, skill and labor by Simpson, Nichols and their small team of craftsmen.

“We are what has been termed — not necessarily by us — a niche builder,” Nichols said. “If you want the best, without compromise, that’s what we do. If you want something quick and dirty, with plastic draw knobs and plastic key coverings, that’s not us.”

They’re working on an organ now for a church in Little Rock whose name they can’t disclose just yet — their first full hometown build since 2004.

The project, which will consume almost every working hour for the next two years of their lives, has an estimated final cost of $2.2 million. That seems like a lot, until you consider the countless hours Nichols & Simpson will sink into the project between now and then and their commitment to using absolutely the best materials.

This might be everything you need to know about what drives Nichols & Simpson: In 2004, when the company was putting the finishing touches on the carved and exquisitely detailed wood facade of the pipe organ it was building for First Presbyterian Church in Little Rock, they looked at the apple-sized lights sent them from a factory to be recessed over the organ. They were in black plastic bezels. “We said, ‘Oh, no,’ ” Nichols said.

A craftsman was dispatched to Nichols & Simpson’s workshop in a brick pillbox of a building at 1115 S. Woodrow St., where he spent the better part of a day turning, sanding and finishing a series of perfect hardwood bezels, near-exact copies of the plastic versions, which went out with the trash.

Just above the keyboard of the console is a small

white rectangular plate bearing the name “Nichols & Simpson” and the year of the organ’s completion in crisp, black letters. Affixing that tag to the console is the final thing Nichols and Simpson do when an organ is completed, tuned and ready to play.

Though it would be easy to assume, in this disposable world, that the plate is plastic, it’s actually highly polished bone. Engraved cow shinbone to be exact. Even more amazing is that nobody knew how to engrave and ink letters on bone with such precision before Nichols and Simpson sat down and developed a laborious, six-step method to do it.

“To engrave bone is problematic because of the pores,” Nichols said. “You can engrave it, but when you start putting the fill in for the color, it runs and it gets fuzzy. So [Simpson] and I developed this method by which bone can be engraved.”

That kind of slavish, near-obsessive attention to detail is everywhere in the work of Nichols & Simpson. Even in the heart of the pipe organ at First Presbyterian, every surface — even the most routine framing, in places where nobody but an organ repairperson will ever see — is sanded and finished like a piece of furniture.

The pipe organ at First Presbyterian won’t need a major rebuild for 100 to 150 years, Nichols said. "We’re building something that’s going to be there. The digital stuff?

Tone generation? Twenty years, maybe.”

The parts Nichols & Simpson and staff have completed so far for the latest organ, made mostly of ash, poplar and furniture-grade plywood, are laid out on a blue taped grid on the floor of the company workshop, each in the exact position it will occupy in the church until — barring fire or flood — every person reading this is gone on to their great reward, those who built it included. The 5,000-plus pipes for the organ, some longer than 25 feet and most made from an alloy of lead and tin (called “spotted metal” after the strange, frog-skin look that naturally forms when you mix tin and lead at certain concentrations), have been contracted to a trusted firm in Alliance, Ohio. Some of the dozens of small, handmade springs inside the organ will be imported from Germany, at $25 each.

Nichols and Simpson each came to building pipe organs through a love of music and a sense of youthful awe for the world’s only instrument that’s actually married to the building in which it sits. A native of Pine Bluff, Simpson loved the pipe organ as a child.

When he went to college at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, he met professor Robert Ellis, an organ instructor who offered to help him learn how to tune.

“Robert and I got to be good friends,” Simpson said. “I was a voice major, and he started teaching me to tune. He didn’t do very well at first because we were trying to tune at his house, and we were drinking scotch. Robert was a big influence on my life. He taught me to listen. You have to learn to listen. You’re not born listening, and the longer you do it, the more you hear.”

Nichols grew up in the small, south LouiARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 35

A LITTLE ROCK MASTERPIECE: Nichols & Simpson completed the organ at First Presbyterian Church in Little Rock (left) in 2004.

PLAYING THE PART: Wayne Simpson tests the sound of a pipe in the voicing room; Joe Nichols (top right) displays a cutaway of the interior of a baffle; Tim Bovard (right) builds valves that allow air into the pipes.

36 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

siana community of DeRidder. A visit to his aunt’s house in Lake Charles when he was 7 brought him to his first church service where a pipe organ was played. “I was smitten,” he said.

From there, Nichols devoured every book on organ tuning and construction he could lay his hands on. After graduating from McNeese State University in Lake Charles as an organ major, he eventually made his way to the Little Rock workshop of organ tuner and builder Lecil Gibson. Nichols and Simpson both started working for Gibson in 1977, and Nichols became a partner in the new firm of Gibson-Nichols Inc. in 1979. After a few years of building, tuning and servicing pipe organs, Nichols and Simpson set out on their own, founding Nichols & Simpson Inc. Both acknowledge they aren’t strong woodworkers, instead relying on craftsmen like Jorge Osorio and Duane Vanderpluym, who have been with Nichols & Simpson more than 20 years. A past president of the American Institute of Organbuilders, a position in which he served for six years, Nichols recently spoke at an organ-builders conference in Canton, Ohio.

“They asked me to speak on running an organ business,” Nichols said. “I told them, you know, there’s nothing like riding a wave of talent. I have woodworkers who can do things that I can only dream of doing. I’m not a woodworker. I can’t do that. But [they] can. So if I can dream it up and think of it, [they] can build it. It’s a team effort.”

Nichols’ primary creative role is in designing every piece of the pipe organs they build as two-dimensional Computer Aided Drafting models from which to draw schematics and plans. For the part of the organ that will be visible to the congregation, he echoes the existing architectural details of the church so it won’t look new. Simpson, meanwhile, works in the voicing room, where the walls are hung with photos of vintage pipe organs and train wrecks on the old Cotton Belt line, where his grandfather worked building boilers for steam locomotives.

There are six Nichols & Simpson pipe organs in Central Arkansas. One of them is at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in North Little Rock. Installed in 2000, the organ was expanded by Nichols & Simpson in 2018 after a successful funding campaign.

Rees Roberts has been the organist and choir director at St. Luke’s since January 2017.

He said the Nichols & Simpson organ there is much more than just a musical instrument.

“I got to watch this congregation rally behind this very large investment they were making,” he said. “It’s a much more exciting thing than just installing a cheap digital organ. It’s a point of pride. They’re proud of this instrument.”

A student of the pipe organ since he was in middle school, Roberts said the organ is unique in its ability to inspire people to sing. A pipe organ can literally vibrate the air around you, he said, inspiring a deeper connection to worship.

“A digital organ just doesn’t have the same effect,” Roberts said. “It doesn’t surround you and hug you in a blanket of sound the way a real pipe organ does. … We define a sacrament as an outward and physical sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

So pipe organs are kind of an outward sign of something we feel inwardly. We believe that when we come to church, we should offer our very best to God. That’s why we put on our best clothes. That’s why we try to sing well as a choir. A pipe organ is the same thing: It is our very best. A digital organ is not our very best. There’s just something about giving our best, and that’s so shone forth in the work that Nichols & Simpson does. They are giving you their very best.”

Like any craftsmen, Simpson and Nichols understand they are building things that will outlast them. They account for that by building their pipe organs with an eye toward being serviced, including components that can be easily opened, and more space between pipes so tuners and service people don’t have to squeeze through.

“You’ve got to be able to get into them, or it’s detrimental in the long term,” Simpson said. “If you can’t service it, there’s no sense putting it in.”

Today, there are only 350 organ builders in America, at a handful of firms, Nichols said.

The profession seems to have a future, however. Nichols & Simpson has had apprentices in the past, and when Nichols spoke to the American Institute of Organbuilders last year, more than 50 young craftspeople attended a dinner for organbuilders under 30 years old.

As for Nichols and Simpson, they’re slowing down a bit — Simpson is 61, Nichols 67.

The music still moves them both, though, especially when one of their pipe organs is doing what it was born to do.

“I can go to the dedication of one of our organs, and they can play all this highfalutin literature and do everything fabulous and impressive,” Nichols said. “But it never moves me emotionally until they start playing a hymn. When all the people are singing and the organ is doing what it’s supposed to do, that’s when I have to cry. I can’t sing.”

Standing in the dim sanctuary of First Presbyterian, still marveling over all the work that went into those carefully turned light bezels, the bone tag and the dozens of rosewood knobs on the console that cost $75 each to create even though an $8 plastic knob would do, a reporter asked Nichols and Simpson why they put so much time, energy and money into parts of their organs that most people will never see — or at least will never recognize as anything particularly special.

Nichols almost whispered his answer.

“It’s ours,” he said. “My name is on that, for the rest of my life and thereafter.

It’s important. Attention to detail makes all the difference in the world in everything in life.”

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 37

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CULTURE SUPER CROTCH: Jim Shaw's "The Issue of My Loins" likens corrections on Shaw's father's drawings to Superman's kryptonite.

A SUPER STRONG EXHIBIT AT CRYSTAL BRIDGES PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY CRYSTAL BRIDGES

‘MEN OF STEEL, WOMEN OF WONDER’ EXPLORES A UNIVERSE OF IDEAS.

Y

ou might think the recently opened exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, “Men of Steel, Women of Wonder,” is a celebration of comic book art and aimed at a particular group of superhero aficionados. It is that — it includes a rare first issue of the Superman comic — but it is much more.

“Men of Steel” delves into many issues in contemporary life: Race, immigration, sexism, gender and human frailty are all part of the picture. The show is smart. It has funny elements and devastating images. It was created by one of Crystal Bridges’ own curators, Alejo Benedetti; the show’s success can be credited to his passion for the characters and his understanding of the ways artists have imbued these paintings, performance art, installation and videos with rich meaning.

Benedetti’s idea for “Men of Steel” was born out of the idea of an exhibition of the museum’s collection of 1940s etchings of steelworkers, the original “men of steel.”

Thanks to his lifelong love of superheroes and their representation, the idea for a larger exhibition took flight. These images of strong men hovering over the city on a steel beam and a 1935 oil painting of muscular laborers are included in the show as illustration of the tropes the comic book artists were familiar with: mighty men doing mighty things. Here also is a 19th century poster of a strongman in tights and wide belt. The familiarity of that strongman image in the popular mind made

By LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK Superman instantly understood as someone whose strength was out of the ordinary: an American god.

Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter, which is part of Crystal Bridges’ collection, illustrates the reality that images of strong women must include feminine elements, too: A muscular Rosie wears lipstick; powerful Wonder Woman is sexy. The dichotomy — sex symbol/power symbol — is one explored

throughout the show.

Mary Beth Edelson looks at Wonder Woman as part of female deities whose power is only mythical in “Exile,” a monumental work in acrylic, fabric and collage. It’s a complex tapestry of sorts that puts our distaff superhero amid Aphrodite, Athena, Eve, the Virgin Mary and the short-lived Goddess of Freedom erected in Tiananmen Square.

Fallibility is taken up in installation artist Jim Shaw’s “The Issue of My Loins.” In Shaw’s case, the superhero is his father.

“When you walk into this space,” Benedetti told a group of journalists invited to

preview the show, “what you are seeing is Superman’s crotch.” A wall that appears to be a huge two-dimensional black-and-white painting of the hero’s costumed groin is actually a three-dimensional piece revealing glowing crystals in all colors behind a wall cut out to define Superman’s legs. “They are the family jewels,” Benedetti said, and they are toxic — like Kryptonite — an idea supported by the rest of the installation of drawings

by Shaw’s father. They are works the elder Shaw did in 1957 for a course with the Famous Artist Correspondence School, and are overlain with corrections mailed back to him with detailed, two-page critiques.

Shaw’s father got a B- for the course, revealing the idolized father to be less than perfect, just as Kryptonite takes Superman’s powers away.

The Shaw installation is a way to “tip off” visitors “that in the show we’re going to be breaking down these characters, and we’re going to be looking at them in different ways,” Benedetti said. “It’s not just going to be pretty pictures.”

One of those less-than-pretty pictures is in the Comic Whitewash portion of the show, where Peter Williams’ painting of a police officer arresting a black superhero whose chest is emblazoned with “N Word” instead of an S can be found.

Also in Comic Whitewash are terrific photographs by African-American artist Renee Cox, in which she casts herself as the superhero Rajé, dressed in high-heeled patent leather boots and her bodysuit the colors of Africa. In one photo, she sits atop Lady LibARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 39

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ARKANSAS TIMES

erty; in another she is brandishing broken chains, referencing not only Wonder Woman’s vulnerability to capture, but the chains of slavery. Cox said she created Rajé after her children could not find any black action figures at the toy store.

Batman and Superman are passionately kissing in Rich Simmons’ “Between the Capes,” which Benedetti said should express that sexual orientation does not change us: Batman is still Batman; Superman is still Superman. A poignant video by Sarah Hill depicts a performance piece in which a transgender Wonder Woman spins and falls and gets back up again until she can no longer stand. Hill is referencing Wonder Woman’s change from secretary Diana Prince to superhero by spinning, but Hill’s spinning superhero can only struggle against a world that doesn’t accept transgender reality.

In a section on vulnerability is Jacob Yarmosky’s hyper-realistic “Wintered Fields,” a painting of his grandmother, old, wrinkled and infirm, dressed in a Wonder Woman outfit. His grandmother, Yarmosky writes, “was a wonder woman to me. Her heroic battle with Alzheimer’s disease left her vulnerable,” and the painting is meant to show “both the heroism and vulnerability of the human condition.”

The artists of “Men of Steel” take advantage of the fact that both Wonder Woman and Superman are immigrants — Wonder Woman from the island of Themyscira and Superman from Krypton (which exploded, making him a refugee as well). Dulce Pinzon’s immensely affecting photographs cast immigrants working in New York to send money back to their families in Mexico as superheroes: Maria Luisa Romero, in Wonder Woman garb, works in a Brooklyn laundromat; delivery man Noe Reyes, dressed in a Superman costume, is pedaling his loaded bike, red cape flying.

Delightfully and painfully sardonic are posters from ICE DISH, or the U.S. Department of Illegal Superheroes, depicting images of multiple superheroes — Supergirl, Hawkman, Thor, Namor (the Sub-Mariner), the Silver Surfer, etc. — emblazoned with the word ILLEGAL under their pictures.

This only a small part of the ICE DISH project: There’s a number you can call (1-844-4-ICE-DISH) where you’ll get a recording directing you to extensions where you can report suspected aliens

of the superhero variety, and a website, icedish.org. (The artists are undercover.)

For comic book fans, there is something special: two rare, bound volumes of comic books, one of Action Comics Issue No. 1, published in June 1938 and introducing the Superman character, and another from 1942. “This is insane, y’all,” Benedetti said, his comic fandom flag flying. “There aren’t tons of them out there. … Some people will be coming just to see these.”

Among the show’s artists who are coming to Bentonville to give talks are Sarah Hill, who’ll appear with video artist Dara Birbaum, whose video “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” a piece about the dual identity of the superhero, is in the exhibition. Hill and Birbaum will talk Friday, March 8. Musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson, whose music video “O Superman” casts the superhero as Big Brother, whose loss of moral compass makes him dangerous, comes to Crystal Bridges Friday, March 22.

The museum has gone all out for “Men of Steel,” and it’s no wonder. It’s the perfect illustration that there’s more to a work of art than what you see just passing by. Crystal Bridges has created a boxed catalog for the exhibition that holds short volumes by arts writers and academicians about various sections of the exhibition. This is the marrow of this rich work. There is also a one-page guide for visitors to help them explore some of the exhibition more deeply.

Crystal Bridges also enlisted Fayetteville artist Gustav Carlson to create Superpower Pads, digital cartoons that tell stories of the art and artists.

Comic book artists will want to post their work to #cbmoswow on Instagram; the images will be shown on a large digital screen in an activity area outside the last gallery.

Also not to be missed there: The aluminum and wood alien sculpture holding dirt from around jazz musician Sun Ra’s grave. Artist Robert Pruitt created the alien (“Untitled Male Figure”) and on Jan. 20, with help from Dr. Ross Carroll with Arkansas BalloonSAT, launched it 109,000 feet above the earth aboard a 12-foottall weather balloon from the grounds of Crystal Bridges. The sculpture was recovered near Hector (Pope County), on a farm. A video of the event can be seen at the museum.

“Men of Steel, Women of Wonder” will run through April 22.

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By STEPHANIE SMITTLE , LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK and OMAYA JONES

‘NO TEARS SUITE’ SATURDAY 3/2 | 8 P.M. | MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER | $40.

“I was drowning in unfamiliar activities and sounds,” Melba Pattillo Beals writes in the fourth chapter of her memoir “Warriors Don’t Cry,” “the sound of the constantly ringing telephone, of people talking loud in my ear and expressing their views about integration, of reporters’ urgent voices about what integration might do to the city and to the South.” It’s Beals’ memories of cacophony and chaos that dominate this chapter of her life — the one where she walked into Central High School and became one of the Little Rock Nine.

That memoir, and the tumult therein, inspired this 60-minute jazz suite from Little Rock jazz pianist Chris Parker and vocalist Kelley Hurt, which was commissioned by Oxford American magazine and premiered in 2017 at the 60th anniversary of the Nine’s entrance into Little Rock Central High School. Since that time, acclaimed bassist and composer Rufus Reid has expanded the suite with a supplement of symphonic arrangements, to be played by 15 members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. For this performance, an addition to the Oxford American’s 2018-19 concert series, ASO Associate Conductor Geoffrey Robson conducts Reid, drummer Brian Blade, tenor saxophonist Bobby LaVell, trumpeter Marc Franklin and saxophonist Chad Fowler. Get tickets at arkansassymphony.org/no-tears or by calling 666-1761, ext. 1. SS

ELISE DAVIS SATURDAY 3/2 | 9 P.M. STICKYZ ROCK ’N’ ROLL CHICKEN SHACK | $12-$15.

In the world of color theory, there’s an illustration used by artists, scientists and psychologists alike: the color wheel, as it’s called, a visual map of the relationships between primary, secondary and tertiary colors. Red and green — the hallmark hues of each of Elise Davis’ last two albums — sit exactly opposite one another on that wheel, and I can’t help but think of it when the Little Rock native discusses her vastly different approaches to those albums, “The Token” and “Cactus.” Davis holed up in a cabin in Maine for 10 days with her band and producer Sam Kassrier for “The Token,” tracking nearly everything live. “There’s a beauty in that,” Davis said on her session for Paste Magazine last month. “You capture something in this time.” Davis’ latest, “Cactus,” on the other hand, was recorded over the course of six months. It’s swaddled in strings, with markedly less vocal reverb, allowing her lyrics to read less like a diaristic fever dream than a deadpan guidebook to the perils of emotional growing pains. (See: “Man.”) Best of all for this particular listener, it’s given a whole new audience a chance to fall in love with the sage, lush retrospective that first sparked my own Elise Davis fandom: “Married Young.” The perpetually stunning Adam Faucett opens the show. See arkansaslivemusic.com for tickets. SS

42 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

PHOTOGRAPHY BY: GREGG ROTH/PHOTOGRAPH OF ELIZABETH ECKFORD FROM THE WILL COUNTS COLLECTION: INDIANA UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

the TO-DO list

DESCENDENTS SATURDAY 3/9 | 8:30 P.M. | REV ROOM | $35.

Add this quote to the list of Sentences Not Often Heard From Punk Rock Legends: “When I got laid off, I could have pivoted real quick and gotten a university job, but I just thought, ‘Yeah, the environment is not right, and the band is going great, and might as well have some fun and let it play out and maybe in a few years I can get back into science.’ ” Descendents frontman Milo Aukerman’s biochemistry career hitting a snag means that fans of skate culture, surf and hyper-caffeinated drum fills are a ticket purchase away from seeing the California rockers live, and the band’s longevity means trading in relics like “No FB” for more socially awakened fare like “Who We Are,” profits of which benefited ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center: “Woke up this morning to a different world/They’re stomping on immigrants and groping girls/There’s nothing American about us now/A whole population driven underground.” See arkansaslivemusic.com for tickets. SS

‘URINETOWN: THE MUSICAL’ THURSDAY 3/7-SUNDAY 3/24 | THE STUDIO THEATRE, 320 W. SEVENTH ST. | $20-$25.

If you’re a person for whom the political, environmental and economic climate seems abominably awry and perhaps irrevocably damaged, here’s the good news: All that bad news? It makes satire even more resonant and delicious. And, every so often, satire goes full-throttle meta, bypassing the act of mocking the cultural climate in which the performance is situated and lampooning the history of socially conscious performance itself. Take Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis’ “Urinetown,” the next production in The Studio Theatre’s 2018-19 season. Therein, an extended drought forces the masses into a hierarchical, for-profit network of public toilets, entrance to which is tightly controlled by a corporation called Urine Good Company. Violators are exiled to a mysterious dystopia and a pee-for-free rebellion builds steam. (Think: David Cross and Bob Odenkirk are tasked with developing an episode of “Black Mirror” for Broadway, poking fun at “Les Miserables” along the way.) Fourth walls are shattered, theater tropes are mocked and an exhaustive litany of euphemisms for going No. 1 are trotted out with earthy gusto from the pee-bound proletariat. This one’s gonna be a good time. See centralarkansastickets.com for tickets. SS

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MARCH 2019 43

ESTHER ROSE TUESDAY 3/12. 10 P.M. STICKYZ ROCK ’N’ ROLL CHICKEN SHACK. $10.

The marvel of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams lies in lucidity; the simplest guitar chords are a backdrop for country music’s most memorable melodies, and seemingly pedestrian turns of phrase take on universal meaning, ripe for interpretation. Esther Rose plays in that same sandbox, and her penchant for recording straight to tape landed her album “This Time Last Night” into the hands of Jack White, who featured her vocals on his 2018 record “Boarding House Reach.” Rose carved out a niche as a singer and percussionist in New Orleans’ traditional blues and jazz scene before the songwriting bug bit, and if “Don’t Blame It on the Moon” is any indication, her forthcoming sophomore album will be painted in the same stunningly simple palette as the first: tender, lilting and austere. See stickyz.com for tickets. SS

VALLEY OF THE VAPORS MUSIC FESTIVAL FRIDAY 3/15-MONDAY 3/18. MAXINE’S, LOW KEY ARTS, THE BIG CHILL (HOT SPRINGS). $10-$120.

In 2005, Bill Solleder and Shea Childs hatched a plan to lure compelling performers from across the globe to picturesque Hot Springs National Park, hoping to catch them on their way to and from the annual SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. It worked, and 14 years later, the staff at Low Key Arts is still throwing what’s very possibly the best fest in the state, giving groups like Downtown Boyz and Water Liars a chance to ditch the outdoor stadium vibe and put on intimate shows for fans — most of whom read as eternally grateful to be seeing their favorite groups without the aid of binoculars or a $480 festival pass. What’s more, the Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival thrives on art, hypercommitment and a healthy sense of mischief: Kelley Deal hosted a knitting workshop at VOV one spring. Devotees put out an annual VOV-specific zine. Brooklyn rocker Zuli played at the Waffle House as part of VOV’s trove of secret popup shows, occasionally using a sugar dispenser as a guitar slide. Up this year at the fest’s three venues are The Bright Light Social Hour, Dazz & Brie, Grandchildren (at right), The Holy Knives, McKinley Dixon, Sea Moya, Modeling, Hnry Flwr, Big Piph, Crush Diamond, Goon, Dendrons, Various Blonde, Sun Parade, Dead Rider, TIME, The Ferdy Mayne, Miles Francis, Colour Design, Stef Chura, Slights, Korine, Paul Cherry, Billy Ruben & The Elevated Enzymes, Death Hags, A Deer A Horse, Empath, Mimico, Vertical Scratchers, Beams, Jamie Lou & The Hullabaloo, Locate S, 1, Carinae, Fossils of Ancient Robots, Adventureland, Godcaster, Parrot Dream, Dead Soft, Charity and Big Bliss. A day pass is $10, a $40 pass will get you entrance to all VOV shows. A $120 VIP gets you all-show access plus unlimited food and drink in the VIP lounge at Low Key Arts. See valleyofthevapors.com for tickets. SS 44 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

PHOTOGRAPHY BY: AKASHA RABUT/ AARON BREWER

the TO-DO list

ARKANSAS TIMES FILM SERIES: ‘SET IT OFF’ TUESDAY 3/19 | 7 P.M. RIVERDALE 10 CINEMA | $9.

In 2018, the Arkansas Times Film Series programmed a succession of classic heist films: “Point Break,” “Rafifi” and “Bob Le Flambeur.” In 2019, bank robberies are the theme: In January, it was George Roy Hill’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” in which the increasing difficulty in being a successful bank robber signals the end of an era; in February, it was Barbara Loden’s “Wanda,” in which a despondent divorcee becomes an unwitting accomplice to a failed robbery. We’ll cap off the bank robbery theme with “Set It Off,” F. Gary Gray’s 1996 action crime drama, and the follow-up to his stoner comedy-turned-cult classic “Friday.” In “Set It Off,” bank teller Frankie (Vivica A. Fox) finds herself falsely linked with a bank robber and, with her dreams of rising through the ranks of the bank hierarchy shattered, she joins three friends who work for a cleaning service: Cleo (Queen Latifah), Stony (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Tisean (Kimberly Elise). Together, they hatch a plan to get ahead in a society that’s designed to hold them back. The film works not only because it’s compelling crime fiction, but also because it allows each of the four women their own interior lives. Frankie, of course, wants payback for the way she was unceremoniously fired. Stony wants to help her brother pay his college tuition. Cleo is openly gay and wants to purchase elaborate gifts for her girlfriend, and Tisean is trying to raise (and keep custody of) her child. Set against a backdrop of the violence and unrest in the ’80s and ’90s in Los Angeles, “Set It Off” was conceived as a socially conscious film. The protagonists’ impetus for getting into the business of bank robbing isn’t frivolous. It’s a means to an economic end, catalyzed by a rooftop conversation about the disappearance of factory jobs that pay a living wage. So many of the societal ills depicted in “Set it Off” — racism, classism — still resonate over 20 years after its release, and the idea of an all-female crime caper still feels novel, even with last year’s “Oceans 8” and with Steve McQueen’s “Widows.” “Set It Off” uses the crime genre to make timely critiques of the way the most marginalized people in society are themselves robbed of social mobility and fair economic opportunity. OJ

‘BEHIND THE BIG HOUSE’ FRIDAY 3/29-SATURDAY 3/30 | HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM.

You’ve always wanted to camp on the Historic Arkansas Museum grounds. Or at least I have. Thanks to Preserve Arkansas, the Black History Commission of Arkansas, the Arkansas Archeological Survey, the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and the Arkansas Humanities Council, there will be an opportunity to do just that AND learn about the importance of slave dwellings to the interpretation of African-American history and their role in heritage tourism. On Friday at 5:30 p.m., libations and samples of the antebellum cuisine of the enslaved will be served; a lecture by Dr. Jodi Skipper on roots tourism in the United States will follow. Then Joseph McGill, the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project and whom people will remember from last year’s “Behind the Big House” event, will give a Fireside Chat before bedding down in the Brownlee Kitchen. A lecture on documenting and preserving slave dwellings and a genealogy workshop will be part of Saturday’s halfday programming. Prospective campers should RSVP to info@preservearkansas.org. Educators may receive professional development hours. For more information, email rpatton@preservearkansas.org. LNP

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ARKANSAS TIMES

Iris Dement talks perfectionism, patriarchy and paradox.

PIETA BROWN

Adriana Milbrath (Roxie), Christopher Johnstone (Billy) & Daisy Hobbs (Velma) in The Rep’s production of CHICAGO. Photo by Chris Cranford. Book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse | Music by John Kander | Lyrics by Fred Ebb Based on the play by Maurine Dallas Watkins | Script adaptation by David Thompson

FEBRUARY 20 - MARCH 24

‘Will it be as good?’

Without her nomadic life’s timeline as accompaniment — the youngest of 14 kids, catapulted from Northeast Arkansas to coastal California at the age of 3 — you might hear Iris Dement’s inimitable voice and assume she never left the American South. There’s something about the way she finds multiple colors in a single vowel, maybe, or the way her melodies are couched in a watery lilt, that seems inextricably tied to a backdrop of humidity, sorghum molasses and the Gospel according to Luke, King James Version. Whatever bits of Arkansas she carried with her all these years, though, have turned up strangely and abundantly on “The Trackless Woods,” Dement’s 2015 album inspired by verse from Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. I caught up with Dement ahead of her upcoming performance on Sunday, March 3, at UA Pulaski Technical College’s Center for the Humanities and Arts (CHARTS), where all proceeds benefit Compassion Works for All, a prison outreach organization that teaches meditation, yoga and conflict resolution to incarcerated Arkansans.

Singer-songwriter Claire Holley and guitarist Ben Harris open the show.

You’ve really made no secret of the fact that although music itself is something you’re very naturally and deeply connected to, performing — and being in the spotlight — hasn’t always been. Has that changed over the years? And if so, what happened to make you feel differently?

What’s changed is that I’ve begun to wonder if I was ever, by nature, all that shy or afraid of the spotlight. My family was very patriarchal. As was the white evangelical church I grew up in. I think a lot of my discomfort with being on stage and stepping out as a writer had to do with old, and largely Biblical, messages I’d carried around with me about how females are supposed to behave in the world. Not drawing a lot of attention to yourself was rated pretty high. It’s taken a few decades, but I’m just about over that. Lies take up a lot of room. The fewer of them I carry around, the more room I have for the music.

You’ve spoken about the ways in which your late mother’s dream of becoming a singer has sort of intertwined with your own career, something you delved into with “Mama’s Opry,” and in an interview with NPR, in which you talk about how you finally found a key you could agree on for “Higher Ground.” Do you think about her when you sing certain songs?

I think about her all the time. Even when I’m not.

That’s how powerful her influence on me has been. She’s why I’m a singer. She’s why I sing in the style that I do. She’s why I step out even when I’m afraid. She was always finding small ways to resist the sometimes stifling and repressive world she was born into, and music was her outlet. I saw that in her before I was even school age. I knew it was the music and I knew she was free there. And when I sang with her I got to be free, too. She put on wings and left the room, and I got to go with her. And so, yeah, she’s with me every time I step on a stage. And I always try to sing in a way that will help my audience to have the same experience that she gave me.

People need that. I wish I could do it better and more consistently than I do. But I try and I know it’s something worth striving for.

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You’re a mother now, too, and I wonder if you could talk about this strange, maybe serendipitous connection you’ve developed with Russia — both through your having adopted a Russian-born child with your husband, Greg Brown, and through this book of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry you discovered and turned into “The Trackless Woods.”

Our daughter spent her first six years in Russia and much of who she is, is still rooted in elements of her birth country and culture. So, there’s that. Then there just seems to be something in my nature or life experience that draws me to Russian literature. When I discovered the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, time stood still. I knew after reading the first poem a meeting had occurred, and some kind of work would come of it. That “work” turned out to be “The Trackless Woods.” Like just about any other recording I’ve made, I can listen back and imagine what I could have done better, but the spirit is strong in that record and the love for those poems and Anna’s will, courage and unique artistry comes through.

When we were working on the record, Richard Bennett, my friend and producer, would often say: “We might be able to do it better, but will it be as good?” It’s so easy to fall into that trap of perfecting the life right out of something. Music, raising a child … just about anything. It’s a fine line.

—Stephanie Smittle Get tickets to see Iris Dement Sunday, March 3, at uaptc.edu/charts. See the full interview online at arktimes.com/irisdement.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

When a couple of her jobs ended last March, photographer Kat Wilson of Fayetteville decided to quit struggling to cobble together various ways to make money and just concentrate on her work. The result is “The Year of the Kat,” which will feature a continuation of her “Habitat” series, works in her new “Warrior Women” series, a “Selfie-Throne” and her emoji paintings when it opens March 4 at UA Fort Smith. The show is in the Windgate Art & Design Gallery; there will be a reception from 5-7 p.m. March 15.

The “Warrior Women” series features women, breasts bared, decked out for battle in various ways: a vest made of metal buttons, a tulle headdress, swords, beads and so forth. “The idea, Wilson says on her website, is “to dissect, redefine, and rectify a women’s clothes to create armor that helps empower women during these strange hard times.”

Cara Sullivan, whose botanical paintings are on exhibition at the Historic Arkansas Museum, aren’t botanical paintings in the field guide sense, but rather details of flowers and leaves against a flat background she’s spray-painted. The work is part of the “Flourish” show at HAM and is paired with Jessica Mongeon’s landscapes. Also at HAM: work by sign painter and popup muralist Olivia Trimble of Fayetteville, whose scramble to cover racist graffiti in Fayetteville in 2016 was reported in the Arkansas Times’ Rock Candy blog. HAM will hold a reception from 5-8 p.m.

Friday, March 8, 2nd Friday Art Night; Tonya Leeks will provide the music and New Province Brewing Co. will provide the beer.

Gallery 360 opens “Ultraviolet,” an exhibition of work that will be viewed under blacklight, with a reception at 6 p.m. March 1. See glowing work by Robert Bean, Diane Harper, Carmen Alexandria, Matthew Castellano, Daniella Napolitano, Michael Shaeffer and more.

The gallery is at 900 S. Rodney Parham Road.

“Ultraviolet” will run though March 22. Gallery 360’s sister gallery, Gleanings, also opens “Found Artists,” paintings by Jerry Colburn and others, March 1.

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MARCH 2019 49

FOOD & DRINK

BRENDA’S TURNS OUT THE FRESHEST IN TOWN.

By RACHAEL BORNÉ Photography by BRIAN CHILSON 50 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

FAMILY AFFAIR: Brenda Martinez (photo at left), the namesake of the tortilleria, and her daughter Juliana Morena man the checkout counter of Tortilleria Brenda No. 1 on 65th St. The family produce and package 30,000 tortillas everyday (above).

B

renda Martinez was 5 years old in 1998, the year her father, Rafael Martinez, named his Southwest Little Rock tortilleria after her. Today, Tortilleria Brenda’s two locations produce and package upward of 30,000 tortillas every day, and the company remains the only business of its kind in Central Arkansas.

Rafael immigrated to the United States from Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1984 and spent time in Texas and North Carolina washing dishes and laying concrete before following his brother Eduardo to Arkansas to open a business. “El quiso algo propio, ser su propio jefe,” Brenda told me when I visited Tortilleria Brenda No. 1, located in a strip mall on 65th Street. (“He wanted something of his own, to be his own boss.”)

Twenty years later, Rafael now owns the original tortilleria on 5317 65th St. and a second location at 7616 Colonel Glenn Road, which he opened in 2005. The second location is along the section of Colonel Glenn between University Avenue and Stagecoach Road, where you’ll find equal parts used tire shops and hole-in-the-wall restaurants, places like Dr. Detail, Chicken Wangs Cafe and the bygone Asher Dairy Bar. Tortilleria Brenda No. 2 is directly across the street from Davis Trailer & Equipment and pretty easy to miss, if it weren’t for the cantaloupe-colored paint job and a small hand-painted sign bearing the company’s logo: a festive woman wearing traditional Guanajuato garb in red, green and white. She’s pictured mid-step and delighted to be carrying a basket full of tortillas. There is something deeply satisfying in visiting a local purveyor for a specific, handmade good.

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KNEADING AND PACKAGING: Francisco Martinez shapes cornmeal dough before it goes in the maquinas; Maria Aualos weighs and packages the tortillas.

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A group of about seven workers produce the full suite of Brenda products: white and yellow corn tortillas, flour tortillas, crispfried tostadas and big bags of chips. They range in size from la chiquita for tacos — the size of a tea saucer — to a flour tortilla as big as a vinyl LP, intended for burritos. They are made simply, with fresh ingredients and seasoned machines.

During my trips to Brenda’s, I tasted tortillas straight off the conveyor belt, hot to the touch and expelling steamy air. The mouthfeel of a fresh corn tortilla is soft and pillowy.

It may split easily under pressure, which is why many taquerias double-up under the weight of a meat filling. Fresh flour tortillas are equally soft, but have a tender elasticity good for burrito- or quesadilla-making.

On the back wall of Tortilleria Brenda No. 1 is a patchwork of Martinez family memorabilia: an assortment of framed family photos and certificates, a soccer trophy, a couple of crucifixes, rosaries and crafty greeting cards.

Next to the family shrine is an equally impres-

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EVERY TUESDAY AT 6 P.M. 1316 MAIN ST. • (501) 372-9990

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Corner of 6th & Collin • Across from Rebel Kettle Antiques to industrial equipment…we have it all!

WE BUY TOO! STOP IN TODAY! 501-258-7122

• Electronics • Supplies

• Furniture • Industrial Goods •

• Items in Storage Areas or Off-Site Buildings

• EVERYTHING! ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 53

DOE’S KNOWS LUNCH & DINNER. Lunch: Mon- Fri 11am-2pm Dinner: Mon-Thur 5-9pm • Fri & Sat 5-10pm FULL BAR & PRIVATE PARTY ROOM BEST STEAK

BEST CATFISH

1023 West Markham • Downtown Little Rock 501-376-1195 • www.doeseatplace.net

LENT CENTRAL GRILLED FISH SHRIMP

CATFISH OYSTERS CRAB CALAMARI FISH TACOS 511 President Clinton Ave, 501-375-3474 FlyingFishInThe.net

Come taste what you’ve been missing!

BEST ITALIAN AROUND THE STATE (CONWAY)

Downtown Conway 915 Front Street | 501-205-8751 Downtown Russellville Downtown Van Buren 319 West Main | 479-747-1707 810 Main Street | 479-262-6225 pastagrillrestaurant.com 54 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

sive altar to the Virgen de Guadalupe, complete with veladoras (religious candles), an artificial magnolia garland and an enormous Mexican flag. Rafael proudly showed me Brenda’s quinceanera portrait, a 2003 award from El Latino for Best Tortillas and a photo of his hacienda in Guanajuato, where he still keeps cows and grows corn and wheat.

When he came to Arkansas, Rafael had never made tortillas on a large scale, but he was ambitious and determined to get his business off the ground. At that time, he told me, there wasn’t a large Mexican population in Central Arkansas, and certainly no tortilleria in town.

Rafael invested in a Celorio Tortilladora, an old school tortilla-making machine, and started visiting trailer parks off Baseline and Geyer Springs roads to sell his product directly to the community, going door to door.

The Martinez family has a distinct enterprising gene, and Tortilleria Brenda is as homegrown as it gets. Brenda greets customers and processes paperwork in the afternoons when she’s not in class at UA Little Rock, where she studies social work. Her brother Ramiro manages the Colonel Glenn location; another brother, Francisco, manages the 65th Street location; and yet another brother, Jorge, started Tortilleria Cadengo in Northeast Memphis. Rafael’s brothers Eduardo and David are the proprietors of Taqueria Karina (next door to Tortilleria Brenda No. 1 on 65th Street), Taqueria el Palenque (on Rodney Parham) and mercados El Guadalupana on Colonel Glenn and Del Campo a la Ciudad at 6500 S. University Ave. The Martinez family is responsible for the sale of some of the best Mexican food in town.

In both tortillerias, the presence of the maquinas tortilladoras (tortilla making machines) is entrancing. The machines look prehistoric: They are dark gunmetal, heavy-duty and screech loudly with the sound of productivity. Their gears, levers and cogs are greased up and threaten to remove a careless finger at the blink of an eye. I asked Rafael if there had ever been an accident in his line of work.

He smiled and raised his right hand, wiggling a little three-inch nub where his ring finger used to be.

Each maquina has a large reservoir where enormous masses of kneaded corn masa are pushed through an extruder. I watched Francisco take good care of the dough, scraping and pushing it down through the canal. With bare hands, he slapped the dough into place, trimmed back the excess and started the process all over again. Chainmail conveyor belts then carry hundreds of tortillas from the mouth of a circular cutout, over a flame-heated surface where they cook and fill with hot air. The tortillas deflate and cool as they travel on a vibrating switchback before they get spit out in the next room.

The recipe for corn tortillas is as simple as it comes: water and Maseca cornmeal are combined into a dense, sticky dough. Tortillas de harina (flour tortillas) require butter, salt and baking powder. A worker in the tortilleria rolls the flour dough into hundreds of small rounds, then places them, three at a

The recipe for corn tortillas is as simple as it comes: water and Maseca cornmeal are combined into a dense, sticky dough.

time, on a machine that presses and flattens them in a split second.

The equipo de trabajadores (team of laborers) is the other star of the show, powered not by gas, but by a damn good work ethic. Moving in concert with the machines, the workers gather, weigh, count and package thousands of tortillas. They are masters of the assembly line and the twist-tie, they move swiftly and nonstop, catching and sorting each disc where it belongs. I talked to a number of folks stacking tortillas, and some had been working at Brenda’s for more than five or 10 years.

The operation feels deeply community driven, and everyone I met was elated to share the tortilla-making process with a visitor.

Tortilleria Brenda No. 2 caters to the commercial market, selling to local mercados, grocery stores and restaurants in Central Arkansas and as far as East Texas. Brenda’s owns the local tortilla market, but is rivaled in Northwest Arkansas by Los Altos Tortillas as well as La Banderita, a national producer with plants across the U.S and which sells in Walmart and Target. Francisco explained that business has gotten tougher as more varieties and brands saturate the market, but he claimed that no other tortilla is a fresh or small-batch as Brenda’s.

Tortilleria Brenda No. 1 on 65th Street has a small storefront for individual shoppers.

There you can grab a bag or two of tortillas for your pantry. A large cooler is stocked with homemade cajeta (Mexican caramel sauce), Nopalitos picados (diced Nopal cactus) and orange Fanta in glass bottles.

At Tortilleria Brenda No. 1, you can buy a five-pound bag of corn tortillas for $3, piled 60 high. A two-pound bag will set you back $1.50. A bag of chips is $2.50 and tostadas are $1. Ten medium flour tortillas cost $1.50 and 12 huge tortillas are $2.50. In other words: Brenda’s is a steal, and there’s nowhere else in Central Arkansas to get tortillas as fresh or handmade.

Serving up the Best Mexican Food in Central Arkansas year after year

BEST MEXICAN FOOD AROUND THE STATE (HOT SPRINGS) BEST MEXICAN FOOD (LITTLE ROCK)

THREE LOCATIONS:

LITTLE ROCK, 3024 CANTRELL RD • BENTON, 17401 I-30 • HOT SPRINGS, 3836 CENTRAL AVE WWW.LAHAMEX.COM

Serving Dinner Monday-Thursday 5 pm - 9:30 pm Friday & Saturday 5 pm - 10 pm

www.Riverfront-Steakhouse.com Located in the Wyndham Hotel 2 Riverfront Place, North Little Rock, AR 501 375 7825 ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 55

56 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

ALL HAIL THE ANTI-HOTEL

TRAVEL

TAKE SHELTER IN AN ARKANSAS ODDITY.

By STEPHANIE SMITTLE

S OZARKS UNDERGROUND: Beckham Creek Cave is underground luxury for grotto-goers, stalactites and all.

omewhere between the heyday of baby-pink mid-century tourist courts and 2019, hotels got dreadfully boring. Where did we go so wrong? And who can we blame? The rise of the interstate highway system, maybe, or the supersizing of the hospitality industry? The ways in which business class accommodations began to play to the beige-colored middle — to those just looking for some predictable, perfunctory respite while attending corporate conferences or training sessions? Mysteries of the milquetoast notwithstanding, here’s to a handful of folks in Arkansas carrying the torch for the anti-hotel, offering up a night’s sleep on a houseboat, in a treehouse or inside a living cave.

Beckham Creek Cave Parthenon (Newton County) beckhamcave.com What a saintly feat of engineering — or maybe an intrepid feat of hubris — the Beckham Creek Cave is. The property, situated on a private, 260-acre resort in the Ozark Mountains near Parthenon, is so singular and bizarro it’s garnered attention from The New York Times, CNBC and travel magazines of all ilk. Originally outfitted as a bomb shelter and transformed into a top-dollar, four-bedroom/four-bathroom luxury lodge, Beckham Creek Cave is an exercise in contrast. Distinctly anthropogenic stuff like right angles and stainless steel faucets and a wall-mounted LED television gets mashed up against flowstone and stalactites, and an indoor waterfall emerges from an underground spring, itself a source of the lodge’s geothermal heating. For those willing and able to book the cave at $1,600/night ($1,200 during the off-season), patrician pastimes are abundant: There’s a catch-and-release pond, horseback riding and even an onsite helipad so you can crash-hawk in there like Oprah.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 57

SALOON STYLE: Diamonds Old West (above and top right) plays on the mining town ambiance of Murfreesboro.

FOR THE EDWARDIAN FAN: The Edwardian Inn in Helena-West Helena is a stately place to spend a night.

A NIGHT ON THE RIVER: The gentle waves of the Arkansas River will rock you asleep aboard the River Nights boats.

FOR AN ELEVATING WEEKED: Hot Springs Treehouses near Hot Springs National Park offer hot tubs on high, plus a creekside house.

58 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

Every Tuesday night is BrewPub Cinema.

March 1 Hollow Jets March 2 Abandon the Artifice March 4 Making of Close Calls Special Watch Party March 8 Hamans Wrath March 9 Sychosys March 10 Stonecutters & Hell Camino & Czarus 7 p.m. $7

Diamonds Old West Cabins 2097 State Highway 19, Murfreesboro diamondscabins.com There’s already a gold-rush sort of feeling baked into any trip to Pike County. Murfreesboro’s Crater of Diamonds State Park has been luring tourists to its kimberlite pipe since 1906, and nowadays, visor-clad daytrippers saunter through the park’s lobby carrying sifting screens, eager to turn the fruits of a 100-million-year-old volcanic vent into assets of the highest liquidity. Given all that, Diamonds Old West Cabins seem like the next logical conclusion. The roadside row of cabins is the perfect caricature of an Old West frontier town, giving you the feeling you’ve stepped a few yards off of state Highway 19 and straight into an episode of “Gunsmoke.” Each cabin bears its moniker across its facade: Saloon, Livery, Miss Kitty’s, Bank, Blacksmith, Sheriff’s Office/Jail. Thematic commitment is devout, but not constraining: The property also boasts a pirate ship-themed playground, a horse-trot pedal car track, a giant community teepee for communal s’mores-making, oversized music chimes, a horseshoe toss, occasional foam parties (“Five feet of hypoallergenic suds!” “The Great Diamond Wash!”) and a tiny building whose floor is covered in a foot or so of dry corn kernels, hailed on the Diamonds Old West website with feigned incredulity: “Corn Pit? Yes! A Corn Pit!”

Edwardian Inn 317 Biscoe St., Helena Helena-West Helena’s charms are many, but they are not lavish ones. The musty, storied storefronts on historic Cherry Street — the ones half-obscured by throngs of buskers and nomads hawking airbrushed crop tops during the annual King Biscuit Blues Festival — tell a story of the mercantile class. A few blocks away, at the Edwardian Inn, one can see how the other half lived, post-Reconstruction. Built in 1904 by cotton magnate William A. Short, the Edwardian Inn estate functioned as a boarding house, an alcohol rehabilitation center and a funeral home before being outfitted as a bed and breakfast in 1983. Two 1915 French Drop chandeliers greet guests in the lobby and cast a glow on the quarter-sawn oak paneling, an ornate oak

staircase and stately wooden columns. The Helena Advertising & Promotion Commission notes that 36 different types of wood were used on the inn’s first floor alone.

Hot Springs Treehouses Whittington Township, Hot Springs hotspringstreehouses.com

March 15 Sabine Valley & StiffBeat March 16 Sock Drive for the VAN! Won Run, and More!

March 23 High March 28 THE OBSESSED, Tempus Terra and Nightspake

Along a forested ridge about five minutes GREAT outside of Hot Springs National Park, a trio AMERICAN OF of cabin rooftops poke their heads out of the THE BEER FESTIVAL FINALIST fray of foliage. Inside are stately living rooms Gold medal winner. with high wooden rafters and outfitted with OF THE gas fireplaces and furnished withGREAT big comAMERICAN BEER 923 WFESTIVAL 7th St • Little Rock Gold medal winner. fy couches, all bathed in natural light. Each 501-375-8466 cabin has one bedroom with a luxurious kingwww. vinosbrewpub.com sized bed; forest-facing decks have hot tubs. vinos@vinosbrewpub.com Oh, and for those averse to heights or unable to traverse treehouse stairsteps, the property also offers a creekside house — built in the 1950s and restored since, save for the vintage bathroom — with shiplap walls, a whirlpool tub, a private deck, three bedrooms and a full kitchen. Room rates, booked through the Airbnb platform, range $175-$185; not bad for private accommodations that promise spells in a hot tub under the moonlight. Travel is, after all, about perspective, and raising your eye level to the treeline of the Ouachita National Forest is a damn good start.

TOAST TOWN TOAST TOWN FINALIST

River Nights and City Lights North Little Rock airbnb.com/rooms/23859338 For roughly half of what you’d pay at a downtown Little Rock hotel to peer out your window at the mighty Arkansas River, you could let its waves rock you to sleep. A trio of quaint, tidy riverboats is up on Airbnb, each of which docks in the Rockwater Marina on the North Little Rock side of the river. A quick search of listings in the area will turn up “River Nights and City Lights,” “Sleep on the Water Under Stars” and “Sundowner Bayliner” — all coowned and managed by Ellen Sullivan. That first listing, on a boat Sullivan calls “Sundowner, Too,” has an upper floor “porch” to catch the sunrise or sunset, depending on your own circadian whims. For cyclists and hikers, the Arkansas River Trail, the Argenta Arts District and the River Market district are minutes away.

serving better than bar food all night long

MARCH 1 -Jamie Louandthe Hullaballow/ Colin Gilmoreand Christy Hays ($7 - 10pm) 8 - Polyester Robot ($7 - 10pm) 9 - CosmOcean ($7 - 10pm) 15 - Cash’d Out ($13 pre-sale // $15 DOS Centralarkansastickets.com) 16 - Mama Said String Bandw/John Henry + Friends ($7 – 10pm) 17 - St.Patty’s Day Partyw/ Big Red Flag 23 -Alabamaafter partyw/The Salty Dogs ($7 – 11pm) 29 -The Mike Dillon Band ($8 – 10pm)

Check-out the bands at Fourquarterbar.com

Open until 2am every night!

415 Main St North Little Rock (501) 313-4704 • fourquarterbar.com ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 59

WHAT'S HAPPENING HOT SPRINGS! MARCH 2019

SPONSORED BY OAKLAWN RACING & GAMING AND VISIT HOT SPRINGS

TILL MAY 4

OAKLAWN

March is an action-packed month at Oaklawn, highlighted by Fat Tuesday, St. Patrick’s Day and world-class horse racing topped by the $1 million Rebel Stakes on Saturday, March 16. oaklawn.com

MARCH 16

SMASH MOUTH

Smash Mouth will perform on Saturday, March 16, the night before St. Patrick’s Day, from the outdoor stage at the east end of the 98-foot-long Bridge Street.

The concert is free and begins at 8 p.m.

MARCH 17

WORLD'S SHORTEST ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE

Make your plans today. Book a room. Rent a car. Design a float. Let’s get green in Hot Springs! Ralph Maccio will be the Grand Marshal of the World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Stephen “tWitch” Boss, Ellen DeGeneres’ favorite DJ and “So You Think You Can Dance” star, was announced in August as the 2019 parade’s official starter. The parade annually attracts throngs to watch an insanely zany collection of marchers, strutters, dancers, waddlers and floats that cover the 98foot length of Bridge Street in the heart of downtown Hot Springs.

Bring the family!

MARCH 17

THREE DOG NIGHT

Music icons Three Dog Night will perform a free public concert in downtown Hot Springs on Sunday, March 17, 2019, immediately after the First Ever 16th Annual World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade® on the world-famous, 98-foot-long Bridge Street.

60 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

THRU MARCH 15

DAFFODIL DAYS & TULIP EXTRAVAGANZA AT GARVAN WOODLAND GARDENS

MARCH AT OAKLAWN

Oaklawn’s Infield opens on March 16th with the St. Patrick’s Day Party SPECIAL EVENTS IN MARCH AT OAKLAWN March 5: 7th Annual Bourbon Street Bash March 16: St. Patrick’s Day Party March 23: Rock & Ribs BBQ Festival March 30: Baggo and Brews Weekend OAKLAWN’S LIVE MUSIC LINE-UP FOR MARCH @ SILKS BAR & GRILL March 1-2: Big Dam Horns, 10 p.m.-2am March 8-9: Electric 5, 10 p.m-2 a.m.

March 15-16: Mayday by Midnight, 10 p.m-2 a.m.

March 22-23: Oreo Blue, 10 p.m.-2 a.m.

March 29-30: Mister Lucky, 10 p.m-2 a.m. , MARCH @ POP’S LOUNGE Karaoke Wednesdays, 8-11 p.m.

Jacob Flores,Thursdays 5-9 p.m.

Susan Erwin, Fridays & Saturdays 5-9 p.m.

MARCH 15- 18

LOW KEY

The 15th Annual Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival kicks off March 15, 2019, in Hot Springs. The festival will feature over 45 acts from all over the U.S. and Canada over the course of five nights. The festival has built a reputation for bringing cutting-edge, up-andcoming artists to Hot Springs and this year’s festival won't disappoint. For the full lineup go to www.valleyofthevapors.com.

MARCH 30-31

CELEBRATE WOMEN

This year’s Hot Springs International Women’s Film Festival will be hosted by Tamara Glynn, an American film actress best known for her work in the horror genre, recently starring in "Halloween 5." Laura Park Lincoln will be at the festival present an actor’s workshop. www.hotspringscentraltheater. com for details.

SAVE THE DATE

Hot Springs' Historic Central Theater & Performing Arts Center will host the 1st annual Hot Springs Photography Festival May-June. Details at hotspringscentraltheater.com.

The Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa Is Excited To Present The 2019 Bridal Expo

Sunday March 24th, 1-4pm $5 Admission MARCH 24TH

CALLING ALL BRIDES Hot Springs Bridal Expo 2019 at The Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa Sunday, March 24 1-4 pm.

Vendors at the expo include bakeries, florists, venues, entertainment, photographers, wedding planners and more. Tickets are $5 per person.

Attend the Arlington’s Sunday Brunch in the Venetian Dining Room and receive free entry to the expo. Attendees who stay with us on Saturday can receive a special rate of $99 and Sunday night of $69, plus tax, subject to availability. Contact Gaye Hardin 501-609-2558.

Join us for Sunday piano brunch and enjoy free admission.

For More Information Call 501-609-2564 or Email: taulgur@ arlingonhotel.com Special stayover rates include free admission for 2.

Saturday @ $99 and Sunday @ $69 (subject to availability, tax & fees)

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 61

GET YOUR DRINK & DANCE ON.

IRISH LOVE

BEST MEXICAN AROUND THE STATE

A PPETIZERS,SO UP & SA LA D ,SA N D W IC H ES,STEA K, SEA FO O D ,PA STA D ISH ES A N D SO M UC H M O RE! 1209 Malvern Avenue • Hot Springs • (501) 624-6262 • www.tacomama.net

APPETIZERS, SOUP & SALAD , SANDWICHES, A PPETI ZERS,SO UPSTEAK, & SA LA D ,SA N D W IC H ES,STEA K, SEAFOOD, PASTA DISHESSEA AND MORE! FOSO O DMUCH ,PA STA D ISH ES A N D SO M UC H M O RE! The Ultimate in Fine SUPERIOR BATHHOUSE BREWERY RR EE AA DD EE RR ’S ’S FamilyZERS, Dining! SO UP & SA LAWhat better way take waters on St. Patrick’s A PPETI D ,SA ND WtoIC Hthe ES, STEA K, CC HH OO IC IC EE

BB EE SS TT AA PP PP EE TT IZ IZ EE RR

2018

“W e w ou ld like to tha nk ea ch a nd every one ofou r drinkM it inUC beerHform?

Superior SEA FO O D ,PA STA D ISH ESDay A than N D toSO MO RE! cu stom ers for the la steightw ond erfu l yea rs.O u r fa m ilies Bathhouse Brewery is excited to announce the 5th annual launch of its always-anticipated Killer look forw a rd to ha ving you enjoy m a ny m ore yea rs of Irish Red ale. Grab one before the parade and it may m em ora ble fa m ily m om ents a tthe Bleu M onkey G rill ~”ZERS,just A PPETI SObeUP SAday!

LA329 D ,Central SA NAve. D W IC H ES,STEA your&lucky “W e w ou ld like to t~haThe nkOeasegu chSEA a andFaFO ever ofSTA ou r D ISH ES A N D SO M UC H M O RE er m ily OyDone ,PA s for the la steightw ond erfu l yea rs.O MARGARITAS! u r fa m ilies C o m e a nd enjo y o ucur Nst EWommer enu look f or w a r d t o ha ving you enj oy m a ny m or e yea rs of T he Ult im at e w ith a d d ed G lu ten Free o ptio ns ! in Fine m em ora ble fa m ily m om ents a tthe Bleu M onkey G rill ~” “W e w ou ld like to tha nk ea ch a nd every one ofou r 4253 Central Avenue (Next to La Quinta Inn & Suites) Fam ily Dining! ~ The O segu era Fa m ily cu stom ers for the la steightw ond erfu l yea rs.O u r fa m ilies R E A D E R ’S 501.520.4800 • www.bleumonkeygrill.com C H O IC E C o m e a nd enjo y o u r N EW m enu look forw a rd to ha ving you enjoy m a ny m ore yea rs of B E ST Ultim ate w i t h a d d ed G l u t en Fr ee o pt i o ! fa m ily m om ents a tTthe A P P E T IZ E R m em orns a ble he Bleu M onkey G rill ~” in “W e w ou ld like toFine tha nk ea ch a nd every one ofou r ~ The O segu era Fa m ily Fam ily Dining! cu st om er s f or t he la st eightw ond erfu l yea rs.O u r fa m ilies 2 0 18 R E A D E R ’S C o m e a nd enjo y o u r N EW m enu look forw a rd to ha ving you enjoy m a ny m ore yea rs of C H O IC E Ultim ate w ith a d d ed G lu ten Free o ptor io ns ! fa m ily m om ents a tTthe B E ST m em a ble he Bleu M onkey G rill ~”

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4253 C ent B EraS lTA venuew• (N La EQRuinta Inn & Suites) A Pext P EtoT IZ LA HACIENDA w w w .bleum onkeyg rill.com Ole! Every Wednesday, ALL DAY, $5 margaritas!

R E A D E R ’S 3836 Central Avenue, open 11 a.m.-10 p.m.

2 0 18

C H O IC E

B E ST HOT SPRINGS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S FILM FESTIVAL,4253 MARCH CA ent rEaTlIZ A venue • 501.520.IT 4800 P P30-31 ER SHAKE (N extto La Q uinta Inn & 1008 Central Ave, Hot Springs National Park • (501) 859-9148 • www.hotspringscentraltheater.com

2 0 18

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w w w .bleum onkeyg rill.com

4253 C entra lA venue • 501.520.4800 (N extto La Q uinta Inn & Suites)

w w w .bleum onkeyg rill.com

4253 C entra lA venue • 501.520.4 (N extto La Q uinta Inn & Suites)

w w w .bleum onkeyg rill.com

STARLITE CLUB

Come follow our rules, and no parking on the dance floor. 232 Ouachita Ave. 62 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

GET YOUR GRUB ON.

GRAB & GO

WELDON'S MEAT MARKET

Has grab & go casseroles, hand-cut steaks, your favorite fresh seafood and deli meats! Don’t forget to grab its famous twice-baked potatoes, cheeses, fresh-baked breads and pies. Try out the Best Butcher from around the state! 3911 Central Ave.

BRUNCH

TACO MAMA

Hit up our brunch before you bet on the ponies.

Serving brunch up 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday: Hangover burrito, cereal shake, brunch punch and smoked brisket hash. 1209 Malvern Ave.

PASTA SINCE 1981

W

’S MEAT MARK N O D EL“QUALITY TELLS, QUALITY SELLS” ET BEST BUTCHER AROUND THE STATE

BLEU MONKEY GRILL

Check out the sauteed chicken tossed with mushrooms and onions in a delicious Madeira wine sauce with penne pasta. 4263 Central Ave.

EVERYTHING IS CUT TO YOUR SPECIFICATION, AND WE’RE BIG ON CUSTOMER SERVICE! 3911 CENTRAL AVE. • HOT SPRINGS • (501) 525-2487 ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 63

Giving Back Arkansas Times presents “Giving Back” to raise awareness about a variety of Arkansas nonprofits and the services they provide to our community.

Our goal is to give readers a better understanding of each organization so they will be inspired to get involved through donations, volunteerism and more.

Junior League of Little Rock For nearly 100 years, the Junior League of Little Rock (JLLR) has been promoting volunteerism, developing the potential of women and improving the community through the effective action and leadership of trained volunteers.

The current community projects of JLLR align to this mission and focus on the areas of nutrition and wellness, school preparedness, financial stability, and leadership development. Events like Boosters & Big Rigs and programs like KOTA Camp, Nightingales, and L.Y.F.E. provide children and families with opportunities to improve their overall health. Stuff the Bus and Little Readers Rock put school supplies and books in the hands of LRSD students.

The JLLR Nonprofit Center and Nonprofit Board Institute help grow and train volunteers to be effective outside of the League.

One way you can help support these important projects is by registering for the Downtown Dash 10K/5K/1K at jllr.org/downtown-dash.

401 Scott St., Little Rock 72201, 501-375-5557 2019 Downtown Dash: Saturday, March 30

THE MISSION of the nonprofit Party with a Heart is to increase awareness, education, and support for causes within our community by bringing women together at fun, simple, and unique events.

Kevin Cole, internationally known artist and Pine Bluff native, gives a tour to Pine Bluff High School art students at a recent AfriCOBRA exhibit at the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas.

WE BELIEVE education is the foundation to happier and healthier lives and fundraising should be fun and not burdensome for organizations, no matter their size. When money raised within our community stays here, we build stronger and more compassionate communities.

Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas (ASC) The Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas (ASC) serves as a cultural crossroad: engaging, educating, and entertaining through the arts and sciences. For 50 years, we have served our community and region through free, high-caliber, hands-on programming in the arts with an emphasis on the intersection between the arts, STEM, cultural heritage and healthy living. ASC celebrates the cultural diversity of the arts through our Permanent Collection and collecting scope of African-American artists, art of the Delta and Arkansas artists. In 2019, we will embark on a new project, The ARTSpace for Creative Thinking & Entrepreneurship, a multiuse space designed to serve as an arts resource partner for area schools, host art-based career workshops and be a proactive contributor to the revitalization of Pine Bluff. Creativity not only changes lives, it can change communities. Your donation to The ARTSpace project can help make that change.

WE ARE WOMEN gathered together for one cause to bring energy, passion and momentum to that cause.

P.O. Box 94725 North Little Rock, AR 72190 501-425-1988 info@partywithaheart.org

701 S Main St., Pine Bluff 71601, 870-536-3375 www.asc701.org

A special advertising promotion 64 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

DOWNTOWN DASH MOVIE MADNESS THEME 10K $35 / 5K $25 / 1K $10

SATURDAY, MARCH 30

Junior League of Little Rock

The 10th Annual Get Up & Give Collection Drive asks Arkansans to contribute necessities to the children and families in the care of Methodist Family Health. The project lasts during the entire 40 days of Lent, March 6 through April 18. Both children and adults can participate by donating personal hygiene items, clothes, shoes, school supplies, bedding funds and other necessities to the Methodist Counseling Clinic in their community. All items contributed should be new.

Monetary donations also can be contributed so specific items can be purchased to meet the needs of these children and families.

Drop-off locations include: Alma: 1209 Hwy 71N, Suite B, Alma, AR 72921; phone 479-632-1022 Batesville: 500 E. Main St., Suite 310, Batesville, AR 72501; phone 870-569-4890 Fayetteville: 74 W. Sunbridge Drive, Fayetteville, AR 72703; phone 479-582-5565 Heber Springs: 407 S. 7th St., Heber Springs, AR 72543; phone 501-365-3022 Hot Springs: 100 Ridgeway, Suite 5, Hot Springs, AR 71901; phone 501-318-6066 Jonesboro: 2239 S. Caraway, Suite M, Jonesboro, AR 72401; phone 870-910-3757 Little Rock: 1600 Aldersgate Road, Suite 100B, Little Rock, AR 72205; phone 501-5373991 Magnolia: 621 E. North St., Magnolia, AR 71753; phone 870-234-0739

register at jllr.org/downtown-dash

$9.00 RIVERDALE 10 VIP CINEMA 2600 CANTRELL RD

F. GARY GRAY’S

SET IT OFF 7 P.M. TUESDAY MARCH 19

For Royal Service, call

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HISTORY

Revenge of the Elite THE CITY MANAGER SYSTEM AND THE COLLAPSE OF RACIAL MODERATION IN LITTLE ROCK, 1955-1957.

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF THE AMALGAMATED TRANSIT UNION

By MICHAEL PIERCE

O

ALLIES OF LABOR: Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann (second from left), Teamsters leader Odell Smith (third from left), attorney and political strategist Henry Woods (far right) and others in 1956.

n March 2, 1956, when the first buses of Little Rock’s new unionowned Citizens Coach Company hit the streets, they did so without the traditional Jim Crow signs that directed black passengers to the back. Moreover, the company never instructed its drivers to enforce segregation ordinances. This peaceful integration of the buses was kept quiet, probably known only to the trade unionists who organized the company, their allies within the civil rights community and the working-class folk who relied on public transportation.

Little Rock’s Union Labor Bulletin, though, justified integration more broadly on the day the buses started rolling: “Our Heavenly Father loves all the people he made …. The AFLCIO being under Him … realizes this fact.

Therefore, our group eternally teaches that there should be no discrimination because of creed, color or placement.”

Seven weeks later, when the integration of the buses became public, segregationists blamed the alliance of union and black leaders that had recently asserted itself in municipal politics. The previous fall had seen labor and black voters rejecting the city’s old-guard leadership and electing Woodrow Mann mayor and a sympathetic majority to the city council. These officials then encouraged the anti-union Capitol Transit to surrender its charter, handed the franchise to the union-

owned Citizens Coach Company, and allowed the bus integration. The Arkansas Recorder, the city’s segregationist weekly, insisted that Citizens Coach should be renamed “AFL-CIONAACP-CCC” as a reminder of who controlled the city.

The clout of the labor-black political coalition also frustrated the city’s old guard who traditionally controlled municipal politics and saw itself as a natural aristocracy.

Alarmed that its challengers wielded enough influence to drive out Capitol Transit, capitalize Citizens Coach and secure the franchise to operate it, the old guard pushed for the adoption of the city manager system that would remove Mann and his allies from office and restore elite rule. Those segregationists who were not members of the old guard readily joined the city manager crusade. The approval of the city manager system in 1956 represents the triumph of an alliance of elites and segregationists over the labor-black coalition. Much like Arkansas’s disfranchisement measures of the 1890s, including 1891 ballot reform measures and the introduction of a poll tax in 1892, Little Rock’s city manager system curtailed a biracial working-class insurgency, ensured that political power remained in elite hands and was helped along by virulent racists. _________________________________

Little Rock’s labor-black alliance dates to 1948. That year, both groups helped elect Democrat Sidney McMath governor and defeat attempts to swing Arkansas into the Dixiecrat column. The alliance was re-energized when McMath ran for the U.S. Senate. McMath worked to make sure his African-American supporters purchased poll tax receipts before Oct. 31, 1953, to vote in 1954’s Democratic primary by securing resources from the national labor federations to qualify black voters. The Congress of Industrial Organization dispatched its top black organizer who helped I.S. McClinton and Harry Bass form the Little Rock-based Citizens’ Committee to lead the effort. The labor federations purchased poll tax receipts in bulk for the Citizens’ Committee to distribute to black voters, increasing the number of black Arkansas voters to a record 65,000.

Although McMath lost his Senate race, Little Rock’s labor-black coalition rushed to help Orval Faubus, a McMath protege, in the runoff for governor. Faubus’ point man in Pulaski County was Odell Smith, the local Teamsters leader who ran Arkansas’s joint AFL and CIO political operation. As the runoff neared, Smith met with unionists and black activists at the Grady Manning Hotel to organize the final drive for Faubus. He handed out thousands of pink “tickets” listing the coalition’s endorsed candidates that were ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 67

distributed to voters on Election Day. This and similar efforts paid off. Daisy Bates later credited “labor, Negroes, and liberals” for Faubus’s victory — a bitter irony, considering the governor is today remembered for the opportunistic alliance he struck with segregationists just a few years later during the 1957 Central High crisis.

The emergence of a powerful, union-led, biracial working-class coalition worried Little Rock’s old guard. These businessmen and professionals had long controlled the city. At the core of their worldview was a faith that education, experience and virtue had placed them atop the civic hierarchy. These were men who did not tolerate challengers and could marshal tremendous resources in defense of what they saw as their civic prerogatives. Rather than exercising power overtly, the old guard operated discreetly, leaving office-holding to a few members and working through organizations like the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce.

Conflicts between the old guard and the labor-black coalition erupted several times before the establishment of the integrated bus system. In March 1955, Odell Smith’s Teamsters led a strike of some 200 delivery drivers (mostly white) and production workers (mostly black) against Terry Dairy.

The dispute revolved around wages. Production workers, who were exempt from overtime regulations, earned less than the federal minimum wage for their 54-hour week.

The Teamsters demanded a 20 percent increase for the lowest paid workers and overtime pay. After the dairy rejected any wage increase, the Teamsters walked out.

The strike was acrimonious from the start, with reports of threats and harassment coming from both sides, and settled into a battle of attrition.

In June 1955, a strike of bus drivers and mechanics against Capitol Transit joined the Terry Dairy dispute on the front pages. Members of Division 704 of the Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway and Motor Coach Employees sought higher wages, noting that Little Rock drivers averaged 40 cents an hour less than the industry average. Capitol Transit refused to negotiate with Division 704. Like the Terry Dairy conflict, the bus drivers’ strike settled into a stalemate marked by bombings and gunfire that struck terror but did not result in any deaths or serious injuries.

Most public officials and politicians sided with the striking drivers and mechanics.

North Little Rock’s city council threatened revocation of Capitol Transit’s franchise if it did not negotiate, and several Little Rock aldermen voiced similar sentiments. Aldermen in both cities criticized the employment of “scabs,” insisting that these men could 68 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

not be trusted around women and children.

Division 704 hired former Governor McMath and his political strategist, Henry Woods, to represent it.

Initially about wages, the bus strike evolved into a conflict over who would govern the city. Only Little Rock Mayor Pratt Remmel, a Republican member of the old guard, expressed sympathy for Capitol Transit. Like others of his class, Remmel had long been hostile to organized labor. In 1946, he had helped establish the Arkansas Free Enterprise Association, which sought to roll back the substantial gains Arkansas trade unionists had made during World War II. The federal government had encouraged wartime

unionization, anxious to ensure labor peace in the construction trades and at the defense factories across Central and South Arkansas.

When the war ended, Remmel joined with other business leaders to warn that the “infiltration of union labor leaders, union labor bosses, union labor policies and union labor practices” threatened Arkansas’s postwar prosperity.

Little Rock trade unionists concluded that Remmel was the main impediment to resolving the bus dispute, and they got behind Woodrow Mann, an insurance executive challenging him in the November 1955 election. Mann, a political novice, allowed Odell Smith and Henry Woods to run his campaign, and they cast the election as a fight between downtown businessmen and working people. The campaign contrasted the poor roads, parks and services in working-class neighborhoods to the amenities found downtown

and on the affluent west side. Smith promised that Mann’s election would free the city from the grasp of the Chamber of Commerce, make it possible to settle the ongoing strikes, and “return democratic rule at City Hall on behalf of the little people.”

Remmel ran an unenthusiastic campaign.

As the incumbent, he did little more than present himself as a capable administrator and list his accomplishments. Arkansas’s segregationist movement joined the old guard in backing Remmel. Little Rock’s most influential segregationist, Amis Guthridge, raised money for Remmel. After the campaign, Remmel thanked Finos Phillips, chair of the White Citizens’ Councils of Arkansas, for his assistance, and Curt Copeland, a prominent segregationist who trafficked in tales of black sexual aggressiveness, praised Remmel as “among the outstanding men of the state.”

There were also contests for city council seats. The most acrimonious battles involved two incumbent aldermen who were also trade unionists: James Griffey (Ward 4) and Arthur Corley (Ward 2). The pair were outspoken in their support for Division 704 and had tangled with the Chamber of Commerce over downtown parking and sanitation. The Arkansas Gazette reported that it was an “open secret” that the chamber recruited Griffey and Corley’s challengers and managed their campaigns.

To mobilize voters, Little Rock labor employed the methods that trade unionists had perfected elsewhere.

Union members and spouses recorded the name and address of each person who had paid the poll tax on an index card and sorted the cards by precinct and block. Shoeboxes full of cards were distributed to block captains who would contact every eligible voter on the block to determine if he or she was for Mann, Remmel or undecided, marking each card. The captain then lobbied the undecideds.

Mann began Election Day at a 7 a.m. rally sponsored by Division 704. There, 500 trade unionists and spouses ate doughnuts, heard speeches and prepared for the get-out-thevote operation. Then block captains used the index cards to make sure that Mann supporters and the undecideds cast their votes, running phone banks and dispatching drivers.

I.S. McClinton assisted the campaign in black neighborhoods.

The Arkansas Gazette acknowledged that “overwhelming blocs of labor and negro votes” had carried Mann, Griffey and Corley to victory. But both daily papers suggested that Mann voters had been manipulated by

Democratic Party leaders and local bosses.

The Union Labor Bulletin took exception to this coverage, noting that economic elites had long portrayed working-class voters as irresponsible to justify their claims to power.

The labor paper warned that the two dailies were enemies of working people and would “try to turn a victory of the have-nots into a gain, and a big gain, for the haves.”

After Mann and the aldermen took office in January 1956, the dispute between Division 704 and Capitol Transit came to a head.

Meeting with elected officials, Smith, Woods and McMath pushed the city to revoke Capitol Transit’s charter and operate the buses as a municipal service. Expecting that an attempt to start a new bus company would take several months, Capitol Transit threatened to cease operations and forfeit its charter unless the aldermen immediately approved a new agreement that delayed tax payments and increased fares. The company’s demand amounted to blackmail — extend our franchise now or we will leave the city without bus service for months.

The gambit failed. Little Rock and North Little Rock councils had little choice but to accept Capitol Transit’s forfeiture and give the bus franchise to Division 704. Signing a new agreement, especially one with concessions, with Capitol Transit was politically untenable. Labor’s preferred solution, municipal ownership, was also off the table. Mann had campaigned against municipal ownership, saying it would create a political mess.

Most aldermen had hoped that an outside operator would take over the system, but efforts to find such a company failed. Granting the franchise to Division 704 was no one’s ideal solution, but it was the best one available.

Division 704’s attorneys, Woods and McMath, quickly organized Citizens Coach. Drivers and mechanics drew on their pensions and pledged their unemployment compensation to finance Citizens Coach. Additional investments came from unions and labor officials. All told, Citizens Coach’s capitalization amounted to $240,000. With this, the company purchased used buses, rented maintenance facilities, recruited a manager, hired the striking drivers and announced that operations would begin on March 2, 1956.

Citizen Coach buses were integrated from the start. The Arkansas Gazette later reported that the coaches entered service with “no segregation signs in them” and the “drivers never had any orders to enforce segregated seating.” The quiet integration of Citizens Coach was in keeping with the approach of Smith, Woods and McMath. They were committed to civil rights for moral and political reasons. But they also realized that a full-throated embrace of racial integration would alienate many white trade unionists, who, like most white Arkansans, supported white supremacy. Thus, they integrated the buses without fanfare.

The low-key integration of the buses was also consistent with Mann’s approach to race relations. Working closely with McClinton, the mayor quietly removed signs that read

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“Colored Do Not Drink Out of Fountain” from city hall, doubled the number of black police officers and appointed African Americans to city boards.

Responding to national events, Citizens Coach announced that its buses had integrated seating.

The announcement, though, provoked little immediate controversy. Reporters from both dailies rode the buses and witnessed little to cause concern. A few African Americans sat near the front and some whites doubled up to prevent blacks from sitting next to them, but there were no incidents. The riders they interviewed voiced little concern about the arrangement.

Segregationist outrage was met by indifference. Led by Amis Guthridge, Little Rock’s segregationists put the blame on Mann and the aldermen who refused to extend Capitol Transit’s charter. Guthridge, insisting that black riders had been harassing whites, lobbied both city councils to return Capitol Transit buses to the streets but received no satisfaction.

That summer, segregationists vowed to punish Mann and “elect leaders who will prevent race mixing on city buses.”

Although most of Little Rock’s old guard probably shared segregationists’ racial animus, they had another reason to be disturbed about the CCC. For them, Citizens Coach exemplified the labor-black alliance’s threat to local enterprises. Shortly after Capitol Transit creased operations, Terry Dairy’s owners — still battling the Teamsters — sold the company to Borden. Thus, what had been two of the city’s most visible local concerns had fallen victim to a powerful labor movement and a hostile political environment. It is little wonder that one businessman called unions “the most sinister influence in the [city’s] political life.”

No one expressed these worries as well as Johnny Wells, the editor/ publisher of the Arkansas Recorder, which catered to both segregationists and businessmen. Wells explained that union leaders working with blacks had mobilized “the biggest bloc of controlled votes in the County” and become the “overlords of City Hall.” For Wells, this coalition had stood the natural order on its head: “the alliance between labor union officers and Negro politicians … [has] made second class citizens of a great number of voters …. ‘Labor’ had its tickets; the Negro political bosses had theirs. Cars were busy hauling to the polls thousands of persons who had no knowledge of the candidates or issues. Suffrage in the hands of such is a hazard.” He urged readers to protect the city from this menace.

The old guard’s efforts to curtail the labor-black alliance began in July 1956 when a Pulaski County grand jury launched a high-profile investigation of public corrup-

tion aimed at the governor’s mansion and the city halls of both Little Rock and North Little Rock. Labor and its allies regarded Pulaski County grand juries as simply tools of the old guard. McMath later recalled that they were “chosen from the ‘higher echelons’ of Little Rock’s business community.”

For weeks, the city’s daily newspapers ran sensational stories, detailing the leaked grand jury testimonies of those summoned to testify. The papers were filled with tales of bribery, cronyism, pettiness, incompetency and fraud. But when the grand jury issued its final report in September, there was more smoke than fire. The jurors found little evidence of criminal activity. The only indict-

ments were of two salesmen who had tried to bribe a purchasing agent. The inability to indict public officials did not prevent the grand jury from issuing a scathing report, alleging widespread “bossism” in Little Rock and insisting that only the adoption of the city manager system would purify the city.

The grand jury’s report, though, defined bossism as political activity on the part of organized labor. The main section, “Secrecy and Boss-Rule,” focused on “the bus situation.” The jurors admitted that they had not closely examined the chartering of Citizens Coach, but nonetheless they used it to illustrate how “boss rule” had corrupted Little Rock. Rather than alleging bribery, the report emphasized the closed-door negotiations that preceded the aldermen’s public votes on the charter and asserted that labor had “dictated” this action. The section’s conclu-

sion made it clear that the jurors considered labor’s political activities to be the real issue: “Financing political campaigns and dictating to elected officials is not a proper function of labor unions.”

The jurors prescribed the city manager system as the antidote to labor’s power. They explained that a city manager would serve “with no political obligations” and administer the municipal government on the basis of expertise. Instead of a 10-person city council elected by wards every two years, the new system would be controlled by seven directors to be elected at large every four years. Whereas each alderman received $1,200 annually for time spent on city business, directors would serve without pay. The city manager system promised to take power from those popular at the ward level and give it to those with the resources to win citywide elections and perform unpaid work.

Trade unionists derided the grand jury’s report as a hatchet job. Odell Smith explained that the jurors had “hint[ed] at things” for which they could marshal no evidence and disputed the claim that union officials controlled the mayor and aldermen.

Smith admitted that “certainly labor works to elect its friends” before castigating the jurors for implying that there was something sinister about unionists exercising their rights as citizens.

While the labor leaders panned the grand jury report, Mann was stung by it. The jurors found no evidence of criminality in his administration, but they contended that he was unfit for office. They noted that Mann had not yet repaid his campaign loans and claimed his indebtedness made him susceptible to corruption. Only those able to self-finance a campaign, the jurors suggested, should serve as mayor.

The jurors’ more serious complaints concerned the type of petty corruption that was common in Arkansas.

They were outraged by Mann’s acceptance, with the aldermen’s permission, of a gift of office furniture. Seeking vindication, Mann called for the people of Little Rock to vote on whether to adopt the city manager system that the Arkansas General Assembly had approved for the city in 1921. Angering his allies in the labor and black communities, he scheduled the vote for November, hoping the short notice would prevent the old guard from organizing an effective campaign.

Mann’s hope was quickly disabused. The city manager campaign was coordinated by the Good Government Committee, which was formed by August Engle, Arkansas Democrat publisher; J. Ned Heiskell, Arkansas Gazette publisher; J.V. Satterfield, a bank president; and Stonewall Jackson Beauchamp, a prominent businessman. The four invited 200 members of the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce to an organizational meeting. The 150

attendees pledged the necessary resources for the campaign and designated Clyde Lowry, a chamber mainstay, to oversee the effort.

Lowry explained that the committee was nonpartisan, its members placed the city’s well-being over personal agendas and the city manager system would benefit the entire

population. One committee member, though, confessed privately that the organization’s purpose was to get rid of Mann, who he called a “labor puppet,” and “labor ridden graft corrupted” officials.

Little Rock’s daily papers functioned as public relations arms of the Good Government Committee’s campaign, providing what one supporter called “a chorus of journalistic endorsement.” Each paper emphasized that the grand jury had recommended the city manager system and ran dozens of front-page articles extolling its benefits, arguing that it had transformed poorly run cities into models of efficiency, saved taxpayers money and ended corruption. The papers also assured readers that the General Assembly would later remove the acknowledged defects in the 1921 city manager plan and make it workable. Initially, the papers echoed the committee’s claim that the move to implement the city manager system was driven by chronic mismanagement rooted in the mayor-alderman structure rather than animosity toward Mann. But after Mann campaigned against the city manager system, the papers transformed the vote into a referendum on the unpopular mayor.

The Good Government Committee avoided discussing racial issues for fear that it would divide members. Membership included racial moderates who had tangled with unions — Harry Ashmore and Fred Darragh — as well as several people who would later lead the

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UPCOMING EVENTS

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St. James United Methodist Church Arkansas Chamber Singers Spring Concert: Haydn’s Creation Mass

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South on Main Sessions :: John Burnette

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The Studio Theatre Urinetown: the Musical

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The Weekend Theater Black & Gold: A Fundraiser Cabaret

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South on Main Sessions :: Marcella and her Lovers

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The Joint Punchline Primetime

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Cranford Co. True Stories of Resilience from Our House

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South on Main Sessions :: Psalm 150

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resistance to the integration of Central High.

Committee member Willie Oates helped create T.J. Raney High School, a private school that sought to use public monies to educate white children in a segregated environment.

Fellow committee member Ed McKinley won election to the school board on a segregationist slate and helped engineer the firing of 44 educators seen as sympathetic to integration.

Most Good Government Committee members probably favored white supremacy but hesitated to associate with segregationist groups.

Opposition to the city-manager system came from a coalition that the Arkansas Recorder described as “labor union officers, city hall politicians, and Negro factions.” Labor formed the Committee for Democratic Government to defend the mayor-aldermen system, but it had few resources to devote to the campaign. Instead, labor concentrated its efforts on four measures appearing on November’s statewide ballot — opposing the three segregationist proposals and managing the campaign to abolish the poll tax. When it did act, the group had trouble getting its message to voters. It tried to buy television and radio air time, but stations told them that slots were unavailable. Lowry refused to debate the group’s leaders, and the city’s papers mentioned the group’s events but rarely covered them.

Similarly, the papers noted that black political organizations like McClinton’s Arkansas Democratic Voters Association would be discussing the city manager proposal, but never reported on what happened.

The one Committee for Democratic Government event that the papers could hardly ignore featured Mann and the labor-black coalition’s allies. At this rally, Mann and the officeholders portrayed the city manager movement as a Chamber of Commerce-orchestrated power grab. Alderman Griffey explained that the chamber championed the city manager system because it knew “it could control the Board of Directors.” Alderman Corley asked voters “to keep the city government and not give it to the Chamber of Commerce.” He added, “If Pratt Remmel had been reelected we never would have had this trouble. But a man was elected they couldn’t run and the Chamber of Commerce does not like it.” City Attorney O.D. Longstreth also questioned the elite’s newfound enthusiasm for municipal restructuring, noting that it only occurred after the election of an administration in which “labor had a chance to be heard.”

Mann, who had angered his allies by calling for the vote, simply accused the chamber of attempting “to overthrow democratic government.”

The November 1956 elections were an unmitigated disaster for the labor-black coalition. Little Rock voters approved the city manager system by a 2-to-1 margin. Once the election became a referendum on the unpopular Mann, the outcome was all but assured. Additionally, voters approved the three segregationist measures by substantial margins, and labor’s proposal to abol-

ish the poll tax went down to defeat. The labor-black coalition was in disarray.

The city manager system was not implemented immediately. In early 1957, the legislature worked out the problems in the city manager plan, crafted in 1921. After it did so, Mann went to court, arguing that the legislature had so fundamentally altered the structure approved by voters the previous fall that another vote was necessary. The Arkansas Supreme Court, though, ruled against Mann, ordering the election of a board of directors to proceed. That vote was scheduled for November 1957.

Until then, Mann remained mayor, and his lame-duck status exacerbated the Central High crisis that began in September. As protestors surrounded Central High, Mann sought to mobilize local resources to protect the black students. He asked the fire department to back up the police and, if necessary, disperse protestors with water hoses, but the chief refused.

Mann called the Pulaski County sheriff for help, but the sheriff snubbed him. Mann could not even trust the police chief, an avowed segregationist. It is impossible to know the degree to which Mann’s lame-duck status made it easier for the sheriff and fire chief to shirk their duties, but they, like the police chief, realized Mann would be gone in November. Unable to marshal local forces, Mann asked President Eisenhower to send troops.

After the old guard and segregationists pushed through the city manager system, they parted ways. Tensions revolved around priorities: One placed elite control at the top; the other white supremacy. The relationship worsened as agitation concerning Central High increased. The old guard had made sure that Hall High, where most of them sent their children, would remain lily white, and segregationists suspected that elite enthusiasm for segregation at Central might wane. The final break came in October 1957 — the 101st Airborne had already arrived — after the Good Government Committee nominated a slate for Little Rock’s new board of directors. The official stance of the committee’s candidates on school integration was one of cowardice; they refused to take a position, presumably fearful that doing so might threaten elite control. Finding the Good Government Committee slate to be insufficiently committed to Jim Crow, the segregationists nominated their own candidates.

In the year before nine black students entered Central High, the old guard-segregationist partnership kneecapped the city’s only political movement working to promote integration. The politics of racial moderation embraced by Smith, McMath, Woods and Mann became untenable. Faubus saw the shifting landscape and needed to find a constituency to buoy his ambitions. His embrace of segregation was a deal with the devil that empowered racists and sullied Little Rock’s reputation but furthered his career. The old guard certainly did not force Faubus to join with segregationists in 1957 any more than fears of the labor-black coalition required them to make racial moderation nearly impossible.

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overnor Hutchinson squashed a legislative bid in February to expand the list of conditions that would qualify a patient for a medical marijuana card.

State Rep. Doug House (R-North Little Rock) failed to get a motion for a do-pass recommendation in the House Rules Committee for his proposal to add 40 medical conditions to the list of 18 that have approval now. ADH Director Nathaniel Smith and Surgeon General Gregory Bledsoe, who testified before the committee on the proposed bill, noted the governor’s opposition to the legislation.

Shortly after the committee met, the Health Department issued a “Public Health Advisory” warning of the risks of cannabis products — including hemp — to human health.

Bledsoe and state Drug Director Kirk Lane joined the health department announcement. Among the warnings: Today’s marijuana is more potent than what was available in your parents’ day, so “the long-term health or developmental consequences of exposure” to the higher levels of THC “are unknown”; there could be an association of marijuana use with schizophrenia and car crashes; smoking during pregnancy could cause low infant birth weight; that though there are conditions where marijuana is useful as medication, outside of those conditions there’s no evidence of efficacy; cannabidiol is unregulated so it’s unknown what is in products claiming to contain CBD; and marijuana impairs judgment.

The advisory did not contain supporting research. The debate over whether marijuana use causes schizophrenia — experts are divided — has gotten attention in the press lately because of a new book suggesting a link, “Tell Your Children” by Alex Berenson.

Besides issuing public health advisories, the department is also issuing medical marijuana cards to approved users. As of mid-February, the number of cards issued stood at 7,126.

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trum Medicine dispensary to move from Rector (Clay County) to a location near Jonesboro, the Department of Finance and Administration was fielding daily complaints from callers about the lack of a medical marijuana dispensary in and near Jonesboro. Spokesman Scott Hardin said callers said it was too inconvenient to have to travel 70 miles to West Memphis, the closest city to Jonesboro where dispensaries have been approved. (There will be three in West Memphis.)

The Commission also approved address changes for Fiddler’s Green in Mountain View from 418 N. Bayou Drive to 16150 State Highway 9. A spokeswoman for Fiddler’s Green said internet service was lacking at the Bayou Drive address. It also gave approval to Grassroots OPCO to move from Ward in Lonoke County to 7303 Kanis Road in Little Rock, the former home of Joubert’s Tavern.

The Arkansas Times has been interviewing licensed dispensary owners on what sorts of products they’ll make available and when.

Here’s a bit about several: Natural State Wellness is building its dispensary at 11201 Stagecoach Road in Little Rock. It has not set an opening date, but plans to operate from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily.

It will offer 120-125 products — concentrates, flowers, edibles, vape pens and cannabidiol — supplied by Natural State Wellness Enterprises cultivators in Newport, spokesman Ben Kimbro said.

Alcohol Beverage Control Board investigators are looking into whether Natural State Capital LLC, a company owned by Wellness operators Harvest Dispensaries, Cultivations and Production Facilities LLC of Tempe, Ariz., should have disclosed on Wellness’ cultivation application that it was also an owner of the cultivation business. Kimbro said he was advised by the DFA that disclosure of Natural State Capital’s “operating stake” was not necessary. State law requires that all owners be listed on applications for licensure and that they be residents of Arkansas.

Natural Relief Dispensary is also going into new construction, at 3107 E. Kiehl Ave. in Sherwood. CEO Michael Faught of Cabot, a disabled veteran and the majority owner, said he’s interested in how medical marijuana can help disabled veterans, though he has not yet applied for a medical marijuana card. Owners expect to open within five or six months after it gets a building license from Sherwood.

Acanza Health is renovating a storefront in the I-49 Business Center, at 2733 N. McCo-

nnell Ave., Fayetteville. Spokesman Michael Mayes, who is consulting with Acanza Health, said plans are to be open by the end of April or May. The majority owner of Acanza, Randy Hernandez (39.81 percent), is a licensed clinical social worker and has worked in cannabis cultivation and extraction in Maine, where cannabis is legal for recreational use. Acanza will require patients to scan the medical marijuana cards before entering a sales floor where products will be visible. Acanza is also a grow facility. To apply for a job at Acanza, email careers@quantum9.net with the subject line “Acanza.”

Northwest Arkansas Medical Cannabis Group will build a 7,500-square-foot dispensary at 3390 Martin Luther King Blvd. in Fayetteville. NWA Medical is also a grow dispensary, though co-owner Don Parker II said he was unsure how much cultivation the dispensary will do initially. Valentine Holdings LLC, which is doing business as NWA Medical, has an ownership stake in the Delta Medical Cannabis cultivation facility in Newport. The business is accepting resumes; send to Don Parker, Northwest Arkansas Medical Cannabis Group, P.O. Box 1733, Jonesboro.

Big Fish of North Central America, to be located at 1400 Heber Springs Road in Tumbling Shoals, hopes to open in the next few months. Josh Landers, who holds a 25 percent stake in the business (Dr. Regina Thurman of Fayetteville, who’s married to Razorback basketball great and assistant coach Scotty Thurman, is the majority owner at 55 percent), said he was motivated to open the dispensary in part because of his grandmother’s wasted condition as she was dying from pancreatic cancer.

Arkansas Medicinal Source Patient Center will occupy a renovated former liquor store at 406 Razorback Drive in Bentonville, and co-owner Erik Danielson said he hopes to be open May 1. AMSPC is a grow dispensary. Like Big Fish’s Landers, Danielson, a lawyer, said he has a friend suffering with cancer and he wants to get medical marijuana to patients like him.

The Releaf Center will be located in the former Big Red Gallery and Gifts at 9400 McNelly Road in Bentonville. CEO Roger Song said he hopes it will be open by midsummer. Releaf is a grow dispensary and will build its cultivation facility in a new building behind the main facility. Song said Relief would offer its extraction services to other dispensaries. He said the dispensary, in a barn-like building, would have a homey feeling: “It’s going to be like walking into your grandma’s house.”

ILLUSTRATION BY TALIA BLANTON

11201 Stagecoach Road, Little Rock 3107 E. Kiehl Ave., Sherwood 309 Seneca St., Hot Springs 26225 State Highway 167, Hensley 4893/4897 Malvern Ave., Hot Springs 2733 N. McConnell Ave., Fayetteville

1151 E. Service Road, West Memphis

Airport Road, Hot Springs

3390 Martin Luther King Blvd., Fayetteville

201 & 203 N. Ok St., West Memphis

47 River Road W., Mayflower

406 Razorback Drive, Bentonville

11913 U.S. Highway 49, Brookland

5144 State Highway 44, Helena

9400 McNelly Road, Bentonville

3904 Ayers Road, Fort Smith

108 Grider Field, Ladd Road, Pine Bluff

State Highway 9, Mountain View

23788 W. State Highway 28, Bluffton

179 Industrial Park Drive, Warren

1400 Heber Springs Road N., Tumbling Shoals

Corner of Pittsburg & County Pivot 2658, Clarksville

3955 Mt. Holly Road, El Dorado

5172 State Highway 62 E., Mountain Home

3506 S. Arkansas Ave., Russellville

410 Realtor Road, Texarkana

931 U.S. Highway 65 N., Clinton

3740 Prince St., Conway

Hines Blvd., Prescott

3700 I-40 Frontage Road E., West Memphis

7303 Kanis Road, Little Rock

188 Valley St., Arkadelphia

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 75

Non-Profit Recipient: ARKANSAS REPERTORY THEATRE

Presented by

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MAY 2 | 6-9pm War Memorial Stadium Little Rock

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Sample variations of the classic cocktail from the city’s best bartenders and VOTE for your favorites! We will crown one margarita best of the fest!

Club 27

Music Sponsor

76 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

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Samantha’s Tap Room & Wood Grill La Terraza Rum & Lounge Taco Mama (Hot Springs) Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa Bleu Monkey Grill (Hot Springs) Doubletree’s Bridges Restaurant & Lounge Colonial Wines & Spirits Capo’s Tacos (Hot Springs) The Ohio Club (Hot Springs) Starlite Club (Hot Springs) Atlas Bar

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AN ARKANSAS TIMES EVENT

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 77

WHAT YOU NEED THIS MONTH!

A special advertising promotion 78 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

The best new old bar in Little Rock

1. FASHIONABLE & COMFORTABLE: The Carlton Varney Brazilliance Sport Legging and Infinity Scarf!

The iconic and original Dorothy Draper Brazilliance design is now exclusively available in these high performance motion fabric leggings and gorgeous scarf, which are ideal for everyday wear!

MATCHING ROBE ALSO AVAILABLE in store! Cynthia East Fabrics, 501-490-9330, cynthiaeastfabrics.com 2. SYMPHONY STORY TIME Arkansas Symphony Orchestra violinist Katherine Williamson will read Mo Willems' new book, "Because," a moving tale of a young girl’s journey to center stage.

She might even play her violin a little!

11 a.m. Saturday, March 9, 2019.

WordsWorth Books, 501-663-9198, wordsworthbookstore.com 3. THE GLENLIVET 12-YEAR SINGLE MALT SCOTCH Available at Warehouse Liquor for $36.99 this month. The Glenlivet 12 Year Old's legendary smooth character and tropical fruity notes come from spending quality time in a mix of American oak casks that have been seasoned with bourbon, and European oak. Warehouse Liquor Market, 501-374-2405 NLR & 501-374-0410, warehouseliquormar.wix.com or find them on Facebook.

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Tired of Working for a Jerk?

ARKANSAS TIMES PUBLISHING, which, along with this magazine, publishes Arkansas Wild,Bike Arkansas, Savvy Kids, Arkansas Food and Farm, Arkansas Made and Block Street and Building, is always on the lookout for good sales, marketing, editorial, design and event talent. We are looking for smart people who want to make a difference in the future of Arkansas while making a good living.

Arkansas Times Magazine is one of the city’s oldest locally owned media companies, with digital and print brands that are now institutions. This year, we celebrate our 45th anniversary — all the while informing, entertaining and enlightening Arkansans who care about this place we call home.

If this sounds like a place you might want to work, give us a shout. Send an email of introduction and your resume to Publisher Alan Leveritt at alan@arktimes.com. He will get it into the hands of the right person.

And we’ll get back to you. Maybe our place is where you need to be next.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 79

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RON ROBINSON THEATER

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ALL MOVIES ARE $5 AND BEGIN AT 7 P.M. IN THE RON ROBINSON THEATER UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.

SAT | MAR 2 | FREE

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FRI | MAR 8

Southside With You (PG-13) SAT | MAR 9

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (PG-13) TUE | MAR 12

The Post (PG-13) THU | MAR 14

History on the Line: Preserving County Courthouses SUN | MAR 17 | 3 P.M. | FREE

Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock & Roll WED | MAR 20 | 8 P.M. | FREE

Shawshank Redemption (R) TUE | MAR 26

Speaker Greg Iles, Cemetery Road RON ROBINSON THEATER THU | MAR 7 | NOON | FREE

THE BOOKSTORE, GALLERIES, AND RON ROBINSON THEATER ARE LOCATED AT LIBRARY SQUARE, 100 ROCK ST.

CALS.ORG 80 MARCH 2019

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64

Edited by Will Shortz No. 0128 ACROSS

9 Roosters’ mates

1 Joint that a sock covers

52 Many, many, many, many, many moons

6 Small recess

53 Hanker (for)

11 “Crime ___ pay”

11 Karl Marx’s “___ Kapital”

54 Ex-senator Bayh

12 Real

55 “Hold your horses”

13 Alternative to a paper clip

14 Country star Tucker

58 Tear to bits

18 Hardy-har-hars

15 Theater worker

60 Mind’s I?

23 Previous incarnation

16 Month with Columbus Day: Abbr.

61 Reaction to an overshare

25 Disorder resulting in seizures 27 Bagful carried by a caddie

17 Giving away unwanted items rather than trashing them

62 Crowdfunding site … or a hint to the beginnings of 17-, 30- and 46-Across

19 Second letter after epsilon

65 Goal

34 Paint layer

20 Rage

66 Inventor Howe

37 Wood for a baseball bat

21 Luau dance

67 Prefix between tri- and penta-

38 Profound

22 Absorbs, as gravy on a plate

68 Martial arts master Bruce

40 Classic typewriter brand

24 Broccoli ___

41 Bosses

26 Clark of the Daily Planet

69 What a star on the American flag represents

28 Obsessive to a fault

70 Slightly off

45 Madrid matrons

29 The Supremes’ “___! In the Name of Love”

DOWN

46 Insurance type that often accompanies medical

30 Extra job in the gig economy

1 Initially

47 Dormmate, e.g.

33 Gin’s partner in a classic drink

48 Punctual

35 Look at, in the Bible

2 Holden Caulfield, for “The Catcher in the Rye”

36 Put in more ammunition

3 Patella

50 Coin with Lincoln on it

39 Greeting in Tel Aviv

56 Barely makes, with “out”

42 Lessens, as pain

4 Chemical compound with the formula NaOH

44 Alternatives to Nikes

5 Made for ___ other

59 Facts and figures

46 Dramatically end a speech, in a way

6 Centers of atoms

63 Spying org.

7 Components of archipelagoes

51 Result of a traffic ticket

8 Second letter after upsilon

64 Band with the 1993 hit “Everybody Hurts”

ANSWERS IN APRIL ISSUE.

10 Therefore

31 When repeated, a sneaky laugh 32 Mil. branch with B-52s

43 Look smugly upon

49 Existing: Lat.

57 Pinball fail

MARKETPLACE SCIENCE TEACHER

(Little Rock, AR): Teach Science to secondary school students. Bachelor’s in science Edu., or any subfield of science. +1 yr exp as Science Tchr. at mid or high sch.

Mail res.: LISA Academy, 10825 Financial Centre Pkwy Ste 360., Little Rock, AR 72211, Attn: HR Dept., Refer to Ad#AT

BIOSTATISTICIAN sought

by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, AR. Master’s in Statistics, Biostatistics or rel. filed, plus 6 mos exp. Review complete job description and apply online at https://jobs.uams.edu UAMS is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer of individuals with disabilities and protected veterans and is committed to excellence.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences is seeking an Assistant Professor – Geriatrics in the Little Rock, AR metropolitan area.TEACHING DUTIES: teaching medical residents, fellows and students regarding family medicine.

CLINICAL DUTIES: prescribing or administering treatment, therapy, medication, vaccination, and other specialized medical care to treat or prevent illness, disease or injury; direct and coordinate activities of nurses, residents, assistants, specialists, therapists and other medical staff. REQUIRES: There are fellowship requirements for the position. No training in Geriatrics and/or other subspecialty is required as a minimum requirement for the position.

Instead, completion of fellowship in geriatrics is sufficient for the purposes of this position. Must have an MD, or foreign equivalent; Must have license to practice medicine or eligibility for license in Arkansas; Board Certification in Geriatrics or eligibility for Board Certification.

Review complete job description and apply online at https://jobs.uams.edu

DUTIES: Examination, diagnosis, and treatment of patients with neurological disorders; interview patients to obtain information such as complaints, symptoms, medical histories, and family histories; order or interpret results of laboratory analyses; and diagnose neurological conditions based on interpretation of examination findings, histories, or test results.

TO ADVERTISE IN THIS SECTION, CALL LUIS at 501.492.3974 OR EMAIL LUIS@ ARKTIMES.COM

Ecumenical Catholic Church

To apply – https://jobs.uams.edu and search for job number 58420

Arkansas Health Group (D/B/A Baptist Health) seeks a Neurologist to work in the Little Rock, AR metropolitan area, including 9601 Baptist Health Drive, Little Rock, AR 72205.

UAMS is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer of individuals with disabilities and protected veterans and is committed to excellence.

San Damiano

UAMS is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer of individuals with disabilities and protected veterans and is committed to excellence.

EPIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ANALYST sought by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, AR. Bachelor’s plus 3 yrs exp.

Sr. Systems Analyst (Little Rock, AR) Gather & analyze customer requirements.

Outline test strategy, estimation, assembly & testing of hardware-setup for Testing DWDM, OTN, CDC, SONET/SDH & GMPLS optical technology features. Create & execute test plans for PSS-1830 DWDM optical product & software release.

Design, implement, & automate test procedures using Python & Perl scripts & regression test on RTOS platform w/ greater than 100GB high speed Transponder & muxponder card. Work w/ product development team, field support & system engineers; collate, reproduce, verify & fix the issues collected from the customer support group. Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Electronics & Communication Engineering or related field required. 5 years of work experience required. Required skills: Test automation using Python & Perl.

Knowledge of optical DWDM/OTN, OSPF routing protocols, traffic engineering (MPLS, RSVP-TE) & GMPLS/control plane mechanisms. Mail resume to Internext Corporation, Attn: HR, 900 S Shackleford Rd, Ste 300, Little Rock, AR, 72211

REQUIRES: Must have a MD; must have completed residency in Neurology; must be Board Certified or Board Eligible in Neurology; must have or be eligible for AR Medical License.

To apply, email resume to: Arkansas Health Group (D/B/A Baptist Health) ATTN: Claire Pittman, Claire.pittman@baptist-health.org (ref. Job BH #00502).

The open, thinking, healing, welcoming faith community you’ve been looking for.

Come and see.

Mass Saturdays • 5:00 PM 12415 Cantrell Road Little Rock 501-613-7878 LRCatholic.org ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2019 81

THE OBSERVER

I

t’s been 10 months since The Observer hung up our cleats after 15 years as a reporter and took a job with a little more pay, a little less stress and a lot better insurance to take care of our various health bugaboos. It’s nice here, and though it keeps us chained to a desk most days, we have a lovely view of the Arkansas River. Still, we miss the job, and take our opportunities to reminisce about the old days. One of the stories we always get around to telling is the time we spoke to Jason Baldwin of the West Memphis Three.

Of the WM3, Baldwin always seemed like the one who was most often forgotten, with poetic and philosophical Damien Echols getting most of the press and Jessie Misskelley getting most of the pity. In January 2011, The Observer was assigned to go down to the prison and talk to the three, and we jumped at the chance. We recall the crimes. We recall the trials, and the outstanding trial coverage in the Arkansas Times by Bob Lancaster, who was one of the first to publicly call bullshit on that kangaroo court, and the later, iconic WM3 stories of Mara Leveritt. We recall our first viewing of "Paradise Lost," the documentary that forced millions to face the terrifying possibility that we had locked up three innocent men while allowing a butcher of three children to walk free.

It had snowed some days before our trip to the prison, and though the roads between Little Rock and Pine Bluff quickly burned off, the sleeping winter fields were still white, like driving across a bleached canvas waiting for paint. Despite scheduling interviews weeks ahead, when we got to the prison where Echols and Misskelley were held, we were informed by a deputy warden that we hadn’t, in fact, been cleared for an interview, only photographs. With our cell phones taken at the gate and all of us entombed in that place where you don’t get much of a choice as to what happens and what doesn’t, The Observer found himself forced to sit mute on threat 82 MARCH 2019

ARKANSAS TIMES

of expulsion while our photographer, Brian Chilson, snapped photos.

Once we were released and our cell phones handed back, we got on the horn to the ADC spokesperson, who was home sick that day with the flu. By the time we got to Tucker Max, where Baldwin was held, we’d been assured we would actually get to talk to him. Once inside, the guards put us in a wood-paneled conference room with the Great Seal of Arkansas on one wall. After a while, they brought Baldwin in, wearing glasses and a bright white jumpsuit that made us think of the melting snow we’d driven through to get there.

He was older than we remembered him, of course, his teens and 20s lost inside those walls. Over the next 30 minutes or so, we chatted about the books he read and the music he listened to. Just two fellas, in a room, talking.

The thing that surprised The Observer most, though, was the person he was inside, even after all he’d suffered. The Observer had been on the job nine years by then, covering a lot of homicides, writing stories that wound up being a catalog of all the rage and stupidity human beings are heir to. It had made us angry at times, often pessimistic about life and our place in it.

Jason Baldwin, meanwhile, went to prison in 1994 for a crime he didn’t commit. Back then, he was a thin, slight boy, locked up in a place where every person believed him to be a molester and killer of children. We didn’t talk about it with him, because how do you talk about a waking nightmare like that? But there’s no way you go in under those circumstances without serving the hardest time.

But here, with that past behind him and the potential for spending the rest of his life in that shadowy box, was a man who was literally one of the most positive and optimistic people The Observer has ever met — smiling, upbeat, steering the conversation ever in the direction of grace, forgiveness and light.

There was a quote from that interview that

The Observer typed up the same afternoon we got back from the prison. We printed it out and pinned it up in a place where we could see it from our desk: “You never want to feel that there’s no hope. ... Bad things happen all over the world, and you can’t let bitterness or regret or anger make it worse.”

Looking at that quote got The Observer through some very hard days. But at that moment, in that conference room with the seal of the state hanging over Jason Baldwin’s body like the descending blade in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” how could either of us know that in seven short months, he would be free? How could either of us know that The Observer would stand in Jonesboro in the burning heat of August and watch Jason leave the courthouse with Damien and Jessie, to begin their lives again?

We couldn’t, which made the fact that he strung together those words all the more incredible. Then and many days afterward, The Observer found himself thinking: If this man, who had lost so much and stood prepared to lose so much more, could find the will to keep his hope alive and carry on, who am I to despair? We don’t exaggerate when we say that interview, unlike so many hundreds of forgettable others, changed The Observer’s life.

We followed Jason Baldwin on social media for a few years after his release, watching him make his way, still the same person we met at the prison, always smiling, always attempting to bend the conversation in the direction of hope and goodness. After a while, it felt a bit voyeuristic and foolish to peek in at the life of a man we’d shared a single conversation with, so we stopped. We are all exhibitionists and voyeurs now, aren’t we? Still, we often think of him and that moment there in the conference room at Tucker Max. We think of him standing somewhere in the sun and blue jeans, with the wind in his hair. We think: We’d like to sit down with him and chat again someday, two free men this time, both of us thankful for all we’ve been given.

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