Arkansas Times | July 2020

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JULY 2020

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JULY 2020

FEATURES

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE: Community leader Osyrus Bolly throws a fist in the air during a demonstration at the Arkansas State Capitol.

23 BEST OF ARKANSAS

The votes are in for the best in eating, shopping, services and more, including pandemic prizewinners.

58 PROFILES IN COURAGE

9 THE FRONT

Q&A with X3MEX and EATS The Inconsequential News Quiz: Black Lives Matter The Big Picture: Quarantine kitchens.

ON THE COVER: Educator Drekkia Writes leads protesters in Little Rock following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Photo by Brian Chilson.

4 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

15 THE TO-DO LIST

Joshua Asante’s new single, streaming “Maladies” from CALS, Black Gay Pride events, Shop Black Live, Freshawn Womack’s new graphic novel, ASO and Tania León.

EBONY BLEVINS

Voices from the Black Lives Matter movement in Arkansas. By Anita Badejo, Heath Carpenter, KaToya Ellis Fleming, Micah Fields, Frederick McKindra, Lindsey Millar, Delilah M. Pope and Stephanie Smittle

18 NEWS & POLITICS

Arkansas is taking care of business. But not its workers.

By Ernie Dumas

68 CULTURE

Male soprano Eli McCormack is a rising star. By Sarah Stricklin

71 HISTORY

Las Vegas in Arkansas: An interview with author David Hill and an excerpt from his book about Hot Springs’ gambling days.

82 THE OBSERVER

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THE FRONT

PAINT AS PROTEST:

Q&A

MATT WHITE

A Q&A WITH THE GEORGE FLOYD MURALISTS

B

elow the Union Pacific railroad underpass on Seventh Street in Little Rock, just north of Interstate 630 and a couple of miles west of the state Capitol, there’s a wall covered with several civil rights/peace murals. Depictions of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the Little Rock Nine and Central High School are displayed alongside ethical directives like Make Art Not War, Justice Before Peace and Black Lives Matter. On Saturday, May 30, artists X3mex (also known as Ch3mex) and Eats, who asked the Arkansas Times to use their artist aliases, went to work on a mural of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a white cop in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. The mural’s grown substantially since that time. These days, it’s rare to drive through the underpass and not see a family or two visiting the murals, posing for a photo or reading the messages past visitors have left behind to commemorate the lives of George Floyd and others. Arkansas Times contributor Rhett Brinkley talked to X3mex and Eats about their work on the wall. Find the full interview at arktimes.com/rock-candy.

Eats: We got out there that first day and started rolling our shit out. Even that first day was chill, but it got crazy.

X3mex: [There] was still a lot of tension, man.

The energy was really tense.

Eats: Working on it was kind of hard, man. I had to keep looking up names. And there’s fucking hundreds and hundreds of names. So I’m like, “OK, I’ll do these little blocks and put the names in there.” But there’s still more names. And I forgot somebody. So more blocks. And that shit sucks. The names could literally stretch off the wall, onto the sidewalk, into the street, across the street and up the other side of the wall.

That’s how long the list is. People that have been brutalized [by police], Mexicans, Blacks, you know? It’s fucking insane. I’ve seen some of these names in the news and on the internet when the shit happened. And it sucks. But something’s telling me to keep putting the names up. I had

put in so much work for years. So it was special, it enforced that our work is important, it energized our want to do more and I think it reached a lot of people. That was the main point that we were trying to make and the reason we did it all. We didn’t know it was going to be on that big of a scale, which we’re grateful for, so we want to just thank everybody that was involved in it and all the artists that have been helping us out with everything.

to redo the names last night at the Capitol. We painted some buildings, and it was the same thing over and over. It sucks, but I’m memorizing these names, you know? …

Painting is always fun for me. But it sucks to have to paint under these crazy circumstances.

X3mex: Knowing that you’re painting that and going out there concerned [because] you don’t know what’s going to happen. Are cops going to come by and harass us or somebody or whatever? But you’re seeing everybody being OK with it, coming out and supporting it. Man, that shit feels fucking great. Seeing people of all walks of life giving the same response of support — just knowing you’re not the only one going through the same shit. You’re not the only one sitting there not knowing what the fuck to do about it.

The support and the love … .

Eats: Anytime we paint, it’s always love. But it resonates more because we’re putting a murdered man from Minnesota on a wall in Little Rock.

X3mex: It’s the privilege of getting to paint, and it’s a responsibility to tell the stories as well. So seeing that resonate with everybody else goes a long way. … It was kind of overwhelming just seeing all the love and the city come together like that. For everybody to be marching to the mural [at the Response to Injustice Education March on June 5], you know, somewhere we’ve

Eats: It was crazy, man, ’cause we were at the Capitol first and then we walked down with everybody. It was just amazing to see armies of people walking down Seventh Street to that mural. A lot of them had never even been there before. There were people from all over the state. It was nuts. When I finally got down there, I just broke down crying, man. [I] hugged it out with a friend and then just watched it all unfold.

The people putting flowers and signs in front of the mural — it was just really beautiful. Singing “Happy Birthday” to Breonna [Taylor, a Black woman killed by Louisville policemen in March], it was a real touching thing, man. I’m a Cancer, I’m real emotional, but I keep it under wraps.

But there I just couldn’t do it. It was too much positive energy. We’ve already been feeding off this crazy vibe since we painted the mural and then just to see it all come to fruition, I don’t even know, man. I’ve still got goosebumps thinking about it and it was the other day. It was the best feeling in the world. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen so far.

X3mex: After COVID, you haven’t seen a lot of friends in a long time, so it was cool seeing everybody and saying hi and knowing your friends are out there. But at the same time, seeing all the messages like “Yo, man, I’m at the safe house, there’s cops coming, it’s a trap.” It’s just mad confusion and people are getting hurt.

People are getting arrested and putting their lives on the line, so you gotta be worried. I am. I’m hopeful, but this has been happening. This isn’t something new. So you just hope they actually change the fucking laws, man.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2020 9

THE FRONT

INCONSEQUENTIAL NEWS QUIZ

BLACK LIVES MATTER EDITION PLAY AT HOME, WHILE STUDYING UP ON HOW TO SAFELY EXTINGUISH TEAR GAS ROUNDS.

1) Incredibly, which of the following Arkansas towns with long-standing reputations for being racist have had sizable, vocal and peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in recent weeks?

A) Cabot.

B) Mountain Home.

C) Harrison.

D) All of the above.

2) Sen. Jason Rapert (R-1957) recently took to Facebook to respond to a Supreme Court decision in which justices ruled that Title VII anti-discrimination protections in the workplace apply to gay and transgender people. According to the post, which of the following is a result of this and other SCOTUS decisions in favor of civil rights?

A) They have erected The False God to Abortion!

B) They have erected The False God to Homosexuality!

C) Individuals and business are being FORCED to bow down or face punishment!

D) All of the above.

3) Which of the following is approximately as delicious as Rapert’s Facebook tears on the morning the SCOTUS handed down a 6-3 decision that vastly expands LGBTQ rights, with Trump-nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch joining John Roberts and the Court’s liberal wing to make it happen?

A) Did your mother ever make you a birthday cake when you were about 5 or 6 years old? Remember how that tasted?

Better than that.

B) Four-pound, triple-decker banana split that somehow doesn’t impart a single calorie.

C) Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve 23yr.

D) Sorry, none of the above are quite as delicious.

4) Which of the following was a real topic of discussion during three hours of recent testimony before the state legislature’s House and Senate committees on City, County and Local Affairs as they discussed the handling of Black Lives Matter demonstrations that saw protesters tear-gassed at the state Capitol?

A) State Capitol Police Chief Darrell Hedden, who is white, said that the largely peaceful protests, which regrettably saw some graffiti and window-breaking downtown, were like “the Vietnam War came to Little Rock,” and added that he feared the Capitol, which is built of granite, “was going to be burned to the ground.”

B) It was revealed that Hedden and the Capitol Police did not coordinate their efforts during the protests with LRPD Chief Keith Humphrey, who is black. Hedden told legislators he had concerns that Humphrey might pass on intelligence to protesters.

C) After intense questioning by Republican lawmakers, including some who suggested the LRPD should have met the protests with a more violent response, Humphrey, referring to his previous employment as chief of police in Norman, Okla., said he had “never been questioned like I’m being questioned now. Even in a sundown town.”

D) All of the above.

5) Attorneys for former University of Arkansas head football coach Bret Bielema recently filed suit against the Razorback Foundation. Why did Bielema head to court?

A) He claims the foundation promised him a $200 bonus for every month he didn’t crash a motorcycle, sports car or personal watercraft while in the company of a much younger woman who wasn’t his wife.

B) He claims being fired by the university irreparably harmed his sideline career as a Fred Flintstone impersonator.

C) He claims the university violated his civil rights by forcing him to bathe, wear shoes and shave at least every third day.

D) Bielema claims the foundation breached its contract with him and still owes him $7.025 million of his total buyout.

ANSWERS: D, D, D, D, D

10 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

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JULY 2020 11

THE FRONT BIG PIC

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LITTLE ROCK’S HOME COOKS SHOW US THEIR EATS. Perhaps no daily routine has been so photogenically disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic as has the routine of eating. Little Rock’s Instagram accounts are teeming with gurgling sourdough starters and family-size Star of India spreads. Curbside grocery pickup is a full-on meme-generating phenomenon.

People everywhere are asking themselves, “Where has cheesecloth been all my life?” The Arkansas Times persuaded a few home cooks to tell us about their favorite meals during the extended stay at home, and about the ways in which their relationship to food has changed during the pandemic.

MORGAN LEYENBERGER, LITTLE ROCK DAN DAN MIAN

JOEL DIPIPPA, LITTLE ROCK LAMB SHANKS IN CHIMICHURRI

LASHEENA GORDON, LITTLE ROCK MEXICAN PIZZA

“Since I’ve been working from home, I’ve been able to slow down my cooking. Slow food, like fermented noodles and bone broth, are comforting and richly flavorful. It’s made from scrappy ingredients that I would normally toss (chicken bones; sourdough dump) but as I spend more time cooking to nourish my family during this intensely scary time, I’ve fallen in love with simple ingredients transformed by time to be more healthful. We’re super lucky to have found high-quality local ingredients like these Wye Mountain mushrooms and gifted greens from our community garden to pack more flavor and texture in this dish.”

“The social distancing and restaurant closures made a big impact on what and how we eat. While we have a meat share through JV Farms, I also tried to buy food through restaurants that could act as grocers. It helped our kitchen stay stocked but also helped the restaurants that weren’t planning to see the decline. Easter is a time for family. Lamb is traditional on the DiPippa table, but we couldn’t gather together like normal. Instead, I got lamb shanks from Graffiti’s to make something that still met the family traditions. A mint-heavy chimichurri, mint-tinged mashed potatoes, roasted carrots and sourdough focaccia rounded out the Easter plate. It provides a sense of closeness to my family and also a closeness to the restaurant community here.

Food binds us together and the difficulty in gathering the last few months has reinforced just how important it is to gather around a table both in homes and our favorite restaurants.”

“My relationship with food/cooking has changed. Cooking now feels like love. When I cook a plant-based meal, I’m not using a recipe. I listen to my body. I give myself time. That’s the first gift to myself, time.

Then I add the veggies, seasonings, color combination and palate combination that my body wants. If it’s green olives and strawberries on the side of a Southwestern pizza, it’s what I have! As I prepare it, it feels like I’ve loved on myself. Once my food is done and the flavors have come together in my mouth, they taste like love.”

Pictured: Dan dan mian (Szechuan pork noodles) with sourdough noodles, Wye Mountain shiitake and greens from Centennial Garden at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.

Pictured: Lamb shanks in chimichurri with mashed potatoes, carrots and sourdough focaccia.

12 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

Pictured: LaSheena Gordon, Mexican pizza with cornmeal crust, salsa, plant-based protein crumble, black beans, whole kernel corn, green and black olives and vegan cheese.

BEST COMMERCIAL ART GALLERY

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AMY FALLS, BENTONVILLE TOFU KARAAGE

SUSANA O’DANIEL, LITTLE ROCK COD EN PAPILLOTE

“My personal relationship with food during the pandemic has shifted somewhat over time. In the beginning, I was scared and depressed, and that led to a lot of comfort food binging. I ate a lot of sweets and chips mostly. I gained weight and then got a lot of anxiety over that, which led to me obsessing over food more. After a while, I adjusted more to my new routine and got over the anxiety that food was going to be taken away (due to shortages or restriction) and my eating balanced out. I’m getting even more into body positivity and intuitive eating now. I’ve been making a lot of nourishing comfort foods for dinner. My favorite is tofu karaage [marinated and fried tofu], which we eat with steamed rice, vegetables and homemade sauerkraut. We also make a dessert every day, usually brownies because it’s what we want. It’s so important for us to appreciate our bodies and be grateful for the food we have to nourish it. And gaining weight is OK. I think you have to let your body do its thing and have a brownie.”

“A friend and her father taught me how to cook fish in parchment paper years ago, but I had never tried to make it on my own. This was my first attempt. I really like this dish because it is easily adaptable to a variety of ingredients, healthy, easy and accessible.

Cooking during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a creative outlet for me. I’ve spent many evenings assessing what I have left in my pantry and reading recipes online that I can make the next day using what I have. One thing I am struck by is that the community that we have built around food has not gone away, it has just shifted. For example, while restaurants have been closed for dining in, several have made the locally sourced farm-fresh produce available for pick-up for home cooks to use. In addition, friends who have chickens delivered farm-fresh eggs to my porch along with sourdough starters and other delights. So, we are still building community around food, we just aren’t necessarily coming together around a table.”

Pictured: Tofu karaage with steamed rice and green onions.

Pictured: Cod en papillote with capers and fennel.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

the TO-DO list

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

JOSHUA ASANTE

SHOP QUIET CONTENDER Multihyphenate creator Joshua Asante’s newest single comes out on gorgeous, ruby-red vinyl next month, and pre-ordering it means your dollars are going not only to a local musician, but a locally owned record label. Asante and Seth Baldy started up Quiet Contender in the midst of the pandemic, finding unexpectedly that they’d need to find ways to engage with an audience across the screen and the speakers, rather than from the stage. The mission, however, remained: to “secure a space for art in general that may be under the radar, that may not have a big machine behind it,” Asante told us in April. “That’s not isolated to Little Rock, or Arkansas, or even the U.S. I feel like my algorithms understand me, to some degree, so I have a lot of interest in art from all over the globe that I’d like to give some sort of platform to, including my own work.” For now, that means “Everybody Gets Used” and “Tell My Mama I’m Back,” Asante’s latest musical missives, layered and luminescent as ever. Find the pre-order link for the vinyl, plus a bevy of other label and label-adjacent goods, on the digital shelves at quietcontender.com.

ORDER ‘THE WOOD WITCHES’

FRESHAWN WOMACK

Freshawn Womack — the saxophonist who blew minds at Won Run’s Arkansas Times Musician Showcase set earlier this year — is also the author and illustrator of a new graphic novel, “The Wood Witches,” and its theme of hitting “reset” on the world’s power structures couldn’t be more timely.

“Everything Old World had built up was destroyed by famine, war, and disease,” the book’s description reads. “This world is up for grabs between mercenaries, witches, organizers and ... a soul-stealing demon that incites war!” Womack features snippets of his drawing/coloring sessions online, accented with music from local beatmakers like Princeaus and Au.Dios.Bass, and the featured coven’s heroes are women of color, making tea and trying to save the human race from its own folly. So, for those of you grappling with the tension between your Harry Potter loyalty and J.K. Rowling’s latest transphobic nonsense, might we suggest you pick up a locally fashioned, inclusive story about sisterhood, witches and plant magic? Get the book at thewoodwitches.com, and follow Womack’s work at patreon.com/thewoodwitches.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2020 15

BRIAN CHILSON

LISTEN TO FLORENCE PRICE AND WILLIAM GRANT STILL

SHOP BLACK LIVE ReMix Ideas’ online shopping event goes live every Friday night on Facebook, giving you a chance to acquaint yourself with the work of Black creators and entrepreneurs in Central Arkansas and elsewhere in the state. ReMix Ideas is a project of Benito Lubazibwa, a Tanzanian native and University of Central Arkansas alumnus who in a 2018 interview with the Arkansas Times said he believes an economic movement is the next phase of justice for people of color. “Martin Luther King did an excellent job on civil rights,” Lubazibwa said. “Now it’s time for this generation to fight for economic mobility,” not just for African Americans, but “women, Latinos, everybody.”

16 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

Among the many bits of Black Arkansas history worth delving into are the work of Florence Price and William Grant Still. Both composed at a time when the concert hall was still a legally segregated space; both now have their names on rooms at historic Robinson Center in downtown Little Rock.

Fire up the streaming platform of your choice and start with Still’s tone poem “Darker America” (1924), or his “Afro-American Symphony,” the first symphony by a Black composer to be performed by a major orchestra. And check out Price’s moving (and prize-winning) “Symphony in E Minor,” or her recently rediscovered “Violin Concerto No. 2,” completed only a year before her death in 1953 and considered lost until 2009, when it turned up in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Ill.

G. NELIDOFF / SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS LIBRARIES, FAYETTEVILLE

the TO-DO list

LITTLE ROCK BLACK PRIDE

FRIDAY 7/24-SUNDAY 7/26. VARIOUS VENUES. In case 2020 hasn’t made her intentions crystal clear, let’s just state for the record: This year is one for the history books, and that means Pride celebrations are going to take a lot of different forms — protest, discussion, revelry, affirmation. One of those forms is Little Rock Black Pride, a series of events across downtown Little Rock that traverses ground between the ballroom and the discussion panel, organized by the Arkansas Black Gay Men’s Forum and others. See Little Rock Black Pride on Facebook for Eventbrite links to the following: the Little Rock Pride “Just Bring It” Ball, Friday, July 24; Girls Dat Like Girls Black Pride Kickoff, Friday, July 24; Transgender Town Hall, Saturday, July 25; and a “State of the Gay Black Man” discussion, Saturday, July 25.

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STREAM CALS ‘MONDAY MALADIES’ SERIES

GET YOUR NAME ON THE ARKANSAS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S MEMBER LIST Cuban-born composer Tania León penned “Little Rock Nine,” from which arias were performed at the University of Central Arkansas in 2017 as part of the commemorations of the desegregation of Central High School 60 years before. León, it was announced in June 2020, will reprise her Arkansas connections with a newly commissioned work for the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in the ASO’s 2021-22 season. The commission is part of the Amplifying Voices Program, a project of New Music USA and the Sphinx Venture Fund, for which orchestras presented proposals in January “for co-commissions and a commitment to promoting existing repertoire that deserves further performances.” Premiering Leon’s work, ASO Interim Artistic Director Geoffrey Robson said, “will be one of the great highlights of the ’21-22 season and a great artistic honor. The Amplifying Voices grant, for which we are most grateful, allows us to pursue the creation of new art

TANIA LEÓN

If the pandemic and the protests are paving the way to some hard-to-swallow history lessons about health inequity, add this one to your list.

Every other Monday at 7 p.m. through August, the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas is hosting a series of lectures on the history of medicine, disease and containment in The Natural State. Each episode is structured as a Zoom webinar, broadcast concurrently on YouTube Live, then archived on YouTube for later viewing. Catch back episodes of lectures from Tim Nutt and Thomas A. DeBlack on the 1918 influenza pandemic and the history of disease in Arkansas, or join any of the following by registering for the webinar under the “Events” tab at cals.org: “ ‘There Is a Great Deal of Sickness in Our Regiment’: Disease in Civil War Arkansas” from David Sesser, July 6; “Soundings in Medical History: Hazards of U.S. Medical Practice in the Past” from William Lindsey, July 20; “Cows, Contagion and Conflict: Federal Efforts to Eradicate Tick Fever and Local Resistance in Arkansas History” from Blake Perkins, Aug. 3; “National Health Care Community: Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas, 1921–1936” from Janis K. Percefull, Aug. 17; and “Where Every Day Was Like a Tuesday: A History of the Arkansas Tuberculosis Sanatorium, 1910–1973” from Rachel Patton, Aug. 31.

at a time when we need it most. Ms. León is a unique, brilliant and prolific composer whom I cannot wait to work with and be inspired by. Her presence in Little Rock will be a powerful experience for the orchestra, music students all around central Arkansas, and all who come to experience her newest music performed live for the very first time!” ASO is also, it was announced in June, a recipient of an $18,760 grant from the League of American Orchestras “to strengthen its understanding of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and to help transform organizational culture.”

The League’s CEO, Jesse Rosen, noted that the grants addressed “decades of inequity within our field.” The ASO, CEO Christina Littlejohn said, “wants systemic, sustainable change that leads us to fulfill our mission to truly serve all Arkansans through music.”

Get season details at arkansassymphony.org.

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JULY 2020 17

BRIAN CHILSON

NEWS & POLITICS

NOT LOOKING OUT FOR THE LITTLE GUY: Governor Hutchinson issued an executive order protecting employers from suits by employees who believe they contracted COVID-19 at work.

LOOKING OUT FOR BUSINESS, NOT PEOPLE TORT REFORM BY FIAT.

BY ERNEST DUMAS

18 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

N

o one could have been surprised when the Walton heir who chairs Governor Hutchinson’s task force to map Arkansas’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic said the state’s priority should be new laws to protect business owners from lawsuits by people who are hurt by a business’ practices during the current and future pandemics.

The legislature, he said, needs to enact protections for business at a special session very soon or at the regular session in January. Such legislation is commonly called “tort reform,” although you might not consider it reform to help companies avoid compensating people who are harmed by fraud, deception or negligence.

Hutchinson, like all Republicans nowadays, is a big advocate of tort reform.

Gov. Mike Huckabee and the legislature enacted “tort reform” in 2003, but the law was largely deflated by successive decisions of the Arkansas Supreme Court in 2007, 2009 and 2011 because the act’s various business protections limited the amount of damages to an injured person in violation of the Constitution and also ran afoul of the sternest provision in the Arkansas Constitution’s bill of rights: “Every person is

entitled to a certain remedy in the laws for all injuries or wrongs he may receive in his person, property or character ...” It continues: “he ought to obtain justice freely, and without purchase; completely, and without denial; promptly and without delay ...”

Luckily for the champions of tort reform, the state Supreme Court has undergone big personnel changes since the last of those decisions, and the court let it be known in recent months that it would be open for business again on matters of commercial interest like tort reform.

From now on, the court implied, it is going to follow the playbook of the Federalist Society, the right-wing legal fraternity that is now the clearinghouse for appointments to the federal judiciary when Republicans control the White House and the Senate. Come January, only two of the nine Arkansas justices who rendered one or all three tort decisions a decade ago will still be around.

In a little noticed decision in April, the court, by a vote of 6-1, embraced the Federalist Society’s war on the “Administrative State,” which is the term affixed to the government’s efforts for the past century to protect consumers, work-

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ARKANSAS TIMES

ers and the general public from commercial abuses in the workplace, marketplace or the environment. The Trump administration has been rolling back those protections for three years, but once someone else is in the White House they will be restored. So it is the courts’ function, in the Federalist Society’s view, to restore and preserve industry’s right to put the spoils of the market above the health and wellbeing of individuals.

Do I attach too much meaning to the case of Mary Myers v. Yamato Kogyo Co. Ltd.? The 6-to1 decision, handed down April 9, attracted no attention in the popular press. The majority opinion, written by Federalist Society protégé Shawn Womack, the former Republican leader of the state Senate, was passing strange.

The Supreme Court upheld both the state Workers Compensation Commission and the Arkansas Court of Appeals, which had barred a widow — whose husband, a worker at a steel mill at Newport who was killed when the cable on an 8-ton ladle broke and dumped molten steel on him — from suing the mill’s big corporate owners for damages. The mass even melted the man’s wedding ring.

The commission and a majority of the Court of Appeals had said the state workers compensation law gave the big corporate shareholders who owned the steel mill immunity from tort claims. Womack’s majority opinion, which agreed with the commission and the Court of Appeals, said the lack of a comma near the end of a sentence in the workers comp statute made the big corporate shareholders immune to damage claims from the widow and children. The pittance from workers compensation was all she was entitled to, whatever the Constitution might say about obtaining justice “freely, and without purchase; completely, and without denial; promptly and without delay.”

Given their recent composition, there ought to be no surprise at the widow’s loss at either the commission, the Court of Appeals or the state Supreme Court. Only one judge on the Court of Appeals and one on the Supreme Court — retiring Justice Josephine Hart — dissented strongly.

What was startling about the Supremes’ decision was that, after agreeing entirely with the Court of Appeals on the substance — the comma interpretation — the Supreme Court formally vacated the lower court’s opinion and announced that the court would never again give any deference to the Workers Compensation Commission or any other state agency that is charged with interpreting the statutes. The rule at the state Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court has

long been that they will defer to the administrative agency that carries out a law unless the agency’s interpretation of the law is manifestly, obviously wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court came close to ending deference two years ago but, to the dismay of the Federalist Society, Chief Justice John Roberts failed to go along with the other four Republican judges and scrap the deference doctrine.

What Justice Womack and those who agreed with him on the court said was that a missing or misplaced comma in the sentence — a dispute among linguists for centuries — meant that the corporate owners of the steel mill who had profited from the man’s toil were not morally or legally obliged to compensate the poor man or the family he succored for the owners’ negligence and that if the Court of Appeals had taken the moral side of the comma dispute, then the Supreme Court would have overruled the court.

But since it did not take that side, the superior court was going to overrule it anyway so as to let government agencies know that any future straying in that direction would not be countenanced.

Would you call that an activist court?

Now, every order of an Arkansas regulatory agency will be subject to reversal by the Supreme Court if a majority of the court thinks it has a better idea about what the law intends than the agency that exists to carry out the law. That goes, for example, for the Public Service Commission, the state Plant Board and the Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, all of which have of late issued controversial orders affecting major industries. If the power companies and the electric cooperatives are as unhappy as they say they are with the PSC’s order last week on net metering for people who install solar-power facilities, all they have to do is appeal. Justice Womack indicates that they may find a friendly ear.

The Supreme Court’s order in Mary Myers’ case makes no mention of tort reform, but when the majority went far out of the way to end statutory deference to agencies, it was trying to say something. I think it was an invitation to the legislature to try again on tort reform. That is Shawn Womack’s peculiar history. As a state senator in 2003, he was one of the sponsors of the act making it harder for individuals to collect damages from businesses for negligence, fraud or deception. Womack left the legislature for a trial judgeship, where he was serving when the Supreme Court rendered its three decisions declaring parts of his tort act unconstitutional.

Womack ran for a seat on the Supreme Court in 2016 and won. Republican lawmakers, by

IMMUNITY, THANKS TO A MISSING COMMA

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then a heavy majority in both houses, drafted another tort-reform law but this time framed it as a constitutional amendment for the 2018 ballot, altering that stern admonition in the bill of rights to protect every person’s right to justice.

Womack, by then a justice, crossed the street to the legislature and lobbied for the amendment’s BEST PHARMACY passage. He told lawmakers that the Supreme A traditional Pharmacy with Eclectic Gifts Court was no longer the court that had struck down the 2003 tort law.

When that proposal’s legitimacy as a ballot measure was challenged at the Supreme Court the next fall, Womack did not recuse, as every ethical guide suggests that he should have. The 2801 Kavanaugh Little Rock 501.663.4131 Supreme Court voted 6-1 to strike the proposal from the ballot. Womack wrote a stinging dissent. Justice Hart, the dissenter in Mary Myers’ case, wrote the majority opinion on the tort amendment in 2018.

Is Womack right that the court has pivoted 180 degrees on the constitutionality of sharply shrinking people’s right to compensation for Entergy Arkansas is investing today to power a brighter future for our customers. Clean, r “all injuries or wrongs”? Hart did not address Entergy Arkansas is investing today to power a brighter future for our customers. Clean, reliable energy is not onlyisvital to the safety and comfort of every Arkansan, it fuels industry and our econ the ruling on ending deference to administranot only vital to the safety and comfort of every Arkansan, it fuels industry and our economy. tive agencies in her dissent to Womack’s opinTogether, we power Together, we power life.life. ion in April. She faces mandatory retirement in January; her replacement will be the wife of the state Republican chairman, a tort-reform advocate. Justice Karen Baker, who participated in the 2009 and 2011 tort decisions, merely Entergy Arkansas is investing today to power a brighter future for our customers. Clean, reliable energy concurred with the decision to uphold the workis not only vital to the safety and comfort of every Arkansan, it fuels industry and our economy. ers compensation and Court of Appeals rulings Together, we power life. without explaining why she was concurring, which suggests that while she went along with the result, she disagreed with the reasons cited in Womack’s opinion.

But it is clearly a far different court than it was BUILDING CLEAN POWER GENERATION for the previous four decades. Two years ago, Arkansas’ largest solar energy project, the Stuttgart Solar Energy Center, came online in 2018, it entered the swamp of sovereign immunity. providing 81 megawatts of clean, reliable power. A 100-megawatt solar facility in Chicot County will While the fathers of the Arkansas Constitution come online in 2020, and a proposed solar facility near Searcy will provide another 100 megawatts. placed the right of everyone to get justice for Together, these facilities will provide enough clean power to energize more than 45,000 homes. all wrongs and injuries at the front of the document, they later included sovereign immunity MODERNIZING THE GRID TO IMPROVE RELIABILITY — the ancient idea that the king (the governWe are replacing and upgrading infrastructure like power lines and substations to improve reliability and maintainCLEAN affordable power for years to come.

BUILDING POWER GENERATION ment) can do no wrong. So people couldn’t sue Arkansas’ solar energy project, the Stuttgart Solar Energy Center, came online inCenter, 2018, the government in a state court for any wrongs a Arkansas’ largestlargest solar energy project, the Stuttgart Solar Energy came online in 2 providing 81 megawatts of clean, reliable power. A 100-megawatt solar facility in Chicot County will government agency does them. Arkansas is one INVESTING IN NEW TECHNOLOGY providing come 81 megawatts ofatechnology clean, solar reliable power.

A solar facility in Chicot C online innew 2020, and proposed facility near Searcy will100-megawatt provide another 100 megawatts.

Implementing digital and advanced meters improves power restoration, energy of three states with such ironclad provisions.

Together, these facilities service. will provide enough cleancan power to energize morebetter than 45,000 homes. efficiency and customer These new tools also help customers understand and online in 2020, and a proposed solar facility near Searcy will provide another 100 m So how can the two conflicting provisionscome of control their energy usage. the Constitution be reconciled? The legislature Together, these facilities enough clean power to energize more than 45,000 ho MODERNIZING THEwill GRIDprovide TO IMPROVE RELIABILITY had passed a law years ago waiving sovereign Learn more at entergyarkansas.com/brightfuture.

We are replacing and upgrading infrastructure like power lines and substations to improve reliability immunity in certain cases. In 2018, in a split deand maintain affordable power for years to come. cision, the court said no, the legislature could not waive the ban on suing the state. The ban INVESTING IN NEW TECHNOLOGY on such suits was ironclad, the majority said.

We are replacing and upgrading infrastructure like power lines and substations to improv Implementing new digital technology and advanced meters improves power restoration, energy The decision sent shockwaves and confusion efficiency and customerpower service. These tools to can also help customers better understand and and maintain affordable for new years A message from Entergy Arkansas, LLC ©2019come.

Entergy Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved. through the judicial system, and it has divided control their energy usage. the justices in case after case. The court altered sovereign immunity recently by saying, OK, you Learn more at entergyarkansas.com/brightfuture. can sue the state to stop it from doing illegal things, but you can’t sue the state for damages Implementing new digital technology and advanced meters improves power restoration, 15067 EAL AB Print Ad 7.21 x 8.743.indd 1 8/16/19 1:22 PM it did to you. efficiency and customer service. These new tools can also help customers better understa But the drift of the court, as Shawn Womack suggests, is clear, and it does not favor the indicontrol their energy usage.

A message from Entergy Arkansas, LLC ©2019 Entergy Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved. vidual, whether he is a nursing-home patient or an injured son of toil boiled alive at his station by a careless industry.

Learn more at entergyarkansas.com/brightfuture.

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Brighter future. Cleaner power Brighter future. Cleaner power.

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Lowell has maintained strong during Covid. Because of the determination of all the people in this great northwest Arkansas city, Lowell will continue to be a stable and dependable source that supplies the needs of this region.

Because of you, the doors are open in Lowell.

Lowell Thanks You.

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THE BEST AMID THE WORST

THE RESULTS OF OUR ANNUAL BEST OF ARKANSAS SURVEY. Our worries that a pandemic that had shut down commerce in Arkansas was a poor time to ask our populace where they liked to go out and spend their money on food, drink and hip threads, or what gym was their favorite, or which resort they liked to enjoy proved unfounded. The readers who took part in the Arkansas Times’ annual survey of what’s Best in Arkansas weren’t so pessimistic that they didn’t envision being able to return to their favorite watering holes and beauty parlors. In a nod to this extraordinary time of limited socializing and constant hand-washing, we also added a section seeking readers’ votes on the best in pandemic life, like booze-to-go, a development so pleasing we hope it continues after we’re all vaccinated and unmasked. So here, for the umpteenth year in row, are the Best of Arkansas winners, from curbside service to canoe routes, antiques to eyewear, salons to sporting goods.

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JULY 2020 23

Just Peachy STAR OF PANDEMIC LIFE: PANDEMIC LIFE CURBSIDE RESTAURANT SERVICE Sami Lal’s Indian cuisine.

STAR OF INDIA Finalists: Trio’s, The Pantry, Heights Taco & Tamale

RESTAURANT DELIVERY TRIO’S Finalists: Pizza D’Action, Damgoode Pies, Fantastic China

BRIAN CHILSON

BOOZE TO-GO BUSINESS COLONIAL WINES & SPIRITS Finalists: Legacy Wine and Spirits, O’Looney’s Wine & Liquor, Sullivant’s Liquor

24 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

MOST INNOVATIVE RESTAURANT THE ROOT CAFE Finalists: Trio’s, @ The Corner, Raduno Brick Oven & Barroom

MOST INNOVATIVE BUSINESS (excluding restaurants) JERRY’S BARBER SHOP IN THE HEIGHTS Finalists: Rocktown Distillery, Just Peachy, Bella Vita Jewelry GROCERY STORE AMID THE PANDEMIC KROGER LOCAL WINNER: EDWARDS FOOD GIANT Finalists: Trader Joe’s, Natural Grocers, Whole Foods ONLINE FITNESS/YOGA CLASS JOLLY BODIES Finalists: Blue Yoga Nyla, Bolte Fitness, ZenStudio Fitness

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PANDEMIC SILVER LINING: Colonial Wines & Spirits’ Chris Catoon loads up alcohol for delivery to sheltering customers.

COLONIAL WINES & SPIRITS

COLONIAL’S AMPLE INVENTORY IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR CURBSIDE OR DELIVERY.

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

I

f you ask Clark Trim what his favorite wine is, he’ll tell you it’s the one in the glass he’s holding at the time. He’s got some favorites: whites and rosés in the summer, reds in the wintertime. He thinks Rieslings are hugely underrated, and loves a good Chablis. For Trim and his partner, Henrik Thostrup, it’s not so much about whether the grape hails from California or Tuscany or the sticker price, it’s about whether you like it or not. “Just enjoy what you like to drink,” Trim said. “A $100 bottle of wine is not worth anything if you don’t enjoy it.”

Trim and Thostrup opened Colonial Wines & Spirits in 1992. In those days, gas stations didn’t have growler taps, craft beer was still a relatively niche endeavor, and Central Arkansas was a bit of a Sauvignon Blanc desert. Equipped with Trim’s background in hotel/restaurant management and Thostrup’s background as a chef, the pair made it their business to anticipate trends and to catalyze new ones.

“There were very few Sauvignon Blancs available in the state in 1992, and we got with our suppliers very early on,” Trim said. “And as hesitant as they were to bring a lot of Sauvignon Blanc in — they said, ‘Oh, people aren’t gonna drink anything but Chardonnay,’ and we said, ‘Just bring them. We’ll sell them. I think one of the first ones we got was [from] Villa Maria, in New Zealand.

And our suppliers were very surprised to see how that trend caught on.” When they think a particular drink is going to go big, they’ll lean on their research and stock up on names from beyond the mainstream channels. Right now, Trim said, you’re going to find champagnes — a lot of them.

Trim and Thostrup are proud of their work to

26 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

“make champagne an everyday wine,” Trim said.

“It’s a great wine for pairing with all kinds of food.

When we came here to Arkansas in ’92, we started doing tastings privately with champagnes and food pairings, and we went from having maybe five to six champagnes to having a full 40-foot section with 10 shelves full of sparkling wines and champagnes.”

Bubbly, he said, is “not just for New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s Day.” Keeping inventory flexible — and ample — means that Colonial needs a lot of space. It had operated in the ’90s from a building on the corner of Alamo Drive and West Markham Street and, in 2007, moved a few blocks eastward to its current location at 11200 W. Markham. The parking lot’s a breeze to get in and out of, and that began to come in handy in March, as Central Arkansans began to self-isolate at home and new “emergency rules” allowing local liquor stores to deliver were implemented. “It was literally announced in the governor’s briefing that afternoon,” Trim said, “and the next day we began to ramp up for it. It was not a simple task. First of all, the requirements were that there were no third parties available; Grubhub, for example, couldn’t deliver alcoholic beverages. It was specifically required that the company own the vehicles, and that the delivery personnel must be employed by the store.” So, the next day, Trim said, they went out and bought a van.

“But one of the things you may not think about,” he said, “was getting commercial insurance to deliver alcohol. That was kind of a hurdle. Not everyone will write that insurance. … And then the internal things, if you compare the steps a customer takes during an online or-

der to the steps taken when a customer comes in and shops, there is about five times more labor involvement for us to fill an online order or a curbside order. So it was a learning curve for sure, We worked on it very diligently to make sure that we were doing exactly the right things, that we got the orders filled properly and delivered properly.”

For one thing, Trim and Thostrup had to make sure they knew who they were selling to, and to put safeguards in place to prevent minors from attempting to order liquor delivery; the customer who ordered the delivery must be present at the home, ID in hand, to accept the delivery. “It was not an easy task, but it was manageable, and it has been successful for us,” Trim said.

And, unsurprisingly, it’s something Trim and Co. would like to see stick around. “I think the customers who use the service — not only from Colonial, but from other stores throughout the metroplex here and throughout the county — the customers enjoy that convenience. I think it would be a very good service to the community if it would be continued. I’m not an attorney, and I don’t profess to know what process it would take to become permanent. But it’s my understanding that it would take a change in the law. … We’re hoping that maybe it will be addressed in the next session, and that there will be enough support behind it to make it permanent.”

Meanwhile, Trim said, they don’t take awards like those in the Arkansas Times’ Best of Arkansas poll for granted. “We are very humbled that your readers have picked us in these two categories. …

We will continue to work extremely hard to meet the desires of our community and to take care of our customers.”

BRIAN CHILSON

Jerry’s Barber Shop in the Heights

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LIVESTREAMED LOCAL CONCERT/EVENT ARKANSAS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S “ BEDTIME WITH BACH” Finalists: Cliff and Susan Erwin Prowse, Club Nevermore, Rodney Block WHAT RESTAURANT ARE YOU GOING TO VISIT FIRST WHEN YOU’RE COMFORTABLE GOING OUT IN THE WORLD? TRIO’S Finalists: Four Quarter Bar, Local Lime, The Pantry

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LOCAL ENTERTAINMENT

ARTIST MICHAEL SHAEFFER Finalists: Katherine Strause, Lisa Krannichfeld, Milkdadd AUTHOR CHARLES PORTIS Finalists: Emily Roberson, Rhett Brinkley, Monica Clark-Robinson COMEDIAN ANDRE “BIG DRE” PRICE Finalists: Chase Myska, Gene Berry, Angry Patrick COUNTRY BAND/ARTIST ARKANSAUCE Finalists: Bonnie Montgomery, Mark Currey, Justin Moore DANCE CLUB CLUB 27 Finalists: Club Sway, Club Nevermore, Discovery Nightclub

In business since 1991, we are the best spot north of the river (some say Central Arkansas) for incredible deals on wine, single barrel bourbon picks, and the latest craft beer releases. Customer service is our top priority and we appreciate being recognized for it.

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JULY 2020 27

ESSENTIAL BUSINESS: For John Akins (left) and David Bevans (right) of Legacy Wine and Spirits, liquor delivery was a “game-changer.”

LEGACY WINE AND SPIRITS THANKS TO PANDEMIC EMERGENCY RULES, LEGACY HAS EXPANDED ITS CLIENTELE.

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

L

ooking at Legacy Wine and Spirits’ website, a couple of things stand out. The first is: It’s easy to see why Legacy has adjusted so smoothly to the pandemic rules that allow for liquor store deliveries. Pre-pandemic, the Chenal Parkway liquor stop was already equipped with a robust online presence, including a gift registry, a cigar selection, a host of grocery items like Blue Sail and Onyx coffee beans and a wine database with a “90+ POINTS” tab that lets you filter results for top-rated wines from your choice of ranking system (Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, etc.).

The other thing you might notice, if you happened to wander over to the staff directory, is that owners/operators John Akins and David Bevans keep a sizable number of former/practicing bartenders on their payroll — an asset to anyone whose business depends on knowing what people like to drink.

Akins and Bevans met back when Bevans was managing his father’s dental clinics. Akins’ background is in banking software, Bevans’ in the service industry, and the pair decided to leave the medical field and open up I-30 Liquor in the Mabelvale district near Baseline Road, all the while making plans for a location in West Little Rock. That happened in November 2015.

“It’s a fun industry,” Bevans said, “and we were actually looking for something that was somewhat recession-proof. Had no idea we were going to be, you know, an ‘essential business’!”

Delivery, Bevans said, is something he and Akins had wanted to do for years, “but it’s a statutory regulation, so it’s got to go through legislation to actually become law. When the governor announced that we could do curbside and

28 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

deliveries, it was an immediate game-changer.

We had to start the whole business model on the fly.” Their existing web presence, Bevans said, helped tremendously, though the announcement meant they needed to take their online inventory and make it “shoppable.”

“It was just a flip of a switch, basically,” Bevans said. “Johnny had the background in IT with the banking gig that he used to do. He’s our resident computer nerd. So he had us ready to roll.” They started making deliveries the day after Governor Hutchinson’s announcement, and business has been nonstop ever since. “It’s opened us up to new clientele, you know. Not just Chenal and West Little Rock. We run deliveries all over town. We have a 10-mile radius, but that encompasses quite a bit of Little Rock.”

As for Bevans, he’s into American whiskeys and craft beer. His staff roster — many listed with their beverage industry certifications like “Certified Cicerone” and “Master Sommelier” — represents knowledge in a host of other boozy categories. “Each column of our industry, there’s a wealth of knowledge behind gin, or behind beer, or wine. You could spend your whole life dedicated to learning just one aspect of it.”

If there’s a universal theme to the business, though, it’s hospitality. As a bartender and server, Bevans learned “food pairings, and how to read people, and how to treat people.” That goes, evidently, for Bevans and Akins’ employees; turnover is low at Legacy, and some staff members have been with Bevans and Akins since the I-30 Liquor days. ‘It’s a laid-back atmosphere,” Bevans said. “Not a lot of drama. A family vibe. We’ve got a lot of great, very knowledgeable people.”

We are honored to be recognized for our online streaming during COVID-19.

DJ DJ PORTERHOUSE Finalists: Michael Shaeffer, Tom Wood, G-Force FILMMAKER DANIEL CAMPBELL Finalists: Graham Gordy, Jeff Nichols, Mark Theideman GAY BAR CLUB SWAY Finalists: Six Ten Center, Discovery Nightclub, Triniti Nightclub HIP-HOP ARTIST BIG PIPH Finalists: 607, Dazz & Brie, Rah Howard JAZZ BAND/GROUP RODNEY BLOCK COLLECTIVE Finalists: Ted Ludwig Trio, Funkanites, Marquis Hunt LATE-NIGHT SPOT FOUR QUARTER BAR Finalists: Midtown Billiards, White Water Tavern, Willy D’s Rock & Roll Piano Bar

As a result, we have formed bonds with people from all over the world from our studio right here in Little Rock.

We love you, Arkansas!

– Cliff & Susan Prowse www.cliffandsusan.live

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LIVE MUSIC FESTIVAL KING BISCUIT BLUES FESTIVAL (Helena-West Helena) Finalists: Yadaloo Music Festival, MusicFest (El Dorado), Hillberry (Eureka Springs) LIVE MUSIC VENUE STICKYZ ROCK N’ ROLL CHICKEN SHACK Finalists: White Water Tavern, Rev Room, Four Quarter Bar LOCAL ACTOR/ACTRESS BARRY CLIFTON Finalists: Brittany Sparkles, Paul Prater, Mary Steenburgen LOCAL THEATER ARKANSAS REPERTORY THEATRE Finalists: The Studio Theatre, Argenta Community Theater, The Weekend Theater MOVIE THEATER RIVERDALE 10 CINEMA Finalists: Movie Tavern, Regal UA Breckenridge, Cinemark Colonel Glenn 18 MUSEUM MUSEUM OF DISCOVERY Finalists: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville), Arkansas Arts Center, Historic Arkansas Museum

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“Festivals are about YOU and the community.

Thank you so much for helping us make something new, fresh and special happen for Arkansas!”

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JULY 2020 29

65

TH

ANNIVERSA

RY

Brewski’s Pub & Grub

Best Marina

Thank You,

YRS

BRIAN CHILSON

65

Arkansas Times readers, 65 for voting us the best!

TH

IV.

ANN

NEIGHBORHOOD FESTIVAL HARVESTFEST Finalists: Arkansas Cornbread Festival, Main Street Food Truck Festival, Chili Fights in the Heights PERFORMING ARTS GROUP BALLET ARKANSAS Finalists: Arkansas Circus Arts, Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre, Haunted Argenta Ghost Tours

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ARKANSAS TIMES

FOOD AND DRINK

PHOTOGRAPHER AMBER LANE Finalists: Katie Childs, Ben Martin, Ashley Murphy

PLACE TO GAMBLE SARACEN CASINO RESORT (Pine Bluff) Finalists: Oaklawn Racing & Gaming (Hot Springs), Choctaw Casino & Resort (Oklahoma), Isle of Capri (Mississippi)

30 JULY 2020

SPORTS BAR BREWSKI’S PUB & GRUB Finalists: Dugan’s Pub, JJ’s Grill, Prospect Bar & Grill

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Big Orange

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BEST RIBS

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Jett’s Gas & Service

BRIAN CHILSON

THANK YOU FOR VOTING BANG-UP BETTY BEST ARTISAN AND STIFFT STATION GIFTS RUNNER-UP BEST GIFT SHOP!

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GOODS AND SERVICES

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bangupbetty.com 32 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

ANTIQUES MIDTOWN VINTAGE MARKET Finalists: Sweet Home Furnishings, South Main Creative, Fabulous Finds Antique & Decorative Mall

BANK ARVEST BANK Finalists: Simmons Bank, First Security Bank, Bank OZK BARBER SHOP JERRY’S BARBER SHOP IN THE HEIGHTS Finalists: Dogtown Barber Lounge, Handle Barbershop, V’s Barbershop BICYCLE SHOP ANGRY DAVE’S BICYCLES Finalists: Chainwheel, The Community Bicyclist, Arkansas Cycling & Fitness BOOKSTORE WORDSWORTH BOOKS Finalists: Dickson Street Bookshop (Fayetteville), Barnes & Noble, Bookish (Fort Smith) CAR INFINITI QX50 Finalists: 1972 Chevelle SS, Subaru Outback, Honda Accord

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ARTISAN BANG-UP BETTY Finalists: AR’T’s Arkansas T-Shirts, Bryant Phelan, Hannah Lawrence

CHIROPRACTOR JOHN VINCENT, WELLNESS REVOLUTION Finalists: Elite Chiropractic, Blackmon Chiropractic, Dr. Beverly Foster

AUTO DEALER EVERETT BUICK GMC Finalists: McLarty Automotive Group, Billy Wood Honda, Parker Automotive Group

COMMERCIAL ART GALLERY BOSWELL MOUROT FINE ART GALLERY Finalists: M2 Gallery, The New Gallery, Gallery 26

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O

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Box Turtle

BRIAN CHILSON

FIND THE BEST SUSHI IN ARKANSAS HERE!

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Little Rock, AR 72205 (501) 660-4100 KemuriRestaurant.com 34 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE AGENCY NEWMARK MOSES TUCKER PARTNERS Finalists: McKimmey Associates, Keller Williams, Kelley Commercial

EYEWEAR JAMES EYECARE & OPTICS GALLERY Finalists: Success Vision, Kavanaugh Eye Care, Little Rock Eye Clinic

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FARMERS MARKET HILLCREST FARMERS MARKET Finalists: Bernice Garden Farmers’ Market, Fayetteville Farmers Market (Fayetteville), River Market Farmers’ Market

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FAMILY DENTIST ARKANSAS FAMILY DENTAL Finalists: Little Rock Family Dental, Hatley Family Dentistry, Jolly Family Dentistry

FUNERAL HOME NORTH LITTLE ROCK FUNERAL HOME Finalists: Roller-Chenal Funeral Home, Ruebel Funeral Home, Smith Family Funeral Home

DESIGNER/DECORATOR JAYME’S INTERIORS Finalists: Garry Mertins, Larry West, Jill White Designs

FURNITURE ASHLEY FURNITURE Local winner: Ferguson’s Furniture Finalists: Hank’s Fine Furniture, Cleo’s Furniture, Galaxy Furniture

DIET/WEIGHT LOSS CENTER ARKANSAS HEALTH & NUTRITION Finalists: University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Weight Watchers, Roller Weight Loss & Advanced Surgery

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YOUR CHILD’S HEALTH IS A BIG DEAL. Don’t delay care.

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JULY 2020 35

NEIGHBORHOOD RECORD STORE.

IN CONTROL: Owner Wes Howerton, filling the need for LPs.

BY WILL BOYD

A

s someone who works in the music industry, and who grew up going to shows where vinyl records were almost always (and sometimes exclusively) available, I’ve never really stopped collecting them. I love the warmth of a good sounding vinyl record, the big artwork, the liner notes and the ritual of flipping the disc when the side is over. I own the same Discman I’ve had for 20 years, which I’ll throw batteries into once in a blue moon when I get the itch for something not available to stream and never pressed on wax.

It seems I’m not alone. According to the Recording Industry Association of America’s yearend report for 2019, vinyl LP and EP sales saw a growth change of over 14 percent between 2018 and 2019, even as CDs saw a loss of over 10 percent. Still, coming off the early 1990s decline of vinyl record output in favor of the CD, this seems wild to me. When has any industry gone from exclusively one format of distribution to a newer “better” one, stuck with it for decades, then gone back?

This is where Michael Shaeffer and Wes Howerton stepped in, with their record store Control.

On the cusp of the one-year anniversary of the brick and mortar shop, they’ve won the Arkansas Times’ Best Of Arkansas poll in the Home Entertainment category. Control announced Shaeffer’s departure from the business shortly before the Arkansas Times went to press, but Howerton has no plans to stop serving Central Arkansans with the records they need.

Control opened up in June 2019 in the Hillcrest neighborhood, an area full of shops, restaurants and plenty of foot traffic, but the heart of the business goes back a bit further.

Howerton and Shaeffer met when Shaeffer was a guest on Howerton’s radio show “NVRMND: The Morning Show,” on KABF-FM, 88.3, then

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ARKANSAS TIMES

DJ’ed some small functions together, including a recurring soul brunch gig at South on Main.

They began doing pop-up shops around the city, including a sort of residency during the 2018 PopUp In The Rock, an annual joint project by Create Little Rock and studioMAIN and part of a national movement known as the Better Block Project. Taking cues from musical acts as varied as Janet Jackson, Pedro The Lion and Joy Division, they named their venture Control.

“Initially, Wes and I pulled from our own collections,” Shaeffer said, “and we took a chunk of that money we were getting from selling records, then we would reach out to distributors and say, ‘Hey, how do we buy from you?’

“That’s when we found there was a really big need for new vinyl, too. Used vinyl, you can go digging, but there’s not really anywhere around here you could go and get the new ‘whatever’ record.

That was an eye-opener for us.”

“Those boxes were getting shipped to my apartment at the time,” Howerton said, “and we would sit in the living room pricing new records, putting them in a crate, and then we’d take ’em to the next pop-up, and people were super excited ’cause we’d have the new Car Seat Headrest record, you know, the newest indie rock, or hip-hop record.”

Shaeffer added, “There were holes in the market that people didn’t realize were holes.”

Eventually they moved into their brick and mortar space at 2612 Kavanaugh Blvd., where foot traffic has brought in lots of young people to browse records in a way they may not have been able to before. Everything from “kids buying their first record player from us” to an 11-year old girl coming in with her dad to make a list for a future birthday purchase. She told them she wanted to see “ ‘what Queen records you have, I wanna see Beach Boys and Beatles records,’ ”

BRIAN CHILSON

CHAMPIONSHIP VINYL THE RETURN OF THE

Howerton said.

Howerton began pulling records and she looked through everything, then she and her dad left without buying anything. Three weeks later, that girl walked in ahead of her dad, Howerton continued.

“You ready to buy Queen records?’ ” Howerton asked her. “She was like, ‘You remembered!’

Of course I did!”

As 2020 progresses, the escalation of the coronavirus pandemic has forced Control, like many businesses, to pivot how it interacts with its customers, both in terms of browsing and getting records to them.

“It’s really tricky right now,” Shaeffer said, “because the magic is taken away from that excitement of walking into a shop. We’ve just been relying on social media to create that magic in some ways. It’s tricky; we want to open the store.

We love being in our store. It’s such a big question mark.”

Still, they remain hopeful that people will come back out to shop for records the way it was intended as soon as they are able.

“I had a beautiful moment a few weeks ago,” Howerton said, “where three kids came up, and those are three kids that would have been ready to explore everything. They called me from the front porch, and they just started telling me things they were interested in, and they sat on the bench looking through the window, and I went to the back and I pulled out a bunch of records, and we both stayed on speakerphone, and I just showed them records through the window and flipped them back so they could will figure out what what was on particular records and looking at track listings and everything, and after like 35 minutes of shopping via speakerphone through the window they bought two records, one each. It was amazing.”

Thank You for Choosing Us as "Best Mental Health Facility."

GROCERY STORE TRADER JOE’S LOCAL WINNER: EDWARDS FOOD GIANT Finalists: Kroger, Natural Grocers, Whole Foods HAIR SALON SUITE 102 SALON Finalists: Fringe Benefits, Jerry’s Barber Shop in the Heights, Southern Blonde and Co. HARDWARE/HOME IMPROVEMENT FULLER & SON HARDWARE Finalists: The Home Depot, Kraftco Hardware, Lowe’s HIP CLOTHING INDIGO Finalists: Crying Weasel Vintage, Fringe, Scarlett

www.MethodistFamily.com

Solstice Collection now available in-store and online!

HOBBY SHOP ARGENTA Bead Co. Finalists: Art Outfitters, Michael’s, Rail & Sprue Hobbies (Jacksonville) HOME ENTERTAINMENT CONTROL Finalist: Arkansas Record and CD Exchange HOME, LIFE, CAR INSURANCE SALESPEOPLE BRIAN CRESS, SHELTER INSURANCE Finalists: Bev Hargraves, Arkansas Insurance Partners; Bruce James, State Farm; Joe Justus Insurance Agency HOSPITAL BAPTIST HOSPITAL Finalists: Arkansas Children’s Hospital, CHI St. Vincent, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences HOTEL CAPITAL HOTEL Finalists: 21c Museum Hotel (Bentonville), The Baker (North Little Rock), The Waters (Hot Springs)

Thank Arkansa you shoppin s for and for g local among t voting us he best!

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JULY 2020 37

Sissy’s Log Cabin

Thank You!

BRIAN CHILSON

We are proud to serve the finest authentic Indian food for 27+ years in the state of Arkansas.

We believe you’re the best!

of India Star✺

HVAC REPAIR MIDDLETON HEAT AND AIR Finalists: Advantage Service Co., Airmasters Heating and Air Conditioning, Bob and Ed’s Heating and Air Conditioning

301 N Shackleford Rd. • Little Rock 501-227-9900 • lrstarofindia.com

INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER AT&T LOCAL WINNER: CONWAY CORP. Finalists: Hyperleap, Suddenlink, Xfinity

BEST CURBSIDE RESTAURANT SERVICE

BEST VEGETARIAN

INVESTMENT ADVISER KELLY R. JOURNEY, EDWARD JONES Finalists: Sarah Catherine Gutierrez (Aptus Financial), Heath Harper (Morgan Stanley), April Pollard, Edward Jones

All Roads Lead to Yum!

JEWELER SISSY’S LOG CABIN Finalists: Bella Vita, Laura Stanley, Roberson’s Fine Jewelry LANDSCAPER/LANDSCAPE DESIGN CHRIS OLSEN/BOTANICA GARDENS Finalists: The Good Earth, Hocott’s Garden Center, Schneider Lawn Care LAWYER VICTORIA LEIGH, LION LEGAL SERVICES Finalists: Erin Cassinelli (Lassiter and Cassinelli) David Slade (Carney Bates & Pulliam), Jenny Teeter (Gil Ragon Owen) LINGERIE STORE CUPID’S Finalists: Angie Davis Lingerie Store and Boudoir Studio (Conway), Seductions, Victoria’s Secret

BEST ONION RINGS We have a pick-up window and text alerts for call-in orders.

Order online or call in today!

7410 Cantrell Rd, Little Rock www.hubcapburger.com 38 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

501.353.0130

MASSAGE THERAPIST AVA BELLA DAY SPA Finalists: Arkansas Healing Arts Massage and Wellness, Cora Crain, RD Sports Massage MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARY HARVEST HOUSE OF CANNABIS Finalists: Green Springs Medical (Hot Springs), Harvest Cannabis (Conway), Native Green Wellness (Hensley)

S

BEST RIB

11, 2010, 20 8, 2009, 14, 2015, 0 0 2 , 7 0 20 13, 20 2012, 20, 2017, 2018, 2016 20 2019, 20

Visit www.wholehogcafe.com for other locations throughout Arkansas!

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oting Us! V r o F s Thank t! Come See Us The Bes

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For custom orders, contact Monica Chatteron at @flakebabypastry CAMPAIGNING: Attorney General Rutledge has bombarded the airwaves with $1.7 million in purported public service announcements since July 2019. Note the position of her family photograph on her desk, facing away from her and toward the camera.

T h a n ky o uAr k a n s a s f o rs u p p o r t i n gl i v e l o c a lt h e a t r et h r o u g h t h i sb r i e fI n t e r mi s s i o n a n da l wa y s .

T h a n ky o uAr k a n s a s f o rs u p p o r t i n gl i v e T h a n k y o u T A h a r n k k a n y s o a u s Ar k a n s a s l o c a lt h e a t r et h r o u g h f o r s u p p o r f t i o n r g s l u i v p e p o r t i n gl i v e t h i s b r i e f I n t e r m i s s i o n @s t u d i o t h e a t r e l r l o c a l t h e a t l r o e c a t h l r t o h u e g a h t r e t h r o u g h a n d a l w a y s . t h i sb r i e fI t n h t i e s r m b r i i s e s f i o I n t e r mi s s i o n a n da l wa y a s n . da l wa y s .

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ARKANSAS TIMES

THE RUTLEDGE RETORT

TIMES’ READERS VOTE HER SPENDING BEST WORST.

BY LINDSEY MILLAR

I

n six years as Arkansas’s attorney general, Leslie Rutledge has been little more than a Trumpian pull-string doll. Whatever travesty is in vogue with the president and his minions — undercutting the Affordable Care Act, making it harder for a woman to get an abortion, rolling back environmental protections — Rutledge has been sure to issue statements and file lawsuits in support. But in the last year, she’s tried to rebrand herself as a crusader for the little guy, spending $1.7 million in the fiscal year that ended in June on advertisements featuring herself. The ads, usually branded as The Rutledge Report, often have a consumer protection theme and have appeared on TV, radio and online. They’re paid for with public dollars from the consumer education and enforcement fund

in Rutledge’s office, which holds recoveries from corporations that have damaged state citizens.

When the Arkansas Times asked the attorney general’s office for an accounting of ad spending, a spokesman’s first response was to point out that previous attorneys general had advertised similarly. But by comparison, Rutledge’s spending this year alone came close to matching the $1.8 million her predecessor, Dustin McDaniel, spent during the eight years of his two terms. The readers of the Arkansas Times saw through this PR push and recognized that Rutledge, considered a likely gubernatorial candidate in 2022, has been using public dollars to burnish her image. They voted her office’s spending the Worst Misuse of Taxpayer Dollars in this year’s Best of Arkansas survey.

BRIAN CHILSON

Harvest House of Cannabis

MED SPA REJUVENATION CLINIC & DAY SPA Finalists: Flawless Med Spa (Bryant), Skin Fix Med Spa, Twilla MedSpa (Fort Smith) MEN’S CLOTHING BAUMANS FINE MEN’S CLOTHING Finalists: Dillard’s, Domestic Domestic, Mr. Wick’s MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY METHODIST FAMILY HEALTH Finalists: Alleviant Health Centers, Chenal Family Health, Riverstone Wellness MOBILE PHONE PROVIDER VERIZON Finalists: Cricket, AT&T, Sprint MOTORCYCLE DEALER RICHARDS HONDA-YAMAHA Finalists: Pig Trail Harley Davidson (Rogers), Riggs Outdoor, Rock City Harley Davidson MOVER TWO MEN AND A TRUCK (North Little Rock) Finalists: All That Matters Moving, College Hunks Hauling Junk & Moving (North Little Rock), Brandon Moving & Storage (North Little Rock)

Huge thank you to Central Arkansas for letting us love on you for the past 10 years.

Love lives here.

STACEY REYNOLDS Yoga Therapist, C-IAYT

BEST YOGA STUDIO

BEST ONLINE FITNESS/YOGA CLASS

MUSIC EQUIPMENT RENOWN MUSIC Finalists: Guitar Center, Quattlebaum Music (Searcy), Palmer Music Co. (Conway) NAIL SALON CHIC NAILS AND SPA Finalists: Best Nails Salon and Spa, Ivy Nails and Spa (Bryant) OUTDOOR STORE OZARK OUTDOOR SUPPLY Finalists: Academy Sports, Bass Pro Shops, Gene Lockwood’s

3801 JFK Blvd., North Little Rock • 501.753.9100 • www.blueyoganyla.com Private Yoga Therapy Stacey celebrates over 20 years of serving “The Walking Wounded” ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2020 41

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JULY 2020 43

A FITNESS PHILOSOPHY: For Lee Ann Jolly, shown here in a Facebook video, and her husband, Burke, working out is about finding joy — and ditching the “shame factor.”

WERKING OUT THE JOLLYS ARE JUST THAT.

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK ou can get a good idea of the attitude Lee Ann and Burke Jolly bring to their fitness philosophy by going to the Jolly Bodies Fitness Facebook page and watching the video of Lee Ann exercising to Todrick Hall’s “Werk Out.” With big hair, big makeup and decked out in a particolored wind suit, she leaps all over her house, lifts weights from atop her refrigerator and mugs in front of the camera. Interspersed in the joyous video is footage of normal folks in normal bodies working out, doing lunges while pushing strollers, jumping up and down in their garages. Lee Ann and Burke want their digital clients — who become members online at jollybodiesfitness.com — to get more than a sweat out of their classes. Their workouts are “about so much more than burning calories.

It’s about how can we shift your mind” away from stresses and toward feeling good about life, Lee Ann said in a phone interview with the Arkansas Times. Burke described himself as a “little bit cheesy” and a “big cheerleader: I want people to know how valued they are and how amazing they are.”

Lee Ann, 34, holds a doctoral degree in physiology from the University of Arkansas for

Y

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Medical Sciences and has been teaching group exercise since 2005. Burke, 38, holds a master’s degree in Family and Youth Ministry from John Brown University and was Lee Ann’s student.

Early in their relationship, Lee Ann said, “We realized there was this huge void in the fitness industry. The messages you see aren’t messages of inclusivity. … If you search on Instagram for a personal trainer, it gets really depressing, the images of white, blonde women and shredded men with their shirts off.” The couple started Jolly Bodies in 2016 in response to that and what Burke said was an “industry that really focuses on negative emotion” what he called the “shame factor.” Lee Ann (who is herself white and blonde but not above satirizing that look, appearing in the video with big hair and blue eyeshadow) and Burke take the position that what they offer is “bigger than a workout.”

Initially, Jolly Bodies was a support group on Facebook. “We didn’t offer services,” Lee Ann said, but offered articles on fitness and workout tutorials. Jolly Bodies eventually grew into a website with videos; the couple also taught classes at the Athletic Club in West Little Rock. “At heart, I am a creator,” Lee Ann said: She’s developed exercise formats that

have been accredited by ACE Fitness, the National Academy of Fitness and the Athletics and Fitness Association of America.

When COVID-19 shut down the gyms, folks asked the couple to put their classes online.

They had to pause the videos, however, over music copyright issues. Those issues have been worked out.

The Jollys are not returning to the Athletic Club. They are instead offering workouts online through their website, where they tell potential clients, “Our bond with you matters more than how fast you can run a mile.”

Here’s how the digital classes work: For $30 a month, clients get both online video classes that have been pre-recorded as well as self-guided workouts via GIFS that folks can watch on their cell phones or tablets while working out to their own music “and get some work done on their own terms,” Lee Ann said.

For clients who want structure, the Jollys will email clients each week with instructions on what videos to do and when. The videos will let clients see us “sweating and struggling.”

Lee Ann hopes the experience will be “jolly in every sense of the world. We want you to be happy, and have joy.”

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2020 45

Little Rock Central High

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Thank You, Arkansas Times Readers!

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BY ANITA BADEJO, STEPHANIE SMITTLE, DELILAH M. POPE, FREDERICK MCKINDRA, KATOYA ELLIS FLEMING, HEATH CARPENTER, MICAH FIELDS AND LINDSEY MILLAR

S

ince George Floyd’s murder on May 25, the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, Little Rock’s Racial & Cultural Diversity Commission and other groups concerned with social justice have called for specific police reforms, including “community oversight with teeth.” Peaceful demonstrators have stopped traffic on major thoroughfares, shut down Walmart stores and faced arrest.

Brian K. Mitchell, assistant professor of history at UA Little Rock, believes we are witnessing “the second modern civil rights movement.” A scholar who studies race and ethnicity, African-American history and urban history, Mitchell is struck by what he is seeing now. “There’s a hopeful feeling that something more lasting will happen in this movement.”

Across the state, from Bentonville to Crossett, thousands of Arkansans have taken to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and to protest police brutality. Some are seasoned organizers. Some are first-time protesters. Some have served on task forces, met with elected leaders, received death threats. They are racially diverse, and they span generations. And they have decided, despite a pandemic that put them at risk when gathering, to keep coming out.

Here are a few of their stories.

58 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

BETH CRENSHAW

Daniella Scott

A

s a young adult in San Francisco, Daniella Scott never felt a need to protest.

“You’re used to people protesting things all the time,” Scott said of her progressive hometown. “I never worried about it because [I thought], ‘I don’t have to protest because somebody else can do it for me.’ ” Now a resident of Harrison, the 39-year-old is one of the most recognizable activists in her rural, conservative community. A protest she organized on Thursday, June 4, in response to the murder of George Floyd drew around 125 people to the town’s courthouse square.

“When I moved out here, I realized nobody was going to do the protesting for me,” Scott said. “I had to do it for myself.”

Growing up, Scott’s father, a white Army veteran who was married to a Black woman, taught Scott and her seven siblings that they couldn’t trust the cops, that most white people — including their own grandparents — were racist. Scott carried that knowledge with her as she made her way across the country, before settling in Harrison in 2011 on the recommendation of a friend.

“She just said it’s just a quiet place to live and a nice place to live and a cheap place to live,” Scott remembered. “She said there’s no people of color here. And I was like, ‘Well, I’ve lived in situations like that before, I can handle that.’ ” It wasn’t until Scott had already moved that her friend divulged that the town is also a haven for the Ku Klux Klan, whose national director lives only 15 miles away.

“And then I felt uncomfortable,” Scott said. “How do I know who’s Klan and who’s not?”

Scott eventually found her community: “the Democrats,” she said, laughing. She met her now-husband and started taking classes at North Arkansas

Harrison

BY ANITA BADEJO

College. She found that for the most part, locals were “really nice.” Overt racism was rare. It was the microaggressions that got to her, like when people would tell her “they don’t see color.”

“I absolutely hate that. It drives me nuts,” Scott said. “Because if you don’t see my skin color then you must not think of me as a human being.”

In late 2013, a rash of now infamous white supremacist billboards began popping up alongside the highway in town. “I didn’t hardly leave my house for two years because I was so scared,” Scott recalled.

Not long after, she was invited to join the Harrison Task Force on Race Relations, a volunteer group that meets regularly in service of repairing the town’s reputation.

Then, Donald Trump got elected president, and meetings didn’t feel like enough anymore.

In 2017, Scott founded Boone County Indivisible, a chapter of a national movement that resists the policies of the Trump administration. Many of their early protests were aimed at racism. “When [the Klan] would have one of their hateful protests, we would do a peaceful, loving protest,” Scott said. “That’s what I call them. Peace and love protests to show that Harrison’s not this racist place that everyone thinks it is.”

Before the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, Scott’s largest protests drew around 20 people. On June 4, she knew something was different when she began getting calls an hour before the protest was to begin. “I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what are we gonna do with all these people?’”

By 7 p.m., a crowd of 125 had packed Courthouse Square. They held up signs. They chanted “Black Lives Matter” and “No Justice, No Peace.”

They knelt for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time Floyd was pinned to the ground

under Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee.

“We got so many honks and so many thumbs up,” Scott said. “People that couldn’t be at the protest were driving by with their own signs of support.”

Among passersby, agitators were few and far between. Rather, the most obvious sign of objection could be found on the periphery of the square, where armed locals had planted themselves in case there was a “riot.”

“There’s nothing to riot on the Harrison square,” Scott said. “It’s a bunch of secondhand stores. What are we gonna do, steal some thrift shop clothes?”

Scott had met with the mayor and the chief of police the day before. She appreciated their presence, especially in the face of so many “guys with guns.” At the same time, she agrees with calls to defund police departments. “They’re too militarized,” she explained. “Even Harrison, Arkansas, has a SWAT team. Why?” (The Harrison Police Department has a Special Operations Team.)

Scott advocates community-based policing as an alternative. It’s one of the many hopes she has, for her country and her community.

“I probably will never get 125 people to show up to a protest again,” she said, “but maybe next time I’ll get 30.

“I just want people to see that, you know, this town doesn’t have to have the reputation that it has. That there are people out there who are willing to fight against that. Even if they don’t say it out loud, even if they don’t come up to me and personally thank me, maybe subconsciously it’s seeping into their brains that, ‘You know, somebody is out here doing something.’”

Anita Badejo is executive editor and co-host of Pop-Up Magazine, a touring live journalism show based in San Francisco. She grew up in Mountain Home.

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JULY 2020 59

Batesville

BY KATOYA ELLIS FLEMING

F

or 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the length of time a Minneapolis police officer kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck — Latoya Garza stood before a hushed and kneeling audience at Riverside Park in Batesville and recited the names of Black men, women and children who have been killed in recent years due to acts of police violence or racially motivated shootings. There were nearly enough names to fill the time.

“Man, it hit home for a few people,” said Garza, the event’s organizer. Batesville’s Peaceful Protest, which featured a diverse panel of presenters who offered prayers for unity and speeches advocating for people of color, looked more like a picnic than a protest. A mixed but mostly white crowd — Batesville is a mostly white town — gathered on the grass around the pavilion. Some carried homemade signs, their messages ranging from heartbreaking — “Am I Next?” — to uplifting. One brightly decorated poster declared that “Color is Not a Crime.”

The feel-good atmosphere of the rally was precisely what Garza was aiming for. “I can’t

60 JULY 2020

MATT WHITE

Latoya Garza

ARKANSAS TIMES

look at the feedback [on social media] without tearing up,” she said. “It has been a roller coaster of emotions.”

Garza, 38, is a nurse who often works 16-hour shifts at a local nursing home. A month ago, she wouldn’t have imagined she would be organizing a protest in her hometown in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. She was pushed into the spotlight when a friend spearheading the event dropped out unexpectedly and delegated the planning to her.

Though the role of leader is one the busy mom fell into by chance, Garza fully embraced the opportunity, taking the reins and garnering an immediate outpouring of support from the community. She is grateful, she said, for having been put in the position because of the broader insight she gained in the process. “We’re all very sick and tired. We have to make a change, so if that means I’ve got to get out of my comfort zone to do so, then that’s what it means.”

It also didn’t hurt that there was so much enthusiasm from the people in town. By the time Garza got word that she was in charge, the orig-

inal event post had been shared more than 40 times and 100 people had signed up to attend.

More than triple that number would show up at the Saturday, June 6, protest. The encouragement was overwhelming, but Garza hopes the event touched the more close-minded folks, too.

“I really hope that this opens up their eyes to see why we feel the way that we feel.”

It was important to her that the Batesville protest was a nonviolent, peaceable occasion not driven by anger. “I want Batesville to lead by example,” Garza said. “Great strategy will always overcome physical force. We’re going to be little David and we’re going to defeat Goliath.

With one stone.”

Her passion to protest, Garza said, is fueled by the countless victims of police brutality in the United States. “This is our home,” she said.

“This is ridiculous. This is injustice. And it needs to be fixed.”

KaToya Ellis Fleming was the Oxford American’s 2019-20 Jeff Baskin Writers Fellow. She is working on her debut nonfiction book, a bibliomemoir titled “Finding Frank.”

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Y

Deairra Griffin Cabot

BY DELILAH M. POPE

oung, Black and protesting, Deairra Griffin looks a lot like thousands of people across the U.S. who have taken body and voice to the pavement to protest police brutality after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, who was killed in March in Louisville, Ky., when police executed a no-knock warrant and stormed her apartment, shooting the 26-year-old unarmed emergency room technician at least eight times. At 23, organizing a march of about 300 protesters through Cabot, Griffin has distinguished herself as a leader.

As a Lonoke County native, Griffin, who is new to organizing, has an intimate knowledge of Cabot and the surrounding area, and she feels a specific calling to protest in small, rural communities like her own.

“It’s cool and all, protesting where the majority of the population is Black, and where the majority of the population will support you, but it’s a whole other ballgame to go somewhere you’re probably not wanted,” Griffin said. “It shouldn’t be that you’re not wanted there because of the color of your skin, but that’s just the reality of it. And it’s just the reality that a lot of people do not want to face.”

Cabot, the largest city in Lonoke County, is known for its schools, sports teams and its proximity to Little Rock. It has never shaken its reputation as a white flight town.

For this reason, Griffin and her friend Brianna Perkins chose to protest there.

Griffin and Perkins attended the first night of protests in Conway, on May 31, and they felt that if a protest could happen there, it could happen in Cabot. On Thursday, June 4, they marched with protesters past the Cabot City Hall and police department, and through the main stretch of town they tried to replicate the same route the Ku Klux Klan took at a rally in 2017.

In the days leading up to the protest, Griffin says she and Perkins received death threats. They received Facebook messages from white men sharing pictures of large trucks, some boasting about their guns. Griffin told protesters that though it was her intention to have a peaceful march, she couldn’t guarantee that they would be able to pass through peacefully because she didn’t know who would show up to try to stop them.

“Nobody thought that the KKK was coming to burn stuff down, even though they have a history of burning stuff down,” she said. “But when I asked to peacefully march, everybody automatically saw a riot.”

What she and Perkins expected to be a protest of about nine people grew to more than 300, and when news of the protest spread and was dubbed a riot by a member of the Concerned Citizens of Cabot Facebook group, she reached out to the Cabot Police Department for protection for herself and for the protesters she intended to lead.

On protest day, she brought up the rear of the group when it became obvious that protesters were getting caught up reading one particularly inflammatory sign from a counter-protester. She made sure her group stayed focused and finished their route without incident. After the threats of violence on social media, the theme of the protest became, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” a rallying cry that developed after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In Cabot, Griffin said, protesters marched with no specific demands of the city other than that law enforcement and citizens respect their right to be there.

Griffin said the town set up numerous water stations along their route, and the group, which included a number of white allies in addition to members of the Jacksonville NAACP, was accompanied by the Cabot Police Department. Cabot’s mayor, Ken Kincade, spoke to the group. In a statement released before the event, he said: “If we take an honest look at our town’s past, we have to acknowledge the fact that we were labeled a racist community at one time in our history and part of that stigma still lingers today.”

Marching that day, Griffin said she left feeling “powerful ... it was amazing.” Moving forward, she plans to join her local NAACP. She wants to empower Black communities and oppose the non-inclusivity and racism of many rural Arkansas towns. Rather than calling herself an activist, she said she is just a person with a message: “It is impossible for all lives to matter until Black Lives Matter.”

Delilah M. Pope is a writer in Little Rock.

She is a former Harding University Ronald E. McNair scholar and Oxford American intern.

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KAT WILSON

Shay Holloway Fayetteville

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

S

hay Holloway once wanted to be an FBI agent — the kind of mindhunter she saw busting perpetrators on episodes of “Criminal Minds.”

“I’ve always been interested in why people do things, the way that they do them,” Holloway said, “and how the mind processes the world and its experiences. What makes people do evil stuff? What makes people do good stuff?”

Now, you’ll find her opposite the law enforcement side of the protest line, demonstrating against police brutality across Northwest Arkansas. She was on the town square in Bentonville on Monday, June 1, for a George Floyd demonstration that, technically, had been canceled.

Rumors of white supremacy groups threatening to counterprotest had led the event’s organizers to postpone. People went anyway and Holloway made a spur-of-the-moment decision to join them — in part, she said, out of a sense of obligation “to keep everybody focused on why we were actually there.” There was chanting and dancing. A sousaphone player undergirded the chants, its bell covered by a poster that read “BLM.” Earlier that day, news broke that the Arkansas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Bentonville Historical Society had reached an agreement to relocate the square’s Confederate monument centerpiece. Fashioned from granite in Barre, Vt., and shipped to Arkansas in 1908, the statue has been a point of contention for decades. For protesters that night,

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its planned removal to a private park was auspiciously timed. Despite the initial tone of the protest, the Benton County Mobile Field Squad, after issuing an order to disperse that Arkansas Times contributor Autumn Tolbert reported was inaudible from where she was standing, fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into the crowd.

Holloway, 25, is a resident of Fayetteville, where she got a degree in psychology and criminal justice at the UA. She grew up in Des Arc and moved to Beebe after her seventh-grade year. Holloway’s American history classes put figures like Martin Luther King Jr. in soft focus — more “I Have a Dream,” less about Jesus being an “extremist for love,” as King wrote in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

“We aren’t educated for real in regards to our history,” Holloway said. “We get fed a story that has been revised. How did slavery get started?

Who has helped push this country forward?

Who helped build this country up?” She pointed to “pushout,” the disproportionate rate at which Black girls in high school are punished or criminalized. She noted, too, policing’s morally dubious origins. “The police were an organization that was created to catch slaves. That’s another thing. In school, they teach you, ‘These people are good people, these people are our heroes.’ But they don’t give us information to be able to make a discernment for ourselves about whether these are people who are working to help us.”

Despite those gaps in her early education, Holloway said her time in Des Arc was comfortable. “But that comfort,” she said, “came at the expense of my ignorance about the reality of being a Black person in America.”

Today, Beebe’s race demographics are about 90 percent white and just under 6 percent African American. “In school,” Holloway said, “sometimes I’d be the only Black girl in my classroom. It would be awkward for me to sit in class and hear my white classmates talk about the rap music that they listened to. They looked at me to validate them in the stuff that they were saying, and I wouldn’t say anything.”

She says her earliest memory of racism is from her elementary school years. She’d stayed at a white friend’s house overnight, and found out later that her visit was a topic of conversation between her friend’s mother and aunt, the latter of whom was ostensibly concerned about the two kids’ friendship. “Those experiences made me think about my little sister,” she said.

“I don’t want people to make statements for her

that are, in essence, derogatory because she’s a dark-skinned girl.”

Today, she feels a responsibility to speak up.

Holloway was at the protest June 2 in Fayetteville, too. Cops kneeled with protesters in silence for 8 minutes to memorialize the death of George Floyd. Police stood on the stage behind the demonstration’s speakers, hands folded at their waists, sans riot gear. They’d kneel again near the end of the protest, prompting a spate of Facebook photos with genial captions: “Exactly what we needed,” “This is where change starts,” “I’m so proud of my community.”

Holloway, like many others that night, had a different reaction. “The first word that came to my mind when I saw that picture: skeptical. That demonstration was a demonstration for show.”

The police were “saving face,” she said, doing “something to counter the feelings and energy that was swirling around in Bentonville.”

Holloway worries that the core sentiment behind the Floyd demonstrations is being eclipsed by optics meant to garner favor for a law enforcement system that, seemingly overnight, appeared to develop a taste for community collaboration.

“Colin Kaepernick kneeled because of police brutality,” Holloway said, “The Lady Razorbacks kneeled [in November 2016] and they got death threats. Kneeling is not gonna change who you are as a police officer and a person.

How do I know that you think this is for real?

What are you gonna do differently? How can I know for sure that I can trust you?”

Holloway works at a daycare now. She’s long abandoned the FBI aspirations; working with kids, she says, is the most impactful way to effect systemic change in society. She hopes to go to graduate school to become a clinical psychologist for juvenile delinquents. In the meantime, she said, she’ll be looking for ways to directly impact her community. For starters, she’s launched a fundraiser on her Facebook profile to raise $1,500 to be distributed to three Black families in the Fayetteville area for clothes and food during the summer months.

“A lot of people right now are really emotional about Black people getting killed, but Black people have been getting killed,” she said.

“We’ve got work to do. We’ve gotta fix the system that has been in place for hundreds and hundreds of years, that was never designed for equality. We have to do more than just march.”

Stephanie Smittle is culture editor for the Arkansas Times and an advocate for The Natural State’s rich history of musicians and artists.

Little Rock

S

peaking before a crowd on the Capitol steps on Sunday, June 7, LeRon McAdoo demonstrated the abilities he’s honed over the past 30 years as a hiphop MC and radio personality, as an educator, and as an activist and community organizer. When he called on protesters not to again press “snooze” in the wake of America’s latest national outrage over police brutality directed at Black men, the crowd full of high school and college-age youth, wearing cloth masks in the battering 90-degree sun, raised their voices to offer shouted affirmation that Black Lives do indeed Matter.

McAdoo, 49, a seasoned veteran of community organizing and activism, seemed ready for whatever the circumstance called for.

During the recent protests, McAdoo has been a participant, an organizer and an adviser as new activists have stepped forward to organize rallies and demonstrations. Of the younger organizers he’s talked with, McAdoo said, “One, I want to recognize them and tell them how proud I am that they’ve engaged with the struggle against the system, and two, I want to show them that it just didn’t start with them.”

His first brush with working collectively to channel outrage at a system of power came during his junior year of high school, when Pine

BY FREDERICK MCKINDRA

Bluff High refused to allow students to stage a Black History Month assembly because it hadn’t been scheduled far enough in advance. McAdoo remembers school officials relaying this announcement during an impromptu assembly and feeling confused by the hypocrisy. “This announcement made all of us say, ‘If you can call this assembly, then you can call an assembly for us to have a Black History program.’ ” That incident sparked a passion in McAdoo for community organizing. He was involved with drug-and-gang-prevention programs in Little Rock through the ’90s; the Million Man March; protests for the Jena Six in Jena, La.; Hurricane Katrina relief; and Black Lives Matter efforts, both in 2014 and today.

McAdoo said the most significant changes he’s seen throughout his organizing career have been the methods of spreading information to people. “The first thing that happened was the advent of hip-hop music,” he said. “Another turn was when emails and things started circulating. The next was the #blacklivesmatter hashtag. I noticed a change, or an uptick, at those three points.”

Networks of organizers have also become more sophisticated. McAdoo has long received training and insight from organizations like the

EBONY BLEVINS

LeRon McAdoo

Poor People’s Campaign, Black Lives Matter, the National Association of Black Social Workers, Highlander Research and Education Center, and Alternate ROOTS, a collective that explores intersections between activism and art. His activism has been inspired by local organizers like Robert “Say” McIntosh and Rev. Hezekiah Stewart, as well as the Little Rock Nine, Janis Kearney, Daisy Bates and the NAACP. Because he sees himself as an experienced protester today, he works to make sure a throughline exists between generations of community organizers and activists. McAdoo has the unique ability to offer insight and advice, perhaps most importantly on creating a concerted response once the initial emotional fervor cools.

On June 7 at the Capitol, McAdoo reminded protesters that one of the most important steps in their protest was recording their demands and joining them to those of other like-minded efforts. “What will have to happen is a stepping back and an assessment. It’s something we definitely have to be more intentional about. And this is just the first leg, this particular leg of the continuum, this particular leg of the race.”

Frederick McKindra was born and raised in Little Rock. He was a 2017 BuzzFeed Emerging Writer Fellow.

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MATT WHITE

Terry Engel Searcy

BY HEATH CARPENTER

64 JULY 2020

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I

n 1978, Terry Engel watched from a Burger King in Tupelo, Miss., while a Ku Klux Klan motorcade passed by on its way to burn a cross in front of a Ramada Inn. More than 40 years later, he carried this memory to the Searcy courthouse, where he and his family protested racial injustice June 3-4.

Growing up in Tupelo, where he attended segregated schools until the fifth grade, Engel, 59, says he was “sheltered” from the racism around him; he never heard the names Emmett Till or Medgar Evers, never learned about lynchings, never knew of the civil rights workers murdered just down the road in Philadelphia.

“My friends and I used pejorative terms and told jokes with watermelon and fried chicken punchlines,” he said. “At the time I wouldn’t have thought of myself as racist, but looking back on it, I was.” He describes his parents as “regular” Tupelo lower-middle class white people. His father was a handyman. “We were taught to not do harm, but to be separate. We didn’t associate with Black people.”

When he was in the eighth grade, his football team integrated and he started to make friendships with Black schoolmates.

Church was also a catalyst for a broadening worldview. In junior high and high school, he began pondering biblical teachings more closely and questioning the willful segregation of churches.

His senior year, the Klan motorcade competed with counter rallies and a Black boycott of white businesses. He recalls finding a Klan tabloid in the school library advertising paramilitary camps to train Christians for the fight for racial purity. A Black student caught him looking at the pamphlet in the library. “I made eye contact with him, and the expression on his face ... I can’t describe it, but it was clear that to be associated with this, or even to be curious about it, was a bad thing.”

After graduating with a degree in forest resources from Mississippi State University, his first job was as a foreman at a factory in Georgia. There, he refused to fire two Black union employees on false pre-

tenses and was demoted to the graveyard shift, where he made friends with a Black colleague. “We had conversations late at night about how our kids would grow up without all the racial baggage,” he said.

Engel eventually quit the job after refusing to fire another Black employee under similarly dubious circumstances. For a time he ran a crew maintaining power lines, working and living with an interracial team. Later, building power lines for the Tennessee Valley Authority, he listened to older Black men who worked for the TVA in the 1960s talk about being bused out of sundown towns in Alabama and Georgia to places that would house them safely.

He had a “gradual awareness,” he said. “I learned to accept that I was raised in a racist community.”

Engel eventually left the TVA to begin a graduate program in creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he read Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. He was in a cohort of liberal-minded students from other parts of the country who would ask probing questions about race and Mississippi. For the first time, he had to “explain to outsiders, here’s how people down here think, how I grew up thinking, and wrestle with how it’s not right.”

He joined the faculty at Harding University in Searcy in 2001. Today he is chair of the English Department. He decided to participate in the Searcy protests for several reasons. “I wanted to support my daughters, who felt strongly about Black Lives Matter and who wanted to express a voice,” he said. He also felt it was important for white people in Searcy to support the Black organizers. “I don’t think of myself in any way as a white savior, that my being there validates their voice — I don’t think that for a moment,” he said. “I wanted to be an encouragement.”

He added: “Part of it was seeking forgiveness for my past in a very deliberate way.”

Heath Carpenter is the author of “The Philosopher King: T Bone Burnett and the Ethic of a Southern Cultural Renaissance.”

Pine Bluff

W

hen activist Kymara H. Seals decided to organize a demonstration in her longtime home of Pine Bluff, she proceeded with equal parts caution and commitment. She was determined to lead a response to the systemic racism and police brutality that affects Black lives throughout the United States, but she knew she couldn’t do it alone.

“I wanted to get a pulse on Pine Bluff,” she said. “I wanted to see if people were ready. And they were.”

After posting a call to action on social media, Seals, 50, received overwhelming support from community leaders — namely, Pine Bluff Mayor Shirley Washington, Democratic state Rep. Vivian Flowers and attorney and advocate Michael McCray. On Thursday, June 4, Seals’ planning resulted in a peaceful assembly of well over 100 attendees, most of whom arrived and remained in their vehicles throughout the event, parked in orderly rows outside the Pine Bluff Civic Center.

Participants covered their windshields in signs and sounded their horns for the impassioned conclusions of speeches and chants, “honking applause.” Some listened from the open air of their cars, while others — whether they were present or not — tuned in to a livestream of the rally that was broadcast on Deltaplex News’ KDPX-FM, 101.3, the “Voice of the Delta.”

Just over a month before the gathering, Seals had buried her grandmother, the matriarch of her extended family, who died in a Pine Bluff nursing home from complications caused by COVID-19. On the evening of the Pine Bluff Solidarity Rally, Seals ascended the front steps of the Civic Center feeling the swirling emotions of grief, anger and hope. Wearing a shirt that

JOSHUA ASANTE

Kymara H. Seals

BY MICAH FIELDS

read, “LEGALIZE BEING BLACK,” she hosted a series of dynamic speakers, from teenaged spoken-word performers to local officials.

Seals inherited her activist ethic from her mother, a career educator and equity coordinator who dedicated a lifetime of service to her community of Hamburg. Seals fondly recalled her first act of public service at age 9, which began when she was roused early one morning after a tornado had ripped through their town, leaving many of her neighbors injured and homeless. “Wake up,” her mother said, ordering a young Seals to get ready. “The Red Cross is in town. We’ve got work to do.”

In addition to both of her parents, Seals cites a host of iconic leaders as inspirations, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Harriet Tubman and Barbara Jordan. She has kept these women, among many others, in mind throughout her fight for equity and justice, from her role as an NAACP voter fund staff member to her current position as policy director at the Arkansas Public Policy Panel. Most of all, she is committed to battling racism and fighting for justice on a local scale, in her own community of Pine Bluff, which she has called home for more than 30 years.

“Before I began planning this event,” she said, “I knew there were others like it around the state. But I told myself, ‘I can’t march with them in Little Rock until I march in Pine Bluff.’

“I wanted to be very careful, both in our messaging and our precautions due to the virus.

Our demonstration had three objectives: to join the national outcry for justice for the murder of George Floyd, to speak out against police brutality in the Black community as a whole, and to stand with the movement arguing that you

cannot achieve social justice without economic justice.”

When Seals speaks, she carries the penetrating quality of a seasoned organizer. She also displays moments of optimism and levity. You can hear her smile, for instance, when she lists the tracks she hand-picked for the rally’s playlist — her “movement songs” — recordings like Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” and Common and John Legend’s “Glory.” In the next moment, though, she transitioned into the unflinching tone of analysis: “Let me be very clear,” she said. “There is racism here. There is a power structure in Pine Bluff that does not want us here. But Pine Bluff is silent no more.”

Since the June 4 rally, Seals says she’s secured meetings with Pine Bluff Police Chief Kelvin Sergeant and other city officials who she hopes will lend a patient ear to the community’s demands for systemic change. She emphasizes the importance of challenging more white allies to stand up, to listen and to empower those around them to do the same. She wants more Black and Brown people to show up, too, and enter the discourse for equity, to hold their cities and towns accountable for injustice. She knows there is a long road ahead, but she is confident in the momentum building across the country.

“We want to turn our pain into power,” Seals insists. “We’re frustrated, we’re tired, we’re hurt and we’re angry. And we’ve got work to do.”

Micah Fields received the Oxford American’s 2018-19 Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship. His book about Houston’s story of development and storms is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

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BRIAN CHILSON

Drekkia Writes and Tim Campbell Little Rock

BY LINDSEY MILLAR

A

fter Drekkia Writes saw the video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, she worried how she could explain Floyd’s death to her young nieces and nephews in a way that didn’t make them afraid. “How do you make sure that they don’t start to feel that their skin is a curse?” she wondered.

Writes (her professional pseudonym), 26, teaches poetry and creative writing to address mental health needs in children. She contracts with schools, including the Little Rock School District and the Pulaski County Special School District, to “teach children to be better comprehenders and communicators.” She works especially with at-risk youth. “I tell them they can be anything they want to be, that their skin is beautiful, that their hair is magical because it can change forms. I sow seeds in kids,” she said.

After Floyd’s murder, Tim Campbell, a second-year student in the Clinton School of Public Service’s master’s program, said he felt compelled to get people together and organize. He reached out to Writes, whom he knew “had a strong community sense,” and together with another friend, they organized Little Rock’s first peaceful demonstration in the wake of Floyd’s death, on May 30.

Campbell, 27, grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s on Wolfe Street in Little Rock, which he said “was probably considered one of the

worst neighborhoods in southern America at the time.” He has an early memory of police officers storming his house with guns. “I remember my mom yelling out, ‘Don’t shoot my baby!’ because I moved or something. I remember the militance.”

But he also has a different childhood memory of Little Rock police. “I remember seeing police officers on bicycles,” he said. They would stop and talk with him and other kids and give them some kind of snack or treat. “We felt like we knew police officers.”

A graduate of Little Rock Central High School and the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Campbell is the first in his family to receive a high school or college diploma. Several of his family members have been caught up in drugs and violence. “I wouldn’t say that I had role models,” he said. “I had people that were doing things that I knew I didn’t want to do.” He spent two and a half years after college in West Africa in the Republic of The Gambia with the Peace Corps, where he said he learned community organizing skills. He called himself lucky to have traveled beyond Little Rock and to have gotten a broader sense of what police officers can be. For friends and family who never left Wolfe Street or other parts of inner-city Little Rock, Campbell said, they may only know the LRPD as a militant presence.

It was in that spirit that Campbell and Writes and others, who have taken on the name The

Movement, hosted a second rally, “The Big Step,” in solidarity with local law enforcement officers.

Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey and Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins, both of whom are Black, marched in the June 10 event.

Campbell and Writes have been sought out by city and state leaders. They and other organizers have met with Governor Hutchinson twice, and Writes has met with Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. Campbell was appointed to Governor Hutchinson’s Task Force to Advance the State of Law Enforcement in Arkansas, which will review state law enforcement practices and procedures and make recommendations to the governor on how they can be improved.

Writes said her group is promoting civic activity, encouraging Black people to vote and to run for office. “We’re not represented enough, so we don’t have a voice,” she said. “We need more Blacks and people of color to get in positions of power. We need people to continue to be the mayors, representatives, senators, policemen, prosecutors and DAs.” Campbell plans to continue working in community politics after he finishes at the Clinton School.

Writes said, “We’re not just jumping on this trending moment and forgetting all about it.

We’re going to continue to unify and not just be reactive, but be proactive.”

Lindsey Millar is the founder of the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network and the editor of the Arkansas Times.

This reporting is courtesy of the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network, an independent, nonpartisan news project dedicated to producing journalism that matters to Arkansans.

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dec. 11, 2020

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CULTURE

BRIAN CHILSON

‘SOMETHING TO SAY’: McCormack’s buoyant lyricism has a way of making ancient music feel new again.

BAROQUE “F 2.0 FOR MALE SOPRANO ELI MCCORMACK, ANCIENT MUSIC HAS EVERYTHING (AND NOTHING) TO DO WITH GENDER IDENTITY.

BY SARAH STRICKLIN

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or a long time, I thought I really couldn’t seriously consider a career in vocal performance because of my voice type — because I don’t have a voice type that’s normative for my gender. That really informed my choice to get into early music.”

For fans of baroque music, it’s a relief that Conway resident Elijah McCormack did not let gendernormative stereotypes stop him from pursuing his art. Born into a musical family, McCormack began singing in choirs in second grade, joining the treble choir at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fairfield, Conn. “I spent about 10 years there, so that was really formative for my musicianship and for the way my voice sounds. The Anglican-style treble choir sound is really distinctive.”

From that musical nursery, he left for college

in upstate New York to study Studio Art at Skidmore College. “Part of the reason I didn’t choose to major in music in college is that — you know — I’m a male soprano, so I didn’t really think it was in the cards for me to go into music performance. It felt like there was a choice between being taken seriously as a man and being taken seriously as a soprano.”

McCormack’s since received acclaim for his powerful tone and vocal agility; The Washington Post swooned for his December 2019 performance with the Washington Bach Consort, saying his was “a voice with the kind of luminosity one longs for in Bach, that of the marvelous young soprano Elijah McCormack.” The Boston Early Music Festival featured McCormack last summer in its biennial festival, and he secured a Judge’s Encouragement Award at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions

in 2018. McCormack, who performed with new group Arkansas Baroque Music in January, is a thrillingly compelling singer on the rise, able to make ancient music feel new and urgent. He also happens to be a transgender man.

In early music, which refers broadly to music created in Europe from the Middle Ages to the baroque era, the gender of the singers mattered less, historically, than the suitability of a particular voice type for a part. Forming its popularity in cathedral settings where women weren’t allowed to perform, the music pulled in voices that suited its sacred, lofty tones and angelic, soaring passages. Sometimes this could mean that the high soprano parts were sung by castrati, young men who had been castrated before puberty could alter their vocal chords. When the music began reaching a popular audience and broadened to include more secular themes, the genders of the singers grew to include women, sometimes singing male characters or perspectives.

Early music’s pliant casting practices aside, McCormack says he didn’t seriously consider a career in performance until a teacher, Dr. Sylvia Stoner-Hawkins, introduced him to a particular body of repertoire — baroque opera that featured a lot of roles for castrati. “Practically every Handel opera, every baroque opera after a certain point,” McCormack said, “features a male soprano or male alto role, at least once, because those singers were really popular at the time.”

A number of topics within the early music community prompt debate among its proponents and practitioners: how to responsibly interpret early works that provide little instruction on ornamentation, tuning and instrumentation decisions for pieces from particular eras and, in particular, the “wobble wars” — the heated dissension among the community over the use or non-use of vibrato (the slight, rapid changing in a pitch that a singer uses). For McCormack, honest self-expression is always the answer to the vibrato question. “I think voice in particular is really personal for people,” he said. “As singers, I think we take it really personally when people tell us one way or another that our vibrato or lack thereof is wrong. Kind of that we don’t have enough or that we have too much for what we’re doing. So, my personal feeling is that in vocal performance, as long as you’re expressive and I can hear what pitch you’re singing and un-

derstand what you’re saying, people should just sing how they sing.”

McCormack points to examples of figures who, when what we call “early music” was still current, were pushing the boundaries of how it should be made, who could control the narrative and who could participate. He pointed first to composer Claudio Monteverdi, who was active in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and was instrumental in widening early opera’s audience from mainly courtly nobles to the public at large. “And I’ve also recently learned music

McCormack’s interpretation highlighted the humor of each of Strozzi’s variations, as he picked up a new page of music for each attempted song and subsequently ripped it to shreds, responding to each with a sarcastic Italian quip in a conversational tone. Finally, having exhausted all the music on offer, the troubled singer expresses his own feelings, in his own words.

The music ultimately settles from the chaotic jumble of musical styles into two arresting and elegant stanzas, melancholy and sweet. Its last two lines demand athletic runs and devilish intervals, the singer finally admitting: “So I, wretched and foolish, not wanting to sing, have sung much.”

Today’s early music landscape contains the sort of playfulness and exploration that Strozzi would likely enjoy. McCormack mentioned the American Bach Soloists Festival and Academy’s program in San Francisco last summer, which combined Bach with bluegrass, exploring “themes from the Brandenburg Concertos, cantatas, and more in folk and jazz idioms,” as the program’s advertisement promised. Other transgender artists, too, McCormack said, are paving the way for a more inclusive and multifaceted community, artists who “don’t really fit into a normative idea of what a man ‘should’ sound like or what a woman ‘should’ sound like.” There’s Adrian Angelico, a Norwegian trans male mezzo who’s performed with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, and Lucia Lucas, a trans female baritone. Lucas made history as the first trans singer to sing a principal role in a U.S. opera house, singing the title role in Tulsa Opera’s 2019 production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

As for McCormack, he said he hopes people hear in him “someone who sounds like they have something to say. Either in terms of communicating the effect and the rhetoric of the music that they’re singing, or in terms of doing something unexpected that might cause someone to reconsider the preconceptions that they might have. ... For me personally, it can be really hard to strike a balance between being too reserved as a performer and not communicating enough versus being too extroverted to the point of losing poise. And that’s something that I’m still working on. Basically, I hope I can move people — whatever that means. That’s sort of optimal for me. And that I can serve the music by communicating what it wants to communicate.”

“I HOPE I CAN MOVE PEOPLE — WHATEVER THAT MEANS.” from a composer named Barbara Strozzi, who was a well-known female baroque composer a couple generations removed from Monteverdi.

If there was one I’d really like to meet in real life, it would’ve been her. She seems like a really interesting person. A lot of her music is quite funny — I like a sense of humor in a composer. And also just being a woman composer in that time period — it must have been interesting. It came with a lot of implications, but we don’t know a ton about her life for sure. She might have been a courtesan. But making a name for yourself as a professional female musician at that time, it probably took a certain personality type.”

In a YouTube video on his own channel, McCormack demonstrates Strozzi’s comical (and exciting) approach in the performance with Arkansas Baroque Music. The piece, “L’Astratto,” finds a troubled soul, searching for comfort in song.

The opening lines read: ”I want, yes, I want to sing/Perhaps by singing I may ease my torment/ harmony’s power should strangle the pain.”

The protagonist searches for the right song in which to find comfort, singing tune after tune, moving through one trite phrase at a time, trying out each song for a few seconds, only to grow more and more confused and frustrated.

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70 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

HISTORY

LAS VEGAS BEFORE THERE WAS LAS VEGAS

A SON OF HOT SPRINGS WRITES ABOUT THE MOB AND GAMBLING.

BY MATTHEW ROWE

H

ot Springs native David Hill’s debut book, “The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice,” tells the true story of three Hot Springs residents during the 1950s and ’60s when the city was poised to become one of America’s largest tourist destination on the back of organized crime and casino gambling. Braiding a story of national crime figures, local officials whose complicity was rewarded with financial benefit, and a family history, Hill’s deeply researched book reads like a crime thriller.

Hill highlights Owney Madden, a leader of the National Crime Syndicate who was exiled in Hot Springs; Dane Harris, the so-called “boss gambler” of Hot Springs who led the city’s vice as he tried to position Hot Springs as a tourist mecca; and Hazel Hill, David’s grandmother, who was dumped in Hot Springs by her father as a teenager and later managed an alcoholic husband, three boys and addiction problems of her own.

The Hot Springs of today is very different from the Hot Springs of “The Vapors.” City leaders’ willingness to allow illegal gambling and other forms of vice from the beginning had fueled an economic machine that supported everything from lavish hotels and nightclubs to basic city service and amenities.

From Lucianos to Kennedys, the book exposes readers to a secret history of how mobsters, politicians, wiseguys, reformers and hustlers alike scrambled to grab a piece of the action in Hot Springs. Throughout the book we see people at the highest level of the mafia and the United States government work to position Hot Springs in a way to get the most out of it for themselves,

and how it finally ended in the early 1960s.

Hill and I have been friends since the beginning of the millennium, and during the writing of his book, I spent several hours going through microfilm, court ledgers and any other available records to help him with the research of his book. That said, my biggest connection to the book wasn’t any of the research I did, but the appearance of my own grandfather, whose story of wanting a piece of the action opens “The Vapors.”

What follows is an excerpt from the book, and following the excerpt is my interview with Hill about how he was able to research a history that has always been filled with half-truths and tall tales, and how he was able to create a story that feels so vibrant and alive.

Hazel Excerpted from “The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice”

by David Hill. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2020. Copyright © 2020 by David Hill.

All rights reserved.

April 4, 1935 Hazel wasn’t sure where she was headed. She was barely sixteen years old, sitting shotgun in her daddy’s Plymouth. They were driving down Highway 70 on the outskirts of Hot Springs, and they weren’t heading back toward Ohio.

Clyde Welch turned off the highway onto a dirt road, the dust kicking up around the car like a brown storm cloud delivering them to their destination, a little farmhouse at the top

of a big green hill. Clyde parked the car and looked toward the house. There on the wooden porch waiting for him was a tree trunk of a man, a long white beard draped on top of his dusty overalls. Clyde took a deep breath before he got out of the car, then headed up to meet the old man. Hazel knew this house and this old man. She watched from inside the Plymouth as her daddy shook hands and conversed with the father of Hollis Hill, the young man she had taken up with while she and Clyde were staying in Hot Springs. She was surprised that Clyde even knew about the boy. She couldn’t have known what to make of the two fathers having a conversation on the Hill family porch on Clyde and Hazel’s way out of town. Whatever it was about, it probably wasn’t good.

Hazel and Clyde Welch had come to Hot Springs, Arkansas, from Ashland, Ohio, in that Plymouth four weeks earlier. Clyde was a horse trainer, or tried his damnedest to be one at any rate. The Oaklawn Park racetrack first opened in Hot Springs in 1905, but had been shuttered off and on since the state government banned betting on horse racing in 1907. There had been many efforts over the years to change the law and bring horse racing back, but they had always been defeated.

It was ironic that the racetrack had remained dark, because for many of those years Hot Springs was “running wide open,” with casino gambling happening in full view of God and everybody. Horse racing was experiencing a surge in popularity across America, in part a consequence of the phenomenal racehorse Man o’ War winning twenty out of twenty-one races in the years after World War I. Across the country, ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JULY 2020 71

states were lifting their prohibition on horse betting to meet the public demand for the sport. But Arkansas’s state legislature, led by conservative Baptists from other parts of the state, didn’t follow suit, and Oaklawn’s out-of-state owner, the St. Louis real estate tycoon Louis Cella, chose to keep the track closed rather than operate in defiance of the law like the casinos. He also owned racetracks in Memphis, New Orleans, Detroit, Buffalo, and several other cities. He was content to wait for the political winds in Arkansas to shift, however long that might take.

When the Great Depression that had set upon the rest of the country finally made its way to Hot Springs, the casino owners were the ones who took action to get the Oaklawn Park racetrack reopened. Horse racing, they reckoned, would be just what they needed to keep the tourists flowing to Hot Springs through the tough times. It was the casino operators, along with Mayor Leo McLaughlin, who reached out to Louis Cella in 1934, and promised him that if he opened back up they’d make sure he wouldn’t get in any trouble. They weren’t just blowing smoke.

They had clearly figured out how to operate illegally without consequence. But in 1934 their good fortune was a fairly recent develHOLLIS AND HAZEL HILL: Hazel’s father, Clyde opment. For many of the years that Oaklawn Welch, left Hazel with the parents of her married was closed down, the casinos had plenty of boyfriend when he left Hot Springs. She was 16. trouble with the law, consistently getting raided and shut down, moving their dice tables from one back room to the next. Louto train at all. When he heard about Oaklawn, is Cella likely remembered those days. He also he knew there’d be a lot of excitement — Clyde likely remembered how back in 1907 the origi- had been to Hot Springs before and knew it was nal owners of Oaklawn had said to hell with the a wild place. Even the residents used to brag law and tried to open up and hold horse races that it was “the sin city of the whole world.” He anyway. They were greeted on opening day by figured he could hustle work away from other an armed state militia. trainers with an ace up his sleeve — he’d agree This, however, was a new day in Hot Springs. to work on commission, only getting paid when In 1928, the voters had chosen as their mayor he won. Without a horse or even a promise of Leo McLaughlin, a gregarious man who paraded one to train, he packed his sixteen-year-old around town in a boater hat with a carnation on daughter into his Plymouth and headed down his lapel and rode to and from the courthouse south from Ashland, Ohio, to see if he couldn’t in a horse-drawn viceroy carriage. He promised convince an owner or two to take a chance on a the citizens that if he was elected he’d let the Yankee trainer with only one good foot. gamblers open up shop, laws be damned, and Despite the town’s reputation, not everyone he’d made good on that promise. He taxed the in Hot Springs was a sinner. Even the gambling craps games and the brothels, paved the roads clubs and taverns would close up shop on Sunand strung up electric lights, and everyone was days. There were more than a few true believers happy. McLaughlin handpicked the sheriff and in Hot Springs. One of them was an old-school the prosecutors, and he kept the governor at Baptist minister named Luther Summers. He bay. Thanks to the new, more permissive admin- made his way in the world preaching in Tenistration, Cella was finally swayed. Oaklawn Park nessee tent revivals, dunking heads in the wawould be open for business for the 1934 season. ter and saving souls at a furious enough rate Like every other horseman in America, Clyde to get the attention of church leaders throughWelch caught wind that Oaklawn was opening out the South. He preached fire and brimstone back up at the start of 1934. It was welcome news. against the ills of society — chief among them The Depression had set upon Clyde Welch, too. liquor and gambling. His crusade eventually He had diabetes and he couldn’t afford to see a brought him to Hot Springs in the late 1920s, doctor. Terrible pain in his legs and feet made where he took over the pulpit at the Park Place him limp. Welch didn’t have a stable of stakes Baptist Church — known in its Sunday live radio horses. He was a blue-collar, lunch-pail horse broadcasts across the South as the “little white trainer who stayed on the road working a cir- church in the valley.” cuit that took him from one end of America all the way to the other, and sometimes even down Summers caught wind of the effort to reopen into Mexico. But lately he hadn’t had any horses the racetrack, and he tried to organize a united 72 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

front among the clergy to oppose it. He appealed to Governor Junius Marion Futrell to send in the militia. For his efforts, Summers received a letter in the mail with a crudely drawn skull and crossbones that read “Your church will burn and you will be among the missing.” He took the letter to the police. They told him if they were him, they’d leave town.

So that’s what Summers did. He bid his congregation farewell and moved away from Hot Springs. The little white church in the valley found itself a new preacher, one who was more charitable toward the town’s tourist trade.

THE RACES BEGAN ON March 1, 1934, in open defiance of the law. The militia didn’t show up, but tens of thousands of visitors did, day after day. Clyde and Hazel were among them. Throughout the twenty-seven-day race meet, Clyde was able to scare up plenty of horses to train for free. Hazel did her part, too. She worked on the backstretch, scurrying around the track collecting zappers, the electric buzzers jockeys would use to cheat by shocking the horse to get an extra jolt of speed out of them. The jockeys unscrupulous enough to use them would toss them into the dirt on the backstretch at the end of the race. Hazel would pick them up and sell them back to the cheating jockeys. On April 4, the final day of the race meet, over fifteen thousand people attended the races — the largest crowd to witness a sporting event in Arkansas history. The most successful race meet in Hot Springs history wasn’t much of a success for Clyde Welch, however. Despite finding plenty of horses to work, Clyde didn’t make much happen with any of them. Hazel might have made a few bucks hustling zappers, but Clyde was flat busted. After the last day of racing, Hazel and Clyde packed up the Plymouth and headed out of town, making one quick stop on the way at the Hill family’s farmhouse.

Richard Hill, the hulk Clyde was gabbing with on the porch, had a sister who owned the café next door to the apartment Clyde and Hazel had rented for the month. Hazel killed a lot of time in that café during those four weeks and eventually met Hollis, Richard’s twenty-two-year-old son, who drove a milk truck and made deliveries to his aunt’s café every day. Hollis was handsome, charming, and confident. He had a thin mustache and, when he wasn’t working, wore a fedora with the brim pushed up in the back in the style of the time. He flirted with Hazel in the café, and before long he was taking her out to the dances at Fountain Lake, a sprawling array of swimming pools, water slides, and beer bars surrounding a small natural spring on the outskirts of town where many locals, especially the younger folks, liked to hang out when the downtown clubs were filled with tourists.

The whole thing was scandalous as hell, since young Hollis was six years older than Hazel and married to boot. At the time this didn’t much matter to Hazel. She was just passing through. When the last race had been run she figured she’d be on her way to the next town. Yet

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here she was, sitting in her daddy’s car outside el from the back, and set off limping down the A moment that I still remember from when I the Hill house instead of watching Hot Springs big green hill, away from the Hill family farm, was writing: I came across this newspaper artidisappear in the rear window of the car. the cow and the chickens, the Plymouth, and cle written by a UPI reporter covering the night Old Richard Hill shook Hazel’s daddy’s hand his baby girl. Hazel turned to face old Richard of the big shutdown of casino gambling in Hot again and then reached into the pocket of his Hill, still standing on the wooden porch of the Springs in 1964, which had national attention. big overalls. He came out with a wad of cash little house. There was so much to figure out in In this story there’s a moment where the writer and peeled off a few bills for Clyde. Richard that moment between opening the door of the is on his way out of town and he asks the guy slapped Clyde on the back and sent him limping car and everything else that would follow. that’s pumping the gas what he thinks about back to the car. the shutdown. And the guy pumping gas is just Clyde still didn’t look directly at Hazel, just Q&A with David Hill like “Who cares?” He says, ‘you know they all stared straight ahead. Hazel was just a girl, but make all the money and I don’t make nothing, she had a tough disposition, and boy, did she like ROWE: One of the things that struck me so it doesn’t doesn’t make a damn bit of differto boss Clyde Welch around. He was her daddy, while I was reading “The Vapors” is how ence to me.’ but he was a touch afraid of her. Clyde told Hazel well you treat each of the narratives and elHe had this attitude toward it and reading he had sold Richard Hill the car for two hundred evate each. I was curious how your family that hit me like a ton of bricks, and I wanted dollars. How, she asked him, were they supposed history would feel next to these stories of big to reevaluate the way I had been telling the to get to the next town without a car? players, Dane Harris and Owney Madden, story. I wanted to ask myself whether or not I “I’m goin’ to Tijuana,” he replied. “You’re sta- and at no point does the story of Hazel and was glossing over how much everyday, ordiyin’ here.” the rest of the Hills take a back seat. In fact, nary people in Hot Springs were not benefiting Clyde explained to Hazel that Hollis was several of the stories of people who were in from it. I don’t think it’s just so black and white getting a divorce. Richard Hill though, and I don’t think the said that Hazel could live with book comes down harder than the Hill family until the divorce one side of that question or the was final, then Hollis and Hazel other. There were a lot of people could live together. in Hot Springs who did not benHazel was stunned. On one efit, but you know the city itself hand she loved Hot Springs. clearly benefited, and there was She loved the energy, the exciteclearly some real social good. I ment, the bright lights. Ashland think that I am showing some of was far from the South, but it that in the book. Hot Springs was was as country as any place different from the rest of Arkanyou’d find. Hot Springs felt like sas in so many ways, and that’s a metropolis. It may as well totally because of the gambling have been New York City, as business, and because it was a far as Hazel was concerned. And tourist destination that brought it didn’t feel like there was any in people from other places.

Depression on in Hot Springs.

That made the community People may have felt it in their more progressive, it made the pockets, but they didn’t show it. community more high tech.

People liked to dance and drink So there was a lot of good that and have a good time, no matter came from it, but I didn’t want what. to completely miss out on telling On the other hand, Hazel the bad, and unfortunately my loved her daddy and her brothgrandparents’ story lended plenLEO MCLAUGHLIN: The Hot Springs mayor, who let the race track ers and her mother, and she ty of the bad. operate illegally, liked to travel around town in his horse-drawn buggy. was only sixteen years old. She hadn’t finished school yet, not ROWE: There are plenty of that she ever much cared for high-tension dramatic scenes school. But was she ready to be on her own, to no position of power are just as interesting involving the criminal underworld, but the be grown, to be taken in by a man she just met? and compelling as those who were plotting stakes seem just as big regarding Hollis Hazel, a wife at age sixteen? out the future of organized crime and gam- Hill’s alcoholism or how Jimmy and Larry There was also something about the arrange- bling in back rooms in Hot Springs.

Hill turn out. Or how Dane Harris is going to ment that looked untoward. Two hundred dolposition himself to lead Hot Springs through lars and I’ll throw in the girl. But that wasn’t HILL: I think the process of doing the research this time. Owney Madden hopping from one really how it was. Clyde had had a hard meet and writing the book delivered me to that place. setback to another. It’s fascinating seeing in Hot Springs. He wasn’t ready to go back to I don’t think I set out to write that book. When I these people and events on a very human Ohio empty-handed. He had to follow the hors- first wanted to tell the story of Hot Springs, my level. Can you talk about the research you es west in order to earn a living. And Hazel tag- sense of the story was colored by all the stories had to do to get here and how you were able ging along, whether she sold zappers to jockeys that we were told about it growing up, and I to navigate the tall tales and half-truths that or not, was a drag on his ability to do that. A didn’t really know a lot of the real history. are out there about Hot Springs during this depression was on. If there was a man with a Also, I felt like I was going to be much more time? job who wanted to look after Hazel, then Hazel sympathetic toward the gambling business ought to go with that man. A man with a job was than in the end I think that I was, and that’s toHILL: The research was difficult. Most of my a much better deal for her than an old Yankee tally because of what you’re pointing out. It was interviews were with people who could only tell horse trainer with a bum foot. hard not to think there was something about the stories secondhand. In terms of documentation Clyde told Hazel he’d be back for the next culture that existed in Hot Springs during that from things like newspapers or police reports, year’s race meet, and he’d look in on her when time that contributed to what my grandparents those are just not around. There’s so little that he got back. He got out of the car, took his satch- were going through.

I could get my hands on, so I had to very heav74 JULY 2020

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822 East 6th St Little Rock, AR A SOUTHERN FAMILY: Hazel Hill, the grandmother of author David Hill, is shown here with her sons.

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ily rely on FBI records. Things I FOIA’d with the Department of Justice. Right after I sold the proposal I filed these requests and had to wait years to get this stuff. And stuff is still coming.

The book is done, and coming out in the month, and it’s still coming.

Those FBI records were a great resource though. A lot of the dialogue in this book comes from actual wiretaps and audio surveillance in Hot Springs. I think I’m the first person to get these records so there’s a lot of this book that very few people have seen before.

I was reading “The Executioner’s Song” [Norman Mailer’s book about the account of first execution in the U.S. after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976] when I first started writing and I wanted to write a book like that. I wanted it to feel just like a novel. I didn’t want to have my voice in there at all, I just wanted to feel like you’re reading a novel, but it’d still be true.

ROWE: So for a town that has been written on a whole lot, there aren’t many primary sources readily available. In a lot of instances, I know that records have been lost to flood or fire.

HILL: You know, I didn’t use the Sentinel Record [the largest newspaper in Hot Springs] very much in the book because I think it intentionally did not report on a lot of this stuff. They kept it out of the papers. So it was out-of-town papers that were writing about what was going on with the gambling business, and the local paper was just like we’re just going to not talk about what’s happening here, we’re not gonna snitch about the goings on, you know, among the gamblers in this town.

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ROWE: This is a good time to maybe mention that Hot Springs was getting a lot of attention at this time, both through national media and during televised U.S. Senate meetings on organized crime. Here’s a quote from a Hot Springs leader to Sports Illustrated in 1962:

“The gambling is home-owned and operated. There’s no hoodlum element, no oppression, no scum. No one forces himself on anyone else. There is no guy around here with greasy hair and a Mafia smile. The people are capable, clean, decent, friendly.

This place reflects the quality, character and charm of all of us. This place has got roots.

It’s 24 hours of happiness.”

This is just a year before a series of targeted bombings in Hot Springs put the casinos in the national spotlight, and not long before the whole casino operation was shut down.

Why would this quote be the message that was being pushed in Hot Springs?

HILL: I mean, it’s bullshit, but it was, you know, the reason that they felt compelled, the reason that they’re bending over backward to like make that point, is because that was the accusation right? Not just from within the state of Arkansas, but from Washington, D.C., and from around the country, that the mob was tied into Hot Springs. This was a real threat to them continuing to be able to operate. Throughout the ’50s with [Tennessee Sen. Estes] Kefauver’s hearing, and the [Arkansas Sen. John] McClellan hearings had really stirred up a lot of animus around the country, public animus against organized crime.

And city after city, there were elections where DAs, mayors getting swept out of office and these reformers were taking over on the issue they were going to root out mobsters, root out organized crime figures in their city.

So there’s a real shift happening around America. It’s real sea change in an attitude towards crime, and it was hard for Arkansas to make this case, because all these mobsters were hanging out in Arkansas, in Hot Springs, all the time. I mean there was a constant presence in Hot Springs. Nobody disputes that. I mean, you can see every bad figure in the history of American crime hanging out in Hot Springs on a regular basis.

The argument they were trying to make was, “Oh, they just come here because they like hanging out here, they just come here because

they like hanging out and gambling and taking baths and eating in our restaurants.” Which is kind of a weird argument because these are the guys that control gambling all over the country and in Cuba, so why do they like coming to Hot Springs when they can go to Havana where they run the joints, you know?

So they have to really bend over backward to say like this is a home-run operation, because that gave the governor cover, that gives McClellan cover, that gave everybody the cover to gambling’s happening here, but it’s not really what you think. It’s not tied into the gambling that’s happening all over the rest of the country, it’s just local boys running it. But I don’t think that’s true; I endeavor in the book to show this wasn’t true.

Owney Madden was giving money every month to [Luciano crime family boss] Frank Costello and then [top-ranking Genovese crime family member] Jerry Catena after Frank retired.

That’s in the FBI files. What’s he kicking up to them, his Social Security check? I mean this is not rocket science, you know, but I think even today people in Hot Springs really want to believe this idea that the mob had nothing to do with gambling in Hot Springs when it’s demonstrably untrue.

ROWE: It’s interesting how many people in powerful positions had connections to Hot Springs. I mean, both Kefauver and McClellan are leading these subcommittees on crime but both have connections and dirt on them from Hot Springs.

HILL: I was surprised at how often I kept finding the words Hot Springs in the Jimmy Hoffa file. There’s another book that came out recently from my publisher called “In Hoffa’s Shadow,” and it’s a book about Chuckie O’Brien, who was the main suspect in the Hoffa disappearance.

The opening section of that book is set in Hot Springs. That’s because Chuckie O’Brien fled to Hot Springs to hide after Hoffa disappeared.

Hoffa investigators came to Hot Springs and spent two weeks in Hot Springs digging up places around DeGray Lake and questioning people.

Hoffa shows up in my book because [Hot Springs] state Sen. Q. Byrum Hurst represented Hoffa as his lawyer in a bribery trial in Chicago, and he did it because he was close to Hot Springs city manager A.D. Shelton, and Shelton’s sister was the judge in the case. So they put them all together so that they could fix the case. Hot Springs was wired in.

I mean growing up in Arkansas, we had a guy from our town become president. The biggest corporation in the world is from our state. Arkansas is a small state, and it’s considered by a lot of people outside of Arkansas to be kind of a Podunk place, but Arkansas has always punched above its weight in a lot of ways. I mean this has always been a running theme with Arkansas that Arkansas is that little dog who barks real loud at the big dog.

I think that my book in a lot of ways is about ambition, and the characters in my book are very ambitious. They all believe that they

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should have something better, and they all believe that that it’s all possible for them. They’re not cynics, and they take great personal risks and make sacrifices in service of their ambition.

It sometimes works, and it sometimes fails spectacularly. But I think that’s very much a part of the character of the state of Arkansas, for people in Arkansas to feel both the combination of resentment about how nobody takes it seriously, and a feeling that we should, and I think my book tells that story.

ROWE: Moving out of the scope of the book, but both of us grew up in Hot Springs.

After gambling was shut down in ’64, the bottom kind of fell out in Hot Springs, and this is maybe why your book feels like a lost history. Maybe if gambling had kept up in that state, maybe these stories about it would have kept being told. I’m a little younger than you, and my time growing up there is very much the ’90s. Growing up you would see these like big elaborate empty buildings and you don’t think anything of it because you don’t live somewhere else and you don’t know these sort of things aren’t in every town in America. Obviously Clinton being president was very exciting, but there was always this sort of disconnect between that kind of excitement and how sleepy things seemed in town.

HILL: I like that point you made about all the big empty buildings because it is true. If you grow up there you don’t realize it until you travel just a little bit outside town, it’s hard to find in other cities the same size as Hot Springs with these massive edifices, that are now either empty or they’re being used as assisted living or senior citizen homes.

The Aristocrat is a perfect example of this hotel that clearly was a swanky joint. I mean it’s got like the little round drive, it’s got the lit up marquee and looked cool, but it was just old and dirty, and I’m not exactly sure what it was in the ’80s but I think it was for assisted living?

Next door is this wax museum, which was once The Southern Club, and it feels weird and odd and no one ever tells you when you’re growing up there that the reason that there’s these massive buildings like the Velda Rose or the Majestic or the Arlington, these massive empty buildings, is because once upon a time this was one of the most popular tourist destinations in America maybe even the world. No one tells you this was Las Vegas before Las Vegas.

I grew up with a friend who had a craps table in his house and his parents had covered the craps table with wood and then put a tablecloth over it. They were using the craps table like a regular table. We were not allowed to touch it, we were not allowed to look at it and I remember being at his house once for a sleepover and we were so curious about it that we wanted to go play with it. We got in so much trouble for taking up the plywood and messing with the craps table. And that’s kind of an interesting metaphor because that’s how the whole city treated its own history, it put like a tablecloth over and were like, “This

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isn’t a craps table, this is a hutch.” “There was no gambling here; these are nursing homes and wax museums.” They swept the sinful nature of the past under the rug and tried to make something else out of what was left over.

Of course, Hot Springs during the ’80s and ’90s was suffering because, and this wasn’t just unique to Hot Springs. Life was moving into the strip malls and moving away from downtown. So prior to that in the ’60s and ’70s Hot Springs had a downtown where all the action was and where the center of town where people hung out, that’s where they socialized, is where they did business. It’s where they ate lunch, that’s where they had dinner, and strip malls and the shopping malls moved everything away from downtown and downtown suffered.

It really started to fall apart. Now I feel like all across America now there’s a real push to move things back into walkable areas, move things back and I feel like Hot Springs is already set up for that, so I feel like Hot Springs is rebounding and if you go downtown today you’ll see a whole new life there that just was not there in the ’80s when I was growing up. Nobody went downtown, now everybody’s coming back, you know. It’s really revitalizing because the culture is changing in America.

ROWE: So how do we keep these stories alive?

HILL: The thing about writing crime is the people involved in crime do everything they can to hide it, and they don’t want anyone to know, right? When writing about crime later, not only is it impossible because not only do people not record what they’re doing, they also tell people lies. When you go back later and try to tell these stories, you don’t have the benefit of — I mean, it’s easier to write about a war hero because people celebrate them and do everything they can to know all about them, but criminals, you know, it’s the opposite. I think this is a challenge that probably all writers — especially people who write about crime — run into. But in obscuring this crime, we obscured the history of an entire community, and that’s the real shame of it. In the attempt to obscure the criminal enterprise, of the corruption, that was involved in keeping the gambling business going, we culled a lot of important history that I think actually later generations would have been proud of. Not proud that their government was corrupt, or that they were breaking the law in order to gamble, but proud of the fact that their city was world renowned, and that important people from all over the world would travel to Hot Springs.

Maybe because I grew up in Hot Springs, and I grew up in a family of gamblers, and I grew up around carnies and gamblers, I’m completely drawn to these types of people and a lot of that exists there in that city. I may not be a great gambler, and I’m definitely not a con man, but there’s some of that DNA in me because that’s from whence I came and I guess I’m pretty fascinated by that, and I continue to want to explore and investigate it. I feel like in learning about these people I’m learning something about myself, too.

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FAREWELL, GOOD SIR. THE ARKANSAS TIMES was saddened to learn of the recent passing of our original staff photographer, John Watson. John was with us a few years the first time we were a magazine before moving on to a successful free-lance career. He continued to do freelance work for us for several more years. His work never disappointed. John was a larger-than-life character who made photo shoots an adventure. We’d like to share a few of John’s first magazine covers and the following tribute from his close friend, John McDermott.

his appreciation is hard to write, not only because I am tremendously saddened by the loss, but because no matter what I say, it will never do justice to the influence John had on the lives he touched. Like all true artists, he had a unique perspective on life, one that embraced a good sense of humor, a bit of the absurd, a penchant for the pure aesthetic, and a great appreciation of beauty in all its forms.

I met John by chance when we both worked at the old Cajun’s Wharf. He introduced me to photography and I fell in love with it. As the staff photographer for the Arkansas Times magazine, he was making a name for himself around town. When he went freelance, he ushered me into his job and mentored me throughout my tenure there. He was generous to a fault, sharing not only his technical knowledge, but the ideas and concepts behind the creative process. It was through his encouragement and influence that I became a photographer myself, and I will always be indebted to him for that.

John was unlike anyone I had ever met. He was always the coolest guy in the room. He captured everyone’s attention and left them happily bemused. He knew the most amazing people and had a wide array of friends and acquaintances from across the spectrum. He even had his own special style when it came to fashion, making sharp and humorous and fun-loving combinations that caught your eye. At one party where everyone was sort of dolled up he came dressed in bright yellow from head to toe, including shoes and hat! He loved hats.

As an artist and a photographer, he found the most bizarre locations to shoot in, the best characters to pose

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model in front of imploding buildings, a nude swathed in multicolored silks underwater, or hand-colored portraits of crazy characters he found in unlikely places. At one point when his cameras were broken, he made exquisite portraits of flowers by scanning them on a flatbed scanner.

He was always making something creative with imagery.

One great tragedy he endured was the loss of much of his life’s work during a studio fire—a crushing loss not only to him, but to all the rest of us who admired his unique perspective. A massive amount of creative talent disappeared overnight. Undeterred, he picked up his camera and got back to making more art. If you have one of his prints, you should consider it priceless.

John will be missed not only for his art but for his humor, his generosity, his brilliant off-the-wall ideas, and his charismatic way of lighting people up when he was around. But most of all, he will be missed as a good friend and bright spot in the creative cosmos.

— John McDermott

for him, and illustrated fascinating concepts with any variety of everyday objects. His work wasn’t meant to make a statement, just to celebrate beauty with a touch of the absurd and a little mischief. Mischievous he was, and cutting edge in every way. He always seemed a step ahead and created his own magical space where he turned people on to new ideas. He gave hundreds of his prints away, a generosity that was also a great part of his character.

In his work, he melded together odd combinations of subject and technique that merged seamlessly to create a clever, artistic piece, whether it was a bikini clad

JOHN WATSON SELF PORTRAIT

T

A Little Rock native, John McDermott worked as a staff photographer for the Arkansas Times from about 1979-82 and later as a freelance commercial photographer. He moved to Los Angeles in 1987 to work in the feature film industry for five years, then in 1993, he moved to Southeast Asia to take up a position as chief photographer for a magazine in Bangkok. One of his assignments took him to Siem Reap, Cambodia, where he began a fine art series on the ancient temples of Angkor, which was exhibited internationally and published in a book, “Elegy: Reflections on Angkor.” He eventually moved to Siem Reap and opened two galleries there. As the region grew into a major tourist destination, he opened a commercial photography studio specializing in hotels and resorts. He has now returned to the US and lives in Maryland with his wife and two children.

JOHN WATSON 1954-2020

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JULY 2020 81

THE OBSERVER

FIVE QUESTIONS

B

ack in the good ol’ days before our collective cheese slid completely off the cracker, The Observer did quite a bit of police reporting. We talked to every square on the Rubik’s Cube over the years: cops and crooks, inmates and turnkeys, prosecutors and defense attorneys, honorable judges and the wholly dishonorable, lowly paid public defenders and criminal defense wunderkinds who don’t get outta the king-sized bed at their lake house for less than 400 clams an hour. Doing that gave Yours Truly a unique perspective on crime, along with the looming suspicion — echoed over and over again by folks up to their eyeballs in policing and civil rights — that eventually, if we kept ignoring the issue, a shitstorm of epic proportions was gonna blow through over police use of force, racist police tactics and the killing of young black men by officers.

Hope you have your umbrella, because that righteous and wholly necessary shitstorm appears to have come.

It occurred to us over the years that part of the issue is maybe people just don’t know how to pick the leaders who can effect real change.

People — and The Observer is not immune to this — will go with the tough-talking one or the smart one or the one with the Million Dollar Smile, assuming that person will also know their beehole from a posthole when it comes to issues like basic fairness, cultural competence and social justice. In The Observer’s experience, those qualities are rarely standard equipment for the creatures known as politicians.

But, as is often the case, the good news and bad news are the same news: We pick our leaders, and those leaders pick the leaders of the police departments. That means that if you’re 82 JULY 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

mad as hell and aren’t gonna take it anymore, you don’t actually have to take it anymore. All you’ve gotta do is register to vote, cast a ballot for the people who are dedicated to holding the powerful to account and convince a couple ten thousand of your friends to do the same. Presto!

A whole new world.

Of course, you’re saying: But how, Dear Observer, do we weed out all non-hackers who don’t pack the gear to serve our beloved city?

Well, besides scribbling everything down legibly and accurately, the other part of reporting is asking questions, and The Observer got pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. Therefore, if you care about these issues, we have some ideas on what to ask the next vote-seeker who runs for office in your city, town or humble village to separate the Big Talkers from the folks ready to put some work in on policing reform. Here, in our never humble estimation, are five pretty good questions to ask the next person seeking your vote: 1) Do you believe police departments in America have an issue with systemic racism, harassment and police brutality toward African Americans? If they say no, or hem and haw, they may be unworthy of your vote.

2) What specific steps will you take to root out systemic racism in our city’s police force, and to make sure there is zero tolerance for cops who express or act on racist sentiments? If they give you only platitudes, or dissemble, they may be unworthy of your vote.

3) What specific steps will you take to work toward ensuring that a majority of our police officers actually live in the city they police? If they mumble about hiring, or why that can’t be done, they may be unworthy of your vote.

4) What specific steps will you take to help make sure officer-involved shootings and useof-force cases are reviewed by a civilian review board that is just, fair to both officers and the public, and has the ability to not just make recommendations but to remove officers or place them in positions where they no longer interact with citizens in a law-enforcement capacity? If they get mealy-mouthed, or don’t have a plan to help push that wheel on their first day in office, they may be unworthy of your vote.

5) What specific steps will you take to make sure that the more affluent parts of our city are never again policed with velvet gloves while poorer neighborhoods are policed with an iron fist? If they haven’t done some serious thinking on ways to make policing colorblind, classblind and wealth-blind by the time you talk to them, they may be unworthy of your vote.

Not to get too “V for Vendetta” on you (there seems to be a lot of that going around as it is), but our politicians and police should be afraid of the judgment of citizens, not the other way around. We need leaders who know that allowing out-of-control, racist, violent and/or burnout cops to remain in positions of power over the public isn’t just an issue, it’s THE ISSUE, because the first two decades of the 21st century have given us ample evidence that you cannot effectively police a population with fear, only with empathy and love, coming from people who live in and know that city.

We’ve just got to find the people who will make that happen, and put them in office. That’s a hell of a lot harder than asking five questions, or voting for the person who can answer them to your satisfaction. But you’ll never make it to the mountaintop if you don’t start walking.

OUR HEROES To every physician, nurse, and front-line care team member — thank you for putting the health and wellness of our neighbors and communities before your own.

And to our members, we want you to be healthy and continue to take recommended precautions to protect yourselves, and others, from the coronavirus. We encourage you to take care of your physical and emotional health every day — stay active, eat right and seek medical care when you need it.

Medical centers and doctors’ offices are prepared to take care of you.

So, if you’ve been delaying needed medical care, now is a great time to connect with your doctor.

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