Lonesome mountain region seeks love and attention…

By Jamie Hammack

That could be the classified ad Mena and Polk County could run in The Pulse if we had singles ads seeking love. We just can’t seem to get the attention we need — and we need it from the state.

You see, there are television commercials promoting Arkansas tourism that air in other states. If you have lived elsewhere or have done some traveling you may have seen them with their fantastic views of Hawksbill Crag in the Ozarks and of the Delta region with video of row upon row of rice fields. Of course, the shot of Old Main on the U of A campus is and should be shown. It’s majestic and beautiful. But as is our region.

When I lived in Dallas and in Louisiana, I would see the commercials expounding the beauty of Arkansas and telling viewers to come visit. But something I never could find in those commercials was anything to do with Mena or Polk County. Perhaps I missed it. But for the life of me there was no Queen Wilhelmina State Park. No Lodge. None of the beauty of the Ouachita Mountains (except for around Hot Springs). No Wolf Pen Gap Trails. No mention of the Ouachita or Moun tain Fork rivers with kayakers or great shots of people fish ing. No hikers on the nationally known Ouachi ta Trail. You would think this area didn’t exist! Well, perhaps that may change. Soon.

Bob Dylan wrote, “Times They are A-Changin’,” and boy howdy are they. Polk County is now wet. Look, we were probably the wettest dry county in Arkansas, but now we’re O-fficial and that will boost tourism here. More and more people have discovered Mena and added us to their weekend getaway destination list. How did they find us? Word of mouth for some. Mena Advertising & Promotions as well as the Mena Polk County Chamber do loads to help, but maybe it’s also the frustration people have of an overly-touristed Hochatown that has helped Mena gain some new visitors to go along with those who ride the trails here.

The numbers coming here are shown in the log cabins in the mountains and refurbished homes that are popping up on rental sites online to help fill the lack of rooms as more people discover the hidden gem that is our area.

Now, with the eclipse next year and the Trails at Mena project coming as well, Mena and Polk County are poised to have record numbers of visitors. It is my hope that those in Little Rock who make the marketing decisions for tourism in Arkansas will throw us a bone and include us in their marketing campaigns. It’s past time that we are featured along-side all those famous landmarks and locations around the state.

We are getting the deserved attention from tourists and the backers of the trails project, but it is time for the state do their part. Let Mena and Polk County share the spotlight and let us shine.

By Richie Lawry

The ringing from the bag phone in the 1994 Honda Accord startled me. We had purchased the phone just a couple of months before. The size of a briefcase, the phone was portable but not easy to carry. Like most people at that time, the phone stayed in the car. Our phone plan came with 10 minutes a month of call time in our small local area. Any time we were out of our area, high roaming fees applied.

The phone call came from Porter Memorial Hospital in Denver, Colorado. My wife and I were racing along Interstate 70 in Kansas, headed to Denver. My fatherin-law was in the hospital, and the prognosis wasn’t good. On our way across Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, we made and received four phone calls to get updates on Dad’s condition. I still remember opening the cell phone bill the next month and being shocked at the additional charges of over $100 for those four calls.

I recounted this story to my teenage granddaughters while we discussed the advances in technology. They had never heard of a bag phone. I told them how we upgraded from the bag phone to a handheld Nokia phone that was almost as big as a brick and seemed heavy. When we upgraded from the Nokia to a Motorola Razor flip phone, we thought we had achieved the pinnacle of phone technology.

But the part of my cell phone history story that shocked my teenage granddaughters was when I told them they had both been born before I saw my first iPhone. They had never considered that they had been born before there were iPhones. Smartphones have become such an integral part of our lives that they couldn’t imagine life before them.

A few days after my conversation with my granddaughters, I watched a documentary about the inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Although Bell is best known for inventing the telephone, he pursued hundreds of projects throughout his life. He created early versions of the metal