IN SHORT: Voters will decide July 5 whether or not Jacksonville is to have a new multipurpose building to replace the 36-year-old library, which is the oldest in the Central Arkansas Library System.
By Brian Rodriguez
Leader staff writer
A Little Rock architectural firm on Monday unveiled designs for a new Jacksonville library that would cost about $2.5 million. Voters will decide whether to fund the library during a special millage election on Tuesday, July 5.
The architectural firm of Witsell, Evans and Rasco showed their plans during a meeting in the Esther Dewitt Nixon Library in Jacksonville, featuring a multi-purpose section for use after library hours, a larger workspace for library employees, study rooms and reading alcoves.
"We’ve got some really, really exciting things going on here in Jacksonville," said Mark Wilson, the Jacksonville representative on the Central Arkansas Library System board. "I think the architects have a lot of passion for their project."
The architects said it would cost about the same to build a new library than to renovate the existing building.
The most discussed part of the presentation was the proposed roof shown in the color renderings — an architectural rarity with the roof sloping from the front and back toward the center of the building.
Charles Witsell, a partner in the WER firm, said the design was used for the triple purpose of imposing monumental size to the side facing Main Street, giving the reading room and the library shelves a high roof, and allowing more window space for reading light.
“When you look outside of the building, it may look a little odd, but when you go inside of the building and there’s light, it’s great,” Wilson said. “With a library, I feel like that’s the bigger issue, how you feel inside the library.”
The pitch would drain the water to the center, said Witsell, and downspouts would then move the water out toward a sewer or drainage ditch to carry the water away from the building.
Most of the argument against the roof came because the center of the proposed roof seemed to have a flat section that reminded the crowd of flooding problems last fall, when the drainage system in the current flat roof leaked and closed the library for about 40 days.
Witsell said Tuesday afternoon that the firm was still in the design stages and other roof designs would be considered to ensure the city is happy with the plans for a new building.
"We certainly saw that it had a negative response so we are indeed going to be looking at different designs," he said. "We listened to the community last night and we certainly will do that."
"Keep in mind I asked the architects to do something very difficult," said CALS director Bobby Roberts, "to draw up a plan with no lot."
An earlier report by the architects showed that not counting land purchase, it would cost more to completely renovate the current building than to build a new one.
The report showed, including the cost to move and rent a temporary location while work was done, expanding and renovating the current building would cost just under $2.5 million.
The cost comparison was broken down to $185 per square foot to expand and renovate the current building, or $170 per square foot to build a new one. Witsell said land purchase was not added to the building cost because a site has not been chosen to get a cost estimate, and if the city is lucky, a site could be donated.
The current library was built in 1969 with 9,265 square feet and was renamed the Esther D. Nixon Library in 1992.
"This is a building that I think has served the community well, but it has worn out," Roberts said. "It’s just simply outlived its usefulness."
The average CALS library building, excluding the Nixon Library, is five years old and has about 14,000 square feet.
"This is like a baseball game – you get a win or you don’t," Roberts said, referring to the millage election. "There’s not going to be a second chance on that."
A positive vote in the election would fund a one-mill tax increase that would generate about $165,000 per year to fund up to a $2.5 million bond for a new library building.
The bond would include paying for a land purchase, equipping the land, and constructing a new library building.
Under the one-mill increase, a home appraised at $100,000 is assessed at 20 percent, or $20,000.
Millage increases are 1/1,000th of the assessed value, so a one-mil increase on that home would cost 1/1,000th of $20,000.
Millage increases are collected once a year, so a $100,000 homeowner would pay $20 per year until a bond was paid.
"I think all you can do is tell people it’s a value to the community," Roberts said.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
TOP STORY>> School board upholds cuts
IN SHORT: PCSSD employees lose their plea Tuesday to have their step pay increases and paid holidays restored, but they threaten a possible lawsuit.
By John Hofheimer
Leader staff writer
Pulaski County Special School District employees failed to convince the school board on Tuesday to reject the administration's freezing of step pay increases and elimination of paid holidays. The board stuck with the new fiscal distress improvement plan, approved unanimously by the board in special session on Monday, to cut spending for the next school year by $8.5 million while restoring—without any discussion in public—the 11 assistant principal positions the board cut in its original improvement plan April 20.
The state Board of Education designated the district as being in fiscal distress April 11, based on its calculation that the district’s operational fund balance would be $5 million in the hole at the end of the next school year.
The district has two years to remedy to the problem or face measures including consolidation, replacement of the superintendent or takeover by the state.
In the April version of the improvement plan, the board thought it reduced expenditures by $11.7 million, only to discover this month that the calculations and projections were inaccurate and the actual reduction would be closer to $8.5 million.
The cuts reduce the projected 2005-2006 school budget from $143.5 million to $135 million, with a projected fund balance June 30, 2006 of about $8 million.
“This allows us a thin cushion,” said interim Superintendent Robert Clowers.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, the district will have about 5.9 percent of its budget in its fund balance at the end of the next fiscal year, but there is no state-recommended or mandated percentage. Balances in Arkansas range from about 3.6 percent to 52 percent, according to John Archetko, acting chief financial officer for the district.
Archetko, who met with Education Department representatives, said the state wants the district to live within its means, avoid debt and create a plan that’s doable.
The largest savings are from freezing step pay increases and eliminating paid holidays.
There was great support among board members for restoring paid holidays and unfreezing step increases as soon as the district is back on solid financial footing, but Archetko warned that only if voters approve a maintenance and operations bond issue is the district again likely to have the kind of money it needs.
Because the savings were recalculated to be about $3.5 million less than originally projected, because the board fired Superintendent Donald Henderson and appointed Robert Clowers interim superintendent and because it wanted more explanation about proposed cuts, the state Education Department gave the school district until June 15 to submit an amended fiscal distress improvement plan.
That revised plan, approved after considering board member Jeff Shaneyfelt’s amendments to restore some paid holidays to non-teaching staff and to bolster discipline by keeping the director of student services and athletics position, spared the 11 assistant principal positions, which were slated to be cut by the original improvement plan.
The largest among the cuts in the plan being submitted to the state Education Department is $3.3 million saved by freezing all step increases to teachers and others.
Eliminating the 11 assistant principals, a suggestion of the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers, would have saved the district an additional $850,000. Apparently Clowers discussed keeping the assistant principals in individual meetings or telephone calls with board members, because cutting the assistant principals was not among cuts proposed and adopted Monday night.
Elimination of all paid holidays to all employees saved $1.9 million and another $1 million by paying off the early-retirement incentive. Hiring substitute teachers instead of contracting that to Kelly Services was projected to save another $500,000.
Purchase of new textbooks was reduced $500,000, reductions to the transportation department will save $248,507. The maintenance budget was trimmed by $124,000, $116,000 was saved by reverting Harris from a year-round school to regular schedule and cutting the director of student services and athletics saved the district $101,854.
By John Hofheimer
Leader staff writer
Pulaski County Special School District employees failed to convince the school board on Tuesday to reject the administration's freezing of step pay increases and elimination of paid holidays. The board stuck with the new fiscal distress improvement plan, approved unanimously by the board in special session on Monday, to cut spending for the next school year by $8.5 million while restoring—without any discussion in public—the 11 assistant principal positions the board cut in its original improvement plan April 20.
The state Board of Education designated the district as being in fiscal distress April 11, based on its calculation that the district’s operational fund balance would be $5 million in the hole at the end of the next school year.
The district has two years to remedy to the problem or face measures including consolidation, replacement of the superintendent or takeover by the state.
In the April version of the improvement plan, the board thought it reduced expenditures by $11.7 million, only to discover this month that the calculations and projections were inaccurate and the actual reduction would be closer to $8.5 million.
The cuts reduce the projected 2005-2006 school budget from $143.5 million to $135 million, with a projected fund balance June 30, 2006 of about $8 million.
“This allows us a thin cushion,” said interim Superintendent Robert Clowers.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, the district will have about 5.9 percent of its budget in its fund balance at the end of the next fiscal year, but there is no state-recommended or mandated percentage. Balances in Arkansas range from about 3.6 percent to 52 percent, according to John Archetko, acting chief financial officer for the district.
Archetko, who met with Education Department representatives, said the state wants the district to live within its means, avoid debt and create a plan that’s doable.
The largest savings are from freezing step pay increases and eliminating paid holidays.
There was great support among board members for restoring paid holidays and unfreezing step increases as soon as the district is back on solid financial footing, but Archetko warned that only if voters approve a maintenance and operations bond issue is the district again likely to have the kind of money it needs.
Because the savings were recalculated to be about $3.5 million less than originally projected, because the board fired Superintendent Donald Henderson and appointed Robert Clowers interim superintendent and because it wanted more explanation about proposed cuts, the state Education Department gave the school district until June 15 to submit an amended fiscal distress improvement plan.
That revised plan, approved after considering board member Jeff Shaneyfelt’s amendments to restore some paid holidays to non-teaching staff and to bolster discipline by keeping the director of student services and athletics position, spared the 11 assistant principal positions, which were slated to be cut by the original improvement plan.
The largest among the cuts in the plan being submitted to the state Education Department is $3.3 million saved by freezing all step increases to teachers and others.
Eliminating the 11 assistant principals, a suggestion of the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers, would have saved the district an additional $850,000. Apparently Clowers discussed keeping the assistant principals in individual meetings or telephone calls with board members, because cutting the assistant principals was not among cuts proposed and adopted Monday night.
Elimination of all paid holidays to all employees saved $1.9 million and another $1 million by paying off the early-retirement incentive. Hiring substitute teachers instead of contracting that to Kelly Services was projected to save another $500,000.
Purchase of new textbooks was reduced $500,000, reductions to the transportation department will save $248,507. The maintenance budget was trimmed by $124,000, $116,000 was saved by reverting Harris from a year-round school to regular schedule and cutting the director of student services and athletics saved the district $101,854.
TOP STORY>> Cabot sets tax vote for new center, overpass
IN SHORT: Lonoke County Election Commission approves July 12 balloting on millage hike.
By Joan McCoy
Leader staff writer
The Lonoke County Election Commission has approved a July 12 special election in Cabot to increase the city millage to pay for a railroad overpass and build a community center.
Voters will be asked to vote for or against increasing the millage from 3.5 to 4.5 to raise $700,000 for the city’s part of the federally-funded $5 million overpass and for or against increasing the millage to raise $2 million to help pay for the community center.
The overpass, to be built north of the Polk Street railroad crossing, is touted as the only means of keeping buses off the tracks and as the first step toward a north interchange that would connect Highway 38 to Highway 5.
The community center was expected to cost $3.5 million, including $500,000 for site preparation. But last fall the low bid came in at $4.2 million and the price could be even higher now.
If approved the millage increase would add about $20 to the tax on a $100,000 home. The ordinance calling for the election says the millage will be rolled back when the bonds that will pay for the construction projects are retired.
The millage increase is expected to raise about $160,000 a year.
If voters turn down the increase in taxes, the city will not be able to build the community center, and the overpass will have to wait at least until 2008, said Mayor Stubby Stumbaugh.
The council has the authority to raise the millage without voter approval, but if they did, city voters could always bring a petition for referendum and force an election.
A year ago voters approved paying for the community center with existing taxes, saying overwhelmingly that 1 percent of the city’s 1.5 percent hamburger tax and an existing half-mill should be used to pay for the center.
“I think this [upcoming election] is an opportunity for city residents to say we want the center and we’re willing to pay for it,” he said.
Early voting will be from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, June 27 through July 11 at the Lonoke County Courthouse.
On election day, polls will be open from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the following polling sites:
Cabot City Ward 1 – Richie Road Gym, 432 Richie Road.
Cabot City Ward 2 – Cabot First Baptist Church, 306 W. Pine.
Cabot City Ward 3 – Victory Baptist Church, 501 N. Lincoln.
Cabot City Ward 4 – Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, 3105 Hwy. 89 S.
If voters approve raising the millage for one project, but not the other, all the new revenue would be applied toward the selected project.
By Joan McCoy
Leader staff writer
The Lonoke County Election Commission has approved a July 12 special election in Cabot to increase the city millage to pay for a railroad overpass and build a community center.
Voters will be asked to vote for or against increasing the millage from 3.5 to 4.5 to raise $700,000 for the city’s part of the federally-funded $5 million overpass and for or against increasing the millage to raise $2 million to help pay for the community center.
The overpass, to be built north of the Polk Street railroad crossing, is touted as the only means of keeping buses off the tracks and as the first step toward a north interchange that would connect Highway 38 to Highway 5.
The community center was expected to cost $3.5 million, including $500,000 for site preparation. But last fall the low bid came in at $4.2 million and the price could be even higher now.
If approved the millage increase would add about $20 to the tax on a $100,000 home. The ordinance calling for the election says the millage will be rolled back when the bonds that will pay for the construction projects are retired.
The millage increase is expected to raise about $160,000 a year.
If voters turn down the increase in taxes, the city will not be able to build the community center, and the overpass will have to wait at least until 2008, said Mayor Stubby Stumbaugh.
The council has the authority to raise the millage without voter approval, but if they did, city voters could always bring a petition for referendum and force an election.
A year ago voters approved paying for the community center with existing taxes, saying overwhelmingly that 1 percent of the city’s 1.5 percent hamburger tax and an existing half-mill should be used to pay for the center.
“I think this [upcoming election] is an opportunity for city residents to say we want the center and we’re willing to pay for it,” he said.
Early voting will be from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, June 27 through July 11 at the Lonoke County Courthouse.
On election day, polls will be open from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the following polling sites:
Cabot City Ward 1 – Richie Road Gym, 432 Richie Road.
Cabot City Ward 2 – Cabot First Baptist Church, 306 W. Pine.
Cabot City Ward 3 – Victory Baptist Church, 501 N. Lincoln.
Cabot City Ward 4 – Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, 3105 Hwy. 89 S.
If voters approve raising the millage for one project, but not the other, all the new revenue would be applied toward the selected project.
TOP STORY>> Air base gets top planners' attention
IN SHORT: The staff at Metroplan is looking at ways to accommodate an influx of new jobs and personnel at Little Rock Air Force Base. Ideas include widening Hwy. 67/167 from Jacksonville to Cabot, as well as parts of Hwy. 89.
By John Hofheimer
Leader staff writer
Widening Hwy. 67-167 between the North Belt Loop and Hwy. 89 at an estimated cost of $124 million will be a high priority if 4,000 new jobs come to Little Rock Air Force Base over the next few years, according to a recommendation of Metroplan staff on Tuesday.
“We’re pleased that they are looking and making sure that the air base is covered,” said Jacksonville Engineer Jay Whisker, who serves on the Metroplan technical coordinating committee. “Its nice when communities get together and we can all benefit from having the air base.”
He said he was pleased Metro-plan was considering the widening of Hwy. 67/167 between Vandenberg Boulevard near the air base and Hwy. 89 in Cabot. One accident or one small problem can back up traffic to Cabot, he said.
No one expressed serious opposition during Metroplan’s transportation advisory council meeting to consideration and reordering of a dozen projects that could be affected by the expected increase in jobs at the base, but the council stopped short of sending the plan on to the Metroplan board of directors.
It would cost an estimated $197 million to complete all 12 projects, with only $48 million currently projected to be available, according to Casey Covington, a Metroplan traffic planner. Most of the proposed changes involve increasing traffic capacity to and from the front and back gates at the base.
“Getting people to the back air base gate is just as important for folks moving into the west side of Jacksonville,” Whisker said, noting growth at Forest Oaks and Base Meadows subdivisions and the approval by the Jacksonville Planning Commission Monday night of the Lost Creek subdivision.
Broken up into three separate projects to meet increased traffic use with additional base personnel, an estimated 2,000 vehicles a day would be projected to travel on each if the new jobs materialize as a result of the base realignment and closure process.
Ten million dollars already is committed to widen the highway to six lanes from the North Belt Freeway to Redmond Road. An additional $32 million would be available to widen it from Redmond to Vandenberg if the Metro 2030 long-range transportation plan is adopted in August.
The segment from Vandenberg to Hwy. 89 would cost $82 million and the staff has recommended that as a high priority should the jobs materialize.
The Metroplan/Highway De-partment plan already calls for widening Hwy. 107 from Jack-sonville/Cato to General Samuels at a cost of $3 million and the widening of Graham Road from Main Street to Loop Road, also $3 million.
If money is available, the widening of Hwy. 107 from General Samuels to the air base would be a high priority and cost about $4 million. A lower priority would be the widening of Hwy. 107 from the air base to Republican Road—a $10 million project.
The widening of Hwy. 89 from U.S. 67/167 to Hwy 367 in Cabot also is rated a high priority if there is air base expansion, at a cost of $4 million.
The widening of Hwy. 321 from Hwy. 67/167 to Hwy. 89 is rated a low air base priority, but improvement of the interchange is considered important in the context of the air base.
By John Hofheimer
Leader staff writer
Widening Hwy. 67-167 between the North Belt Loop and Hwy. 89 at an estimated cost of $124 million will be a high priority if 4,000 new jobs come to Little Rock Air Force Base over the next few years, according to a recommendation of Metroplan staff on Tuesday.
“We’re pleased that they are looking and making sure that the air base is covered,” said Jacksonville Engineer Jay Whisker, who serves on the Metroplan technical coordinating committee. “Its nice when communities get together and we can all benefit from having the air base.”
He said he was pleased Metro-plan was considering the widening of Hwy. 67/167 between Vandenberg Boulevard near the air base and Hwy. 89 in Cabot. One accident or one small problem can back up traffic to Cabot, he said.
No one expressed serious opposition during Metroplan’s transportation advisory council meeting to consideration and reordering of a dozen projects that could be affected by the expected increase in jobs at the base, but the council stopped short of sending the plan on to the Metroplan board of directors.
It would cost an estimated $197 million to complete all 12 projects, with only $48 million currently projected to be available, according to Casey Covington, a Metroplan traffic planner. Most of the proposed changes involve increasing traffic capacity to and from the front and back gates at the base.
“Getting people to the back air base gate is just as important for folks moving into the west side of Jacksonville,” Whisker said, noting growth at Forest Oaks and Base Meadows subdivisions and the approval by the Jacksonville Planning Commission Monday night of the Lost Creek subdivision.
Broken up into three separate projects to meet increased traffic use with additional base personnel, an estimated 2,000 vehicles a day would be projected to travel on each if the new jobs materialize as a result of the base realignment and closure process.
Ten million dollars already is committed to widen the highway to six lanes from the North Belt Freeway to Redmond Road. An additional $32 million would be available to widen it from Redmond to Vandenberg if the Metro 2030 long-range transportation plan is adopted in August.
The segment from Vandenberg to Hwy. 89 would cost $82 million and the staff has recommended that as a high priority should the jobs materialize.
The Metroplan/Highway De-partment plan already calls for widening Hwy. 107 from Jack-sonville/Cato to General Samuels at a cost of $3 million and the widening of Graham Road from Main Street to Loop Road, also $3 million.
If money is available, the widening of Hwy. 107 from General Samuels to the air base would be a high priority and cost about $4 million. A lower priority would be the widening of Hwy. 107 from the air base to Republican Road—a $10 million project.
The widening of Hwy. 89 from U.S. 67/167 to Hwy 367 in Cabot also is rated a high priority if there is air base expansion, at a cost of $4 million.
The widening of Hwy. 321 from Hwy. 67/167 to Hwy. 89 is rated a low air base priority, but improvement of the interchange is considered important in the context of the air base.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
FROM THE PUBLISHER>> B.B. King: World’s greatest entertainer
Riverfest rivals Memphis in May, while Handys honors artists
BY GARRICK FELDMAN
When it came to musical variety, last weekend’s Riverfest rivaled the much bigger Memphis in May a month ago. The crowds are much better behaved here — the overpriced Memphis in May attracts mostly adolescents drawn to adolescent music — and when you have B.B. King as your headliner, Riverfest was bound to succeed, even with some rain.
King, voted blues entertainer of the year at the W.C. Handy Blues Awards ceremony in Memphis, performed his hits for an hour and paid tribute to his favorite president. Instead of “Every Day I have the Blues,” usually his first song, he opened with “Why I Sing the Blues,” continued with “Bad Case of Love,” “Early in the Morning,” “Rock Me, Baby,” “Key to the Highway,” “The Thrill Is Gone,” and even included the politically incorrect “Ain’t It Just Like a Woman” (popularized by Brinkley’s Louis Jordan, one of B.B.’s favorites) and we even heard U-2’s “When Love Comes to Town.”
Backed by a rousing band, the king of the blues was in fine form, although he’s showing his age: King, who is a diabetic, will be 80 in September and performs sitting down. Even so, he’s still the world’s greatest entertainer.
As for Memphis in May, it was muddy and claustrophobic, as usual, but it was nice to see Ike Turner, who is in his 70s, is still putting on a good show, although he’ll never find another Tina, although many have auditioned for the job.
The Handy awards ceremony in downtown Memphis, a few days after Memphis in May, saw many of our favorites make an appearance, although not all of them performed, often because the show ran too long and the artists left.
Kenny Neal and Billy Branch, who won best acoustic album for their Alligator CD “Double Take,” came onstage around 1 a.m. and were soon told to stop, which upset Branch, who went into a tirade. Who can blame him?
The great Sam Lay, drummer for Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, waited backstage, but he never got the call to perform. Lay, who is from Alabama, stormed off with his wife and drove to Augusta (Woodruff County) to visit his in-laws.
A Handy nominee, Lay has a new CD out called “I Get Evil” (Random Chance Records), and he sings and play drums, too.
Several winners and nominees did perform, including Mavis Staples, who won for best blues and soul album (“Have a Little Faith”) was named best soul blues artist; Charlie Musselwhite, who won for best contemporary blues album (“Sanctuary”) and was named best contemporary blues artist and blues harmonica player; Pinetop Perkins, who won for best traditional blues album (“Ladies Man”) and was named best traditional blues artist.
Perkins, who is 92, played a little piano, while Honeyboy Edwards, who’ll be 90 this month and was named best acoustic blues artist, played a few minutes onstage before he had his portrait taken backstage and headed back to Chicago that night in his manager’s car.
Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones, the firebrand poet and critic, seemed lost at the proceedings. Baraka, who had written an anti-Semitic poem about 9/11, was supposed to receive an award for his book “Blues People,” but apparently no one recognized him except for this reporter.
Still wearing winter tweeds, Baraka, who must be in his 70s, seemed much smaller since his black power days in the 60s and was largely forgotten until his appalling poem on 9/11. He should have received his award the night before, but he didn’t know that, so he may have left Memphis empty-handed.
The great soul-blues singer Little Milton Campbell has his own take on 9/11. Standing back stage, he told us, “When 9/11 happened, that was the only time we were one. There was no black and white. We were all Ameri-cans. Then we went right back to where we were.”
Koko Taylor, who won for best traditional blues artist, wasn’t well enough to perform. But after accepting her award, she defined blues for us.
“The blues is having a hard time,” she said. “I know what I’m singing about. I experienced everything I sing about.”
Other winners and their categories: John Lee Hooker, Jr., new artist debut for “Blues with a Vengeance;” Holmes Brothers, blues band; Willie Kent, bass; Willie (Big Eyes) Smith, drums; Bob Margolin, guitar; Roomful of Blues, blues horns; Robert Randolph (who played at Riverfest and Memphis in May) blues instrument; Jim Tullio and Jim Welder, “Have a Little Faith,” blues song; Gary U.S. Bonds, “Back in 20,” comeback blues album; Shemeika Copeland, contemporary blues artist; Hound Dog Taylor, “Release the Hound,” historical blues album, and Bobby Rush, soul blues artist.
BY GARRICK FELDMAN
When it came to musical variety, last weekend’s Riverfest rivaled the much bigger Memphis in May a month ago. The crowds are much better behaved here — the overpriced Memphis in May attracts mostly adolescents drawn to adolescent music — and when you have B.B. King as your headliner, Riverfest was bound to succeed, even with some rain.
King, voted blues entertainer of the year at the W.C. Handy Blues Awards ceremony in Memphis, performed his hits for an hour and paid tribute to his favorite president. Instead of “Every Day I have the Blues,” usually his first song, he opened with “Why I Sing the Blues,” continued with “Bad Case of Love,” “Early in the Morning,” “Rock Me, Baby,” “Key to the Highway,” “The Thrill Is Gone,” and even included the politically incorrect “Ain’t It Just Like a Woman” (popularized by Brinkley’s Louis Jordan, one of B.B.’s favorites) and we even heard U-2’s “When Love Comes to Town.”
Backed by a rousing band, the king of the blues was in fine form, although he’s showing his age: King, who is a diabetic, will be 80 in September and performs sitting down. Even so, he’s still the world’s greatest entertainer.
As for Memphis in May, it was muddy and claustrophobic, as usual, but it was nice to see Ike Turner, who is in his 70s, is still putting on a good show, although he’ll never find another Tina, although many have auditioned for the job.
The Handy awards ceremony in downtown Memphis, a few days after Memphis in May, saw many of our favorites make an appearance, although not all of them performed, often because the show ran too long and the artists left.
Kenny Neal and Billy Branch, who won best acoustic album for their Alligator CD “Double Take,” came onstage around 1 a.m. and were soon told to stop, which upset Branch, who went into a tirade. Who can blame him?
The great Sam Lay, drummer for Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, waited backstage, but he never got the call to perform. Lay, who is from Alabama, stormed off with his wife and drove to Augusta (Woodruff County) to visit his in-laws.
A Handy nominee, Lay has a new CD out called “I Get Evil” (Random Chance Records), and he sings and play drums, too.
Several winners and nominees did perform, including Mavis Staples, who won for best blues and soul album (“Have a Little Faith”) was named best soul blues artist; Charlie Musselwhite, who won for best contemporary blues album (“Sanctuary”) and was named best contemporary blues artist and blues harmonica player; Pinetop Perkins, who won for best traditional blues album (“Ladies Man”) and was named best traditional blues artist.
Perkins, who is 92, played a little piano, while Honeyboy Edwards, who’ll be 90 this month and was named best acoustic blues artist, played a few minutes onstage before he had his portrait taken backstage and headed back to Chicago that night in his manager’s car.
Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones, the firebrand poet and critic, seemed lost at the proceedings. Baraka, who had written an anti-Semitic poem about 9/11, was supposed to receive an award for his book “Blues People,” but apparently no one recognized him except for this reporter.
Still wearing winter tweeds, Baraka, who must be in his 70s, seemed much smaller since his black power days in the 60s and was largely forgotten until his appalling poem on 9/11. He should have received his award the night before, but he didn’t know that, so he may have left Memphis empty-handed.
The great soul-blues singer Little Milton Campbell has his own take on 9/11. Standing back stage, he told us, “When 9/11 happened, that was the only time we were one. There was no black and white. We were all Ameri-cans. Then we went right back to where we were.”
Koko Taylor, who won for best traditional blues artist, wasn’t well enough to perform. But after accepting her award, she defined blues for us.
“The blues is having a hard time,” she said. “I know what I’m singing about. I experienced everything I sing about.”
Other winners and their categories: John Lee Hooker, Jr., new artist debut for “Blues with a Vengeance;” Holmes Brothers, blues band; Willie Kent, bass; Willie (Big Eyes) Smith, drums; Bob Margolin, guitar; Roomful of Blues, blues horns; Robert Randolph (who played at Riverfest and Memphis in May) blues instrument; Jim Tullio and Jim Welder, “Have a Little Faith,” blues song; Gary U.S. Bonds, “Back in 20,” comeback blues album; Shemeika Copeland, contemporary blues artist; Hound Dog Taylor, “Release the Hound,” historical blues album, and Bobby Rush, soul blues artist.
OBITUARIES>> June 8, 2005
PHILLIP SAYLES
Specialist Phillip Nicholas “Nick” Sayles, 26, of Jacksonville, died May 28 in Iraq. He was born May 2, 1979, in Little Rock, to Charles and Pearl Sayles, who survive him.
Nick was the oldest of three children. He was the grandson of the late Earl and Lois Sayles and J. P. and Lucille Lentz.
He was preceded in death by his uncles, Tom Sayles, Jim Sayles, and Tom Barnes.
Nick is also survived by his brothers, Joseph Aaron Sayles of Crocker, Mo., and Wesley Patrick Sayles of Jacksonville; aunts, Don-na Lentz of Cabot, Helen Barnes of Crocker, Mo., Carol Sayles and Teri Sayles, both of Little Rock, and Mildred Sayles of Hensley; uncles, John Lentz and Joe Lentz, both of Cabot, and Don Sayles of Hensley; great aunts, Mildred Hammons of Jacksonville, Emma Jean Purtle, and Ruby Finch of North Little Rock. Nicholas had many loving cousins, including Tyler and Travis Barnes of Crocker, Mo., Joshua Lentz of Cabot, Gabe and Israel Lentz of Beebe, Tracy Slobig of Cabot, Dana Wiggins of Danville, and Tammy Rees of Jonesboro.
Nick attended North Pulaski High School and was enrolled in ROTC classes at Jacksonville High School for three years where he excelled in leadership, which he brought to the program.
He was known by his superiors and comrades for his dependability. Nick earned several awards while serving in ROTC and graduated in 1997 from Cabot High School.
Nick began his military career in May 2002, as an infantryman and earned the rank of specialist. Nick was assigned to 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade 25th Infantry Division in Fort Lewis, Wash., where he took computer training and then taught others.
He trained and became a sniper before his deployment to Mosul, Iraq. While in Mosul, Nick worked in the operations section of the 1st Battalion 24th Infantry Headquarters, drove, and operated computers for the battalion commander. He then moved to a job out on the line with Bravo Company.
Nick was a member of First Assembly of God in Jacksonville. Nick was an exceptional person.
He demonstrated outstanding performance as a soldier and as an individual while employed in numerous capacities in the military and civilian life, earning the confidence of his leadership and peers. He was the epitome of an infantryman, earning numerous awards and badges, including the Bronze Star and Purple Heart awarded posthumously, Army Achievement Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal (Iraq), the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal (Iraq), Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Expert Infantryman’s Badge and Sniper Distinction.
Funeral services were held Monday at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Cabot with Rev. Terry Fortner, Pastor Royce Lowe and Nick’s former youth pastor Dale Dahl officiating. Interment will be in Sumner Cemetery.
In lieu of flowers, make memorials to the Nick Sayles R.O.T.C. Scholarship Fund at Twin City Bank or Community Bank.
RUTH WILSON
Ruth Nixon Wilson, 86, of Jacksonville passed away Sunday, June 5 at her home.
She was born Feb. 25, 1919 in Little Rock to Hugh and Cora Mae McNair Nixon.
After graduating from Little Rock High School in 1937, she attended Southwestern (now Rhodes) College in Memphis.
She transferred to the Univer-sity of Arkansas where she graduated in 1941 with a degree in romance languages.
She was a member of Delta Delta Delta sorority. She was elected to the honorary academic fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa.
In February of 1942, she married Pat Wilson and soon began her career as a loving housewife and mother.
Mrs. Wilson was a faithful member of First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville where she served over 30 years as the church organist. Over the years, she contributed her time and talents to the school PTA’s, various church committees and “circle” groups and Little Rock Air Force Base Officers Wives Club. Mrs. Wilson was a charter member of the Rebsamen Hospital Auxiliary.
During the 1960’s, Mrs. Wilson and several of her friends began an informal needlepoint and cross stitch group referred to as the “Needlenuts.”
They traveled nationally and internationally together, met for lunch, swapped recipes, and created many beautiful cross stitch pieces that they shared with family and friends. Mrs. Wilson was preceded in death by her husband, Kenneth Pat Wilson, on January 2, 2002; her parents; a brother, Dr. Ewing Nixon and a sister, Mae Kathryn Nixon.
She is survived by her three children, Mike Wilson of Jacksonville, Kathy Roberts of Little Rock, Larry Wilson of Jacksonville; nine grandchildren, Kenneth Wilson, Jan Williams, Liza Wilson, Mary Kathryn Williams, Scott Williams, Patrick Wilson, Matt Wilson, Corrie Gladstein and Mark Wilson; five great-grandchildren, Sullivan Williams, Jack and Emily Wilson, Caroline and Joe Gladstein.
Funeral services will be 10 a.m. Wednesday at First Presbyterian Church with Dr. David Dyer officiating. Interment will follow at Bayou Meto Cemetery in Jacksonville.
Her grandsons will serve as pallbearers.
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials be made to the First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville, the Esther DeWitt Nixon Library in Jacksonville or a charity of the choice of the donor.
Funeral arrangements are under the direction of Moore’s Jacksonville Funeral Home.
THURMAN GARNER
Thurman L. “Dub” Garner, 77, of Jacksonville passed away on Sunday, June 5. He was a cowboy and a Mason.
He is survived by three sons, Bobby L. Garner and his wife Cheryl of North Little Rock, Michael T. Garner of Jacksonville, and Joel C. Garner of Cabot; one brother, Bobby R. Garner of Jacksonville; one sister, Fae Jones of Jacksonville; four grandchildren, Jason C., Zeblin, and Justin Garner and Jodi Haggard; and two great-grandchildren, Bry-son and Zoe Garner. He was preceded in death by his parents, a brother, A.O. Garner, and his wife, Rachel Garner.
Funeral will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at North Little Rock Funeral Home Chapel. Burial will be in Rest Hills Memorial Park.
Family will receive friends from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday at North Little Rock Funeral Home.
Lawrence Henry
LAWRENCE HENRY
Lawrence Gerald Henry, 17, of Romance, passed away May 26.
He was born April 11, 1988 in Little Rock to Glen and Brenda Carol Morgan Honey. He attended Cabot schools where he played baseball and football in the seventh, eighth and ninth grades. He loved to hunt, fish and cook.
He was preceded in death by his great-grandparents, Joseph and Jewell Higgins and Charles and Ethel Morgan. Lawrence is survived by his parents, a sister, Brittany Henry of Ward and a half-brother, Aaron Henry of Cabot.
His grandparents, Diana and Billy Ray Ashley of Jacksonville and Roy and Velta Morgan of Quitman survive him as well as an aunt, Patricia Lockridge; cousins Erica McDermont of Kansas, Monica Jenson of Jacksonville and J.J. Lockridge of Jacksonville and a special friend, Rachael Herrin.
Funeral services were held May 31 at Moore’s Cabot Funeral Home chapel with interment in H&H Family Cemetery in Romance.
Arrangements by Moore’s Cabot Funeral Home.
JAMES RAMBO
James Curtis Rambo, 54, of Lonoke, died Saturday, June 4.
Survivors are his children, Curtis Edward Rambo and Tiffany Nicole Rambo of Pine Bluff, Cristi Dulaney of Florida; sisters, Janice and husband Grant Goff of Beebe, Diane Williamson and Mary and husband Chris Vines of Lonoke. He was preceded in death by parents, Mary V. and Curtis L. Rambo and grandparents, Ollie L. and J.D. Shackael. Cremation arrangements are by Westbrook Funeral Home, Beebe.
Arrangements were made through Huson Funeral Home in Sherwood.
Specialist Phillip Nicholas “Nick” Sayles, 26, of Jacksonville, died May 28 in Iraq. He was born May 2, 1979, in Little Rock, to Charles and Pearl Sayles, who survive him.
Nick was the oldest of three children. He was the grandson of the late Earl and Lois Sayles and J. P. and Lucille Lentz.
He was preceded in death by his uncles, Tom Sayles, Jim Sayles, and Tom Barnes.
Nick is also survived by his brothers, Joseph Aaron Sayles of Crocker, Mo., and Wesley Patrick Sayles of Jacksonville; aunts, Don-na Lentz of Cabot, Helen Barnes of Crocker, Mo., Carol Sayles and Teri Sayles, both of Little Rock, and Mildred Sayles of Hensley; uncles, John Lentz and Joe Lentz, both of Cabot, and Don Sayles of Hensley; great aunts, Mildred Hammons of Jacksonville, Emma Jean Purtle, and Ruby Finch of North Little Rock. Nicholas had many loving cousins, including Tyler and Travis Barnes of Crocker, Mo., Joshua Lentz of Cabot, Gabe and Israel Lentz of Beebe, Tracy Slobig of Cabot, Dana Wiggins of Danville, and Tammy Rees of Jonesboro.
Nick attended North Pulaski High School and was enrolled in ROTC classes at Jacksonville High School for three years where he excelled in leadership, which he brought to the program.
He was known by his superiors and comrades for his dependability. Nick earned several awards while serving in ROTC and graduated in 1997 from Cabot High School.
Nick began his military career in May 2002, as an infantryman and earned the rank of specialist. Nick was assigned to 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade 25th Infantry Division in Fort Lewis, Wash., where he took computer training and then taught others.
He trained and became a sniper before his deployment to Mosul, Iraq. While in Mosul, Nick worked in the operations section of the 1st Battalion 24th Infantry Headquarters, drove, and operated computers for the battalion commander. He then moved to a job out on the line with Bravo Company.
Nick was a member of First Assembly of God in Jacksonville. Nick was an exceptional person.
He demonstrated outstanding performance as a soldier and as an individual while employed in numerous capacities in the military and civilian life, earning the confidence of his leadership and peers. He was the epitome of an infantryman, earning numerous awards and badges, including the Bronze Star and Purple Heart awarded posthumously, Army Achievement Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal (Iraq), the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal (Iraq), Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Expert Infantryman’s Badge and Sniper Distinction.
Funeral services were held Monday at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Cabot with Rev. Terry Fortner, Pastor Royce Lowe and Nick’s former youth pastor Dale Dahl officiating. Interment will be in Sumner Cemetery.
In lieu of flowers, make memorials to the Nick Sayles R.O.T.C. Scholarship Fund at Twin City Bank or Community Bank.
RUTH WILSON
Ruth Nixon Wilson, 86, of Jacksonville passed away Sunday, June 5 at her home.
She was born Feb. 25, 1919 in Little Rock to Hugh and Cora Mae McNair Nixon.
After graduating from Little Rock High School in 1937, she attended Southwestern (now Rhodes) College in Memphis.
She transferred to the Univer-sity of Arkansas where she graduated in 1941 with a degree in romance languages.
She was a member of Delta Delta Delta sorority. She was elected to the honorary academic fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa.
In February of 1942, she married Pat Wilson and soon began her career as a loving housewife and mother.
Mrs. Wilson was a faithful member of First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville where she served over 30 years as the church organist. Over the years, she contributed her time and talents to the school PTA’s, various church committees and “circle” groups and Little Rock Air Force Base Officers Wives Club. Mrs. Wilson was a charter member of the Rebsamen Hospital Auxiliary.
During the 1960’s, Mrs. Wilson and several of her friends began an informal needlepoint and cross stitch group referred to as the “Needlenuts.”
They traveled nationally and internationally together, met for lunch, swapped recipes, and created many beautiful cross stitch pieces that they shared with family and friends. Mrs. Wilson was preceded in death by her husband, Kenneth Pat Wilson, on January 2, 2002; her parents; a brother, Dr. Ewing Nixon and a sister, Mae Kathryn Nixon.
She is survived by her three children, Mike Wilson of Jacksonville, Kathy Roberts of Little Rock, Larry Wilson of Jacksonville; nine grandchildren, Kenneth Wilson, Jan Williams, Liza Wilson, Mary Kathryn Williams, Scott Williams, Patrick Wilson, Matt Wilson, Corrie Gladstein and Mark Wilson; five great-grandchildren, Sullivan Williams, Jack and Emily Wilson, Caroline and Joe Gladstein.
Funeral services will be 10 a.m. Wednesday at First Presbyterian Church with Dr. David Dyer officiating. Interment will follow at Bayou Meto Cemetery in Jacksonville.
Her grandsons will serve as pallbearers.
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials be made to the First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville, the Esther DeWitt Nixon Library in Jacksonville or a charity of the choice of the donor.
Funeral arrangements are under the direction of Moore’s Jacksonville Funeral Home.
THURMAN GARNER
Thurman L. “Dub” Garner, 77, of Jacksonville passed away on Sunday, June 5. He was a cowboy and a Mason.
He is survived by three sons, Bobby L. Garner and his wife Cheryl of North Little Rock, Michael T. Garner of Jacksonville, and Joel C. Garner of Cabot; one brother, Bobby R. Garner of Jacksonville; one sister, Fae Jones of Jacksonville; four grandchildren, Jason C., Zeblin, and Justin Garner and Jodi Haggard; and two great-grandchildren, Bry-son and Zoe Garner. He was preceded in death by his parents, a brother, A.O. Garner, and his wife, Rachel Garner.
Funeral will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at North Little Rock Funeral Home Chapel. Burial will be in Rest Hills Memorial Park.
Family will receive friends from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday at North Little Rock Funeral Home.
Lawrence Henry
LAWRENCE HENRY
Lawrence Gerald Henry, 17, of Romance, passed away May 26.
He was born April 11, 1988 in Little Rock to Glen and Brenda Carol Morgan Honey. He attended Cabot schools where he played baseball and football in the seventh, eighth and ninth grades. He loved to hunt, fish and cook.
He was preceded in death by his great-grandparents, Joseph and Jewell Higgins and Charles and Ethel Morgan. Lawrence is survived by his parents, a sister, Brittany Henry of Ward and a half-brother, Aaron Henry of Cabot.
His grandparents, Diana and Billy Ray Ashley of Jacksonville and Roy and Velta Morgan of Quitman survive him as well as an aunt, Patricia Lockridge; cousins Erica McDermont of Kansas, Monica Jenson of Jacksonville and J.J. Lockridge of Jacksonville and a special friend, Rachael Herrin.
Funeral services were held May 31 at Moore’s Cabot Funeral Home chapel with interment in H&H Family Cemetery in Romance.
Arrangements by Moore’s Cabot Funeral Home.
JAMES RAMBO
James Curtis Rambo, 54, of Lonoke, died Saturday, June 4.
Survivors are his children, Curtis Edward Rambo and Tiffany Nicole Rambo of Pine Bluff, Cristi Dulaney of Florida; sisters, Janice and husband Grant Goff of Beebe, Diane Williamson and Mary and husband Chris Vines of Lonoke. He was preceded in death by parents, Mary V. and Curtis L. Rambo and grandparents, Ollie L. and J.D. Shackael. Cremation arrangements are by Westbrook Funeral Home, Beebe.
Arrangements were made through Huson Funeral Home in Sherwood.
EDITORIAL>> The Jayhawker remedy
Pssst. Pass it on, but don’t tell the justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court lest they get ideas about the prerogatives of an appellate court. Friday, in a case breathtakingly similar to Arkansas’ Lake View case, the Kansas Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the legislature had failed to provide the funding for Kansas schools that the state Constitution required.
It gave the governor and the legislature until July 1 to provide another $143 million for the schools next year.
Otherwise, the state will be in default and Kansas schools may have to be closed in the fall.
Within hours, the governor and legislative leaders were huddling about how they might meet the deadline.
The court observed that the legislature had hired Colorado consultants to determine what an adequate school program for all children, which was required by the Constitution, would entail and what it would cost.
The legislature must at least provide what its own unrebutted study showed was necessary, the justices said.
Conditions could hardly be more similar, except the Arkansas legislature hired not one but two sets of experts to enumerate the essential needs of Arkansas schools, one for programs and another for school facilities.
The Arkansas legislature met neither standard, but it fell glaringly short on school facilities. Its own study, celebrated by legislative leaders themselves, said Arkansas needed to spend more than $2 billion to provide safe and modern schools for children. Then the legislature allocated $104 million to meet that need. It could have provided $250 million without raising a dime of new revenue and created a mechanism for raising future capital for schools through general-obligation bonds, but it didn’t.
The Arkansas Supreme Court is deliberating whether to hold the lawmakers and Gov. Huckabee responsible now or let their failures percolate through the judicial system for another three years by forcing a fresh lawsuit.
Arkansas has never taken cues from the Jayhawks, but they may have it right this time.
It gave the governor and the legislature until July 1 to provide another $143 million for the schools next year.
Otherwise, the state will be in default and Kansas schools may have to be closed in the fall.
Within hours, the governor and legislative leaders were huddling about how they might meet the deadline.
The court observed that the legislature had hired Colorado consultants to determine what an adequate school program for all children, which was required by the Constitution, would entail and what it would cost.
The legislature must at least provide what its own unrebutted study showed was necessary, the justices said.
Conditions could hardly be more similar, except the Arkansas legislature hired not one but two sets of experts to enumerate the essential needs of Arkansas schools, one for programs and another for school facilities.
The Arkansas legislature met neither standard, but it fell glaringly short on school facilities. Its own study, celebrated by legislative leaders themselves, said Arkansas needed to spend more than $2 billion to provide safe and modern schools for children. Then the legislature allocated $104 million to meet that need. It could have provided $250 million without raising a dime of new revenue and created a mechanism for raising future capital for schools through general-obligation bonds, but it didn’t.
The Arkansas Supreme Court is deliberating whether to hold the lawmakers and Gov. Huckabee responsible now or let their failures percolate through the judicial system for another three years by forcing a fresh lawsuit.
Arkansas has never taken cues from the Jayhawks, but they may have it right this time.
EDITORIAL>> Pillsbury dough boy sells out again
When friendly economic interests or pastoral connections do not interfere, Gov. Mike Huckabee can be a whale of a leader.
Free of the beseeching of commercial benefactors, he will insist on the consolidation of tiny inefficient school administrations, demand absolute adherence to school standards like music and art classes, fight his party’s conservatives to gain government-paid health services for hundreds of thousands of needy children and educational benefits for the children of undocumented aliens and even, this last week, put a thoughtful and energetic man in charge of public health programs.
But Huckabee’s sturdy backbone turns to jelly any time political benefactors evince an interest in public policy.
The governor’s weakness was plainly in evidence again over the weekend when he told his appointees on the state Board of Education (all are his men and women) that he did not want them to require Arkansas’ 254 school districts to meet a new set of health and fitness standards. The board will do his bidding.
Oh, he likes the standards very much, Huckabee said, but when it comes to these particular rules local school boards and administrators should decide for themselves whether they want to do more to save their children from poor health and early death.
Huckabee will insist, as he has maintained on other such occasions, that his libertarian instincts guide him. He is against nosy, intrusive government.
That is why he stopped his own Board of Health from cracking down on smoking in public places, why he has on other occasions guided his government away from forcing high-fat snack foods and soft drinks out of the schools and why, very early in his political career, he sided with the bottling industry in fighting a tax on soft drinks to pay for nursing-home care and medical services for poor children.
It is just a coincidence, we are supposed to believe, that the unifying factor in all of those fights was that the stakeholding commercial interests were reliable Huckabee financial supporters.
That the governor would go so far out of the way to stop the Board of Education from following the clear purpose of a law that he signed seems particularly perverse and self-defeating. Huckabee is criss-crossing the country promoting his new diet book and fitness crusade.
Junk food can ruin your life and ultimately kill you, he says. The crusade is aimed at children, and with good reason. American youngsters on average have become about the fattest and least healthy in the developed world, and Arkansas kids are about the unhealthiest in the land. Obesity is epidemic.
Act 1220 of 2003 addressed it and Gov. Huckabee proudly signed the legislation. The law is loaded with imperatives. It created a child-health advisory committee comprising health professionals, which was directed to prepare diet and exercise standards for the state Board of Education, which in turn was to use the committee’s recommendations to formulate new standards for Arkansas schools.
The act directed the committee to look at the impact of “competitive” snack foods — the commercial vending-machine foods and drinks that have become pervasive in Arkansas schools. The vending foods have become addictive not only to kids but to school administrators, who count on a cut from the machines to pay for school programs.
Huckabee began to cavil at the law’s purposes even before the advisory committee perfected its recommendations. He wasn’t so sure that the state should try to limit the sugary and fatty foods that children get from the machines. Contrary to his own experience and preaching, Huckabee found that there was no hard evidence of the impact of the vending machines on kids’ health.
Now that the advisory committee has given its findings to the Board of Education, Huckabee does not want the state to mandate the programs. Here’s a shocker: He said the soft-drink industry joined him in not wanting the state to require school administrators to follow the rules.
Among the professionals’ proposals: require at least half the commercial beverage sales in schools to be 100 percent fruit juice, low-fat or fat-free milk and water; ban foods with more than 23 fat grams per serving; limit the size of fat-food packages; ban vending-machine snacks from elementary schools and ban them from other schools until 30 minutes after the last lunch is served.
State Rep. Jay Bradford of White Hall, who has often been a key Huckabee ally in the legislature, was too generous when he was told of the governor’s stance on the fruits of his legislation.
“That's leadership, isn’t it?” Bradford said. “Somehow, I’m not surprised. The governor has always talked a good game, but sometimes when it comes to being proactive, he doesn’t always get there. He has wasted a great opportunity to improve the health of Arkansans who put him in the governor’s office.”
We thought the governor’s lame-duck status would free him of the leg-irons of private emoluments and campaign gifts. Apparently, we erred, or else he has other ambitions.
Free of the beseeching of commercial benefactors, he will insist on the consolidation of tiny inefficient school administrations, demand absolute adherence to school standards like music and art classes, fight his party’s conservatives to gain government-paid health services for hundreds of thousands of needy children and educational benefits for the children of undocumented aliens and even, this last week, put a thoughtful and energetic man in charge of public health programs.
But Huckabee’s sturdy backbone turns to jelly any time political benefactors evince an interest in public policy.
The governor’s weakness was plainly in evidence again over the weekend when he told his appointees on the state Board of Education (all are his men and women) that he did not want them to require Arkansas’ 254 school districts to meet a new set of health and fitness standards. The board will do his bidding.
Oh, he likes the standards very much, Huckabee said, but when it comes to these particular rules local school boards and administrators should decide for themselves whether they want to do more to save their children from poor health and early death.
Huckabee will insist, as he has maintained on other such occasions, that his libertarian instincts guide him. He is against nosy, intrusive government.
That is why he stopped his own Board of Health from cracking down on smoking in public places, why he has on other occasions guided his government away from forcing high-fat snack foods and soft drinks out of the schools and why, very early in his political career, he sided with the bottling industry in fighting a tax on soft drinks to pay for nursing-home care and medical services for poor children.
It is just a coincidence, we are supposed to believe, that the unifying factor in all of those fights was that the stakeholding commercial interests were reliable Huckabee financial supporters.
That the governor would go so far out of the way to stop the Board of Education from following the clear purpose of a law that he signed seems particularly perverse and self-defeating. Huckabee is criss-crossing the country promoting his new diet book and fitness crusade.
Junk food can ruin your life and ultimately kill you, he says. The crusade is aimed at children, and with good reason. American youngsters on average have become about the fattest and least healthy in the developed world, and Arkansas kids are about the unhealthiest in the land. Obesity is epidemic.
Act 1220 of 2003 addressed it and Gov. Huckabee proudly signed the legislation. The law is loaded with imperatives. It created a child-health advisory committee comprising health professionals, which was directed to prepare diet and exercise standards for the state Board of Education, which in turn was to use the committee’s recommendations to formulate new standards for Arkansas schools.
The act directed the committee to look at the impact of “competitive” snack foods — the commercial vending-machine foods and drinks that have become pervasive in Arkansas schools. The vending foods have become addictive not only to kids but to school administrators, who count on a cut from the machines to pay for school programs.
Huckabee began to cavil at the law’s purposes even before the advisory committee perfected its recommendations. He wasn’t so sure that the state should try to limit the sugary and fatty foods that children get from the machines. Contrary to his own experience and preaching, Huckabee found that there was no hard evidence of the impact of the vending machines on kids’ health.
Now that the advisory committee has given its findings to the Board of Education, Huckabee does not want the state to mandate the programs. Here’s a shocker: He said the soft-drink industry joined him in not wanting the state to require school administrators to follow the rules.
Among the professionals’ proposals: require at least half the commercial beverage sales in schools to be 100 percent fruit juice, low-fat or fat-free milk and water; ban foods with more than 23 fat grams per serving; limit the size of fat-food packages; ban vending-machine snacks from elementary schools and ban them from other schools until 30 minutes after the last lunch is served.
State Rep. Jay Bradford of White Hall, who has often been a key Huckabee ally in the legislature, was too generous when he was told of the governor’s stance on the fruits of his legislation.
“That's leadership, isn’t it?” Bradford said. “Somehow, I’m not surprised. The governor has always talked a good game, but sometimes when it comes to being proactive, he doesn’t always get there. He has wasted a great opportunity to improve the health of Arkansans who put him in the governor’s office.”
We thought the governor’s lame-duck status would free him of the leg-irons of private emoluments and campaign gifts. Apparently, we erred, or else he has other ambitions.
NEIGHBORS>> Model Citizens
IN SHORT: Charles and Mary Garner named Beebe’s top residents
By Sara Greene
Leader staff writer
Normally an outstanding individual gets the Beebe Citizen of the Year award, but this year, the award went to an outstanding volunteer team of two. Charles and Mary Garner were presented with the 2005 Beebe Citizens of the Year Award at the annual Beebe Chamber of Commerce banquet.
“We don’t see why anybody needs an award for doing what they’re supposed to,” said Charles Garner, 84.
“We felt honored. We feel good about what we do,” he said modestly.
The Garners have been married 63 years. They met during high school in Jonesboro. Charles joined the Army Air Corps in 1942 and retired after more than 31 years of service.
They moved to Beebe from Jacksonville more than 20 years ago and got involved helping to run a food bank ministry at their church.
Now the couple volunteers with the non-denominational Beebe Community Outreach program helping deliver food to 38 families in the area.
They stop and visit with the families they serve, and the deliveries usually take up an entire day.
“We stay busy seven days a week,” Charles Garner said.
The Garners have been involved with The Shepherd’s Center of Beebe since its inception five years ago. Both are now board members. They are still actively involved in the classes and activities at the center.
Charles teaches a class on organic gardening, and Mary helps with organizational duties. She pitches in with other volunteers at the center with creating a theme each week and decorating.
Charles laughs when remembering the lesson he got when he taught his first class.
“My first organic gardening class had 11 people, nine ladies, and those ladies were all master gardeners, and there I was, not knowing nothing,” he said.
Charles Garner is chairman of the Wheels That Care program at the center which has about 15 volunteers who drive the elderly to their doctor appointments.
Since January, the program has helped 120 people get to their medical appointments in Searcy and Little Rock.
“The Garners are very handy,” said Paul Ramsey, executive director of The Shepherd’s Center of Beebe. “Anytime they see a need, they just do it. They are most deserving.”
When they aren’t busy volunteering, the Garners enjoy collecting antique bottles and Civil War relics, fishing and gardening.
By Sara Greene
Leader staff writer
Normally an outstanding individual gets the Beebe Citizen of the Year award, but this year, the award went to an outstanding volunteer team of two. Charles and Mary Garner were presented with the 2005 Beebe Citizens of the Year Award at the annual Beebe Chamber of Commerce banquet.
“We don’t see why anybody needs an award for doing what they’re supposed to,” said Charles Garner, 84.
“We felt honored. We feel good about what we do,” he said modestly.
The Garners have been married 63 years. They met during high school in Jonesboro. Charles joined the Army Air Corps in 1942 and retired after more than 31 years of service.
They moved to Beebe from Jacksonville more than 20 years ago and got involved helping to run a food bank ministry at their church.
Now the couple volunteers with the non-denominational Beebe Community Outreach program helping deliver food to 38 families in the area.
They stop and visit with the families they serve, and the deliveries usually take up an entire day.
“We stay busy seven days a week,” Charles Garner said.
The Garners have been involved with The Shepherd’s Center of Beebe since its inception five years ago. Both are now board members. They are still actively involved in the classes and activities at the center.
Charles teaches a class on organic gardening, and Mary helps with organizational duties. She pitches in with other volunteers at the center with creating a theme each week and decorating.
Charles laughs when remembering the lesson he got when he taught his first class.
“My first organic gardening class had 11 people, nine ladies, and those ladies were all master gardeners, and there I was, not knowing nothing,” he said.
Charles Garner is chairman of the Wheels That Care program at the center which has about 15 volunteers who drive the elderly to their doctor appointments.
Since January, the program has helped 120 people get to their medical appointments in Searcy and Little Rock.
“The Garners are very handy,” said Paul Ramsey, executive director of The Shepherd’s Center of Beebe. “Anytime they see a need, they just do it. They are most deserving.”
When they aren’t busy volunteering, the Garners enjoy collecting antique bottles and Civil War relics, fishing and gardening.
SPORTS>> Lookouts split with Stuttgart Sunday
IN SHORT: Legion teams trade blowout victories
By Ray Benton
Leader sports editor
The Lookouts AA team didn’t have a great day Saturday afternoon against Stuttgart, losing 11-4 in seven innings, and giving up seven unearned runs.
“This was the worst we’ve played all season,” Lookout coach Bob Thornton said. He included a 12-1 loss to Searcy in the team’s first week of play.
“Searcy’s a really good team. We just gave this one away.”
Stuttgart scored three earned runs in the first inning, and just one more of its last eight the remainder of the game, including an unearned run in the first that gave the visitors a 4-0 lead after one-half inning.
The Lookouts answered with two runs in the top of the first.
Leadoff hitter Todd Watson singled and two-hole hitter John Mooney doubled him in on the next at bat.
Dusty Thornton and Tyler Thornton walked to load the bases, and Trey Watson singled to score Mooney from third.
Stuttgart scored a run in the second, but the host team scored two in the bottom of the same inning to cut Stuttgart’s margin to one run.
Shawn Robertson singled to lead off and Jared Mathis walked to put two runners on. Two batters later Mooney bounced his second shot off the wall in left-center for a two-RBI double to cut Stuttgart’s lead to 5-4.
It would be the last run the Lookouts would score, while handing over several more runs.
Stuttgart scored once in the third, three times in the fifth and two more in the sixth inning to set the final margin.
Tyler Thornton started and took the loss.
The Lookouts didn’t get a single base hit in the final three innings of the game after picking up seven in the first four innings.
Mooney went 2 for 2 with two doubles and two RBIs, one run scored and one walk.
Robertson went 2 for 3 with a run batter in.
The Lookouts rebounded with a blowout win in the second game against Stuttgart’s A team.
Dusty Thornton pitched the first inning and got the win in just that one inning of work.
Shawn Robertson and Jared Mathis pitched two innings each in relief duty.
Josh Thornton got a home run in the third inning to highlight the game-two victory.
The split makes the Lookouts’ record 4-6 overall. They’ll likely take the rest of the week off after two teams cancelled. Bob Thornton isn’t too upset about the cancellations.
“We’ll get three practices in and we need that right now,” the head coach said. “We looked a lot better in that second game but there’s some things we need to work on.”
By Ray Benton
Leader sports editor
The Lookouts AA team didn’t have a great day Saturday afternoon against Stuttgart, losing 11-4 in seven innings, and giving up seven unearned runs.
“This was the worst we’ve played all season,” Lookout coach Bob Thornton said. He included a 12-1 loss to Searcy in the team’s first week of play.
“Searcy’s a really good team. We just gave this one away.”
Stuttgart scored three earned runs in the first inning, and just one more of its last eight the remainder of the game, including an unearned run in the first that gave the visitors a 4-0 lead after one-half inning.
The Lookouts answered with two runs in the top of the first.
Leadoff hitter Todd Watson singled and two-hole hitter John Mooney doubled him in on the next at bat.
Dusty Thornton and Tyler Thornton walked to load the bases, and Trey Watson singled to score Mooney from third.
Stuttgart scored a run in the second, but the host team scored two in the bottom of the same inning to cut Stuttgart’s margin to one run.
Shawn Robertson singled to lead off and Jared Mathis walked to put two runners on. Two batters later Mooney bounced his second shot off the wall in left-center for a two-RBI double to cut Stuttgart’s lead to 5-4.
It would be the last run the Lookouts would score, while handing over several more runs.
Stuttgart scored once in the third, three times in the fifth and two more in the sixth inning to set the final margin.
Tyler Thornton started and took the loss.
The Lookouts didn’t get a single base hit in the final three innings of the game after picking up seven in the first four innings.
Mooney went 2 for 2 with two doubles and two RBIs, one run scored and one walk.
Robertson went 2 for 3 with a run batter in.
The Lookouts rebounded with a blowout win in the second game against Stuttgart’s A team.
Dusty Thornton pitched the first inning and got the win in just that one inning of work.
Shawn Robertson and Jared Mathis pitched two innings each in relief duty.
Josh Thornton got a home run in the third inning to highlight the game-two victory.
The split makes the Lookouts’ record 4-6 overall. They’ll likely take the rest of the week off after two teams cancelled. Bob Thornton isn’t too upset about the cancellations.
“We’ll get three practices in and we need that right now,” the head coach said. “We looked a lot better in that second game but there’s some things we need to work on.”
SPORT>> Gwatney wins A tourney crown
By Ray Benton
Leader sports editor
Jacksonville’s Gwateny Chevrolet class A American Legion team became the first Gwatney A team to win its annual preseason tournament, beating Benton 10-1 Sunday night to secure the tournament title.
Jacksonville had lost earlier in the tournament to Benton on Friday. They went on to beat North Little Rock on Saturday and Sylvan Hills early Sunday to secure a spot in the championship game on the tiebreaker format.
NLR and Sylvan Hills also went 2-1 in the tournament, but lost the tiebreaker due to head-to-head competition with Jacksonville.
In Sunday night’s championship game, Benton helped Jacksonville early and often throughout the evening. The Sports Shop team committed nine errors and gave up eight unearned runs, playing nothing like the most dominant team of the first tournament through the first three games.
While Benton was kicking the ball around in the field, Jacksonville’s Brian Thurman was making quick work of Benton’s batting order.
Thurman went the five innings and gave up just two hits and no earned runs.
Adam Ussery walked in the second at bat of the first inning. He stole second base and moved to third on an error at shortstop. He then scored on a wild pitch during Zach James’ at bat to give Gwatney a 1-0 lead.
Matt Crane led off the second inning by reaching on an error at third base. Matt Williams singled two batters later and another E5 off the bat of Thurman scored Crane easily.
In the third, Zach Thomas and Zach James were hit in consecutive at bats to start the inning.
Matt Crane got another error at third that scored one run, while Beau Flynn hit a sacrifice grounder to second to score James for Jacksonville’s first earned run of the game.
Benton committed three straight errors on Jacksonville’s first three at bats of the fourth inning. Thurman hit a grounder to short that was bobbled and thrown wildly to first. Leadoff hitter Jake Ussery hit a grounder to first that was kicked and Adam Ussery’s grounder to second was simply missed.
One run scored on Adam Ussery’s at bat, another came in two batters later when James hit a fly ball deep to left field.
That made it 6-0, but Benton finally got on the board in the bottom of the fifth after holding Jacksonville score less in the top of the fifth for the first time in the game.
After cutting Gwatney’s lead to 6-1, Jacksonville put together its best inning of the game in the sixth.
The two Ussery’s walked to put runners on first and second with one out. Thomas then singled to left field for one RBI.
Adam Ussery scored two batters later on a wild pitch. James came in on Benton’s fourth error at third base, this time off the bat of Blake Mattison. Another error at second base scored Mattison to set the final margin.
Jacksonville got just three base hits. Benton picked up five.
The A squad played the first game of a class A and AAA doubleheader against Vilonia Tuesday night, and will be back in action at home on Thursday evening.
Leader sports editor
Jacksonville’s Gwateny Chevrolet class A American Legion team became the first Gwatney A team to win its annual preseason tournament, beating Benton 10-1 Sunday night to secure the tournament title.
Jacksonville had lost earlier in the tournament to Benton on Friday. They went on to beat North Little Rock on Saturday and Sylvan Hills early Sunday to secure a spot in the championship game on the tiebreaker format.
NLR and Sylvan Hills also went 2-1 in the tournament, but lost the tiebreaker due to head-to-head competition with Jacksonville.
In Sunday night’s championship game, Benton helped Jacksonville early and often throughout the evening. The Sports Shop team committed nine errors and gave up eight unearned runs, playing nothing like the most dominant team of the first tournament through the first three games.
While Benton was kicking the ball around in the field, Jacksonville’s Brian Thurman was making quick work of Benton’s batting order.
Thurman went the five innings and gave up just two hits and no earned runs.
Adam Ussery walked in the second at bat of the first inning. He stole second base and moved to third on an error at shortstop. He then scored on a wild pitch during Zach James’ at bat to give Gwatney a 1-0 lead.
Matt Crane led off the second inning by reaching on an error at third base. Matt Williams singled two batters later and another E5 off the bat of Thurman scored Crane easily.
In the third, Zach Thomas and Zach James were hit in consecutive at bats to start the inning.
Matt Crane got another error at third that scored one run, while Beau Flynn hit a sacrifice grounder to second to score James for Jacksonville’s first earned run of the game.
Benton committed three straight errors on Jacksonville’s first three at bats of the fourth inning. Thurman hit a grounder to short that was bobbled and thrown wildly to first. Leadoff hitter Jake Ussery hit a grounder to first that was kicked and Adam Ussery’s grounder to second was simply missed.
One run scored on Adam Ussery’s at bat, another came in two batters later when James hit a fly ball deep to left field.
That made it 6-0, but Benton finally got on the board in the bottom of the fifth after holding Jacksonville score less in the top of the fifth for the first time in the game.
After cutting Gwatney’s lead to 6-1, Jacksonville put together its best inning of the game in the sixth.
The two Ussery’s walked to put runners on first and second with one out. Thomas then singled to left field for one RBI.
Adam Ussery scored two batters later on a wild pitch. James came in on Benton’s fourth error at third base, this time off the bat of Blake Mattison. Another error at second base scored Mattison to set the final margin.
Jacksonville got just three base hits. Benton picked up five.
The A squad played the first game of a class A and AAA doubleheader against Vilonia Tuesday night, and will be back in action at home on Thursday evening.
TOP STORY>> Farewell to soldier killed in Iraq
IN SHORT: Funeral services here on Monday and last week at Fort Lewis, Wash., honor a fallen young fighter who gave his life for his country.
By Brian Rodriguez
Leader staff writer
A highly decorated 26-year-old Jacksonville soldier was buried Monday in Cabot after memorial services were held at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Cabot and before that at Evergreen Chapel in Fort Lewis, Wash., on Friday.
Army Spec. Phillip Nicholas Sayles, 26, was killed May 28 in Mosul, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his security post. Thirteen other soldiers were wounded, as were numerous Iraqi adults and children.
“I watched him develop as a very special young man who has a special love for God and for his country,” said Royce Lowe, pastor of First Assembly of God in Jacksonville.
“Physically, he was of average size, but he had a big heart and spirit.”
“Nicholas was a caring person. He was a responsible person,” Lowe said. “We will never understand why Nick was taken from us so young. We prayed every week for him in our church services and asked God to protect him.”
Sayles earned numerous awards and badges in the Army, including the Bronze Star and Purple Heart awarded posthumously. He also earned the Army Achievement Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal for Iraq, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal for Iraq, Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Expert Infantryman’s Badge and Sniper Distinction.
Sayles joined the Army as an infantryman and trained to become a sniper before his deployment to Mosul. He worked in the operations section of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Headquarters, drove and operated computers for the battalion commander in Mosul.
He had pleaded for the chance to get out with an infantry squad, said his former commander, Capt. Bryan Carroll, and he was moved to a job on the line with Bravo Company.
“Nick lived up to every one of my expectations,” Carroll told soldiers and family members at Evergreen Chapel. “Not only was he extremely intelligent, he was a natural leader and a brave soldier. He led from the front, taught, coached, mentored – he looked out for everyone around him.”
Spec. Donald Bergren met Sayles the day they arrived at Fort Lewis to report for duty in September 2002. They were standing in front of the wrong building, trying to find their way.
Bergren, still recovering from the Dec. 21 suicide bombing at a Mosul chow hall that killed 22 people and wounded dozens more, stood with a cane in Ft. Lewis and said Sayles had a sense of humor that could brighten even the worst circumstances.
“It was hard to have a bad day with Nick working next to you,” he said. “Nick always had a smile for a friend, and he was loved by many for it.”
Sayles spent many weekends and holidays with Bergren and his wife and children. Bergren said his friend often said how much he admired their family, and said he hoped to have one of his own some day.
Sayles attended North Pulaski High School and was enrolled in ROTC classes at Jacksonville High School for three years before he graduated from Cabot High School in 1997.
His former youth pastor, Dale Dahl, said Sayles was known for his dependability, excelled in leadership and earned several awards while he was in the ROTC at Jacksonville High School. He was a member of the honor guard and a member of the Elite Saber Team.
“Lowe said he performed the marriage ceremony for Sayles’ parents and had known him all his life.
He remembered Sayles and his brother, Joey, enjoyed playing soldier together when they were young, and that he was a good second-baseman in baseball.
Lowe also remembered a time when Sayles worried several people on a camping trip to Greer Ferry. He got separated from his group and they searched everywhere. He was eventually found rolled up in a quilt, sleeping in their tent.
Funeral services at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Cabot were conducted Monday with Rev. Terry Fortner, Lowe and Dahl officiating. Sayles was buried afterward in Sumner Cemetery in Cabot.
“He made the ultimate sacrifice for our country,” Lowe said. “His love and compassion were big enough to help those who hurt. Nicholas, today we all salute you. We sadly say, Thank you. We are proud of you, and we love you. We do not say goodbye, but we say we’ll see you in a little while.”
His family asked in lieu of flowers that memorials be made to the Nick Sayles ROTC Scholarship Fund at Twin City Bank or Community Bank.
By Brian Rodriguez
Leader staff writer
A highly decorated 26-year-old Jacksonville soldier was buried Monday in Cabot after memorial services were held at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Cabot and before that at Evergreen Chapel in Fort Lewis, Wash., on Friday.
Army Spec. Phillip Nicholas Sayles, 26, was killed May 28 in Mosul, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his security post. Thirteen other soldiers were wounded, as were numerous Iraqi adults and children.
“I watched him develop as a very special young man who has a special love for God and for his country,” said Royce Lowe, pastor of First Assembly of God in Jacksonville.
“Physically, he was of average size, but he had a big heart and spirit.”
“Nicholas was a caring person. He was a responsible person,” Lowe said. “We will never understand why Nick was taken from us so young. We prayed every week for him in our church services and asked God to protect him.”
Sayles earned numerous awards and badges in the Army, including the Bronze Star and Purple Heart awarded posthumously. He also earned the Army Achievement Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal for Iraq, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal for Iraq, Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Expert Infantryman’s Badge and Sniper Distinction.
Sayles joined the Army as an infantryman and trained to become a sniper before his deployment to Mosul. He worked in the operations section of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Headquarters, drove and operated computers for the battalion commander in Mosul.
He had pleaded for the chance to get out with an infantry squad, said his former commander, Capt. Bryan Carroll, and he was moved to a job on the line with Bravo Company.
“Nick lived up to every one of my expectations,” Carroll told soldiers and family members at Evergreen Chapel. “Not only was he extremely intelligent, he was a natural leader and a brave soldier. He led from the front, taught, coached, mentored – he looked out for everyone around him.”
Spec. Donald Bergren met Sayles the day they arrived at Fort Lewis to report for duty in September 2002. They were standing in front of the wrong building, trying to find their way.
Bergren, still recovering from the Dec. 21 suicide bombing at a Mosul chow hall that killed 22 people and wounded dozens more, stood with a cane in Ft. Lewis and said Sayles had a sense of humor that could brighten even the worst circumstances.
“It was hard to have a bad day with Nick working next to you,” he said. “Nick always had a smile for a friend, and he was loved by many for it.”
Sayles spent many weekends and holidays with Bergren and his wife and children. Bergren said his friend often said how much he admired their family, and said he hoped to have one of his own some day.
Sayles attended North Pulaski High School and was enrolled in ROTC classes at Jacksonville High School for three years before he graduated from Cabot High School in 1997.
His former youth pastor, Dale Dahl, said Sayles was known for his dependability, excelled in leadership and earned several awards while he was in the ROTC at Jacksonville High School. He was a member of the honor guard and a member of the Elite Saber Team.
“Lowe said he performed the marriage ceremony for Sayles’ parents and had known him all his life.
He remembered Sayles and his brother, Joey, enjoyed playing soldier together when they were young, and that he was a good second-baseman in baseball.
Lowe also remembered a time when Sayles worried several people on a camping trip to Greer Ferry. He got separated from his group and they searched everywhere. He was eventually found rolled up in a quilt, sleeping in their tent.
Funeral services at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Cabot were conducted Monday with Rev. Terry Fortner, Lowe and Dahl officiating. Sayles was buried afterward in Sumner Cemetery in Cabot.
“He made the ultimate sacrifice for our country,” Lowe said. “His love and compassion were big enough to help those who hurt. Nicholas, today we all salute you. We sadly say, Thank you. We are proud of you, and we love you. We do not say goodbye, but we say we’ll see you in a little while.”
His family asked in lieu of flowers that memorials be made to the Nick Sayles ROTC Scholarship Fund at Twin City Bank or Community Bank.
TOP STORY>> Matriarch of family is praised
IN SHORT: Funeral today for Ruth Wilson, who touched the lives of many who knew her.
By Sara Greene
Leader staff writer
Funeral services for Ruth Nixon Wilson of Jacksonville will be conducted at 10 a.m. Wednesday at First Presbyterian Church. She passed away in her home Sunday.
She was a faithful member of First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville and served as the church or-ganist for more than 30 years.
“She was a kind, thoughtful and very gracious lady,” said Alton Johnson, a fellow church member. “She was very dependable. She was always right there and totally committed to her church and family.”
The matriarch of a family prominent in banking and politics, she was born Feb. 25, 1919, in Little Rock to Hugh and Cora Mae McNair Nixon. After graduating from Little Rock High School in 1937, she attended Southwestern College, now Rhodes College, in Memphis.
She transferred to the University of Arkansas, where she graduated in 1941 with a degree in Romance languages. She was a member of Delta Delta Delta sorority. She was elected to the honorary academic fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa.
In February 1942, she married Kenneth Pat Wilson. They lived much of their live on land owned by the Nixon family off Military Road.
The Wilsons’ family life revolved around scholastics, church and athletics, according to the 1996 memoir “At Work in the Fields of Commerce and Industry: The Life and Accomplishments of Kenneth Patrick Wilson” by Elizabeth Shores.
Ruth Wilson taught their children Latin during summertime sessions in the living room, and the family rarely missed high school football or basketball games.
“She would drive five miles out to the country and let her boys Mike and Larry play with my younger son Tommy,” said Johnson. “She was really a special person.”
Her relatives remembered her as someone who loved and cared about her family. Her daughter Kathy and grandson Patrick recalled those summertime Latin lessons for the three children when they were just 8, 10 and 12.
Patrick also recalled how she taught her children and grandchildren the importance of reading and learning.
By Sara Greene
Leader staff writer
Funeral services for Ruth Nixon Wilson of Jacksonville will be conducted at 10 a.m. Wednesday at First Presbyterian Church. She passed away in her home Sunday.
She was a faithful member of First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville and served as the church or-ganist for more than 30 years.
“She was a kind, thoughtful and very gracious lady,” said Alton Johnson, a fellow church member. “She was very dependable. She was always right there and totally committed to her church and family.”
The matriarch of a family prominent in banking and politics, she was born Feb. 25, 1919, in Little Rock to Hugh and Cora Mae McNair Nixon. After graduating from Little Rock High School in 1937, she attended Southwestern College, now Rhodes College, in Memphis.
She transferred to the University of Arkansas, where she graduated in 1941 with a degree in Romance languages. She was a member of Delta Delta Delta sorority. She was elected to the honorary academic fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa.
In February 1942, she married Kenneth Pat Wilson. They lived much of their live on land owned by the Nixon family off Military Road.
The Wilsons’ family life revolved around scholastics, church and athletics, according to the 1996 memoir “At Work in the Fields of Commerce and Industry: The Life and Accomplishments of Kenneth Patrick Wilson” by Elizabeth Shores.
Ruth Wilson taught their children Latin during summertime sessions in the living room, and the family rarely missed high school football or basketball games.
“She would drive five miles out to the country and let her boys Mike and Larry play with my younger son Tommy,” said Johnson. “She was really a special person.”
Her relatives remembered her as someone who loved and cared about her family. Her daughter Kathy and grandson Patrick recalled those summertime Latin lessons for the three children when they were just 8, 10 and 12.
Patrick also recalled how she taught her children and grandchildren the importance of reading and learning.
TOP STORY>> Schools to get single-gender classes in fall
By John Hofheimer
Leader staff writer
Adopted last winter with great fanfare, plans to separate Jacksonville’s sixth, seventh and eighth graders by gender for core classes languished in recent months, but the plan is back on track for an August launch, Bishop James Bolden III said Monday.
“For a period of time, the ball had been dropped,” Bolden told Jacksonville Rotary Club members. He represents Jacksonville on the Pulaski County Special School District Board. “I went down and raised heaven,” he told club members.
Jacksonville also will house an alternative school for students who are suspended for several days or expelled. Robert Clowers, interim superintendent, said Mike Nellums will be principal of the alternative school for students north of the Arkansas River, and he may also serve as principal of the boys’ school. That alternative school is likely to be housed in a wing of the boys’ school. Clowers said the alternative school also would help students who were short on credits get back on course.
The single-gender public schools will be the first in the state, according to Bolden, but he said he was unimpressed.
“If I feel it’s flakey, I’ll put it right back on the agenda,” he said.
Among the advertised benefits of the single-gender education are better test scores, fewer discipline problems and—an unexpected consequence—a break from the academic distress designation that the junior high had been on for two years. Clowers said the new configuration of grades and genders would retire the junior high school’s numbers and create a brand new one with a clean academic slate.
NO THEMES
Bolden said the plan to assign themes to the high schools—aeronautics to Jacksonville and hospitality to North Pulaski—would not be implemented this fall.
Several questions—including one by former school board member Pat O’Brien, now Pulaski County/Circuit Clerk—were asked about the current school desegregation status and its consequences as far as Jacksonville getting its own school district.
“I do want Jacksonville to have our own district,” said Bolden, who was a leader of the movement to detach Jacksonville-area schools from Pulaski County a year ago. “I’m starting to get more involved in the desegregation (aspects).”
GENDER SEPARATION
The gender separation idea grew out of the board’s decision to move Jacksonville’s ninth graders from the junior high school to the high school—the way other schools in the district are configured. Marvin Jeter III, assistant superintendent for learning services, championed the single-gender school idea and presided over several public meetings leading to the decision. Bolden said Jeter now was seeking another job and would not be back to guide the program. “Keep on trucking,” Bolden said. “Everyone’s replaceable. The program still goes on.”
Jeter couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Jeter had said grant money would be available to train teachers to teach in single-gender environments, but interim superintendent Clowers, who joined Bolden at the Rotary meeting, said no grant money had been procured, but that the district would pay for it out of its existing teacher-training money.
The teacher training will begin Aug. 11, said Clowers, and would continue throughout the year.
“He’s jumped into this big bowl of gumbo,” said Bolden.
Teachers are now in place to teach at the single-gender schools, located close enough that they will be connected by a covered walkway.
Clowers said James Warren, assistant superintendent for facilities, had said there was money to construct the walkway. That’s good because students must move between the two schools to take electives, which will be coeducational.
Leader staff writer
Adopted last winter with great fanfare, plans to separate Jacksonville’s sixth, seventh and eighth graders by gender for core classes languished in recent months, but the plan is back on track for an August launch, Bishop James Bolden III said Monday.
“For a period of time, the ball had been dropped,” Bolden told Jacksonville Rotary Club members. He represents Jacksonville on the Pulaski County Special School District Board. “I went down and raised heaven,” he told club members.
Jacksonville also will house an alternative school for students who are suspended for several days or expelled. Robert Clowers, interim superintendent, said Mike Nellums will be principal of the alternative school for students north of the Arkansas River, and he may also serve as principal of the boys’ school. That alternative school is likely to be housed in a wing of the boys’ school. Clowers said the alternative school also would help students who were short on credits get back on course.
The single-gender public schools will be the first in the state, according to Bolden, but he said he was unimpressed.
“If I feel it’s flakey, I’ll put it right back on the agenda,” he said.
Among the advertised benefits of the single-gender education are better test scores, fewer discipline problems and—an unexpected consequence—a break from the academic distress designation that the junior high had been on for two years. Clowers said the new configuration of grades and genders would retire the junior high school’s numbers and create a brand new one with a clean academic slate.
NO THEMES
Bolden said the plan to assign themes to the high schools—aeronautics to Jacksonville and hospitality to North Pulaski—would not be implemented this fall.
Several questions—including one by former school board member Pat O’Brien, now Pulaski County/Circuit Clerk—were asked about the current school desegregation status and its consequences as far as Jacksonville getting its own school district.
“I do want Jacksonville to have our own district,” said Bolden, who was a leader of the movement to detach Jacksonville-area schools from Pulaski County a year ago. “I’m starting to get more involved in the desegregation (aspects).”
GENDER SEPARATION
The gender separation idea grew out of the board’s decision to move Jacksonville’s ninth graders from the junior high school to the high school—the way other schools in the district are configured. Marvin Jeter III, assistant superintendent for learning services, championed the single-gender school idea and presided over several public meetings leading to the decision. Bolden said Jeter now was seeking another job and would not be back to guide the program. “Keep on trucking,” Bolden said. “Everyone’s replaceable. The program still goes on.”
Jeter couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Jeter had said grant money would be available to train teachers to teach in single-gender environments, but interim superintendent Clowers, who joined Bolden at the Rotary meeting, said no grant money had been procured, but that the district would pay for it out of its existing teacher-training money.
The teacher training will begin Aug. 11, said Clowers, and would continue throughout the year.
“He’s jumped into this big bowl of gumbo,” said Bolden.
Teachers are now in place to teach at the single-gender schools, located close enough that they will be connected by a covered walkway.
Clowers said James Warren, assistant superintendent for facilities, had said there was money to construct the walkway. That’s good because students must move between the two schools to take electives, which will be coeducational.
TOP STORY>> District sees $3.5M drop for school year
IN SHORT: Miscalculated savings from cutting paid holidays and decline in state aid leave the Pulaski County Special School District short of expectations.
By John Hofheimer
Leader staff writer
Instead of the $11.5 million carryover the Pulaski County Special School District labored to have at the end of the approaching school year, interim Superintendent Robert Clowers now projects only an $8 million fund balance, he told members of the Jacksonville Rotary Club Monday.
The board and administration are attempting to stem the financial hemorrhaging that has increasingly drained district coffers over the past few years, because the district has been dipping into savings to pay its bills. Without a change, it would have been about $5 million in the red by the end of the 2005-2006 school year. As a result, the state Education Department in April designated the district as being in fiscal distress.
The possible consequences of financial distress include annexation with another district, or the possibility that the state could name its own superintendent and dissolve the board.
Led by then-Superintendent Donald Henderson, the board in April made dramatic cuts in spending aimed at reversing the trend and making a plan to rehabilitate its financial circumstances and appease the Education Department.
At that meeting, the board lopped $11.7 million from the proposed 2005-2006 budget of $143 million.
Of that, the board expected to save about $4 million by eliminating all paid holidays from all employees, but John Archetko, the district’s chief financial officer, has reworked the numbers to discover the savings would be closer to $2 million, Clowers said.
In addition, state aid is expected to be about $4 million less than projected earlier, Clowers said, but property tax revenues could be $1.5 million to $2 million greater than a year ago, offsetting some of the shortfall in state aid.
Two weeks ago, Clowers had said he hoped to restore some of the budget cuts, but those hopes were extinguished when the projected $11.7 million fund balance turned out to be closer to $8 million, he said.
“I was hoping we could bring back some holidays,” he said.
The district hand-delivered its plan to get off fiscal distress in April, but Clowers said Monday that the district would submit a revised plan, reflecting the new financial information, within about one week.
“We’re tweaking it,” he said.
The board saved $3.3 million by freezing teacher pay-step increases for experience and continuing education, although the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers is trying to get some or all of that reinstated in its current negotiations with the district.
Among other cuts slated for next year are 11 assistant principal positions, the paid holidays and $500,000 in textbook acquisitions.
The board had considered closing Homer Adkins Elementary School to save about $430,000 a year. Clowers said Monday that at least for the next school year, it would remain open as an elementary school.
“Is the union being cooperative?” asked one man.
“I’ll answer that,” said Bishop James Bolden III, Jacksonville’s representative on the school board. “Anytime they ask for money and we’re broke, that’s not cooperative,” he said, then called on state Rep. Will Bond for rebuttal.
“That’s what the union’s supposed to do,” said Bond. “It’s for the board and the superintendent to say no.”
In recent years, the district has spent millions more each year than it receives, depleting its savings to cover the difference. It even spends $10 million a year originally designated to retire school construction bonds and another $14 million dollars in desegregation money from the state.
Archetko has projected ending fund balance for the current fiscal year is $4.9 million, down from about $20 million three years ago according to one board member.
Without carrying the fund balance over and without making cuts, the year-end fund balance next year is projected to be $5.3 million in the red.
Clowers said that Archetko, the interim chief financial officer, had agreed to stay on until the budget process is completed, perhaps another four months.
Clowers himself has not applied for the vacant superintendent job, but said he’d stay on if asked by the board. The application deadline had passed when Clowers was appointed interim chief.
He is fully certified as a school superintendent, he said.
By John Hofheimer
Leader staff writer
Instead of the $11.5 million carryover the Pulaski County Special School District labored to have at the end of the approaching school year, interim Superintendent Robert Clowers now projects only an $8 million fund balance, he told members of the Jacksonville Rotary Club Monday.
The board and administration are attempting to stem the financial hemorrhaging that has increasingly drained district coffers over the past few years, because the district has been dipping into savings to pay its bills. Without a change, it would have been about $5 million in the red by the end of the 2005-2006 school year. As a result, the state Education Department in April designated the district as being in fiscal distress.
The possible consequences of financial distress include annexation with another district, or the possibility that the state could name its own superintendent and dissolve the board.
Led by then-Superintendent Donald Henderson, the board in April made dramatic cuts in spending aimed at reversing the trend and making a plan to rehabilitate its financial circumstances and appease the Education Department.
At that meeting, the board lopped $11.7 million from the proposed 2005-2006 budget of $143 million.
Of that, the board expected to save about $4 million by eliminating all paid holidays from all employees, but John Archetko, the district’s chief financial officer, has reworked the numbers to discover the savings would be closer to $2 million, Clowers said.
In addition, state aid is expected to be about $4 million less than projected earlier, Clowers said, but property tax revenues could be $1.5 million to $2 million greater than a year ago, offsetting some of the shortfall in state aid.
Two weeks ago, Clowers had said he hoped to restore some of the budget cuts, but those hopes were extinguished when the projected $11.7 million fund balance turned out to be closer to $8 million, he said.
“I was hoping we could bring back some holidays,” he said.
The district hand-delivered its plan to get off fiscal distress in April, but Clowers said Monday that the district would submit a revised plan, reflecting the new financial information, within about one week.
“We’re tweaking it,” he said.
The board saved $3.3 million by freezing teacher pay-step increases for experience and continuing education, although the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers is trying to get some or all of that reinstated in its current negotiations with the district.
Among other cuts slated for next year are 11 assistant principal positions, the paid holidays and $500,000 in textbook acquisitions.
The board had considered closing Homer Adkins Elementary School to save about $430,000 a year. Clowers said Monday that at least for the next school year, it would remain open as an elementary school.
“Is the union being cooperative?” asked one man.
“I’ll answer that,” said Bishop James Bolden III, Jacksonville’s representative on the school board. “Anytime they ask for money and we’re broke, that’s not cooperative,” he said, then called on state Rep. Will Bond for rebuttal.
“That’s what the union’s supposed to do,” said Bond. “It’s for the board and the superintendent to say no.”
In recent years, the district has spent millions more each year than it receives, depleting its savings to cover the difference. It even spends $10 million a year originally designated to retire school construction bonds and another $14 million dollars in desegregation money from the state.
Archetko has projected ending fund balance for the current fiscal year is $4.9 million, down from about $20 million three years ago according to one board member.
Without carrying the fund balance over and without making cuts, the year-end fund balance next year is projected to be $5.3 million in the red.
Clowers said that Archetko, the interim chief financial officer, had agreed to stay on until the budget process is completed, perhaps another four months.
Clowers himself has not applied for the vacant superintendent job, but said he’d stay on if asked by the board. The application deadline had passed when Clowers was appointed interim chief.
He is fully certified as a school superintendent, he said.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
NEIGHBORS>> Dakota returns from Jerusalem
IN SHORT: Cancer patient is hailed along homecoming route to Cabot
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Being back home in Cabot is sweeter than ever for the Hawkins family.
They returned Thursday, May 26, from living in Jerusalem for three months for their oldest son Dakota, 14, to undergo leukemia treatment at Hadassah Medical Center. After receiving a cell transplant from his mother, Sharon, and brother, Riley, 12, Dakota is now leukemia-free.
An enthusiastic crowd of friends and relatives gathered at the Little Rock National Airport to welcome the family home. Gasps of surprise erupted from the Hawkins family as they saw the crowd awaiting them in the terminal. Other passengers walking through the terminal glanced at the large group as they hugged and wept.
“We go to church with the Hawkinses at Mt. Carmel and it’s nice to have them back,” said Maghan Slater, holding a “Welcome Home Dakota” sign.
A large group of faculty from Cabot Junior High School North was on hand as well with “CJHS loves the Hawkins family” signs. Dakota’s father, Henry, is an assistant principal at the school.
“It’s so wonderful just to see them again, they all look so good,” said Penny Hawkins, Dakota’s aunt.
When they drove into Cabot, the Hawkins family was given a police escort to their home, and crowds lined up along Hwy. 321 to welcome the motorcade.
“Thanks to all of you who greeted us at the airport and those who made signs and lined up on Hwy. 321 and our road as we came home,” wrote Sharon in the family’s online journal http://www2.caringbridge.org/ar/keepthefaith. “Dakota was so overjoyed at your support. Thank you, Cabot, for all the welcome home signs around town.”
She said the entire family was overwhelmed at the displays of love and support.
“Most of all, thanks to each of you for the prayers of faith, restored health and praying us home,” she wrote.
Dakota is recovering from his treatment and a lung infection. His improvement will be closely monitored during twice weekly clinic visits.
Mindful of Dakota’s recovery, the family is resting and enjoying their return to Cabot.
They spent the weekend visiting with family and friends and eating plenty of American food.
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Being back home in Cabot is sweeter than ever for the Hawkins family.
They returned Thursday, May 26, from living in Jerusalem for three months for their oldest son Dakota, 14, to undergo leukemia treatment at Hadassah Medical Center. After receiving a cell transplant from his mother, Sharon, and brother, Riley, 12, Dakota is now leukemia-free.
An enthusiastic crowd of friends and relatives gathered at the Little Rock National Airport to welcome the family home. Gasps of surprise erupted from the Hawkins family as they saw the crowd awaiting them in the terminal. Other passengers walking through the terminal glanced at the large group as they hugged and wept.
“We go to church with the Hawkinses at Mt. Carmel and it’s nice to have them back,” said Maghan Slater, holding a “Welcome Home Dakota” sign.
A large group of faculty from Cabot Junior High School North was on hand as well with “CJHS loves the Hawkins family” signs. Dakota’s father, Henry, is an assistant principal at the school.
“It’s so wonderful just to see them again, they all look so good,” said Penny Hawkins, Dakota’s aunt.
When they drove into Cabot, the Hawkins family was given a police escort to their home, and crowds lined up along Hwy. 321 to welcome the motorcade.
“Thanks to all of you who greeted us at the airport and those who made signs and lined up on Hwy. 321 and our road as we came home,” wrote Sharon in the family’s online journal http://www2.caringbridge.org/ar/keepthefaith. “Dakota was so overjoyed at your support. Thank you, Cabot, for all the welcome home signs around town.”
She said the entire family was overwhelmed at the displays of love and support.
“Most of all, thanks to each of you for the prayers of faith, restored health and praying us home,” she wrote.
Dakota is recovering from his treatment and a lung infection. His improvement will be closely monitored during twice weekly clinic visits.
Mindful of Dakota’s recovery, the family is resting and enjoying their return to Cabot.
They spent the weekend visiting with family and friends and eating plenty of American food.
EDITORIAL>> Will Bond for speaker
Call us boosters and homers, but it seems important to us that Rep. Will Bond is elected speaker of the House of Representatives in 2007, a choice that the current House members probably will make tentatively this winter. It means very little of a parochial nature to the community unless Bond turned out to be as grabby with state improvement funds as state Sen. Bob Johnson of Bigelow, but it can mean much to the state of Arkansas.
A profile of the candidates and their fund-raising and political gifts in the Tuesday Arkansas Democrat Gazette provides fresh argument for Bond’s election, if any were needed. Bond’s chief competitor, Rep. Benny Petrus of Stuttgart, raised a whopping $70,000 for his re-election campaign last year, although he ran without opposition.
He explained that he kept raising funds until near the end out of fear that a write-in candidate would run against him. He took much of the cash and passed it around among other House members with races, acquiring chits for his race for speaker. It is an open question whether that is legal under the state ethics law.
Both Petrus and Bond gave money to help another House member pay the medical bills of his son; Petrus gave from his campaign fund, but Bond gave his personal money.
The newspaper article did not raise a more serious ethical problem. Petrus allowed lobbyists for the timber and gambling interests to use his Little Rock apartment during the legislative session as a hospitality suite to wine and dine lawmakers. Perhaps as speaker, Petrus would observe better decorum.
But really the ethical standards of speaker and member should be no different.
Neither should sell his public office or any manifestation of it to private interests.
Who the lawmakers elect speaker will say a lot about the primacy of the public interest in Arkansas. Let us hope that it is Will Bond.
A profile of the candidates and their fund-raising and political gifts in the Tuesday Arkansas Democrat Gazette provides fresh argument for Bond’s election, if any were needed. Bond’s chief competitor, Rep. Benny Petrus of Stuttgart, raised a whopping $70,000 for his re-election campaign last year, although he ran without opposition.
He explained that he kept raising funds until near the end out of fear that a write-in candidate would run against him. He took much of the cash and passed it around among other House members with races, acquiring chits for his race for speaker. It is an open question whether that is legal under the state ethics law.
Both Petrus and Bond gave money to help another House member pay the medical bills of his son; Petrus gave from his campaign fund, but Bond gave his personal money.
The newspaper article did not raise a more serious ethical problem. Petrus allowed lobbyists for the timber and gambling interests to use his Little Rock apartment during the legislative session as a hospitality suite to wine and dine lawmakers. Perhaps as speaker, Petrus would observe better decorum.
But really the ethical standards of speaker and member should be no different.
Neither should sell his public office or any manifestation of it to private interests.
Who the lawmakers elect speaker will say a lot about the primacy of the public interest in Arkansas. Let us hope that it is Will Bond.
SPORTS>> Young making it a hobby
IN SHORT: McRae native building points lead
Beebe’s Jason Young is the man to beat in the Hobby Stock class at Beebe Speedway in 2005. Young holds a very comfortable 40 point lead over closet rival Dennis Fisk in the championship point standings. Young has also won five of the nine feature races held at Beebe so far this year, and has led in all but one feature this season.
This is Young’s fifth season in the Hobby class, and his years of learning the ropes are starting to pay off. Young scored his very first career feature win just last season in 2004.
Much of his ’04 campaign was marred with mechanical failures and less experience than a lot of his competitors. This year is a completely different story altogether. A brand new car for 2005, and a much talked about maturity as a driver has propelled Young into the position of being one of the most feared drivers on the track.
Young belongs to one of the most recognized teams in local racing, the Fox Racing team. Led by Steve Fox and his mother, Carol, the Fox team holds an incredible stable of talent including Young, modified guru Randy Weaver, and hobby class rookie contender Blake Jones. Though Weaver has been the headline grabber for the Fox team in recent years, this season appears to be Young’s time to shine.
“The car has felt really good all season,” Young said. “It really helps when you have a car that runs this well.”
Although some competitors like to hint that the success is all due to the car, anyone who has followed local racing for a number of years remembers a sloppy Jason Young whose inexperience led to collisions and torn up race cars.
That Jason Young is gone, and in his place is an aggressive, precise, and clean driver who can make his car work in any groove on the track, regardless of conditions. Though he now has one of the strongest cars in the field, he also has the talent to match. Young carries more than love of racing to the track every weekend, he also carries the legacy of a fallen friend. Young was best friends with local racing legend Scrapp Fox.
The two discovered racing together in the early nineties, as Young helped his friend turn wrenches on his race car.
“I moved here from Memphis in 1993,” Young recalls, “ Scrapp was the first person I made friends with, so anything that one of us got into, the other was right along with him.” After Scrapp’s death in 2001, Young decided that his friend would want nothing more than for Jason to carry on. “I didn’t know much about cars at first.” Young said. “The more I helped work on the cars, the more I started to learn about handling and setups. When Steve asked me if I wanted to drive the car, I figured it would be a good way to help keep Scrapp’s memory alive.”
Young is more than just a driver to the Fox family, he is almost like family. Aside from his childhood friendship with Scrapp and driving Scrapp’s first race car, Jason also works in the family business at Fox Quality Pools in Beebe.
“I do a little bit of everything there. From running machines to running errands or what have you, just wherever I’m needed.” Young also lives close by, just outside of Beebe with his wife of three years, Kristen.
Though Young’s sights are set on his first track championship in the hobby division this year, he also has his plans for the future figured out as well.
“I really want to try in run in the E-mod class next year.” Young said. “I really hope that class makes it. Maybe they can get their car counts up. It just looks like a lot of fun to run one of those things.”
Jason takes his racing seriously, but also realizes what is truly important when it comes to local racing.
“We’re all like a big family out here. We may get out on the track and beat and bang on each other, but if anyone needs help or ever has any trouble, everyone is always there to help out. This is a big hobby for all of us, so we all want to see each other do well.”
Young has gone from underdog to favorite in less than one year’s time at Beebe Speedway.
Anyone with as much determination and positive outlook on life deserves to be where Jason is now, at the top.
Beebe’s Jason Young is the man to beat in the Hobby Stock class at Beebe Speedway in 2005. Young holds a very comfortable 40 point lead over closet rival Dennis Fisk in the championship point standings. Young has also won five of the nine feature races held at Beebe so far this year, and has led in all but one feature this season.
This is Young’s fifth season in the Hobby class, and his years of learning the ropes are starting to pay off. Young scored his very first career feature win just last season in 2004.
Much of his ’04 campaign was marred with mechanical failures and less experience than a lot of his competitors. This year is a completely different story altogether. A brand new car for 2005, and a much talked about maturity as a driver has propelled Young into the position of being one of the most feared drivers on the track.
Young belongs to one of the most recognized teams in local racing, the Fox Racing team. Led by Steve Fox and his mother, Carol, the Fox team holds an incredible stable of talent including Young, modified guru Randy Weaver, and hobby class rookie contender Blake Jones. Though Weaver has been the headline grabber for the Fox team in recent years, this season appears to be Young’s time to shine.
“The car has felt really good all season,” Young said. “It really helps when you have a car that runs this well.”
Although some competitors like to hint that the success is all due to the car, anyone who has followed local racing for a number of years remembers a sloppy Jason Young whose inexperience led to collisions and torn up race cars.
That Jason Young is gone, and in his place is an aggressive, precise, and clean driver who can make his car work in any groove on the track, regardless of conditions. Though he now has one of the strongest cars in the field, he also has the talent to match. Young carries more than love of racing to the track every weekend, he also carries the legacy of a fallen friend. Young was best friends with local racing legend Scrapp Fox.
The two discovered racing together in the early nineties, as Young helped his friend turn wrenches on his race car.
“I moved here from Memphis in 1993,” Young recalls, “ Scrapp was the first person I made friends with, so anything that one of us got into, the other was right along with him.” After Scrapp’s death in 2001, Young decided that his friend would want nothing more than for Jason to carry on. “I didn’t know much about cars at first.” Young said. “The more I helped work on the cars, the more I started to learn about handling and setups. When Steve asked me if I wanted to drive the car, I figured it would be a good way to help keep Scrapp’s memory alive.”
Young is more than just a driver to the Fox family, he is almost like family. Aside from his childhood friendship with Scrapp and driving Scrapp’s first race car, Jason also works in the family business at Fox Quality Pools in Beebe.
“I do a little bit of everything there. From running machines to running errands or what have you, just wherever I’m needed.” Young also lives close by, just outside of Beebe with his wife of three years, Kristen.
Though Young’s sights are set on his first track championship in the hobby division this year, he also has his plans for the future figured out as well.
“I really want to try in run in the E-mod class next year.” Young said. “I really hope that class makes it. Maybe they can get their car counts up. It just looks like a lot of fun to run one of those things.”
Jason takes his racing seriously, but also realizes what is truly important when it comes to local racing.
“We’re all like a big family out here. We may get out on the track and beat and bang on each other, but if anyone needs help or ever has any trouble, everyone is always there to help out. This is a big hobby for all of us, so we all want to see each other do well.”
Young has gone from underdog to favorite in less than one year’s time at Beebe Speedway.
Anyone with as much determination and positive outlook on life deserves to be where Jason is now, at the top.
SPORTS>> Young making it a hobby
IN SHORT: McRae native building points lead
Beebe’s Jason Young is the man to beat in the Hobby Stock class at Beebe Speedway in 2005. Young holds a very comfortable 40 point lead over closet rival Dennis Fisk in the championship point standings. Young has also won five of the nine feature races held at Beebe so far this year, and has led in all but one feature this season.
This is Young’s fifth season in the Hobby class, and his years of learning the ropes are starting to pay off. Young scored his very first career feature win just last season in 2004.
Much of his ’04 campaign was marred with mechanical failures and less experience than a lot of his competitors. This year is a completely different story altogether. A brand new car for 2005, and a much talked about maturity as a driver has propelled Young into the position of being one of the most feared drivers on the track.
Young belongs to one of the most recognized teams in local racing, the Fox Racing team. Led by Steve Fox and his mother, Carol, the Fox team holds an incredible stable of talent including Young, modified guru Randy Weaver, and hobby class rookie contender Blake Jones. Though Weaver has been the headline grabber for the Fox team in recent years, this season appears to be Young’s time to shine.
“The car has felt really good all season,” Young said. “It really helps when you have a car that runs this well.”
Although some competitors like to hint that the success is all due to the car, anyone who has followed local racing for a number of years remembers a sloppy Jason Young whose inexperience led to collisions and torn up race cars.
That Jason Young is gone, and in his place is an aggressive, precise, and clean driver who can make his car work in any groove on the track, regardless of conditions. Though he now has one of the strongest cars in the field, he also has the talent to match. Young carries more than love of racing to the track every weekend, he also carries the legacy of a fallen friend. Young was best friends with local racing legend Scrapp Fox.
The two discovered racing together in the early nineties, as Young helped his friend turn wrenches on his race car.
“I moved here from Memphis in 1993,” Young recalls, “ Scrapp was the first person I made friends with, so anything that one of us got into, the other was right along with him.” After Scrapp’s death in 2001, Young decided that his friend would want nothing more than for Jason to carry on. “I didn’t know much about cars at first.” Young said. “The more I helped work on the cars, the more I started to learn about handling and setups. When Steve asked me if I wanted to drive the car, I figured it would be a good way to help keep Scrapp’s memory alive.”
Young is more than just a driver to the Fox family, he is almost like family. Aside from his childhood friendship with Scrapp and driving Scrapp’s first race car, Jason also works in the family business at Fox Quality Pools in Beebe.
“I do a little bit of everything there. From running machines to running errands or what have you, just wherever I’m needed.” Young also lives close by, just outside of Beebe with his wife of three years, Kristen.
Though Young’s sights are set on his first track championship in the hobby division this year, he also has his plans for the future figured out as well.
“I really want to try in run in the E-mod class next year.” Young said. “I really hope that class makes it. Maybe they can get their car counts up. It just looks like a lot of fun to run one of those things.”
Jason takes his racing seriously, but also realizes what is truly important when it comes to local racing.
“We’re all like a big family out here. We may get out on the track and beat and bang on each other, but if anyone needs help or ever has any trouble, everyone is always there to help out. This is a big hobby for all of us, so we all want to see each other do well.”
Young has gone from underdog to favorite in less than one year’s time at Beebe Speedway.
Anyone with as much determination and positive outlook on life deserves to be where Jason is now, at the top.
Beebe’s Jason Young is the man to beat in the Hobby Stock class at Beebe Speedway in 2005. Young holds a very comfortable 40 point lead over closet rival Dennis Fisk in the championship point standings. Young has also won five of the nine feature races held at Beebe so far this year, and has led in all but one feature this season.
This is Young’s fifth season in the Hobby class, and his years of learning the ropes are starting to pay off. Young scored his very first career feature win just last season in 2004.
Much of his ’04 campaign was marred with mechanical failures and less experience than a lot of his competitors. This year is a completely different story altogether. A brand new car for 2005, and a much talked about maturity as a driver has propelled Young into the position of being one of the most feared drivers on the track.
Young belongs to one of the most recognized teams in local racing, the Fox Racing team. Led by Steve Fox and his mother, Carol, the Fox team holds an incredible stable of talent including Young, modified guru Randy Weaver, and hobby class rookie contender Blake Jones. Though Weaver has been the headline grabber for the Fox team in recent years, this season appears to be Young’s time to shine.
“The car has felt really good all season,” Young said. “It really helps when you have a car that runs this well.”
Although some competitors like to hint that the success is all due to the car, anyone who has followed local racing for a number of years remembers a sloppy Jason Young whose inexperience led to collisions and torn up race cars.
That Jason Young is gone, and in his place is an aggressive, precise, and clean driver who can make his car work in any groove on the track, regardless of conditions. Though he now has one of the strongest cars in the field, he also has the talent to match. Young carries more than love of racing to the track every weekend, he also carries the legacy of a fallen friend. Young was best friends with local racing legend Scrapp Fox.
The two discovered racing together in the early nineties, as Young helped his friend turn wrenches on his race car.
“I moved here from Memphis in 1993,” Young recalls, “ Scrapp was the first person I made friends with, so anything that one of us got into, the other was right along with him.” After Scrapp’s death in 2001, Young decided that his friend would want nothing more than for Jason to carry on. “I didn’t know much about cars at first.” Young said. “The more I helped work on the cars, the more I started to learn about handling and setups. When Steve asked me if I wanted to drive the car, I figured it would be a good way to help keep Scrapp’s memory alive.”
Young is more than just a driver to the Fox family, he is almost like family. Aside from his childhood friendship with Scrapp and driving Scrapp’s first race car, Jason also works in the family business at Fox Quality Pools in Beebe.
“I do a little bit of everything there. From running machines to running errands or what have you, just wherever I’m needed.” Young also lives close by, just outside of Beebe with his wife of three years, Kristen.
Though Young’s sights are set on his first track championship in the hobby division this year, he also has his plans for the future figured out as well.
“I really want to try in run in the E-mod class next year.” Young said. “I really hope that class makes it. Maybe they can get their car counts up. It just looks like a lot of fun to run one of those things.”
Jason takes his racing seriously, but also realizes what is truly important when it comes to local racing.
“We’re all like a big family out here. We may get out on the track and beat and bang on each other, but if anyone needs help or ever has any trouble, everyone is always there to help out. This is a big hobby for all of us, so we all want to see each other do well.”
Young has gone from underdog to favorite in less than one year’s time at Beebe Speedway.
Anyone with as much determination and positive outlook on life deserves to be where Jason is now, at the top.
SPORTS>> Gwatney secures rematch for title
IN SHORT: Jacksonville class A team beats Benton and Conway Monday
By RAY BENTON
Leader sports editor
The Jacksonville class A American Legion team earned a trip to the championship game of the North Little Rock Memorial weekend tournament. The young Gwatney team lost its opening game, but won its next two to advance to Tuesday night’s title game against Maumelle.
Maumelle was the team that beat Jacksonville in the tournament opener, but wins Monday against Benton and Conway got Jacksonville a rematch.
Two teams backed out of the tournament when rain canceled play on Sunday, helping pave the way for Jacksonville’s comeback. But winning twice, once against a team it had lost to the week before, still impressed Gwatney coach Travis Lyda.
“We lost 12-1 to Conway last week, and these kids played like that game never happened,” Lyda said. “They were focused and they had some confidence from beating Benton earlier in the day.”
Jordan Payer, the same pitcher that took the loss to Conway last week, got the 6-1 win on the mound Monday. He worked out of trouble in the very first inning, then worked with a lead the rest of the way after Jacksonville put up three runs in the bottom of the first.
Conway opened with a leadoff double, but Payer got a strikeout, a fielder’s choice grounder and another K to close the door on the rally.
“They got some hits off of him, but he worked out of trouble every time,” Lyda said. “He’d get a strikeout or we’d turn a double play every time they’d make a threat. He threw a great game.”
Jacksonville responded with two walks to open up the bottom half of the inning. Jake and Adam Ussery each got free passes. Tyler Uptergrove hit into a fielder’s choice that left runners on first and third. Zach James then got an RBI double to centerfield. Scott Bolen followed with an RBI single and Zach Thomas hit a sacrifice fly to score James for a 3-0 Jacksonville lead.
Both teams added a run in the second, and James closed out the scoring with a two-RBI single in the bottom of the fourth that scored Adam Ussery and Uptergrove to set the final margin.
James went 2 for 3 with three RBIs to lead the offensive attack.
Earlier in the day, Jacksonville beat Benton 3-1, scoring one run in the first and two in the second inning. That was all the runs pitcher Brian Thurman needed. Thurman gave up one earned run while holding Benton Sports Shop to just two base hits in seven innings.
The win ran Gwatney’s record to 3-2 on the season. They lost 5-0 to Maumelle on Saturday. They will be back in action this weekend, hosting their own A tournament at Dupree Park.
Look for information on that tournament, as well as Tuesday’s championship matchup with Maumelle in Saturday’s edition of the Leader.
By RAY BENTON
Leader sports editor
The Jacksonville class A American Legion team earned a trip to the championship game of the North Little Rock Memorial weekend tournament. The young Gwatney team lost its opening game, but won its next two to advance to Tuesday night’s title game against Maumelle.
Maumelle was the team that beat Jacksonville in the tournament opener, but wins Monday against Benton and Conway got Jacksonville a rematch.
Two teams backed out of the tournament when rain canceled play on Sunday, helping pave the way for Jacksonville’s comeback. But winning twice, once against a team it had lost to the week before, still impressed Gwatney coach Travis Lyda.
“We lost 12-1 to Conway last week, and these kids played like that game never happened,” Lyda said. “They were focused and they had some confidence from beating Benton earlier in the day.”
Jordan Payer, the same pitcher that took the loss to Conway last week, got the 6-1 win on the mound Monday. He worked out of trouble in the very first inning, then worked with a lead the rest of the way after Jacksonville put up three runs in the bottom of the first.
Conway opened with a leadoff double, but Payer got a strikeout, a fielder’s choice grounder and another K to close the door on the rally.
“They got some hits off of him, but he worked out of trouble every time,” Lyda said. “He’d get a strikeout or we’d turn a double play every time they’d make a threat. He threw a great game.”
Jacksonville responded with two walks to open up the bottom half of the inning. Jake and Adam Ussery each got free passes. Tyler Uptergrove hit into a fielder’s choice that left runners on first and third. Zach James then got an RBI double to centerfield. Scott Bolen followed with an RBI single and Zach Thomas hit a sacrifice fly to score James for a 3-0 Jacksonville lead.
Both teams added a run in the second, and James closed out the scoring with a two-RBI single in the bottom of the fourth that scored Adam Ussery and Uptergrove to set the final margin.
James went 2 for 3 with three RBIs to lead the offensive attack.
Earlier in the day, Jacksonville beat Benton 3-1, scoring one run in the first and two in the second inning. That was all the runs pitcher Brian Thurman needed. Thurman gave up one earned run while holding Benton Sports Shop to just two base hits in seven innings.
The win ran Gwatney’s record to 3-2 on the season. They lost 5-0 to Maumelle on Saturday. They will be back in action this weekend, hosting their own A tournament at Dupree Park.
Look for information on that tournament, as well as Tuesday’s championship matchup with Maumelle in Saturday’s edition of the Leader.
TOP STORY>> Schools may see benefits from base growth
IN SHORT: Despite privatization of base housing and the expected influx of nearly 4,000 more people at LRAFB, districts find financial gains uncertain.
By JOHN HOFHEIMER
Leader staff writer
It’s too early to predict the effect 4,000 new Little Rock Air Force Base jobs could have on the Pulaski County Special School District or neighboring districts over the next six years, but not too early to recognize the givens and the unknowns in the equation, according to John Archetko, acting chief financial officer for the district.
Complicating any early forecasting is the unknown effect the privatization, renovation and new construction of airbase housing will have upon county and school district coffers, Archetko said last week. Privatization, begun last August, is also slated for completion over the next six years.
Pulaski County Special School District receives a certain amount of federal impact aid for children who live on the base, a lesser amount for students or whose parents work—but don’t live—on base, according to Archetko.
For the 2004 school year, the district received $483,000 in federal impact aid for about 1,000 students.
For 2005, the district projects aid of $290,800 for about 780 students.
About 230 fewer students resided on base.
“At this point all I can say is obviously the change in status there and any expansion will have some impact on our impact aid,” he said.
Lonoke Superintendent Sharron Havens said Tuesday that she didn’t know off hand how many children of Air Force Base employees currently attend her district. “We have quite a few students who live between Furlow and Jacksonville on Hwy. 89.
“I have no idea what the impact will be on our district,” she said.
Officials from the Beebe and Cabot school districts did not return calls Tuesday.
Here are some considerations, according to Archetko:
- No one is certain how many school-aged children will accompany parents if the new jobs materialize.
- Of those children, there is no way to estimate how many will attend Pulaski County Special School District schools, or how many will attend Little Rock, North Little Rock, Cabot, Beebe or other schools, public or private.
- The number of airmen living on base is unlikely to increase much, with the number of on-base housing units limited to about 1,200, so federal impact aid for most new students attending the Pulaski district schools will be figured at the reduced rate—one-fifth the compensation for students whose parents live on base.
Other districts schooling children of the expected new jobs presumably also would be compensated at the reduced rate, since none of them would be living on base.
So the amount of new impact revenue to any particular district is unknowable right now.
Another problem in predicting and preparing: “We don’t know the (age and grade) distribution,” said Archetko. “Will it require new classrooms or new teachers?
“There are a lot of interrelationships that take place,” he said. “New students could be spread across 12 grade levels. Or we may get a whole slew of 5-year-olds and need an-other kindergarten class.”
If the new jobs result in construction of new houses, the district’s property-tax base—and thus revenue—would increase.
Independent of all this, says Archetko, is the $5,400 per student minimum state aid that follows the student from district to district.
If 4,000 new employees brought say 1,000 new students, it would mean $5.4 million a year in minimum foundation aid, divided by the districts according to the number of students living in their district.
Because base housing has been sold to American Eagle Com-munities, federal impact fees should diminish, while the company will be paying county property taxes. American Eagle bought the houses last August but so far, Pulaski County Assessor Janet Troutman Ward’s office has not appraised or accessed any of them—and property taxes in Arkansas are paid a year in arrears.
Adding to the uncertainty, Ward has declined to speculate on the value of the remodeled and new houses to be built on the base, saying that would be voodoo economics.
If the properties were appraised now, the district would receive no new revenues until 2006 or 2007, Archetko calculates.
By JOHN HOFHEIMER
Leader staff writer
It’s too early to predict the effect 4,000 new Little Rock Air Force Base jobs could have on the Pulaski County Special School District or neighboring districts over the next six years, but not too early to recognize the givens and the unknowns in the equation, according to John Archetko, acting chief financial officer for the district.
Complicating any early forecasting is the unknown effect the privatization, renovation and new construction of airbase housing will have upon county and school district coffers, Archetko said last week. Privatization, begun last August, is also slated for completion over the next six years.
Pulaski County Special School District receives a certain amount of federal impact aid for children who live on the base, a lesser amount for students or whose parents work—but don’t live—on base, according to Archetko.
For the 2004 school year, the district received $483,000 in federal impact aid for about 1,000 students.
For 2005, the district projects aid of $290,800 for about 780 students.
About 230 fewer students resided on base.
“At this point all I can say is obviously the change in status there and any expansion will have some impact on our impact aid,” he said.
Lonoke Superintendent Sharron Havens said Tuesday that she didn’t know off hand how many children of Air Force Base employees currently attend her district. “We have quite a few students who live between Furlow and Jacksonville on Hwy. 89.
“I have no idea what the impact will be on our district,” she said.
Officials from the Beebe and Cabot school districts did not return calls Tuesday.
Here are some considerations, according to Archetko:
- No one is certain how many school-aged children will accompany parents if the new jobs materialize.
- Of those children, there is no way to estimate how many will attend Pulaski County Special School District schools, or how many will attend Little Rock, North Little Rock, Cabot, Beebe or other schools, public or private.
- The number of airmen living on base is unlikely to increase much, with the number of on-base housing units limited to about 1,200, so federal impact aid for most new students attending the Pulaski district schools will be figured at the reduced rate—one-fifth the compensation for students whose parents live on base.
Other districts schooling children of the expected new jobs presumably also would be compensated at the reduced rate, since none of them would be living on base.
So the amount of new impact revenue to any particular district is unknowable right now.
Another problem in predicting and preparing: “We don’t know the (age and grade) distribution,” said Archetko. “Will it require new classrooms or new teachers?
“There are a lot of interrelationships that take place,” he said. “New students could be spread across 12 grade levels. Or we may get a whole slew of 5-year-olds and need an-other kindergarten class.”
If the new jobs result in construction of new houses, the district’s property-tax base—and thus revenue—would increase.
Independent of all this, says Archetko, is the $5,400 per student minimum state aid that follows the student from district to district.
If 4,000 new employees brought say 1,000 new students, it would mean $5.4 million a year in minimum foundation aid, divided by the districts according to the number of students living in their district.
Because base housing has been sold to American Eagle Com-munities, federal impact fees should diminish, while the company will be paying county property taxes. American Eagle bought the houses last August but so far, Pulaski County Assessor Janet Troutman Ward’s office has not appraised or accessed any of them—and property taxes in Arkansas are paid a year in arrears.
Adding to the uncertainty, Ward has declined to speculate on the value of the remodeled and new houses to be built on the base, saying that would be voodoo economics.
If the properties were appraised now, the district would receive no new revenues until 2006 or 2007, Archetko calculates.
TOP STORY>> Upscale apartments planned at Greystone
IN SHORT: Cabot is set to annex an area across from the expensive subdivision, which would also see new commercial development, including possibly a new grocery store.
By JOAN MCCOY
Leader staff writer
Cabot could soon be getting a housing development like none it has seen before.
A Little Rock company, Orion Capital Partners, has bought 50 acres across from Greystone, the city’s upscale golf course subdivision, and will build apartments that will not detract from the exclusive neighborhood.
Brock Martin, with Orion Capital Partners, said this week that some of his tenants will likely be connected in some way to Little Rock Air Force Base, but many will likely be permanent Cabot residents who simply need a temporary home.
“I predict that we will have a number of people who’ll rent from us while they build their houses at Greystone,” he said.
Martin said the apartments will have nine-foot ceilings with crown molding and covered parking. The complex also will include a fitness center and a common area with computers that Martin said he likes to call a homework center.
Some of the property will be set aside for commercial use. Brock said he had spoken with Bill Minton and Jack King, Greystone developers, about what the residents in the area need, and the consensus is that a grocery store is what is needed most.
It has not been decided how many apartments will be built in the first phase of development of the property.
“We’re doing our market research now,” he said.
The company has apartments like the ones it intends to build in Cabot in Little Rock and northwest Arkansas.
Cabot Mayor Stubby Stumbaugh confirmed Tuesday that he talked with Martin a month ago about the subdivision. He said his only concern is that the spot on Hwy. 5 where the entrance will likely be located already is one of the most dangerous in the area. And more traffic will make it even more dangerous, he said.
Stumbaugh says a traffic light is needed there, and the developers will likely have to pay at least part of the cost of installing one.
The property is not currently inside Cabot city limits, but it is on the agenda for the planning commission meeting next Tuesday to start the annexation process.
By JOAN MCCOY
Leader staff writer
Cabot could soon be getting a housing development like none it has seen before.
A Little Rock company, Orion Capital Partners, has bought 50 acres across from Greystone, the city’s upscale golf course subdivision, and will build apartments that will not detract from the exclusive neighborhood.
Brock Martin, with Orion Capital Partners, said this week that some of his tenants will likely be connected in some way to Little Rock Air Force Base, but many will likely be permanent Cabot residents who simply need a temporary home.
“I predict that we will have a number of people who’ll rent from us while they build their houses at Greystone,” he said.
Martin said the apartments will have nine-foot ceilings with crown molding and covered parking. The complex also will include a fitness center and a common area with computers that Martin said he likes to call a homework center.
Some of the property will be set aside for commercial use. Brock said he had spoken with Bill Minton and Jack King, Greystone developers, about what the residents in the area need, and the consensus is that a grocery store is what is needed most.
It has not been decided how many apartments will be built in the first phase of development of the property.
“We’re doing our market research now,” he said.
The company has apartments like the ones it intends to build in Cabot in Little Rock and northwest Arkansas.
Cabot Mayor Stubby Stumbaugh confirmed Tuesday that he talked with Martin a month ago about the subdivision. He said his only concern is that the spot on Hwy. 5 where the entrance will likely be located already is one of the most dangerous in the area. And more traffic will make it even more dangerous, he said.
Stumbaugh says a traffic light is needed there, and the developers will likely have to pay at least part of the cost of installing one.
The property is not currently inside Cabot city limits, but it is on the agenda for the planning commission meeting next Tuesday to start the annexation process.
TOP STORY>> Upscale apartments planned at Greystone
IN SHORT: Cabot is set to annex an area across from the expensive subdivision, which would also see new commercial development, including possibly a new grocery store.
By JOAN MCCOY
Leader staff writer
Cabot could soon be getting a housing development like none it has seen before.
A Little Rock company, Orion Capital Partners, has bought 50 acres across from Greystone, the city’s upscale golf course subdivision, and will build apartments that will not detract from the exclusive neighborhood.
Brock Martin, with Orion Capital Partners, said this week that some of his tenants will likely be connected in some way to Little Rock Air Force Base, but many will likely be permanent Cabot residents who simply need a temporary home.
“I predict that we will have a number of people who’ll rent from us while they build their houses at Greystone,” he said.
Martin said the apartments will have nine-foot ceilings with crown molding and covered parking. The complex also will include a fitness center and a common area with computers that Martin said he likes to call a homework center.
Some of the property will be set aside for commercial use. Brock said he had spoken with Bill Minton and Jack King, Greystone developers, about what the residents in the area need, and the consensus is that a grocery store is what is needed most.
It has not been decided how many apartments will be built in the first phase of development of the property.
“We’re doing our market re-search now,” he said.
The company has apartments like the ones it intends to build in Cabot in Little Rock and northwest Arkansas.
Cabot Mayor Stubby Stumbaugh confirmed Tuesday that he talked with Martin a month ago about the subdivision. He said his only concern is that the spot on Hwy. 5 where the entrance will likely be located already is one of the most dangerous in the area. And more traffic will make it even more dangerous, he said.
Stumbaugh says a traffic light is needed there, and the developers will likely have to pay at least part of the cost of installing one.
The property is not currently inside Cabot city limits, but it is on the agenda for the planning commission meeting next Tuesday to start the annexation process.
By JOAN MCCOY
Leader staff writer
Cabot could soon be getting a housing development like none it has seen before.
A Little Rock company, Orion Capital Partners, has bought 50 acres across from Greystone, the city’s upscale golf course subdivision, and will build apartments that will not detract from the exclusive neighborhood.
Brock Martin, with Orion Capital Partners, said this week that some of his tenants will likely be connected in some way to Little Rock Air Force Base, but many will likely be permanent Cabot residents who simply need a temporary home.
“I predict that we will have a number of people who’ll rent from us while they build their houses at Greystone,” he said.
Martin said the apartments will have nine-foot ceilings with crown molding and covered parking. The complex also will include a fitness center and a common area with computers that Martin said he likes to call a homework center.
Some of the property will be set aside for commercial use. Brock said he had spoken with Bill Minton and Jack King, Greystone developers, about what the residents in the area need, and the consensus is that a grocery store is what is needed most.
It has not been decided how many apartments will be built in the first phase of development of the property.
“We’re doing our market re-search now,” he said.
The company has apartments like the ones it intends to build in Cabot in Little Rock and northwest Arkansas.
Cabot Mayor Stubby Stumbaugh confirmed Tuesday that he talked with Martin a month ago about the subdivision. He said his only concern is that the spot on Hwy. 5 where the entrance will likely be located already is one of the most dangerous in the area. And more traffic will make it even more dangerous, he said.
Stumbaugh says a traffic light is needed there, and the developers will likely have to pay at least part of the cost of installing one.
The property is not currently inside Cabot city limits, but it is on the agenda for the planning commission meeting next Tuesday to start the annexation process.
TOP STORY>> Hawkins taken to hospital
IN SHORT: Cabot youngster is admitted to Arkansas Children’s soon after his return from Jerusalem.
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Dakota Hawkins, 14, of Cabot, is recovering in Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, after being taken to the emergency room on Monday. He woke up vomiting and complaining of abdominal pain. He is being treated for high liver enzymes.
On Tuesday, Dakota’s mother, Sharon Hawkins, wrote in the family’s online journal
http://www2.caringbridge.org/ar/keep-thefaith
that he seems to be feeling better. He woke up hungry Tuesday morning after a day of not eating.
“We need your continued prayers and appreciate your praises of giving the deserved glory to God for our many answered prayers,” wrote Sharon.
The Hawkins family returned to Little Rock National Airport last Thursday after living in Jerusalem for three months for Dakota to undergo leukemia treatment at Hadassah Medical Center.
After receiving a cell transplant from his mother, Sharon, and brother, Riley, 12, Dakota is now leukemia-free, but is still recovering from the transplants and fungal lung infection. The family is calling Dakota’s battle with leukemia a “Journey of Faith.”
The journey began when the youth was diagnosed with leukemia in December 2002. Dakota underwent five months of intense chemotherapy at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock and went into remission, but relapsed in October 2003.
He received a bone-marrow-transplant from his younger brother Riley in February 2004, but his leukemia returned in late November.
In February 2005, while at the M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston for additional treatments and therapy, the Hawkins family learned of Dr. Shimon Slavin, who offered the family innovative new approaches in cell therapy and leukemia treatment not available in America.
Community fundraising efforts helped the family raise $127,000 within two weeks to cover treatment costs and the family flew to Israel.
Dakota will continue post-transplant cell therapy to prevent the leukemia from coming back.
The family plans to take Dakota back to Israel for a second treatment. His physician plans to infuse Dakota with natural killer cells from both parents.
These cells are often called the human body’s first line of defense against mutant and virus cells such as cancer.
By SARA GREENE
Leader staff writer
Dakota Hawkins, 14, of Cabot, is recovering in Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, after being taken to the emergency room on Monday. He woke up vomiting and complaining of abdominal pain. He is being treated for high liver enzymes.
On Tuesday, Dakota’s mother, Sharon Hawkins, wrote in the family’s online journal
http://www2.caringbridge.org/ar/keep-thefaith
that he seems to be feeling better. He woke up hungry Tuesday morning after a day of not eating.
“We need your continued prayers and appreciate your praises of giving the deserved glory to God for our many answered prayers,” wrote Sharon.
The Hawkins family returned to Little Rock National Airport last Thursday after living in Jerusalem for three months for Dakota to undergo leukemia treatment at Hadassah Medical Center.
After receiving a cell transplant from his mother, Sharon, and brother, Riley, 12, Dakota is now leukemia-free, but is still recovering from the transplants and fungal lung infection. The family is calling Dakota’s battle with leukemia a “Journey of Faith.”
The journey began when the youth was diagnosed with leukemia in December 2002. Dakota underwent five months of intense chemotherapy at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock and went into remission, but relapsed in October 2003.
He received a bone-marrow-transplant from his younger brother Riley in February 2004, but his leukemia returned in late November.
In February 2005, while at the M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston for additional treatments and therapy, the Hawkins family learned of Dr. Shimon Slavin, who offered the family innovative new approaches in cell therapy and leukemia treatment not available in America.
Community fundraising efforts helped the family raise $127,000 within two weeks to cover treatment costs and the family flew to Israel.
Dakota will continue post-transplant cell therapy to prevent the leukemia from coming back.
The family plans to take Dakota back to Israel for a second treatment. His physician plans to infuse Dakota with natural killer cells from both parents.
These cells are often called the human body’s first line of defense against mutant and virus cells such as cancer.
TOP STORY>> Soldiers who fell in Iraq praised
IN SHORT: Two service members from Jacksonville are killed within a week, along with another soldier from Van Buren.
By BRIAN RODRIGUEZ
Leader staff writer
A Jacksonville soldier, remembered as a quiet man who just did his job, was killed Saturday in Mosul, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his security position.
Army Spec. Phillip Nick Sayles, 26, of Jacksonville was killed when a roadside bomb was detonated near where he was helping check for weapons in three cars that American troops had stopped. The explosion killed Sayles and wounded 13 other soldiers and eight Iraqi civilians. Three of the civilians were children under 10 years of age.
Sayles attended North Pulaski High School and was active in the Jacksonville High School ROTC program through a PCSSD agreement that allowed students to participate in programs on other campuses that were not available at their own schools.
“I got some really good students through the agreement, and of course Nick was one of those,” said retired Maj. Bob Jones, who taught at JHS. “Nick was a quiet young man. He simply got the job done that he was tasked to do. He was a good kid. He knew what he wanted to do and he did it.”
Jones said Sayles was a very effective member of the cadet program, a scholastic simulation of military life.
“It’s a hands-on program where you don’t sit in the class and spout theory,” Jones said.
Sayles was responsible for teaching younger cadets under the guidance of ROTC instructors before his senior year, when he transferred to Cabot High School.
“It was a good program, and Nick was definitely a good asset to that program,” Jones said.
Sayles graduated from Cabot High School in 1997 and joined the Army. He was assigned to the Army’s 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash., before he was sent overseas to support Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“He was a credit, not only to my program, but to his family,” Jones said. “I’m very grateful to Nick’s family for letting me borrow him for that time. My heart absolutely grieves with his family, and my prayers are with his family.”
Jones said Sayles gave his life for freedom, a concept so intangible that most people don’t appreciate it, and he hopes that his family realizes what his contribution means.
“Hopefully one day,” he said, “when the grief is not so heavy on them, they’ll understand that too.”
Sayles is the 35th serviceman with Arkansas ties to die in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the second soldier killed with Jacksonville ties within a week.
Army Spec. Tyler Loren Creamean, 21, of Jacksonville, died May 22 in Mosul after an improvised explosive device went off near his Humvee.
According to reports, he and 1st Lt. Aaron N. Seesan, 25, of Massillon, Ohio, who also died in the explosion, kept telling medical personnel to see to each other and to a third soldier in the Humvee who survived.
“That didn’t surprise me at all. That does not surprise me,” said Mary Coop, an oral communications teacher at Jacksonville High School. “He turned into a great young man, a wonderful young man.”
People who knew him did not see his role searching for roadside bombs as a surprise either.
“I could see him being out there and doing that,” said Jessica Jensen, who knew Creamean since he was about 14. “Tyler likes to be where the action is and where the excitement is.”
“I know he was responsible and whatever he signed up for he would do that job responsibly,” Coop said, “whatever it took.”
Jensen said she met Creamean one summer when she was working as a lifeguard at the recreation center in Jacksonville.
He spent half the summer in “time out” under her chair for causing mischief, she said.
“He would do something and you’d want to get mad at him, but you’d just want to laugh,” she said. “He ended up being one of my dearest and closest friends.”
Creamean joined her the next summer as a lifeguard. Jensen said it was odd to see the size difference between him and the people he dove in to save, but said she had full confidence in him.
“He was so skinny, so little…Whenever he would make a save it was just comical,” she said. “He did it right. He was a great lifeguard and a great person.”
Coop said he was also a mischievous student, but never got into any trouble.
“He was the type of student who each teacher would wish it was legal to tie him to his chair and tape his mouth shut,” Coop said jokingly.
“He did not have a mean bone in his body, he was just the type of student who drove you crazy.”
She would get frustrated with his antics, she said, but she couldn’t stay mad at him because he would do something funny.
“He just knew how to make people feel at ease, and if something needed to have a laugh, he would provide it,” she said. “I’m really gonna miss him.”
“He just always wanted to make light of every situation,” Jensen said, “and sometimes school wasn’t that way.”
Creamean left Jacksonville High School after his sophomore year and joined the Youth Challenge, a 22-week program sponsored by the Arkansas National Guard.
He graduated from the program and earned the spirit award before joining the Army in April 2003.
He was stationed at Fort Lewis in August, was sent to Mosul on Nov. 1, and earned his first purple heart in mid-December.
He returned to the United States on leave for his birthday on Feb. 24 and married his girlfriend, KaMisha Hickman, that day.
He earned his second purple heart for a head injury on March 3, the day he returned to active duty. Creamean, who had conducted more than 600 patrols, will receive a third purple heart posthumously for the explosion that took his life.
By BRIAN RODRIGUEZ
Leader staff writer
A Jacksonville soldier, remembered as a quiet man who just did his job, was killed Saturday in Mosul, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his security position.
Army Spec. Phillip Nick Sayles, 26, of Jacksonville was killed when a roadside bomb was detonated near where he was helping check for weapons in three cars that American troops had stopped. The explosion killed Sayles and wounded 13 other soldiers and eight Iraqi civilians. Three of the civilians were children under 10 years of age.
Sayles attended North Pulaski High School and was active in the Jacksonville High School ROTC program through a PCSSD agreement that allowed students to participate in programs on other campuses that were not available at their own schools.
“I got some really good students through the agreement, and of course Nick was one of those,” said retired Maj. Bob Jones, who taught at JHS. “Nick was a quiet young man. He simply got the job done that he was tasked to do. He was a good kid. He knew what he wanted to do and he did it.”
Jones said Sayles was a very effective member of the cadet program, a scholastic simulation of military life.
“It’s a hands-on program where you don’t sit in the class and spout theory,” Jones said.
Sayles was responsible for teaching younger cadets under the guidance of ROTC instructors before his senior year, when he transferred to Cabot High School.
“It was a good program, and Nick was definitely a good asset to that program,” Jones said.
Sayles graduated from Cabot High School in 1997 and joined the Army. He was assigned to the Army’s 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash., before he was sent overseas to support Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“He was a credit, not only to my program, but to his family,” Jones said. “I’m very grateful to Nick’s family for letting me borrow him for that time. My heart absolutely grieves with his family, and my prayers are with his family.”
Jones said Sayles gave his life for freedom, a concept so intangible that most people don’t appreciate it, and he hopes that his family realizes what his contribution means.
“Hopefully one day,” he said, “when the grief is not so heavy on them, they’ll understand that too.”
Sayles is the 35th serviceman with Arkansas ties to die in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the second soldier killed with Jacksonville ties within a week.
Army Spec. Tyler Loren Creamean, 21, of Jacksonville, died May 22 in Mosul after an improvised explosive device went off near his Humvee.
According to reports, he and 1st Lt. Aaron N. Seesan, 25, of Massillon, Ohio, who also died in the explosion, kept telling medical personnel to see to each other and to a third soldier in the Humvee who survived.
“That didn’t surprise me at all. That does not surprise me,” said Mary Coop, an oral communications teacher at Jacksonville High School. “He turned into a great young man, a wonderful young man.”
People who knew him did not see his role searching for roadside bombs as a surprise either.
“I could see him being out there and doing that,” said Jessica Jensen, who knew Creamean since he was about 14. “Tyler likes to be where the action is and where the excitement is.”
“I know he was responsible and whatever he signed up for he would do that job responsibly,” Coop said, “whatever it took.”
Jensen said she met Creamean one summer when she was working as a lifeguard at the recreation center in Jacksonville.
He spent half the summer in “time out” under her chair for causing mischief, she said.
“He would do something and you’d want to get mad at him, but you’d just want to laugh,” she said. “He ended up being one of my dearest and closest friends.”
Creamean joined her the next summer as a lifeguard. Jensen said it was odd to see the size difference between him and the people he dove in to save, but said she had full confidence in him.
“He was so skinny, so little…Whenever he would make a save it was just comical,” she said. “He did it right. He was a great lifeguard and a great person.”
Coop said he was also a mischievous student, but never got into any trouble.
“He was the type of student who each teacher would wish it was legal to tie him to his chair and tape his mouth shut,” Coop said jokingly.
“He did not have a mean bone in his body, he was just the type of student who drove you crazy.”
She would get frustrated with his antics, she said, but she couldn’t stay mad at him because he would do something funny.
“He just knew how to make people feel at ease, and if something needed to have a laugh, he would provide it,” she said. “I’m really gonna miss him.”
“He just always wanted to make light of every situation,” Jensen said, “and sometimes school wasn’t that way.”
Creamean left Jacksonville High School after his sophomore year and joined the Youth Challenge, a 22-week program sponsored by the Arkansas National Guard.
He graduated from the program and earned the spirit award before joining the Army in April 2003.
He was stationed at Fort Lewis in August, was sent to Mosul on Nov. 1, and earned his first purple heart in mid-December.
He returned to the United States on leave for his birthday on Feb. 24 and married his girlfriend, KaMisha Hickman, that day.
He earned his second purple heart for a head injury on March 3, the day he returned to active duty. Creamean, who had conducted more than 600 patrols, will receive a third purple heart posthumously for the explosion that took his life.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
EDITORIAL>> Missing Mr. Smith
Pining for the good old days of vigilant government is not always misplaced nostalgia.
For a half-century, you could count on the state of Arkansas to protect people, particularly the unwary, from loan sharks.
Arkansas had the toughest usury law in the land — even a mite over 10 percent interest was unlawful — and every time a lender would concoct a way to skirt the constitutional limit, the Arkansas Supreme Court would strike it down and order the lender to double the borrower’s money back.
That happened for the nearly 50 years that Justice George Rose Smith was on the court. He usually delivered the court’s stern opinion, which was that whatever clever name you called a lending fee, it was interest.
Justice Smith has been gone for more than a decade, and the state is a haven for predatory lenders. Payday lenders now fleece the desperate at interest rates of 300 percent or more.
Millions of dollars are sucked from the pockets of the working poor and out of the state.
The legislature authorized check cashers, gave them pretty much carte blanche and refuses to correct its mistake. The governor and attorneys general have for several years looked the other way. The Supreme Court, sans Justice Smith, temporizes. The state agency that is supposed to regulate the lenders shrugs and asks, what can we do?
It was at work again this week. Representatives of 20 groups appealed to the state Board of Collection Agencies to enforce the law and an admittedly fuzzy court mandate and require the surety company of a payday lender to pay a $191,000 judgment against the lender to customers whom it had fleeced. The executive director of the board did not think it had the authority under the law to do that.
The case is complicated — purposely and needlessly complicated, we think.
The circuit court in Pope County ordered the surety company for the lender, Russellville Check Express, to release its $50,000 surety to the people who sued the check company, which loaned people money at stratospheric rates in exchange for which people would turn over their next paycheck. The Supreme Court overturned the judgment because the plaintiffs had not first gone through the board of collection agencies to get relief.
So they were back before the board this week to do that. It was clear after a short hearing that it would be futile.
An attorney for the surety company, standing in for the absent check casher, said that the company did not have to pay because the court had not said flatly that the lender had violated the law. The board ruled unanimously against the customers two years ago and it seemed unimpressed by their argument this time. It will hold another hearing sometime.
Paul Kelly of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families urged the board to rule for the customers and make the company and its insurer pay a price for violating the usury law.
Afterward, he said he expected the board to rule for the lenders. “We just want them to sweat and know that people are watching them,” he said.
George Rose Smith is dead, the Supreme Court is changed, and the law has been weakened. But society seems to have changed, too. Government is no longer the tribune of the poor and of working people, as we see almost weekly in the decisions on workers’ compensation and the shrinking power of people to sue over corporate neglect and abuse.
Jesus was only having a bad day when he threw the moneychangers from the temple. What he surely meant to say was caveat emptor.
For a half-century, you could count on the state of Arkansas to protect people, particularly the unwary, from loan sharks.
Arkansas had the toughest usury law in the land — even a mite over 10 percent interest was unlawful — and every time a lender would concoct a way to skirt the constitutional limit, the Arkansas Supreme Court would strike it down and order the lender to double the borrower’s money back.
That happened for the nearly 50 years that Justice George Rose Smith was on the court. He usually delivered the court’s stern opinion, which was that whatever clever name you called a lending fee, it was interest.
Justice Smith has been gone for more than a decade, and the state is a haven for predatory lenders. Payday lenders now fleece the desperate at interest rates of 300 percent or more.
Millions of dollars are sucked from the pockets of the working poor and out of the state.
The legislature authorized check cashers, gave them pretty much carte blanche and refuses to correct its mistake. The governor and attorneys general have for several years looked the other way. The Supreme Court, sans Justice Smith, temporizes. The state agency that is supposed to regulate the lenders shrugs and asks, what can we do?
It was at work again this week. Representatives of 20 groups appealed to the state Board of Collection Agencies to enforce the law and an admittedly fuzzy court mandate and require the surety company of a payday lender to pay a $191,000 judgment against the lender to customers whom it had fleeced. The executive director of the board did not think it had the authority under the law to do that.
The case is complicated — purposely and needlessly complicated, we think.
The circuit court in Pope County ordered the surety company for the lender, Russellville Check Express, to release its $50,000 surety to the people who sued the check company, which loaned people money at stratospheric rates in exchange for which people would turn over their next paycheck. The Supreme Court overturned the judgment because the plaintiffs had not first gone through the board of collection agencies to get relief.
So they were back before the board this week to do that. It was clear after a short hearing that it would be futile.
An attorney for the surety company, standing in for the absent check casher, said that the company did not have to pay because the court had not said flatly that the lender had violated the law. The board ruled unanimously against the customers two years ago and it seemed unimpressed by their argument this time. It will hold another hearing sometime.
Paul Kelly of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families urged the board to rule for the customers and make the company and its insurer pay a price for violating the usury law.
Afterward, he said he expected the board to rule for the lenders. “We just want them to sweat and know that people are watching them,” he said.
George Rose Smith is dead, the Supreme Court is changed, and the law has been weakened. But society seems to have changed, too. Government is no longer the tribune of the poor and of working people, as we see almost weekly in the decisions on workers’ compensation and the shrinking power of people to sue over corporate neglect and abuse.
Jesus was only having a bad day when he threw the moneychangers from the temple. What he surely meant to say was caveat emptor.
FROM THE PUBLISHER>> Group to buy 200,000 acres to save woodpecker
There’s an abandoned railroad trestle bridge on a dirt road at the Dagmar Wildlife Management Area off Hwy. 70 just past Biscoe, where you can watch for birds before the weather gets hot and the mosquitoes want to eat you alive.
The dirt road is on the right, and to the left, there’s a display about the recently discovered ivory-billed woodpecker. If you go past that display on the left about five miles down a nearby dirt road along Bayou DeView, you’ll get close to where Gene Sparling of Hot Springs spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker on February 2004.
The ivory-billed was believed extinct until Sparling alerted the outside world that the elusive bird was alive in the Cache River Wildlife Refuge.
It is in this area and beyond that the Arkansas chapter of the Nature Conservancy hopes to buy 200,000 acres as part of a preservation plan for the ivory-bill, which was considered extinct until Sparling made his credible sighting. Volunteers with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have made several more sightings since Sparling’s discovery.
For three decades, the Nature Conservancy has helped preserve thousands of acres along the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge that probably saved the ivory-bill. The area could be the home to several other ivory-bills.
At the Big Woods Birding Festival in Clarendon last Saturday, Sparling was holding an ivory-billed woodpecker, just like the one he had spotted more than a year ago in the Bayou DeView near Brinkley.
But the coal-black creature in his hand was a stuffed bird that a collector had mounted back in the 1930s.
He was also holding a mounted pileated woodpecker, a more common bird that is sometimes mistaken for an ivory-bill. The pileated is smaller and its wing is all black on top, while the ivory bill has white on top of its wing. Both species have red crests, except for the female ivory-bill, whose head is black.
The man who spotted the elusive woodpecker is a shy outdoorsman who made an appearance at the Big Woods Birding Festival in Clarendon last Saturday and talked about how he spotted the bird on a February afternoon while he was taking it easy in his canoe.
"I sat my paddle down," he recalled. "It was a moment of contentment. I felt like one of the luckiest people in the world."
"At the end of the channel," he continued, "a long woodpecker headed toward me. I thought it was the biggest pileated I’ve ever seen. It became aware of me and dodged left toward a tree."
Sparling saw the bird’s white wings in flight, and as it perched near the base of the tree, he remembered that "the feathers on the lower portion of the wing were white-yellow on the tail."
"The bird made a jerky, odd motion," he continued. "It seemed animated. It made a quick jerk of the head. It bounced to the other side of the tree in typical woodpecker fashion. It continued its flight straight and direct, more so than a pileated."
"As the bird was sitting on the base of the tree, I thought of the ivory-bill," he said.
But then, sitting there in the bayou, he thought it couldn’t have been an ivory-bill. It supposed to be extinct, and when it was still around, it lived farther south in Louisiana, Texas and Florida.
"I didn’t know they ranged this far north," Sparling said.
But seeing the woodpecker’s white wings, he suddenly realized he had witnessed what was until then considered impossible: A dead species had made an appearance in the swamps of east Arkansas.
" If it wasn’t a pileated, it had to be an ivory-bill," he concluded.
He posted his discovery on a Web site, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology folks were soon in touch with him, and they hung out in the swamps for more than a year before they told the world about their amazing discovery.
Jay Harrod, a spokesman for the Arkansas Nature Conservancy, says preserving more land will ensure a spacious habitat for the bird, which thrives in southern swamp forests that have all been destroyed, except for the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas.
The real threat to the bird are not hunters but "the loss of habitat and the health and the health of the Cache and White Rivers," Harrod said.
But Scott Simon, who directs the state Nature Conservancy, warns against planned dredging of the White River, which could threaten the bird.
"The real threat to the ivory-billed woodpecker is hydraulic changes to the rivers, which serve as the lifeblood to this region," Simon says. "Higher water tables and periodic flooding made it possible for birds to survive."
What can the average person do to help preserve the ivory-billed woodpecker?
Act responsibly in the refuge and join the Nature Conservancy.
The dirt road is on the right, and to the left, there’s a display about the recently discovered ivory-billed woodpecker. If you go past that display on the left about five miles down a nearby dirt road along Bayou DeView, you’ll get close to where Gene Sparling of Hot Springs spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker on February 2004.
The ivory-billed was believed extinct until Sparling alerted the outside world that the elusive bird was alive in the Cache River Wildlife Refuge.
It is in this area and beyond that the Arkansas chapter of the Nature Conservancy hopes to buy 200,000 acres as part of a preservation plan for the ivory-bill, which was considered extinct until Sparling made his credible sighting. Volunteers with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have made several more sightings since Sparling’s discovery.
For three decades, the Nature Conservancy has helped preserve thousands of acres along the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge that probably saved the ivory-bill. The area could be the home to several other ivory-bills.
At the Big Woods Birding Festival in Clarendon last Saturday, Sparling was holding an ivory-billed woodpecker, just like the one he had spotted more than a year ago in the Bayou DeView near Brinkley.
But the coal-black creature in his hand was a stuffed bird that a collector had mounted back in the 1930s.
He was also holding a mounted pileated woodpecker, a more common bird that is sometimes mistaken for an ivory-bill. The pileated is smaller and its wing is all black on top, while the ivory bill has white on top of its wing. Both species have red crests, except for the female ivory-bill, whose head is black.
The man who spotted the elusive woodpecker is a shy outdoorsman who made an appearance at the Big Woods Birding Festival in Clarendon last Saturday and talked about how he spotted the bird on a February afternoon while he was taking it easy in his canoe.
"I sat my paddle down," he recalled. "It was a moment of contentment. I felt like one of the luckiest people in the world."
"At the end of the channel," he continued, "a long woodpecker headed toward me. I thought it was the biggest pileated I’ve ever seen. It became aware of me and dodged left toward a tree."
Sparling saw the bird’s white wings in flight, and as it perched near the base of the tree, he remembered that "the feathers on the lower portion of the wing were white-yellow on the tail."
"The bird made a jerky, odd motion," he continued. "It seemed animated. It made a quick jerk of the head. It bounced to the other side of the tree in typical woodpecker fashion. It continued its flight straight and direct, more so than a pileated."
"As the bird was sitting on the base of the tree, I thought of the ivory-bill," he said.
But then, sitting there in the bayou, he thought it couldn’t have been an ivory-bill. It supposed to be extinct, and when it was still around, it lived farther south in Louisiana, Texas and Florida.
"I didn’t know they ranged this far north," Sparling said.
But seeing the woodpecker’s white wings, he suddenly realized he had witnessed what was until then considered impossible: A dead species had made an appearance in the swamps of east Arkansas.
" If it wasn’t a pileated, it had to be an ivory-bill," he concluded.
He posted his discovery on a Web site, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology folks were soon in touch with him, and they hung out in the swamps for more than a year before they told the world about their amazing discovery.
Jay Harrod, a spokesman for the Arkansas Nature Conservancy, says preserving more land will ensure a spacious habitat for the bird, which thrives in southern swamp forests that have all been destroyed, except for the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas.
The real threat to the bird are not hunters but "the loss of habitat and the health and the health of the Cache and White Rivers," Harrod said.
But Scott Simon, who directs the state Nature Conservancy, warns against planned dredging of the White River, which could threaten the bird.
"The real threat to the ivory-billed woodpecker is hydraulic changes to the rivers, which serve as the lifeblood to this region," Simon says. "Higher water tables and periodic flooding made it possible for birds to survive."
What can the average person do to help preserve the ivory-billed woodpecker?
Act responsibly in the refuge and join the Nature Conservancy.
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