In Arkansas, 1980 was a prodigious news year. It would have been so if the Titan II disaster were the only event of great consequence. There were at least three others.
The first was in the spring, as a result of the Mariel Boatlift -- Mariel being a harbor in Cuba. When 10,000 Cubans tried to gain asylum at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, the Cuban government said that anyone who wanted to leave the island could.
An estimated 125,000 Cubans immigrated to the United States. Some of the immigrants came out of Cuba's prisons and mental institutions.
Fort Chaffee, near Fort Smith, had a few years earlier housed refugees from Southeast Asia. Now came the Cubans, who turned out to be a somewhat less agreeable population.
On May 9, the first planeload of Cubans arrived at Fort Smith Municipal Airport. The 128 men in their late 20s and early 30s were greeted by military personnel, Arkansas State Police and the press.
A protester dressed in a Ku Klux Klan costume got through airport security. "Don't let those Cubans into Arkansas," he shouted. "They're all scum."
Around May 18, Fort Chaffee reached its maximum of 20,000 refugees. They were coming in faster than expected, one Army officer said. "It's a dynamic, growing situation. It's a mess."
Conditions deteriorated by the end of the month. The refugees were frustrated, hot and bored. At one point, 300 left the post and walked through the community of Jenny Lind. Security, once casual, had grown to a small army of men with guns and nightsticks.
It came to a head June 1 with two disturbances. In the first, dozens of refugees left through the main gate. State Police and soldiers herded them back inside. The second disturbance, described by observers as a riot, involved more than 1,000 Cubans.
Sixty-two people -- Cubans, soldiers and police -- were injured. Fires were set inside the post. Even some members of the press were attacked.
Gov. Bill Clinton rushed to the scene, put the Arkansas National Guard on alert, and asked the federal government for more help. Eventually the Cubans were resettled elsewhere.
TOO HOT
Next up was a heat wave that lasted from June 22 through Sept. 17, a space of 88 days. On 41 of those days, the recorded temperature in Little Rock surpassed 100 degrees.
The deaths of 153 Arkansans were blamed on the heat wave.
'HI, I'M FRANK WHITE'
The final shocker of 1980 was in November's general election.
Clinton had been damaged politically by the Cubans, and by his support of an increase in the cost of licensing a vehicle.
Hence his opponent's slogan: "Cubans and car tags," usually punctuated with an angry exclamation point. Clinton was in his first term as governor, having previously been attorney general.
Terms for constitutional officers at the time were two years. It was an unusual political event when a governor wasn't elected for a second term.
The unusual happened Nov. 4. Frank White, a banker running for office for the first time, beat Clinton. Even more remarkable, White was a Republican in the era of Yellow Dog Democrats -- people who would vote for a yellow dog before they'd vote for a Republican.
A news story in the Arkansas Democrat called White's win "astounding." Hyperbole, it was not.
The Yellow Dogs reverted to form two years later. Clinton beat White in the rematch.
ActiveStyle on 09/21/2015