Roy Rogers, meet Dale Evans. Some of us can still hear them singing on the flickering black-and-white movie screen of the Saturday matinees at our neighborhood movie theater during our anything-but-wasted childhood. Wasn't there a time when every boy wanted to be a cowboy when he grew up, and every girl a cowboy's sweetheart? But that was before women's lib, political correctness and all the other fashionable fads that followed them over the years and decades since. But in our memories they never change up there on the silver screen.
So it was only to be expected that Pulaski County, the state's largest, would adopt the western look for its sheriff's deputies. What's more, as an extra added bonus, as it used to say on the cereal boxes, its perfectly named sheriff, Doc Holladay, says his deputies won't have to spend a dime on the fancy get-up; the money will come out of their clothing allotment.
If all this hubbub over uniforms leaves you as unmoved as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind ("Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"), then it shouldn't. Because uniforms matter--whether they're the scrubs worn by aspiring doctors, the fatigues complete with insignia that military officers wear, the nun's habit of Little Sisters of the Poor, or sheriff's deputies. Wear those new/old uniforms with pride out in the country, deputies. Lest you forget, they're also a handsome complement to the starchy-crisp uniforms of the cops in town.
Think of Pulaski County, like the state of Arkansas itself, as a giant jigsaw puzzle lacking only one piece to be complete. The county, like the state, is where the West begins, or is it where the East ends? It's also where North and South meet, as in the Ozark uplands just short of the Missouri border or the rolling hills of southwest Arkansas around Texarkana--not to mention the ever fecund Delta along the state's eastern borders. Put all that together and you've got this small, wonderful state.
There are always going to be changes--for good or ill--in our fashions. Some will be revivals of the past, others futuristic enough to make Buck Rogers, ray gun and all, look old-fashioned--as indeed he has become with the passage of time. It's hard to top the look of the Roaring Twenties, complete with headbands and bobbed hair, but there will always those who try. There will also be those who decry every change as proof of our decadence. Don't be one of them. Keep up with the times or fight them, but don't pretend they--or their uniforms--don't matter.
Editorial on 04/01/2016