HOPE -- Guides at the President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home, open again after a Christmas Day arson that kept it closed for seven months, field all sorts of questions by tourists from around the world.
"I've been asked whether Monica Lewinsky ever stayed here," said Aaron Charles as he recently showed visitors around the white two-story house with green trim. Of course, Lewinsky's illicit intimacy with the 42nd president occurred in a much larger white house, nearly a half-century after the tyke spent his first four years at this residence.
Charles and other National Park Service rangers also occasionally have to explain that the frame house wasn't actually the site of Clinton's birth. That happened Aug. 19, 1946, at Julia Chester Hospital in this southwest Arkansas town. The home belonged to Clinton's maternal grandparents. They shared it with little Billy and his recently widowed mother, Virginia Blythe, until she remarried in 1950 and moved elsewhere in Hope with son and new husband, Roger Clinton.
The Dec. 25 predawn fire, ruled as arson by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was set at ground level in the back of the house. It remains an unsolved crime. Flames damaged one room on each of the first and second floors, while smoke and soot spread throughout the building. Repair work dealt with fire and water damage, as well as the cleaning of smoke-permeated furnishings.
Two pieces of furniture, a gold-patterned sofa and an oval coffee table, were in the house when the young Clinton lived there. The rest of the period furnishings, many donated by Hope residents, reflect the life of ordinary Americans just after World War II.
Perched in the living room on a huge console radio is a trophy Billy won in a local cutest-baby contest, along with a photograph of the toddler, who clearly was a charmer even then. Another photo shows him with a birthday cake the day he turned 3. In yet another, taken on Mother's Day, he is sitting on a pony while wearing chaps and a cowboy hat.
Whether a visitor loves or loathes the former president, or falls somewhere in between, a tour of the home serves as a reminder that he was born to modest means -- like Abraham Lincoln or Barack Obama, unlike John F. Kennedy or George W. Bush.
In his My Life memoir, published 12 years ago, Clinton evoked the Hervey Street house as "the place I associated with awakening to life -- to the smells of country food, to buttermilk churns, ice-cream makers, washboards and clotheslines; to my Dick and Jane readers, my first toys, including a length of chain I prized above them all; to the strange voices talking over our 'party line' telephone."
Guide Charles said it's premature to speculate what exhibits might be added to the home's next-door visitor center should Hillary Clinton be elected president. In that vein, tourists may be amused to see a display of campaign buttons from her husband's two victorious presidential campaigns.
One 1996 button emblazoned with her picture urges voters to "re-elect Hillary's husband." Should she win the White House in November, "first husband" might be a suitable sobriquet for Bill.
The President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home, 117 S. Hervey St., Hope, is open 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. daily. Admission is free. For details, call (870) 777-4455 or visit nps.gov/wicl.
More Clinton material is displayed at the Hope Visitor Center & Clinton Museum, 100 E. Division St. Call (870) 722-2580 or visit hopearkansas.net.
Style on 08/30/2016