REX NELSON: Along U.S. Highway 82

It was a dream assignment two decades ago. I was the political editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in the spring of 1996, and President Bill Clinton was running for re-election. My idea: Take U.S. 82 from the Texas-Arkansas line at Texarkana and head east until the highway runs into the Atlantic Ocean at Brunswick, Ga. Photographer John Sykes would accompany me. We would stop in small-town restaurants, interview people along the way and then produce a multipart series on the political pulse of the South in that presidential election year.

Numerous writers and photographers have taken U.S. 50 across the middle of America through the years and recorded what they found. But I had never seen coverage of trips along U.S. 82, which cuts through the heart of the Deep South. The attraction of the route was this: We would go all the way across Arkansas without passing through Little Rock, across Mississippi without passing through Jackson, across Alabama without passing through Birmingham and across Georgia without passing through Atlanta. In other words, we wouldn't be talking to the usual suspects in the big cities. John and I headed to Texarkana on Easter Sunday, spent the night and began our trip with breakfast at the King's Row Inn on State Line Avenue with then state-Sen. Wayne Dowd.

Dowd died last month at 74 while attending the Arkansas Bar Association summer meeting in Hot Springs. I'll never forget the sight of Dowd as we walked into breakfast that Monday morning in 1996. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. He looked up and said: "Y'all look like a couple of college frat boys on spring break." His Senate biography noted that "the gravelly tone of his voice was not a reflection of any gruffness in his personality but of his habit of smoking cigarettes. The consensus among legislative colleagues, lobbyists, bureaucrats and Capitol observers was that Sen. Wayne Dowd was one of the big dogs."

We made our way to Greenville, Miss., that first day and wound up at the home of Clarke Reed, a longtime Republican activist who became famous for helping ensure the nomination of President Gerald Ford at the 1976 Republican National Convention. Reed is the father of well-known writer Julia Reed. A long visit at the Reed home was followed by dinner at the original Doe's Eat Place, complete with tamales and steaks. Another highlight of the week was an interview in Montgomery with former Alabama Gov. George Wallace. Wallace was almost deaf and blind by the time of our interview, which necessitated writing out questions in large block letters on a legal pad. We conducted the interview in the Lurleen Wallace State Office Building, having walked there after a visit to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been the pastor. It was a day heavy with history.

Following the Wallace interview, we visited Alabama Gov. Fob James in his office. James served two terms, from 1979-83 and from 1995-99. He made his fortune by founding in 1962 Diversified Products Inc., which, in essence, invented the plastic barbell. My father, a sporting goods dealer, was one of the company's best customers. As it turned out, James and my father knew each other.

I thought about that 1996 trip as Paul Austin of the Arkansas Humanities Council and I headed west last month on U.S. 82 from Magnolia to Texarkana. We had attended the Purple Hull Pea Festival at Emerson and were determined to stop at the original Burge's in Lewisville for a cherry limeade before heading to Garland on the banks of the Red River for a catfish dinner. The high-water mark for Lafayette County as far as population came in the 1930 census when it had 16,934 residents. By the 2010 census, the county was down to 7,645 residents. About 1,300 of the remaining residents live in the county seat of Lewisville. Downtown Lewisville is still filled with brick buildings constructed when the cotton, timber, oil and gas industries were going strong in the early 1900s. Many of those buildings are now empty.

Burge's thrives despite the county's population losses. Alden Burge moved to Lewisville from Shreveport in 1953 to work in the oil business. He smoked turkeys in a backyard smokehouse on the weekends. On Friday nights in the fall when there were home football games, he would sell barbecued chickens, baked beans and slaw. In 1962, Burge purchased a dairy bar near where Arkansas 29 intersects with U.S. 82. Barbecue, burgers and ice cream were on the menu. Barbecued goat, peppermint ice cream and even fireworks were sold for the Fourth of July. In 1977, a location was opened in the Heights neighborhood of Little Rock. It's no longer owned by the Burge family but remains popular.

Our next step was Garland (sometimes called Garland City). The community is along the Red River after crossing from Lafayette into Miller County. The town of 242 residents often is described as the Catfish Capital of Arkansas due to the presence of two popular restaurants, Doc's Fish & Steak House and West Shore. Some form of Doc's has been around since 1969, when Ham's Restaurant opened. West Shore opened in 2004. It was devastated by a flood last year but reopened earlier this year. People from southwest Arkansas, east Texas, north Louisiana and even southeast Oklahoma pour into Garland on Friday and Saturday nights for catfish. Both restaurants were full the night we were there.

Twenty years after that first road trip, U.S. 82 still has its charms.

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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate community relations for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial on 07/13/2016

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