PAPER TRAILS: Death of surgeon from Arkansas a mystery; Fayetteville singer on 'America's Got Talent'

SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS: Little Rock native Dr. Frank Buddy McCutcheon Jr. was a 64-year-old plastic and reconstructive surgeon who worked in Arkansas until 1999, when he moved to North Carolina. The plastic surgeon who practiced at his business, Cosmetic Surgery of Asheville, was found dead in his Arden home in the early morning hours of July 16 by his wife Brenda, reports the Citizen-Times in Asheville. According to a Tuesday article in the local paper, the case, called a “suspicious death investigation” by investigators, remained open.

Brenda McCutcheon told the dispatcher that someone — she said she didn’t know who — had come into the home and shot her husband while she was sleeping upstairs and he was on the first floor on a couch in the TV room, where he often slept because he snored. She added that her husband had not had any arguments with anyone and that there were no suspicious vehicles around the house. But, she told the dispatcher during the 911 call, that her husband never locked the back door and it was open.

An Arkansas service for McCutcheon will be held in Fayetteville at an unknown date and time, according to Groce Funeral Home. He is survived by his wife and several family members.

ARKIES GOT TALENT: Madison Watkins of Fayetteville got pretty far along in the process of the reality talent show, America’s Got Talent, which she appeared on this past Tuesday. Alas, she was eliminated on that episode and won’t be advancing to the live shows.

WHAT’S COOKIN’: John Munday, the head chef at Samantha’s Tap Room & Wood Grill in Little Rock, has been chosen to compete in the national Great American Seafood Cook-Off on Aug. 6. Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin chose Munday and the restaurant’s sous chef, Marshall Smith, to represent the Natural State in Louisiana’s 13th annual Great American Seafood Cook-Off to be held in New Orleans.

LITERARY FOOTNOTES:

Bob Reising, author of “Revisiting Ernest Hemingway and Baseball: Sanity, Success, and Suicide” in the June 2016 edition of The Journal of American Culture, tells Paper Trails that, in addition to writing A Farewell to Arms while he was married to Pauline Pfeiffer between 1927 and 1940, Reising believes Hemingway also did some of his earliest thinking and planning for his novella The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952, during that time, possibly while visiting his in-laws’ home in Piggott.

“The year that is invariably cited for ‘starting’ The Old Man and the Sea — 1936 — is not accurate,” he says, adding that he believes Hemingway had Joe DiMaggio [a central character in the book] and The Old Man and the Sea in his mind, and was writing plans for it as early as the early 1930s.

“Pauline obviously played a role in her husband’s earliest thinking and planning of The Old Man and the Sea,” says Reising, retired supervisor of the Academic Success Center at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

Contact Linda S. Haymes at

(501) 399-3636 or lhaymes@arkansasonline.com

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