It’s all got to go. The silver punch bowls, crystal vases, antique furniture and a massive closet filled with Christmas decorations — everything will be reclaimed by its original owners or sold at auction.
SELF PORTRAIT
Kelly Phillips
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Aug. 23, 1978, McGehee
FAMILY: husband Tim; daughter Maddie, 8; and sons Hudson, 10, Liam, 5, and twins Aaron and Miles, 23 months
FAVORITE LEISURE ACTIVITY: I’m an avid reader. I’m normally reading a book and listening to a book at the same time. Right now I’m listening to the Jason Bourne series and I’m reading all the Sue Grafton A to Z mystery books. I’m on “R.”
MY FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORIES INCLUDE picnics on my aunt’s living room floor. We would have pickles, olives, crackers, cheese and Vienna sausages.
WHEN I’M NOT AT WORK I LIKE TO WEAR T-shirts and pajama pants.
MY FAVORITE ASPECT OF THE JUNIOR LEAGUE HOUSE IS the camaraderie that happens here. I really enjoy all of us coming together at the house.
I ALWAYS WANT MY CHILDREN TO REMEMBER that I always do the very best that I can do for them.
MY HUSBAND WOULD DESCRIBE ME AS encouraging and genuine.
TAKE ANYTHING BUT DON’T TAKE my bed. I love naps. I’d rather get up early and take a nap than sleep late.
MY SHORTCOMING IS that I do not like a mess. Nothing will get me through the roof faster than piles of junk just sitting around.
TRADEMARK SAYING: “You need to get your act together.”
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: determined
The Junior League of North Little Rock is leaving the E.O. Manees House, the 1895 Victorian-era structure in Argenta that has been its home since 1962. The group has been leasing it from the city, but a neighboring property owner made officials an offer they couldn’t refuse. The league has until Dec. 15 to vacate.
As a member, Kelly Phillips knew the sale was a possibility. She got the confirmation moments after the league’s annual banquet in late April, where she was installed as president.
“I wasn’t president 30 minutes before I was told this was happening,” says Phillips, 38. “It was done.”
Sustaining member and past president LaNissa Gilmore recalls being blindsided by the news. Phillips, who was trained by Gilmore, was left with the unenviable task of telling the current membership and hundreds of sustaining members.
“I can’t imagine being in her shoes right now,” Gilmore says. “It’s a pretty delicate matter.”
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the house boasts dramatic staircases, fireplaces, a grand piano, courtyard and a large kitchen. The Junior League didn’t have the $430,000 necessary to buy it. Nor can it expect a sustaining member to swoop in at the last minute to save the day.
From about 1976 to 2010, the Junior League and the city made attempts at restoring the building using public and private funds and historic preservation grants. North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith estimates that upward of $150,000 was spent on the house in the last decade. The league holds its own functions there but also has rented it out for special events, weddings and receptions.
“I know the financial situation we are in, and this house, while fantastic, is a financial burden,” Phillips says — especially for a group suffering a gradual decline in membership.
But this tall, tough broad from Pickens is tackling adversity with the same tenacity she brings to bear as a public accountant and as a mother of five — including a set of 23-month-old twins.
“If we can all be together and make the best of the situation, we can certainly be viable, we can still grow, we can still impact our community and help the people who need it.”
Smith — who met his wife at a Junior League function — appreciates Phillips’ attitude regarding the sale.
“She approached this with an open mind and realized, as sad as it was, that things were going to change, and that it was best for the city,” Smith says.
The door is closing on the Junior League building — not the Junior League, she says. It’s the people, not the building, that matter.
“If we can all be together and make the best of the situation, we can certainly be viable, we can still grow, we can still impact our community and help the people who need it,” she says.
The group’s last big bash at the house is the Farewell Mingle at Manees, slated for 7-10 p.m. Friday. The night of dinner, drinks, dancing and a silent auction benefits the Junior League’s ongoing efforts on behalf of early childhood literacy.
BIG TIME IN A SMALL TOWN
The former Kelly Hardin claims she had “a largely uneventful childhood,” although it seems anything but that.
Born in McGehee, she was 5 when her father, also an accountant, took a job as a farm accountant/partner in the R.A. Pickens & Son farm corporation and moved the family to the unincorporated Pickens community. The southeastern Arkansas farm town, three miles from Dumas, provided a rustic backdrop for a youth well spent.
Phillips rode bikes and participated in small-town shenanigans, like throwing pumpkins or Easter eggs off a bridge. “There was just all kinds of stuff going on there,” she says.
The general store across the street from their home also served as a schoolbus stop, a post office, a place where farmers classed cotton and a polling place.
Phillips’ father, Robert Hardin, worked the polls and deciphered ballots for those who couldn’t read. Phillips tooled around town in an ancient Chevrolet Blazer once owned by the doctor who delivered her.
After high school, many of her friends darted off to the University of Arkansas, but Phillips proudly made her way to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. She says memories of her time in the UCA honors college are among her best. She took away more than a degree in accounting with a minor in honors interdisciplinary studies — she also met her future husband, Tim, and made many lifelong friends, a group of whom still vacation together.
“I’m not sure I could even get in anymore with the caliber of students they recruit now, but I was lucky, and I loved UCA and the honors college,” Phillips says. She felt well-prepared for the graduate program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where Tim had moved to pursue a doctorate in materials engineering.
Phillips earned her master’s of accounting from Birmingham in 2001, and the couple married in 2003, the same year she passed the CPA exam.
Tim says he was drawn by her independence.
“I knew that she could take care of herself. She doesn’t need me, and therefore doesn’t have to be with me. She’s with me because she wants to be with me,” says the senior engineer at Southwest Power Pool.
His 6-foot-tall wife isn’t at all bashful about showing tattoos on her back, ankle and wrist. All have sentimental meaning. She’s less apt to point out that she is a huge Barry Manilow fan — a fact Tim readily shares about her.
Her first full-time accounting job was as controller for Corporate America Credit Union. Then she returned to the regional firm of Pearce, Bevill, Leesburg, Moore P.C., where she had been a summer intern.
As she rose through the ranks of public accounting, the 90-plus-hour workweeks began to wear on her. Her biological clock was ticking. Growing up, Phillips was a self-described “world-class baby sitter,” but her mother, Barbara, had advised her: “Don’t get married, and don’t have kids.”
“That was something she always told me, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’” recalls Phillips, whose parents divorced when she was in college. “She got married young, and what I think she was really saying was, ‘Wait until you’re really ready for this.’”
Kelly and Tim were lukewarm on the idea of children until a little girl from their church nursery in Alabama stole their hearts. Once their first-born, Hudson, came along, they decided they needed to move back to Arkansas, where they had the support of their family.
The couple eventually rounded out their clan with a daughter, Maddie, 8; another son, Liam, 5; and a set of twin sons, Aaron and Miles, who will be 2 next month.
The couple split parenting and household duties.
“We’d probably have to take some very fine measurements to find out who does more laundry, more dishes or cooking,” the husband says. “We just kind of double up and tackle everything together.” He says Kelly goes to great lengths to make sure the holidays are done up right and that they’re memorable for the kids.
FINDING HER WORK HOME
Phillips thought she’d have less stress and be able to manage her schedule better with a job in internal accounting, but a stint in the corporate tax department at Windstream proved “disastrous,” she says. She landed back in public accounting as supervisor for Bell & Co. in North Little Rock, where she has worked since 2009.
“It was like that office had been waiting on me to show up and be in it,” she says. “It was the best fit. I came in, they gave me work to do, I did it and they were pleased with it.” Phillips is now a principal in the firm, which has about 40 employees between Conway and North Little Rock.
“From day one, she fit our firm like a glove on a hand,” says Richard Bell, founder and majority owner. Phillips mainly reviews tax returns that go through the office and handles all compliance work in the tax department. Bell says her excellent technical skills are matched by a caring demeanor.
“There’s a lot of nurturing that’s involved with the small-business clients that we have, and I think she definitely has that trait,” he says. Most days, some combination of kids, dogs or both can be found at the Bell & Co. offices, says Bell, noting young Liam walking past his door. He credits his sister, Nell Sterling, for creating a productive environment for working moms.
“The maternal instincts kick in, and they take care of their clients like they do their children,” he says. “Nell started it, and Kelly’s taken it to a new level.”
He says Phillips sets an example of work-life balance for the other young professionals — women and men — in the office.
Sterling started in the business in 1986 and remembers being turned down by big firms because she was over 25 years old and she was married.
“At that time, women didn’t work in the accounting field,” Sterling says. “I always told them, I’m just as smart as these guys … you’re missing out on a lot of talent.” She wanted women to know it was possible to have a career and a family.
“Kelly’s living proof of that,” Sterling says. “If you go by the good-old boy rules of back then, nobody would have even considered her.”
Says Phillips: “Every time I try something other than public accounting, I find myself out of sorts, and come back to what I love to do. The clients, the constant changing tax landscape, the work family are all so important to me.”
SURROUNDED BY KIN
The Phillipses didn’t name any of their children until the babies were born. “Tim and I have to look at them for a couple of days. The records people would come around and say they need a name, and we would say, ‘We don’t have it. When we do, we’ll tell you.’”
Most of her immediate family — with the exception of a brother, J.D. Hardin, and his family in Georgia — live within close proximity in Sherwood. Tim’s parents and her father live nearby in North Little Rock. Her mom and husband reside in Malvern. Kelly’s younger sister, Haley Watson, and her husband, Antwan, also have five children. One recent night, nine of the 10 Phillips/ Watson offspring enjoyed a sleepover at the Phillipses’ house.
The fuller the house, the better, Kelly Phillips says.
“I enjoy having all my family around me,” she says. “It makes your children’s lives more enriched because they are around these people who love them unconditionally. And that’s important.”
When the twins were born, she cut back on her community service work, which had been extensive. She sits on the boards of the Arkansas Arts Center and the Accounting and Financial Women’s Alliance in central Arkansas, but her position as president of the Junior League of North Little Rock is her “main deal.”
Tim’s too, it seems. He has been to the Junior League house to replace faucets and work on its stubborn air conditioning system, among other chores.
Once the city closes on the sale of the house, $36,000 of the proceeds will go to the league to help fund a new meeting place. Phillips says there are no immediate plans for the Junior League to obtain another home of its own, although they’ve pinpointed some options for temporary space through spring.
“If we had a choice, we would have liked a year to work on a plan and implement it,” Phillips says.
They have just a month left in a house still full of decades worth of memories.