Book on Arkansas curiosities includes entries on Abraham Lincoln in state, goldfish production, 'sand glaciers' and more

Imagine a book about Arkansas past and present that makes only passing mention at most of David O. Dodd, Orville Faubus, Daisy Bates, Frank Broyles, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Grisham, Tom Cotton, or Mike Huckabee and daughter Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Instead, in Joe David Rice's Arkansas Backstories: Quirks, Characters, and Curiosities of the Natural State, you'll come upon these revelations:

• Abraham Lincoln may have worked for a little while in Arkansas around 1830, cutting wood on a Delta plantation owned by William D. Ferguson, first sheriff of Crittenden County and owner of 40 slaves.

• John James Audubon, the legendary artist of bird portraits, spent time in the Arkansas Delta in 1820 and 1822, killing avian species as models for his paintings. He and his companions shot hundreds of birds some days, including the now vanished ivory-billed woodpecker.

• Arkansas ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for production of goldfish. Pool Fisheries near Lonoke breeds about 80 percent of the goldfish sold in pet stores across the nation.

• The first sitting member of the U.S. Congress to be assassinated was an Arkansan, Rep. James M. Hinds, shot to death at age 34 in Monroe County during Reconstruction in 1868 by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

• Jellyfish can be found in Lake Ouachita and other Natural State bodies of water. Roughly bell-shaped and about the size of a thimble, with no dangerous stingers, this fresh-water invertebrate can best be observed in late summer.

• Arkansas has glaciers, though not the icy kind likely to melt soon. They're what geologists call "sand glaciers" -- expanses of boulders sprawling from near hilltops and creeping ever so slowly toward ravines below.

• The proprietors of the former IQ Zoo in Hot Springs did classified work for the Central Intelligence Agency and other federal bodies during the Cold War, experimenting with animal behavior that might have been of military use.

Arkansas Backstories, the first of two volumes being published by Butler Center Books, is list-priced at $39.95. Its 90 pithy chapters are arranged alphabetically from A-to-L for munching like a bowl of salted peanuts. The M-to-Z second helping is scheduled to appear in the spring.

The aim, according to author Rice, is a compilation "that informs, entertains and delights its readers while also eliciting 'I didn't know that!' reactions from even the most accomplished students and supporters of the state."

Born 66 years ago in Paragould and brought up in Melbourne, Jonesboro and Little Rock, Rice retired some months ago after three decades as the state's tourism director, having worked under five governors for the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism.

Following graduation from Little Rock's McClellan High School and the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, he earned a master's degree in environmental planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Early in his work, he went underground by owning Sherfield Cave, near Boxley in Newton County. The cavern, second longest in Arkansas for miles of passages, houses the state's largest winter population of Indiana bats. It is no longer open to the public. He also operated Buffalo Outdoor Center at Silver Hill in partnership with Mike Mills. Then came his 30 years with Parks & Tourism.

Rice cites as his inspiration for writing Arkansas Backstories the late Peter Mayle, "an Englishman who wrote a series of light-hearted narratives and mysteries set in southern France. One of his latter books was Provence A-Z. He called it 'a collection of the most interesting, curious, delicious or downright fun' subjects in his favorite part of France. I felt someone should do something similar for Arkansas, and finally realized I could be that someone."

. . .

About eight years ago, Rice "started compiling an alphabetical list of the lesser-known but interesting aspects of Arkansas. It topped out at more than 300 entries, and I then began the difficult task of paring it down to a more manageable number."

His finished manuscript still totaled around 160 subjects and stretched for 115,000 words plus dozens of illustrations. Rod Lorenzen, who then worked at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, suggested the split into two volumes. That was necessary even after Rice had done his winnowing.

"Deciding what to include or exclude wasn't easy," Rice says. "What I tried to do was pick topics such as jellyfish and glaciers that most Arkansans don't know occur in the state, plus those such as armadillos, chiggers and kudzu that we usually don't know that much about."

Some omissions happened for lack of evidence. According to Rice, "I'd heard that Edgar Allen Poe had lived in Camden for a short time while working on a local newspaper, but was unable to find anything to substantiate that. And I'd seen an account that Joseph P. Kennedy had been involved in producing and shipping liquor to Chicago from Hot Springs during Prohibition, but again couldn't locate source material."

Familiar names are featured in some chapters of Arkansas Backstories. As the author explains, "I expanded on the stories of people like Stephen F. Austin, Bear Bryant, Elvis Presley and Helen Gurley Brown to showcase their ties to the state."

Presley's performance in March 1955 in El Dorado could have been a debacle, by the book's account. When the young singer was introduced, "a resounding chorus of boos and catcalls and a barrage of thrown objects immediately greeted Elvis and his band. ... The audience included a tough crowd of roughnecks, tough-necks and lumberjacks who resented Elvis' pretty-boy looks and the local girls' infatuation with the rising star."

Undeterred, "Elvis kept singing and gyrating, and the raucous fans soon ran out of anything to throw. By the time the concert was over, Elvis had converted most of those in the audience. He spent the night in downtown El Dorado's Garrett Hotel (now gone) and apparently wasn't alone."

It seems that a high-school coed "showed up for class the next morning, announced that she and Elvis were now engaged, and proudly displayed a gaudy piece of costume jewelry on the ring finger of her left hand."

The book's three pages on the IQ Zoo, illustrated with a photograph of a raccoon about to dunk a scaled-down basketball through a hoop, read almost like the nugget of a spy thriller. A Hot Springs tourist attraction from 1955 to 1990, the zoo was run by Marian and Keller Breland as part of their Animal Behavior Enterprises, recognized widely as a premier animal training company.

Rice explains that the Brelands had "contracts with nearly every branch of the U.S. military. Although much of their defense work remains classified, the known projects involved training pigeons to spot snipers, take photographs and carry packages of confidential data; dolphins to track boats; gulls to locate downed airmen; and sea lions to recover practice torpedoes."

While doing top-secret work for the CIA, the Brelands built sets "replicating foreign towns where they trained animals to perform certain data-gathering tasks."

The IQ Zoo's chicken that could beat human visitors at tic-tac-toe evidently was not a part of any secret government work.

. . .

Living in Little Rock with wife Tracey, Rice is working on a book about the New Madrid earthquakes of the early 19th century. He also has written a couple of mystery novels that he hopes to have published.

Meanwhile, his M-to-Z volume of Arkansas Backstories is ready to be printed. He offers these sneak previews for several of its topics:

• Ouachita National Park. "Chances are good you've never heard of the park," Rice writes. That's "largely due to the fact that the place doesn't exist. But it came oh so terribly close." Proposed by an Arkansas congressman in 1927, the Ouachita park bill passed the U.S. House and Senate, but died after President Calvin Coolidge failed to sign it on his last day in office in 1929. It was never revived.

• Porches. In this forthcoming chapter, Rice laments the fact that front porches are an endangered species, due to air conditioning and other factors. He still prefers "the old-style home where friends and family can gather on the porch for watermelon and homemade ice cream." Look for porches, he suggests, in "neighborhoods where homes were built in the mid-1940s or earlier."

• Zack. One of only two U.S. towns with this alphabet-bottom name, Zack is located in Searcy County. It was the birthplace of James Elton Baker, an early country-music star who performed as Elton Britt and was known as "the Yodeling Cowboy." His 1942 hit single "There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere" gained him an invitation from Franklin D. Roosevelt to play at the White House.

So stay tuned. And be prepared to repeat, "I didn't know that!"

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"Arkansas Backstories' by Joe David Rice

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Joe David Rice is the author of Arkansas Backstories.

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

This ivory billed woodpecker photo was taken in 1937 by James L. Tanner.

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

Did Edgar Allen Poe work for a short time at a Camden newspaper?

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

This handbill helped advertise the 1955 opening of the IQ Zoo in Hot Springs.

Style on 12/02/2018

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