Let's have a bit of gossip.
One hundred years ago (on Sept. 28, 1920), the Arkansas Gazette reported an incident that appears to explain, at least in part, why a North Little Rock couple was ejected by their Baptist church.
Picture an outdoors scene beside a little stream, with a Methodist church not far off. (That church might have been far away from the stream, I don't know, just join me in imagination.)
We are in Pulaski County at Levy, which since 1946 has been a big residential and commercial neighborhood of North Little Rock but in 1920 was much more rural. It grew out of a drovers' campground northwest of Argenta beside the road to Fort Smith. The farmers and drovers were served by a Jewish merchant's general store.
That pioneering storekeeper was Ernest Stanley, and in 1905 he secured a post office for the settlement and named it after another merchant, Morris Levy.
According to historian Cary Bradburn's essay in the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the story goes that Levy gave Stanley $50 and credit to open his store: "Walter Stanley, a grocer and one of Ernest's brothers, said the community would have been called Stanley if that name had not already existed elsewhere."
No offense to anyone named Levy, but I'm a little sad North Little Rock lost a chance to have a big neighborhood named Stanley. We could have had headlines like "Lions Club to help resurrect Stanley Day" or ... hmm. Turns out, the archives do not include headlines that mention Levy in contexts other than the long-ago annual celebration of Levy Day. There are plenty of stories about events that happened in Levy and houses for sale there, but the headlines name-check North Little Rock.
Ernest had other bothers who started a hardware business, and with a druggist and grocer, there you had (eventually) the greater Levy business district.
But in 1917 Levy incorporated. Bradburn says Levy had its own government, a mayor and five aldermen and a city recorder. The first mayor was Ernest's brother William F. "Flake" Stanley. By then there were two grammar schools. The town boundaries were Thomas Cemetery and (today's) 38th Street to the north, Pershing Boulevard to the south, Division Street on the west and Orange Street on the east.
Streets were dirt and the speed limit was 10 mph.
Back to our little scene with the creek and the church.
Methodists held a baptism in the stream on a Sunday afternoon. Following that baptism, a fist fight occurred in which R.E. Sutton inflicted a black eye upon the pastor of the Baptist church at Levy, the Rev. Mr. Jones.
Deputy Constable Hardcastle responded to the scene or, possibly, was on the scene or, possibly, tracked down the principals after reports reached him about the black eye. We're talking about a small town.
Hardcastle arrested Sutton. On Monday morning, Hardcastle testified in the municipal court of Judge J.F. Wills that Sutton and his wife had been dismissed from the Baptist congregation at Levy.
When Mr. Jones and Mr. Sutton met near the stream where the Methodist church had just concluded a baptizing, Mr. Jones offered to shake hands with Mr. Sutton. Instead, Mr. Sutton, it is said, took a wallop at the divine.
The Rev. Mr. Jones said he did not want to see Sutton prosecuted. Sutton pleaded guilty and Wills fined him $1 and court costs.
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Speaking of big-town life, that Sept. 28 Gazette also reported (atop Page 1) that a "dancing fool" had been spotted in Little Rock on Frazier Pike.
Unfamiliar with dancing fools, I overthought and went searching through histories of 14th- and 15th-century illuminated manuscripts (for instance, see this one ... or don't; it's a tedious read). Tiny jesters and fools in handwritten and hand-decorated Scriptures are interpreted as emblems of madness or inanity representing the opposite of the godly power of kings, with whom fools typically were associated.
But I should have thought immediately about entertainment.
The dancing fool was a Vaudeville trope along with the sweet damsel and the race track bear. Physical comics like Lew Lubin and Thomas Patricola played dancing fools or "nuts" by capering gymnastically, teasing the audience, lifting damsels' skirts and doing pratfalls. And Big Time Vaudeville came regularly to the Majestic Theatre in Little Rock.
Also in the area in summer 1920, a five-reel, comical moving picture titled "The Dancing Fool" starred heartthrob Wallace Reid. That movie played in Hot Springs in July and later came to Camp Pike. Judging from an ad July 14, 1920, in The Sentinel Record, Reid played Sylvester "Ves" Tibble, a youth from Hicksville who earns $6 a week minding his uncle's sleepy jug business in New York but on the side secretly is a fancy dancer in a jazz cabaret, earning $200 a week and the love of a wonderful girl, "until one night ..."
But was the so-called dancing fool who was spotted on Frazier Pike 100 years ago an entertainer ... or a criminal?
Reports from residents southwest of the city reached the police, who decided that someone was trying to make Black people there worry that the dancer was the ghost of a spiritualist who had been killed on Frazier Pike three years before. So Deputies W.F. Silbeck and Clifton Evans drove about a mile from town along the pike, in the morning.
An agile young white man suddenly appeared in the middle of the road 100 yards in front of them. After giving a few wild flings and giving them 'the high sign' with his arms, he darted behind a clump of bushes ...
He was wearing a blue blouse and short white skirt, which he flung about airily. He was bareheaded.
Residents reported he had a mustache but wore women's stockings and slippers, and would talk to women and children but ran away from men. One Black child told police the dancer tried to lead him into the woods.
The officers, thinking that such a "dancing fool" would easily be caught, alighted from their car in leisurely fashion. But to their dismay, they found no one behind the clump of bushes. The woods were 200 yards away, and they hadn't noticed anyone skittering off in that direction.
Maybe the dancer was a phantom. They searched the area for three hours and found no dancers.
The next day's Gazette reported that a young hunter had seen two dancing fools in the woods off the pike, a man and a man dressed as a woman.
The couple were deep in the heart of the wildwood — tra, la — and were putting on a few of the aesthetic, or interpretive, steps.
The deputies returned to the area after more calls came in reporting the dancer had been seen at 9:30 a.m. They didn't find him or her but they did find paper cartons heaped on the ground, evidently as a bed, and a pair of men's shoes.
They concluded the dancers were moonshiners trying to frighten residents away from a still. There were several hundred acres of hawthorn scrub along the pike, good concealment for an illicit distillery.
When I close my eyes, I can see that.
Email:
cstorey@adgnewsroom.com
