LITTLE ROCK — CRAFTING A STORY: A recent issue of the glossy magazine Fine Homebuilding featured a tale from Arkansas.
The feature, “Fred Gets His Sideboards” written by David M. McWethy of Fayetteville, appeared on the issue’s final page in the “Great Moments in Building History” section.
The article centers on Fred, “the owner of a chain of barbecue stores in Northwest Arkansas ... the Old Smokehouse... .”
The story? It happened about 30 years ago when a new employee overheard his boss Fred repeatedly say he wished the bed of his old, beat-up pickup truck had sideboards so he could carry higher loads.
So, when Fred was out of town on a weekend trip to Little Rock, his new, eager to-please employee took some rough-sawn boards he’d spied stacked in the barn and built his boss some sideboards.
Upon seeing the finished result, Fred had tears in his eyes. Why? Because of the wood his new employee used. It was several 14-foot-long, (full) 2-inch thick by (full) 12-inch-wide cherry boards Fred’s father had stored and “stickered” to air-dry in the barn before his death more than 20 years prior.
IN THE GAME: Linda Smith, a 12th-grade English teacher and quiz bowl coach at Morrilton High School with the South Conway County School District, will appear as a contestant on the TV game show Jeopardy! this Thursday.
Smith taped the show in advance but can’t reveal how she fared. Want to know? You’ll have to tune in. The show airs at 11 a.m.
on KATV, Channel 7, in the central Arkansas area.
EARNING THEIR KEEP:
It’s always fun to peruse the annual salary survey of What People Earn in this paper’s Sunday magazine insert, Parade, and look for Arkansans.
Who appeared in the recent edition? Firefighter and EMT Jennifer Winchell, 33, of Sherwood who makes $45,000 a year (and was featured on the cover) and tractor salesman Derrick Van Valkenburg of Little Rock, 51, who earns $58,100 a year.
SPIRITED SEASONINGS:
In a similar vein of southern writers Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays’ hilarious Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies’ Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral, the Mount Holly Cemetery Association has created a cookbook combining cemetery lore and a collection of recipes.
The Mount Holly Cookbook, Recipes in Perpetuity was unveiled last Sunday at the cemetery’s annual picnic fundraiser and is now being sold to the public.
The 248-page collection, priced at $29.95, includes stories of those buried in Mount Holly as recounted by Mary Worthen of Little Rock, a cemetery board member for six decades, beginning in 1951. More information is available by calling Kay Tatum at (501) 375-5197.
Paper Trails appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact Linda Caillouet at (501) 399-3636 or at lcaillouet@arkansasonline.com
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 04/28/2010