Beth Calhoun

Bald Knob’s first female mayor honors father with run for position

Newly elected Bald Knob Mayor Beth Calhoun takes her seat at the table in the city council chambers of the Bald Knob Municipal Building. Calhoun, the city’s first female mayor, will soon be all too familiar with these surroundings after winning a four-year term in the top post for Bald Knob. The new mayor is a lifelong resident of Bald Knob, having been born a year after her parents moved the family from nearby Russell.
Newly elected Bald Knob Mayor Beth Calhoun takes her seat at the table in the city council chambers of the Bald Knob Municipal Building. Calhoun, the city’s first female mayor, will soon be all too familiar with these surroundings after winning a four-year term in the top post for Bald Knob. The new mayor is a lifelong resident of Bald Knob, having been born a year after her parents moved the family from nearby Russell.

Bald Knob has a new mayor, and as a longtime resident of the city, Mayor Beth Calhoun said she is excited for the future of her hometown.

Calhoun was born and raised in Bald Knob. Her late father, Roy Dale Hale, moved the family to Bald Knob in 1970, and Calhoun was born the next year.

“My mother is from Clarksville, and my dad is from West Point,” Calhoun said. “My dad got a job in Clarksville, and that’s when he met my mother (Georgia). He brought her to West Point, and she said she didn’t want to live there. That’s when he moved her to Bald Knob in 1970, and I was born in ’71. I’ve been here all my life, so we’ve known this town and everyone here for forever and a day.”

Her father worked as a butcher in Searcy and then started managing grocery stores. When the family moved to Bald Knob, Hale managed a Thriftway store near the railroad tracks. He later built and opened Russell Grocery in Russell, which he managed until 1995, when he had a heart attack.

“As kids, we all grew up knowing the grocery business,” Calhoun said. “That was our trade. … As children, we had it made. We had great parents. They taught us manners and to respect our elders.”

In Calhoun’s race for mayor, she said she focused a lot on the youth of the town. One of her goals is to have some kind of local gathering place for Bald Knob teenagers. When she was growing up, she and her siblings played outside a lot, but now the entertainment options tend to fizzle out once kids start to grow up.

“We were very playful kids,” she said. “Back then, they’d tell us to go outside and play, and we’d play all day, and they’d have to call us in at night because we didn’t come back. That’s when things were simple.”

Calhoun played basketball at Bald Knob High School, and she said she was always interested in science.

“Sports was a big thing for the whole family,” she said.

She graduated high school in 1990, then worked at Qualitron in Bald Knob and started going to school at Eastern College of Health Vocations in west Little Rock to get a registered medical assistant certificate.

With that certification, she got a job with Dr. Stephen Lefler at the Searcy Clinic for Women.

“I basically assisted him on surgeries and with patients,” she said. “That was where I made my start.”

Calhoun worked at the Searcy Clinic for Women from July 1994 until Lefler moved to Russellville in November 2008.

“I loved the doctor I worked for,” she said. “It was interesting. It was fun.”

After her time with the Searcy Clinic for Women, Calhoun went to another business her father had started.

This time, instead of selling groceries, they were mowing yards.

“My dad had a lawn-care service,” she said. “Me and my brother got in with him. Dad started it in 1998. Believe it or not, I can weed-eat better than any man. I can mow on commercial mowers and everything. We worked seven days a week. Some days we’d do 16 yards in a day. Some days we’d do 18 yards in a day. We just moved, moved, moved.”

Calhoun and her brother continued working the lawn-care business after their father died five years ago, but she said it soon got too emotional to carry on the business he had started.

“It was also hard to find — and keep — help,” she said. “People don’t realize that you do more than one or two yards a day. When you start hiring them in, they only last two or three days. I had one last two weeks and I thought he was going to stay, but he didn’t end up wanting to stay.”

After the family officially closed the lawn-care business, Calhoun got a job at Fred’s Super Dollar, where she has been able to utilize the skills and knowledge about grocery stores that she learned from her father when she was younger.

“Still now at Fred’s, I’m doing what I did when I was a kid,” she said. “They ask me how I know everything, and I just tell them I have been around this all my life. I was raised up in it.”

Calhoun said she always wanted her father to run for mayor. He was well-loved in the town, and she was not the only one to think he would have done well in office.

“He knew everybody here,” she said. “He knew everything. He was all up on it. People wanted him to run for mayor, but he didn’t do it. That’s when I decided to run to see if I could make a change and do it for him.”

While she loves the town she grew up in, Calhoun has big dreams of what Bald Knob could become. She said the city sits at an important crossroads, and there is a lot of potential with that location. Travelers utilizing U.S. 67 to get to Little Rock, Batesville or Jonesboro will go through Bald Knob, and many in the community want to see the town turn into a destination instead of just an exit off of the highway, Calhoun said.

“You’ve got three great highways coming through here,” she said. “Everyone thinks there is a potential to grow. It’s not going to happen overnight. You’re looking at another 20, 30, maybe even 40 years until this town really booms. It’s going to take awhile for it to grow.”

Still, those long-term goals can help drive decisions that are being made now to make the town ready for this anticipated boom. One of the immediate actions Calhoun has identified is sprucing up the town through cleanup work and code enforcement.

“Our town is not an ugly town,” she said. “Everywhere has vacant houses, but everyone needs to follow city codes. That’s a lot of things people want.”

Her first priority as mayor, she said, is with the youth of the town. As a mother of a 14-year-old, she knows some of the struggles teenagers in Bald Knob face when looking for something to do.

“I want something for the teenagers,” she said. “We have ballparks and school functions, but what else? I have to drive my daughter to Searcy to go skating. You have to pick them up at midnight, and by the time you eat and get home, it’s 1 in the morning. People are tired of giving their revenue over there, but we need something here.”

Some initial thoughts Calhoun has had for the youth include a building with pool tables or a television for video-game systems. That way, after school games or on the weekends, there would be a safe and local place for teenagers to go.

“We just need somewhere for them to gather, to be able to hang out,” she said. “Right now, there’s no place for kids to go mingle.”

Calhoun is going to be the Bald Knob mayor for at least four years, and she said she is happy to represent the town and work on its behalf. Ultimately, she wants to please the people in her community.

“They’re the ones that voted me in,” she said. “It’s a job, and I want to do it and do it right.”

Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.

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