Most of you unfortunately have never met gregarious Fred Garry of Harrison. If you're fortunate, you've probably known others as kindhearted and easygoing as Fred.
I was seated around a table during Fred's retirement party last week where more than 100 had gathered to share a meal and what was alleged to be a roast for this mountain of a man. He was leaving his local FedEx Freight Service Center after 36 years of owning and operating that successful business, which actually began as Harrison's Arkansas Freightways Service Center.
After the meal, friends and family stepped to the podium to tell tales on Fred as he sat back and absorbed it all with his familiar grin. While several tales about him drew belly laughs, everyone talked about the positive effects Fred had on their lives.
He most assuredly had helped a lot of people in various ways. And on this night everyone was discovering the width and depth of his enormous heart.
Having known and admired Fred for decades, I was content to sit back and absorb the many accounts. In doing so, it struck me that here was a perfect living example of the adage about the significance of our individual lives I've written about previously: Only the things we do for others survives our lifetime while all we did for ourselves is buried with us.
Wouldn't it be a wonderful world indeed were we all to pattern our lives after Fred's lifetime of giving and sharing that benefited others? Who knows, perhaps then we each might also have packed rooms attend our own retirement parties to relate accounts of how our presence in this world improved their lives.
Skateboard Samaritan
Staying with feel-good stories, Joseph Eli Smith posted this on social media the other day. It begged to be shared.
Smith said he was looking out his office window at RaganPro Computer Services in Harrison and saw an older man who lived above his business pass by in his wheelchair, as the disabled man often did along that street while walking his dog along the steepish incline. As the man reached the bottom of the hill, Smith said he watched a young man riding a skateboard heading down the same street.
Stopping at the bottom before continuing on his way, the youth saw the wheelchair-bound man was having a hard time trying to head back up. Smith said the young man at first looked further down the street as if to continue, but then laid his skateboard aside, walked over and positioned himself behind the chair. He grabbed the handles and began pushing the man back up the incline.
When they reached the top, the youth jogged back to recover his skateboard, jumped aboard and rolled away.
Smith said he shared what only he had witnessed because it helped restore his faith in others, particularly the younger generation. Mine too.
No words minced
Malcolm Cleaveland of Fayetteville holds bachelor's and master's degrees in forestry from Clemson University, and a Ph.D in geosciences from the University of Arizona, with a concentration in watershed management. He's spent his academic career teaching in the environmental sciences, and is an emeritus professor and associate of the members of the UA's Geosciences Department who are closely involved with watershed management professionals.
Cleaveland wrote recently to offer his scientifically informed and unabashed opinion about C&H Hog Farms, with some 6,500 swine, being misplaced in the watershed of our Buffalo National River. I'll share portions of Cleaveland's comments edited for space.
"The decision to put a CAFO in the Buffalo watershed on karst terrain was criminal, quite literally. The original plan did not call for impermeable liners for the waste ponds, but specified that there would be a certain amount of leakage from the holding ponds. Spraying waste on a few fields is inadequate. It guarantees continuing pollution of groundwater. So this CAFO has been polluting the watershed from day one. How do you explain the decision to allow that? Perhaps it was a product of corruption?
"It will take a long time for the pollution already introduced into the groundwater to clear, even if the pollution were stopped today. But it is continuing. What is the first maxim of policymaking? 'When you are in a hole stop digging.' Wastes should be trucked out of the watershed, beginning immediately, and the CAFO should be shut down. That would require the state to make the owners whole, but since it was the state that blundered in permitting the operation in the first place, the state should do the right thing. The continuing losses from impaired recreation in the national river when the [National Park Service] has to shut down access to the river because of contaminant loads will cost the state far more than getting rid of this CAFO.
"I urge the [Department of Environmental Quality] to contact the attorney general to start an investigation of the way the permitting process was conducted. I strongly suspect that there was collusion between private interests, [agency] personnel and federal employees to sneak the initial permit in under the radar."
------------v------------
Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.
Editorial on 10/23/2018