100 years ago
June 12, 1921
• Weary of the life of a fugitive from justice, Sam Payne, Lawrence county white man, who escaped from the penitentiary, where he was serving a life sentence for first degree murder, yesterday walked into the governor's office and surrendered. Penitentiary officials were notified, and Payne was taken to the Tucker farm yesterday afternoon. Payne twice has been sentenced for murder, first in 1910 while serving as city marshal of Walnut Ridge. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for an affray which resulted in the death of an alleged bootlegger, but the sentence was commuted.
50 years ago
June 12, 1971
• The Justice Department said Friday that federal Judge Oren Harris made an "appropriate" decision March 30 when he found John Norman Warnock, attorney for the Watson Chapel School Board, in contempt of court for his statements and actions in the Watson Chapel school desegregation case. The Department filed a brief in the United States Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals at St. Louis in which it contended that Judge Harris' rulings in the Watson Chapel case should be affirmed.
25 years ago
June 12, 1996
• The Environmental Protection Agency proposed a $2.5 million plan Tuesday to stop the spread of an underground pool of polluted water as part of a continuing attempt to clean up a chemical factory site in Jacksonville. EPA officials presented the plan Tuesday night at a public meeting in Jacksonville. The plan calls for setting up five wells on the former Vertac Chemical Co. site in Jacksonville. The wells will pump about 4 gallons of contaminated groundwater a minute from a small underground aquifer into an on-site wastewater treatment plant. The plant will not clean all the polluted groundwater on the site but should prevent it from spreading into other underground water sources, said Wren Stenger, head of the EPA's Superfund efforts for Arkansas and Oklahoma.
10 years ago
June 12, 2011
• As fire marshal for the Sheridan Volunteer Fire Department, Ben Hammond can spout off dozens of examples where a smoke detector has saved lives. The fires where children died and there wasn't a functional smoke detector or an exit plan in place particularly haunt him. Hammond is now on a mission to make sure every household in Grant County with a child elementary school age or younger has working smoke detectors.