OPINION

OPINION | REX NELSON: Home to Corning

During the years I worked in the governor's office, trips to Clay County on the Fourth of July were a must. Annual picnics at Corning and Piggott attracted former residents from across the country. And those people expected the governor to be part of the celebration.

I was reminded of visits to Clay County with Gov. Mike Huckabee while reading "I Grew Up in a Small Town," a new book by Corning native David Wilson. The 1980 graduate of Corning High School was my classmate at Ouachita Baptist University. He went on to receive a doctorate in educational administration at the University of Missouri. Wilson worked in education for 27 years in Missouri before moving to Springdale in 2016.

Though Wilson's book is largely a love letter to small-town life, he includes the bad with the good in this 140-page volume.

"Americans have a perception of what small-town life is like, even those who aren't from a small town," he writes. "Understanding small towns is a part of understanding the country's culture, and it has always been a fairly accessible concept. The small-town environment has been chronicled in America's history, literature and media, and for city dwellers who still don't fully grasp it, there's always the template of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and the fictitious town of Mayberry.

"Corning, however, isn't Mayberry. On the other hand, if one understands Mayberry, then he or she may begin to understand Corning. According to several people who remember Corning's past, she resembled Mayberry in the area of local law enforcement. Mayberry had Andy Taylor. Corning had Snide. That was a nickname for police officer Dewey Snider, and he pretty much took care of all the police duties in the town for much of his tenure."

Wilson says there wasn't much crime in Corning during the 1950s and 1960s when about 2,000 people lived there. Corning had a population of 3,227 in the 2020 census.

"Snide's main priorities involved dealing with mischievous teenagers or with locking up the occasional person who succumbed to alcohol and made a nuisance of himself," Wilson writes. "Dick Walls said that in the pool hall you could tell if a person had recently gotten drunk and then got in trouble with Snide."

"They had a knot on their head," Walls told Wilson.

Wilson says a typical Saturday night crowd in Corning--made up in part of tenant farmers and sharecroppers who worked on area farms--"was there to shop, get supplies, have supper or watch movies."

"From modest beginnings in 1944, the homecoming and Independence Day celebration in Wynn Park has become one of the ties that bind former residents to their hometown," Franklin Cochran writes for the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "The celebration is sponsored by the local chamber of commerce and run by residents for the benefit of civic organizations. ... This event is a popular time for school reunions. During election years, many political candidates campaign at Wynn Park."

Wilson remembers being home from college in the summer of 1982.

"I was on Second Street in front of the courthouse, getting ready for the morning parade," he writes. "In fact, I was helping put a sign on a vehicle that was a parade entry. About a block to the north, I saw one of Arkansas' politicians. His face was familiar because I had seen it on television many times. He was mingling with the crowd before the parade started, shaking hands and engaging people in conversation.

"I continued to put the finishing touches on the vehicle. When I turned back around, I found myself face to face with the aforementioned candidate. He extended his hand to shake mine."

It was Bill Clinton, who had been defeated two years earlier by Frank White in Clinton's re-election campaign for governor. Clinton was seeking to unseat White in 1982 and would be successful in that endeavor.

"For years, any serious candidate for a county or statewide office made a point to be in Corning and Piggott in Clay County and Portia in Lawrence County on the Fourth of July," Wilson writes. "Each place had a guaranteed crowd who welcomed a speech that was both political and patriotic. Clinton was one of the politicians who made multiple visits to Corning on the Fourth of July.

"One year there was a controversy about whether Arkansas would supply water to Texas. James Leonard's sister lived in Texas but was back in town. She walked right up to Clinton, told him she was from Texas and said, 'If you don't give us the water, we're not going to give you any more oil.'"

Huge crowds turned out for Corning's 100th birthday in 1973 and for the country's 200th birthday in 1976. The July 1976 issue of Ford Times, published by Ford Motor Co. in those years, had a feature on the Fourth of July in Corning.

"Second Street, the main drag of Corning, is deserted on Independence Day," the article noted. "The American flags that stand irregularly along the way hang limp in the 95-degree heat. ... The action is about a mile away, at Wynn Park. It's hot there, too, despite a canopy of shady oak trees and an occasional breeze drifting in from the soybean fields nearby.

"But Wynn Park is jammed with people, as it has been every Fourth of July but two since the 1940s when the tradition began. Those two were rained out. Whatever the weather, the Independence Day reunion is so firmly ingrained in the sons and daughters of Clay County, in the extreme northeast corner of Arkansas, that they keep coming back, year after year, as if in response to some inherent homing instinct."


Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.


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