King George III was "a Tyrant ... unfit to be the ruler of a free people," Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence exactly 238 years ago this week.

Jefferson had it right.

Ever since then, Americans have been calling out their leaders. "Tyrant" was just the start. We've moved on to crook (Nixon), liar (Clinton) and moron (Dubya).

Whether or not you agree with the peanut gallery, there's no denying that such written assaults on public honchos are as American as baseball, apple pie and the iPhone.

So on this Independence Day, those closest to American politics — 50 writers and editors of the alternative press from across the land — have combined their collective genius. They've named 53 of the nation's worst elected leaders from 23 of the largest states and the District of Columbia, then separated them into five categories: hatemongers, sleazeballs, blowhards, users and boozers, and horn dogs. (The full version is available here.)

And there's more than just the usual stodgy Washington losers. Try Colorado sheriff Terry Maketa, who allegedly had sex with not one, not two, but three underlings and then lied about it. Or check out Idaho Senate GOP leader John McGee, who stole and crashed an SUV, admitted to drinking too much, and went to jail. Upon returning to the statehouse, he was accused of groping a female staffer.

Want a little old-school corruption? Florida's governor, Rick Scott, who will be up for re-election soon, founded a health care empire that was whacked with the largest Medicare fraud fine in U.S. history: $1.7 billion for stealing from the feds. There's also Washington, D.C., council member Michael Brown, who once accepted $200,000 to stay out of an election and was later indicted after grabbing at a cash-stuffed duffel bag offered by an undercover FBI agent.

Of course, there are big names here, too. South Carolina's "Luv Guv" Mark Sanford made the list. So did Texas' Green Eggs and Ham filibusterer Ted Cruz and Minnesota loon Michele Bachmann. Even pol wannabe Donald Trump snuck in a side door.

So before you head out for the fireworks or swig some American brew, consider this hall of shame. — Chuck Strouse

SOUTH

SLEAZEBALL

Florida Gov. Rick Scott

He looks like Voldemort, speaks in the high-pitched timbre of a Wes Anderson movie villain, and wants to drug-test as many human beings as possible. More disastrous for Florida residents, he's recklessly rejected federal stimulus packages and dismantled regulatory agencies. He's Rick Scott, and he's America's least popular governor for damn good reason.

Backed by a wave of Tea Party support — and bankrolled by $70 million of his own cash — he won a shocking gubernatorial victory in 2010. The win was all the more remarkable considering Scott's background. His fortune came from founding a health care empire, later called Columbia/HCA, which paid the single largest Medicare fraud fine in U.S. history: $1.7 billion for stealing from the feds.

Scott showed that his wanton disregard for regulation didn't end with his golden parachute from his felonious firm. In the governor's office, he quickly stripped millions of dollars from the state health care agency and laid off environmental regulators. He also signed new laws requiring all welfare recipients and every state employee to undergo random drug testing. How did he get around the slightly sticky wicket that a firm he owned makes millions by administering such tests? He signed the company over to his wife. (The courts have since thrown out the drug-testing laws for violating the Fourth Amendment.)

He's made other shady moves. Scott rejected $2.4 billion in federal aid to build a high-speed train in Central Florida and lied about the state having to eat cost overruns for the project. During the 2012 presidential election, he tried to suppress black votes with blatantly race-based bans on Sunday early voting (which black congregations dominate). He also tried to kill a prescription-drug database that has decimated oxycodone abuse, while his underfunded health care agency has allowed steroid clinics — like the Biogenesis clinic at the heart of last year's Major League Baseball scandal — to proliferate.

And through it all, Scott has largely flouted Florida's "Sunshine laws" by hiding his correspondence from the public and has resisted reporters' attempts to hold him accountable — all while grinning like a demented right-wing Skeletor for TV cameras at scripted events. Is it any wonder his opinion polls have struggled to top 30 percent since he was elected? —Tim Elfrink, Miami New Times

HORN DOG

U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee

No one should be robbed of the joy of discovering an artist's early, lesser-known work. So if you don't know the pre-2012 past of Republican Scott DesJarlais — whom Esquire's indubitable political blogger Charles P. Pierce dubbed a "baldheaded bag of douche from Tennessee"— allow us to loop you in.

In 2010, when the then-unknown Dr. DesJarlais was challenging incumbent Democratic Congressman Lincoln Davis in Tennessee's Fourth District, things got ugly. That was because some papers from DesJarlais' divorce nearly 10 years earlier made their way into the public eye. The good doctor's ex-wife claimed his behavior had become "violent and threatening." She accused him of dry-firing a gun outside her bedroom and putting a gun in his mouth for three hours. DesJarlais cast the revelations as the desperate "gutter campaign" of a losing candidate.

But that gutter proved to be a veritable Mariana Trench. Two years later, DesJarlais, who by then had become an incumbent, found himself in trouble again when more information surfaced from the same bitter divorce. This time it was revealed that the "pro-life, pro-family values" Republican had pressured a mistress — who was also a patient of his — to get an abortion. He would later explain that, actually, he had pushed for her to get an abortion as part of a ruse to expose the fact that her pregnancy was a lie.

Brilliant! There was more: dalliances with six women — two patients, three co-workers, and a drug rep — and a confession that he had supported his ex-wife's decision to get two abortions before they were married. By the grace of Tennessee voters, he was re-elected. By the grace of God, that will be corrected this fall. —Steven Hale, Nashville Scene

HATEMONGER

Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert

Jason Rapert is the Elmer Gantry of the Arkansas Legislature — a Brush Arbor Baptist preacher, bluegrass fiddler and proprietor of a putative African missionary effort that specializes in countries where homosexuality is a crime.

The Republican from Bigelow's outrage at the "radical homosexual lobby" and "elitist judges" over the march of marriage equality knows no bounds. On his passion meter, that subject is up there with his views on President Obama (he wants him impeached), fracking (it's seriously good) and abortion (uh-uh). On that last issue, Rapert tried to pass a six-week abortion limit but settled for 12; it was immediately invalidated by a Republican federal judge who, unlike Rapert, still believes Roe v. Wade guides federal law.

The judge did keep in place a mandatory ultrasound for women, which will mean an invasive vaginal probe in some cases. Rapert believes the United States, its laws and its people should be governed by God's commandments. And it's Rapert's interpretation of the commandments, not those of different religious persuasions, that count. —Max Brantley, Arkansas Times

BLOWHARD

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, Georgia

Why legislate when you can embarrass? Since arriving in Washington in 2007, the right-as-you-can-go Republican doctor has perfected a special kind of crazy — and President Barack Obama, who Broun claims upholds the "Soviet Constitution," has been a frequent target.

Over the course of five terms, Broun has compared Obama to Adolf Hitler, expressed doubts over the commander-in-chief's citizenship, and pondered his impeachment. While discussing the potential pitfalls of the Affordable Care Act, he referred to the Civil War as the "War of Yankee Aggression." Broun, who is a medical doctor, also proclaimed that global warming was "one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated by the scientific community" and that evolution was a lie "from the pit of Hell"— comments that no doubt spurred more than 4,000 Athens voters to write in "Charles Darwin" as an alternative to Broun.

A clean energy bill in 2010 would bring death to not only jobs, he said, but also probably people. Keep in mind that citizens might be hard-pressed to remember Broun's proposing any important legislation — except for maybe an amendment to the Military Honor and Decency Act, which banned the sale or rental of sexually explicit materials at military facilities.

But it's not just verbal gaffes and a dearth of ideas. Twice Broun has landed on the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's list of most corrupt members, most recently for failing to disclose the source of loans to his campaign. (Broun disputed the allegation and sent a local newspaper a copy of a letter claiming the Office of Congressional Ethics found no wrongdoing.)

Come next year, however, we say goodbye to Broun. He lost a U.S. Senate bid in a crowded GOP primary May 20. —Thomas Wheatley, Creative Loafing

HORN DOG

U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford, South Carolina

Until June 2009, Mark Sanford was little more than a buffoon in C Street slacks and a sensible libertarian sports jacket from the clearance rack at Kohl's. During his first term as governor of South Carolina and most of his second, there were laughs aplenty. He took two piglets into the statehouse to protest earmarks. One was named Pork, the other Barrel — natch — and one, if not both, promptly shat on the floor during Sanford's important presser.

Then there was the time when the state legislature overrode, or nearly overrode, all of his vetoes. We're not sure if that was in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 or 2009 because it seemed to happen every year. And then there was Sanford's general weirdness. When he was a child, his well-to-do family slept in the same room during the summer to conserve electricity, and when his father died, guess who made the coffin — Mark. During his gubernatorial years, Sanford liked to dig holes with a hydraulic excavator back at his country farm in order to relax — unfortunately, a child fell into one of those holes and died.

But then came some real creepiness. It began when Sanford apparently told his staff he was taking off to hike the Appalachian Trail, but instead he flew to Argentina on the taxpayer's dime to be with his mistress.

Upon his return home, the Luv Guv gave a strangely honest but extremely uncomfortable confession on live television. Much to everyone's surprise, the Bible-beating members of the South Carolina Statehouse didn't demand his immediate resignation — and this was even after they had read his erotic poetry. Shortly after Sanford's affair became public, his wife, Jenny, divorced him and wrote a tell-all book (the governor once gave her a piece of paper for her birthday featuring a drawing of half of a bicycle, and the next year he gave her a drawing with the other half, along with a $25 used bike). Jenny also filed a complaint with the court after Mark repeatedly trespassed on her property; he even hung out at her home during the Super Bowl when she wasn't there.

And get this, he flew airplanes at their two sons. Yes, you read that correctly — he flew airplanes at his children, whatever that means, according to the divorce settlement. But despite all of that — the cheating, the lying, the stalking and the childhood terrorizing — Sanford ran for his old U.S. House seat and won. Now he can take his mistress out to eat in D.C. without meeting the disapproving eyes of his constituents back home in Charleston. —Chris Haire, Charleston City Paper

HORN DOG

Kentucky State Rep. Jim Gooch

While serving in the Kentucky General Assembly for the past two decades, Jim Gooch has made a name for himself as the state's No. 1 climate-change denier. Gooch — as chair of the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee — once held a hearing to get to the bottom of this so-called global warming kerfuffle; the hearing featured only two witnesses who were climate-change deniers but not scientists. He explained he didn't want any scientists to testify because "you can only hear that the sky is falling so many times."

Gooch has accused the scientific community of engaging in a massive cover-up and fraud to perpetuate the "hoax" of global warming and has even suggested that Kentucky secede from the union to avoid EPA rules. He also sponsored a bill this year to openly discriminate against utility companies that seek to switch from coal to natural gas. Gooch happens to own a company that primarily sells mining equipment to coal companies.

This year, he also made a name for himself as being quite the ladies' man. He interrupted and blocked a vote to recognize the courage of two legislative staffers who stepped forward to accuse a legislator of rampant sexual harassment. Following that spectacle, the same staffers accused Gooch of inappropriate behavior, including throwing a pair of pink panties onto their table at a conference and saying, "I'm looking for the lady who lost these." Gooch excused himself by saying that a woman had slipped the panties into his pocket moments earlier and that "actually they weren't pink; I think they may have been beige."—Joe Sonka, LEO Weekly

WEST

HATEMONGER

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer

In 2010, Arizona's governor, Jan Brewer, affixed her signature to the infamous, immigrant-bashing legislation called Senate Bill 1070 and rode a wave of xenophobia to electoral triumph, a book deal, conservative accolades and liberal opprobrium. She did this despite massive goofs such as claiming that headless bodies were routinely found in the Arizona desert, blanking for several seconds during a TV debate with her gubernatorial rivals, and claiming her dad died fighting the Nazis when he actually worked in a munitions depot during World War II and died 10 years after the war ended.

But who cares about that when there are "Messcans" to whoop on? Wahoo! Brewer spent millions in donations on appeals to a U.S. district court's injunction against most of 1070. Then, in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court overthrew a large part of the statute as unconstitutional. Still, it had its intended effect. More than 200,000 Hispanics fled the state because of 1070 and other anti-immigrant laws, according to one estimate. They took their purchasing power with them to other states, making Arizona's recession even worse.

Brewer still plays the race card, even as a lame duck with zero political prospects. For instance, she stubbornly refuses to relent on her executive order denying driver's licenses to so-called DREAMers who qualify for deferred action under a federal plan.

Recently, the governor has tried softening her image by pushing through a Medicaid expansion and overhauling Arizona's inept Child Protective Services. Nevertheless, her political gravestone is destined to read, "Signed SB 1070."—Stephen Lemons, Phoenix New Times

SLEAZEBALL

California State Sen. Ron Calderon

In 2011, L.A. Weekly dubbed brothers Ron and Charles Calderon, then a California state senator and the assembly majority leader, respectively, the "worst legislators in California" for authoring "sponsored" laws they didn't write — then taking serious money from the special interest groups that actually wrote them.

The Calderons insisted they weren't selling laws. After all, of the avalanche of about 1,000 new bills introduced annually in the state, the San Jose Mercury-News found that 39 percent are ghostwritten by groups seeking to benefit — environmentalists, manufacturers, municipalities. They're successful, too: From 2007 to 2008, sponsored bills composed 60 percent of those the governor signed into law. The Sacramento press corps largely treats "sponsored" bills as non-news. After all, almost all legislators do it.

But few legislators, we hope, do it like Ron Calderon. In February, he and a third brother, former assemblyman Tom Calderon, were indicted for corruption. Ron allegedly took $28,000 in bribes to preserve a flawed state law that was being milked for millions of dollars by a corrupt hospital executive. He was also charged with selling laws after taking $88,000 in bribes from a "film executive" who — whoops — was an undercover FBI agent. (Ron has been suspended from the legislature.)

And what of the other Calderon brother, Charles? In mid-May, the Los Angeles Times editorial board endorsed him for a judgeship. It didn't mention his history of taking gobs of cash from those whose custom laws he'd enabled or the fact that he'd paid his son $40,000 in campaign funds for doing basically nothing. Voters weren't about to side with the Times and cheer on Charles. Recently they elected his opponent with 66 percent of the vote. —Jill Stewart, L.A. Weekly

BLOWHARD

U.S. Rep. Ted Cruz, Texas

Stupid is as stupid does, but the problem with Republican Ted Cruz is that the freshman senator from Texas isn't stupid. Since taking Kay Bailey Hutchison's seat in 2012, he has spent his time railing against pretty much every other politician from either side of the aisle. This approach has earned him the loathing of members of his own party, but it has gotten him tons of attention and made him a household name.

These are not the moves of a stupid man. It's a clever strategy. Cruz has made himself a Tea Party poster child and become a national political star with clear presidential intentions thanks to his remarkable talent for spouting off against most of the legislation anyone proposes (of the almost 500 votes he has cast since being elected to the Senate, more than half have been nays.)

The height of the Cruz show came when he staged a nonfilibuster filibuster to take another stand against the Affordable Care Act, even though the stunt was basically political grandstanding. Cruz stood there reading "Green Eggs and Ham" while the rest of Congress tried to make a deal to get the government running again.

It would be comforting to write Cruz and his antics off as the doings of a not-so-bright politician, but if he were as one-dimensional and guileless as he pretends to be, he'd be on his way out, a one-term senator. As it is, he looks to be setting himself up for a 2016 run at the White House. —Dianna Wray, Houston Press

USER AND BOOZER

Former Idaho Sen. and GOP Majority Caucus Chairman John McGee

John McGee began winning elections before he was 20 years old and didn't stop until he became chairman of the Idaho Republican Majority Caucus — he had become the 21st century face of what many people considered the future of the Idaho GOP. But today, at 41, McGee has had his face plastered on more mug shots than campaign posters and is considered a political pariah.

Following his June 2011 drunk driving arrest, McGee admitted to imbibing a bit too much at a Father's Day golf tournament. He was also charged with stealing an SUV that night (complete with a utility trailer) and crashing it in a neighbor's front yard, prompting a bathrobe-clad woman to rush to her bedroom window. Police said McGee emerged from the wreckage, mumbled something about the woman being an angel, made some passing remarks about driving the stolen vehicle to Jackpot, Nev., and promptly passed out.

McGee, who by then was an Idaho state senator, saw that his political career was hanging in the balance. So he underwent a series of mea culpa TV interviews in which he spoke in hushed tones about how eager he was to "move forward."

But after he retained his Republican leadership and returned to the Idaho statehouse politically unscathed, it turned out that some of McGee's moves were more than forward; they were inappropriate. A female staffer said he had sexually harassed her on several occasions at the state capitol. According to the staffer, McGee exposed himself, asked for sex and groped the subordinate. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail, but after 44 days behind bars, he was released "for good behavior." He hasn't been heard from, at least publicly, since. —George Prentice, Boise Weekly

HORN DOG

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa, Colorado

Terry Maketa chases bad guys — when this bad boy isn't chasing skirts, that is. After the married politician was accused of having sexual relationships with several women on his staff — including one he elevated to oversee the sheriff's office budget and another who was promoted despite the fact that her major credential was being a nude model — the county commissioners unanimously passed a vote of no confidence. But the term-limited Maketa decided the sheriff's office ethics policies didn't apply to him. He wanted to override the nominations of worthy deputies in order to award the office's One Hundred Club prize — essentially an employee-of-the-year honor, complete with gold watch — to himself. And he doesn't plan to write any resignation letter, maybe because he's too busy writing messages like this one, sent to one of his female colleagues: "I think often about touching kissing and licking every inch of your amazing body."

When three of his commanders filed a complaint against Maketa in May that included reports of sexual harassment and accused him of running a hostile workplace, they were put on administrative leave. And Maketa initially denied the allegations: "I have never had an inappropriate sexual relationship with the three individuals you named," he told the Colorado Springs Gazette, which broke the story. "If you publish anything to the contrary, I am fully prepared to take legal action." But a week later, Maketa took another kind of action entirely, releasing a video apologizing to employees and admitting he'd "engaged in inappropriate behavior in the past."—Patricia Calhoun, Westword

BLOWHARD

Montana State Rep. Jerry O'Neil

In fall 2012, Montana Rep. Jerry O'Neil, a Republican from Columbia Falls, drew national media attention when he requested that the state pay his legislative wage in gold and silver. But his letter to Montana Legislative Services was largely laughed off.

The response was in keeping with public reaction to much of O'Neil's 12-year legislative record. During the 2013 legislative session alone, he introduced bills to eliminate the minimum wage for high school dropouts, limit the federal government's ability to regulate firearm restrictions, and allow criminals to opt out of jail time by submitting themselves to corporal punishment. Of the last proposal, O'Neil famously told the Associated Press in January 2013: "Ten years in prison or you could take 20 lashes, perhaps two lashes a year?"

Professionally, O'Neil calls himself an "independent paralegal." He has been at odds with the Montana State Bar and the state supreme court's Commission on Unauthorized Practice since 2001, when a district judge wrote a letter stating O'Neil was engaged in the "unauthorized practice of law."

All of this adds up to a long and predominantly unsuccessful career of comical yet troubling policy attempts. But O'Neil is determined to keep trying. He's campaigning for his seventh term in the Montana Legislature. —Alex Sakariassen, Missoula Independent

BLOWHARD

Clackamas County Chairman John Ludlow, Oregon

Portland, Ore., may be known in the national consciousness as a frivolous paradise of banjos, naked bike rides and fair-trade coffee. But its suburban commuter communities have nourished a resentful Republican movement that's dead serious about stopping what they call "Portland creep."

The face of this anti-Portland movement is John Ludlow, a brawny real estate broker with a shaved head that suggests Lex Luthor as a high school sports coach. His bid for Clackamas County chair was funded by a timber magnate and propelled by a populist revolt against light rail. Once elected, he set about trying to break contracts the county had signed years earlier to extend rail lines south from Portland.

But it's his demeanor in Clackamas — a largely rural county of 380,000 that's becoming more Stepford all the time — that's been the most embarrassing. In a planning meeting last summer, he yelled, "Do you want a piece of me?" at a fellow commissioner.

You can't say voters weren't warned. When he ran for county chair in 2012, lawn signs went up that declared, "John Ludlow is a bully." Ludlow had previously been removed from the planning commissioner in Wilsonville, where he served as mayor, for what one city councilor called "rude, combative, argumentative, and disrespectful" behavior toward the public. Ludlow sued, and in 2003 a judge restored him to his position, ruling his objectionable ways were actually protected speech.

A personnel complaint filed by the county's lobbyist in April claims that, when news broke about the Boston Marathon bombing, Ludlow declared it was likely the work of "a damn A-rab." Speculating about suspects in a local shooting, he allegedly said, "I bet they were Mexicans."

And when a former county board member, Ann Lininger, won appointment to an open state legislative seat this year, Ludlow said she succeeded because "she does a good job of sticking out her perky titties in people's faces."

Ludlow apologized for his statements while denying making the comments about the state legislator's breasts. An investigator cleared Ludlow of violating any county rules — but added that, when it came to the "perky titties" comment, Ludlow's denial was probably a lie. —Aaron Mesh, Willamette Week

HORN DOG

Former Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon, Washington

Aaron Reardon was the golden boy, the rising star of the Democratic Party in Washington state. Brash and cocky as a rooster, sure, but someday, most political observers agreed, he would sit in the governor's mansion.

When he was sworn into office in 2004, Reardon was the youngest county executive in the nation. His fall from grace began a couple of years ago when a very tan bodybuilder named Tamara — also a county social worker — came forward to reveal her long affair with Reardon, a married man with two young children. There were junkets, most of them put on the county's credit card, and even an intimacy kit containing condoms and lubricants purchased during one of their trysts at a boutique hotel in Washington, D.C.

In Chicago, he skipped out on the Democratic Leadership Council conference by faking a headache and then hailed a taxi to have dinner and drinks with Tamara. Reardon weathered scandal after scandal — the out-of-control drunkard of a planning director he hired who groped a building-industry lobbyist on a golf course, allegations of using county resources for his campaign, a Washington State Patrol investigation into his travel.

Then came the final straw, which smacked of Nixonian politics: One of his staffers concocted a phony name and made public-records requests of county employees who had spoken to police about Reardon's involvement with Tamara. His staff was also tied to web pages that attacked Reardon's political opponents. Reardon resigned last year and called for an independent investigation into "false and scurrilous accusations." He is said to be living in exile somewhere in Arizona. —Ellis E. Conklin, Seattle Weekly

NORTH

BLOWHARD

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Illinois

Even toward the end of his 22-year mayoral reign, when he started selling off pieces of the city to hide its escalating financial woes, Richard M. Daley had broad support in Chicago. Sure, he was a tyrannical, thin-skinned jerk who doled out jobs and contracts to his friends, but he was the people's tyrannical, thin-skinned jerk who doled out jobs and contracts to his friends. His successor, Rahm Emanuel, is simply a jerk.

At least that's how he's seen by lots of Chicagoans after his first three years in office. In a recent poll commissioned by the Chicago Sun-Times, Emanuel had the support of a meager 29 percent of city voters.

The mayor and his allies stress he's made "tough choices" to get the city back on track, starting with restoring fiscal discipline. It's certainly true he's shuttered mental health clinics, raised water fees, privatized city jobs, laid off teachers and closed schools — four dozen of them at once. At the same time, he's poured millions of additional dollars into nonunionized, privately run charter schools.

But it's not only what he's done; it's also how he's done it. Emanuel is widely seen as an outsider who uses Chicago as a backdrop for his broader political ambitions. Though he appears regularly in city neighborhoods for news conferences, his daily meeting schedule is filled with millionaire corporate leaders and investors, earning him the nickname "Mayor 1%" (and inspiring a book of that name by journalist Kari Lydersen). He jets regularly to Washington to maintain his national image — yet he also has a knack for avoiding the spotlight at home when it's especially hot, such as the time he was on a ski vacation when the school-closings list was released.

Still, Emanuel remains a formidable politician. He already has more than $7 million in his campaign coffers and is prepared to raise millions more before he's up for election next February. Rahm may not be loved, but he's unlikely to go down unless some high-profile candidate runs against him, and so far, that special someone hasn't jumped into the race. —Mick Dumke, Chicago Reader

BLOWHARD

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota

Minnesota natives include Prince and Michele Bachmann, explanation enough why the state's official bird is the loon.

Both His Royal Badness and the Tea Party's homecoming queen have shown themselves to be geniuses at bizarre self-promotion. Alas, only Prince is a genius at his job. The congresswoman, on the other hand, is retiring in 2014 one step ahead of looming congressional censure, if not outright criminal charges.

Negro Leaguer Satchel Paige once pronounced that "it ain't bragging if you can do it." Bachmann, however, still preens in self-congratulation despite her utter political failure. A defrocked demagogue, she still pretends her Tea Party is a reactionary revolution, not a moribund refuge for the Republicans' traditional bloc of bat-shit crazy far-right-wingers.

Bachmann's gift for gaffes became horridly apparent in 2012, when she lasted one presidential primary. Visiting Waterloo, Iowa, the candidate grandiosely lauded the town because it birthed that embodiment of red-blooded patriotism, John Wayne. Unfortunately, Waterloo's most famous native son is actually mass murderer John Wayne Gacy.

The stench still hovers from her sixth-place Iowa finish. Her pathetic showing is remarkable considering the amount of cheating allegedly perpetrated by the Bachmann campaign. Purported election law violations have been or will be investigated by the House Ethics Committee, the Federal Election Commission, Iowa's Senate Ethics Committee and the FBI. Additionally, one of her Iowa operatives stands accused of making illegal payoffs to political consultants, and Bachmann has been sued for stealing Hawkeye State email lists.

Prospects for Bachmann's next gig range from hosting her own Fox News blabfest to sitting in a defendant's chair. She has said God told her to run for national office. And thank the Lord, Congress shortly won't have Michele Bachmann to kick around anymore. — Neal Karlen

HATEMONGER

Marionville Mayor Dan Clevenger, Missouri

On April 13, former KKK member Frazier Glenn Cross fatally shot three people outside a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home in a Kansas City suburb. After his arrest, a handcuffed Cross yelled, "Heil Hitler!" from the back of a police car. Why anyone, much less a public figure, would subsequently speak in support of a racist homicidal maniac is beyond comprehension, but Marionville Mayor Dan Clevenger did just that.

He told a local ABC affiliate reporter that, though he believed Cross should be executed, he also "kind of agreed" with, well, you know, racism. "There are some things that are going on in this country that are destroying us. We've got a false economy, and it's — some of those corporations are run by Jews, because the names are there," he said. "The people that run the Federal Reserve — they're Jewish." The reporter also discovered a letter to a local newspaper written by Clevenger in 2004 calling Cross a "friend" and warning readers that the "Jew-run medical industry ... made a few Jews rich by killin' us off."

After the story aired, residents of the southwest Missouri town demanded Clevenger resign. He initially refused but then relented after citizens aired their grievances at a packed and raucous city meeting. Afterward, Clevenger told reporters he was hurt by the town's rejection. —Chad Garrison, Riverfront Times

SLEAZEBALL

Michigan Speaker of the House Jase Bolger

It's puzzling how Jase Bolger has remained speaker of Michigan's Republican-led house. He previously led the state GOP's quest to eliminate (nonexistent) voter fraud and, more recently, supported the politically sheisty move to reallocate Michigan's electoral votes based on who wins the popular vote — in districts he helped gerrymander to the benefit of his party.

But Bolger's most egregious move came during the 2012 election cycle: He hatched a scheme to rig the election in Michigan's 76th House District. Bolger conspired with state Rep. Roy Schmidt, a Republican from Grand Rapids, to have Schmidt register as a Democrat in the race at the very last second. Schmidt had his son find a phony candidate and agreed to pay to have this person file for the race but never actually campaign.

Their guinea pig initially agreed to go along with the plan but later backed out. Nonetheless, a Republican prosecutor who investigated the case determined the episode wasn't illegal but was obviously unethical. The prosecutor, William Forsyth, wrote he was embarrassed by Bolger's plan, a move he said was "clearly intended to undermine the election and to perpetrate a fraud on the electorate."—Ryan Felton, Detroit Metro Times

BLOWHARD

Wisconsin State Rep. Brett Hulsey

You have to hand it to the two-term Democratic state representative from Madison. Brett Hulsey knows how to grab headlines. But in his quest for publicity, he has also made himself irrelevant. Not a great tradeoff.

The former county board supervisor and environmental consultant almost immediately pissed off his Democratic colleagues in the state assembly by constantly grandstanding during the chaotic time after Gov. Scott Walker proposed ending collective bargaining rights for most public workers. Once he even jumped up to the podium at a news conference to give an impromptu Democratic response to a speech Walker had just made. His colleagues were not amused.

Then things got weird. News surfaced in July 2012 that Hulsey had pleaded no contest to a disorderly conduct charge for flipping off a 9-year-old boy while both were swimming at a local beach. A little less than a year later, Hulsey's legislative aide asked to be reassigned, saying she felt threatened by her boss' plan to use a box cutter to show her how to defend herself.

Hulsey soon after told a reporter that he was going through a particularly difficult time and was receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from childhood abuse.

Knowing his chances to retain his seat were slim to none, Hulsey didn't seek re-election. But he didn't go away, either. He threw his hat into the ring for Wisconsin governor, challenging frontrunner Mary Burke in the Democratic primary.

In the lead-up to the state Republican Party convention, Hulsey thought it would be a good idea to show up dressed as a Confederate soldier and to distribute KKK-style hoods to delegates there. He said he wanted to call attention to the GOP's alleged racist policies.

News of his plans drew worldwide attention, none of it good, and he called off the stunt. But it pretty much burned any remaining relationships with colleagues who might have still admired his smart analysis and progressive stance on issues. —Judith Davidoff, Isthmus

EAST

SLEAZEBALL

Former Washington, D.C., Councilman Michael Brown

With Clinton-era Commerce Secretary Ron Brown as his father, Michael Brown could have been anything he wanted — a business mogul, a top lawyer, maybe a Cabinet secretary himself. Instead, he became one of the most crooked council members in District of Columbia history.

Brown saw a chance to outdo his father's legacy by winning elected office. He threw his hat into a 2006 race, only to hear from a city Medicaid contractor who offered him $200,000 to drop out and endorse the contractor's favored candidate. Brown took the cash, then received hundreds of thousands of dollars more in illicit help from the contractor, and finally won a council seat in 2008.

On the council, the sharp-dressing Brown made his name as a crusader for the poor. But he had his own financial woes, including a home in D.C.'s tony Chevy Chase neighborhood weighed down by nearly $2 million in mortgage and IRS liens. When another group of would-be city contractors offered Brown bribes to help get government business, he jumped at the chance.

The eager contractors, though, were actually undercover FBI agents. The bribes would turn out to be the end of Brown's white-collar crime spree. Videos released after his indictment on bribery charges in June 2012 showed the councilman eagerly grabbing at duffel bags and mugs filled with cash.

Though Brown's legacy won't outshine his father's, he has introduced a phrase to the District's corruption lexicon. Before helping the agents, Brown told them he would need his "piece of the piece"— in other words, another stack of bills. —Will Sommer, Washington City Paper

BLOWHARD

Pennsylvania State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe

State Representative Daryl Metcalfe likes to walk softly and carry a big flamethrower. Whether it's gay rights, immigration reform — which he has called "illegal alien invasion"— or requiring voter ID cards, you can count on the eight-term Republican from western Pennsylvania to unleash a double dose of inflammatory rhetoric.

As chairman of the powerful House State Government Committee, Metcalfe authored a controversial voter ID law and then drew fire when he went on a Pittsburgh radio station to complain about people who were too "lazy" to apply for the ID card. Then, when newbie state Rep. Brian Sims, the first openly gay lawmaker in Harrisburg, tried to speak on the house floor last June in support of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, Metcalfe relied on his direct connection to the Divine to deny Sims the right to speak. Metcalfe said Sims' intended remarks were "in open rebellion against God's law."

The far-right conservative took the limelight in Harrisburg in 2001 when he introduced a resolution asking the federal government to fund and deploy a national defense missile system. No one could figure out why state lawmakers should be debating the issue, but the measure passed anyway. His latest crusade, launched in May, was to call on Gov. Tom Corbett to appeal a federal court decision that struck down the ban on same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania. He is consistent, at least, and he sees himself as being ahead of the curve. As Metcalfe, 51, told Talking Points Memo: "I was a Tea Partier before it was cool."—Lil Swanson, Philadelphia City Paper

SLEAZEBALL

Massachusetts State House Speaker Robert DeLeo

Robert DeLeo has bobbed and weaved around investigations that have come dangerously close to his circle. But he has somehow avoided the same criminal fate of the three consecutive house patriarchs before him. Nevertheless, with occasional reluctant aid from POTUS prospect Gov. Deval Patrick, the speaker has reacted more to headlines than the commonwealth's needs.

From facilitating ineffective three-strikes legislation in response to the high-profile murder of a single cop, to perpetually playing politics with casinos and medical marijuana, to his despicably stubborn stance on increasing the minimum wage, DeLeo demonstrates that in true-blue Massachusetts, Democrats generally make the best villains. —Chris Faraone, Dig Boston

HATEMONGER

Ohio State Rep. John Becker

"This is just a personal view. I'm not a medical doctor." So says Becker, who, after less than a year in Columbus has introduced a dozen bills, all of them bat-shittier than the last. His personal, nonmedical opinion, if you were wondering, pertained to HB 351, a bill that would have banned health care providers from covering abortions. And not just abortions in the sense we all know, but a hazy, very unscientific view of abortions that would include "drugs or devices used to prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum."

And he's after IUDs, which are proven to be, as Slate pointed out, among the most cost-effective and, ya know, effective forms of birth control.

Becker advocated the impeachment of a federal judge in Ohio who had overturned part of the state's same-sex marriage ban. He also penned an open letter in the wake of gay marriage approval in Massachusetts advocating a constitutional amendment prohibiting the practice. (His next best solution was expelling Massachusetts from the union and removing a star from the flag.)

He has admitted to being a bit of a Don Quixote with his opinions, though we're pretty sure Becker has never read Cervantes' masterpiece. Otherwise, he would have read passages like "When equity could and should be upheld, do not apply the rigor of the law on the accused; the reputation of a rigorous judge is no better than a compassionate one" and then promptly proposed a bill to ban "Man of La Mancha."—Vince Grzegorek, Cleveland Scene

BIG BLOWHARD

Donald Trump, New York

Though the Donald isn't technically a politician (he has never held office), he routinely threatens to run for president and perpetually inserts himself into the national political debate. From stoking conspiracy theories by offering a $5 million bounty for President Obama's birth certificate to calling the 2012 election "a sham and a travesty," Trump is the ultimate political troll.

The reality TV star and real estate magnate recently toyed with the idea of running as the GOP candidate for governor of New York before removing himself from the race. And he has donated millions to candidates from both parties over the years. While his political ambitions may be as absurd as his comb-over, Trump is a master at exploiting the media to generate semiserious discussion of fringy ideas that would normally be dismissed out of hand.

At various times, Trump has suggested repealing campaign contribution limits, imposing a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese goods, and building a "triple-layered fence" and flying Predator drones along the Mexican border.

Trump's sideshow routine has become tiresome for some reporters (BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins compared the experience of covering the Donald's short-lived 2014 gubernatorial campaign to "donning a network-branded parka during a snowstorm and shouting into the camera about a predictable phenomenon"), but many major news outlets still find the act irresistible for the ratings and page views. And that begs the question: Who's dumber, Donald Trump or the journalists who keep feeding the troll? —Keegan Hamilton

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Little Rock is today a city of two halves. One, to the east of I-30 and to the south of I-630, is predominantly black and poor. The other, to the west of I-430 and to the north of I-630, is predominantly white and more affluent. Anyone who drives across the city can see this with their own eyes, and anyone who takes the time and trouble to do so can examine the demographic data to confirm it.

How did the city, 60 years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, and 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, end up this segregated? The answer lies in the incredible expansion of segregated neighborhoods since the mid-20th century. Some would suggest that this came about through a series of individual choices. But that is not true. The city's current geographically segregated housing patterns have been consciously created by public policy, with private sector collusion, since the 1950s.

Little Rock's housing patterns did not always look the way they do today. From its earliest days, the city developed a reputation for having a more progressive racial climate than surrounding areas. The scarcity of labor in the pre-Civil War period meant that skilled black slaves were in demand and could bargain for better terms of employment and for more freedoms. Some were allowed to "hire out" their labor and keep a portion of their wages, and some even purchased their own living quarters.

As a result, even during slavery, racially mixed housing patterns in the city were established. In Little Rock, unlike many other cities, there were no laws to prohibit blacks and whites living in the same area. As the city grew, discernible black residential areas did begin to develop just off West Ninth Street's downtown black business district and toward the east of the city. This was due largely to economic constraints, the location of black institutions, and the practicalities of finding security in numbers. Yet there were also many "pepper and salt" (that is, mixed black and white) neighborhoods, too. As late as 1941, a study sponsored by the Greater Little Rock Urban League noted that, "While Negroes predominate in certain sections ... in Little Rock, there are ... no widespread ... 'Negro sections' [of residence]."

The passage of the federal Housing Act of 1949 changed all that. The act, designed to beautify cities in the post Second World War era, was used by Little Rock to begin an aggressive racial redistricting of the city. It initially held out the promise of better conditions for Little Rock's black population by eradicating poor housing and replacing it with new public housing units. But white city planners had other ideas. Their focus was less on improving the conditions of the black community and more on using funds to perpetuate and even extend segregation in the city. B. Finley Vinson, head of the Little Rock Housing Authority (LRHA) and its slum clearance and urban redevelopment director, freely admitted that, "the city of Little Rock through its various agencies including the housing authority systematically worked to continue segregation" through its slum clearance and public housing projects.

The intent of city planners to use federal housing policy as an instrument for achieving residential segregation was evident when black areas of residence were seemingly targeted for redevelopment because of their close proximity to white neighborhoods rather than their slum status. The first part of the city designated as a "blighted area" for demolition and clearance was a 10-block area of homes at the heart of the downtown Little Rock black community in the Dunbar neighborhood. Blacks viewed the area, resident Lola S. Doutherd said, as "the choicest area of the Negro residential section. ... It contains many churches, schools, completely modern homes, paved paid out streets, and it is within easy walking distance to the business section of the city." Doutherd alleged that "coercion and intimidation" was used by the LRHA to force black residents to sell their properties in the area. The LRHA "threatened the owners by telling them if they did not sell at the appraised price, they would be ordered in court and given less, or evicted from their homes."

While the LRHA evicted black residents downtown it built black public housing on the edge of the city limits as far away from white neighborhoods as possible. The first public housing projects built under the redevelopment plans were the 400 units of Joseph A. Booker Homes in the far southeast city limits. Other housing projects followed a similar pattern. By 1990, the major public housing projects of the 1950s had 99 percent black occupancy. Predominantly white areas had only 5 percent of the city's public housing units and there were none at all in the far west of the city.

Given this residential gerrymandering, it is hardly surprising that Little Rock's first response to the Brown decision was to build two new geographically segregated high schools in the city. In addition to the existing centrally located white Central High and black Dunbar High, Horace Mann High was built in the predominantly black eastern part of the city, and Hall High was built in the predominantly affluent white western part of the city. From the outset this encouraged the school district to grow in a geographically segregated manner hand-in-hand with city housing policy.

City residents clearly understood what was happening. A 1964 report by the Greater Little Rock Conference on Religion and Race titled, "Confronting the Little Rock Housing Problem: An Alarming Trend," noted that, "The evidence indicates an advanced trend toward complete racial segregation in housing." At one meeting of concerned citizens, Little Rock housing director Dowell Naylor was asked bluntly, "Is development in housing in Little Rock drawing racial groups together or silently drawing them apart?" Naylor answered, "Drawing them apart."

Private sector practices bolstered public policy in creating a geographically segregated city. "Restrictive covenants" were placed in property contracts to prevent resale to blacks. "Redlining" was used by banks and mortgage brokers to deny loans to black families in white areas of residence. Real estate agents used "racial steering" to show white purchasers homes only in areas of white residence, and black purchasers homes only in areas of black residence. In a maneuver known as "block-busting," real estate agents sometimes deliberately moved black families into centrally located white blocks of residence. Whites moving out were sold more expensive homes in the growing Little Rock western suburbs, while blacks paid high prices for the limited housing stock left available to them.

Meanwhile, unwanted efforts by black families to move into white areas were resisted. In September 1965, lawyer John Walker purchased a home in the all-white Broadmoor addition in West Little Rock. A can of paint was hurled through his front window and his shrubbery was set on fire even before his family moved in. After they moved, white neighbors ostracized them. As one resident put it, "The policy in Broadmoor is to ignore the Walkers. If no one says anything to them I think it will be only a matter of time before they move somewhere else." They were right. Walker moved north to the University Park development not long after. The area was one of the rare instances where middle-class blacks were able, through a concerted effort, to preserve a black presence in West Little Rock.

In 1966, the Arkansas Gazette ran a series of articles by Jerol Garrison that assessed trends in "Race and Residence." An editorial summed up the findings: "There has been a clear trend, a trend toward the concentration of Negroes in one large area centrally located, and of whites in newer residential areas to the west. ... The movement is away from the 'pepper and salt' pattern in which Negro and white neighborhoods are interspersed." It concluded, "In such circumstances racial segregation becomes more obvious and all-encompassing, especially when schools desegregated by law become largely segregated in fact simply because of prevailing residential patterns."

In 1971, when busing threatened to overturn the purpose of residential segregation by forcing cross-city transportation of students to ensure integrated public schools, Little Rock witnessed a sprouting of new private schools. Their locations once again largely mirrored the city's segregated housing patterns. The latest charge toward charter schools in West Little Rock can be viewed as simply another wave in the ongoing school building program in the city dating back to the mid-1950s that has sought to reflect and reinforce segregated neighborhoods.

Other urban planning devices have created a divided city. Often viewed as the bogeyman of geographical segregation in Little Rock, the construction of I-630 in fact only drew a hard line across an already segregated city. I-630 is not the primary cause of today's segregated neighborhoods. Their origins go much deeper and wider than that. But I-630 nevertheless effectively cemented the existing demarcation between those neighborhoods.

Since the 1950s Little Rock has successfully created a more residentially segregated city. This means that the current clamor for neighborhood schools will inevitably produce schools that are just as segregated as the purposefully segregated neighborhoods that surround them. And those segregated neighborhoods will not only have segregated schools, but many other segregated facilities as well, in practice if no longer by sanction of law. Residential segregation has now replaced Jim Crow segregation laws as the main instrument of racial division in the city in the 21st century.

John A. Kirk is the George W. Donaghey Professor and chair of the History Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Jess C. Porter is assistant professor of geography in the History Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

A longer version of this piece can be found in John A. Kirk, Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis (University of Arkansas Press, 2007).

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Some subjects are too personal to ask a stranger about. Like, what's it like to be transgender? To be quadriplegic? So, few of us know the answers.

Then there are the impersonal questions you might not have thought to ask. But we did. Such as, what does your plumber hear and see down in your crawlspace? What's it like being in front of a room full of squirming elementary school kids you want to teach but are constrained by No Child Left Behind's perpetual testing requirements? What's it like being a nurse in the operating room?

The Times lifts the veil on these matters, thanks to our anonymous sources who let us ask, as long as we kept their confidences.

Transgender woman

My earliest memory of self-awareness that I was a person who was different was 5 years old. I think the earliest thing was me being with my godsisters, and their grandmother buying both of them a Barbie doll. They were so confused as to why I didn't have a Barbie doll. So I remember them taking them to their grandmother and saying: "Hey, why can't he have a Barbie doll, too?" The grandmother replied: "Oh, because he's a boy. Boys don't play with Barbie dolls."

Adults made me realize that I was different. I was just doing what felt natural to me. It's just like you or anybody else who is cisgender — which means your gender at birth and your identifying gender match up. Imagine if you were a man who woke up tomorrow in the body of a woman. That's our experience, from birth. I always thought I was a girl, honestly.

I'm a heterosexual transgender woman. I told my friend: "You're a heterosexual cisgender woman, and I'm a heterosexual transgender woman. That's the difference between us." A lot of times when people talk to me, they talk to me as if they're talking to someone who is gay. Or, they'll refer to a man who may be interested in me as gay. It's such a complicated thing. People can't understand that transgender women are women, period. The men who get attracted to us are heterosexual men! It's just not something that people can grasp. Everybody is used to "male" and "female." They're not used to the in-betweens and the ones on the outside, and all the mixtures. People want black and white. People want something easily explained. People want something defined. And you know what? Everything can't be defined. Everything can't be explained. And this is one of those things.

When I first started to search for a title as a teenager, the only two options that I could see around me were either "gay" or "drag queen." I knew I wasn't a drag queen. So I started to identify as gay, which most transgender people do to begin with. But even "gay" didn't feel right. Because I thought that I couldn't do it, I pushed the dream of being a woman aside. I went with "gay" because it was easier. It was the role of least resistance.

I had to play a role. I had to play the role of male. I had to check "male" when they asked my identity. That's what trapped me, because I couldn't properly express myself. Everybody expected me to act one way, but I felt another. And when I acted the way I truly felt, I was so ridiculed for it. I was punished. I was outcast. For being myself. I tried to conform for the longest time, until I couldn't conform any more because it was killing me.

Probably around 17 or 18 is when I first saw another black transgender woman in the media. Her name was Amiyah Scott. She was beautiful, and she was open about being trans. She was this great person who just lived courageously, unafraid of her truth. She forced people to deal with her. That's when I thought: OK, this is me. This is who I am.

I tried to identify with everything else before I finally accepted my identity as a woman.

I remember telling my mother, and she was very supportive. I just knew that she was going to disown me when I told her. It had just gotten to the point where I was absolutely hating what I saw in the mirror. I was screaming and crying. I was lying on the bathroom floor. I just really wanted to die, but I had to make the decision: to live that day as who I really was. I was 20 years old.

I feel really bad for transgender people who have to depend on their family financially, because they have to take disrespect in order to eat, in order to have a place to stay, in order to have love. I really feel for those who are kicked out, put out, and have nowhere else to go — who have no one to turn to. When you're a child or a teenager, you need that protection. You need that love. I really wish more people would be understanding. When you put your kid out, they could die on the streets, just because you don't agree with who they are. A lot of times, a family lets religion or how other people see them get in the way.

Most people don't realize that there's friction between gays and transpeople. Transpeople experience transphobia from gay people. We're basically viewed as the bottom of the bottom. The lowest of the low. Way back when, when gays were trying to get their rights, there were gay groups that had this idea that if they could show how normal they were to the heterosexual mainstream, they would be more accepted. So gays ended up rejecting transgender people, because they felt like we would hold them back from being accepted by mainstream society. It's still going on today. One of the biggest focuses of the gay rights movement has been marriage equality. For transpeople, that's not a big deal to us. For us, things like workplace protections and protections against discrimination and violence are more important. We just want to live. Don't get me wrong. Gays face discrimination, too. But transgender people need food on the table before we think about who we're going to marry.

People want to know about our genitalia, about our surgeries, about what we've done and how we have sex — all these very personal things. People tend to forget that there's an actual living, breathing person behind all this. It's almost sexual harassment that people feel they're justified in doing. Because we're transgender, because we're different from normal, people tend to subconsciously view us as less than human. When somebody is less than human, or at least less than you in your mind, you can treat them inhumanely. You can do things and ask them things and commit even violent acts against them because you don't view them the same as you. It's a very dangerous thing to be trans. A man is still viewed as justified if he hurts a transgender woman. There have been so many cases of transgender women being killed because men find out they're transgender, and the dead women face more backlash than the men who killed them. I have never been assaulted because I'm transgender, and I'm so fortunate to say that. But that fear exists. I feel like I can protect myself. But at the same time, I don't want to be put in that situation where I have to. It's still not a safe world for transwomen. That's why we strive to get being transgender viewed as a normal thing.

We all need to learn how to be OK with ambiguity. We need to learn how to let people define themselves. I think that's one of the things that's beautiful about the trans movement: We're pushing toward that. I won't ever say I was born in the wrong body, because I absolutely love my body. I love everything that it's becoming, I love everything that has been done to it, and everything that it's been through. Because that has led to me being the person I am today. I didn't get a whole new body once I started on my hormones. This is the exact same one.

— as told to David Koon

Nurse

I wasn't at all sure I could be a nurse. Partly because there are physical limitations. There's a lot of running and toting and lifting and being able to move up and down hallways and in and out of rooms efficiently and quickly. And the sight of blood didn't bother me, but the sight of bedpans upset me for a while. I had to get over that, you get immune to it. It's still not my favorite thing (we call them Code Browns), but everyone participates and gets it all taken care of quickly.

I've worked in Little Rock and very briefly in Austin, Texas. When I was still in school I got a job at a nursing home. There was a lady in one of the rooms who had by all reports been comatose for a number of years. Pretzeled up, mouth open, still breathing. I decided one day after work that I was going to take this lady and just do everything in the world for her: brush her teeth, wash her up, massage her. She was completely curled up and locked in a fetal position, and when I lifted her to turn her, I heard this little voice go, "You're good to me." I almost dropped her. It was, "Oh my God, it's alive." And it was horrifying to think that she'd been conscious in that position for years, and everyone had her treated like she was comatose. Completely flipped me out.

The first time I ever took a call at the O.R., it was a ruptured spleen. They opened this guy's belly up and put the suctions in, and the canisters just filled up with blood. I just thought, "Damn, why are they still working on this person? He's obviously dead." And I'm standing there thinking they were going to pronounce him. But no, not dead. Because we don't stop there, we don't allow people to be dead. We transfuse them and we sew them back together.

It's very unusual to see people die. They die later. If they die in the O.R. it screws up your statistics horribly, because it's considered an inter-operative death and nobody wants that. So we keep them alive until they can die three days later in the I.C.U. That's my cynical view. And really the only people that happens to are people who are so sick that we operate on them as a last-ditch effort, a one-in-a-million chance. I have not seen a real "oops" death. I cannot think of one.

I worked in the O.R. for a while and now I'm in the immediate post-op recovery room. Apparently there are a lot of people who have surgery who don't expect to have pain afterwards. I shouldn't let that frustrate me, but it does, especially now that I've been doing this for a long time. You get a little jaded, you can't help it. People wake up and go, "Why does it hurt?" And you just want to say, "Are you serious? Do you know where you are?" I know it's because they're surprised, and some of them really believe that they'll get medicine for the pain and then it won't hurt. But that's completely unrealistic. We cannot cut into you without it hurting you. We can't take a scalpel, cut you open, rearrange your inward parts and sew you back together without you waking up in pain. We'd love to, but we can't.

You get to where to you can pick out the drug seekers pretty well. Because their metabolism is so altered by their dependence on stuff, it's almost impossible to control their pain. And they're frustrated and I'm frustrated, but it's quite common. They have such a high tolerance that nothing will override it. You have to explain that we can't medicate them to the point where they're at risk for respiratory arrest. My big line is always, "Respiration is mandatory, comfort is optional."

I don't like doing kids. For one thing, they don't understand what you're doing to them. They scream their little lungs out and you can't tell if they're frightened or if they're hurting. Their metabolisms are super fast and they will go down in a second if something goes wrong. And their parents are there and are totally freaked out — and who wouldn't be? It's their baby. So then you've got two patients, the child and the mother or father. You have to tend to them as well, because they're coming unglued. Here's their baby looking like a semi-anaesthetized, shrieking monkey. It's ugly.

I dread having to deal with red tape. Like the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which is computerized charting and which has had a lot of unintended consequences. Instead of having a piece of paper, they have a computer there for you to document everything on. I'm sure it was well intended, but the day it went live was the worst day of my career. I think it's very bad for patients, because everyone is looking at their screens; no one is looking at the patients. These are real live people. You can't watch the patient and do the computer at the same time.

Dealing with doctors, though, has improved enormously. When I first started in nursing, if a doctor came into the room you got to your feet, stood at attention, gave them your chair and didn't speak. It's ever so much better now. They'll be reprimanded now if they're verbally abusive, so it's much more collegial. It's still not perfect. You have to have a sort of audacity to pick up a knife and cut into another human being and say, "I'm going to make this person better." What personality type does that? You can't be a shrinking violet. Different people handle it different ways — I've met some very sweet, humble surgeons, and I don't know how they do it. Because how do you do that job and not have a sort of God complex?

The job isn't gruesome at least, it's a very controlled environment. Everything is sterile. And you're making someone better, you're not tearing them apart. You're going to fix something and that's fascinating. Anatomy and the way the human body works is fascinating. From a cellular level, it's just perfection. On some level, no matter how messed up they are, the fact that they're here at all is kind of miraculous if you think about it.

— as told to Will Stephenson

Elementary School Teacher

So you want to know what it is like being an elementary school teacher in the public schools? I've been teaching for 27 years, 15 of them in Little Rock. I love it. I'm there for the kids. But.

I've been through about five superintendents in the past 15 years. They all added programs and pet projects, and nothing ever got taken away. I fill out forms for a superintendent that was here three superintendents ago. It just goes in a file. You learn to triage, which forms to spend a lot of time on, which will never be looked at. You've got to, because there's never enough time to teach.

We spend too much time testing kids. It's one thing for kids to know the content and another to be able to regurgitate the information on a bubble sheet. All the tests are in a different form. Students have to learn how to take the test. It's like basketball. Players may know how to dribble and shoot, but not the rules of the game. We take three to four weeks or more just prepping kids for the rules and formats of the tests. If we're prepping for the tests, all instruction stops. I feel like I have almost no control now about how I plan for instruction, teach or help students. Everything is planned and laid out for us. Very cookie cutter without regard for what kids need or the style and personality of the teachers. Teaching is an art and a craft. Let us teach! No Child Left Behind has left us in a tailspin. It's ruined us.

Kids are very verbal these days, and their attention spans are so diminished. The number of students with attention deficit disorder has exploded — I'd never even heard of it when I started teaching. They don't know how to settle themselves. Recess has been cut drastically. At home they are constantly entertained with computers, TV and video games. That's tough to compete with! So I make learning as active and positive as I can with small group teaching and with instruction that meets individual differences. Then for a week right after spring break, we sit them in a chair and tell them they have to be still and silent for an hour and a half to three hours three to five days in a row to take a test. Sometimes it feels like child abuse. No matter ... the little ones work so hard and they want to please their teachers and their parents, but the tests are too far above their level. Kids who've made remarkable progress are still labeled and told they're not good enough. It breaks my heart.

Why am I, a professional with a master's degree in my teaching area, required to take 60 hours of professional development every year? That's twice what doctors are required to have! And why are all those 60 hours taken from instructional time BEFORE the test? Why don't we do that before school? In summer?

They tell us everything. "I love you.""Mommy and Daddy had a fight last night and the police came over." One little girl in class wouldn't stop crying. She told me, "The police came and took my mom, and I don't think I'll see her again." Neither she nor I got much teaching or learning done that day. I held her in my lap most of the day. They all call me mom at some point. There's always one who hangs on. There's always one I just want to take home with me.

There are always kids who are coming in and out of the school, because their parents are having to move out of their houses for unpaid rent or whatever. I keep a seat and school supplies ready for a new student at all times. Once I had a new student show up on Valentine's Day without valentines for the party. She was crying, but her mom wouldn't listen. So we got a box of valentines for her and helped her sign them. The little girl hugged my neck at the end of the day and said it was the "bestest" party ever.

The economy and social spending cuts hurt kids so much more than adults. As one example of many, I had a child who always came to school looking neat, her hair in braids, clothes clean and pressed, with a great big smile. She was doing well. Then I noticed that her clothes were a little wrinkled, and she didn't look as tidy. I asked her if anything was wrong. She asked me, "Do you have any food? I didn't get to eat last night or this morning." She didn't have any running water or electricity at home. Her mom had been getting water from a hose from the next-door neighbor to cook and flush the toilet. She wouldn't ask for help. Then there are the kids who need glasses, but their family can't afford them. There are dental issues, too. Kids in pain.

What I am most surprised about is how disrespectful kids are. It's not a socio-economic thing. In the last 20 years, the level of respect for adults has gone to the bottom. One of my students wrote an essay about the size of my breasts, which he called "boobilicious." He just handed it to me. He was suspended.

I have only been afraid at school once. One day, the younger brother of a boy who'd been dealing drugs brought a gun to school. Sometimes the older ones give the younger ones guns and drugs to run. A boy in my class asked to see it and brought it to the classroom while we were split up into reading groups. I noticed the boy — basically a good kid — was hunched over. I turned around and heard a click. He had pulled the trigger. I was scared to death. He was scared, too. I didn't say anything, just held out my hand and he put the gun in it and we walked to the office. Then a special ed kid, seeing how much attention the gun got the student, brought in a toy gun a few days later. He thought it was a big joke. They had to send him home, too.

I've seen a lot of changes, but I wouldn't trade the last 30 years for anything. I put my own kids through LRSD. They are doing very well. It was a good experience.

Some of my parents are so worried all the time. They want me to give their kids extra homework or spelling words. I want to tell them, just hug your kids. Work a puzzle with them at night. Read to them or with them. Let them be kids. Don't worry so much. I'm a professional. I do my job well, and it's all going to be OK. Enjoy the time you have.

Like I said, I love it. Every year is a fresh start. Kids come up to me years later and say, "remember me?" I was the first one to make the lightbulb burn in that science lesson you taught us! I want to be a writer because you taught me how. One student came to my room specifically to invite me to his high school graduation because he said I had made him believe he could do anything he wanted if he just worked hard. And he did. First member of his family to graduate! I love seeing old students. It makes the hard stuff worth it.

Sometimes you just say to hell with the system. I'm going to do my job in spite of you.

—as told to Leslie Newell Peacock

Quadriplegic

The woman we spoke to for the following piece is an Arkansan in her 20s who has been confined to a wheelchair, with limited use of her arms and legs, since she was involved in a serious car accident in 2010.

I don't remember the wreck. Even the months before are hazy and mixed up.

It was the Tuesday after Labor Day. I was in school studying, and I had to work that evening. I worked as a cocktail waitress, and as a makeup artist at [a local store]. I worked. I worked all the time.

What happened was, my boyfriend at the time was driving, and he ran into the back of a semi that had pulled off the side of the road. I had been leaned back in my seat, asleep. I don't remember any of this, but my boyfriend said that the entire time in the ambulance, my eyes were just darting around, darting and darting and darting. He said that I just kept repeating, in this kind of creepy, almost inhuman voice: "Help! Help! Help!" over and over again, until they put the oxygen mask on me.

I had a hangman's fracture of the C2 vertebrae. They call it that because when they hang people, that's what kills them. My C3 through C5 vertebrae were perched. It took two days of surgery — one 14 hours, one 12 hours — to fix that. I had collapsed both lungs, broken all my ribs, broke my arm, disconnected my voice box from my trachea by two inches and had contusions on my lungs and on my kidneys. I had a severe brain injury. I had a huge subdural hematoma and a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is where you're actually bleeding into your brain. They said I had minutes left to live, because the swelling was pressing on my brain stem. They took the entire right side of my skull off, and left it off for two months to swell. My brain swelled up so big that my dad said it was like a balloon. They put my hair in a baggie with my clothes, to give to my parents in case I died. I still have that hair and my cut-up clothes to this day, in a big Ziploc bag in my closet. It's just eerie to look at.

I was in the ICU for a month, and then I went to rehab for eight weeks. They said I would never talk, eat or move anything below my shoulders. They said I would never breathe on my own. I remember asking my mom to kill me. I asked her to kill me. I begged her, begged her, begged her. If I had known I could've asked them to take me off the ventilator, I would have in a heartbeat. I didn't know exactly what was wrong with me. I didn't know that I was paralyzed. I just knew that something was really wrong. I remember them asking me to wiggle my toes in the ICU, and when I did it, they all clapped. But I didn't get it. I didn't understand it for so long.

I started moving my right arm in about two weeks and pushing with my legs in about two weeks, and I had full sensation. But it took me a month and a half to be able to swallow, and a long time to be able to talk. At first, I had to use a head tracker to be able to type so I could talk. It's like this: My legs are strong. I can feel a fly on my leg. I thought a quadriplegic meant — like most people do — that you couldn't move or feel anything. But it's more complicated than that. I get extremely upset when people in the medical community assume I can't feel anything. I had a blood clot once, and the doctor was like: "Well, you couldn't feel it." But I could.

When I try to move my leg muscles, every single other muscle in my body tightens up. My arms clench up. My fists clench up. My abs clench up. I can't control it. To me, almost everything feels the same, except there's a tingling all over my body most of the time. My muscles spasm. They'll tighten up, and my hands will shake. I can feel a pinch. I can feel when someone lightly brushes my leg. But I can't feel temperature, hot and cold on my feet. My hands are my weakest. My dexterity in my hands is awful, and I typically use a stylus to text with or type with.

I miss my independence. I feel like a child. I lived with my parents for a while, but I moved into an apartment with a caretaker. I had to live with the caretaker, and they dictated when I had to go to bed. It was better living on my own with my caretaker because they were young and allowed me more freedom, but I'm back living with my parents now.

I miss working. I miss being able to dress myself. I miss having a choice of what time I get up, what time I go to bed, how I want to do my makeup. I miss riding a bicycle. I miss driving. Oh, my God! I miss driving, listening to music on the radio, and smoking a cigarette! I miss men's stares when I walk into a room. I miss the simple things the most: walking to the fridge to get a drink. Stretching when I wake up in the morning. Turning the pages of a real book, feeling the paper against my fingers. Grocery shopping. Handwriting things.

I fantasize about cleaning. That's one of the things I miss the most. I fantasize about it. I would use old-school Comet to clean my bathroom, and I fantasize about doing that again. Scrubbing. I fantasize about washing dishes, and the way it felt, and the way the soap lathered up. I fantasize about using Clorox wipes to wipe down the toilet. I fantasize about the smells, about doing laundry, about folding sheets, folding clothes. I fantasize about riding bicycles and walking up the stairs. But I can't remember what it feels like to walk. I can remember what it feels like to walk up the stairs or to ride a bicycle. But I can't remember what it feels like to walk. I asked my therapist about that, and he said that when you walk, you're not thinking about it.

I told my therapist once: "I miss having control over my life." And he said: "Name one person who has control over their life." I said: "My mom, my sister, my brother. They get to pick out what they want to wear and where they want to go." He said: "You're talking about independence. No one has control. You wake up thinking your car will start tomorrow, you wake up thinking you're going to see your kids, you wake up thinking your wife is not going to be diagnosed with terminal cancer." That made me think. That's true.

My boyfriend now is wonderful. The funny thing is, I would not have gone for him before the wreck at all. He's just not somebody who I would have gone out with. It was a blind date, and when I first saw him, I said: "Hell, no." He was wearing Dad jeans and a belt, with a tucked-in shirt. But then, we drove around in his car and listened to music and it was just gorgeous.

I'm thankful for my boyfriend. For my family being around. Food. The weather. Music. Literature and art, and especially poetry. Poetry saves me. I can't explain it any other way.

I cannot say I'm grateful for my accident. But my daddy always told me that ever since I was a little girl, I was very intuitive and introspective, and that I'd see things with a different point of view. I think my wreck has allowed me to see more of the beauty in life and in people. Even in my darkest days in ICU, there was goodness around me. There were people who made me laugh. I can't say that I'm grateful for my wreck quite yet, but I know that my whole outlook is different now. What I want to do with my life is just different. Now, I just think that life is beautiful.

— as told to David Koon

Plumber

I've been a plumber since I came home from Vietnam in 1970. I hated plumbing since the second week I was in it, but it's been a good living. You do see some stuff when you are a plumber. In my 20s, on one of my first jobs, I was at a rent house. A guy was abusing his wife while I was working on his commode. I told him he was treating her like a junkyard dog. I hear a lot of abuse from crawlspaces. Anyway, this guy drew a pistol on me and said, "don't talk to me like that in front of my wife." I finished the job and left. It was a crappy house, owned by this executive. I quit taking his calls.

I don't answer every call for work. I don't work for low-income people or if they sound odd on the phone. Indians and Pakistanis are hard to work with and Chinese don't want to spend any money. I like my Filipino customers. All up in the Heights — they're slow pays. One scumbag had his mother make him cupcakes for his office party and he dropped them on the floor and just picked them up and re-iced them. I put in a bathroom for him. He stiffed me about $700. But there are a lot of considerate people, too. I've been flown to Georgetown in Washington, D.C., to put in a bathroom for a lady's son. She said it was cheaper to fly us up there on her frequent flyer miles than hire someone there. That's where I learned to drink espresso.

I've been met at the door by naked women. I've seen that at the door in a high-dollar part of Little Rock. A woman in panties and a T-shirt. You know, for years I never went back to that house. Another woman was in bed with her boyfriend when I came over to work on her washing machine. She was drop-dead gorgeous. She was wearing a serape and that's it. The guy in bed was laughing his ass off. I think it was a dare. It was in Hillcrest. They lean left. I lean my own direction. When I was apprenticing in North Little Rock, a lady wanted to swap out plumbing for, you know. She wanted a new water pipe. I said I didn't think so. You got to draw a line somewhere. But I have dated some women I met on the job.

I've been in danger on the job. I was in the Tie Plant area putting in a sewer line in a trench about five-foot deep when the sides started to ooze. I was laying the last joint when the sides started liquefying. The backhoe operator on the job swung his bucket over to me and I grabbed hold and he pulled me out. I was wearing chest waders, and the mud pulled the boots off of them. I got paid and lived happily ever after.

I've pulled all kinds of things out of pipes. Diamond rings, earrings, watches. Years ago, a lady in Rose City called and said she'd been out partying and came home, barfed in the commode and lost her false teeth. What we did was we took a long snake — a cable — sent it down the pipe and up to the manhole outside, wrapped it in old towels and dragged it back up to the commode. Never did find them. The choppers went down the sewer.

Over in North Little Rock people thought they had a gas leak. A cat had crawled up under the house and died and swelled up. I was carrying it out on a wire hoping it didn't pop. The lady gave me a $10 tip. I don't work under houses anymore. Once I was working under a house in this long crawlspace, all the way at the end of the house. I was there for a long time and my flashlight was going dim and I was tired and I saw what I thought was a 220 cable going up to the stove. Then it started to move. What it was was a black snake. I was petrified. Scared the daylights out of me.

Once I was paid in cash that smelled like pot. I know what pot smells like. I'm a child of the '60s. It was a couple of thousand dollars.

I'm not going to be a plumber forever. It gets boring. I might be a gardener.

—as told to Leslie Newell Peacock

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It was 85 degrees and humid at the Fourth of July picnic in Corning, just south of the Missouri border. Tom Cotton stood by the stage in Corning's Wynn Park, waiting his turn to give a short speech. Dressed in khakis and a crisp, light blue button-up, sleeves rolled up slightly, Cotton bounced gently on his heels, taking a moment to himself before the hobnobbing to come.

Corning's population is a little more than 3,000, but on the Fourth it's probably five times that, as people from all over the county and beyond pour in for the festivities: a parade, carnival rides, country music, $2 hot dogs, a beauty pageant, fireworks. Oh, and politics. In election years, candidates from both parties, for everything from governor to dogcatcher, show up to make their pitch and glad-hand.

This is the day-to-day grind of a politician on the trail, "gripping and grinning" as the campaign consultants say. In a small, rural state like Arkansas, as the prevailing wisdom goes, this kind of retail politics still matters. The Corning picnic is part of the circuit, which includes the Coon Supper in Gillett, the Oyster Supper in Slovak, the Chicken Fry in Mount Nebo and the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival. (Cotton skipped this last one to attend a closed-door seminar with numerous billionaire donors and GOP elites in California, hosted by the Koch brothers. According to a report in The Nation, the Kochs served "oven roasted Angus natural filet mignon served in a fresh green peppercorn sauce," which sounds a little better than pink tomatoes, but Cotton's political opponents have attacked his choice as out of touch with Arkansas.)

Cotton, 37, is running for Senate, challenging incumbent Mark Pryor, and on paper he should be winning handily. He's running in an off-year election with an electorate likely favoring Republicans, in a state trending dead red. President Obama's approval ratings in Arkansas are in the low 30s. Pryor is the last Democrat in the state's congressional delegation; former Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was trounced in 2010 by more than 20 points. And then there's Cotton's resume: Harvard undergrad, Harvard law, Army Ranger who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last year, the national media had declared Pryor the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the Senate, a "dead man walking." Instead, with the election just four months away, the polls seem to indicate a tight race. The early prognosticators may have underestimated the Pryor brand in Arkansas, but with a pickup for Republicans now in some doubt, grumblings have emerged about Cotton himself, who had been considered a rising political superstar in the Republican ranks. "What's wrong with Tom Cotton?"asked a recent U.S. News & World Report article; a writer at The American Conservative followed up by blogging that the Cotton campaign was "flailing."

The assembled crowd in Corning waved political novelty fans ("I'm a FAN of Pryor") to keep cool. "Pryor's done Arkansas really good for a lot of years," one Pryor fan, Jerry Ladd of Corning, told me. "I don't think Obama's done good this year, or the last four years." But that wouldn't stop Ladd, who works for the Highway and Transportation Department, from voting for Pryor, he said. "He's helped Social Security, trying to keep it where it is. If you're the workingman and woman out there, when you get in your late 50s and 60s, your old body's not the same as it was. So you need help. That's why I really like Pryor. He's a family politician who has helped the state of Arkansas. I'll vote for Democrat or Republican — anybody that'll help the state of Arkansas and help me."

Paragould truck driver Michael Sanders said he was planning to support Cotton. "We definitely need a freaking change," he said. "From Biblical to what's actually right. What's ruining this country is all the freebie stuff. I'm a taxpayer, I still work and I'm probably going to have to work until I die. I feel like Mark Pryor's sold us out, supporting everything Obama goes for."

Obama, Obama, Obama. Republicans running for office in Arkansas this year are hoping that's the magic word. In particular, many Republican strategists believe that the president's signature health care law, bludgeoned to great success in Arkansas in the 2010 and 2012 elections cycles, is a political gift that will keep on giving. "Most definitely, 100 percent, it will work in 2014," GOP strategist Bill Vickery recently told Talk Business. "There are only three things for certain in life: death, taxes and the unpopularity of Obamacare in the South."

At his turn on stage in Corning, even Tim Griffin, the outgoing congressman running for lieutenant governor, vowed to continue to fight Obamacare, despite running for a state office that has nothing at all to do with the national health care law (an office so light on duties that when previous Lt. Gov. Mark Darr resigned in disgrace early this year, the state didn't bother to fill the vacancy). "My opponent [John Burkhalter] is the preferred candidate of President Obama," Griffin told the crowd with a straight face.

When Cotton's name was called, he bounded up the steps. While others walked to the middle of the stage to deliver their spiel, Cotton grabbed the microphone and took off at a trot to the front, fast enough that it appeared he might run off the edge. He held the mic close and spoke loudly, with the hard, thudding consonants of a cheerleader (or a drill sergeant).

You could hardly blame Cotton for being a little overeager. The candidate has been taking heat from the chattering classes over his skills as a retail politician. He's too cold, too stiff, too academic, too robotic, the story goes. As University of Arkansas professor and pollster Janine Parry told U.S. News & World Report, "Cotton has a reputation, bless his heart, for being a bit of a cold fish." Cotton himself joked to Politico, "I'm warm, dammit."

After his speech, Cotton began to make the rounds. He walks in big, forceful strides and speaks in a flat, facts-and-figures cadence. At 6-foot-5, he stands a head above the crowd. He's a political cartoonist's dream: angular and gangly, big ears, crew cut, a neck that seems two sizes too tall.

Cotton has an intensely formal manner, and that will probably never change, but he has steadily improved at the awkward business of making small talk with strangers. Both in Corning and other stops where I've watched him on the trail, he seemed confident and at ease in individual conversations with voters. He speaks directly, he's a patient listener and is quick to laugh.

A Cotton campaign worker told me that the criticism is the best thing that could have happened to the candidate, an extremely driven man used to willing his way to success. Cotton was a little stung by the press labeling him a subpar retail politician; now he was bound and determined to prove them wrong.

And once Cotton fixates on a goal, he is, by all accounts, a force to be reckoned with. He is methodical, hyper-focused and single-minded. A meticulous perfectionist and obsessive worker. Always has been. Surely his experience in the Army shaped him, but old friends say he already had a demeanor well suited to the military. If Bill Clinton — a politician who made a big impression on Cotton when he was growing up — was born with charm, Cotton was born with discipline.

Of course, while many things in life can be won by outworking the other guy, likability isn't one of them. Cotton can be stiff in public appearances and in front of the camera. He always hits his talking points, but he's still working on mastering the skill that has made more than a few Arkansas politicians famous: making all those talking points sound like aw-shucks empathy. 

"He's a little more professorial," a former teacher of Cotton's who saw him recently at a fundraiser told me. "I don't see Tom as ever being the backslapping politician at the chicken fry."

One of the people Cotton met in Corning was Betty Foster, a retired resident of Knobel, sitting in a lawn chair near the stage. (Actually, he came to shake her hand twice —"He forgot the first one," she said. "Most of them have better memories than that.") Foster said that Cotton was polite and friendly, but she wasn't planning on voting for him. "He scares me," she said. "He's a little bit radical. There's too many people in this country who depend on Social Security and Medicare. They have got to be protected."

For all the talk of personality, it's Cotton's votes — and the bombardment of advertising over the last few months pointing them out — that seemed to be influencing the voters in Corning still skeptical of the challenger. Many Democratic operatives believe that Pryor got a lifeline drawing an opponent with Cotton's record.

Cotton voted against funding for disaster relief, against the farm bill and against bills to make student loans more affordable. He voted for a bill that would have eventually raised the retirement age for Medicare and Social Security and moved toward "voucherizing" Medicare. He was in the middle of the government shutdown fight and voted against the omnibus appropriations bill that kept the government running this year and included funding for Arkansas Children's Hospital and countless other local interests. The list goes on.

Team Cotton has arguments about why he did so, but the broad picture is hard to dispute: Cotton is an ideological purist on the far right end of the American political spectrum. He believes in an aggressive reimagining of the role of government and the social safety net in modern American life, and is more than willing to stand by his principles, even at the cost of federal dollars flowing into Arkansas. The Pryor campaign has been attempting to paint him as an extremist and "reckless," and his voting record gives them plenty of material.

Will Cotton's politics and personal style give him trouble in a state with a tradition of economic populism, folksy retail politics and an independent political streak? Or does it even matter? Perhaps Arkansas is destined for Republican rule no matter whose name is next to the R. Perhaps an all-Obamacare-all-the-time political message can't lose. Certainly, that's why many thought Pryor was toast to begin with.

We'll have our answers come November. Major implications for both Arkansas and the national political picture hang in the balance, as voters try to decide just what to make of Thomas B. Cotton.

***

When Cotton first emerged on the political scene in 2012, the conservative breitbart.com gushed that he was "one of the best candidates running for Congress this election cycle — and possibly ever." Unflagging neoconservative and GOP kingmaker Bill Kristol was also a big fan and his magazine, The Weekly Standard, has run dozens of fawning items on Cotton ("best read while listening to John Philip Sousa and cooling an apple pie" as Slate's Dave Weigel put it). A recent profile in National Review reported that Cotton had both read all of Thucydides and volunteered for the infantry, concluding that he "seems to have it all."Even the National Journal, ostensibly sober and above the fray, called him "The Immaculate Candidate."

(Cotton declined to be interviewed for this article; his Congressional office has responded to queries from the Times only once, when asked what Cotton's favorite song was for a sidebar in the Times' Music Issue. Answer: "Battle Hymn of the Republic.") 

Cotton is the great hope for a splintered Republican party in search of a savior. He has both Tea Party cred and approval from the establishment, plus big-money backing from powerful right-wing advocacy groups like Club for Growth and Heritage Action. He is a hard-liner who appeals to both the anti-tax and the war hawk wings of the party. Perhaps most of all, there is that sparkling resume, a life story perfect for a political bio. Even the name: Tom Cotton. If a Hollywood movie gave that name to a fictional all-American Southern politician, it would almost be too on the nose.

Cotton grew up on a cattle farm just outside of Dardanelle in Yell County, son of Len, who worked for the state Department of Health, and Avis, a middle school principal.

Friends remember Cotton as unusually driven and methodically focused, even as a boy. He was a thoughtful kid who followed the rules, and he had the same serious bearing that he has today — he's often remembered as mature and "wise beyond his years" by both peers and adults who knew him growing up.

"He was a planner," said Marcia Lawrence, principal at Dardanelle High School, who taught Cotton AP English. "That was his makeup. He was gonna work that plan and do what it took to get that plan into fruition."

"He always seemed to have it together from day one," said Greg Judkins, a friend who grew up with Cotton in Dardanelle. "Always organized, no wasted effort. There was a group of us who would want to go party and hang out and be a little more rambunctious. He always just had things to do. There was always something on his mind, something big. He had a bigger picture. Just like you see today, he was motivated. Pretty much everything he did was efficient. He always had a plan. When he decided he wanted to go to Harvard, he made up a plan on how to do it."

In addition to his schoolwork, Cotton's big passion was basketball, and he played as a lanky center for the Dardanelle High School Sand Lizards. Cotton wasn't the best athlete, an old AAU coach remembered, "but he was intuitive as far as being able to be in the right position. He understood the angles. Very fundamental. He knew where he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do."

Cotton's parents were Democrats and Clinton supporters when he was growing up, but by high school, Cotton considered himself a Republican, according to friends. When he arrived at Harvard's very liberal campus, his conservative perspective only hardened. He delighted in being an iconoclast. Cotton devoted his time at Harvard to "cultivating contrarianism," as he wrote in his column at the Harvard Crimson.

"He was never shy about it," said Adam Kovacevich, a close college friend of Cotton's now working for Google in Washington, D.C., who considers himself a moderate Democrat (after Harvard, he did a stint as then Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman's press secretary). "He always kind of knew himself, knew who he was. I certainly don't agree with Tom on all the issues, but we were both very interested in the ideas behind politics." Their rap sessions had a philosophical bent, and Cotton was as interested in Plato and Aristotle as he was in the news of the day.

Cotton wrote his senior thesis on the Federalist papers. "He thought a lot about what it means to be an American, what are the values that define American democracy," Kovacevich said.

Cotton also seemed to romanticize certain grand ideas that may have seemed antiquated to his classmates. In his columns, he wrote often of virtue, honor, glory, patriotism. "We dislike honor in this most democratic age," Cotton lamented in one. Another: "How little we hear of self-discipline in our indulgent and permissive society."

The summer after his freshman year, he re-read Jane Austen's novels, wanting to reflect on what they had to say about virtue and an ethical life. Some friends told him he seemed like he would be more comfortable in another century.

As a college columnist, Cotton was an oddball conservative intellectual. Undergrad scribblings from 20 years ago, of course, reveal no secret clues as to what sort of senator Cotton might make. They nonetheless make for interesting reading, in part because College Cotton was more engaging and recognizably human than the scripted Candidate Cotton is allowed to be. He could occasionally be prudish and hectoring, but his style — if stuffy and overstuffed — was endearing. It's actually too bad that we don't get more of Cotton the columnist on the campaign trail (imagine William F. Buckley in fatigues), rather than the robo-candidate repeating ready-made talking points.

"No, I could not have sought or expected popularity and its absence concerns me not at all," Cotton wrote. "This is the reason I have written polemical philippics: I have sought to counteract rampant prejudices. ... It was my intent to challenge with my writings; and by challenging, I meant to improve, to jolt slumbering minds into wakefulness." Harrumph! It's a long way from backslapping at barbecues.

Cotton eventually went on to Harvard Law, followed by a stint clerking for a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in Houston and gigs at private law firms in Washington, D.C. On his way to a lucrative career as an attorney, Cotton decided instead to take a sharp turn, enlisting in the U.S. Army. Someone with Cotton's background would typically have gone into the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, but Cotton wanted to be a soldier on the ground, and he volunteered for the infantry.

Friends who spoke to him at the time were surprised by his decision to enlist but described him as resolute and assured in his decision. (Cotton has said that the events of Sept. 11, when he was in his last year of law school, originally inspired him to join, but he first needed to pay off his student loans.) Cotton, whose father had volunteered to go to Vietnam, had always held soldiers in high esteem. His hero was Churchill, "the greatest man of our century," in Cotton's estimation. A Crimson column Cotton penned on Churchill might help in understanding his thinking: "Had Churchill not faced down death as a young man, would he have had the courage to face down Hitler in 1940?" In another, he wrote, "Americans once venerated their generals; today we venerate our sports heroes. This development is both healthy and sad; healthy because it means we do not suffer the depredations of war, but sad because it deprives of us displays of great virtue."

Cotton completed paratrooper and Ranger training and served as a platoon leader for the 101st Airborne in southern Baghdad in 2006, then later volunteered for a second combat tour, serving as captain on a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Laghman Province in Afghanistan.

Andrew Wilson, who served as a fellow captain with Cotton in Afghanistan, described him as "the moral compass of the PRT. I was probably always more of an emotional leader. Tom wasn't really that. He was more steadfast, he had a process. He's a very straightforward guy. He follows the rules, always plays by the rules."

After five years of active duty, Cotton took a job at the Washington, D.C., office of high-powered consulting firm McKinsey & Co. In 2011, he decided to run for Congress back in Arkansas, taking residency at a family home in Dardanelle. By that time, he had been gone for more than 15 years and was a relative unknown on the political scene. During the primary, he received a FedEx envelope from the Club for Growth, Politico reported: "Tucked inside that envelope and several to come were $300,000 in checks from Club members, enough to help lift the 35-year-old former Army captain from obscurity — and 47 percentage points down in his first internal poll — to the fourth floor of the Cannon House Office Building."

Thus Cotton emerged as a darling of the right: a well-funded, articulate, diehard conservative. Almost immediately, his fans began to dream of bigger things, including Pryor's Senate seat. "He's bound to attract attention in Washington, and ... blessed with bright prospects for gaining still higher office," wrote Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard. Cotton was thinking big too — he started polling a possible Senate race in February, a month after he was sworn in to the House.

"Some people say I'm a 'young man in a hurry,'" Cotton told National Review last May. "They're right."

***

The stories and myths of Arkansas politics are dominated by the outsized personalities of charming good ol' boys like Dale Bumpers, Mike Huckabee, Mike Beebe and Mark Pryor's father, David, the popular former governor, congressman and senator (whose name still counts for something; a Pryor campaign worker told me that every time they go out on the trail, voters say things like "say hi to your daddy for me" or "make sure and tell your dad, thanks for everything"). Finally, of course, there was Bill Clinton, whose shadow hangs over any Arkansas politician on the rise.

Cotton's first column at the Crimson was about meeting Clinton with his family as a boy: "His eyes twinkled that twinkle that is now so familiar to all of us. He mouthed inaudible thanks, and then moved on to the next face. Forty-five seconds, at most. And he absolutely meant it all, the way young couples mean it when they say, 'I love you.'...Bill Clinton is the most successful campaigner of our time because he is the most sincere campaigner of our time."

Cotton has steadily improved as a campaigner, but no one will confuse him with Clinton. "It's almost like the minute he realizes he's smiling, he puts on a serious face again," said Julie Baldridge, who has been close to Cotton since he spent a summer working for her at age 19 in the Little Rock office of then-U.S. Congressman Ray Thornton, a Democrat. "He's simply a formal, serious person. ... It's hard for him not be himself." One old friend compared him to the characters on "The Big Bang Theory," the hit show about loveable but socially awkward brainiacs.

"I think the characterizations people try to make are amusing, pretty far off base," said Michael Lamoureux, a Republican state senator from Russellville who has known Cotton since they were basketball rivals as boys. "It seems like the intent is to describe him as some sort of robot. You know, he's a normal guy that happens to have a better resume than the average guy, but he's a human. I see some of the attacks and I think, maybe he's wrong on policy, but he's not from another — he's not a robot or something."

Politics is a funny business. Talk to those who really know Cotton and you'll hear about his dry sense of humor and what a loyal and generous friend he is. But that's a different matter altogether than translating the perfect political bio into a human being that Arkansans can relate to. Al Gore was reportedly charming once you really got to know him, but the caricatures in political narratives have a way of hardening. "He does have a great deal of empathy," one friend of Cotton's said. "It's just it's hard to see it."

Of course, there are other skills in a politician's toolbox beyond charm. Keeping to the same talking points over and over isn't easy, and it's probably no surprise that Cotton is extremely good at sticking to the script, making him unlikely to make an unforced error.

"He's disciplined in that regard," said Clint Reed, a Little Rock GOP strategist. "Not everybody has that skillset. As a guy who does politics for a living, man, I'd take candidates like that every day of the week."

One way of looking at the campaign, then, is that Cotton is a robot. Another way of looking at it (a frightening prospect if you don't like his politics) is that Tom Cotton is a political machine.

The Cotton campaign's big bet is that all he needs to do is perseverate on "Obama" and "Obamacare." Cotton's standard OPM rate —"Obama" per minute — is typically around 4 or 5, but can be as high as 10 when he really gets going. Ask him about student loans and he'll talk about repealing Obamacare. In an interview with the right-wing blog Hot Air, he was asked about America's sluggish economic recovery and responded with a sentence about jobs and a paragraph about Obamacare.

There is zero doubt that Obama, and Obamacare, are a net negative for Pryor. Antipathy for the president runs deep in Arkansas, ranging from honest, coherent critiques to the more unhinged variety. (A couple of voters at a campaign event in Pangburn told me they "wouldn't be surprised if we don't have another four years of Obama." When I noted that his term would be up, they responded, "All he's gotta do is declare war somewhere, and then we won't change presidents; think about that.")

Still, there is the risk that voters may start to tune out such a narrow message (not to mention the fact that nearly 200,000 Arkansans have gained coverage via the state's "private option" version of Medicaid expansion; Cotton has dodged taking a position on the private option, but it's funded by Obamacare, the law that Cotton is so eager to repeal). It's worth noting that Republican Asa Hutchinson, running for governor, has been offering a more diversified — and locally focused — campaign portfolio, and is doing a bit better in the polls.

Meanwhile, Pryor will continue to hammer Cotton on his votes. When Cotton voted against the farm bill, political analyst Charlie Cook wrote, "My hunch is that there is a lot of head-scratching over that vote among farmers and folks in rural and small-town Arkansas. ... my guess is, his vote on the farm bill will be a cudgel that Pryor will swing at him from now to November, providing an opening that the incumbent needed and the challenger could ill-afford to give. If Cotton doesn't regret the vote already, he soon will."

Cotton and his campaign were defiant — Cotton was going to stand by his beliefs even if doing so was politically risky. His backers believe that voters will appreciate Cotton's actions as principled even if they are unpopular.

The Pryor campaign has a different take, pointing out that Cotton's controversial votes — often as the lone member of the Arkansas delegation — track neatly with the scorecards put out by advocacy groups like the Club for Growth. (Cotton has been one of the top recipients of campaign donations from the Club over the last two election cycles, totaling around $500,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The Club has also spent more than $700,000 in independent expenditures attacking Pryor.)

"The only guiding principle that explains all Congressman Cotton's votes against Arkansans is his principled interest in seeing himself get ahead," said Pryor deputy campaign manager Erik Dorey. "The Club for Growth is perfectly illustrative of exactly how loyal Congressman Cotton is to these out-of-state special interests and the billionaires backing his campaign, and has been from the very beginning of his political ambitions. ... There is a guiding principle when someone will ride the special interest dollars into Congress, then take an oath of office and immediately position himself to ride those same out-of-state backers into the next higher office, and that guiding principle is Tom Cotton looking out for Tom Cotton."

Of course, all politicians are seeking career advancement. What stands out about Cotton is the intensity of his ideological purity. Rather than running on personality or local issues, Cotton has said he wants to "run contests of ideas." Cotton is unbending in his commitment to those ideas — Tea Party economics and aggressively hawkish foreign policy — no matter the consequences and regardless of the parochial interests of Arkansas. Cotton has been a stickler for rules his entire life — it makes sense that he's rigid on first principles. Policy is messy; Cotton argues in black and white.

In the end, it doesn't much matter what Cotton's precise motivation was for voting the way that he did. We don't judge politicians on intentions. We shall know them by their works.

Cotton believes so fervently that the federal government should no longer be involved in subsidizing student loans (despite the fact that he took Stafford loans at Harvard) that he voted against bills that would have lightened the burden of loan repayment for more than 200,000 Arkansans. He is such a hard-liner on the debt that he was willing to drive right off the fiscal cliff into national default, a potential economic catastrophe that he called "short-term market corrections," saying, "I'd like to take the medicine now."

Voting against the Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Bill, Cotton said, "I don't think Arkansas needs to bail out the Northeast." He said that it was larded up with pet projects, but he also voted against a Sandy bill that included only funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Cotton complained that it wasn't offset with corresponding spending cuts).

On foreign policy, Cotton is an unreconstructed neoconservative. "George Bush did largely have it right," he said.

Cotton co-sponsored a bill that would likely ban certain forms of birth control, such as IUDs and the morning-after pill. He voted against the Violence Against Women Act and against the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Around half a million Arkansans get food stamps, but Cotton advocates for massive cuts to the program, claiming that "we've all been in a situation where we stand in the grocery line at Walmart" and see someone using a food stamp card with "steak in their basket, and they have a brand new iPhone, and they have a brand new SUV."

Cotton voted for the Paul Ryan budget, which would cut benefits for seniors, including preventative care, and eventually transition Medicare into a voucher-like system; he was also the only member of the Arkansas congressional delegation to vote for the Republican Study Committee Budget, which would eventually raise the eligibility age for both Social Security and Medicare to 70. Both budgets would give tax cuts to the wealthy and cut trillions of dollars in programs serving low-income Americans.

Cotton seems to be a true believer on all of this. He is resolute and uncompromising. He's not pretending to be someone he's not. It will be up to Arkansans to decide whether they like what they see.

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Goods and services

Shopping Center

Promenade at Chenal

Runners-up: Park Plaza Mall, Pleasant Ridge Town Center, Midtowne

Grocery Store

Kroger

Local winner: Edwards Food Giant

Runners-up: The Fresh Market, Terry's Finer Foods, Whole Foods Market

Women's Clothing

Dillard's

Local winner: E. Leigh's

Runners-up: Scarlet, Tulips, Box Turtle

Men's Clothing

Dillard's

Runners-up: Baumans, Greenhaw's, The Independent

Hip Clothing

E. Leigh's

Runners-up: Ember, Fringe, Indigo

Children's Clothing

The Toggery

Runners-up: The Children's Place, Whippersnappers, Carter's

Vintage Clothing

Savers

Runners-up: Goodwill, Paddywack's, Mid-Towne Antique Mall

Antiques

Mid-Towne Antique Mall

Runners-up: Sweet Home/Clement, Fabulous Finds, Blue Suede Shoes

Furniture

I.O. Metro

Runners-up: Ashley Furniture, Haverty's Furniture, Hank's Fine Furniture

Garden Store or Nursery

The Good Earth Garden Center

Runners-up: Hocott's Garden Center, Botanica Gardens, Cantrell Gardens

Hardware/Home Improvement

Home Depot

Local winner: Kraftco Hardware and Building Supply

Runners-up: Fuller and Son, Lowe's Home Improvement, Cantrell Hardware

Eyewear

James Eye Care

Runners-up: Kavanaugh Eye Care, Burrow's and Mr. Frank's Optical, Deer Penick Eye Clinic

Fresh vegetables

Little Rock Farmers' Market

Runners-up: Argenta Farmers Market, Hillcrest Farmers Market, Bernice Garden Farmer's Market

Outdoor store

Ozark Outdoor Supply

Runners-up: Bass Pro Shops, Academy Sports, Gene Lockwood's

Bicycle Shop

Chainwheel

Runners-up: Spokes, The Community Bicyclist, Phat Tire Bike Shop (Bentonville)

Gun Store

Fort Thompson Sporting Goods

Runners-up: Arkansas Armory, Bass Pro Shops, Don's Weaponry Inc.

Commercial Art Gallery

Gallery 26

Runners-up: Cantrell Gallery, Greg Thompson Fine Art, Stephano's Fine Art Gallery

Mobile Phone

AT&T

Runners-up: Verizon, Cricket Wireless

Internet Service Provider

AT&T

Runners-up: Comcast, Suddenlink, Cox Communications

Real Estate Agency

The Janet Jones Co.

Runners-up: The Charlotte John Co., Crye-Leike, Keller Williams Realty

Auto Service

Austin Brothers Tire and Service

Runners-up: Jett's Gas and Service, Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., Discount Tire & Brake Inc.

Auto Stereo

Auto Audio

Runners-up: Arkansas Car Stereo, Best Buy, Carnes Audio Visual

Travel Agency

Poe Travel

Runners-up: Sue Smith Vacations, Avoya Travel, West Rock Travel

Hotel

Capital Hotel

Runners-up: Little Rock Marriott, 21c Museum Hotel (Bentonville) , DoubleTree Hotel

Private School

Pulaski Academy

Runners-up: Episcopal Collegiate School, Catholic High School for Boys, Mount St. Mary Academy

Public School

Central High School

Runners-up: eStem Public Charter Schools, Forest Park Elementary, North Little Rock High School

Apartment Complex

The Pointe Brodie Creek

Runners-up: Brightwaters Apartments, Pleasant Woods, The Park at Riverdale

Bank

Simmons Bank

Runners-up: Arvest Bank, First Security Bank, Bank of the Ozarks

Salon

Fringe Benefits

Runners-up: Caracalla Salon and Body Spa, That French Salon, The Local Hair Shop

Spa

Caracalla Salon and Body Spa

Runners-up: Rejuvenation Day Spa, Ava Bella Day Spa, Floating Lotus Yoga Studio and Day Spa

Barber shop

Jerry's Barber Shop

Runners-up: Sport Clips, The Art of Men's Cuts, The Local Hair Shop

Jeweler

Sissy's Log Cabin

Runners-up: Stanley Jewelers, Roberson's Fine Jewelry, Cecil's Fine Jewelry

Pharmacy

Kroger

Local winner: Cornerstone Pharmacy

Runners-up: Walgreens, Rhea Drug Store, Don's Pharmacy

Auto Dealer

Landers Toyota

Runners-up: Bale Honda, Adventure Subaru (Fayetteville), Russell Chevrolet

Lingerie

Victoria's Secret

Local winner: Barbara Graves Intimate Fashions

Runners-up: Dillard's, Lavender Lingerie, Seductions

Home entertainment store

Best Buy

Local winner: Carnes Audio Visual

Runners-up: Apple Store

Sporting Goods

Academy Sports

Local winner: Ozark Outdoor Supply

Runners-up: Gene Lockwood's, Bass Pro Shops, Mack's Prairie Wings

Toys

Toys 'R' Us

Local winner: Learning Express

Runners-up: The Toggery, Cheeky Marshmallows, Target

Florist

Tipton & Hurst

Runners-up: About Vase, Frances Flower Shop, Floral Express (Fayetteville)

Plumber

Ray Lusk Plumbing

Runners-up: Advantage Service Co., Bert Black Service Co., Dwayne Boggan

Gift Shop

Box Turtle

Runners-up: The Crown Shop, The Freckled Frog, The Full Moon

Veterinarian

Hillcrest Animal Hospital

Runners-up: Green Mountain Animal Hospital, Pinnacle Valley Animal Hospital, Shackleford Road Veterinary Clinic

Cleaners

Hangers Cleaners

Runners-up: Comet Cleaners, Moose Cleaners, Oak Forest Cleaners, Schickel's

Decorator

Larry West

Runners-up: Garry Mertins, Tobi Fairley, Tom Chandler

Shoes

Dillard's

Local winner: Shoe Connection

Runners-up: DSW, Shoe Carnival

Bookstore

WordsWorth Books & Co.

Runners-up: Barnes & Noble, River Market Books and Gifts, Dickson Street Bookshop (Fayetteville)

Pawn Shop

Braswell and Sons Pawnbrokers

Runners-up: USA Loans, A-1 Gun and Pawn Inc., National Pawn Shop

Funeral Home

Ruebel Funeral Home

Runners-up: Roller-Chenal Funeral Home, Olmstead Funeral Home, North Little Rock Funeral Home

Retirement Community

Woodland Heights

Runners-up: Parkway Village, Butterfield Trail Village, Hot Springs Village

Place to take a yoga class

Barefoot Studio

Runners-up: Blue Yoga Nyla, Floating Lotus Yoga Studio and Day Spa, Zenspin Studio

Chiropractor

Brady DeClerk

Runners-up: Beverly Foster, John Vincent at Chenal Chiropractic, Elite Chiropractic

Tattoo Artist

Matt O'Baugh (Black Cobra)

Runners-up: Caleb Pritchett (Supernova Tattoo Studio, Fayetteville), Katie McGowan (Black Cobra), Jud Ferguson (7th Street Tattoo & Piercing)

Investment Advisor

Kelly Ross Journey (Edward Jones)

Runners-up: Kirk Bradshaw, Barry Burch, Heath Harper

Company to work for

Central Arkansas Library System

Runners-up: Arkansas Children's Hospital, Aristotle Inc., Heifer International

RECREATION

Place to swim

Little Rock Racquet Club

Runners-up: Magic Springs, Greers Ferry Lake, Lake Ouachita

Park

Burns Park

Runners-up: Two Rivers Park, Pinnacle State Park, Murray Park

Cheap Date

Movies in the Park

Runners-up: Central Arkansas Library System, Big Dam Bridge, Two Rivers Park Trail

Weekend Getaway

Hot Springs

Runners-up: Eureka Springs, Mount Magazine, Bentonville

Resort

Mountain Harbor

Runners-up: Red Apple Inn, The Lodge at Mount Magazine, Gaston's White River Resort

Golf Course

Rebsamen Park Golf Course

Runners-up: Pleasant Valley Country Club, Chenal Country Club, War Memorial Golf Course

Athletic Club

Little Rock Athletic Club

Runners-up: Little Rock Racquet Club, LA Fitness, 10 Fitness

Hiking trail

Pinnacle Mountain State Park

Runners-up: Allsopp Park, Petit Jean Mountain, Two Rivers Park

Marina

Mountain Harbor

Runners-up: Heber Springs Marina, Brady Mountain Marina, Crystal Springs Resort

Local charity event

Eggshibition (Youth Home)

Runners-up: Paws on the Runway (CARE for Animals), Rock the Runway (UAMS Winthrop Rockefeller Cancer Center), Serving up Solutions (Hunger Relief Alliance)

ENTERTAINMENT

Band

Tragikly White

Runners-up: Adam Faucett, Amasa Hines, Rodney Block and the Real Music Lovers

DJ

Gforce

Runners-up: Seth Baldy, Wolf-E-Wolf, Sleepy Genius

Place for live music

White Water Tavern

Runners-up: Stickyz Rock 'N' Roll Chicken Shack, Revolution Music Room, Cajun's Wharf

Place to dance

Discovery

Runners-up: Cajun's Wharf, Deep Ultra Lounge, Club Level

Live music festival

Riverfest

Runners-up: Wakarusa, Legends of Arkansas, Arkansas Sounds

Neighborhood festival

Hillcrest Harvestfest

Runners-up: Cornbread Festival, Chili Fights in the Heights, Block Street Block Party (Fayetteville)

Late night spot

Midtown Billiards

Runners-up: Discovery, Ciao Baci, Ernie Biggs

Gay bar

Discovery

Runners-up: 610 Center, Sway Nightclub, TraX

Sports bar

Buffalo Wild Wings Grill and Bar

Runners-up: The Tavern Sports Grill, West End Smokehouse and Tavern, Dugan's Pub

Movie theater

Rave Cinemas

Runners-up: Dickinson Chenal, Market Street Cinema, Ron Robinson Theater

Museum

Museum of Discovery

Runners-up: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Clinton Presidential Center

Performing arts group

Arkansas Repertory Theatre

Runners-up: ReCreation Studios, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Arkansas

Place to gamble

Oaklawn Park

Runners-up: Southland Greyhound Park, Choctaw Casino, Cherokee Casino

Place to see someone famous

Capital Hotel

Runners-up: Clinton Presidential Center, South on Main, Doe's Eat Place

FOOD AND DRINK

Food and festival

Greek Food Festival

Runners-up: Jewish Food Festival, Main Street Food Truck Festival, Cornbread Festival

French fries

Big Orange

Runners-up: McDonald's, Buffalo Grill, Five Guys Burgers and Fries

Onion rings

Sonic

Local winner: Cotham's

Runners-up: Arkansas Burger Co., Dugan's Pub, Town Pump

Cheese Dip

Mexico Chiquito

Runners-up: Local Lime, Stoby's Restaurant, Senor Tequila

Ribs

Whole Hog Cafe

Runners-up: Sims Bar-B-Que, Corky's Ribs and BBQ, McClard's Bar-B-Q

Wine list

Crush Wine Bar

Runners-up: Ciao Baci, So Restaurant Bar, Zin Urban Wine and Beer Bar

Arkansas-brewed beer

Diamond Bear

Runners-up: Stone's Throw, Core, Vino's

Liquor store

Colonial Wines and Spirits

Runners-up: Sullivant's Liquor Store, Springhill Wine and Spirits, O'Looney's Wine and Liquor

Sushi

Sushi Cafe

Runners-up: Oceans at Arthur's, Osaka Japanese Steakhouse (Hot Springs), Sky Modern Japanese

Salad

ZAZA Fine Salad and Wood-Oven Pizza Co.

Runners-up: U.S. Pizza Co., Jason's Deli, The Root Cafe

Business lunch

Capital Bar & Grill

Runners-up: Cache, South on Main, Loca Luna

Brunch

The Root Cafe

Runners-up: B-Side, YaYa's Euro Bistro, Red Door

Cocktail

Capital Bar & Grill

Runners-up: Big Orange, Local Lime, South on Main

Milkshake

Big Orange

Runners-up: Purple Cow, Loblolly Creamery, Sonic

Vegetarian

The Root Cafe

Runners-up: Big Orange, Greenhouse Grille, The Veg

Bread

Boulevard Bread Co.

Runners-up: Arkansas Fresh, Old Mill Bread and Flour Co., Community Bakery

Caterer

Simply the Best

Runners-up: Catering to You, Dinner's Ready, Trio's Restaurant

Outdoor dining

U.S. Pizza Hillcrest

Runners-up: Acadia Restaurant, Cajun's Wharf, Pizza Cafe

PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Artist

John Kushmaul

Runners-up: Erin Lorenzen, Matt McCleod, Stephen Cefalo

Artisan crafter

James Hayes

Runners-up: Judd Mann, David Clemons, Stacey Bowers (Bang-up Betty)

Celebrity

Mary Steenburgen

Runners-up: Bill Clinton, Judge Reinhold, Justin Moore

Photographer

Tim Ernst

Runners-up: Meredith Melody Hubbell, Nancy Nolan, Rett Peek

Politician

Mike Beebe

Runners-up: Mike Ross, Mark Pryor, Warwick Sabin

Athlete

Alex Collins

Runners-up: Derek Fisher, Joe Johnson, Cliff Lee

Liberal

Warwick Sabin

Runner-up: Kathy Webb, Joyce Elliott, Max Brantley

Conservative

Davy Carter

Runners-up: Bill Vickery, Mike Ross

Worst Arkansan

Jason Rapert

Runners-up: Tom Cotton, Mike Huckabee, Mike Maggio

Charity

Heifer International

Runners-up: Our House, The Van, Arkansas Hunger Alliance

Misuse of taxpayer funds

Jason Rapert

Runners-up: Mark Darr, Central Arkansas trolley, appealing ruling overturning same-sex marriage

MEDIA

Radio Station

Alice 107.7

Runners-up: 88.3 KABF, 89.1 KUAR, 103.7 The Buzz

Radio Personality

Heather Brown

Runners-up: Poolboy, Tommy Smith, Bob Robbins

TV Station

KATV

Runners-up: KARK, Fox 16, KTHV

TV News Person

Craig O'Neill

Runners-up: Beth Hunt, Donna Terrell, Scott Inman

TV Weatherman

Todd Yakoubian

Runners-up: Ned Perme, Ed Buckner, Greg Dee

TV Sports

Steve Sullivan

Runners-up: Aaron Peters, Wess Moore

Newspaper writer

Max Brantley

Runners-up: John Brummett, David Koon, Michael Wickline

Blog

Forbidden Hillcrest

Runners-up: Arkansas Blog, Blue Hog Report, The Mighty Rib

Website

Arkansas Times

Runners-up: Forbidden Hillcrest, Rock City Times, Encyclopedia of Arkansas

Twitter feed

Forbidden Hillcrest

Runners-up: Arkansas Blog, Rock City Times, @KATV_Weather

Author of books

Mara Leveritt

Runners-up: Charles Portis, Trenton Lee Stewart, Kat Robinson

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BEST LONG-AWAITED ALBUMS On Tuesday, Fast Weapons Records released Bonnie Montgomery's self-titled full-length album debut. On Aug. 5, Partisan Records will put out Christopher Denny's "If the Roses Don't Kill Us." Both are must-buys for anyone who appreciates rock 'n' roll-flecked country and folk, sharp songwriting and distinctive voices. At different times, Denny and Montgomery have been the toast of the Little Rock music scene, talents friends tell friends about, that attract multigenerational audiences, that lead to talk of "when they will break out." Denny, a North Little Rock native with an otherworldly voice that can recall Roy Orbison, has been flirting with fame for a while. He's toured nationally, had his songs licensed by advertisers and TV shows and hung out with Rick Rubin. But he got mired in addiction and depression. More than half a decade later, he's mounted a comeback. By all indications, it's going to be a success. Early press for "If the Roses ..." has been glowing. NPR is currently previewing the album on its website. Montgomery, a Searcy native, is a classically trained composer and opera singer, whose operetta about Bill Clinton's boyhood received attention from the New Yorker and international press. But lately she's made her living on sweetly sung, timeless-sounding country-folk ditties, playing just about every venue in Central Arkansas and touring the globe opening for Gossip, the internationally beloved pop band cofounded by her high school classmate, Nathan Howdeshell, whose guitar stylings often give Montgomery's songs a nice rockabilly punch and whose Fast Weapons Records is putting out this record. If there's any justice in the world, this album will put Montgomery on a path to a wider audience. LM

BEST TIME KILLER Though there's plenty to see in the abyss of the Internet, one of my guilty pleasures in recent months has been the "Missed Connections" pages on Craigslist Little Rock, which allow those who saw somebody somewhere to shout into the electric Grand Canyon on the off-chance that the person they're talking about might respond. Never has there been assembled a greater collection of near-poetic regret, hope, remorse and lust than in that space. For example: "Cajun's 7/20/14: You were there with a group of women. Dressed very attractively. Never got a chance to get over and introduce myself. Hope you see this." That, friends, is damn near a haiku of longing, not to mention one of the widest nets ever cast for womankind. Nice try, Cajun's Guy. Nice try. DK

BEST ARKANSAS ACTIVITY TO FINALLY GET AROUND TO DOING WHEN YOU HAVE OUT-OF-TOWN GUESTS My wife has been wanting to go crystal digging ever since we moved to Arkansas, but it took a German buddy coming to visit to actually get us out on a quartz hunting mission. (German buddy: "What do you do in Arkansas?" Us: "We dig for crystals!") We took the pleasant hour-and-a-half drive to Jim Coleman Crystal Mines in Jessieville, just northeast of Lake Ouachita. So there are no surprises, let's be clear about what's involved: You go out to a big pile of red dirt that has been hauled in from the mines and dumped. You climb up the dirt and wade through the mud. You pick and hack at the dirt and the mud with crappy tools. That doesn't sound promising, but it's surprisingly addictive. Is it magical vibes from the crystals? Or just the pleasure of frequent rewards for repetitive labor? (It's kind of like playing the slot machines if you won more often, and were — sort of — in nature.) Whatever it was, I got the fever. Only our heat-exhausted German buddy could pull us away. We still cherish our best finds, clear and perfectly shaped, Earth's own knick-knacks. Next time we'll wear more appropriate shoes. DR

BEST GRAPE I've managed to convince my kid that fruit is an acceptable dessert thanks in part to grapes as sweet and delicious as Jupiter, a seedless table grape bred by the wizards at the University of Arkansas System's Division of Agriculture Fruit and Breeding Program. "It's our most exciting grape currently," says Dr. John Clark, professor of horticulture, in a not-very-exciting YouTube video that the U of A's Agricultural Experiment Station put out last year that's still worth watching if only to see the purple delights swaying gently in the breeze. That video, and Jupiter Grapes in general, are good reminders that Arkansas is still the Wonder State. We buy our Jupiters from Cleveland's Cedar Rock Acres at the Argenta Farmers Market. Cedar Rock's Sheldon Sturtevant says he expects to have some to sell through early August. LM

BEST MEMOIR OF LITTLE ROCK IN THE '80s Acclaimed Little Rock novelist Kevin Brockmeier made his first foray into nonfiction this year with "A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade," which is precisely what it sounds like: a poignant, elaborately rendered account of Brockmeier's seventh-grade year, in 1985-86. "There's this idea that only big lives, momentous lives, are worthy of memoir," he said earlier this year in an interview with the Times, "and I remember thinking, well, maybe, but isn't every life momentous — or at least wouldn't it be if you approached it with enough care, enough perceptiveness? Take any one year of any one life, recount it with clarity and sympathy, and shouldn't it matter?" He said the book also marked his "hardest effort to capture Little Rock as it actually exists, or at least as it did back in 1985," and it succeeds on this front as well, with an evocative sense of place that can't help but trigger nostalgia in even the most jaded Arkansans. WS

BEST PLACE TO BUY A WIDGET While we're all about supporting our local hardware stores, there are times when you're in the middle of a project and you just don't have the dough to buy a $30 hammer or a $9 paddle bit for your drill, no matter how good the service. When that happens, put on your hang-dog face and head for the Little Rock outlet of Harbor Freight Tools in the shopping center with Big Lots at the corner of University and Colonel Glenn/Asher avenues. Sure, it smells like Shanghai took a polyurethane dump in there, the tools are around the quality that they give to laborers in South American prison camps, and nothing in the joint is some great heirloom you're going to lovingly cradle in a mahogany box and hand down to your grandkids, but when you have your toilet ripped out some Saturday afternoon with $12 in your pocket, and you find that you REALLY need a ratsafrackin' pipe wrench that must be no less than 19 inches long and no more than 22, it's a good name to know. Also, they've just got a lot of interesting stuff, like vibrating rock tumblers, super-long hemostats, tool boxes, crazy strong magnets, hydraulic presses, tarps, power tools (nothing you'd want to make a living with, but maybe OK for light duty), dollies and floor jacks, all of it dirt cheap. You get what you pay for, but if all you have to pay is a little, sometimes you have to go to Plan B, for Broke. DK

BEST PRE-DINNER SNACK Deviled eggs are a delicious snack — but they're most frequently served at events that are awkward and often don't have alcohol (funerals, church gatherings, neighborhood watch meetings). For that reason, deviled eggs have some undeserved bummer associations. Leave it to Czech-born chef Tomas Bohm to rescue the appetizer for the restaurant crowd, with the dynamite Truffled Deviled Eggs at The Pantry. OK, we can understand being leery at the truffilization of all things, but in this case it adds a needed jolt of flavor. The innards are well whipped, creating the perfect light and fluffy filling, then topped with Parmesan crisps. Perfect prologue to a night out eating and drinking with friends. It's like a church potluck, but awesome — the deviled kind. DR

BEST DOG With apologies to the very attractive dog model that graces these pages, the Best Dog in Arkansas is clearly Champion "Champ" Bartholomew Alewishious 3000. Back in January, Millie Fiser, 60, was pushed down and threatened by a robber who demanded money as she was taking her trash to the curb outside her 18th Street home in Little Rock. She was saved when Champ — Fiser's arthritic, 11-year-old pitbull terrier — leaped over a backyard fence and drove the man away after hearing her cries for help. Champ then lay next to her and kept her warm until help arrived. DK

BEST PLACE TO SCORE FANCY SALT Salt enhances flavor (it's science!). Do high-end sea salts enhance flavor more? Based on our own home-kitchen taste tests, we say that the good stuff really does make a difference for certain dishes as table salt (don't waste it as cooking salt). If you want to give it a try, Dandelion in the River Market district has you covered with around 30 varieties of sea salts, sold in bulk (most are $2 to $3 per ounce). They come from all over the world and range in hue from pastel pink to ink black. Plus, there are various infused concoctions — vanilla bean, sun-ripened tomato, porcini mushroom, venom hot pepper and Q's Bloody Salt, a housemade specialty for Bloody Marys. If you get a little thirsty sampling all the options, you can get a tea brewed for you in the store from among the many varieties of tea leaves available. DR

BEST LOCAL ENTREPRENEURIAL DREAM Tofu misozuke is a Japanese delicacy that involves aging tofu for months in a paste that includes miso, sake and sugar. "I needed a proper cheese substitute," said AiLien Draheim of Little Rock, who describes herself as a part-time vegan. "In my opinion, this is as close as you can get. It's got the creaminess, the umami, the stank of an aged cheese." Draheim has made two batches so far and is still perfecting her recipe. One day, she'd love to start a business offering up Arkansas-made tofu misozuke. The link between the Natural State and Japanese cuisine isn't so far-fetched. Arkansas became the first state to grow soybeans for edamame commercially in 2012, when 12 Arkansas farmers partnered with a food company in Houston. Meanwhile, Lonoke County rice farmer Chris Isbell — who previously made a name for himself growing high-quality sushi rice — has recently been growing an even more prized rice varietal for premium sake, the signature alcoholic beverage of Japan. Former Big Orange bar manager Ben Bell, who trained in Tokyo in 2013 to be a certified advanced sake professional, is hoping to eventually open a sake brewery in Central Arkansas, perhaps using rice grown by Isbell. Which means that it's possible that Draheim could eventually make entirely local tofu misozuke. "My dream is to make it with tofu made of Arkansas soybeans, miso made with Arkansas soybeans, and sake made by Ben Bell of Arkansas," she said. "How nice would it be if it was a 100 percent Arkansas product?"DR

BEST BIRD-THEMED MESSAGEBOARD If finding improbable, but actual, things in Arkansas — and we're not talking politics here — gives you a thrill, we've got the thing for you. It's a message board that will email you tips hot off the keyboard to things rare and wonderful. Sign up to be among the first of your peers to know that if you hurry, you'll see a greater roadrunner in the parking lot of the Other Center. That there was an albino American robin in Conway, "snow white with pink eyes and legs." That nine Western kingbirds are checking out Frazier Pike as a summer home, and that speaking of Western kingbirds, a scissor-tailed flycatcher/Western kingbird hybrid is being seen — and photographed — in Arkansas. That a Snowy Owl had flown way out of its range to perch on a LR port authority building. That in April there was, yes, a two-headed bluebird hanging out in North Little Rock (both heads functional). This is good stuff, no? Rara avis city!

Here's how to get in on the chase: Email listserve@listserv.uark and put in the message body "subscribe ARBIRD-L" and your name. Nothing else. Leave the subject line blank. You'll get a confirmation from the University of Arkansas site and subscription instructions, sort of like Mission Impossible, but not. You can also go to the listserv website, https://listserv.uark.edu, and read from there after you've registered. The latest string provided a woman in Newton County advice on how to see a scarlet tanager. Asked and answered immediately ("anyplace where you can bird in mature forest at high elevation in Newton County"). LNP

BEST BIRD SCULPTURE This honor goes to Jeff Sharp's "Tread Lightly," a beastly night-black owl sculpted from tires, captured presumably as it swoops upon some hapless rodent. The ceiling bulbs gleam like moonlight over the bird's downturned cranium, and it's difficult to distinguish those deathly talons from the tread flowing like melted rubber over the exhibit stand. We love this depiction of fearsome natural vengeance because it's just plain scary. Sharp won a Delta Award for his bird-menace entry in the Arkansas Arts Center's Delta Exhibition. CG

BEST WEEKEND CHEAP EATS The premise of Fonda's $1 Taco Saturday is simple: For a buck a piece, eat as many delicious carnitas and carne asada tacos on homemade soft corn tortillas as you can. Oh, and the outstanding margaritas cost $4. Perfect chips and salsa are free. You stuff yourself, get a little tipsy, and spend maybe ten bucks. Fonda is in a crappy strip mall in West Little Rock, but don't be fooled by the ambience — this place is a hidden gem. DR

BEST NEW LOCAL FILM SERIES Splice Microcinema first emerged in March as a mysterious, anonymously run Facebook page offering links to articles about the revival, all around the country, of small, communal, alternative film screenings. In April, the series began in earnest, screening early Jean-Luc Godard films on 16mm in the back room at Vino's. Over the summer, it's picked up steam and in the process has become a vital part of the Little Rock film scene, offering Orson Welles deep cuts and locally produced, VHS B-movies alike. As of this month, Splice relocated to Few, a "design and development agency" housed above Lulav on Sixth Street, and plans to continue serving world cinema classics, Hollywood cast-offs and subterranean cult fare on a biweekly, donations-only basis. Put simply, this is exactly the sort of thing that Little Rock needs more of and should support at all costs — we hope other aspiring curators, show-promoters and no-budget creative-types take note. Why complain about what Little Rock culture lacks when you can fill in the gaps yourself? WS

BEST INDIAN SNACKS OK, honestly Veggi Deli could be an editor's pick in any number of categories: Best Indian, Best Vegetarian, Best Hole in the Wall, Best Snacks, Best Place to Order a Bunch of Food for a Party, Best Surprisingly Good Family Restaurant in the Back of a Grocery Store. Hell, it might just be the best place to eat in town. Veggi Deli makes outstanding traditional street food from northern and southern India, all $3 to $6. Tucked away in the back of Asian Groceries in northwest Little Rock, the little cafe features a dizzying array of distinctive and memorable flavors. Soak them up with the crispy rice-flour crepe of the Dosa Sambar and the crunchy puffed rice of the Bhel. Oh, and don't miss the samosas. Really, come hungry, try everything. DR

BEST NOSTALGIA-INDUCING ROADHOUSE A 39-year wait was worth it. Herman's Ribhouse, a 50-year-old roadhouse on College Avenue in Fayetteville, still serves draft beer in frozen mugs, heaping plates of peppery ribs, bargain-priced giant boiled shrimp, slab steaks and monstrous burgers in the cozy confines of a wood-paneled, red-checked-curtain highway joint. R&B on the sound system completes the old-school vibe, though we'd still substitute Schlitz for one of the many craft beers on tap, including a couple from local microbreweries like Core of Springdale. Last time we were there, Bill Clinton was a law professor and spinning campaign stories from 1974. Forty years later, both Herman and Bill seem to be doing OK, though skinny Bill could do with a burger. MB

BEST SURVIVOR STORY Few people have stared death in the face as closely as Kali Hardig, the young Saline County victim of Naegleria fowleri— the so-called "brain-eating amoeba"— who seems to have made a full recovery from her ordeal last summer. She is now 13 and leading a happy, active life, according to a BuzzFeed piece published this July about Hardig's improbable survival. Out of about 130 known infections in North America in the past 50 years, Hardig is only the third person to have survived contact with the parasite, which subsequent testing revealed to be present in a now-shuttered water park in Little Rock that she visited before becoming sick. (The amoeba is found in warm freshwater lakes throughout the South, but actual infections are very rare.)

With such an uncommon disease, it's impossible to say how Hardig got so lucky. Use of an experimental drug may have helped. What's certain is that major credit goes to the staff of Arkansas Children's Hospital, the quick response of Hardig's parents and the sheer miraculous unpredictability of the human body. BH.

BEST READING SPOT Wander down the grassy knoll underneath the southeast corner of the Junction Bridge, and you'll find a few sturdy unseen sitting spots among the rocks along the bank. If you don't let that industrial I-40 traffic spoil the solace of this natural hideaway, you've got a beautiful downstream river view. Go early or late enough and you might also enjoy the colors of an impressionist sky. Say hello to the fishermen if you see them — the guppies like to gather around the concrete foundations for the algae. No doubt the essential spot to try and fail anew Joyce's riverrun classic "Finnegan's Wake.""A way a lone a last a loved a long the —"CG

BEST DRUNK Justin Booth has become something of a phenom on the local literary scene since the Arkansas Times Observer first bought a homebrewed book of the then-homeless poet's phenomenal work from him in the River Market in 2012. He read for the Times at this year's Pub or Perish event during the Arkansas Literary Festival, and was thoroughly potted by the time my wife and I drove him home to his place on Rodney Parham. Let's just say that Dean Martin has got nothing on him in the Charming Drunk department, with Booth keeping us laughing the whole ride, discussing topics ranging from Arkansas poetry, whether he dabbles in misogyny, and a freaky librarian he once talked into a romp in the stacks. He's probably as full of shit as a Christmas turkey, but the best storytellers often are, especially while schnockered. DK

BEST (IF FUTILE) EFFORT BY PHOTOGRAPHERS TO TRY TO SAVE A HISTORIC LANDMARK Rita Henry and members of her Blue Eyed Knocker photography group have photographed the once-elegant 1913 Hotel Pines in Pine Bluff, designed by George R. Mann, to document and encourage its preservation. The Interior Design Department at the University of Arkansas's Fay Jones School of Architecture has asked students to dream up new uses for the hotel, but given its condition and the economy in Pine Bluff, a rescue is unlikely. LNP

BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL Everybody loves the first volume of "March," the graphic novel collaboration between civil rights legend and Congressman John Lewis and Nate Powell, the Little Rock-native comic artist (Andrew Aydin, an aide to Lewis, is also credited as a co-author). Everybody is right. It's a beautiful story rendered in beautifully inked frames that project the history of the early civil rights movement through Lewis' remarkable life as leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

At an authors' panel at the Arkansas Literary Festival this spring, Lewis said he hoped the book would spark a new generation into activism on issues such as immigration reform and equity in education. Read it and you'll wonder about the impact it might have —"March" is educational and moving, inspiring and accessible. Since its publication last summer, schools across the country have picked up the book as required reading.

Powell spoke to the Literary Festival audience about the pressure of illustrating such weighty, iconic subject matter (you try faithfully representing Martin Luther King Jr.'s face panel after panel). However, his art ends up being the perfect vehicle for depicting an epic of struggle and suffering and dignity — stark, declarative lines seamlessly meld with energy-laden scribbles and gentle ink washes. Powell's confessional, emotive style has always sought to coax a sense of grandeur from everyday life, but it seems even better suited to telling an epic story like Lewis'. Book Two of the three-part series is due out in early 2015. BH

BEST ONE-DAY STREET ARTS FESTIVAL The Thea Foundation brings talented artists and musicians to downtown North Little Rock's Argenta neighborhood in April for its one-day Thea Arts Festival, filling several blocks of Main Street with booths of good art and live music all day. Kids make clay pots and other fun stuff while their parents meet established and emerging artists and buy a few things and then everyone dances in the street. Can't beat it. LNP

BEST LATE-NIGHT GRUB The oldest open secret about late-night drinkers is their penchant for transmogrifying, at some dim and hazy hour, into ravenous late-night eaters. While Fayetteville's Dickson Street has long held the title as the state's most bountiful pub-crawl destination (condolences, downtown Little Rock), that strip has traditionally left its aficionados/victims with few options for the sort of quick, cheap, messy dining that inebriated sorts, as well as their designated drivers, tend to crave a few hours after dinner.

Qdoba, Waffle House and Jimmy John's all do yeoman's work. This year, though, in the shadow of Jose's, the Schulertown food truck court has arrived to shift the Dickson dining scene cheerily down-market, with a casual urbanity that makes carousing in Fayetteville feel suddenly more like Portland, Oregon. Belly up for beers or for any of seven dining trucks parked in the snug lot, most of which stay open until 3 a.m.: pizza, soul food, tamales, pies, sandwiches, all for your woozy consumption on picnic tables.

The proprietor of the space told the Fayetteville Flyer earlier this year that he hopes to keep it a family-friendly place — and it is! But when the productive people of the world head home to read stories to their kids and rest up for the morrow, those of us out making idiot-decisions will slur praises to the salvation a basket of hot fried okra confers after two whiskeys too many. SE

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At the Museum of Discovery, the youngsters are making huge steam rings, bowling and pumping up lungs. The smallest ones are making lava lamps out of colored water, oil and carbon dioxide. It is a play area of sorts. But it is also a place for finding wonders in the physical world, for both the squirts and their parents.

"It's exciting for a kid to see hydrogen ignite, but it's no less exciting for adults," said Kevin Delaney, the museum's director of visitor experience who's gained a modicum of fame by making elephant toothpaste on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." (Hydrogen peroxide plus soap plus dye plus potassium iodide will launch an astonishing sploosh of colored foam.)

Getting that message across — that the museum is for adults as well as children — is the challenge Delaney and the educational staff at the museum have taken on. Sometimes, adults learn by watching their kids. Last week, a father lay on a bed of nails for his daughter (what father wouldn't) and they talked about why it didn't hurt. Sometimes, the grownups learn at Science After Dark, the museum's monthly event that combines a cash bar and pizza with a science program (this Wednesday's was the Science of Fire, with the Little Rock Fire Department, a Forestry Commission employee and museum staff).

And though there is a bit of running amok and noise in the museum, the staff is constantly engaging children, like the adorable redhead who dragged Delaney over to the scorpion tank last week to inform him that a scorpion is "vemenous." He's also an arachnid, Delaney told him, counting off the eight legs. And then he asked the cute redhead, what's the difference between venomous and poisonous? An uninformed reporter waited eagerly for the answer. You're "vemonous" when the poison is inside you and poisonous when it's outside you, the kid answered. Right! We all made fang signs with our fingers and moved on.

The museum staff's eagerness to enrich the experience might be why in June alone there were 12,600 visitors to the museum. In all, there were 152,000 visitors in 2013.

Do the museum's hands-on exhibits and experiments fuel a real interest in science as well as entertain? "Absolutely," Delaney said. He's seen it himself. He was heading up a class in brain dissection for older school kids. "I remember one kid up in the front. He was very rambunctious and I was thinking, oh no, I was going to have to keep an eye on him. As soon as he got to the table with the specimen and tools ... he was the most focused kid in the group." The kids around him, nervous about making the cut, calmed down when they saw his focus. "That kid is going to be a surgeon," Delaney said. "It's happened so many times. Kids will see a demonstration and it resonates. They will remember it. ... That's why I keep doing my job."

Delaney himself is an example of a nonscience person getting turned on by science (though his uncle studied ancient pollen and his brother is a marine biologist whose claim to fame is breeding leafy sea dragons at Sea World in Orlando). Delaney's background is in theater and writing; he taught improv in Providence, R.I., before moving to Arkansas with his wife, a native of North Little Rock. He also worked with animals at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence. He thought when he was hired on at the MOD that his job would be to work with the museum's animal collection. "Then they told me, 'You're now going to learn chemistry, physics, math and everything else.'"

And he does it with flair. Delaney's TV appearance has brought great publicity for the museum and his theatrical talents; NASA invited him recently to do science demonstrations for a bring-your-kid-to-work day event there. "Social media blew up," museum PR person Kendall Thornton said. "A lot of visitors here — our core — it gave them a whole new sense of pride in the museum."

The museum's Facebook page, which features humble but funny staff-made videos, is the best way to keep up with what's happening there. The museum is at 500 President Clinton Ave. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for children under 12, seniors, teachers, active duty military and city employees and free for children under 1. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

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When I was a child and on a trampoline, I bounced my knee right into Billy Owens' nose; his nose broke. Around puberty, my cousin, his friends and myself would box on the same trampoline, wearing sparring gloves — the idea being to jump way high, thus adding gravity's pull to the power of a chocked-back and velocity-loaded haymaker. I know a couple of parents who hid their trampolines in the woods when they remortgaged, expecting an inspector — insurance against higher insurance rates.   

There are 249 trampolines at Little Rock's supreme trampoline attraction, Altitude Trampoline Park.  

My colleague, Jeramie, and I walk into the warehouse-like space, jam-packed with bobbing, hopping, bouncing broods propelled by the springs of "Olympic quality" trampolines. We sign waivers. We take off our shoes. We ascend an entrance ramp. We jounce about.

Altitude opened in December 2013, and has become a popular destination for families with children. Betsy Browning, Altitude's general manager, estimates that on an average weekday, 400 to 500 people visit the park.

The park, on Chenal Parkway, has many small trampolines. Thin strips of purple padding encircle individual trampolines serving as walkways and barriers. Walls are elasticized. The park features a main "court" as a general bounce area, a foam pit for aerobatic diving, two basketball goals for dunking and dodgeball arenas. There are sections that cater to toddlers: the "Kids Court" and a kids dodgeball zone.

Jeramie, who has studied dance for 22 years, is graceful on the park's court, her strawberry-blonde hair whirling, her green eyes happy. I grow jealous of the ease with which she can leap over foam walkways and between trampolines and rebound off walls. I try to double-bounce her. At Altitude, however, only one person is allowed on a single trampoline at a time. (A double-bounce can happen only when two people are on the same trampoline, both parties landing at the same time, and one person is rocketed skyward with double the usual inertia.)

I land in her trampoline and a piercing whistle blows. Altitude's rules are enforced by a gaggle of teenaged employees. They stand sentinel over the play areas, gym-teacher whistles looped around their necks on lanyards.

"Hey, you! Get out of there!" an enforcer yells at me.

Browning says that the employee training process is intensive, including instruction about rules, lessons on safety and required participation in a "team lead-around," where a potential worker is mentored by and observes a knowledgeable staff member as they work. A written quiz follows.

Jeramie and I move on to dodgeball. A new game is about to start and we are faced with the critical decision of which team to join. The team on the right-hand side of the arena has a gang of 13-to-14-year-old boys in Under Armor, so we head right. A whistle is blown.

"The teams are now uneven," an enforcer yells. "You!"

"Me?" I say.

"Yeah, you," he says. "Move to the other team." My new team looks wimpy.

An Altitude employee, Daniel, 18, explains the rules: "If you get hit, you're out. If somebody catches your ball, you're out. Headshots don't count. If somebody throws a ball and you try to block it but drop your ball, you're out. That's about it."

Jeramie mingles with her sole female teammate and asks for dodgeball advice.

"Keep moving," the 7-year-old girl tells her. "Stand behind the boys and they will block balls. Watch out for the boys on the other team because they will go for you. Keep moving."

A whistle is blown and the game begins. A lanky guy on my team instantly strikes, green foam to enemy flesh. "First blood!" he yells and grabs his crotch. Not so wimpy after all, I think. Struck by the moment, I am struck on the shoulder by a ball. I meet Jeramie, already on the sideline.

Altitude markets safety as its No. 1 priority. But an enforcer confesses to me that there are quite a few injuries. "Honestly, one time playing dodgeball, one guy's teeth went into the another guy's head." The testimony continues, "The worst part about the job is the crying. There're a lot of little kids, and they just cry all the time."

Another enforcer, James Gunn Rowland, tells me he carries three ice packs in his fanny pack while he works, "just in case."

Despite the risk, the park seems to be a hit with parents. Dennis James stands in a suit and tie watching two of his grown daughters and six of his grandchildren play. He says he knows his girls would have loved this place when they were young.

Clay and Heather Mercer are hosting a birthday party for their son, Henry. "As a parent, I like it," Clay says. "It feels secure for kids when you know that every kid has an armband, and there is a security form that you are filling out, and the staff is really paying attention."

A child tells me, "I can be like Jesus. In the foam pit I can walk on water."

In front of the pit, Jeramie bends down beside a 5-year-old to inquire about his favorite part of Altitude Trampoline Park.

"The jumping," he says.

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There's something happening in America, and it's been happening for a long time. The last of the mom-and-pop operations are disappearing, plowed under by the acre-square monoliths on the edge of town, so big they've got their own horizon, often staffed by people whose know-how is limited to how to get to the bathroom. There are, thankfully, a few survivors. One of those in North Little Rock is Don's Weaponry, your friendly neighborhood gun store in Rose City.

Love 'em or hate 'em, guns are beautiful little gadgets, oiled and machined and gleaming, designed to make what's essentially an explosion in your hand no more painful than smacking your fist into your palm. They've got a lot of guns at Don's, everything from tiny Derringers to the political football AR-15 rifles to giant military machine guns displayed (though not for sale) up next to the ceiling. Unless you're a nervous sort when it comes to firearms — and we don't blame you if you are, as the philosophical weeds on the subject are deep and getting deeper by the year — browsing through the wares, hunting trophies, antiques and accessories on display and for sale at Don's is a good way to spend an afternoon. They even let a reporter from the local lefty rag do some looking, and were very nice about it.

Don Hill is the owner and proprietor of Don's Weaponry, and has been in business at 4116 E. Broadway since 1986. Hill said he's been fooling around with guns since he was a kid but really became interested in firearms during a stint in the Army. A lifelong hunter, he was in the medical business for over 30 years, but when a conglomerate bought his employer and his division was phased out, he took it as a sign he should open his own gun shop. He started with a small store behind his house in 1973, selling to friends and via word of mouth. Forty-one years later, he's still selling shooting irons.

Hill said that the big-box stores like Bass Pro and Gander Mountain have killed off many small gun shops, but he usually beats them on prices and always beats them in service. "Their prices are quite a bit higher than mine," he said. "We have been a customer-oriented store ever since the day I opened. We're going to give a customer the best price we can and still make a living. We're going to give you good values on your trade-in. We buy estates. We buy bankruptcies. I've bought out seven other gun shops since I've been in business. ... My people here are all highly knowledgeable. I don't hire kids off the street. With my guys, I think the least any of them have been with me is probably 10 years."

Hill said that when people come in looking to buy a gun, his staff tries to guide them to what they need instead of what they think they want. That starts with asking them what they plan to do with it: home protection, hunting, target shooting or concealed carry. Then, Hill said, come questions like the buyer's familiarity with firearms, whether they have children in the house, whether they live in an apartment, and the surroundings of their home.

"If a guy comes in off the street and says, 'I want that gun right there,' I usually stop him, and say, 'Whoa.' As a general rule, he'll buy it and then come back in two weeks and say, 'I don't like it.' ... We try to sell a person what they need. A lot of the time, we end up having to sell him what he wants, but we try to guide you in the right direction."

Helping narrow down the choices is a full-service firing range in the basement, which allows prospective buyers to rent and try any of over 50 handguns for $5 each. Range fees are $12.50 per person, and you have to buy the ammo, but — as Hill points out — spending $50 and an hour to test drive a pistol before you buy it is a lot better than paying $600 and having buyer's remorse later. Don's also offers comprehensive handgun safety classes that include range time and information on when a person can legally use a handgun in self-defense.

A longtime member of the NRA, Hill is happy to talk about the politics of guns if you ask. He's very old-school in his thinking on guns, saying that he doesn't really understand the point those carrying rifles into Home Depot and Target are trying to make, and adding that he'd never open-carry his own handgun in a holster on his belt. Too easy for someone to walk up and pull it out of the holster, you see. He's a big proponent of gun safety classes for those who purchase firearms ("You take somebody who has never been through a carry class, and he gets the John Wayne Syndrome, you know? He's liable to shoot somebody 100 yards away.") and would like to see the State Police doing more to make sure concealed carry class instructors are actually teaching safe and legal firearm use.

As for his shop, Hill said he's not planning to try his luck up on the freeway anytime soon. Though the fortunes of Rose City have changed since 1986, he said he's never had any trouble there. Besides, he owns the building.

"Why should I move?" he said. "Why should I go pay $3,000 a month in rent when I'm rent-free here? That's one of the reasons I can sell the guns at the prices I do. I don't have a big rent payment."

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Larry West is our readers' choice as Best Decorator, so we decided to test his mettle with perhaps the greatest challenge of his 20-year career: re-imagining the Arkansas Times office. If you have never paid a visit to our humble home base, I will briefly paint a picture. The walls veer between drab grey, mustard-beige and off-white — imagine a variety of skin tones of sickly men near death. There are stacks of papers and boxes close to the tipping point at every corner; dozens of unused dilapidated chairs; entire walls unadorned by decoration of any kind; a patchwork of well-stained carpets perhaps older than the Times itself; entire rooms used to store things that no current employee claims; fluorescent lights flickering between those familiar middle-school-classroom ceiling tiles. Everywhere: a faint muskiness.

When told of the idea to get an interior design consult from the Best Decorator winner, Times publisher Alan Leveritt said, "That's like taking a city planner to Berlin in 1945."

Upon arriving at Times HQ, West noted that the office environment seemed to be an odd fit with the spirit of the publication.

"When I think of the Arkansas Times, I think of fun, I think of interesting, I think of out of the box," he said. "When I walk off the elevators, that's not what I get. I feel like I'm maybe at the back office at Home Depot."

West noted that, but for one hallway with framed past issues of the Times (more of that, he suggested), the office had mostly blank walls. Meanwhile, he questioned what actually had been put up. A giant calendar ("boring," he said) was tacked to one wall in the meeting room, but was completely blank. "Do you need that?" he asked. I didn't have a good answer. Meanwhile, in our newsroom, West asked about a 4-by-7-foot white poster board, blank, attached to the wall with a mish-mash of tacks and packing tape. After some investigation, it turns out that Times editor Lindsey Millar put it up a year ago in order to project a power point presentation. It hasn't been used since.

"It's called editing," West said. "That's what we call it just like you would call it. Get all that riff raff out. Use the space that you have."

That also means getting rid of what has affectionately become known around the office as the "furniture graveyard": shabby chairs from various decades, the majority of them broken, most of them without owners.

"It just seems gloomy," West said. "Isn't it gloomy to y'all? You can admit it — it's boring in here. I would want to work in a place that makes me excited."

For the walls, West suggested framed images — classic Times covers, notable photographs from our archives. "I'd have pictures all over the place," he said. "Stuff that's fun. Stuff that's got Arkansas Times written all over it." One staffer's office features a dress that was made out of issues of the Times— West heartily approved.

The whole place would get a paint job, West said. "The color is boring in this whole entire space, that's the first thing I think we should change," he said. West sent over suggestions, a vibrant array of oranges, purples, greens and pastel blues. "Something bright and fun and cheery — not depressing. I feel like I'm going to jump out a window into the river."

West also suggested mid-sized club chairs (cozy and colorful), sleek laptop tables, stylish lamps in lieu of the fluorescent overhead lighting, new carpeting ("something fun") and more attractive commercial insets for the ceiling grids.

"I like the fact that the space is very open," he said. "It just looks junky. This kind of chair, that kind of chair. We just need to clean that up." West said he would aim for "a mix of style: mid-century modern accompanied with a mix of pop art."

Another big one: Shelving mounted to the walls. Anything, West said, to get us out of our current habit of stacking stuff everywhere. Half of our desks (mine included) have assorted stacks of paper. Stacks of overstuffed boxes are everywhere (one set of boxes by my desk is labeled with years from the early 1990s). Two stacks of unread editions of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspapers in the newsroom form 4-foot-high twin towers.

Again, West suggested going for fun — metal, sleek, brightly colored. "I'd love to see some red shelves in here," he said. "It would look great and you could actually organize and store what you need. If things are in disarray, it makes your perception of what needs to happen off balance."

West's most popular suggestion around the office was one of his simplest. One large room is currently completely unused, cluttered with unoccupied desks, empty boxes, empty shelves and various unwanted knick knacks. Why not convert the space into a lounge, West suggested? It could be a second, more spacious meeting area, plus a place with laptop tables set up for people who want to take a break from the newsroom or their office. Stick an espresso maker in there and you could almost have the vibe of an office coffee shop. Again, said West, it's about "using the space that you have. Here's a blank open space. Right now, there's too much space — shelves, chairs, office space, desks — that are abandoned."

This approach fits with West's design philosophy. "My forte is taking what people have and finding the proper balance and placement," he said.

West has been decorating his whole life. "My mother loves to tell stories of me pushing furniture around when I was like 3 or 4," he said. After a stint working under Little Rock interior decorator Tom Chandler, West struck out on his own in 1995 — West Interiors does both home and commercial projects, predominantly in Arkansas and Texas, but they have done projects in 15 other states as well. Notable projects include all nine of the Dallas-based Campisi's Italian restaurants and major events for the Arkansas Arts Center and the Little Rock Zoo.

West believes that comfort and style lead to more creativity in a work space.

"I think a lot of people don't actually realize it until their space is properly organized and put together," he said. "It really does make a difference. Once they get themselves into an environment where the colors are right, the placement is correct, the organization is where it should be — it just changes people's lives."

Thus far, no word from the bosses on whether we get to put West's plan for the Times office in action. We labor on, our lives unchanged. The broken chairs stare at us, accusingly.

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What sets the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture apart from its peers across the country? "I don't think any other state encyclopedia has an entry on a death metal band," offers Mike Keckhaver, the online collection's media editor and author of the entry on the band in question, North Little Rock's Rwake.

Other topics on which the EOA (encyclopediaofarkansas.net) likely has a monopoly among similar projects: cheese dip ("... considered to be an important part of Arkansas's food culture"), drag shows ("... have their roots in rural folk dramas often used as fundraisers for community institutions") and slime molds ("... do not have a particularly attractive name, but some examples produce fruiting bodies that are miniature objects of considerable beauty").

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas takes on topics that might be of broader interest, of course: The entry on the Little Rock Nine who integrated Central High School is the EOA's most visited page, often, judging from the sorts of queries the staff gets, from students working on assignments, according to editor Guy Lancaster. That means the encyclopedia is fulfilling one of its original aims. A big reason the Central Arkansas Library System started the project in 2002 "was a recognition that, if we're going to teach Arkansas history in secondary schools, we need a resource," said Susan Gele, assistant director, public relations for the library.

Officially launched in 2006 as a project of CALS' Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, the encyclopedia began with 700 entries and 900 pieces of multimedia. Today, thanks to a staff of four and dozens of volunteer contributors who receive an honorarium of 5 cents per word, the EOA counts more than 3,600 entries and 5,000 pieces of media within its collection. CALS has pledged to support the encyclopedia in perpetuity; along the way, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the Department of Arkansas Heritage, the Arkansas General Assembly, the Arkansas Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities and other foundations and donations have helped it grow.

Two recent grants came from the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission to add entries on the Civil War in Arkansas. The encyclopedia already had entries on significant battles; what they've added are mostly skirmishes, Lancaster said, "where a group of five people go out foraging for something and runs across a group of four bushwhackers and they trade bullets for a little bit and then back away.

"I really enjoy these because not only do they make the Civil War history more local — the war is now suddenly not something that happened around Pea Ridge and around Helena or around Arkansas Post — but it shows the more likely average war experience of your soldier, that there's a lot of waiting around, there's a lot of small-scale conflict, a lot of just holding territory. I tell Mark Christ [of the Sesquicentennial Commission] that it actually makes the Civil War more interesting by making it boring."

Lancaster said local history often gets dismissed as unimportant, too quotidian.

"But really local history is where it's at," he said. "That's where most people are connecting with whatever is happening in the wider world."

Further reading

We asked Encyclopedia of Arkansas Editor Guy Lancaster, an occasional contributor to the Arkansas Times, to pass along some of his favorite entries. Here is a sampling:

Freda Hogan Ameringer:"Socialist, suffragette, and all-around amazing woman."

Bullfrog Valley Gang:"An international counterfeiting cartel based in the hills of Pope County — paging Guy Ritchie."

Grannis Vigil and Incoming Kingdom Missionary Unit:"So far, no one predicting the Second Coming has been proven right."

Mitchell v. Globe International Publishing:"Oddly enough, 'Pregnancy Forces Granny to Quit Work at Age 101' wasn't quite an honest headline."

Richard Sharpe Shaver:"If a mentally ill former hobo managed to influence science fiction so much, what does that say about the genre?"

Skipper v. United Central Life Insurance:"The Arkansas Gazette described it as 'perhaps the strangest case in the criminal annals of Arkansas,' and that's saying something."

Helen Spence:"She killed the man who shot her pa, and won the hearts of many."

"The White River Kid":"Arguably the worst movie filmed in Arkansas. Any decent state encyclopedia would be well within its rights to overlook this direct-to-video travesty that was first released on VHS in Bulgaria and Spain, but we are not any ordinary state encyclopedia. I like to think that our inclusion of this raging mess of inconsistent plot and bad acting is a testament of our commitment to cover all aspects of the state's history and culture, no matter how obscure or regrettable."

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There are so many bests in Arkansas that the Arkansas Times has to put out this issue every year to cover them all. Last year, our Best of Arkansas issue covered an artist and tattoo aficionado, a water park, french fries and blue politics in a red state. This year, along with a list of all our readers' choices, we're highlighting the Museum of Discovery, Don's Weaponry and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas (which includes an entry on slime molds). Then we asked an interior decorator what he thought about the Times' office. He said it made him want to jump in the river. We're also writing about the rap collective Young Gods of America, with a feature on Altitude Trampoline Park thrown in for some spring.

To help us on our tour of the best of the best, we enlisted Maggie, a Catahoula Leopard dog, who has a nose for winners (but may be permanently afraid of science experiments.)

We've got our editors' picks, too (find best dog, best pre-dinner snack and other iconoclastic bests there), and give you a piece of our minds on pie.

Here, the big list of bests, from clothes to golf courses to liquor stores to liberals.

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With the exception of the Pie Shop at Terry's, these folks need a couple days' notice if you want to buy a whole pie. We figured volume because we wanted to include pi in our pie. Volume figures are a tiny bit fudged, given that none of the pies were cylinders.

Lemon icebox pie
Big Orange, 379-8715
$32 per pie, $6 per slice

A top vote-getter by the Times' taste-testers, nicely lemony with a whipped cream topping instead of meringue (a plus with one of the testers) and a graham cracker crust, which gives any pie an advantage. Don't drink with sauvignon blanc, however, or you'll have a hard time tasting the lemon.

Aesthetics: The orange zest on the top added a nice touch.

Volume: A bit less than 113.5 cubic inches.

Coconut meringue
Charlotte's Eats & Sweets, 842-2123
$26 per pie, $4.25 per slice

Winner of the highest meringue category at two and a half inches, this pie would have been better served before the rest, so delicate is its flavor. In fact, we're sure of it. Don't have a piece of lemon pie first. And here's a hint: When you go to Charlotte's, don't wait until you've eaten your hamburger to order your pie, or you might be out of luck.

Aesthetics: Thanks to the meringue, described by one tester as "wicked," this prize wins for looks.

Volume: A bit less than 270.4 cubic inches.

Peanut butter pie
Three Sam's BBQ Joint, 407-0345
$20 per pie, $4 per slice

Testers liked the combo of chocolate and peanut butter in this creamy pie, heaped high and blanketed with peanuts. It got an "OMG" from one taster; another compared it favorably to a giant Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

Aesthetics: A little over the top nut-wise.

Volume: A bit less than 238.6 cubic inches (biggest pie tasted).

German chocolate pie
The Pie Shop at Terry's Finer Foods, 663-4152
$32 per pie, $4 per slice

Is this a German chocolate pie with pecans? Or a pecan pie with German chocolate? One naysayer, the type who doesn't color outside the lines, was bothered by the cross-cultural identity of this pie. Naysayer was shot down in a hail of derision, however. The pecans were praised.

Aesthetics: We could look chocolate in the face for a long time.

Volume: A bit less than 80.1 cubic inches.

Pecan pie
Franke's Cafeteria, 225-4487 (Marketplace), 372-1919 (downtown)
$14.94 per pie, $2.69 per slice

This was the bargain pie, from the venerable Franke's. It should be served hot, and if you are home, put a scoop of ice cream on it. Drawback: an undistinguished crust.

Aesthetics: Ice cream makes everything beautiful.

Volume: A bit less than 85.1 cubic inches.

Raspberry cream pie
Trio's Restaurant, 221-3330
$26 per pie, $6 per slice

Excellent cream filling and graham cracker crust, rather than the raspberries, made this pie a standout. (But if strawberries are in season, get the strawberry shortcake instead at Trio's. Outstanding.)

Aesthetics: Wayne Thiebaud.

Volume: A bit less than 75.39 cubic inches (smallest pie tasted).

Caramel apple cinnamon crumb
Pie Hole food truck, 712-6366
$27 per pie, $4.50 per slice

Pockets of crunchy caramelized sugar cinnamon plus apple plus pie crust ... such cries of pleasure one never heard in a newsroom. This pie was so delicious that its appearance — the color of dog food — was completely forgiven.

Aesthetics: Ol' Roy, but smelling great.

Volume: A bit less than 143.1 cubic inches.

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Chainwheel, which has kept Little Rock's cyclists rolling for more than 42 years, has seen enormous change in the technology of bikes. Today's two-wheelers are lighter, more comfortable and come in many styles, even motorized. Pat Barron, owner of Chainwheel, says Little Rock's biking community has also changed, thanks to an emphasis by city and county government on creating places to bike, such as the 17-mile Millennium Trail (also known as the Arkansas River Trail) that connects Little Rock and North Little Rock over the Big Dam Bridge on the west and the Clinton Presidential Park Bridge on the east and includes a route to Two Rivers Park. Overland trails have been improved as well for mountain bike riders. Chainwheel, the Readers Choice for best bike store, has wheels to suit cyclists of varying interests and abilities. Here are some of Barron's recommended styles, with starting prices listed:

Trek FX $600

The Toyota Camry of Chainwheel's selection, this fitness bike is both comfortable and efficient, and it's a good place to start if you're new to the cycling scene. The frame structure and pedal position allow you to sit more upright than you would on a true racing bike, making for a more comfortable ride. The bike also holds a more stable pair of tires. But don't think you can't pull a 50-mile cruise on these wheels — the name of the game is versatility.

Trek Emonda $2000s

A step up from the FX, the Emonda is a high performance bike. The word comes from the French verb "emonder," which means to pare or to cut, and this bike runs a bit lighter and stiffer than its cozier counterparts. The Emonda doesn't abandon comfort, which makes it a reasonably priced investment for a semi-serious road-rider.

Trek Marlin (mountain bike) $600

Modern mountain biking was born on the rocky slopes of Colorado and California in the late '70s. Many first-time cyclists want thick-wheeled mountain bikes for their strength and durability rather than their ability to traverse tough terrain. Barron says mountain bikes are perfect for jumping curbs and speed bumps as wheel as off-road obstacles.

Trek SpeedConcept $4,000

Call it a "dream-bike." Trek SpeedConcepts are all business. Trek markets this frame as the fastest design available, and the bike's electronic gear-shift mechanisms don't fail. You can attach a sleek plastic carrying container beneath the seat to store your valuables. Too much technology to enumerate in strict detail (invisible brakes and aero skewers and speed fins), but this one's a good investment if you'll be training for next year's Tour, or something similar.

Electra Townie $500

A lifestyle bike — emphasis on the "style"— like the Electra Townie suits the casual cruiser best. Designed to maximize comfort, the Townie's appropriate for a downtown ride to the Root Cafe or for rolling through the suburban streets of Hillcrest. The seat sits lower and farther back from the handlebars, so if you need to take a phone call mid-cruise, you only need to put your feet down. Fenders on both wheels create an old-school aesthetic, and the bike's simplicity makes it perfect for people who have what Barron calls "gear-phobia," a fear of overcomplicated gears, wires and handbrakes. Not so on this model — figure out the pedalbrake and you're good to go.

Electra Townie Go $2,300

Around Chainwheel, they call it the future of local transportation. It's not a motorbike, but it does carry an electric motor. This bike calculates your pedaling power and then supplements your effort with energy from the motor, but you don't need a license to drive it because the motor will stop helping you at 15.5 mph (20 is the license limit). One full charge (3 to 4 hours) gets you about 30 miles. The Townie Go is a good way to save on gas money for short errands, and it costs much less than a car.

Strider $100

Take the philosophy behind scooters, apply it to a bicycle, and you get the Strider. Two tires for 2-year-olds, this training bike teaches toddlers how to balance the fulcrum without training wheels. The bike doesn't have pedals (they don't call it the "Strider" for nothing). Little kids can run on the bike to establish pace and then hop on to glide. Thick wheels help to preserve balance, and the seat sits low enough for most kiddos to be able to touch the ground. No more first-fall trauma.

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Last March, in a conference room at the former Peabody Hotel, Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola stood up to address a small gathering of mostly out-of-town academics. He cleared his throat, thanked everyone for coming. To the mayor's immediate left was seated Pharoah Sanders, the pioneering avant-garde saxophonist who Ornette Coleman, no amateur, once called "probably the best tenor player in the world.""I want you all to know," said the mayor, looking out at the sparse crowd, "I come from a musical family."

Sanders, 73, wore a long, loose-fitting white shirt that fell far below his waist. He kept his eyes closed while the mayor spoke, facing down into his lap as if meditating or in great pain. "I was very pleased to hear about all the talent that Pharoah has exhibited over the years," the mayor continued, not hiding the fact that he knew very little about the man sitting next to him. Sanders hung his head even lower, which hadn't previously seemed possible. The speech went on for a few more minutes and ended with the mayor proclaiming that day, March 8, "Pharoah Sanders Day here in the city of Little Rock."

Light applause, and then Sanders finally opened his eyes, stood and shuffled over to the podium. His beard was jagged, white, Zeus-like. He threw up his hands, the international sign of speechlessness. "God bless everybody, all of you," he said very slowly, his voice almost inscrutably deep. There was silence for a while, but for the awkward hum of an AC unit. "I don't know what else I can really say," he said. "I will remember this day my whole life."

Maybe you were there that day at the Peabody, but I doubt it. Not many were. I wasn't. The moment is preserved on an old VHS tape somewhere deep in the catacombs of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. I visited the Center not long ago and met with John Miller, coordinator of the concert series Arkansas Sounds. Miller was there, he introduced Sanders and he remains visibly shaken by the encounter. "He's got this weird, heavy presence," he told me, sitting in his office surrounded by stacks of local cultural debris. "It was like I could walk into a room, and I'd just know, 'He's here.' Then I'd look around and there he'd be. You could feel that heaviness."

Why weren't we there? Consider that there is arguably no musician more influential or interesting, no one more central to the story of the development of music-as-art, to grow up and develop creatively in Little Rock than Pharoah Sanders. This is the man who, at 25, was handpicked by John Coltrane to join his band, and who Coltrane would go on to say, "helps me stay alive sometimes." The man who the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka wrote "has produced some of the most significant and moving, beautiful music identified by the name Jazz." If there is a Pharoah Sanders Day, then, why does nobody celebrate it?

I've been asking that question of a lot of people lately, and the best answer I've gotten so far was from John E. Bush IV, great-grandson of the John E. Bush who founded the Mosaic Templars in 1883. Bush is younger than Sanders, but he's met him a few times, even played with him some out in Oakland, Calif., decades ago. (When they were first introduced, in the '60s, Sanders asked him if he had a saxophone mouthpiece he could buy, then lost interest and walked off.)

"Little Rock has never accepted him," Bush said, sounding defeated, flustered. "With Pharoah, it's like the story of Jesus. When he went home, they said to Jesus, 'Ain't you Joseph's son? The carpenter? We know you.' And Jesus knew then that he couldn't work no miracles there. He was just Joseph and Mary's boy. That's the feeling Pharoah has about Little Rock. People here don't know Pharoah Sanders. They've just heard the name."

Back before they called him Pharoah, after he'd fled Arkansas and was living broke and routinely homeless in Oakland and New York, he had another name. Back then they called him "Little Rock."

***

Whenever Sanders talks about his upbringing in interviews, which isn't often, he never fails to mention Jimmie Cannon. A Korean War vet from Oklahoma, Cannon was the band director at Scipio A. Jones, the black high school in segregated North Little Rock, where Sanders lived with his mother and father in the 1940s and '50s. Cannon played tenor sax and spent his nights out on an endless string of gigs across the river in downtown Little Rock, a lifestyle that seems to have appealed to Sanders right away. "Say what you got to say, then shut up," was one of his maxims, and that seems to have appealed to Sanders, too.

Sanders' lifelong introversion, his deeply felt inner solitude, is fundamental. Going by the accounts of those who have known him, it is one of his most notable qualities: He hardly speaks. On the other hand, all he ever did was make noise. His parents, by all accounts musical themselves, didn't approve of music as a career route, and so as a boy, living in a small house on Hazel Street across the street from a drive-in movie theater, Sanders would stand outside on the porch and practice his scales for hours. Out in public, he was rarely seen without a neck strap.

In those days he went by his given name, Farrell, a name that's oddly appropriate considering the atavistic, primal, feral imagery that early critics would resort to years later in describing his sound. Whitney Balliet of the New Yorker referred to his "elephant shrieks" in 1966, while the jazz historian Eric Nisenson, confronting one his solos, wrote, "One is reminded of a child having a tantrum, who begins by whining and complaining and builds to out-of-control howls and shrieks." Picture young Farrell out on his porch at night with his sax, a child having a tantrum.

Cannon went on to play with Count Basie's Orchestra, as did his friend, the Little Rock-born trombonist Richard Boone, who would often sit in on Sanders' band classes. In this way, he learned how professional musicians — adults — spoke and joked with one other, how they carried themselves. By the time he was 15, he was sneaking into clubs across the river. In a mid-'90s interview with Down Beat magazine, he remembered dressing up in a suit, wearing dark shades and a fake, drawn-on mustache, slipping past the bouncers into the darkness of a nightclub.

Little Rock nightlife in the postwar years meant West Ninth Street, a dense, vibrant ecosystem that some called "Little Harlem" and others called simply "The Line." It meant two-for-one dances at Club Morocco, where the house band was Ulysses S. Brown and The Castlerockers. Glance through the listings in any given issue of the Arkansas State Press, the black newspaper of record, and every week is a blur: Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf and Redd Foxx. At Robinson Auditorium there would be Little Richard or Fats Domino or Bo Diddley. Lil' Green and the Jumping Jive Maestro.

There was "Kan Man," who threw saddlebags bulging with concert flyers over his bicycle handlebars and rode around both sides of the river pasting them to trees or streetlamps. At night he played a Prince Albert can as if it were a harmonica. There was Lloyd Armon, host of "Lloyd's Midnight Ride" on KGHI (and later KOKY) and proprietor of Lloyd's Cafe, Lloyd's Drive-In and the Hotel Del Rio, featuring the ever-exclusive Ebony Room. There were racketeers, pool halls, secret societies and drive-by shootings. Club 67, The Casablanca, The Twin City Club, The Magnolia Room.

At the center of it all, there was Taborian Hall, the heart of Ninth Street with its classical architecture and ever-shifting clubs on all three floors. Sanders picked up early gigs at the second-floor Waiters Club, opened in 1955 and managed by a man named Boo-Boo Douglas. There was an old wooden piano in the corner, and every night a dice game that seemed to never end. He also played the Flamingo Club across the street; it had a more modern vibe and a younger crowd. He backed Junior Parker there, and Bobby "Blue" Bland. On a good night, he could make five dollars.

Around this time he met York Wilborn, who was a couple of years older and who had a car. They bonded immediately over music and quiet. "If he wasn't saying nothing, I wasn't saying nothing," Wilborn told me. "We'd just play and practice, try to figure stuff out." Wilborn, who lived with his mother on Louisiana Street, would regularly make the drive across the river to pick up Sanders so the two of them could listen to records and try their best to play along. Their favorite was John Coltrane's "Blue Train." He played too fast for them, so they'd always have to slow it down, but that was no good either, because it changed the key.

Wilborn led a locally adored rhythm and blues band in those years called The Thrillers, and Sanders frequently sat in on sax. Henry Shead, who would go on to a celebrated career as a Las Vegas lounge act, played piano. The name Thrillers came from an audience call-in contest on a public access "American Bandstand"-type TV show called "Center Stage." They played Ninth Street and anywhere else that would have them. They once backed Minnijean Brown Trickey, not yet famous as one of the Little Rock Nine, at the Dunbar Community Center. She sang "Love Is Strange."

The band recorded one single, billed for whatever reason as O'Henry, for the Memphis label Fernwood: "Wanna Jean" backed by "Why Do I Love You." Wilborn's name is misspelled on the record, and he never received any royalties. Sanders wasn't there at the session, but these are the songs that he played. Harmless, boogie-era dance numbers with a rolling sax-and-piano backbeat. Listening to them now, it's hard to imagine Sanders committing to this stuff. He has been abrasive and cosmic and spiritual and esoteric, but he has rarely been danceable.

Sanders went on tour with the Thrillers in 1958, the summer before his senior year. A former bus driver named Andy had offered to manage the group and they'd agreed, on account of some connections he had to a resort in Idlewild, Mich. The plan was to play a series of gigs before heading to the resort, where they'd audition for the resort's owner and spend the summer there playing for rich people and getting rich themselves in the process. They made it as far as Norfolk, Va., before realizing they were broke. (They'd purchased their matching suits on credit.) Andy pawned a typewriter, and the crew advanced to Philadelphia.

That's where things really went downhill. It turned out Andy had been mishandling their finances, essentially robbing them, and nobody could pay for their hotel, which promptly kicked them out onto the street. Wilborn fired Andy, then Shead contracted jaundice and was hospitalized. They spent the rest of the summer playing at a bar in Philadelphia, trying to earn enough to make it back to Little Rock. The Idlewild resort gig ended up going to a young vocal group from Detroit called The Four Tops.

Any relief at returning home must have been tempered by the fact that they were walking into what the historian Grif Stockley has described as "the ugliest period in Little Rock's history," aside from the Civil War. The integration crisis of the previous year had resulted in an atmosphere in which, as Daisy Bates wrote in her autobiography, "hysteria in all its madness enveloped the city." In an old interview with a public access TV show in Brooklyn, Sanders was asked if racism was ever a problem growing up in Arkansas. "When I had to go to the grocery store," he said, "I had to fight going and coming." You can see him considering it, turning it over in his mind. "Yes," he said finally, "there was a lot of racism, a whole lot back there at that time."

Everyone knows what happened to the students who tried entering Central High in 1957, but there's less attention given to the similar showdown that occurred at North Little Rock High. It's there on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette: Sept. 10, 1957. Six students from Scipio A. Jones, Sanders' classmates, walked up the steps to the public high school and were swarmed and blocked by hundreds of their repulsed, snarling white neighbors. The photo caption reads, "This Time It's Across The River.""The Negroes were shoved and pushed but not struck," wrote the Gazette's Roy Reed. "They did not resist."

By 1959, Club Morocco had gone bankrupt. For that matter, so had the Arkansas State Press. That was the year Sanders left for California. As to why exactly he left, there is no definitive answer. Maybe it was because his own city made very clear the notion that it did not want him, his family or his peers. The local trumpeter Walter Henderson, who played with Sanders as a 17-year-old and later met him a few times in Chicago, thinks it might have been something else, too. "There is a certain kind of complacency here that stops people from following their dreams," Henderson told me. "And maybe the only way you can follow them is to get the hell out."

***

York Wilborn and The Thrillers became York Wilborn and The Invaders became York Wilborn and The Psychedelic Six became Classic Funk. York Wilborn became a band director in Marianna. After Sanders moved away, Wilborn saw him a few more times. Once, in the '60s, he brought one of his albums home so that his mother could hear it, and Wilborn dropped by to see his old friend. By then, he was already playing with Coltrane, the musician they had imitated as kids, and Wilborn asked him how he played all those "long lines and crazy stuff." Sanders told him, "Music is just like a circle," which he didn't understand. He said, "Well, OK."

Charles Stewart, founder of the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, which inducted Sanders into its ranks in 2004, remembers spending time with Sanders before and after the ceremony. He said he took his saxophone with him everywhere, even kept it in his lap in the car. He told Stewart, "I don't want it to fall over." Watching him perform at the Statehouse Convention Center, Stewart said, "He did something I've never seen anyone do before. He blew so much air — and I don't even know how you do that — but he was able to take his mouth away from the reed and still play it for several minutes."

One of the most unusual and physically difficult techniques associated with Sanders over the course of his career is called circular breathing, in which, by inhaling through his nose and keeping stores of air in his cheeks while still blowing on his instrument, he can create the impression of a continuous, unbroken breath. There's a 1982 video you can find online of him playing his song "Kazuko" in an abandoned tunnel, accompanied only by a hand-pumped harmonium. Near the middle of the 10-minute song, the camera zooms in on his face as he begins playing a series of quick and sharp arpeggios. His cheeks inflate and deflate rapidly, and because of the acoustics of the tunnel, it sounds for a while as though he's doing something actually impossible. It sounds like a choir of saxophones, but it's just him. It's one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

Amiri Baraka, always Sanders' most acute listener and maybe the most important real-time chronicler of the free jazz movement ("New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it," he once wrote), claimed that Sanders in particular standardized the technique, claimed even that he "has advanced the science of breathing." Baraka described Sanders' implausible strings of notes beautifully, as "long tissues of sounded emotion." In his book "Black Music," Baraka includes Sanders in his pantheon of musicians who are also "God-seekers."

In his history of the saxophone, "The Devil's Horn," the writer Michael Segell goes to see Sanders play and speaks to him briefly after the show. They talk about what he learned from Coltrane. "He often said the saxophone is not completed," Sanders says. "He heard something else in it; he thought there was more there but it hadn't been heard yet. So that's my mission, that's what I've been looking for the past forty years. I think he would be pleased with all the new sounds I've discovered." Then, after hesitating for a while, he seems to reconsider. "Except, of course, they're not new sounds," he says. "They're very old sounds."

What he means, I think, is that music is just like a circle.

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Matt White might be the most widely beloved figure in the Central Arkansas music scene. The co-owner of White Water Tavern is only 31, but he's been booking and promoting concerts for almost half his life. Where most promoters book shows with an eye toward the bottom line, White has always sought out bands and performers that, first and foremost, he admires — often willing them into popularity through repeat bookings and promotion. That — along with his gentle demeanor and willingness to stand in front of the stage while everyone else lurks in the back — has made him a friend, and White Water a home, to musicians across the country.

Last year, he took a picture of someone in the bar's entryway and liked the way it looked. It dawned on him that it would make a good spot to stage a series of portraits of those who perform and hang out in the bar, "a kind of running document of a particular era in the bar's history." The candid shots, which number more than 100, are wonderfully expressive. White captures flirty eyes, sly grins and stoned impassivity. A couple furtively making out. You can almost hear the shit-talking and yelps of laughter in a few of them. They make you want to head to the bar.

Someday, White hopes to put them together in a book. Until then, find them on Facebook and Instagram.

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Where were you on Pharoah Sanders Day?
The early years of a Little Rock legend.
by Will Stephenson

The return of Christopher Denny
After years of struggles and addiction, the North Little Rock singer-songwriter is back with his first album in seven years.
By David Ramsey

Matt White's 'Portraits in a bar'
Candid shots from White Water Tavern.

Favorite Little Rock concert memories
With G-Force, 607, Big John Miller and more.

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In Little Rock, for the time being, it's still possible to stay out drinking and dancing 'til the break of dawn. That soon could be history. For months now, the City Board of Directors has been discussing the possibility of forcing all clubs in Little Rock to close by 2 a.m. The discussion is aimed at the few nightspots that are currently allowed to stay open until 5 a.m. by virtue of possessing one of the few grandfathered-in Class B Private Club licenses, which the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board stopped issuing in 2001. There are 13 Class B licenses in Little Rock, only eight of which are connected to an active nightclub: Triniti, Salut, Paper Moon, Midtown Billiards, Jazzi's, Club Elevations, Discovery and Electric Cowboy. (Jazzi's elects to close at 3 a.m.)

One ordinance that would shut down late-night clubbing is the work of Ward 4 City Director Brad Cazort and at-large Director Gene Fortson. It would close Class B clubs at 2 a.m. during the week and 3 a.m. during weekends and on holidays. A counterproposal presented to City Manager Bruce Moore by an association of private clubs would allow the clubs to stay open until 5 a.m., but would require a contingent of at least two off-duty police officers on site at each location, with the option to require more on a case-by-case basis if the Little Rock Chief of Police deems it necessary. An earlier ordinance put forward by at-large Director Joan Adcock, which would shut private clubs at 2 a.m. every night of the week, now appears to be off the table, with Adcock evidently supporting the proposal put forward by Cazort and Fortson.

Votes on the ordinance proposed by Cazort and Fortson and the pro-club proposal could happen as early as the next City Board meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 19.*

On a recent Saturday morning visit to three of the 5 a.m. clubs — Midtown Billiards, Electric Cowboy and Club Elevations — we saw easily more than 1,000 people out between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. The crowds we saw skewed young, and the off-duty police and security contingent overseeing them was large. We're not ashamed to say that there have been times in the past when we were among those crowds.

There's been a lot of fear-mongering recently about the 5 a.m. clubs — from opponents saying they are hotspots of crime to a recent story in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in which Cazort (escorted on an exploratory jaunt to the 5 a.m. clubs by two undercover vice cops) called the wall-to-wall crowd at Midtown "a huge public safety issue" because they were allegedly beyond the capacity set by the fire marshal. But there are great and, dare we say it, important reasons to keep the clubs open all night. Just to be clear, we're not just pushing protectionism for those with Class B licenses, either. If we had our way, we'd let any bar or club that wants to do so stay open until dawn, and we believe it would still be a good thing for Little Rock. No foolin'. Here's why:

1. Because great cities have great nightlife.

We've got a couple hundred thousand tourists a year streaming through Little Rock these days, and those are just the overnighters. That's not counting all the people who drive in from the hinterlands on the weekends to party and listen to music. Have you been on President Clinton Avenue around midnight on a Saturday lately? It's a zoo down there, man. Enough spangley outfits, revving motorcycles, stripper shoes, big hair and questionable undergarments to stage "Jersey Shore: The Musical" right this minute. Some people want to party. They want to dress up and drench themselves in sweet smellums. They want to drink and laugh and sweat and listen to music and have a good time. Some of them even want to do all that stuff 'til dawn. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, there's something right about it, especially if we want to help this city break the Bible Belt stereotype that has the rest of the world thinking Arkansas is still "Li'l Abner" meets "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Three little hours might not seem like much, but to the tourists who stay up until 2 a.m. only to find their entertainment options from then until daybreak are limited to Waffle House, it's a big deal. Do we really want to take the first step toward the re-podunkification of Little Rock, led by the same kind of prudes who wrote the Blue Laws back in the day to help make sure everybody kept the Sabbath holy whether they wanted to or not?

Here's the facts, ma'am: When people travel to a city, they don't take home fond memories of Johnny Gubmint knocking the drink out of their hand, yanking the plug on the jukebox and telling them it's time to go to bed. Sure, there is bound to be some drunken bad behavior associated with keeping these Little Rock clubs open until 5 a.m. (though not as much as you may have been led to believe). But that, friends, is the cost of making sure Little Rock keeps a reputation as a city that doesn't roll up the sidewalks when the chickens go to roost.

2. Because the "public safety" argument is a red herring.

Since some on the City Board started talking about trying to limit the hours of the 5 a.m. clubs, the core of their argument has been about concern for public safety — that the clubs are associated with bad behavior. "Nothing good happens after 2 a.m." has been the rallying cry of those wanting to close late-night clubs, who are always ready to trot out the number of police calls to these venues between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. Crime is being caused by the nogoodniks who frequent these clubs! If only they were at home watching funny cat videos on YouTube!

Well, before we pronounce Electric Cowboy a hive of scum and villainy, consider the following comparison. The Arkansas Times made a Freedom of Information Act request to the LRPD for all requests for police assistance made from the Walmart Supercenter stores at 8801 Baseline Road and 2700 Shackleford Road. Let's just say that if public safety is the issue, then the City Board better get its big pants on and tell Walmart it will have to close for the public good as well.

There were a total of 413 police calls made to the eight clubs with active Class B permits in 2013. Meanwhile, there were 692 calls made to the Walmart Supercenter at 8801 Baseline Road alone, and that particular store actually closes from midnight to 6 a.m. every night. There were 596 calls made to the 24-hour Walmart Supercenter at 2700 Shackleford in 2013, with police responding 46 times between the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. last year. That's almost 8 percent of the yearly police calls to that location, and Uncle Wally sells duct tape, butcher knives, shovels, sheet plastic, thong underwear, Nyquil and Billy Ray Cyrus albums all night long. Oh, the humanity!

Meanwhile, the clubs themselves have also compiled some figures. The Arkansas Licensed Beverage Association (ALBA) — a coalition consisting of Elevations, Discovery, Triniti, Electric Cowboy and Midtown — says the number of total LRPD calls made to all the 5 a.m. clubs in 2013 was less than 0.3 percent of the 146,668 calls the department received last year. That's three-tenths of 1 percent. Not exactly a crime wave.

If the argument for closing the 5 a.m. clubs is one of safety, then the city needs to stop playing favorites and close Walmart and everything else at 2 a.m. From there, they can order lights-out after "Jimmy Kimmel" and have the vet put a microchip in everybody's neck in case any of us get lost.

But seriously, folks: One of the reasons we live in Arkansas's biggest city is because if we get a hankering for lime sherbet at 3:30 in the morning, we can have it. Same with ordering a beer. If you want to have a 24-hour economy, let's have a 24-hour economy. It's a good thing. It allows adults to make choices on when they spend their money. If a small percentage of those adults run afoul of the law, deal with them, whatever the venue.

3. Because adults generally don't want other adults to set their bedtime.

Like City Director Adcock, we don't generally frequent nightclubs at 3 in the morning. But we understand that laws shouldn't be decided by what we, personally, don't like to do.

The list of things that are (and should be) legal but that you yourself have absolutely no interest in doing is a long one, and the composition of that list varies according to who you are. It's guaranteed that there are activities out there that interest lots of people but leave you cold, perhaps baffled, maybe even a little disgusted. That's fine; you're allowed to think those whose sense of decorum doesn't match yours are a bunch of deviants. You can think anything you want. It's when you start trying to use the hammer and tongs of the law to straighten out the supposedly kinked behavior of others that the problems begin to surface.

Actually, we're upset on a daily basis by questionable behavior we see around us. We're dismayed by individuals who sink the cost of a new West Little Rock McMansion into a garageful of shiny antique cars or a NASA-level home entertainment system. Or who spend a beautiful fall day chain-smoking their way through a 12-hour slot-machine binge at the Isle of Capri. Or anyone who keeps the thermostat set at 78 in the winter and 65 in the summer. But while we may loudly complain about the things that offend our sensibilities, we're not trying to pass laws prohibiting people from doing them unless there's serious public harm at stake.

If all this sounds a little libertarian ... well, it is. This attempt to close the 5 a.m. clubs is one of those cases where civil-liberties-minded folks from the left and the right should be able to find common ground. We don't like the idea of being nannied for no good reason any more than Rand Paul does.

If a 2 a.m. closing time for clubs would make for a safer city, how about making an even safer one by closing everything down at midnight? Better yet, a blanket citywide curfew after dusk. Think of all the police resources that would be saved! Absurd? It follows from the same premise with which Adcock and her ilk begin: Public safety trumps free assembly.

Crime is no joke, but neither is the First Amendment. The Founding Fathers probably weren't envisioning the early morning dance floor at Discovery when they articulated the right to assemble, but the gist still stands. When you start regulating when and where adults can meet in privately owned spaces, you better have a damn good reason.

The best argument against drifting over to Midtown in the middle of the night is the self-evident one: There's a good chance you'll spend too much of Saturday with your ashtray-scented head drooping over a cup of coffee while you lament the futility of your life. Fine. But that's an argument to be made to your drunk friends who want to keep the party going at 2 a.m. — not one to be imposed on the public by city officials with a weird concern over our collective bedtime.

4. Because legislating morality doesn't work, and might actually hurt in this case.

Witness the following quote from Adcock that Arkansas Times reporter David Ramsey collected back in January for a story he did on the push to shutter the late-night clubs:

"Lots of people, when you go out and drink until 5 a.m., then you go home and you're not very willing, probably, to get up and get the kids off to school, or visit and spend time with the family. One thing we desperately need in this city and this state and this country is more family time."

Somebody go dig up Carrie Nation and retrieve her hatchet.

As hard as it might be to believe, some people don't even have kids. Even among those who do, the City Board isn't going to fix or break the art of parenting by passing an ordinance to make sure mom and dad are in their PJs by 2:30 a.m. so they can spring out of bed the next morning to fix French toast. Good parenting is an issue that must be addressed by individuals and families, not by the edict of an elected official. But we digress.

If the grand, national experiment of Prohibition and the 35-year boondoggle of the war on drugs have taught us nothing else, it's that you can't make people conform to a narrow view of morality with a gavel. Sure, as a good attorney told us once: All laws are moral laws in the end. But there's a difference between making sure people don't do outright evil by the rest of mankind, and using the law to make them do what you, personally, think is best for them.

Here's a radical idea: Having late-night clubs might actually keep Little Rock and its citizens safer. Your average politician and policeman are shaking their heads right now, clucking over our naivety. But bear with us.

Punishing the law-abiding majority for the misdeeds of the small minority of law-breaking knuckleheads is not only an ass-backward way to go about crime suppression, it takes away the beneficial effects of giving people who do want to stay up late a well-lit place to congregate. Nightclubs, no matter what you may think of them from afar, are at least somewhat regulated. There are people there whose job it is to remain sober, to bust up fights, to keep out underage drinkers and to call a cab for someone who is blotto. Bartenders, floor managers, bouncers and private security (typically off-duty police officers) are a constant. You close the late-night clubs, and you're just going to drive their customers to neighborhood house parties and other less-than-legal venues, where nobody will be checking for weapons and under-age I.D.'s at the door, where there will be much less supervision by the sober, and where folks will be a whole lot more likely to get up to the kind of reckless, dangerous, maybe even illegal nonsense that would never fly in an establishment with a rare and precious 5 a.m. liquor license on the wall.

Yes, some people do stupid and illegal stuff late at night. By all means, arrest them for it. But until a person steps over that line, let's resist the urge to do pre-emptive strikes on peoples' choices. That kind of thinking rarely leads to better outcomes, sends a bad message about the law, and punishes exactly the wrong people.

5. Because closing the clubs will cost people their jobs, and cost the city tax revenue.

According to ALBA, the association of club owners, four of its five member clubs collect the majority of their revenue between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. If Adcock's ordinance passes, some may well have to close down entirely. That will throw a lot of people out of work: bartenders, janitors, bouncers and even cops who make extra money working off duty. Elevations makes 53 percent of its total revenue after 2 a.m. For Discovery, the figure is 87 percent of total revenue. For Triniti, it's 83 percent; for Midtown Billiards, 80 percent. You can believe those figures or not, but we suggest you go to any of these places at midnight and then return at 3 a.m. and look at the difference in the size of the crowd. Then ask yourself if those businesses, which ALBA says employ over 150 of your neighbors, can survive being shuttered at 2 a.m.

Jake Udell is a co-owner of Club Elevations at 7200 Col. Glenn Road. The club, which primarily serves an African-American clientele, was packed when we visited around 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning in July, the bass from the speakers thumping so loud it made the hair on this reporter's arms vibrate. Sitting in his office under a bank of screens showing the views of 34 security cameras inside and outside the club, Udell said that in addition to bartenders, DJs and other staff, Elevations employs 28 security guards inside and five off-duty police officers outside.

"If we had to close at 2 o'clock, I'd have to fire half my staff," Udell said. "That's the main thing. A lot of people would be out of jobs. My people and police officers, because we wouldn't be able to afford to keep them. We have so many employees here who depend on Elevations, and we depend on the customers."

Garrett Voth has worked at Electric Cowboy since last August, first as a floor man and currently as the dress code enforcer at the door. Asked what he thought would happen to the club if it were forced to close at 2 a.m., Voth said, "We're going to end up closing, most definitely. We're on a separate side of town, and most people want to go downtown. There's no way Electric Cowboy can compete, in my opinion."

Voth said he and around 25 other people at the club stand to lose their jobs. Once the club is gone, he said, Little Rock will lose revenue from the taxes on the money spent by Electric Cowboy employees, annual taxes paid by the club, the taxes on the liquor purchased by the 5 a.m. clubs and sold to guests, and more. With the dance floor full in the club over his shoulder, we asked Voth where he thought all those people would be if they weren't at Electric Cowboy. "They would be at Waffle House three hours earlier and in the middle of the street causing trouble," he said. "When the City Board says that 5 a.m. causes more trouble, I don't believe that. When you start closing down at 2 a.m. on everybody who is used to being out until 5, now they have another three hours to do whatever they want. That's bad."

6. Because some people work until midnight or later.

Most of the patrons we approached on our tour of late-night clubs had caught wind of the 2 a.m. proposal. There weren't many fans.

"I work in food service, at P.F. Chang's," Jared Snowden, a customer at the Electric Cowboy, said early one Saturday morning. "I get off at 11 p.m. or midnight some nights. By the time I go home and jump in the shower and change clothes, I have an hour or an hour and a half before the bars close.

"We should have the ability to choose where we go late at night. If you're an adult, you should be able to choose when and where you drink."

To the service workers who toil away their evening hours attending to the thirst and hunger of 9-to-5ers, the city's proposal is more than an inconvenience. It's an insult. Ask anyone who's ever been a waiter: When you've just finished an eight-hour second shift with a long string of jerk customers transferring their own workday frustrations onto your deferential, indentured ass, you deserve a drink.

At Midtown, the Times spoke to five people crammed into a tiny booth next to the door. All of them work after hours in bars and restaurants around town, and the late-night clubs are their domain.

"I know half the people in here, and most of them work in the service industry," said one man in his early 30s, gesturing toward the crowd. "They get off at midnight or 2 a.m. and they want to go out, too. I want to hang out right here and have a drink after work. What's wrong with that? All work and no play, what's that? That's chaos."

Plenty of other lines of work entail late nights too — nurses and paramedics, janitors and taxi drivers, even security guards and cops — but it's the low-wage folks who mix your drinks, bus your dishes and cook your lo mein who would be most affected by the city ordinance. Census data shows there are about 21,000 service workers employed in the Little Rock area. Many of them work late into the evenings. We think a commenter on the Times blog said it well, in a rant directed toward Director Adcock:

"The hours of these Revenue Generating Businesses ... which provide respite to those who have had to endure and serve pointlessly demanding people (hint, hint), do not put any unnecessary or undue stress on this city in any way. Plus, after dealing with people like you, the service industry needs to decompress ... trust me on this! The fact that you clearly show no regard for the recreational needs of this sector reveals to me your lack of regard for these people and the jobs they do."

7. Because being out late is FUN, and people deserve that experience.

Believe it or not, this — by our way of thinking — is the most important point of all. It's simply not true that nothing good happens after 2 a.m. Oh, we've had bad times at late-night bars. We've also had moments of deep friendship, of inspiration, of resonant conversation, of creative epiphany, of loony storytelling fodder. We've made new friends and had fascinating encounters with strangers we never saw again. Public spaces are vital to cities because they foster community and possibility. That stuff happens after 2 a.m., too — and sometimes it happens with a special energy peculiar to the late night, and to the late-night crowd.

There's an allure to the deep of the night, especially when you're young. When you're 23 or 24 — even when you're 29 or 30 — you still acutely remember the disappointment of being told it's bedtime. It's a magic moment when you realize that nobody else is making decisions for you but you.

For our more seasoned readers: Think back. Before serious relationships. Before mortgages. Before responsibility, car notes, kids and dogs, when all you needed was a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and whatever was left over for beer and cover charges after your share of the rent. Think back, more vintage friends, to a time when every one of us could hang out in a bar and laugh with friends until dawn, catch three hours of sleep, take two Tylenol and still go be productive at work. If you didn't have at least a taste of that experience in your youth, we downright pity you. There is a tragedy, we think, in the idea that the 50- and 60-somethings on the City Board might be considering taking the experience of being in a bar at 4 a.m. away from the people of Little Rock, especially because some of the best memories of our lives were made in the early morning hours, and in some of the same nightclubs they're considering closing at 2 a.m. for the vaunted good of the city.

Yes, there are stupid choices made in the darkness before the dawn, even some reckless and dangerous choices. But wherever failure is an option, life lessons are plentiful. Allowing young people to hang with friends, do adult things, and make those right and wrong choices that will shape the right and wrong choices they make as older taxpayers is a good thing for Little Rock, not a bad thing. If they break the law, arrest them and make them pay the penalty. But until then, let them — and all of us — have the space to have those experiences.

David Ramsey also contributed to this story.

*This story has been updated to reflect decisions made at the Aug. 12 Little Rock City Board of Directors meeting, which took place after the Times went to press for its weekly edition.

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Gyronne Buckley is a free man.

His criminal record reflects that fact. It shows that he has never been tried or convicted of any offense, save a misdemeanor for "inciting a riot" after, he said, he was jumped amidst racial tensions at his high school in 1972. At 60, he lives a quiet life. He mows the grass and takes care of his grandkids while his daughter catches extra shifts. He is free. But he has been rendered un-innocent.

In January 1999, Buckley was arrested for allegedly selling less than a paperclip's weight of crack cocaine to an undercover informant with a checkered past. Within six months, Buckley was sent to prison for two life sentences on the word of Drug Task Force Agent Keith Ray, a cop who resigned after later admitting he'd lied in a similar case. A videotape would later surface of Ray coaching an informant into the right answers the month before Buckley's trial.

In November 2010, after a decade of courtroom wrangling, a special prosecutor dropped charges against Buckley, and he was freed after 11 years and 6 months in prison. With his record expunged, Buckley's attorneys presented a case for wrongful conviction to the Arkansas State Claims Commission in December 2013. The commission unanimously voted to award him $460,000 — only the second time the commission had awarded money to a wrongfully convicted inmate. The other case also involved task force agent Ray, a man who Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel would later call a disgrace to the state.

If the top law enforcement officer of the state believes that, why did a legislative subcommittee ultimately reverse and dismiss Buckley's claim, after McDaniel's impassioned argument that they do so? Buckley attorneys will tell you that the answer to that question likely has a lot more to do with money than with justice.

240 yards

Corey Livsey was a small-time guy with a problem.

A Chicago native who had followed his girlfriend to sleepy Arkadelphia, he'd been in town less than three months when he was caught shoplifting at the local Walmart on Jan. 12, 1999. Having been to the penitentiary in Illinois three times for petty crimes, he ran as the police closed in. When they caught him, the charge was bumped up to robbery because he'd fled. He didn't want to do time in Arkansas. So he told the officers he could help them bust a drug dealer.

Later that day, he met with Arkadelphia police officer Roy Bethell, Linda Card and Keith Ray. Ray and Card were agents with the South Central Drug Task Force, which operated in seven Southwest Arkansas counties, converting federal dollars into drug arrests and convictions. The war on drugs was in full flower in 1999, and a record of sending drug pushers away for long sentences looked a lot like job security for cops and prosecutors all over the state.

By the afternoon of Jan. 12, Livsey had cut a deal, telling the agents that he had bought crack cocaine on at least 10 occasions from Gyronne Buckley, who he met through Buckley's cousin. The cops would wire up Livsey with a hidden microphone, give him money with recorded serial numbers, and send him to Buckley's house on Peake Street to purchase crack as they watched from a distance. In addition to having the charges against him dropped, Livsey later testified, he was paid $100.

Attempts by the Arkansas Times to locate Ray and Livsey were unsuccessful. Former task force agent Card, who now works as an enforcement agent for Arkansas Tobacco Control, replied to an initial inquiry with an email that said, in part, "Mr. Buckley was not an innocent man. He was a dope dealer who finally got caught." She later wrote that because she could not locate a copy of the transcript of Buckley's trial and other documents, she would not be able to answer further questions about Ray and her involvement in the case.

In January 1999, Gyronne Buckley was living in Houston, working construction and driving back to see his mother in Arkadelphia every few months. In a recent interview the Times, he said he sold clothes out of his house in Arkadelphia whenever he came home — knock-off purses and flashy clubwear. He still has a tote full of old records from his business — catalogs, receipts and spiral notebooks full of entries in his handwriting. He said that with the traffic in and out of his house, some might have thought he was dealing drugs.

That afternoon, Livsey was wired by the police and searched to make sure he didn't have any other money or drugs on him. Ray dropped Livsey off a few blocks from Buckley's house, while Card and Bethell stationed themselves in an unmarked car at the corner of Hunter and North Peake. Card testified that she monitored audio while Bethell watched through binoculars.

Using a range finder, Buckley's lawyers — including Little Rock attorney Patrick Benca and University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law Professor J.T. Sullivan — later determined that the corner of Hunter and North Peake is 240 yards from Buckley's house; almost two and half football fields. In addition, Buckley's house also has a privacy fence along the side that would have further blocked the officers' view from their position — a fence that was already in place in 1999.

When Arkansas Times went to Arkadelphia last month to view the scene from the corner of Hunter and North Peake, a mailbox beside the privacy fence next to Buckley's house registered to the naked eye as a tiny gray dot, unrecognizable at that distance. Neither the house nor Buckley, wearing a white tank top, standing in the street, could be seen through Arkansas Times photographer Brian Chilson's telephoto lens on his camera. While July isn't January, Sullivan said that a person standing on the porch still isn't visible even when the leaves are off in the winter.

At Buckley's eventual trial, both Bethell and Card testified that they watched from Hunter and North Peake as Livsey walked up to Buckley's house, walked onto the porch and knocked, and that a man they said they recognized as Buckley came to the door and lingered a bit on the porch before inviting Livsey briefly inside.

After confirming under questioning that she had no binoculars, Card testified, "On the 12th, I observed Buckley reach up into the rafters [of the front porch]. I watched Livsey walk up onto the porch and knock and there was some conversation. Buckley appeared at the door and reached up into the rafters and then both of them went back into the residence." In addition to the testimony at trial, Card's observations would be used to get the warrant to search Buckley's house.

The police surveillance audio of the interaction between Buckley and Livsey that day is full of pops and hisses. There's a nervous, staccato knock. A voice is heard and then Gyronne Buckley speaks, asking Livsey what's going on. Buckley then says what sounds like "don't pull your money out."

Going by the audio, Livsey was in the house less than a minute, but drugs are never mentioned. The rest of the conversation is about Livsey's women troubles, with Buckley telling him he better "put that other woman down," and asking Livsey to hook him up with a female friend. During that encounter, Livsey later testified, he used police money to purchase two $20 rocks of cocaine, which he later returned to officers. Walking away, Livsey can be heard to mumble, "I ain't never been so scared in my motherfuckin' life."

The agents sent Livsey back to the house again the next day, wired, with marked money. A visit at around 10 a.m. found Buckley still sleeping. Livsey returned again a little before 5 p.m. to find Buckley fixing a leaky faucet in his mother's house across the street. The audio of the encounter is also mostly garbled, and includes the voices of kids playing basketball in the street. Again, drugs are never mentioned, but Livsey said he used $40 of police money to purchase two rocks of crack.

At one point near the end of the conversation, it sounds like Buckley says, "Like the other day, I don't want no [inaudible] to them white folks. I don't want to have to send you back in a box now. But I ain't gonna let 'em find nobody though." The quality of the audio leaves some room for interpretation. The official police transcript of the recording, as provided by the Arkansas Attorney General's Office, has that line as: "But I ain't gonna mess a thing with whitey, you know?"

Though Livsey is laughing all the way through the conversation, he later told officers that Buckley's statement was a threat — that Buckley was saying he'd kill him if he found out he was talking to white drug cops. Buckley, on the other hand, says it was a continuation of the conversation from the previous day, and a warning: that Livsey was messing around with a white woman, and that a black man could get "sent home in a box" for doing that in small-town Arkansas.

Whatever the case, the audio and the testimony of the officers were enough for a search warrant. The next day, Jan. 14, the police swooped. Buckley was arrested and his home thoroughly searched.

What's remarkable, given the outcome at his trial, is what wasn't found in Gyronne Buckley's house: drugs of any kind. No large amounts of money. No scales. None of the recorded money provided to Corey Livsey. In short, no evidence whatsoever that Buckley was a major, longtime drug dealer who finally got caught. Outside, in the top of a metal fence post near the street, officers found a piece of aluminum foil containing marijuana seeds. In the rafters of the porch, where Linda Card testified she saw Buckley place his hand as he spoke to Livsey, Card retrieved a pair of tweezers and a medicine bottle containing white residue that later tested positive for cocaine. The only other thing seized by police during the search was a small baggie. It, too, was found outside the house.

These people

At Buckley's trial in Clark County Circuit Court in May 1999, prosecutors offered as witnesses Bethell, Card, Livsey and Ray, who testified to a textbook drug sting against Buckley. The defense put on the stand Buckley, Buckley's cousin and Buckley's mother. Buckley denied selling drugs to Livsey. After a two-day trial and a brief deliberation, the jury found Buckley guilty of two counts of delivery of cocaine.

In the sentencing phase, prosecutor Henry Morgan put on the stand Keith Ray, who told the jury that the drug task force had used confidential informants to make drug buys from Buckley in 1988, 1994, 1995 and twice in 1996. "None of those cases were prosecuted," Ray told the jury, "because the witnesses failed to show up for court and we could not locate them." Buckley was never tried or convicted in any of those cases.

In his closing argument during the sentencing phase, Morgan told the jury that Buckley had been a drug dealer for years. "No telling how many countless hundreds of stories of wrecked lives from our city from this man," Morgan said. "No telling how many houses have been robbed to get money to go to this man in the course of these years. And for this reason, and I don't normally do this, I am going to ask you to consider writing the word 'life' in there."

There were "people" watching the case, Morgan told the jury. "We need to let these people know, in Clark County, we're not going to put up with this stuff and that there is a price to pay for ruining those hundreds of lives for those many years that we were unable to catch him."

On May 17, 1999, the jury returned from their deliberations and sentenced Gyronne Buckley, a man with no other felony record, to spend the rest of his life in prison for allegedly selling an amount of crack cocaine that weighed less than a restaurant sweetener packet.

XOM 157

There were two important things that not many people knew about when Gyronne Buckley was convicted in 1999 — not Buckley's attorney, not the jury, not the court or prosecutors.

The first was that a month before the trial, Keith Ray brought Livsey in to talk about what his testimony would be in court, recording the conversation on a videotape that wasn't disclosed to the defense for almost a decade.

On the black-and-white video, shot by a camera high on the wall, Ray, with Card looking on, questions Livsey about his recollections of how he came to work as an informant, and the buys he made from Buckley. Livsey seems jittery, talking rapid fire. At times, Ray noticeably nudges Livsey toward the right answer when Livsey makes a mistake, as he does at one point when Livsey says he went to Buckley's house at around 1 p.m. on the second day of the sting, even though the police surveillance audio timestamp says it was 4:50 p.m., Ray takes a long pause and then says, "Are you sure about the time?"

"I'm not sure about the time," Livsey says. "No."

"Could it have been later in the afternoon?" Ray asks, at which point Livsey says it was after school let out.

Though the video would eventually be the key to Gyronne Buckley's release from prison, the existence of the tape was not revealed to the defense until Linda Card made an offhand mention of it while being questioned in court in 2005. Even then, it still wasn't turned over for examination to the defense until February 2009, when a federal judge ordered the Attorney General's Office to release it to Buckley's attorneys. A magistrate determined that it contained 38 instances where Livsey's recollection of events differed from his eventual trial testimony.

The second thing nobody but Keith Ray knew in 1999 was the truth about Arkansas license plate number XOM 157, which had once been affixed to a smoke gray 1987 Ford Mustang owned by a man named Rodney Bragg. (Professor Sullivan also worked on Bragg's case with attorney Patrick Benca. Sullivan became involved in the Buckley case after the Buckley family reached out to him following his success in winning Bragg's release from prison.)

In March 1993, Ray was working undercover in Prescott when he said he went to a house there and bought $50 worth of cocaine. Ray didn't recognize the man who sold him the drugs, but said he kept him in mind.

On March 1, 1994, in Clark County, Ray witnessed another buy. He would later tell prosecutors that he recognized the drug dealer as the unknown man who had sold him cocaine in Prescott a year earlier. Ray would testify that during the March 1, 1994, drug purchase, he wrote down the number of the license plate on the dealer's car — XOM 157 — saying he later used that plate number to identify the owner of the car as Rodney Bragg. After obtaining a photo of Bragg, Ray said, he positively identified Bragg as the man who had sold him cocaine in Prescott in March 1993.

In January 1996, Bragg was put on trial for the March 1993 cocaine sale in Prescott. He professed his innocence, but he was convicted after testimony by Keith Ray. Like Buckley, Bragg had no prior drug convictions. Also like Buckley, the jury sentenced him to life in prison. To add insult to injury, Bragg's Mustang was forfeited to the state because it had allegedly been used in a drug transaction.

Though he was in jail for life, Bragg sued to get his car back in March 1998. In the course of that lawsuit, it was revealed that, though Ray said he saw the car and jotted down the plate number on March 1, 1994, which led him to identify Bragg as the man who sold him cocaine in 1993, Bragg hadn't actually purchased the Mustang until March 22, 1994. Documents later revealed that the license plate Ray claimed to have seen and used to link Bragg to the cocaine sale in Prescott wasn't issued to Bragg by the state until March 23, 1994, three weeks after the date when Ray claimed to have seen Bragg driving the car with plate number XOM 157.

Later, after being confronted by prosecutor Henry Morgan about his testimony in the Bragg case, Ray resigned from the South Central Drug Task Force. Under questioning by Sullivan in federal court in Texarkana, Ray later admitted he'd lied under oath about the plate and other evidence, though he continued to insist Bragg had conducted both drug sales. Ray has never been arrested or tried for filing a false report or perjury in Bragg's case. Sullivan said that doesn't surprise him.

"If they had gone after him and filed perjury charges, they would have convicted him," Sullivan said. "There's no question about that because he'd already admitted too much stuff on the stand. But every one of their cases he had made would have been busted wide open. There's no telling how many people are in prison — maybe still — who Keith Ray put there. Maybe they did it, or maybe he made it up."

Former task force agent Card said via email that she hadn't talked to Ray in several years. Asked about her opinion of Ray, she added, "As far as my personal/professional feeling about Agent Ray, he is not the bogeyman he got painted to be."

Bragg, meanwhile, was ordered released from prison in 2000. In 2006, the Arkansas State Claims Commission awarded Bragg $200,000 for the years he spent in jail. Other than the award the commission later made to Gyronne Buckley, it's the only Claims Commission award ever made to a wrongfully convicted person. That award was ultimately confirmed by the legislature.

'A man-made hell'

For Buckley, meanwhile, life in prison ground on.

"It's a cruel place," he said. "You have to see things you normally won't see. It's a man-made hell, and I prayed every day that God would release me from that place."

Anger, he said, is a cancer that can destroy a man, so he eventually just had to let it go and give it to God. He had to fight several guys over the years. Once, he said, he saw a young man slit the throat of his sleeping cellmate, the kid reaching in and pulling out the man's windpipe. Working in the prison kitchen, Buckley slipped and separated his shoulder on the concrete. "You think they took me to the doctor?" he said. "They gave me some ibuprofen, and that was it." He still can't straighten that arm.

In 2000, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld Buckley's convictions but ordered him resentenced after ruling Ray's allegations about the drug buys that produced no charges during the sentencing phase shouldn't have been considered by the jury. After largely the same information was presented to a different jury, Buckley was resentenced to 28 years on each count. In 2002, the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed that sentence.

In 2009, after the tape of Livsey being questioned by Ray was finally turned over to Buckley's defense, the federal habeas corpus proceeding in the case gathered steam. After viewing the tape, a federal judge ruled that had the defense had the tape at Buckley's original trial, it could have potentially been used to impeach the credibility of Livsey and other witnesses, which meant it should have been turned over.

In 2010, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that Buckley deserved a new trial that included the admission of evidence contained on the videotape. With the prosecutor of Clark County recusing himself because of previous work with the public defender's office when Buckley was originally convicted, Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley was appointed as a special prosecutor in the case. Believing that Buckley had already served enough time on the charges, Jegley initially offered Buckley a deal: time served and immediate release from prison in exchange for a guilty plea. Buckley turned it down, over the objections of almost everyone in his life.

"I told him take the deal and get out," Sullivan said. "[I told him] you may not get out. Technically, if we'd gone back to trial, he could have gotten life again. There was no impediment to that. He knew that. His family, his sisters, everybody was telling him to take the deal. His mother was asking him to please come home. ... Everybody in the family is telling him to take the deal, and he says, 'I just can't get up and swear an oath before God that I did something I didn't do.'"

With Buckley unwilling to take the deal, Jegley dropped the charges in the case. Buckley was released from prison on Nov. 1, 2010. Jegley said that the linchpin of his decision to drop the charges was that the 11 years Buckley had already served was a satisfactory punishment given the small amount of cocaine he was convicted of selling. "Would it have been a difficult retrial?" Jegley said. "Perhaps. But the bigger issue is that I don't think it would have served any purpose."

While Jegley concedes that Ray was a bad cop and the tape of Ray talking to Livsey should have been turned over to the defense, he said that after reviewing the entire case file, he believes Buckley was guilty of selling narcotics. Even if the sentence in the case was out of whack and he was wrongfully convicted because the tape wasn't disclosed to the jury, Jegley believes, that doesn't mean Buckley was framed.

"I realize [Buckley] has advocates who say, 'Oh no, he's an innocent man, wrongly convicted, dirty cops, blah, blah, blah,'" Jegley said. "But you know, it's a free country."

Pure luck

Looking to the precedent of Rodney Bragg's successful $200,000 claim for wrongful conviction, Sullivan and Buckley's attorney Mark Hampton filed a claim in March 2013 seeking $460,000 from the state: $40,000 per year Buckley spent in prison.

The hearing before the Claims Commission was held Dec. 17, 2013. In that hearing, Hampton and Sullivan were able to extensively lay out the case for Buckley's innocence, including information about the activities of Keith Ray in the Bragg case, the 240-yard distance between Buckley's home and where officers were stationed during the initial buy, the seeming impossibility of the police seeing what they testified they did, and more.

In the end, the commission voted unanimously to award Buckley the total amount of his claim. Their ruling called Ray's behavior "shameful," saying his actions "cast a shadow on all good law enforcement personnel in Arkansas." Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said that he would appeal the judgment to the Arkansas Legislative Council Claims Review Subcommittee of the Arkansas General Assembly.

This is where it gets complicated yet again, however.

In 2006, when the $200,000 was awarded to Bragg, the claims review subcommittee recommended that Bragg's award should be taken from the statewide fund for deputy prosecutors' salaries. With many prosecutors' offices across the state already living close to the bone, there was a fear that the salary fund might be at risk again if the Buckley decision were allowed to stand. Jegley, for one, voiced his concerns to both Buckley's attorneys and the Claims Commission.

"Back when the Bragg thing went down and they granted the claim, they were going to take it all out of deputy prosecutors' salaries in one fiscal year, and we didn't have it to give," Jegley said. "Again, let's talk fairness: Why should a deputy prosecuting attorney in Benton or Craighead County be furloughed or otherwise disadvantaged because of something that went on [in another jurisdiction]? Nobody ever said that any of the prosecutors did anything." Jegley said that a compromise was eventually reached that took the award from the deputy prosecutors' salary fund in two $100,000 payments in consecutive years.

McDaniel told Arkansas Times that while he can't recall specific calls from prosecutors about the Buckley award, his staff spoke to the state prosecutor coordinator's office about it. He said the money coming out of a specific part of the budget, however, was "not the primary concern" in his decision to fight the Buckley award.

At the hearing before the legislative subcommittee, McDaniel came out swinging from the start, telling the subcommittee in no uncertain terms, "Gyronne Buckley was a crack dealer in Arkadelphia. He had a long criminal history and he sold crack cocaine to undercover informants repeatedly." McDaniel went on to characterize Buckley as "a general bad guy." Referencing Buckley's criminal record other than the 1999 conviction, Sen. Linda Chesterfield asked, "If he hasn't been convicted, why is he labeled a repeat offender?" but her question was never answered.

McDaniel also had harsh words for Keith Ray, though he called him a "minor player" in Buckley's conviction. "Keith Ray is and was a dirty cop," McDaniel said. "Wherever that man is, to this day, he should be ashamed of himself. He is a disgrace to his badge, he is a disgrace to law enforcement, he is a disgrace to Arkansas, because he did perjure himself and fabricate evidence and do all kinds of things that officers should never do. But it wasn't in this case. It was the Bragg case, which we've already paid out for." McDaniel called Ray's involvement in the Buckley case "pure luck" for Buckley. But, McDaniel added, "It doesn't mean that [Buckley is] innocent. It certainly doesn't mean there was any evidence fabricated in this particular case."

At one point while discussing the resentencing of Buckley, McDaniel told the subcommittee: "So they went back and they resentenced him in front of another jury, and the other jury saw the evidence from the trial, they heard the audio tape of him taking money in exchange for selling crack cocaine and they heard him making threats to kill whitey for whatever police action may come against him and all that kind of stuff, and the jury gave him 28 years to serve."

While the police surveillance recording McDaniel is referring to features Buckley talking about "white folks," and the court transcript does have the last sentence as "I ain't gonna mess a thing with whitey," there is no audible threat by Buckley to "kill whitey" on that tape. Sullivan said, "I think he was playing the race card." The subcommittee McDaniel was addressing is majority white.

McDaniel told Arkansas Times that his statement that Buckley was heard on tape "making threats to kill whitey for whatever police action may come against him" was an accidental misquote of Buckley's statement on the police surveillance audio. He added that Sullivan has known him since law school and "should know better" than to suggest he would play the race card.

"I would be deeply offended if anyone were to suggest I was attempting to race-bait anyone," McDaniel said. "That's not my record, that's not my person, that's not who I am. I didn't make up the word. I was quoting Mr. Buckley, though I did misquote him."

In his argument before the subcommittee, McDaniel went on to make the case that wrongful conviction and actual innocence are not the same thing, noting that no court has ever found Buckley not guilty of the offense with which he was charged.

"Let's be clear," McDaniel said. "Nobody has ever said this guy is actually innocent. Not guilty, wrongfully convicted, and actually innocent are all completely different things. No jury has ever found him not guilty."

Though Sullivan and Hampton sought to argue for the actual innocence of Buckley as they did before the Claims Commission, the parties involved were eventually told by the chair to wrap up their arguments because the subcommittee had to get on to other business. In the last few minutes of the hearing, Hampton said the subcommittee might be missing the point.

"You're sending a message if we don't award something to Mr. Buckley," Hampton said, "that cops can do whatever they want to. ... As a legislative body, if you want to say it's OK for dirty cops to do things, to violate your constitutional rights, you put yourself in jeopardy of that, [and] you put your children in jeopardy of that. That's why you're here."

Soon after, a motion and second were made to reverse the Claims Commission award. The motion carried on a voice vote.

Things unseen

Gyronne Buckley talks a lot about God, and the plans the Almighty might have for all of us. Sixty years old now, he spent more than 11 years sleeping on a steel rack. That steel, he said, can sap the life right out of a man. His father grew sick soon after he went to jail, and died in 2001. Some days then, Buckley hated waking up — hated that he had been given another day of life in that place.

He did some reading in prison. He read some about slavery. Sitting in Mark Hampton's office a few blocks from the state Capitol, he said that one thing that stuck with him were the torments those slaves who disobeyed would be put through as a warning to others. "That would put fear into all the other peoples' hearts," he said, "to make them not do like this buck. That was the same way they did me when they took me to trial. They get one of the strongest people. They say, 'We don't want none of them growing up to be like Gyronne Buckley.' So they're going to make an example out of me." A modern lynching in the guise of the law, he called it.

"When you've got a small town and people want to keep control of you," he said, "that's what they do. A lot of people is not going to let go of the past."

He has his freedom now, and it's good. A free man can take a woman out on a date, or not. He can go to the refrigerator and get something to eat, or not. He can watch TV, or not. Buckley said some days, though, it's hard to make himself go outside the house. Those are the days when he remembers the old men in prison, the ones who had been there so long that it got inside of them.

As for the $460,000, Buckley said it's no money compared with what he might have accomplished with 11 years in the prime of his life. But, then again, he said, he can't miss what he never really had.

"I try not to let things unseen become my heart," he said. "Those things unseen that you allow to become your heart will destroy you. I never had that money. It would be a different thing if they gave me the money, and I had it in my hand, then they come take it away."

"Life goes on," he said. "I'm still living."

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It's time again for our annual Visionaries issue, a celebration of Arkansans with ideas of transformative power. This year's class is filled with people who are devoted to enriching life here, from theater to the natural environment to education. They've created political action committees (Amanda Crumley, director of the Southern Progress Fund), helped musicians reach an audience outside Arkansas (Jeff Matika of Green Day), worked to give the children of immigrants access to higher education (Rosa Velázquez of United We Dream). Joseph Jones is the founding director of Philander Smith College's Social Justice Institute. David Bailin is an artist of the highest caliber whose drawings make us think. Andrea Zekis lobbies for the rights of transgender people. All 25 are people with clear intent on what they want to achieve in life, and their visions help create our realities.

Patricia Ashanti
Nonprofit founder fights poverty in the Delta with adult education.

Delta Circles, founded by Patricia Ashanti in 2009, is a small nonprofit in Helena with a big mission: fighting poverty in the Delta by helping people help themselves.

"We've got a lot of challenges here, but there's a lot of hope that things are going to change and get better," Ashanti said.

With funding and support from the Arkansas Community Foundation and the Clinton School of Public Service, Delta Circles runs classes — one called "Getting Ahead" and another called "Financial Literacy"— to help people develop skills to tackle problems they may face as they try to lift themselves out of poverty. "They decide where they want to go, and we start to help them create those pathways," Ashanti said. "In some cases it could be trying to get into college. In other cases it could be trying to locate jobs, start their own business, buy their own home."

Delta Circles educates people on what Ashanti calls the "hidden rules" of the workforce and the middle class, and connects folks to resources for job training, education and entrepreneurship. It also gives people in the community, going through the same struggle, a forum to share their experiences and knowledge. "We allow the individuals that are affected by poverty the most to be a part of the solution," Ashanti said. "We recognize and respect the leadership ability that they already have and they're already using in their lives."

Ashanti, a Helena native with a background in accounting, was inspired by the work of Dr. Ruby Payne, an expert in generational poverty best known for her book "A Framework for Understanding Poverty" and accompanying workshops.

"The information just hit a chord with me," Ashanti said. "It brought the whole conversation of poverty to the individual level. Previously I had been looking at it on a community level. I saw that I wanted to work with individuals and families. With the struggles I have had in my life financially, I knew that with the information I was learning myself, others could benefit from that same information."

The workshops are free and open to anyone in the community; facilitators are typically previous graduates of the classes. The "Getting Ahead" class meets once a week for 12 weeks and the six-month "Financial Literacy" class meets once a month. Delta Circles typically offers four classes over the course of a year. The program has had 160 graduates since 2009.

In addition to the classes, Delta Circles helped create a task force, partnering with the state Department of Workforce, Phillips Community College and Southern Bancorp, to help place people in jobs and ensure that they had the skills to succeed. Southern Bancorp was also a partner in the "Financial Literacy" class, offering graduates an individual development account — if people attend all six classes and save $600 over that time period, Southern Bancorp matches that by $2,000, funds that can be used for education, the purchase of a home, or starting or developing a business. Delta Circles is also hosting literacy programs and is developing a program to send literacy tutors to help employees on the job.

"We're working with individuals who are interested in moving forward in their lives," Ashanti said. "People who are ready to make changes. We're not trying to convince anybody that they need to try and get off food stamps or whatever. They have to make that decision for themselves. But if they have dreams and they have things they want, then our job is to support them. We are seeing a change in people's lives. They start to dream again."DR

David Bailin
Artist's fine hand finds humor in human plight.

David Bailin describes his work as Kafkaesque, cites critic Harold Bloom on his website and believes the humor in his work can be compared to that of deadpan comedian Buster Keaton. Yet, he says Arkansas created who he is as an artist and he can't imagine living anywhere else. Bailin, who moved to Arkansas in 1986 with his wife, Amy Stewart, a lawyer, is a cerebral artist whose drawings are narrative works that reflect an evolution of his ideas in archetypical form. As a younger man, there was his larger-than-life Minyan series of 10 exquisitely drawn charcoals of images from the Holocaust overlain by symbols of Kabbalah, as if the symbols of Jewish mysticism could provide a healing blessing on the dead and living. That led to his Midrash series, his interpretations of Biblical stories in larger-than-life-sized charcoals, peopled by men in slacks and belts, women in shirtwaist dresses and purses, Yahweh wearing a tie. That was followed by what he calls the "cubicle" series, scenes of drab offices and desperate or sometimes pointless activity, and after that his "Dreams and Disasters" series. Sitting in the Townsend Wolfe Gallery at the Arkansas Arts Center, Bailin says the "official version" of the inspiration for the "Dreams" series is that "dreams come from the result of dealing with the routine," the daydreams that arise during repetitive or automatic actions, like driving. Which leads us to his work in the 56th annual Delta Exhibition, in which he won the Grand Award for his work "Slippage." (It's his fourth Grand Award.) "Slippage" is a terrifically composed scene, a suburban street lined by trees and homes on a titled horizon — drawn in charcoal, oil, coffee and pastel on paper — in which a man, in a suit, lies on his back under what might be a boulder. The road ends in a swath of white, much like the pillar of cloud that appeared to lead the Israelites from Egypt. Bailin draws and revises and draws some more until the purpose of the work has been achieved and the marks suit him. "Once you get the hook," he said, "it's playtime," and his abstract blobs of orange and green and red dance over the drawing and down the street. Bailin, who says his studio "has never been my friend," is working on the next outgrowth of "Dreams," about memory and senility. Appropriately, perhaps, he keeps wiping off what he's drawn. "If it was smooth sailing, I'd be making wallpaper," Bailin said. LNP

Kenneth Bell
Music video director

One night in late 2012, Kenneth Bell went to a house party in Lonoke and nobody came. His cousin was throwing it, and the local rapper Pluto Maxx was all set to perform, but without an audience, they figured, why bother? Instead, Maxx turned to Bell, who'd brought his camera, and suggested they make a music video. "It's not how I planned it," Bell said. "It's just how it happened."

Little Rock's hip-hop scene has experienced an influx of new energy in the last couple of years, particularly with the emergence of young artists like Kari Faux and Young Gods of America, and Bell, 25, is one of its most important forces, having directed music videos for most of the members of this younger generation, plus veterans like Big Piph and Pepperboy. "I'm always in the middle of working on multiple videos," Bell said. "All the time. It's pretty much where my time goes."

Though his parents are originally from Forrest City, Bell grew up outside the state and moved frequently because of his father's position in the Army. He studied film at Towson University, just outside Baltimore, and then moved to Conway, where his dad had taken a job teaching R.O.T.C.

After shooting the clip for Maxx at his cousin's party, Bell began meeting other artists through the Little Rock-based "Good Vibes" rap showcases. He became a contributor to the now-defunct rap blog Natural State of Mind, and took on as many assignments as he was offered.

"It's different with every person and every song," Bell said of his process, and the diversity and vibrancy of his catalogue bears this out. Filming rap videos, he notes, can come with its own set of challenges, too. Most recently, there was the time he was loading up his car in the parking lot under the I-30 exit ramp after a shoot downtown, and found himself (and the rapper Pepperboy) surrounded by five police officers demanding their IDs and vehicle registration. "They said they'd been watching us for a while and we were acting suspiciously," Bell said, "but we'd only just walked up."

Bell cites his work with Big Piph, for whom he's been working as a videographer, and Kari Faux, whose most recent Bell-directed video was premiered by Complex magazine, as his proudest achievements, but it's the sheer volume of it all that confirms his status as one of the major visual stylists of the music scene. When I asked one rapper about Bell and his work recently, he nodded, sighed and said, "He's the truth."

"It's in a place right now where it could go anywhere," Bell said of the city's rap scene. "We're in a situation where we could really build a huge following here, while also making Little Rock known to an audience outside of Arkansas. We could create some mass appeal for the state. We just have to keep doing what we're doing."WS

David Couch
Doing the people's work politicians can't stomach.

Little Rock lawyer David Couch makes an excellent point about why the petitions and ballot initiatives he's fought for since the 1990s are important: Though 49 percent of the voters in the state turned out in 2012 to vote for medical marijuana, go up to the state Capitol while the legislature is in session and try to find one elected official there who will say, on camera and without reservations, that medical marijuana should be legal in Arkansas. Just try.

Couch got into petitioning in the early 1990s, when the law firm he worked for was hired to make a push for a ballot measure allowing casinos in the state. From there, he was hooked on petition drives, especially those that make an end run around politics to put third-rail issues on the ballot so the voters can decide what's best for themselves. Since then, he's been involved in such campaigns as those to take tax off food, the failed Regnat Populus petition drive in 2012 that would have asked voters to curtail gifts to and lobbying of elected officials in the state, and the 2012 medical marijuana initiative, which came within two percentage points of passage. Currently, he's involved in the drive to put a measure raising the state minimum wage on the ballot, and another to allow voters to decide whether to let alcohol be sold all over the state. Looking ahead, he's gearing up to help get ethics and medical marijuana measures back on the 2016 ballot. In every instance except the original casino petition drive that got him interested, he said, he's worked on the measures for free, just to be a part of trying to change his state for the better.

"It's really the purest form of democracy," he said. "We have a representative form of government, but the people can take issues and circulate petition themselves and get a measure on the ballot to let the voters decide." Even in the cases in which the petition drives or eventual ballot measures fail, he said, they can start a conversation and raise awareness, which can eventually lead to the bettering of the state.

Nearly every attempt to get on the ballot involves some amount of nail biting as ballot titles are considered and the petitions come in. Couch said the work is always "a twist and a turn." It's worthwhile, though, especially in today's political reality, where every decision a politician makes is potential ammo for his future opponents.

"Most of the petition work is something that's popular yet controversial," Couch said. "The politicians don't have the guts to do it themselves."DK

Amanda Crumley
PAC cofounder sees hope for Democrats in Arkansas.

From 1992 to 2012, Arkansas went from being the state that gave the country President Bill Clinton to the state that gave the country U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton. Sen. Mark Pryor is the last Democrat standing in a congressional delegation that was once mostly blue. Both chambers of the state legislature were taken by the GOP in 2012, and Barack Obama is about as well liked in Arkansas as Bashar al-Assad.

Arkansas Republicans tend to see their current dominance as permanent and destined, a consummation of an historical inevitability. Amanda Crumley sees it as a call to arms.

"I don't believe the reddening of the South or of Arkansas is a foregone conclusion, but it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy if Democrats don't spend time and money here," she said. "The Koch brothers dropped $3 million into our state, because they saw that Arkansas media markets are inexpensive and they could easily dominate the airwaves, stifle the debate on issues and drown out Democrats' message. ... Democrats can level the playing field and counterbalance the Koch machine if we make the same kind of investments in the South that we make in presidential battleground states — in developing smart data and analytics, continually communicating with and registering voters and building strong voter turnout."

Crumley is executive director of the Southern Progress Fund, a multistate PAC that she founded with Arkansas politico George Shelton and former Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove. Their mission is to combat Republicans in down-ballot races across the South. This election cycle, Crumley is concentrating on her home state of Arkansas (she's from England, in Lonoke County).

While big donors and media lavish attention on the Cotton-Pryor matchup, Crumley has her eyes set on state-level races for several reasons: because Democrats need to build a strong bench of future talent, because the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity pours money into state races, and, perhaps most importantly, because state politics is increasingly where big policy decisions are being made.

"The gridlock in Washington has forced policy fights down to the state level," Crumley explained. "Issues like women's health, marriage equality, voting rights were once all federal issues. Now those fights are being waged in state houses, not in Congress. That makes state legislative and statewide elections for offices like attorney general even more important, yet those are the elections in the South that are traditionally underfunded."

Crumley has lived and breathed politics since she was a student at the University of Arkansas in the early '90s working for the Clinton campaign. After victory in November 1992, the 21-year-old Crumley headed to Washington and spent four breathless years working in the White House under George Stephanopoulos. She bounced around the country from campaign to campaign in the years that followed, eventually settling in Los Angeles in 2004. But after watching Republicans sweep into Southern state legislatures in recent cycles — and the acquiescence of national Democrats, who often dismiss the region as a lost cause — she decided to return home.

"My family is here, my roots are here, and I felt I could make a difference," she said. "Reports of the demise of Arkansas Democrats have been greatly exaggerated, and I think this election season will prove that."BH

Robert Ford and Amy Herzberg
Their TheatreSquared bring new plays to Arkansas stage.

Few are the places in Arkansas where people can attend professional theater. Where they do exist, it's because people appreciate good playwriting and good acting. And then more people come to appreciate the theater. That's something Robert Ford and his wife, Amy Herzberg, counted on when they started TheatreSquared in 2005 in Fayetteville.

Ford is a Renaissance guy: an author, flutist, playwright and artistic director of TheatreSquared. He is quick to say that his wife, an actor and director, is the true visionary and that there are numerous people and grantmakers who made TheatreSquared what it is. (Ford and Herzberg also teach at the University of Arkansas.)

TheatreSquared is a stage where new plays get an audience, sometimes premiering regional works headed to bigger stages. It's the sponsor of the Arkansas New Play Festival, the 2011 winner of one of only 10 National Theatre Company Grants for new companies doing outstanding play development, and has commissioned new work with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Its success was predicted, Ford said, by Herzberg, who a decade ago told him that Fayetteville could sustain a professional theater with equity actors and they should put one together.

The 175-seat TheatreSquared (originally planned for a space off the square but located instead in the Nadine Baum Studio of the Walton Arts Center) staged its first play in May 2006, and originated the Arkansas New Play Festival in 2009 with a grant from the Department of Arkansas Heritage, which was looking for a project to celebrate Arkansas culture and history. The festival, which now includes readings at The Rep in Little Rock as well as Fayetteville, has just completed its sixth season, one that included the first fully staged play. Once working with a budget of only $100,000, the theater has now "broken the million-dollar mark," Ford said, and is breaking records in audience size as well. TheatreSquared has staged four of Ford's own plays, including the well-received "My Father's War" in 2008, a play based on Amy Herzberg's father's experiences as a Jew fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, and in which Herzberg played the role of her father. A review in the Times called the performances "heartfelt," leaving the audience with "a real sense of the haplessness of war." The play has been read in New York, translated into Italian for a production there, and staged in Germany.

Perhaps the most widely known commission of the theater is "Sundown Town" by Kevin Cohea, a play about racism that featured bluegrass music by 3 Penny Acre; the NEA funded its commission.

"Our vision for the theater is to do work that is pretty fresh ... doing new work is very much a part of who we are. We fill a nice niche here," one that complements the Walton Arts Center's big Broadway shows, Ford said. "It's a perfect marriage between what we do and a region that's hungry for this. I'm incredibly grateful to the community."LNP

Matt Foster
Brewer pushes Arkansas beer culture forward.

Matt Foster has a vision for Arkansas beer independence. Today, commercial and home brewers across the state mostly use ingredients grown outside the state. But as the locally grown foods movement builds momentum, Foster sees an opportunity to pair it with Arkansas's growing love for craft beer. Last fall, the co-owner of Little Rock's Flyway Brewery launched the Arkansas Native Beer Project, an effort to brew beer made with ingredients grown and processed entirely in Arkansas.

Most beer is made using four things: barley, hops, water and yeast. Foster and other local brewers have long used Cascade and Nugget hops grown at Dunbar Community Garden. Last October, Foster connected with Jason Kelley, an agronomist with the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service who specializes in wheat and feed grains, and an assortment of local farmers to test-grow several varieties of barley, a crop that hasn't been grown in Arkansas since the rise of the automobile.

The experiment appeared to be on its way to success last winter, despite some harsh weather, but the week it needed to be harvested torrential rains came through the state, and the barley germinated on the vine. The Native Beer Project lost 80 percent of its first crop.

Foster is undeterred. A farmer in Wynne has agreed to grow hops and barley for him, and Kelley is growing some wheat that's especially suited for brewing. With it, he plans to make what's called a smash beer, which uses a single barley malt and single hop. "We want to find out what these grains taste like," he said. Meanwhile, Grant Chandler, a research technician at UAMS, has been working to isolate wild yeast strains by taking yeast samples from apricots, pears and strawberries at Dunbar Garden. Foster hopes to use Chandler's yeast to make what's known as a wild ale.

Foster is invested in the success of the Arkansas Native Beer Project, but it decidedly comes second to growing Flyway, the brewery he launched last fall after home brewing for nearly a dozen years. From last November until this spring, he operated out of a commercial kitchen in Quapaw Towers, brewing enough to supply local restaurants, mainly South on Main, where his Migrate Ale became that restaurant's unofficial house brew. People request it nearly every day, said bar manager David Burnette.

For much of the summer, he's taken a break from brewing to work on expansion. He and Jess McMullen, a longtime friend and business partner who recently moved his family from North Carolina to Little Rock, are poised to open a mid-sized brewery the likes of which doesn't currently exist in Little Rock.

Once in operation, it will be capable of producing 45,000 gallons of beer a year. (By comparison, that's more than three times the capacity of Vino's or Stone's Throw.) They'll hand-bottle 22-ounce bottles to distribute to area liquor stores, and they hope to soon occupy 100 taps around Central Arkansas. How soon? Soon is as specific as Foster and McMullen are willing to go before they sign a lease.

Flyway will debut with four beers: Early Bird IPA, Free Range Brown Ale, Migrate Pale Ale and Shadowhands Stout. "We're trying to make fantastic representatives of those styles," Foster said. The brewers have tested and refined the recipes for years. "We've been working on them for a long time," McMullen said.

The reception for Flyway's beer has already been positive. "I get emails, calls on a daily basis," Foster said. "Everything from people wanting to volunteer, to people wanting to have an event. And a lot of restaurants wanting to carry our beer."LM

Brad Harvey
Entrepreneur creates 'cool' smart-kid camp.

Since he ran a tutoring company during his undergraduate years at Texas Tech, self-acclaimed math nerd Brad Harvey has always loved education. The trick to educate, he said, is to make it cool. That realization came to him at what might be, in the eyes of any sporting 12-year-old, the antithesis of a schoolroom: Springdale's Balls N Strikes batting cage.

"Man, if you love baseball, this place is awesome," Harvey said. "But where's the batting cage for nerds? Where is the place where nerds can get better at what they love?"

Aside from school tutoring programs, he couldn't find it, and Harvey will be the first one to tell you he's not interested in founding another school, building classrooms or hiring teachers.

Harvey, who has worked in management at various mobile media companies and Tyson Foods, founded Nerdies, a day camp in Fayetteville for kids "who think smart is cool." He raised about $20,000 through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to cover startup costs, aided by support from people he calls ONs — Original Nerds — who've told him they wished they'd had a Nerdies in their golden days.

"Part of our goal at Nerdies is to create passion," Harvey said. "If you can talk my ear off about something, to the point that I get bored, then you're a nerd in that area. Secondly, because it is Nerdies, we're generally taking what are historically marginalized kids and giving them a cool place to call their own."

Nerdies opened its doors on June 9, and by the end of the summer, over 300 kids had attended at least one weeklong session. The camp hosted, among many others, a session on "Mods for Minecraft," several on robotics, one on hacking and two on drone-building. Harvey recently invested in a state-of-the-art gaming studio, complete with bright orange walls, flat-screen televisions and rows of plush gaming chairs, which he plans to rent out for birthday parties and the like. After all, he said, Nerdies isn't a school.

"I really purposefully seek non-teachers," Harvey said. "I'm really seeking and trying to find passionate people who do it and live it every day. For instance, my daughter is a musician. I know Benjamin del Shreve, a huge local artist, an NWA Music Hall of Famer. From an artist's standpoint, I don't even care what he teaches her, just as long as she can spend a week writing songs and being creative with him. That's more important to me than, 'Hey, this is a G chord.'"

But following a low summer turnout of the more artistic types, Harvey diagnosed his company with a marketing problem. Many of the creative minds who'd love to attend a photography session, he realized, might not feel comfortable branding themselves under the "Nerdies" banner. So, in August, he launched Arties, a sister camp of Nerdies, to attract those kids who feel an inclination toward more right-brained pursuits like standup comedy, filmmaking and creative writing.

"The big deal is that we've just gotta go do," Harvey said. "The learning is secondary to the doing. If we're going to build this, write this, shoot this, the learning has to occur. But we're very much outcome-focused. ... By the time they're 18 and they're applying for jobs, they can say, 'I've already shot 12 films.'"

Because a summer session at Nerdies costs $425 (Arties is $325), Harvey and his wife, Mandy, founded the Foundation for Nerd Advancement to raise money to provide access to kids who otherwise couldn't afford camp. Nerds from all backgrounds welcome the access to the cutting-edge technology and the expert guidance that Nerdies can offer, Harvey said.

"We had a kid who came bouncing through the door at 7:30," Harvey said. "His mom was visibly tired, and she said, 'Apparently my son says you should open at 7. He went outside and started my car this morning.' What kid wants to get up at 6 a.m. to go learn?"

Nerdies do. CG

Harvey's photo was taken by Jill Cross, age 11, who attended a Nerdies photography session this summer.

Charlotte Hobbs
Research in birth defects helps Arkansas mothers avoid risk factors.

Three out of every 100 babies are born with a birth defect. Dr. Charlotte Hobbs of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences knows that statistic from a lifetime of nationally recognized research into the causes of congenital disorders. It also bears for her a certain existential relevance. Hobbs' own mother was born with a potentially fatal birth defect — gastroschisis, a condition in which the baby's abdominal wall fails to develop properly, causing a portion of the child's intestines to extrude from her body.

"This was in 1928," she said. "My mom was born at home and the doctor came out of the room that my grandmother delivered her in and he was shaking his head, saying, 'I don't think the baby's going to make it.' But he had just read an article the week before about gastroschisis in some medical journal. Even though he was a GP, he redid the abdominal wall, got the intestines back in, sutured it all together, and for probably 6 to 8 weeks they didn't know whether Mom would make it or not. But they kept doing what they could, and she did make it."

"There's no question that it was research, or at least sharing scientific information from one physician to another, that resulted in saving her life," Hobbs said.

Today, Hobbs is the director of the Arkansas Center for Birth Defects Research and Prevention, where she analyzes data resulting from a national 15-year study of birth defects that concluded in 2012. Hobbs was the principal investigator for the Arkansas site and is also heading a follow-up study that's just begun to identify participant mothers. The goal of both studies: to better identify the complex causes and risk factors underlying birth defects, both environmental and genetic.

The Arkansas center, Hobbs said, is "kind of at the forefront in terms of the genomics," though she's quick to add the work is done in collaboration with major research institutions, including Stanford University, Columbia University and MD Anderson Cancer Center, as well as similar state research centers.

Some factors affecting the risk of birth defects are well known to science. Taking certain medications, such as the acne drug Acutane, greatly increases the probability that an expectant mother will bear a child with a congenital disorder, while consuming proper doses of folic acid, a B vitamin, decreases it. Hobbs' work is contributing to that vital body of knowledge. Among the findings so far to emerge from the recently completed study: Mothers diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes or those who are obese have a significantly increased risk of giving birth to children with various defects. That's an especially important public health message for Arkansas, which is home to counties with some of the highest diabetes rates in the country.

About half of all birth defects in the United States are congenital heart deformities, Hobbs said. Cleft lips and palettes are also frequent, as are neural tube defects such as spina bifida. And gastroschisis, the disorder that almost killed Hobbs' mother as an infant, has actually increased somewhat in recent years. Scientists aren't yet sure why, however — and so the investigation continues. BH

Kendra Johnson
Human Rights Campaign state director works to close civil rights gap.

Though it's a Southern state that's backward in many ways, Arkansas doesn't have to bring up the rear in civil rights. That's the feeling of Little Rock native Kendra Johnson, who is working to help dissolve the idea that the South — even the rural South — can't be tolerant and inclusive of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

In July, Johnson was introduced as the new state director of HRC Arkansas, a third of the Human Rights Campaign's three-pronged "Project One America" campaign, which will install permanent staff and offices in Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi, with a goal of bringing LGBT equality to the Bible Belt.

A graduate of Mount St. Mary Academy, Johnson went on to Spelman College, then left the states for Brazil, living there for 14 years while working in the nonprofit sector and as a teacher, translator and journalist. She returned to Little Rock eight years ago to be closer to family and to get her master's degree in public administration at UALR. Since coming back home, she's worked for several nonprofits, including Heifer International and the LGBT advocacy group Southerners on New Ground. Working for change, she said, is a passion.

"I've really been a lifelong volunteer and a lifelong activist," Johnson said.

Her goal at HRC Arkansas, she said, is to help the state reach a place where people are judged solely by their character. That means changing hearts and minds, and building bridges of understanding. "I think there are some progressive partners that we have — straight allies," she said. "There are a lot of people who are just supportive of having a loving environment for people to grow up in."

Johnson said HRC Arkansas will be working to extend legal and workplace protections for LGBT people across the state, but will also reach out to those who might have reservations about extending gay rights, including some religious leaders. By showing those with doubts on the issue that gay people in the state are decent, hardworking Arkansans who just want to be happy and provide for their families, she believes, the stereotype will be broken. That has to start one-on-one, Johnson said.

"Right now, really, there's a part of the United States that enjoys full civil liberties, and there's a part of the U.S. that has second-class citizenship," she said. "It doesn't make sense that, if you're a productive member of society, you should be denied basic human rights."DK

Joseph Jones
Helping bring social justice to Philander Smith.

Joseph Jones has a uniquely challenging job. As the founding director of Philander Smith College's Social Justice Institute, he's charged with developing a new identity for the nearly 150-year-old school, and making sure it is maintained.

Established under the leadership of former president Walter Kimbrough in 2007, Philander Smith's mission of graduating students "who are advocates for social justice, determined to intentionally change the world for the better" expanded in 2010 when the Kresge Foundation awarded the school a $1.2 million grant to develop a center for social justice.

Kimbrough tapped Jones, a bright, young Philander Smith alumnus, then working as a professor of political science at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C., to head the new initiative. Jones told Kimbrough "no" three times. He'd just finished post-doctoral research at Harvard for a book he was writing on W.E.B. DuBois for Temple University Press. He wrote opinion columns for a local pub. He was making a name for himself in Charlotte and at Johnson C. Smith. But ultimately, Jones said, the opportunity to create something from the ground up that could transform his alma mater was too good to pass up.

Jones realized right away that the school shouldn't roll out the new institute immediately.

"When I got here the same question kept coming up, 'What is social justice?' We needed to take some time to have that conversation." It began with a basic definition: "Social justice is people improving other people's lives," Jones said. From there, he talked about marginalization and oppression on the basis of race, economic status, sexuality, environment and more. That big-tent approach was intentional from the outset.

"We wanted to keep it as broad as possible because we were trying to make clear connections to the curriculum. I can go to a mathematician and a businessperson and a biology professor and say, 'This is how social justice looks in your discipline.' We try to empower and train professors to teach it in their classrooms. But curriculum belongs to the faculty. We can't tell them to teach social justice."

After three years of making the case for social justice, Jones estimates his office has gotten buy-in from two-thirds of the faculty. Meanwhile, every freshman is required to take a social justice seminar class. In the coming years, all classes taught in students' first year will have service learning components: Jones' office will help pair classes with nonprofits whose work provides both a practical application of the curriculum. The experience will show students ways to improve other people's lives.

Jones said he expected it would take two to three years for the Social Justice Initiative to grow into the Social Justice Institute. Along the way, he didn't expect to see Kimbrough leave ("I told him he was making the biggest mistake of his life. I said, 'I would've made you look so good," Jones said, laughing), nor did he expect to see his successor, Johnny Moore, come and go so quickly. Finalists to be the next president should be announced in the coming weeks.

In the near future, look for the initiative to officially transform into an institute and become more visible. In the fall, it will release a report titled "The State of Black Arkansas," modeled on the Urban League's "The State of Black America." In February, Philander Smith will host an annual social justice conference for students from all over the country. A social justice radio show produced by the institute for Sirius radio is in the works. The institute will also continue Archival Justice, a project that's already begun.

"Philander's contribution to Arkansas's history hasn't, at least from my estimation, been told in a way that explains the deep impact it's had in the state," Jones said. He hopes to correct that through research. "This is about giving voice to those who have been written out or excluded from history."

Somewhere along the way, Jones also plans to finish that book on DuBois he was working on before he took the job at Philander Smith. "I made a promise to my wife. It will be done this year. All I need is a week."LM

Paul Leopoulos
Envisions better schools in memory of daughter.

The start of something very good — a foundation that awards scholarships to student artists, performers, designers and writers, and promotes arts-infused education — was something very bad. Thea Leopoulos was 17 when she was killed in a car accident in Little Rock in May 2001. Her father, Paul Leopoulos, said he woke up the day after his daughter's death and despaired that "no one would say her name" again, that "she would cease to exist." Leopoulos and his wife decided the next day to start the Thea Foundation.

It gave him purpose, he said, to create something in her name. Thea's foundation has taken the key that made her excel in school — a confidence-building art class — and given it to students across Arkansas.

"I don't see myself as a visionary," Leopoulos said, "as much as following where things lead me."

The foundation's first scholarship awards, to seniors at North Little Rock High School, totaled $1,000. "One thing lead to another," Leopoulos said, and the foundation began to increase its scholarship categories.

Today, the foundation awards $80,000 to 30 graduating seniors from all over Arkansas, dollars matched (or sometimes exceeded) by 20 state colleges. Thea will announce in September a capital campaign to raise $2 million to endow its scholarship program; the foundation has already raised $1.23 million in pledges.

Other projects brought to fruition by Leopoulos: Thea's A+ program that uses all manner of art forms to teach academic subjects. Its system to provide art supplies to schools. Its Thea Paves the Way sidewalk art chalk event at the Clinton Presidential Center. Its exhibition program for young professionals, The Art Department. A collaboration with other arts institutions to offer arts instruction in schools.

"The cosmos puts this thing in front of you," Leopoulos said, and you act on it. "I'm an early adopter kind of person," he added, "and that can get you real in trouble."

One of those early adopted programs was A+. Leopoulos learned about the teaching system on a visit to Hugh Goodwin Elementary School in El Dorado, where the Windgate Foundation had funded an A+ pilot program. Leopoulos was there to deliver art (from the Art Across Arkansas program, since defunct); when he got there, the principal grabbed him and showed him around so he could see what A+ was doing for the school. Leopoulos saw kids engrossed in their studies. Student scores had shot up exponentially after Hugh Goodwin's teachers embraced A+. "I ran out of the building and I called Linda and I said this is it!"

That was 2007. Since then, the Thea Foundation's A+ network has taken two steps forward, one step backward — the program requires serious teacher and principal buy-in — but now appears to be taking hold. In 2013, there were 12 A+ schools. Today, there are 17, including a program that will start in September at the Division of Youth Services' Arkansas Consolidated High School in Alexander. The Walton Foundation just awarded a grant to the foundation of $572,915 over the next three years to help with costs of A+ training and the creation of a virtual "learning network" for A+ staff, principals and teachers.

The foundation's newest project, Arts Reconstruction, run by the Leopouloses' son Nick, will partner with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, the Arkansas Arts Center and Trike Theatre in Bentonville to offer arts classes in school. Unlike A+, this is a program purely to promote the appreciation of the arts, and it's started off with violin classes at four schools. The foundation and symphony provide the instruction and the violins free the first year, with schools picking up a portion of the costs in ensuing years.

It takes a lot of pluck to start so many programs, and "it costs some money," Leopoulos said, putting his head down on the table for emphasis. But, he said, "If you want something done, goddam it, go do it. And if some people want to help, great, but I'm not waiting."LNP

Darlene Lewis
Selflessly finding jobs for felons.

While lots of people talk about crime and recidivism in Little Rock, it's hard to find those who can point to hard facts and figures to show they're actually doing something about it. One of those few, however, is Darlene Lewis of Lewis-Burnett Employment Finders. An agency that specializes in finding employment for former felons, helping them provide for themselves and their families without falling back into crime, Lewis-Burnett doesn't charge for its services because, Lewis said, she doesn't want to take money out of the pockets of those who have none. They see around 100 people a week, most of them recently former felons.

The roots of the agency started back in 1987, when Lewis became alarmed at the number of young people in her community who had no idea how to get a job, putting them on the fast track to prison. In her spare time, Lewis started sitting down at her kitchen table with friends and family, helping fill out applications and making calls to see who was hiring. Through word-of-mouth, others heard she was willing to help. Soon, she was seeing dozens of people a week, many of them with felony records that barred them from most employment.

Lewis-Burnett was officially founded in 1999, and since then the agency has helped thousands of people a year find work. In addition to employment services, the agency teaches GED classes, computer courses, "dress for success" classes, interview skills and more, all for free. Lewis said the work they do is mostly funded out of her pocket, with help from occasional grants and donations.

"People tell me all the time: 'Why don't you just charge people for finding them a job?'" she said. "If I did, I'd be no better than any of the other agencies. These individuals are struggling to get on their feet."

Housed at the city-owned Willie L. Hinton Center on 12th Street, Lewis-Burnett Employment Finders is in the process of being evicted because Lewis, with very little money coming in, can't afford to pay the $389 monthly rent. She's been told she has to be out by Sept. 1. Though what the agency does is surely worth $389 a month to the city just in terms of helping fight recidivism, Lewis said that if the eviction goes through, she'll try to find other space and work on to find jobs for those without hope. Hers is often the second face a newly released prisoner sees, after his parole officer.

"The parole officer sends them over to us, and then we're going to do everything in our power to find them a job so they don't go back down that road," Lewis said. "Whatever it takes to help them, that's what I'm going to do. I believe in setting people up for success, not failure."DK

Jeremy Lewno
Bicycle advocate sees Little Rock going beyond River Trail.

Jeremy Lewno, owner of the bike-tour and rental business Bobby's Bike Hike, grew up taking trips with his father's bus tour company across the country. His father, Lewno said, believed in connecting the state of Arkansas to the rest of the country, and vice versa.

"He'd tell them, 'The thing is you're a piece of Arkansas, and we're not just going out there to explore the rest of the country. We're going out there to bring people back to our state. ... So I want you guys to talk proud that you're from Arkansas, talk about how beautiful it is to the people you meet on these travels.' So he would engage the folks to be ambassadors to the state. I was inspired by that."

Now Lewno himself has aspirations to interconnect different regions within his hometown of Little Rock. When he became the city's bike-pedestrian coordinator at the beginning of 2013, Little Rock had just passed a sales tax to repave existing roads around town. With a bike master plan developed in 2011 that had grown "a little bit dusty," Lewno saw a chance to implement bike infrastructure at no additional cost to the public.

"It's the lowest hanging fruit," Lewno said. "You're just slapping paint on.

"We're also trying to connect everyone to the River Trail. We don't want people to have to drive their bikes. We're going to connect everything at some point so you can ride your bike to the zoo. It's not, 'Oh, do I go for a bike ride on this beautiful day or do I take my kids to the zoo?' No, you bike your kids to the zoo."

Lewno estimates that within the next two years, the city will see a host of new bike lanes to add to the ones already installed under his guidance. Backed by Bicycle Advocacy of Central Arkansas, he hopes to oversee a route connecting Daisy Bates to existing lanes on 12th Street, effectively implementing an "east-west corridor," joining UALR, Arkansas Baptist College and Philander Smith along with Central High and Dunbar Middle School.

Lewno's business, Bobby's Bike Hike, named for his late father, has operations in both Chicago and Little Rock. In Little Rock, Bobby's offers a historic neighborhoods tour, which takes bikers to the Quapaw Quarter, MacArthur Park Historic District, Central High, the state Capitol and back along the river trail. Bobby's also offers a pork and bourbon tour and a "Tyke Hike" for families. Lewno said that more than anything, in the face of an obesity epidemic, rising gas prices and a "renaissance of people interested in their own history," he wants to use Bobby's Bike Hike and his role with the city to "engage the community" and "get people healthy."

"I really do believe in biking and active transportation as the future of all good things," he said. CG

Jeff Long
UA athletic director remaking the business of the Hogs.

Frank Broyles had the prescience to move Arkansas into the Southeastern Conference well before the Hogs' old league, the Southwest Conference, collapsed upon itself in the mid-1990s. But it has been Jeff Long who had the foresight to monetize that move in ways Broyles didn't touch before his run as UA athletic director ended on Dec. 31, 2007.

Long, 54, who came to Arkansas from the University of Pittsburgh to become the UA's fourth athletic director in 62 years, isn't without his detractors over his boosting of Razorback coffers and restocking of the athletic department's personnel. Many point to 2011 as the point where longtime midlevel donors began to be turned off with required donations to the Razorback Foundation to secure choice football tickets and game parking for some fans by as much as 200 percent. Long and his staff have continued to preach that even after the donation price hike, Arkansas fans still were enjoying seeing the Hogs at a bargain compared with the SEC powerhouse programs such as Alabama, LSU and Georgia. And, he will add in responding to Hog followers via social media — Long is a regular Twitter user with the average fan — the additional dollars will bring Arkansas's ancillary athletic facilities up to date with the rest of the SEC: a student athlete study center and a basketball "performance" center (a practice facility for men and women) appear to be foremost in Long's priorities, and eventually Reynolds Razorback Stadium may require more skyboxes and expansion at its north end to bring in more revenue to support both men's and women's athletics. Long brought both departments together when he arrived, something Broyles avoided doing.

Thanks to Broyles' move to steer the Hogs to the SEC, Long can look at anticipated payouts of $20 million or more each year from the new SEC Network on cable TV — at least that is the forecast from the financial gurus. Media has always been a Long focal point: One of Long's immediate moves upon getting the job in 2008 was to sign over media rights to what is now under the IMG Sports Management umbrella, bringing in more millions.

Meanwhile, the UA sports department has created its own news site while limiting basic media coverage at football practices from commercial newspapers and TV, all supposedly under edict from Long to bolster the web traffic to the new-and-improved arkansasrazorbacks.com.

Nearly all of the employees who manned the Broyles Athletic Complex or the Razorback Foundation offices before Long arrived are gone. Interestingly, some of Long's choice hires from elsewhere have moved out of athletics to other financial departments on the UA campus, away from Long's purview.

Those who were familiar with Long's four-year stay at Pitt, where he changed the traditional logo and the uniforms while finding new ways to separate the fans from their dollars with seating changes in football and basketball, could see the UA changes coming. He put his stamp on the athletic image of Pitt, which didn't have a tremendous national brand to begin with. At Arkansas, some of his moves have been met with resistance from longtime fans and the old guard of former Hogs, while outside the borders he's been lauded with such honors as Athletic Director of the Year in 2013 by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (in part because of his handling of the Bobby Petrino scandal and subsequent firing). His reputation for integrity in NCAA matters and his dealing with the Petrino incident led to his appointment by the leadership of the Football Bowl Subdivision universities as the chairman of the first-ever College Football Playoff selection committee, which will choose the top four teams to compete for a national title this season. JH

Jeff Matika
At Green Day break, guitarist sheds light on local talent.

Jeff Matika moved to Little Rock in 1991. "I kind of thought this was going to be a stepping stone," he said recently. "I'd come here for a couple of years and figure out where I wanted to go." He fell into the music scene, playing shows and hanging out at Vino's until he got a job there, which he kept for 10 years. He toured the country in beloved local bands like Ashtray Babyhead and the Magic Cropdusters, before settling down in the 2000s with an IT job. "I had decided, I'm going to play music forever," he said, "but as a casual thing." Then he got a call from Green Day.

His old friend Jason White, a Little Rock native, had been playing with the band for a decade, and when they decided they needed a touring guitarist, Matika's name came up. He was flown out to Los Angeles and spent a panic-stricken night practicing Green Day songs in a hotel room. His tryout lasted two weeks. "I figured the worst that could happen was I'd get a cool vacation out of this," Matika said. A few months later he was playing the season finale of "Saturday Night Live," sharing a cramped backstage with Tom Hanks and Will Ferrell.

"For me, the big stages are almost not real," he says of his time with the band. "It's just so ridiculous. To play stadiums in Europe, with thousands of people, it's just kind of a blur. Somebody may be looking at me every once in a while, but the chances of me making eye contact with anyone are slim."

It's a long way from Vino's, but Matika found himself missing his hometown venue. Now that Green Day is on break for at least the remainder of the year, he's taken over Vino's booking and hopes to revive some of the '90s spirit of the place. He remembers it as a linchpin of the local music community, a space where young bands who "didn't really have their stuff together" could develop, and though he's aware that "times have changed," he wants to do his part.

He's also started a booking agency, The Poison Shop, through which he hopes he can encourage artists "willing and able to work" to think broader than the local scene. So far, he's working with Bonnie Montgomery, Kevin Kerby, Peckerwolf and Whale Fire, though he knows there are plenty more out there ready for the road. "People need to hear these bands," he said. "They need to get out of Little Rock occasionally and take it to the masses."

When he's on vacation from his role as part of the biggest rock band in the world, he's committed to giving back to the Little Rock scene. "I don't know how long it's going to take to get a foothold on this and get things going again," he said, "but I've got time."WS

April Seggebruch and Stan Zylowski
Startup founders battle retail inefficiency, build community.

Stan Zylowski and April Seggebruch were students in the master's in business administration program at the University of Arkansas Walton School of Business when they came up with the idea for a new business: an app to track employees.

Zylowski had worked for vendors selling products in Walmart and Sam's, and he knew that companies operating in retail stores had a problem: They were losing millions of dollars in inefficiency and fraud because they didn't have a system in place to manage remote employees.

"These companies have people all over the United States, and their job is to represent the brand by doing work in the store — like build a display, return products, check in stocks, place an order," Zylowski said. "On a given day, you might have 70 or 80 people working inside a Walmart, for example. All of that stuff was reported via scout's honor. There was no real way to ensure that people were where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to be doing."

Zylowski and Seggebruch came up with a solution: Movista (originally called Merchant View), founded in Bentonville in 2010. "Our job is to take companies and help them mobilize their workforces, particularly through smart devices," Zylowski said. "Everything a worker needs is on a single application on their smart device."

What began as a startup with just the two of them in an office suite has grown to a company with 25 employees and revenues in the multimillions.

Companies tailor Movista's app to their needs, with options for task management, data flows, mapping, document sharing, scheduling, payroll, communications and more. One big advantage for companies is that it allows managers to simply identify where the workers are and track their progress. "First of all, it is their time clock," he said. "It delivers their schedule to them. If you want to really boil it down, it's 'where do I want you to be, what do I want you to be doing, when do I want you to do it? '

"Twenty percent of the time — that was the presumed industry standard — [workers] who said they went to the store didn't go to the store at all. What we saw was an opportunity to apply technology to address a big problem in business."

Movista started with a focus on retail, but Zylowski and Seggebruch expect their concept to be applicable to other businesses, too. "If you think about the problems we're describing in retail, they're really no different than if you're talking about trying to manage pharmaceutical reps or oil field auditors or financial auditors or anybody else," Zylowski said. "You've got people running around, you don't know where they are or what the heck they're doing — you need to be able to harness all that."

As the company has grown, Bentonville has been booming, too; Zylowski called it a "city on fire" in a recent interview. Zylowski and Seggebruch say that Bentonville was a natural home for Movista given the connection to retail, but it was a risk. "Northwest Arkansas four years ago — it was known for supply chain, for logistics, but for tech — never," Seggebruch said.

The city's growth is good news for Movista. "All of the social development and leisure activities around Northwest Arkansas really help us," Seggebruch said. "The [Walmart] AMP in Rogers, the flourishing of downtown Bentonville, it's huge for us because that really supports our efforts to recruit talent into the state."

Zylowski and Seggebruch have taken an active role in fostering business and cultural growth in the region, sitting on boards of the Bentonville Chamber of Commerce, the Rogers public library and Trike, a children's theater in Bentonville. They have also supported a number of businesses, restaurants and commercial and real estate development in downtown Bentonville, including playing a significant role in backing and developing the concept for the highly successful restaurant Tusk and Trotter.

It's a symbiotic relationship between town and company: Zylowski and Seggebruch's activities have helped Bentonville grow, and that growth will help build the sort of community that will allow Movista to attract and retain startup talent.

"You can't put your blinders on and expect the rest of the folks around you to do all the heavy lifting," Seggebruch said. "We participate to the benefit of the community and to the benefit of Movista, because as that tide rises, it lifts the Movista ship."

As companies like Movista succeed and new startups emerge, while cultural and culinary options keep popping up, Zylowski and Seggebruch hope that the various things happening in the "city on fire" will feed on each other.

"It's a shared vision of creating our own Silicon Valley, our own Austin," Seggebruch said. "Not to replicate what they've done, but really to own our Northwest Arkansas culture."DR

Mark Thiedeman
Making films about sex, religion and the South.

In 2011, a year after Mark Thiedeman returned to Little Rock from New York, he screened a short film called "A Christian Boy" at the Little Rock Film Festival. He describes the short as "nearly silent and totally controversial," which seems right, since the plot summary uses the phrases "evangelical radio program" and "sexual awakening" in the same sentence. Accordingly, he expected the worst. The response surprised him. Not only were audiences supportive, they wanted to help.

This has been the pattern of Thiedeman's career ever since. Each year, he makes another ambitious and uncompromising film about the South that revels in the region's hypocrisies and complexities; and, rather than rejection or confusion, he finds his work increasingly celebrated and embraced. He finds new fans, fundraisers, volunteer crew members. Today, after a widely acclaimed full-length feature ("Last Summer") and this year's award-winning short, "Sacred Hearts, Holy Souls," Thiedeman, 32, is probably the most promising representative of a local film scene that hardly exists, not that he sees this as a problem. "At one point I thought of leaving Little Rock and heading back to New York, but I very quickly changed my mind," he said recently, "because I realized that there's a level of generosity and support that people have for me and for my work that I don't think I would find anywhere else."

Originally from New Orleans, Thiedeman came to Little Rock in middle school, and graduated from Catholic High, which more than anything else left him lonely and bored. "I spent a lot of time alone," he said, "and the best way I could think of to occupy myself was to watch movies." After Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves" convinced him he should be a filmmaker, he enrolled in New York University. "It was a very expensive experience," he said of his time in film school, though he allowed that it gave him the opportunity to study with personal heroes like Kelly Reichardt ("Meek's Cutoff") and become immersed in the retrospectives and independent theaters that have always distinguished the city's film culture.

Thiedeman's films, visually arresting dramas about adolescence, sexuality and Southern identity, are deliberately impressionistic, steeped in the art-house traditions of the 1960s and `70s. "I think that in some ways I feel more of a kinship with Russian filmmakers than I do with American ones," he said. "A lot of Russian films deal with a kind of spiritual conflict that I think is very familiar to me as a Southerner."

His latest effort, "Sacred Hearts, Holy Souls," won the Charles B. Pierce Award for Best Film Made in Arkansas at this spring's Little Rock Film Festival, though Thiedeman describes it as primarily an experiment. Alternating between color and black-and-white, the film is a nuanced portrait of a friendship between two outsiders at a Catholic boarding school. He wanted, he says, "to make a movie that people would actually really enjoy, which isn't typically my first goal as a filmmaker."

Thiedeman is currently in pre-production for his second feature, which he isn't ready to talk about in much detail. In his spare time, he's part of the collective behind Splice Microcinema, the biweekly film screening series held at the design space Few. Thiedeman frequently introduces the films, which are as diverse and as challenging as the selection he had access to in New York. The goal, he says, is "to turn cinema back into an event."WS

Annabelle Imber Tuck
Former Supreme Court Justice fights for access to justice.

"If people can't get access to the courts and feel like they're getting a fair shake, that to me is the end of our judicial system," said Annabelle Imber Tuck, a former Arkansas Supreme Court justice — the first woman to be elected to the state Supreme Court — and current chair of the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission. "This is so basic. Our country is at a place where people are not sure the legal system is on their side — there's a court system set up only for people who can afford it."

The Access to Justice Commission was created by the state Supreme Court in 2003 and given one directive: "To provide equal access to justice in civil cases for all Arkansans." In a criminal matter, defendants are legally entitled to a public defender if they can't afford an attorney, but no such guarantee exists for low-income people in civil matters, including potentially life-altering problems, such as legal issues related to domestic violence, child custody or housing foreclosures. Two legal aid organizations provide legal services for Arkansans who make less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level (that's around $15,000 for an individual or $30,000 for a family of four), and they serviced around 15,000 clients last year, but because of limited capacity, they had to turn away another 15,000. On top of that are thousands more of the working poor who make a little too much to qualify for legal aid but not enough to be able to afford an attorney. That's the puzzle the commission, of which Tuck has been a member since 2005, is trying to solve.

One big push has been a focused and organized statewide fundraising effort for legal aid organizations. The Commission has also been active in organizing and recruiting private attorneys to represent clients pro bono or what they call "low bono" (the lawyer volunteers to work for a reduced rate that the client can afford).

Tuck and the Commission are also advocating new approaches beyond traditional full legal representation.

"We can't continue doing the same thing," Tuck said. "Thinking outside the box is the only way we're going to be able to make the courts accessible to people and make the courts actually mean something to people."

One project has been a website (which can be found at arlegalservices.org) that serves as a hub for legal resources, not just for legal aid and pro bono attorneys, but also for the general public. One program, which operates a bit like TurboTax, guides people step by step on how to complete the forms they need for a simple legal action, as well as instructions on what to do.

This program recognizes the reality that more and more people are representing themselves. Tuck acknowledges that it would be better if people were able to hire a lawyer, but given the costs, that simply isn't a realistic option for many Arkansans, about half of whom make less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. "You're basically asking people to take food out of their children's mouths, or be homeless, to pay for a lawyer," she said. "That's not going to happen."

The other innovation the Commission is promoting is "unbundling." The basic idea is that private attorneys would offer limited services for the more complicated aspects of the case or court appearances rather than full representation. Clients would take on the less complicated parts of the case, representing themselves, perhaps by consulting arlegalservices.org. The goal is to make this piecemeal representation profitable for private attorneys via higher volume, but more affordable for clients who are willing to take on some of the work themselves. "It's a new economic model," Tuck said. "The private bar will get access to more clients" and, rather than paying for an online service like LegalZoom that may have inaccurate information, lower-income Arkansans will be able to get legal help they can afford.

Tuck calls it a three-legged stool: 1) Full representation via legal aid, pro bono and "low bono" attorneys for the most complicated cases; 2) helping people with the tools they need to represent themselves on simple cases and 3) encouraging private attorneys to use the "unbundled" model for cases somewhere in between. The more success they have developing the latter two, the more resources legal aid will be able to devote to the clients who need the most help.

"We should be able to have an organized and effective way to make our courts accessible to our citizens," Tuck said. "That's where my passion is. If we don't do this, then there will be a real disconnect between regular folks out there in America, such that the court system will only be a court system for hire. It will not be a court system available to every citizen. As the third branch of government, we have an obligation, so that courts will remain independent and viable in this country. Why would people want to invest in a justice system that is not there for them?"DR

John Van Brahana
Geologist works to protect Buffalo River watershed.

When Dr. John Van Brahana, a recently retired University of Arkansas geology professor, heard about the details of C&H Hog Farm, the first (and so far only) facility in the state to get a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) permit, he was alarmed.

C&H is located in Mt. Judea near Big Creek, one of the largest tributaries of the Buffalo National River. Critics believe that the waste produced by the facility's 6,500 hogs poses an unacceptable risk to the Buffalo River watershed, as well as odor and health concerns for the Mt. Judea area.

Brahana is an expert in the unique karst geology of the Ozarks, with its irregular limestone formations. Karst areas are porous; it's extremely unpredictable where the water that so easily soaks in will reappear.

Brahana wrote a letter to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality in June 2013: "I know of no active karst consultant who recommends that a CAFO be sited on karstified limestone, particularly upgradient from so sensitive a natural resource as the Buffalo National River, with its direct-contact use by canoeists, fishermen, and swimmers." His letter was ignored.

Concerned about the environmental risks from the more than 2 million gallons of hog crap and wastewater that the facility will generate, Brahana began volunteering his time to do water testing and monitoring in the Mt. Judea area. His work has focused on two areas: attempting to determine water pathways below the surface, and testing water for pollution.

Brahana injects a non-oxic dye into the groundwater; the dye acts as a sort of fingerprint that allows Brahana to determine how quickly the water is moving and where it's going. The dyes "are moving through rapidly and they are not being attenuated in any way," he said. "If it was contaminants instead of dye, if contaminants get to this level in the rock that's immediately below the soil, then we've got some problems." This mapping will also help establish where to focus future water sampling efforts.

Brahana has also done water testing for people in the Mt. Judea area. About 40 property owners have invited Brahana to test their water for nutrients and bacteria (Brahana offered to do the testing for C&H but the farm declined). The goal of this initial testing has been to establish a baseline; Brahana will follow up with future testing to try to monitor whether the hog farm is leading to pollution in the area.

The state legislature last year approved funding for pollution testing and monitoring on the farm, work that will be done by water and soil experts at the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture.

Brahana expressed great respect for the UA testing and the scientists involved but said that their directive — focusing on nutrient management and monitoring the soil and surface streams — was insufficient given the terrain. This has been Brahana's concern from the beginning, starting with the permit itself. "They didn't look at ground water, and they didn't look at karst," he said. "The groundwater moves as quickly as water in a stream — except that exact location of pathways is very difficult to predict. The high velocity of the water in conduits is capable of transporting sediment, organic matter, fecal waste and dissolved solids from the CAFO."

With funding from conservation groups and private donors, Brahana plans to continue the work that he believes ADEQ should have done in the first place, and to communicate with state officials about his findings. "I am grievously concerned," he said. "These are special places and they justify being a little careful about how we treat the land and the water."DR

Rosa Velázquez
DREAMer works to empower Arkansas immigrants.

In 2012, Rosa Velázquez traveled from her home in De Queen to Washington, D.C., to speak to the Obama administration about a proposed change in immigration policy that would eventually grow into the memorandum known as DACA, or "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals." DACA, which was officially authored by the White House a few months after that meeting, directs U.S. immigration agencies to exercise prosecutorial discretion in deporting individuals who are illegally residing in the U.S. but originally came here as young children. It's since become a blessing for some 580,000 young people who have lived in the U.S. for as long as they can remember — and a dirty word to many conservative activists who say such acts of compassion fuel more illegal immigration.

Although Velázquez and others in her group, a delegation from a national organization called United We Dream, were invited to the table by administration officials, the meeting had to take place in a nearby church rather than inside the White House. That's because Velázquez and several other activists couldn't pass a White House security clearance: They didn't have government-issued identification. They were, and are, undocumented.

"I have been in the U.S. for the past 26 years," says Velázquez, who was brought to Southwest Arkansas by her mother when she was 5 years old. She quickly learned English as a child, and by the time she was a senior in high school she knew what she wanted to do with her life: go to college and become an English teacher herself.

She won a scholarship to Ouachita Baptist University. Then she discovered her status rendered her ineligible.

"It was not until I had my scholarship taken away that I knew what it really meant to not have a green card," Velázquez recounted. "And since then, I've had difficulty going back to college and finishing a degree. So that's why I'm still working for immigration reform, because I go back to that day and I see kids who are in that situation now."

Velázquez is the co-founder of Arkansas Coalition for DREAM, one of several Arkansas groups that successfully pressured on Sen. Mark Pryor to support a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013. (It has since stalled in the House.) Arkansas Coalition for DREAM also holds workshops to help eligible immigrants apply for DACA.

"We have 12,000 people that could qualify for DACA in the state of Arkansas, but only 3,000 have applied. We still have a large pool of students that haven't been able to be reached," she said. But the undocumented immigrants are only one part of the picture: There are many tens of thousands more immigrants in Arkansas who are U.S. citizens, or legal residents who could one day become citizens.

"There are 100,000 Asian and Latino voters in the state of Arkansas that could potentially turn out to vote," she said. "We're going to be focusing a lot on civic engagement [this year]. We're doing door-to-door voter registration. We're going to help the people who are legal permanent residents qualify to become citizens through the workshops that we have; then we'll come knock on their doors and get them registered to vote.

"I think numbers are important, but at the end of the day when you're able to change a life by providing that service, and six months later they have their license or their Social Security number? That's life changing. I get messages at 11 p.m. saying, 'I got my certificate, I'm a citizen' or 'I got my social.' I don't have words for stuff like that."BH

George West
Teacher encourages students to give voice to discrimination.

In 2005, George West, a civics and economics teacher at Little Rock Central High, hosted in his classroom a group of Japanese-American visitors who, once held at the World War II Japanese internment camps at Rohwer and Jerome, had returned to Arkansas to take part in a memorial event sponsored by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. The visitors told stories to West's students, who were encouraged to take notes and ask questions. West himself videotaped it.

After that conversation, West, who loves journal prompts, asked the students to scribble something they remembered their guests sharing, whether a story or a simple truism. Then he added part B —"Why do you think that story sticks in your mind?"— and part C —"Why do you think this story would be important for others to know?"

"There wasn't this usual inhibition about putting thoughts into words on a piece of paper with pencil in hand," West said. "I understood then that that was the prompt that unlocked the reactions and the responses the students were having to this story that a person had shared with them."

So West, alongside fellow civics teachers Cynthia Nunnley and Keith Richardson, developed lesson plans calling on all of their ninth grade students to go home over Thanksgiving break and interview their relatives or older family friends about their experiences with discrimination, whether as a member of a movement or as an isolated individual.

The stories flowed in — not just those from the Central High crisis or even just the African-American Civil Rights Movement, but stories from the Tiananmen Square protests, stories of life under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, stories of marrying outside a strict Indian caste system, stories of sexual assault in the workplace. Under the guidance of West, Nunnley and Richardson, a small team of particularly driven students assembled to read the hundreds of essays that were pouring in and collectively answer part C of the original journal prompt for each one. Out of hundreds, they published the 60 "most important" essays in a book called "Beyond Central, Toward Acceptance." A little over two years later, a new wave of students read a new wave of essays and published a new anthology, "Mapping the Road to Change: Insights on Perception, Prejudice and Acceptance." The team also created a website, lrchmemory.org.

In making presentations to various conferences around the state and the nation, Memory Project team members such as Central seniors Ginny Greer, Sally Goldman and junior Eric Peters have developed a storytelling method called the Griot Project, named for the tradition of wandering storytellers and oral poets in West Africa. The method demands that members of the Memory Project team commit to memory a story that resonates with them and then retell the story in a way that "gives voice" to the person who originally told it.

For its emphasis on recording lessons from the past, West said, the Memory Project represents not only the opportunity to ask questions about history, but also stories that weren't so commonly told 60 years ago, such as those of the LGBT community or those of Mexican and Central American immigrants.

"It's not one person's vision," West said. "And if it were, it would just peter out. Actually it's every person's. The project becomes a way to envision not just the events of the past, but current issues of present-day life in Little Rock and America."CG

Sherece West-Scantlebury
Nonprofit director moves the needle.

Next to the Walton Family Foundation and the Walton Charitable Support Foundation, Little Rock's Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation is the big dog among Arkansas nonprofits, a funder that's both large enough to get the attention — and dollars — of massive national foundations and sufficiently engaged in Arkansas to have its stamp on much of the state's nonprofit infrastructure. Last year, the foundation gave $3.2 million in grants to 77 groups working in Arkansas. Since it was founded 40 years ago, it's supported hundreds of Arkansas nonprofits and granted more than $140 million.

"I don't know if people realize the important role nonprofits play in civil society in the state," Sherece West-Scantlebury, president and CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation, said recently, while her two little dogs, Peaches and Herb, scurried around her feet in the foundation's River Market district office. "We need to keep it a flourishing, strong sector, so it can provide the kinds of support and services needed to kids and families throughout the state, especially in our rural communities."

When West-Scantlebury was hired to head the foundation in 2007, the board asked her to develop a strategic plan for the coming years. She came up with Moving the Needle, an ambitious set of goals for making Arkansas a better place. The plan calls for taking steps to increase prosperity (the glass half-full version of reducing poverty), increasing educational attainment, strengthening communities (especially those that have been marginalized) and building nonprofit infrastructure.

The way the WRF gets things done, of course, is by providing resources. But it's far from a passive partner, West-Scantlebury said. "We're a transformational foundation, not transactional. We don't just write checks. With our goals, we're very intentional."

One of the WRF's initiatives, "Why Arkansas?", asks and answers why the state is a place where outside do-gooders can find a high return on investment (chief among the reasons is our relatively small population). Such a campaign seems hardly necessary considering Arkansas's low rank among all sorts of educational, health and wealth categories compared to other states. But urban areas typically attract the attention of national funders and the federal government first, West-Scantlebury said.

As the foundation's 40th anniversary in December nears, look for it to be more vocal about the good works its grantees are doing in the state. West-Scantlebury said the foundation will spread the good word, so that people say things like, "'Wow, there are some great things happening in Eudora or Luxora or other parts of the state.'"LM

Robin White
Central High Site superintendent seeks dialogue about race and reconciliation.

For Robin White, "dialogue" is everything. When she came to Little Rock in 2008 to become superintendent of the National Park Service's Central High School historic site, she brought with her plans to make the site into a world heritage center, where groups from around the globe could engage in productive conversation.

"People are uncomfortable with talking about race, OK?" White said. "But I think there can be no reconciliation until we go to the root of the problem, until we really address our disparities, our differences. Why is my dark skin a sin? What made me so different? Or why is it painful for you to look at me? Why do you hate me? Those things we need to talk about and our fears of things that are different, of people that are different, because it boils down to our lack of knowledge and fear."

Next summer, White and the historic site will host the 2015 Social Justice Conference, "My America: Moving Beyond the Color Line: Civil War to Civil Rights," to address some of these questions. White has invited speakers to discuss, among other topics, Arkansas's history in the context of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears and Japanese internment in World War II. She hopes it will lead to wider discussion, debate and dialogue.

"This is our history," White said. "The thing is, this is not black history. This is America's history. That's why I said this is my America, my America. What does America think of me? I love who I am. I love my country. Does my country love me?"

During White's tenure as superintendent, the historic site has sponsored programs like the Central High Memory Project, organized by another Times' Visionary, George West; an annual poetry slam at the Mosaic Templars Center, and the Youth Leadership Academy, a service-learning club that involved a group of high school students in education about the historic site and in engagement with the community around Central High. White sees more room for expansion of educational programs.

"What we really need to do is have a summer program for the youth here," White said. "Or we should have an after-school tutoring program. We could also open the doors and have a language-learning program. We could do that."

As a young woman, White herself attended school in the North, but her "rearing was on plantations, whether in New Orleans, South Carolina or Mississippi."

"I was married to the South. But I also knew, bearing witness to the things that were happening, that I was going to have to make a difference, and this is it, coming into this agency. Whether it's working with gangs, whether it's working with Native American tribes or the Latino community, everywhere I go I'm part of the universe, and my job is to make a difference. I don't look at myself as an agent of change. I look at myself as part of the problem, and I have to become part of the solution."CG

Andrea Zekis
Advocate for transgender rights fights for community.

Before Andrea Zekis made the decision to transition into living as a woman in July 2009, a friend told her that she should be prepared to lose something: a home, a job, or family. It turned out that, among other things, she lost part of her old life. Originally from Illinois, Zekis moved to Arkansas in 2005, and worked three years for a local TV station before following her childhood dream and taking a job as a mapmaker for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, where she's been for five years. Soon after getting the job with the Highway Department, she made the decision to transition. The next time she visited friends at her old job, she said, she was turned away. "I was no longer welcome in the newsroom," she said. "They thought that I was going to be a distraction."

After a trip to the national LGBT conference Creating Change, Zekis was asked to lobby Arkansas politicians during the National Center for Transgender Equality's Transgender Lobby Day on Capitol Hill. She decided to not only stop living "stealth," but to become an outspoken activist for trans equality in Arkansas.

She formed the Arkansas Transgender Equality Coalition in February. The group has since held town hall meetings all over the state, and has put together one of Arkansas's first surveys of how transgender people view their access to health care. Zekis has also worked with other advocates to organize an online list of trans-friendly service providers in the state, including doctors, therapists and support groups. The list is available at artranscoalition.org

"Part of what I was hoping with a statewide organization was to say, 'If you live in Little Rock or Fayetteville, that's great, but you don't have to live there to have access to education and resources and to find a community,'" she said. "There are transpeople who drive two or three hours to Little Rock from Hope or Mena just to see a doctor, and that's a burden."

While the number of transgender Arkansans has been estimated at over 9,000, Zekis said that figure may be low. Getting a more accurate picture of the trans community, she said, is one of the coalition's short-term goals. They'll be holding another town hall in Fort Smith in September, and the group took 14 transgender Arkansans to D.C. for Transgender Lobby Day this year, where they met with Arkansas's representatives from both parties.

As the Transgender Equality Coalition comes together, Zekis said, it's important to her that the group is a collaborative effort, with "a table that's big enough for everyone who wants to be at that table," including transpeople, parents, spouses, family, friends and allies both gay and straight. Zekis said she feels like she's helping to make her adopted home a better place.

"I love my life now," she said. "I love Arkansas, and I will defend Arkansas when I go and talk to other folks outside of the state. ... Arkansas has always been a place that had a little bit of everything. There's a place for everyone in this state. Everyone is able to find their place here."DK

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