This summer's news headlines have contained numerous stories about white policing in African-American communities. Eric Garner in New York died after being placed in a chokehold by white New York Police Department officers. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., was shot dead by a white police officer, allegedly while his hands were held up in the air. Closer to home, there was the dismissal of the case against Josh Hastings, a white Little Rock Police Department officer, who killed 15-year-old Bobby Moore in 2012. Such incidents are just the latest episodes in an all-too-familiar story of conflict between white officers and African-American men that have proved highly contentious flashpoints in the ongoing struggle for racial justice.

A historic case in Arkansas helps inform and contextualize contemporary events. The story begins on Memorial Day afternoon, May 31, 1971, when 24-year-old Carnell Russ was driving back to his hometown of Monticello after visiting his in-laws in Benton. In the vehicle with him was his wife, Clementine, six of their nine children, and Clementine's cousin Denton Lambert.

Around 5:45 p.m., as they were traveling on Highway 81 (now U.S. Highway 425) through Yorktown, six miles north of Star City, Arkansas State Trooper Jerry Green pulled Russ over for allegedly driving 75 miles per hour in a 60-miles-per-hour speed zone. In a routine stop, Russ halted the car and tendered his license. Green told Russ to follow him to the Star City Jail to post bond.

Green radioed ahead, and Charles Ratliff and Norman Draper met them at the jailhouse. Ratliff was a Star City policeman recently arrived from Shannon, Miss., and had been on the job for just four months. Draper was preparing to begin his job as a city policeman the following day. At the jail, Russ was advised that his required bond was $23. He asked if he could be released on his own recognizance, since his father knew Lincoln County Sheriff Billy Bert French. Ratliff unsuccessfully attempted to contact French. Russ was unable to reach his father. Ratliff told Russ he could not leave without posting bond. Russ asked if he could pay by check. Ratliff said he needed cash. Russ then went out to the car and Clementine gave him the bond money.

Back inside, Russ asked if he could have a copy of the speeding ticket. Green told him no, that the ticket would be retained for the local court. Ratliff said he would issue him a receipt. Russ insisted that he would not hand over the bond money until he had a copy of the ticket, which he was entitled to under state law. Ratliff told Russ that he was going to lock him up for refusing to pay. He placed his hand on Russ' left elbow. Russ drew back and assumed a fighting posture.

Exactly what happened next elicited different accounts from the survivors. According to Ratliff, Russ exchanged a number of blows with him. Then, Ratliff said, "I didn't have a slapper and didn't have no gas, and I wasn't paid to stand and fist fight nobody so I used my gun as a slapper." Ratliff said that he hit Russ in the head with his gun and that it accidentally discharged in the process, shooting Russ in the forehead. Draper told a similar story, though he claimed it was all over in "a very few seconds." State Trooper Green testified that "no licks" had been exchanged and that Ratliff had extended his arm and had shot Russ in the head.

Green left the building to contact his superior officer. Ratliff phoned for a doctor and an ambulance. Russ' wife, children and cousin watched Green pull away in his police vehicle but thought nothing of it. It was not until around 35 minutes later when an ambulance pulled up that they were first aware that something was wrong. Green, who had also just driven back, told them that Russ "had been killed."

But Russ was not dead. Barely hanging on to life, an ambulance took him to University Hospital in Little Rock. No one told Clementine that her husband was still alive until several hours later. She immediately rushed to Little Rock where she was able to see him, albeit still comatose (he never recovered consciousness after the shooting), for a short time. He was pronounced dead at 2:20 a.m.

As news of the shooting spread through the local African-American community in Star City on Monday evening, around 50 to 60 blacks congregated on the courthouse lawn to express their concern to Sheriff Billy Bert French. They dispersed around 9 p.m. after French assured them that "justice would be done."

On June 3, a 16-member Lincoln County grand jury comprised of 14 whites and two elderly blacks convened. Around 100 local African Americans kept a vigil in the courtroom. Others sat on the courthouse steps or leaned against their vehicles in the parking lot waiting to hear the decision. One told a reporter, "We're just waiting to see what the grand jury does. We want dignity and justice; we don't want no violence. We pay taxes and live here, too, you know."

At 3:15 p.m., the jury returned a true bill of voluntary manslaughter. Ratcliff stuck to his story that Russ "attacked me" and that it was "a complete accident all the way." NAACP officials, whose help in the case had been requested by the Russ family, were disappointed. Arkansas NAACP legal counsel George Howard said, "The thinking is here that it was an under-indictment. It should have been murder." Howard further pointed out, "In a county where the population is 50-50 black and white, there should have been more black people on the grand jury."

Arkansas NAACP state president Dr. Jerry Jewell sent a telegram to the U.S. Justice Department asking for a federal investigation of the shooting, insisting that, "The state NAACP feels this manner of handling violent action shows complete disrespect for the man's family ... and rights." No directive to the local FBI to investigate was forthcoming. Jewell later wrote to U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell requesting a federal investigation. "Our information suggests that Mr. Russ was the victim of police violence," Jewell said. "It is imperative that there be a prompt investigation of this tragedy by the Department of Justice and the guilty parties prosecuted." Again, federal authorities took no action. In January 1972, it took an all-white jury less than eight minutes to return a verdict of "not guilty" against Ratliff.

On the second anniversary of Russ' death, May 31, 1973, his widow and her nine children began a "wrongful death" civil lawsuit seeking damages totaling $1 million. The suit alleged that Ratliff had denied Carnell Russ his civil rights by shooting him and that Draper and Green "took no steps" to prevent the "violent conduct resulting in his death," even though both had been "present at all times and in the immediate presence and vicinity of Russ." It accused the mayor and aldermen of being "negligent and careless" in hiring Ratliff in the first place, an officer who, it was alleged, had "established a record and reputation for ... violence and maltreatment of persons arrested by him."

The presiding judge, Oren Harris, was not the most sympathetic for a civil rights trial. After serving as an Arkansas congressman for a quarter of a century, Harris was nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson for a federal judgeship in 1965. While in Congress, Harris had signed the Southern Manifesto against the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown U. Topeka Board of Education school desegregation decision and had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. "He was not considered a strong supporter of civil rights," notes his entry in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. The trial began at 9:35 a.m. on Oct. 14, 1975, when an all-white jury of seven women and five men were selected to hear the case. This was after seven African Americans were discharged from the jury because of preemptory challenges from the defendant's attorneys. Three days into the trial, Judge Harris ordered a directed verdict from the jury to drop the mayor, the six aldermen, and Norman Draper from the case. He ruled that they were not responsible "in any way" for Russ' death. The mayor and aldermen had not been present when Russ was killed, and Draper was still a trainee at the time of the shooting.

On the fourth and final day of the trial, the jury deliberated for three hours before acquitting Ratliff and Green on all charges. NAACP lawyers took the case to the 8th Circuit Appeals Court, which upheld the dismissal of the mayor, the aldermen and Draper, and the verdict acquitting Green. It did, however, order a new trial for Ratliff on the grounds that, "under any version of the incident [Ratliff] must be held to have used excessive force on his prisoner."

In April 1979, almost eight years after Carnell Russ' death, a jury awarded the Russ family a total of $288,000 in damages. It had little practical effect. Ratliff had since absconded from Arkansas and, even if found, had little prospect of ever paying out.

In July 1980, Clementine Russ filed a $330,000 wrongful death claim against the state of Arkansas. She maintained that it was liable for her husband's death since, "As a result of the policies of the state of Arkansas, a black American citizen was shot and killed, wantonly, recklessly and intentionally by a law enforcement officer of a municipality created by the state of Arkansas." The claim came to nothing.

From blatantly hostile and aggressive policing, to skewed all or mostly white juries, to the lack of black police and black jurors in heavily black areas, to less than impartial judges, to unconcerned federal agencies, to the procedural intricacies and bureaucracy of the criminal justice system that seem designed to block rather than to ensure equity, Carnell Russ' case vividly illustrates the reasons why many African Americans today are skeptical that color-blind justice can exist in the United States. Although some problems have been fixed in some places, many of the themes in Russ' case still remain painfully evident today, over 40 years later.

The Russ family has never given up its fight for justice and has never forgotten Carnell Russ' tragically short life. Through their efforts, the Lincoln County NAACP branch was renamed the Carnell Russ branch, the only one in the state named after an individual. Four years ago, Leatrice Russ-Glenns, Carnell Russ' sister, successfully helped to establish Carnell Russ Day Community Unity Festival in Star City. Supported by the office of the mayor, the day offers a series of events to bring together the black and white communities. It is underpinned by Russ-Glenns' conviction that an honest reckoning with the past can provide a valuable lesson for today, and help to lay the groundwork for community reconciliation and the hope of a brighter future. If that can happen, she believes, there may yet still be a positive legacy for her brother's death.

Carnell Russ Day Community Unity Festival will be held onSaturday, Oct. 11, at the Star City Civic Center, 201 Lincoln Ave., from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. It's free and open to the public.

John A. Kirk is George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His new book, an edited collection of essays, "Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives," will be published by the University of Arkansas Press in December.

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"Don't get me wrong," Dwight Brown said. "I love dogs — love hounds — when they're out in the woods."

But when his neighbor had five dogs, he said, two of which were hounds, and "those old squirrels would get up in the trees around their pens," the howling became a nuisance.

Brown said it was even more aggravating that his neighbors let their three other dogs roam free, to "go around trashing yards," and that the situation persisted for 10 years, despite complaints to city officials.

Brown lives and owns a business in Wynne. The city has a leash law, as well as an ordinance limiting the number of dogs per household to two.

Brown believes his neighbors' professional clout kept authorities at bay. Kathleen Talbott, Wynne's city attorney, shares a practice in Wynne with her husband, Michael L. Ladd.

Ladd was the attorney for Cross County, and more importantly, a deputy prosecuting attorney for the state's First Judicial District, where he served under Fletcher Long Jr., the district's elected prosecuting attorney.

Ladd's professional responsibilities required intense cooperation with city and county officials, courts and police. But Brown said that, in the past, when he complained to Long about Ladd and his dogs, Long took no action.

"He's the boss like I am," Brown said. "He's supposed to have control of his employees — the way they represent his office to the community. I expected Mr. Long to do something, but that didn't happen."

Brown installed a video surveillance system at his home, hoping to gather evidence of the dogs' running free. Last year, he got city officials to issue Ladd a citation regarding his dogs. After that, Brown said, on Aug. 13, 2013, a car containing three men pulled into his driveway at 12:53 a.m. "They were honking and cussing," Brown said, and when his wife opened the door, one man yelled, "You die!"

According to Brown, video from that night shows Michael Ladd, his brother, and an unidentified man in the car. The video reportedly also captured the moment when Ladd's brother "got out of the car and mooned us."

"Michael Ladd is just a drunk and a bully," Brown said. Now, armed with the video, Brown wanted someone to rein his neighbor in.

Police would not do it, he said, and neither would Long. So, about 10 months ago, when it had become apparent to Brown that Long was "stonewalling," he called the state Prosecutor Coordinator's office in Little Rock.

"The gentleman I spoke with said they knew of Mr. Ladd," Brown said, "but I was told that they can't tell a local prosecutor what to do. He said the local prosecutor, Fletcher Long, has control of his district."

'Authority to investigate'

Brown did not know at the time that he could also have reported Ladd to the Arkansas Supreme Court's Office of Professional Conduct (OPC), the section established to enforce the court's Rules of Professional Conduct for Attorneys.

If the OPC finds that an attorney has committed some kind of misconduct, it can refer the matter to a committee that has authority to issue the offending attorney a sanction ranging from the mildest — a caution — to something as severe as suspending or revoking of an attorney's license.

But in this writer's experience, complaints against prosecutors have proven problematic. Stark Ligon, the OPC's executive director, once informed me by letter that the office had "no authority to review the discretionary actions of appointed or elected officials." But if neither the Prosecutor Coordinator's office nor the Supreme Court's Office of Professional Conduct can compel a prosecutor to obey the law, or require him to hold his subordinates accountable, who can?

I turned to Stephanie Harris, the Supreme Court's media liaison, for clarification. Did the OPC really consider prosecutors — both elected and appointed — off-limits? Her response contradicted what Ligon had written to me.

"I have spoken with Mr. Ligon," Harris wrote. "He said that his office always has the authority to investigate allegations of violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct, whether the attorneys are elected or appointed. The Committee's authority does extend to the professional conduct of all attorneys.

 "If the alleged conduct involves violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct, the Committee would investigate the attorney general, elected prosecutors, and 'appointed' officials who are attorneys. Elected and appointed attorneys are not exempt from professional oversight."

The question then becomes: Is the OPC sanctioning prosecutors?

Ligon's office began posting records of the actions it takes against attorneys online in February 2001, when it suspended President Bill Clinton's license to practice law in Arkansas.

By now, the number of sanctions listed comes to just under 750. I could not find any prosecutor I've known on that list — a fact that Bob McMahan, who has been the state's prosecutor coordinator since 1997 (and with that office since 1987), does not find surprising.

Though Arkansas currently employs 28 elected prosecutors and 245 deputy prosecutors, McMahan said that in his 25 years' experience, he could not recall a prosecutor having been sanctioned.

In fact, the only attorney contacted for this article who thought a prosecutor might have been sanctioned was Larry Jegley, the prosecuting attorney for Central Arkansas's Sixth Judicial District. He mentioned one of his deputies who, he thought may have once been cautioned. But no record of a sanction for that attorney appears on the OPC's web page.

'The most powerful person'

Years ago, a prosecutor told me, without a trace of hubris: "I'm the most powerful person in this county — in several counties, actually." He noticed my surprise.

"Think about it," he said. "When it comes to the ability to affect individual lives, no other official — not the governor, not the head of the State Police, not the chief justice of the Supreme Court — holds as much power as a prosecuting attorney."

Brown made roughly the same observation. Asked to describe Long, Brown simply said, "He pushes a lot of buttons."

A district's elected prosecuting attorney and the attorneys he or she hires have the ability, as one prosecutor told me, "to get the ball rolling, merely by filing charges." He added, "That alone is going to make a dramatic change in someone's life."

The decision not to file charges can have an equally great impact, as in Brown's case, or when victims of serious crimes are upset because no one has been charged.

Charging decisions can at times be very tough calls. The prosecutor must weigh hefty issues such as the community's safety, the rights of a person accused, and the strength of the case made by police.

Even if charges are filed and subsequently dropped, or a jury finds the defendant not guilty, the fact that the person was charged in the first place can never be undone.

But prosecutors' powers far exceed that. They decide how many and the severity of the charges to be filed, the sentence to be sought, and the tactics to be used at trial —if there will be a trial.

The war on drugs has flipped the justice system in the past 40 years, resulting in more arrests than courts could possibly handle. As a result, more than 90 percent of all convictions are now obtained through plea deals — contracts — that prosecutors negotiate with defense attorneys.

In addition, prosecutors are responsible for seeing to it that all pertinent information obtained by the state — via police, the crime lab, witness interviews or through other powers that are only available to the state — gets conveyed to defendants' lawyers. So, whether a criminal case is settled in a trial or through a plea deal, rules have been established to ensure that defendants are not handicapped in their negotiations or trials due to information the state had withheld from them.

Serving as a gatekeeper of this information may be a prosecutor's most critical role — and the good ones take it seriously. When I spoke with Jegley, for instance, he told me he had recently made an appointment with Little Rock's new chief of police, to stress the importance of officers' credibility.

That's because, if information that should be turned over to the defense is not — whether by police, crime lab officials or anyone else on the state's side — responsibility for that failure rests with the prosecutor. As Jegley put it, "If they knew about it, I knew about it."

That same concern led to the firing of a police officer in Mayflower last month. Cody Hiland of Conway, the prosecutor in that district, told Mayflower's police chief that the officer had withheld evidence that tended to exonerate a woman who'd been accused of theft.

Withholding such evidence, Hiland told the chief, "places your city and my office at risk of civil and/or criminal liability" and undermines citizens' trust.

While prosecutors represent the state in criminal trials, state supreme courts — including ours — and the American Bar Association, require prosecutors to be more than just advocates. They are also expected to serve the state as "ministers of justice."

In other words, achieving justice in every case is supposed to take precedence over winning. That is a legal and ethical obligation.

In Arkansas, it is spelled out both in the Supreme Court's Rules of Professional Conduct and in its Rules of Criminal Procedure. A prosecutor's duty to disclose was also spelled out by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Fifty-one years ago, in the famous case of Brady v. Maryland, the nation's high court laid down the law that withholding pertinent information from a criminal defendant at trial violated the defendant's constitutional right to due process.

In other words, a prosecutor who withholds information from the defense is committing a much more serious offense than, say, violating a city's animal control ordinances, or even harassing his neighbors.

But, though Arkansas courts have reversed several convictions due to Brady violations, the Supreme Court has never cited any of the prosecutors responsible for them with misconduct.

'No one can be sued'

For decades, it was hard for many to believe that wrongful convictions occurred in our system of justice. But now that nearly 1,500 prisoners have been exonerated through DNA evidence, reviews of several wrongful convictions have exposed prosecutor misconduct at trial.

For nearly 40 years, however, prosecutors have been protected against civil liability, thanks to another U.S. Supreme Court ruling that tried to spare prosecutors from having to worry about "shading" their charging decisions for fear of liability. But, in granting prosecutors immunity for actions performed as part of their jobs, that court presumed that state supreme courts would hold them accountable.

Writing in Imbler v. Pachtman, the U.S. Supreme Court observed that "... a prosecutor stands perhaps unique, among officials whose acts could deprive persons of constitutional rights, in their amenability to professional discipline by an association of his peers."

Yet, despite the court's confidence in the self-regulation, public concern about Brady violations and other forms of prosecutor misconduct have only grown.

Awareness of Brady, in particular, intensified in 2009, after a whistle blower produced evidence that federal prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence at the trial of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. A jury had found Stevens guilty of corruption.

But after evidence of the prosecutors' misconduct was confirmed, the judge in Stevens' case vacated his conviction and held his prosecutors in contempt of court, accusing them of what he called the worst case of prosecutor misconduct he'd seen.

Two years later, however, the U.S. Supreme Court extended protections for prosecuting attorneys. In 2011, a sharply divided court ruled in Connick v. Thompson that a Louisiana man who'd been imprisoned for more than 18 years could not sue the prosecutor whose deputy had withheld his exonerating Brady material.

The prisoner, John Thompson, had faced seven execution dates before the charges against him were dropped. After the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling he wrote:

"I don't care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn't do, and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no one can be sued."

Critics howled that the ruling in Connick gave prosecutors almost total immunity. The Innocence Project, which had supported Thompson, said the ruling "begged the question of what, if anything, can prosecutors be held accountable for."

But responsible prosecutors do not rely on immunity. In 2012, the prosecuting attorney in Oklahoma City fired two deputy prosecutors a month after they had prevailed in a murder trial, when it was learned that they had withheld potentially exculpatory information.

"The gravity of their alleged ethical violation is so great," District Attorney David Prater said, "that only one punishment equals their transgression."

Last year, Troy Rawlings, a prosecuting attorney in Utah, fired a deputy for behavior that included a Brady violation. The state bar association investigated and recommended that the fired attorney be sanctioned.

"This type of misconduct is aggravated," Rawlings wrote in his deputy's notice of termination. "It goes to the heart of the criminal justice system. Prosecutors who engage in such are a cancer on the system and undermine public confidence."

Similar sentiments are also being voiced on the federal level. Last year, the chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Alex Kozinski, decried what he called an "epidemic" of prosecutor misconduct "abroad in the land."

'Holy-shit moments'

In Little Rock, Jegley acknowledges the complexities inherent in complying with Brady, especially in an office that would rank as one of the biggest law firms in the state. Asked about an "epidemic," he responded, "I don't see it."

Jegley stressed that he and his 45 deputies recognize that they "have a continuing obligation to be forthcoming" with evidence that they gather from a wide array of sources over what could be months or even years before a trial.

Because the duty to disclose falls squarely on the prosecutor, Jegley said he and his staff have to stay "hyper-vigilant." That means, he said, that they have to be honest, keep careful records, maintain trustworthy relationships with other agencies, and guard against the kind of intense "tunnel vision" that attorneys can easily develop as they head into a challenging trial.

Even so, he said, there have been some "holy-shit moments" just before the start of a trial, when someone on his staff realized that something required had not been provided to the defense. Jegley said the only option he had was to ask the court to delay the trial until matters could be set right.

But what happens if one of those moments isn't caught? What if a Brady violation makes its way into a trial?

One answer is that the withheld information may never be discovered. Tom Sullivan, a professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Bowen School of Law, recently wrote:

"Claims of prosecutorial misconduct in the suppression of exculpatory or impeachment evidence are among the most difficult claims to prove ... in part because the very act of suppression of favorable evidence means that neither the accused nor counsel has access to the evidence."

Even when a violation does come to light — often long after a conviction — official "remedies" rarely suffice. A prisoner may be freed from prison, as was Gyronne Buckley, who was sentenced to life in prison on testimony from an unreliable informant coached by a dirty cop, but the chunk of Buckley's life the state had unjustly taken could never be replaced.

Many states now try to make amends with money, but Arkansas denied Buckley that, even though he had spent more than 11 years in prison due to Brady violations, and the state Claims Commission voted to award him $460,000 in compensation for its prosecutor's misconduct. Buckley's payment was denied, however, when the claim went to a legislative committee for approval.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, the state's top prosecutor and top law enforcement officer, went to the senate committee authorized to pay Buckley and vigorously opposed paying Buckley by minimizing the state's misconduct.

McDaniel said that all that was at issue in Buckley's case was a videotape (which proved the informant had been manipulated by police) that had "wound up in a drawer somewhere or a box somewhere, and it was not disclosed to the defense, and it should have been disclosed to the defense."

What McDaniel did not tell the legislators was that, even when the tape's existence was discovered, six years after Buckley's conviction, McDaniel himself had argued against turning it over to Buckley's lawyers — until a federal judge ordered it released.

So the prosecutor at Buckley's trial violated Brady's requirements, and maybe the attorney general did, too. But, as surely as Buckley never got paid, no state prosecutor ever got sanctioned for the wrongdoing that put Buckley in prison.

'In no way intentional'

While it is impossible to know how much other Brady material lies undiscovered in a box or a drawer "somewhere," unmentioned and unmoved, the problem clearly persists. Buckley and the cases below may represent just the visible tip of a large judicial iceberg.

In 2011, the Arkansas Supreme Court denied an appeal by Billy Green, who was convicted of murdering a family in Northeast Arkansas. In denying that appeal, however, the court noted that the deputy prosecutor handling Green's case had "conceded" that a potentially exculpatory statement by Green's son "should have been provided to the defense and that a Brady violation had occurred."

Similarly, at a hearing in Ashdown last October, Circuit Judge Charles Yeargan found that a Brady violation had occurred in the case of Tim Howard, about whom I've written here before. After Howard had spent almost 15 years on death row, Yeargan vacated his conviction and ordered a new trial. That is now scheduled for March.

In ordering the new trial, Yeargan noted that the prosecutor at Howard's trial, who is now a circuit judge, had not "intentionally" withheld the Brady material, suggesting that lack of intent meant that no misconduct had occurred.

As recently as June — and in the same vein — the state Supreme Court affirmed the Pulaski County murder conviction of Donnie Maiden. The Court acknowledged that a Brady violation had occurred in Maiden's trial, but took pains to note that the prosecutor had apologized for his mistake in court and assured the judge that his failure to disclose had been "in no way intentional."

The prosecutor in Maiden's case was John Hout, and Larry Jegley is his boss. Jegley said he does not believe that Hout broke any law and added that, "the minute John realized he'd made a mistake he took action to correct it."

Moreover, Jegley said, Hout had reported himself to the Office of Professional Conduct — and had recently been notified by Ligon's office that no action would be taken against him.

"It was just a dumb mistake," Jegley said. But he acknowledges that it was a serious one. "We're using it and Connick and what happened in Oklahoma City as a wake-up call for everyone to pay extra attention," Jegley said, "because the criminal justice system has to be fair."

For Jegley, that duty to be fair extends beyond conviction, as when he learned shortly after winning a conviction in a drug trial that one of the state's witnesses had "gone south on us."

Jegley became aware of the situation when he got "a personal visit from the U.S. attorney's office," informing him that Sedrick Reed, an Arkansas State Police lieutenant who had testified at the trial, had just been arrested as part of a drug distribution ring. Jegley said he told his federal counterpart, "Thanks a hell of a lot."

"I think that happened on a Thursday," he said. "And the first thing Monday morning, we vacated the conviction."

Was Jegley required to undo a conviction his office had won? The American Bar Association says that after a conviction, prosecutors have a duty to report any "new, credible and material evidence" creating "a reasonable likelihood" that a convicted defendant did not commit the offense.

But, while the Arkansas Supreme Court adopted most of the ABA's rules for prosecutors, it opted not to adopt that one. As a result, a circuit judge told me, the question of what ethical responsibilities prosecutors and attorneys general have after the state has obtained a conviction remains "a gray area."

However, Jegley said that for him, the question was a no-brainer. "Even post-conviction," he said. "If it's exculpatory, the answer is, 'Yeah.' You disclose." He said that that message is being repeated nationally among prosecutors these days, as Brady issues have become what he termed "top-water topics."

In prosecutor groups he attends, Jegley said, "Everybody's thinking about it. Everybody's talking about it. And everybody agrees it comes down to training, training, training."

'Slap on the hand'

Back in Wynne, Dwight Brown does not know what kind of training Fletcher Long requires for his deputy prosecutors regarding their conduct, in and outside of court.

But he did finally find a way to draw some legal attention to his complaint against Ladd. He did it the old-fashioned way: He hired an attorney.

According to Brown, the attorney took Brown's video to District Judge Joe Boeckmann in Wynne, and that Boeckmann, in turn, wrote to Chief Justice Jim Hannah of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Hannah then contacted McMahan, the state's prosecutor coordinator, whereupon Prosecuting Attorney Long and Judge Boeckmann recused.

That left McMahan, now armed with a request from the chief justice of the Supreme Court, free to appoint a special prosecutor. The special prosecutor, Jason Barrett, brought in the State Police to investigate, after which an officer wrote a report.

Barrett took that report to District Judge Jim Rhodes in DeValls Bluff, and on Aug. 12, Rhodes signed arrest warrants for Ladd and his brother, charging each with one count of harassment. Rhodes ordered the men to appear in court on Sept. 17.

That's a long, roundabout way to get a harassment complaint heard in court. That wasn't Brown's whole point, however.

"I knew if anything came of it, it would just be a slap on the hand," he said, "but something needed to be done."

Whatever happens in court this month, Michael Ladd's legal troubles may not be over. The same day in August that Ladd was charged, Barrett, the special prosecutor, wrote to the State Police again, asking that its investigation of Ladd be continued.

"Other potential criminal actions have come to light," Barrett wrote, "and my appointment as a special prosecutor has been extended to cover these other possible crimes ..."

On Sept. 2, during a recess in a court proceeding, Ladd told Long that he wanted to resign as deputy prosecuting attorney, reportedly due to stress. When asked about that news, Brown said he was not really surprised: "It was a train wreck waiting to happen."

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Forty years. Good God. Has it really been that long? Over a third of a century? Then again, you don't want to oversell it. We haven't always been right, nor always true to the spirit that moved us in the first place. We'd like to think, however, we've always been honest, and we've always had guts. As long as the inkwell stays full and the lights stay on, truth and guts are enough. We must admit that keeping the lights on has been, at times, a struggle.

Let's just call it a long time, then. "Long" is one of those adjectives like "little" or "old" that means something different to everybody, but we feel safe in saying that we've been at this long and long. The lifespan of most underground, stick-it-to-The-Man newspapers started by college kids in the 1970s was roughly that of a peeled peach on a hot windowsill, so we feel justified in saying Arkansas Times is a rarity. Four unbroken decades of anything these days is so much scarcer than you would imagine, a miracle brew of people and dedication, of folks whose enthusiasm kicked in as that of others waned, of id and ego, of bad news and good, of disasters both embarrassingly private and baldly public. Of fear. Of love. Of anger and joy. Of pride and shame. Of turncoats and thieves. That Arkansas Times has survived 40 years is kind of like mixing together all the chemicals in your garage, taking a slug of the resulting goop, and realizing you've discovered The Elixir of Life instead of Dow Chemical Presents: Insta-Death. To sink into the pale pink of sentimentality, this place has always been a labor of love. Love for this place we call home. We sure ain't doing it for the money.

We are a culture that has perfected the art of the discard, the dispose, the never-look-back. The cynic might say it's fitting, then, that the main product of one of the longer running businesses in Little Rock is what has been not fondly referred to by those who hate us as: That Throwaway Tabloid. We have, for the record, always liked it when people call us that rag, that fishwrapper, that liberal shill. It means they're reading us. Too, in addition to the old saw about Follow the Money, we have learned this one over the years: Follow the Self-Righteous Indignation.

Since you asked, here's the secret of our success: Arkansas Times may be free these days, but the stuff inside has always come dear, paid for in sweat and tears, stewing over politics as the Thanksgiving turkey sat slowly cooling to vulcanized rubber, 10 million gallons of cold coffee, wrong turns in the darkest heart of Smackover and Delight and Pangburn on the way to an interview, second jobs, second mortgages, nights and weekends and dreams deferred. Not to get too inside baseball on you, but there's a hell of a lot that goes into bringing all this something to you for nothing month to month and week to week. A lot of hands. A lot of people who worked themselves right over the edge or into the ground for a job that likely pays less than an assistant manager at the local Kroger.

But don't cry for us, Argentina and Augusta. We have won a few, and lost a few. But we — the royal we, even the ghosts of the dead that hover over this place, because we've lost some friends in 40 years — have loved it all, even when we cursed the job and the red editor's marks, when we fought like cats and dogs over comma placement, when we despised the damn words, words, words that refused to line up and march across the page in brilliant lines. We loved it, even when financial realities forced us to move on, even when we quit and came back, even when we quit and never did. We never cashed out in 40 years. That's where the blade meets the hilt of the thing: we never cashed out. God willing, we never will.

A recollection then, on four decades of Arkansas Times, whatever she was and whatever she became (we'll leave "whatever she will be" to our descendants, if there's anybody left to remember us 40 years from now). Part gripe session. Part history lesson. Class reunion and old soldier's reunion and family reunion. Creased photos, passed hand to hand, and the long silences while trying to remember names. The best of us and the worst of us. The places we got it right, where we got it wrong, and where we managed to do the best thing writing can do, bar none: to move the needle even one thin degree in a positive direction.

That's all easier to see in retrospect. Harder are the questions we need to know the answer to in the now: Are we still carrying on the fine traditions of all the great writers who have been published in these pages? Are we getting it right or wrong? Are we still moving the needle?

Answer unclear, traveler. Ask again later. For now, let's just leave it at: And miles to go before we sleep. And miles to go before we sleep.

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What follows is a compilation of quotes from an oral history project initiated by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and phone interviews. Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Sept. 5, 1974

First issue.

Alan Leveritt (founder, publisher): We printed the first issue with $200 that I got from Jim Bell, who owned Publisher's Bookshop in Little Rock. The only requirement to work at the Times was that you had a night job or another means of support. I was a taxi driver.

Jim Bell (investor): The investment was a crapshooter's chance. Both Alan and I were very desirous of having the city grow and become a place of intellectual excellence. Alan would drive his taxicab up to the bookstore and come inside, and we'd drink coffee and talk about what could be done.

Alan Leveritt: We thought there was a real lack of investigative reporting being done at the Gazette and the Democrat, so we wanted to get out there and save the world and uncover wrongdoing, and do right. Plus, we were fascinated by the culture of Arkansas.

Mara Leveritt (contributing editor, former associate editor): At first we were the young, real alternative paper when there were two, big competing papers throwing millions and millions of dollars at each other.

Alan Leveritt: The main idea was that there was a group of us out of UALR and we just wanted to write. I got the UALR journalism department to let me use an electronic typewriter that would duplicate a letter over and over, and I sent out a pitch to come start a magazine to journalism schools all over the country.

I got responses from someone in Virginia, New York, Boston and Wisconsin. So I hitchhiked across the country to interview them. I could tell the guy in Virginia really wanted to do it, but his parents were pretty well-to-do and wanted him to be a lawyer. The mother of the girl in Boston really didn't like me, and wouldn't let me spend the night. I convinced the girl to drive me to Walden Pond; we went skinnydipping in it, and I slept in the woods. David Glenn was at NYU. He was really suspicious of me, but I ended up convincing him to come to Arkansas. About five years ago, I got a letter from the guy from Virginia wanting to know whatever happened with the magazine. He was a lawyer in Richmond or something.

Olivia Myers Farrell (former publisher, sales manager and account executive): We referred to the company as the University of the Arkansas Times. I was out of school for a month, not even a month, I think, when I went to work at Arkansas Times. I remember in the early days, the median age of our staff was 23. We all basically learned the business while we were building it. I got my master's and I think my doctorate in publishing at the Arkansas Times.

Alan Leveritt: A TV station did a story on us after the first issue, and Ira [Hocut], who was then a maintenance supervisor at MM Cohn, saw it and hopped in a cab and came in and volunteered to do paste-up. He must have been the only legally blind production manager in the country. But because he had to get within an inch or so of the articles when he was pasting them up he never made a mistake.

Alan Leveritt: Of course our $200 was gone in two weeks. We lived in the office. We had a little railroad house down on Second Street, and David and I slept in the back. Don Mehlburger was our landlord — sweet man. I was so embarrassed finally I stopped going to explain why I couldn't pay the rent, and he just left us alone. The heat went out in the wintertime, so we had no heat in our office, nor in the house where we lived, and I was too embarrassed to ask Don if he could fix the heat since I wasn't paying rent.

Bill Terry (former editor): I had gotten fired at the Democrat for activities like throwing antique typewriters into wastebaskets and for, in general, not doing right. I came on part time in the fall of 1974 and full time in July 1975 on the terms that I would receive no pay for at least a year and would not be allowed to take a pencil home.

July 1975

Bill Terry becomes editor and Union Station Times becomes Arkansas Times.

Alan Leveritt: Bill was out of work, and I said, "Bill, why don't you be the editor, and I'll be the salesman." I didn't know if I could do anything, but I went down to The Shack barbecue and sold a half-page ad on my first sales call, and I thought, "Shit, I can do this."

Bill Terry: I will never forget that first day at the office. Back then, Alan had one pair of pants, two shirts and a pair of shoes with one sole that flapped. He drove a 1961 black and white Ford that was scarred like a cueball and had tires slick as cannonballs, and he lived in the Terminal Hotel in a $10-a-week room with a warehouse view and neighbors down the hall who went to bed and got up in the morning thinking of muscatel. Alan had come into the office a few minutes before, and it was raining. The door wouldn't shut tight, the rain was blowing in and there were two or three leaks in the roof that splattered on the floor making a sound like a very slow and half-crazy clock. A cat came in, looked around and went back out into the rain. The place was drafty: on the order of driving a car with the windows down, and it had a chain-pull toilet that flushed with a kind of wail and groan that reminded you of a boatload of people sinking. The furniture was what you would call gothic salvage, and included ripped chairs, leaning desks, a table made of unfinished plywood set on concrete blocks and a couple of typewriters with unreadable keys.

Alan got up to shake my hand, and I said, looking around at everything: "We're going to set the world on fire!" It was a way of saying we didn't have a chance, and it seemed like a humorous way to put it. But Alan leaned forward a bit and looked into my eyes, deeper than my mother ever has, and said: "You bet your ass!"

In 1975, Times staffers got wind of the existence of an audiotape made by private investigator Larry Case of a conversation between him and Little Rock Police Department Inspector Kennith D. Pearson, in which Pearson asked Case to plant marijuana in the car of Jim Guy Tucker, who was prosecuting attorney for Pulaski and Perry counties at the time the tape was made and Attorney General when the Times learned of its existence. Arlin Fields, the first Times reporter to draw a salary ($50 a week, drawn from publisher Alan Leveritt's cab fares), tracked down Case.

Alan Leveritt: The good news was that the tape existed. The bad news was that Case wanted $500 for it. That might as well have been $500,000 for us in 1975. So I went to Dixon Bowles, founder of The Group, and I told him the whole story. He said, "Be at the Worthen Bank Branch at Cross Street at 9 a.m. in the morning and just stay in your car." So I pull up in this piece-of-shit Pontiac, and this guy I don't know gets out of his car, walks in the bank, comes out and, as he walks by my car, he just pitches a little envelope in with five $100 bills.

Fields paid Case for the tape and wrote the story. But just before it went to press, Fields showed the story to Tucker, who told him it would only increase interest in rumors of drug use by him that had circulated since he first ran for office in 1970. Tucker threatened to sue the printer if it was published. The printer stopped the press as the Times was printing and told Leveritt he would only start it up again if the Times promises to pay any legal bills he might incur. So Leveritt went to several local civil rights lawyers, who signed a contract saying they would defend the printer for free up to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

Alan Leveritt: So we got the thing printed. The story comes out, the police officer resigns, and Jim Guy Tucker leaves the state for two weeks, so he is not available for comment, and the Gazette runs the story on its front page with all kinds of caveats because they didn't have all the details.

Not long after we published, Case calls Bill Terry and says that a judge who's friendly with the police chief is getting ready to subpoena the tape to erase it, so we needed to get the tape out of our safety deposit box at Worthen Bank.

So Bill and Arlin go down there and walk in with Case to the safe deposit box and get the tape out. As soon as they do, Case grabs the tape, opens his jacket and he's got a pistol, and he says, "Touch me and I'll shoot you," and he walks straight out of the bank with the damn tape and gets in his car. Bill jumps in front of the car and says, "You're not leaving," and Case says, "I'm going to run your ass over." Case starts the car and guns it, and Bill leaps out from in front of the car just in time to avoid getting run over. So there we are. We have no tape, story's out, a lot of people are denying shit although the police officer is gone, so we just waited. Fortunately, no one ever called. That story made people take us seriously.

Alan Leveritt: The big newspaper distributor of the day said we were communists and wouldn't distribute us. So I'd gotten attorneys Johnny Bilheimer and Phil Kaplan to loan me money, so I could buy pay boxes distributed around town. At the time we were doing a lot of reporting on organized crime, the Dixie Mafia. And our racks kept disappearing. They found 20 of them down by the river. They had been blown to pieces by high- caliber rifles.

I sat with a crowbar one time in the foyer of TGI Friday's, across the street from The Shack barbecue, and a son a bitch stole one of our boxes right across the street from me!

February 1976

Arkansas Times prints its first glossy cover.

June 21, 1979

An arsonist burns Arkansas Times'office at 1111 Second St. The culprit was never apprehended.

Mara Leveritt: Alan and I were living together at the time and someone banged on the door and said the office was burning. We stepped out on our front porch and we could smell the smoke.

Alan Leveritt: Our offices [had moved to] this big beautiful mansion. We were so proud of it. We were living high. Someone threw something through our picture window, like a Molotov cocktail. The fire chief said it was an accelerant. The fire marshal was asking me all these questions, and I realized, "He thinks I burned this down." Then he asks, "How much insurance did you have?" And I said, "I don't have any insurance." Suddenly I went from being a perp to an idiot.

Mara Leveritt: All the staff who'd showed up at the fire, which was just about everyone, came back to our apartment and we started fixing bacon and eggs and had a big breakfast. There was never ever doubt that we would go on.

Alan Leveritt: We had just gone to the printer that morning. So despite everything, we got the next issue out on time.

Olivia Myers Farrell: I remember climbing on top of Alan's shoulders to go in through a broken window after they put the fire out to try and recover as much of our accounting materials as could be saved. We lost everything really and just started over. We had to ask our advertisers what they owed us, which was hilarious. As far as we know, everybody was very understanding and forthcoming.

June 1982

Alan Leveritt: We did an issue on the worst politicians in the state. About three weeks later, the revenue department shows up on our doorstep to audit us for sales tax. We tell them that the law says newspapers don't have to pay sales tax. They say, you're not a newspaper, you're a magazine. They audit us and come up with $10,000 that we owe. That was an existential threat. We were just absolutely sure that this was wrong, so we took it to chancery court. We said that you can't discriminate among publications. We won. Then the state revenue department appealed it to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which upheld the department. Ann Owings, our attorney, said, "I want to take this to the U.S. Supreme Court. I'll do it for free. I'm sure we can win this." And damned if the U.S. Supreme Court didn't agree to hear the case. And she went up there and won it. So we got our $10,000 back.

May 1983

Bob Lancaster becomes editor.

Bob Lancaster: I had a chance to get a real dream job with the New York Times, so I had to decide right then if that was going to be what I was. I finally decided that wasn't what I wanted to do, so I came back here to Arkansas without a job and without much of anything other than two kids to raise. I was here and not doing much of anything. Bill Terry got me to write a piece about the Arkansas diamond mine and the prospect for a big-money diamond industry here, which was a big topic at the time. At that same time, he was about to retire. Alan asked me to become the editor, so I did. It was just a matter of timing.

Mel White (former editor, senior editor): Bill Terry was a talented guy and very quirky and kind of an iconoclast. He liked to shake up the tree. He liked to go after corruption. Bob came in and was a little less interested in politics and more interested in Arkansas culture, Arkansas history and Arkansas traditions. And just good writing for the sake of good writing.

Bob Lancaster: I decided to sort of change the character of the magazine from news tabloid journalism to do something that I thought was classy and beautiful. We got some good people to do historical pieces. We got some really good photographers to do photo features. Dee Brown did a lot of stuff for us, and people liked that. We changed it into a sort of semi-literary magazine instead of muckraking and that sort of thing. That worked.

Mara Leveritt: Bob Lancaster has his own place in Arkansas literature that will never be filled by any other voice.

Mike Trimble (former associate editor): I left the Arkansas Gazette to go to the Times. Bob was the editor. He had sent out feelers saying if I ever wanted to take a cut in pay and work longer hours that the Arkansas Times was there for me.

Bob Lancaster: I had a lot of friendly battles with Alan over stuff. The Times was founded as a kind of political manifesto, and Alan wanted to continue to do that. I wasn't much interested in it, so we battled over that.

August 1985

Mel White becomes editor.

Mel White: Bob's a great, great writer. He was wasting a lot of his time doing editor duties. So he didn't get to write as much as everybody wanted him to. We were wasting his talent. So we flipped positions. I became the editor and stopped doing so much writing.

Mike Trimble: We were pretty smart-ass about our Best and Worst of Arkansas issues. One year I said the ugliest building in Arkansas was the Dillard's headquarters. I said it's the biggest mausoleum in Arkansas and the only one with a clock.

Alan Leveritt: Dillard's had three pages of advertising in the magazine then, and they canceled their contract. Maybe we could have done without that, but it was very funny.

I really believe in letting editors edit. I've always said the Times has always had better talent than it could afford. I think one reason that we've always been able to attract such excellent people editorially is that the publisher stayed out of it. If they write something that destroys an advertising contract, I hate that, but it's the way it is. My job is to back them up, to find another source of income, and let them do what they do because ultimately it comes down to the readers. It comes down to journalism. It comes down to stories.

Max Brantley (senior editor, former editor): We've had any number of issues over the years, where things we've written cost us advertising. I've never worked for a publisher or newspaper executive who takes it more in stride than he does. I mean, he hates to lose a customer, but he has never said, "Can't you take it back? Can't you do it differently?"

March 1990

Richard Martin becomes editor.

Mike Trimble: The magazine changed. The new editor was a guy named Richard Martin. Apparently, the idea was to goose up the magazine, make it more contemporary and appeal more to younger, hipper readers. I don't know what. Richard had a lot of plans to make the magazine snappier and more relevant. More trend pieces. More 10 best this and more 10 worst that.

Richard Martin (former editor, associate editor): I was in town in '89, and heard that Alan was looking. That was during the Mel White period. It was basically Mel, Mike Trimble and Bob Lancaster, three of the best journalists in Arkansas history. But the place had gotten pretty moribund. They were losing money, and Alan wanted to spice it up and all that. He hired me to kind of come in and shake things up.

Mel's a good friend of mine and he's a great journalist. He's a naturalist by vocation. That's what his passion is, so it was much more of a nature magazine when I came in. My charter was really to take it back and do some of the investigative reporting and bring some new energy. It was successful. We doubled the page count and increased circulation and won a couple of awards.

Mike Trimble: I remember one of the first editorial conferences. Martin said, "We got to get readership up and we are going to do things that you might have thought were beneath us, but we're really going to strive for new readers. So don't be surprised if you see some bodacious ta-tas on the cover in the next few months. Mara was incensed at that remark, and I was just sort of, "Whoa! Don't include me in that, pal!"

Richard Martin: This was my first staff meeting. What I was trying to say was perfectly legitimate. We were kind of planning out issues and this was going to be the May or June issue, on Summer Fashion or whatever. What I was trying to say was, "This is the issue where you put an attractive woman on the cover and you drive newsstand sales." There's nothing mysterious about that. Unfortunately, the way I put it was, totally offhandedly, I said, "You know, on this cover, we need a pair of bodacious ta-tas." To say the least, that was the wrong thing to say in front of Mara. She immediately walked out. That was my first major faux pas as the editor. I think she's finally forgiven me. It took years, but I think she's finally realized that I'm not a sexist pig.

Bob Lancaster: Martin wanted to write stuff for people. He wanted to tell them how to write it and would pretty much change your stuff up. He was a real hands-on editor. I wasn't real proud, but I wasn't going to put up with that. God Almighty! So we had a parting of the ways there.

Richard Martin: In my obituary, I'll be The Guy Who Fired Mike Trimble and Bob Lancaster. That's not completely true. I didn't fire Bob. To Bob, I said, "Bob, here's what I want you to do. I want you to just go hang out at the Capitol and do what you do best. Be our political reporter. Just be the H.L. Mencken of the Arkansas Capitol." He said, "Well, let me think about it." Two days later, he came back and said, "I don't think I can do that." And he quit. Like a week later, he became the political correspondent for the Gazette.

Mike Trimble: Rick Martin and I got along, but I could tell that he thought I was a little hidebound and conservative literarily, not politically, and he thought that I did not write enough stories. And I thought he was a little whiz-bang superficial. We each had a point, but he was in a better position to press his point than I was.

Richard Martin: I love Mike, but he was, like, writing one story every two issues. He was writing six features a year. I said, "Mike, we've gotta have more productivity." It just didn't work out, and this is to my eternal shame. Finally, after a couple of weeks, he came in and said, "So, are you firing me or what?" I said, "Mike, I don't want to fire you, but this is what I've gotta have." It didn't work, so essentially I did fire Mike.

John Brummett (former editor, senior editor, columnist): I came to the Arkansas Times in October of 1990. I came from the Arkansas Gazette, where I was writing a very popular six-days-a-week column. Front page of the Metro state section, a real newsy column.

The Gannett company had made the mistake of inviting me to a planning retreat at the Red Apple Inn that summer, and what I got out of that planning retreat was that we were going down the tubes, and I needed to find something else to do if I wanted to be in journalism in Arkansas. As it happened, Alan Leveritt had previously talked to me about becoming senior editor of both his publications at the time: Arkansas Times, which was a slick monthly magazine, and Arkansas Business, which was this still-young business weekly. I thought, OK, I'll do that.

Richard Martin: The word for me when I took over was "callow." I was wet behind the ears. I did an OK job, but it was clear that the best thing I could do for the magazine was write for it. So [Alan] brought in Brummett as the editor. That was a short-lived, misguided experiment. John is great at some things, but he's not a magazine editor.

John Brummett: I loved being in charge, and I loved the assignment I had from the top, from Alan, to make it more topical. To make it more newsy. He kept telling me about Tina Brown and buzz. And I said, OK, let's buzz this thing up.

We had a first-person cover article about David Pryor writing about his heart attack. I went down to Dallas on the Monday after he won the Super Bowl and did an interview profile with Jerry Jones. We did a piece on John Daly. We were sort of trying to make it a Vanity Fair. Newsy. It was fun.

... Charles Portis called me one day. I knew him from drinking at the Afterthought and the Faded Rose. He said, "You're the editor now?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "You want a piece?"

He had driven along and explored the Ouachita River from its start up in the hills and he just did a cultural thing. He would show up at my desk about every other day to make sure I hadn't changed a letter, and I hadn't. But he wanted to make sure.

Max Brantley: In 1991, when it became clear that the great Arkansas daily newspaper war was coming to an end, Alan, who I had known since I first came to town in 1973 and who tried to hire me several previous times, came to me and said he wanted to talk to me about going to work at the Times. His then wife, Mara Leveritt, was a chief advocate for converting the monthly magazine to a weekly newspaper, in large measure to fill the hole that was going to be left philosophically by the closure of the Arkansas Gazette, which had a reputation as a progressive newspaper. Alan offered me $25,000 a year. I also had a job offer from what was then another alternative weekly in town, Spectrum. They offered $26,000 a year. I was making about $64,000 at the Arkansas Gazette at the time. I knew it was a seller's market, so I told Alan, "You've got to match Spectrum." So he matched Spectrum at $26,000, and the die was cast.

John Brummett: I don't know who had the idea first — I think Leveritt smartly let me think it was my idea that Max should be the editor and I shouldn't.

Alan Leveritt: I went out and raised $680,000 to convert the monthly magazine into a weekly. We wanted to keep the Gazette's voice alive in the community.

May 7, 1992

Arkansas Times becomes a weekly with Max Brantley as editor.

The Times hired much of the senior editorial staff of the Arkansas Gazette — Jim Bailey, Leslie Newell Peacock, and Doug Smith; columnists Ernest Dumas and Deborah Mathis, and political cartoonist George Fisher.

Max Brantley: You had all these potential readers that you could add to your circulation base who were disaffected daily newspaper readers who were not particularly happy that all they had left was the Arkansas Democrat -Gazette to read. We hired a big staff and we went to work at it and we pretty rapidly over about a three-year period spent all the money up [laughs].

Leslie Newell Peacock (managing editor): On election night in 1992, we all stayed up all night and went to all the parties and got pictures of Bill and Hillary. The next morning, Mara and I went around downtown, exhausted and hung over, and hawked papers on the street: "Here's the Times! Get your Times!" Then we went to Clinton headquarters and got James Carville to autograph our own copies.

Max Brantley: It was fortuitous for us really when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 because at that point the surviving dominant daily newspaper in Arkansas was the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. It did not like Bill Clinton. The editorial page hated Bill Clinton. So there we were, the alternative newspaper really, with more or less the mainstream outlook on Bill Clinton.

I think we were particularly important in writing about abuses by the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr when he operated in Little Rock that helped create an atmosphere in Little Rock that the town was being picked on and being abused and people's lives were being ruined in pursuit of a political vendetta.

Alan Leveritt: During Ken Starr's persecution of Clinton, we made "Starr-On-A-Stick," a funeral fan with his face on it. He was teaching law school in New York at the time, and some of his students heard about it and ordered 100 of them from us. One morning he came into the classroom, and they all raised the fan over their faces. We heard he was not amused.

Alan Leveritt: We were doing 30,000 copies a week selling them, mostly through subscription statewide, which is hard because your advertisers aren't statewide, they're mostly in Little Rock.

We were down to about $20,000 in the bank. I was losing $220,000 in circulation annually, and I talked to the publisher of the Memphis Flyer, who was distributing a free weekly, and he was making money. So we went free, we moved our circulation more into Little Rock, and we bought news racks and suddenly we were visible all over the city. Advertisers started seeing results. We hit the mountain and got the nose back up and started making money again.

Max Brantley: Mike Huckabee once gave me the biggest compliment anybody could ever give somebody. He got really mad at an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter who'd raised a question on some ethical matter that we'd first reported, and he said something to this reporter like, "What, is Max Brantley the puppet master of the Arkansas media? You're just asking this because they wrote about it." To the extent you can ever contribute to the public discourse and the shape of the debate and you hope people come to your point of view, well, it's great.

Leslie Newell Peacock: The funny thing is that though the Huckabee administration wouldn't include us in press notices — we weren't really a paper, see — we covered the Huckster like the dew. We didn't need his OK to publish his gifts from Jennings Osborne or Huckabee's sales to the Mansion gift shop of his own books. One of the great things about the Times is that it's the kind of publication where Max could put at the end of The Week That Was column every week a countdown on how many more days were left in the Huckabee administration.

Mara Leveritt: The Times was wonderful for me. I got to find my way into work that I found that I liked, which was reporting mostly on criminal justice issues. I had a foot in the stories I wrote books about because of reporting I had gotten to do for the Times. I don't know if anyone at the paper got tired of me saying, "Well, I've got something else on West Memphis."

Max Brantley: Philosophically and spiritually I think Mara is the mother of the Arkansas Times and deserves a tremendous amount of credit. She has passion for social justice that really undergirded a lot of what the Times did.

David Koon (associate editor): I went to school at UALR and while I was there I started caring about news and current events. As a teenager growing up in Paron, Ark., you don't really care what's going on, none of it's ever going to matter. The Arkansas Times was handed out on the UALR campus, and I start reading some of the early stuff about the West Memphis Three. Mara's stuff, and I believe I even read Bob Lancaster's original story back when they were convicted.

It all had a resonance for me, because there were 17 people in my graduating class. It's not like there were cliques of weirdos, there was only one weirdo there and it was me. I was the dude wearing the black T-shirt and listening to the crazy music. Reading the stuff about the West Memphis Three you really got a sense that this is another town so small that the weirdos don't have a pack, they just cling to each other. I think I saw a lot of myself in that story. And that was my entree into this idea that A) you can do good journalism in Arkansas, and B) horrible shit happens in the name of the law and justice in this state.

One day I was looking through the Arkansas Times and saw they were looking for a writer, there was just an ad in the back of the paper, and I remembered those West Memphis Three stories. So I applied for it. I was shocked as hell when I got the job. I was so stoked to be here on my first day that I got dressed in the dark. I put on my one suit — which Max later told me made me look like Frankenstein — and came to the office and realized I'd put on two different shoes. They weren't even close. I went into Michael Haddigan's office, and I showed him the shoes, and he said, "You're going to fit in fine, kid."

Max Brantley: I think our biggest value is that we say things that sometimes other people are afraid to say. And I don't expect Arkansas to wake up tomorrow and say, "Gee, you know, Max Brantley has been right all along. We ought to be liberals." But I do think there's a real value in challenging the conventional wisdom.

Oct. 14, 2004

The Arkansas Blog debuts.

Alan Leveritt: Max wanted to get back into the daily newspaper business, and he saw he could do that with a blog. He's absolutely obsessive about it. He starts at 5 a.m. and quits at 10 p.m. Max knows everybody in town and has great contacts, so he knows where all the skeletons are hanging.

Max Brantley: We were an early adopter of blogging in Little Rock, and it served us very well. It was cheap. I just started doing it on top of everything else I was doing. That's kind of the Arkansas Times model: Do more without spending any money to do it.

David Koon: I see this place as a little family. The very few people not withstanding who were complete and utter shitheads, I'm always sad to see people leave here. It's a small enough endeavor that it sort of forms into this family reunion every day at work.

July 2011

Lindsey Millar becomes editor.

Lindsey Millar (editor, former entertainment editor): To a potential hire, I once described the editorial staff as a family, where Max and Leslie were the parents, who know everything, and David Koon, [former entertainment editor] Robert Bell and I were the sons, and Max and Leslie had given me power of attorney to make decisions in case they slipped into their dotage.

But really I became editor in 2011 so Max could "retire" to blogging. That just means he takes a couple more trips than he did before. He still works 60 hours a week or more.

John Brummett: I don't see the news print product every week. But I check the Arkansas Blog an average of a half dozen or more times a day. And it's a tour de force. That's all I can say. For one guy to sit there — and of course I know him because I've seen him do it for decades — but for one guy to sit there and cover as much as he covers. It's wild! It needs to be remembered for some sort of journalism museum some day. It's remarkable.

Lindsey Millar: Several years ago, before the West Memphis Three were freed, we broke the news thanks to Mara's years of reporting on the case. We broke it online on the Arkansas Blog and pushed it out on Facebook and Twitter. We covered the story live from the court proceedings from the blog and then wrapped all of our knowledge from years covering the case, good sourcing and on-the-ground reporting into a cover package. At the end of the week, Max and I talked about it on our weekly podcast. That kind of encapsulates where I think we are as a paper: We have a wealth of institutional knowledge paired with some young, talented writers who've really hustled. We go after stories that, for one reason or another, others ignore. And we use all media available to do our reporting. In fact, we've really gotten into video this year.

Alan Leveritt: I think the future of the Times is very bright. We've got some good people. I think print is going to be around for a long time, and the web is going to become more and more important. But who knows? In 10 years the company might not be recognizable because of new technology. I'm just running as fast as I can to keep up.

Interviewers for UALR's "Arkansas Times: Product of our Experience" were by Courtney Bradford, Anne Frymark, Victoria Garrett, Jessica Goodman, John Jones and Jim Stalling, students in a public history master's program led by Deborah Baldwin. Bill Terry's quotes come from a sixth anniversary edition of Arkansas Times (September 1980).

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Best excuse to use the catfish as an icon for a newspaper

"It's Arkansas's answer to the sophisticated bunny, and we think a more appropriate symbol for Arkansas than the Razorback. Watch for the catfish, he's strong, keeps his ponds and rivers picked up, and as you will see, has some very interesting things to say about Arkansas." Haters, form a line to the right to make "bottomfeeder" jokes. (January 1977)

Worst culinary pandering to a political candidate

Cotham's, home of the Hubcap hamburger, serves Joe Lieberman lox and bagels when he campaigns in Arkansas with presidential hopeful Al Gore. (September 2000)

Best prediction

"Huckabee ... could be the Baptist ministry's answer to David Pryor. He's the kind of young man who might succeed in secular politics," writes John Brummett in a story about a schism in the Southern Baptist Convention. (March 1991)

Best vision

In a story by Judith Gallman about the idea to revitalize East Markham, future River Market godfather Jimmy Moses says, "It will work. I swear to God it will happen." Proposed new names for the district: East End, East Markham, Entertainment district, Water Street. (July 6, 1994)

Best assignment given to a young male reporter

David Glenn, in researching a story on massage parlors in Little Rock, finds one where a sweet lady he calls "Louise" includes what's called "a local" in her rubdown. Louise tells him she believes in the Bible and that her type of massage is important to her customers. "They need relief." (October 1974)

Worst result for a citizen trying to report child pornography

A doctor who tries to report to the FBI the sender of unsolicited emailed pornography ends up being charged with a felony and convicted. Bottom line: Don't let the government know if you're being emailed stuff you don't want and know is illegal. (September 2000)

"I think an important part of starting the Times was Alan's synergy with the Art Farm, which at that time was not only the hippie commercial art agency for First Federal Savings and Loan but also the Little Rock home of Greasy Greens," remembers Vernon Tucker in an email to the Times. "The band wasn't just a band and the Art Farm wasn't just another ad agency. This was hard to explain to the 4H member from Lonoke who was writing an essay on agriculture in Arkansas, saw Art Farm in the telephone directory and listened patiently while I tried earnestly to explain our contribution. The Greens, or Greasy Greens were more of a performance art collective than a traditional music group. Most of us were artists of one kind or another with little musical background." Tucker was co-editor with Alan Leveritt in the early '70s. Art Farm leader Patrick McKelvey illustrated often in the early days, including the first cover of Union Station Times. And Danny Morris created the catfish logo.

Best pinball parlor in Little Rock in 1974

The Little Rock Municipal Airport, reported in the Times to have the widest selection of pinball machines in the city. (Sept. 19, 1974)

Best low bar for measuring success forArkansas Timesin 1976

"Two years is not a very long time of life; but it is a milestone of large importance for a new publication. We think the magazine has improved, in the quality of writing and appearance, but there are other ways to measure improvement: They don't cut off the lights any more and we pay the rent nearly on time." (September 1976)

Worst "It's OK when we do it" moment

In the Sept. 22, 1994, issue, the Times pokes fun at the Democrat-Gazette for bringing back the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" feature, writing, "Once again, Arkansas readers have access to valuable and provocative knowledge: 'Beavers can completely close their nostrils and ears!'" A year later, on Oct. 27, 1995, the Times does a cover story "Believe it Or Not," focusing on Arkansans whose achievements won them a place in the column (but failing to note that Times freelancer Stephen Steed and his three brothers were once in Ripley's, because all four were born on the same date in different years).

Best branding

Columnist Graham Gordy proposes new slogans for Arkansas cities. Among the most memorable: Ash Flat: "Kick-ass name for a town or a baby."

Bryant: "Because Benton was getting all uppity." Eureka Springs: "If you're into UFOs, dulcimers and Jesus, look no further." Fayetteville: "Your daughter had a lot of sex here." Fairfield Bay/Heber Springs: "Sure, you can drive your golf cart on a state highway." Maumelle: "French for 'small breasts,' Arkansan for 'MILF MOUNTAIN'!!" North Little Rock: "We see your palatial Presidential Library and raise you a concrete RV park."

Texarkana: "Two cities. One fantastic Bennigan's." West Memphis: "If you'll eat crab legs from a dog track, you won't mind all the other terrible shit that goes on here." (Aug. 10, 2011)

Best follow-up comment

On the online version of Graham Gordy's column, a reader reports the Bennigan's in Texarkana has been closed for three years.

Worst timing

About three weeks before Viagra was approved by the FDA, the Times ran a story on a Van Buren doctor who was treating his impotent patients with inflatable prosthesis implants, which cost around $20,000. The doctor had done 570 over the previous three years, the most in the world. "This is a happy business," he said. (March 6, 1998)

Best is that how it really was?

In an advance article on Jimmy Buffett coming to Little Rock to play Robinson Auditorium (for "an older and more discerning crowd that often turns up for rock concerts at Barton Coliseum"), the Times writes, "But the obvious question is whether Little Rock is ready for anything but wild hippie acid music." (March 30, 1975)

Worst contest idea

The Times sponsors a contest for folks wanting to have dinner with groupie Connie Hamzy. (July 4, 1997)

Best advice from theTimes

That Keith Moyer, the editor of the Arkansas Gazette, call John Robert Starr, editor of the Arkansas Democrat, "Boo's Belching Buttboy." And in return, Starr should call Moyer "Gaseous Gannett Goon." The advice came after emails between the two surfaced that showed similar puerile insults. (June 1991)

Best shocked!

The month after the 1980 Le Dare story, three people write in to cancel their subscriptions, including one Little Rock reader who said the story was full of "trashy and gutter language."

Best observation by an architect about a building

In a cover story about Arkansas architect Fay Jones, Jones recalls meeting Frank Lloyd Wright in a new Houston hotel and hearing him say when he looked at circular holes in a light cove, "Now Jones, here you see the effect of venereal disease in architecture." (October 1983)

Worst recipe to appear in theTimes. Or maybe in history

Horseradish souffle. Main ingredients: horseradish, lemon gelatin, whipping cream. (April 1982)

Worst moment of temporary insanity

"Paul Greenberg's voice may be Arkansas's best voice." (November 1987).

Worst metamorphosis of an Arkansas legislator

In a 1987 profile of powerful state Sen. Nick Wilson, Bob Lancaster writes that Wilson started out as "an idealist young liberal in the David Pryor mold," and that he, along with three other legislators, "helped change the Senate's image from that of a smoky lair filled with fat old stogie-smoking crooks and buffoons to that of the more progressive and more promising of the two houses of the legislature." But 10 years later, Doug Smith breaks the news that little-understood legislation steered $3 million in state grants to three lawyers, the tip of the iceberg that would eventually bring down Wilson. In 1999, the plump, stogie-smoking Wilson was convicted of conspiring to divert funds from state programs and tax evasion and sent to prison.

Best scent in theTimes

Former editor Bill Terry writes for the 15th anniversary of the Times that contributing writer Miller Williams advised the young Times to keep a certain possum scent about it, since Little Rock didn't "need another New Yorker." Terry writes, "So we had a little sex in the magazine, including a nude on the cover once. A little sex and a little of this and that; one issue, for example, bashing doctors and exploring the value of whores, a cover on the stupidest (and the smartest) Arkansas legislators and some cops and robbers stuff." (September 1989)

Best sequel to "Babe"

A story about an old hunter who raised an orphaned razorback hog with his hounds and taught it to tree 'coons with the best of them. (November 1983)

Best life

That of the late Arkansas-born stuntman Hal Needham. It included once jumping from an airplane onto the back of a galloping horse, directing "Smokey and the Bandit," stunt-doubling for Captain Kirk in some early episodes of "Star Trek," owning the Budweiser rocket car, driving cross-country in a souped-up ambulance in the famous "Cannonball Run," and living in Burt Reynolds' pool house for over a decade. (June 1, 2011)

Worst review

Our smackdown on "Raiders of the Lost Ark," in which we like the first reel, but say that by the end (the part, as you'll remember, with all the Nazi face melting, pits full of snakes and Wrath of God stuff) "they had run out of ideas." (August 1981)

Worst ad in history, ever, which probably killed some people

Just in time for the suicide season, the Times runs a double-page ad featuring a little old lady bundled up and alone, sitting beside her Charlie Brown Christmas tree and frowning sadly out the window, clearly lost in thought about how she just wishes sometimes that The Lord would take her now. The headline: "You don't have to be alone at Christmas." Why? Because COMPUTERS! A computer store on Kavanaugh has a 24-hour helpline to help you with any issue you have with your new computer! No, really. We ran that. (December 1983)

Worst pioneer tale

Bob Lancaster's characteristically brilliant writing about the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which a mob of pissed-off Mormons descended on a wagon train full of Arkansans traveling through Southern Utah and slaughtered anybody old enough to speak. (March 1984)

Best viscous/vicious pairing

In a short blurb, we note Philip Martin's erotic novel "The Eavesdropper," excerpted in Nerve magazine. We're no prudes, but almost the only part of the Nerve excerpt we can print here is: "... viscous, vicious milk. Spoonful, spoonful, spoonful." Why yes, the excerpt of Martin's novel IS still available online at nerve.com. Why do you ask? (June 1998)

Worst speculation

The Times explores what would happen in Arkansas in the event of a full-on nuclear exchange with the Soviets. Digest: Between the ICBM silos in Faulkner County, Little Rock Air Force Base, the defense industries in Camden and being downwind of big air bases in Oklahoma and Texas, we'd all be the past tense of that word that starts with F, ends with K, and ain't "firetruck." (April 1984)

Worst fawning over Joe Lieberman

The Times would later conclude that the former senator from Connecticut was "slimy," a "turncoat and a warmonger" who would "mislead and manipulate the people." The Times called him "Loserman" and "serpentine" and never forgave for his "wimpish acquiescence to the theft of running mate Al Gore's victory in 2000." But back in 2000, in the homestretch of the presidential campaign, some Times columnists think Joe Lieberman's nomination as veep is just the ticket. Ernie Dumas writes in August that "Lieberman seriously elevates Gore's moribund campaign." By September, John Brummett is full-on swooning: "[T]his man has done nothing less than unite American Christians and Jews under a banner of God and shared values."

Worst eye for political talent

"Overrated: Mike Beebe, the extolled Democratic state senator and oft-suggested candidate for statewide office who has never been tested in terms of telegenic skills or retail political ones," writes John Brummett. (Dec. 8, 2000)

Best kind Robert Starr obituary

Max Brantley: "The big war over, Starr and I became occasional lunch mates, part of a loose band of old fogey media types. These invariably pleasant meetings were no stranger, I always said, than the post-war reunions of Japanese and American Pearl Harbor survivors." (April 7, 2000)

Best unkind Robert Starr obituary

Bob Lancaster: "[T]hat last batch of columns, which, if they lacked the old venom, still bore the old Starr taint in that they were self-indulgent, inconsequential, stupid, loutish, and uncalled for." (April 21, 2000)

Worst advice from God

"I asked God, 'Do you want me to change the law to put prayer in schools?' He said no. If you do that, kids would have the right to pray to other gods, too. They could pray to Buddha. God doesn't want that."— Kathy Smith, founder of Put God Back in Public School, a North Little Rock group that sought to provide "Christian counseling" in public schools. (June 12, 1998)

Best things hidden in a bottle on a high shelf in White Water Tavern

The ashes of one of former owner Larry "Goose" Garrison's best friends. "In high school, I bit part of his ear off. We got in a fight — that's how we got to be friends," Garrison tells Lindsey Millar in his oral history of the bar. Also in the bottle: Four women's pubic hairs — three reds and one black. A line of cocaine. "Some good kine bud." (Oct. 14, 2010)

Best gullible Huck

When the Canadian spoof TV show "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" came to Arkansas, the interviewer told then-Gov. Mike Huckabee that the Canadian Capitol was a downscaled replica of the Arkansas Capitol, only made out of ice. "We're worried about global warming, though, so we're putting a dome over it," said the interviewer. "But to pay for it, we must attract visitors." They filmed Huckabee saying, "I'm Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, wanting to say congratulations, Canada, on preserving your National Igloo." The live audience in Canada watching the tape laughed uproariously. (Dec. 18, 1998)

Best last of a kind

"If the philosophy of liberalism is thinking that the government has a role in helping people who need help, I plead guilty."— Dale Bumpers (Jan. 8, 1999)

Best "You're a Real Arkie If"

"... You've ever written 'Go Hogs!' on a hotel registry in a foreign country." (Oct. 16, 1998)

Worst headline to encourage a re-read

"Diarrhea drug a cheap high" (March 17, 1994)

Worst headline typo

"Who's scenery is it, anyway?" (May 7, 1999)

Worst headline typo ON THE COVER!!

"Arkansan of the year: Towsend Wolfe" (sorry, Townsend!). (Jan. 26, 2001)

Best dated political advice

"Republicans win the state only by luck, disease, or when the Democrats make fools of themselves ... If you want to run for office in the state and lose, then simply be a woman, a black, a Jew or a Republican — in that order."—Pollster Jim Ranchino on Arkansas in the '70s. (September 1977)

Best adios

The Observer eulogizes "Sunglasses After Dark,""the best (we think) and strangest radio show to ever grace Arkansas airwaves." The KABF 88.3 FM show, hosted by Oleo Magneto, went dark after 23 years thanks to a programming shakeup. Oleo, The Observer remembers, "used 'of course' often, as in 'That was, of course, from the extremely rare Japanese pressing of Pere Ubu's third album.' Few DJs could rival Oleo's musical knowledge, and he never failed to pass it along to his listeners." The Observer is torn up about the loss, but Oleo asks that we remember this: "Every noise I ever broadcast is still in circulation, in its original form, somewhere in the ether, and, as a result, has a better claim on eternity than humans are likely to have." (April 19, 2007)

Best fishing advice

How to catch a bass: "Take an ordinary wooden spring loaded clothespin and drill a small hole in one of the flat ends, working a split ring through the hole. Then attach a swivel to the split ring. Next, tie the monofilament line to the swivel. To the other prong of the clothespin on the wide outside edge, affix two or three treble hooks with eye screws and split rings. Wonder lure is almost ready. For the clincher, stick an Alka-Seltzer tablet in the mouth of the clothespin, and chunk the whole contraption somewhere near the lurking lunker. The fizzing of the Alka-Seltzer tablet on top of the water is enough to drive most bass absolutely crazy, and they will often strike the line out of pure spite." (July 7, 1994)

Worst ain't never been no gay "Hey, I'm 6 foot, 195. I ain't never been no gay. ... Everybody that knows me knows I'm not homosexual."— Alderman Mike Meadows of El Dorado. (Dec. 31, 1999)

Worst high society

Did you remember that David Koch (of the billionaire political meddlers the Koch brothers) married a young woman from Conway? Koch was 50 and Julia Flesher was 27 when they met; they're still married. Well before the Koch brothers became famous right-wing bogeymen, we make note of the Times of London reporting on Julia Flesher Koch's foibles in Great Gatsbyville back in 1999. She had been the leading "fin de siecle society wife," but then fell out of favor with "New York's snobbish society grande dames." She threw a boring edition of the annual Koch New Year's Eve party in Aspen, Colo. According to the Times of London: "Diana Ross, yawning on a sofa, left before midnight." (April 9, 1999)

Worst failure to recognize how annoying a style of music could become

"The punkization of horn-and-rhythm rich ska music has formed one of the most energizing ... hybrids of late." (Jan. 23, 1998)

Worst 1970s lede

"There is one concept of feminine sexuality that is going to have to be dealt with before some of us can continue down the path of enlightenment toward women's equality. I'm not talking about sensitivity or emotion or intelligence. I'm talking about pussy." Opening lines of Arlin Fields's  "A Dissertation On An Important But Seldom-Discussed Concept Of Feminine Sexuality or 'Shake It, Baby, Shake It.'" (October 1975)

Worst failure to appreciate the smell of napalm in the morning

Our original verdict on "Apocalypse Now": A "surrealistic disappointment." (January 1980).

Best animal magnetism

"An animal lover — and how! — in southwest Arkansas." The Times reports on Catherine Gordon, who owned 14 lions, 14 cougars, nine tigers, five bears, three leopards and one camel. Plus 35 horses and "various coyotes and dogs." The subhed asks, what do you do with all those animals? "Dress 'em up of course."

From the article: "'Whenever company comes over you have to put clothes on the children, don't you know?' she says, slipping a blue T-shirt onto Vincent, a four-month-old lion club.' Next she puts a scarf on a cougar cub, and a shirt on a bear cub with pierced ears and purple toenails."

Gordon brought her brood over from India to her hilltop farm just across from the Miller County swamp.

"I don't think there's anything unusual about sleeping with lions, but I guess some people do," she tells the Times. "This is what I like. I don't like shopping. I don't like eating out. I don't have a husband or children. I like this. I'm the only kid on the block like me." (July 1989)

Best breaking news

An entire column in 1998 explains honey. Sample: "Honey is sweet, like sugar, but with more complex flavor." (Feb. 13, 1998)

Worst effort at clickbait before there was such a thing as clickbait

"Some Views of Arkansas History, Including a Sexy Indian Princess" is the headline to a review of Pat Winter's "River of Destiny" ("the breathtaking saga of a buxom Indian princess who looks like Sophia Loren is a checkout-counter classic"). (January 1987)

Best barbecue, same as it ever was

"Ever try to eat a rib sandwich in the traditional fashion? Hell, ever try to eat any Sims sandwich in a traditional fashion? They pile on what seems like a pound of meat, drown it in sauce and give you the pile and wish you good luck." From Max Brantley's review of an old standby (Jan. 23, 1998). Max also recounts his first encounter with Sims when he was a cub reporter working the police beat in the early 1970s. Covering a shooting at the restaurant, he sought a quote from Alan Sims. "I didn't see nothing," he replied. "I was just basting my ribs." 

Best lede to a true crime story

"It is 7:30 p.m., March 10, 1980. My hand grips a skillet on my kitchen stove. Bubbles form and rise in the simmering bacon grease, and I wish those tiny bubbles were crystal balls. There are six other people in my house. Minutes ago, I fried bacon and eggs for four of them, one of whom was not invited. He is a stranger. He is, he warns us, a desperate man, a fugitive, a man who has nothing to lose. We believe him. His eyes are like a cold, wet wind. He is armed. He is holding the rest of us hostage." Thus begins a first-person, purportedly true tale of a family taken hostage by a gunman in the Ozarks. A nail-biting thriller from start to bloody finish. (May 1983)

Best reporting in the fieldcoming up empty

Bob Lancaster goes to Southwest Arkansas after multiple reports of UFO sightings. "I saw a shooting star in the southern sky, and imagined that a UFO doing dipsy doodles wouldn't be halfway as remarkable," he writes. "The ordinary can be more amazing than what we can conjure or suppose." (June 1988)

Best catch

The unsuccessful 2008 attempt, as revealed in a story by David Koon, by Westside School shooter Andrew Golden to obtain a concealed handgun permit. Golden, who filed for the permit under his new name, Drew Douglas Grant, was denied a permit by the State Police. Though Golden's record was officially clear due to his being only 11 years old at the time of the March 1998 shooting which took the lives of four of his classmates and a teacher, the State Police had an old set of his fingerprints on file. (Dec. 11, 2008)

Best A Simple Plan

Warwick Sabin reports on a Mena man who as a boy found the only money recovered from the 1971 D.B. Cooper plane hijacking and robbery. Brian Ingram, 8 years old at the time, came across a buried bundle of $20 bills in 1980 while camping with his family on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state. The money was turned over to the FBI, but Ingram was eventually allowed to keep $3,000 of the $5,800 he found, which he planned to sell for big bucks as a souvenir. (Jan. 26, 2006)

Worst credit check

A 1974 exclusive reveals that two insurance companies had denied a Eureka Springs woman auto insurance because a credit report alleged that she was sexually promiscuous. Then-editor Alan Leveritt writes, "Occasionally a story crosses an editor's desk describing an act so outrageous that simply printing it and getting the word out isn't enough. Newsprint is too thin and flimsy. You want to pick up the typewriter and use it on someone." The report from Retail Credit says "she is sexually promiscuous, she uses language not normally used by females in mixed company, and she has a reputation in the community for having bad morals. Equity Mutual and State Farm both decline to insure her based on the report. A representative from State Farm says that if a woman was reported to be sexually promiscuous, the company would refuse insurance "not on moral grounds, but because it would be impossible to predict who might be driving the car." (Nov. 28, 1974)

Worst truth

The Observer, writing in the June 13, 2003 issue about things learned since becoming a father: "As long as it issued from your kid, you can clean up vomit and then go back to eating your chili."

Best headline

"Fingering the Federalist Society" (July 11, 2003)

Best lonely lede

"They're poor, or affluent. They live across town, or next door.

Or, they're you.

They're lonely."

David Glenn's examination of loneliness in Little Rock in 1974 is well-reported and unapologetically sad. Glenn speaks with dozens of lonely people and catalogues the results. "I usually cry at night," says one. A worker for Central Services for the Elderly describes a client: "Mrs. A, early to mid-nineties, is a very remarkably lady. ... I have called her ... to inquire how she was feeling. She is very alone and quite sad."

Glenn never divulges whether he himself is lonely. It is implied. (Nov. 28, 1974)

Best complaint

"Let's face it: Arkansas doesn't have any real bars. ... What we've got — the result of a half-Baptist, half-hellraiser heritage that causes us to drink wet and vote dry — is a weird assortment of hotels with bars attached (in some parts of the state), restaurants with bars attached (in some parts of the state), country clubs, honky-tonks, and 'private clubs' that are such a sham you couldn't pry the quotation marks off with a crowbar." (July 1987)

Best yesterday feels like today

From a 1987 bar guide: "Having survived all that, people say [the White Water Tavern] is just not the same as the old days, before it served mixed drinks, when it was darker ... . Despite its slight slicking up, the White Water still has that good neighborhood blend of older folks and college kids, dating couples, married couples, businesspeople, cowboys, and unisex tables of singles who wouldn't be averse to meeting somebody cute who also likes to dance to "Hand Jive" or "Mr. Union Man." (July 1987). Bonus same-as-it-ever-was: "The nice thing about the Capital Bar in Little Rock is that you can pretend you're a big shot and nobody will call your hand."

Best pulp lede

"He used to wear rings on his fingers made of twenty-dollar gold pieces crested with diamonds that glistened on his fat bronzed hands like pineapple rings on a ham." From Bill Terry's dazzling profile of "Big Man," the 300-pound con man and police informant who played both sides of the street.  (March 1978)

Best proof theTimesis up on the trends

"Crystals run computers and keep watches in time, but will they cure diseases and bring about world peace?" (April 1986)

"Tattoos aren't just for bikers anymore. Some dare call them art." (April 26, 2007)

Worst news that doesn't change

A sampling from 1998:

Senate candidate gets in hot water for stating rape doesn't produce pregnancy because of a peculiarity of female body chemistry. Ugh. Fay Boozman in 1998 (Oct. 23, 1998; great caption: "Boozman: His theory debunked in 1820").

"We have the worst roads of any state," writes Bob Lancaster (May 22, 1998).

"Legal yes; available no: Fewer abortion doctors threaten choice." (Feb. 13, 1998)

The outlook on Mara Leveritt's hobby horses haven't improved much in the last 15 years. "As always, the explanation offered for the drive to increase surveillance of citizens is safety," she wrote (March 6, 1998). And on the "abominable war on drugs," she wrote, "We are seeing the failure of that meddlesome approach. ... Our prisons are bursting. Families have been shattered. Drug use has not been stopped." (March 27, 1998).

Best Portis being Portis

Some favorite bits from "The Forgotten River," Charles Portis' long-form piece for the Times on journeying along the Ouchita River:  

"The girl behind the bar knew nothing, which was all right. You don't expect young people to know river lore."

"At lunch one day he found a split avocado on his plate, or 'alligator pear,' as it was called on the menu. 'I had never seen one before. I wouldn't eat it.'"

"[DeSoto] was looking for another Peru, out of which he had taken a fortune in gold. ... What he found was catfish."

"Those earnest enunciators who say 'bean' for 'been' should know that Hakluyt, the Oxford scholar, spelled it 'bin,' as did, off and on, the poet John Donne."

"Did they know of any songs about the Ouachita? Well, no. They tried hard, too, to think of a song. Everybody was very obliging."

"My motel room cost only $21, and, as a bonus, a man was practicing law in the next room." (August 1991)

Best description

James Carville looks like a combination of "Walter Hussman and E.T." writes John Brummett from the campaign trail. (May 7, 1992)

Best 40-year crusade

The Times' first story on gay marriage comes in 1974 (then-editor Alan Leveritt opens the issue by comparing the struggle for equality for gay people to the Civil Rights movement). From that issue, "Like Any Other Marriage": After 15 years, Roy and David know that this has worked." What does a gay couple argue about, we ask? "I argue about the telephone bill being too high and such things as that," Roy says. We note that Roy and David live "in a society that does not yet fully accept their ideas and actions." Says Roy, the public is "learning more about it and the more you learn about anything, the less afraid you are of it." In 2014, the Times cover story on the first legal gay marriages (before a stay in the legal case put the brakes on for now) is headlined "At Last." We interview dozens of newlyweds. "This is something we've waited a long time for and never thought we'd see in this lifetime," says one new husband, James Paulus. "We just never thought we'd see the day."

Best fortune telling

A 1974 story makes predictions about what Little Rock would look like in 1990. "There are apparently conflicting ideas about what the city of Little Rock will look like in the year 1990 and what function it will perform. They vary from space odyssey visions of a towering futuristic metropolis where people are clustered like thriving aphids to far more modest projections of an inner-city with pretty, traffic-less streets, quiet parks and cultural areas." Amazingly, we also predict the precise timing of the rise and fall and rise and fall of Hot Dog Mike decades later. (Dec. 12, 1974)

Best and Worst: Clinton Chronicles

Best kicking a Big Dog when he's down

Betsey Wright, former chief of staff to Gov. Bill Clinton, pens a cover story for the Times titled "Musings and Rantings from the far (Arkansas) North." On the "ridiculous distraction" of the Lewinsky scandal, Wright writes, "The only other thing I am sure of is that if Bill Clinton were in my reach I would be mightily tempted to bash him on his head and kick him in the shins." (Aug. 14, 1998)

Worst where have I heard that before?

"Public support for the president's voluminous plan plummeted even as polls showed that people continued to like all its major ideas." That's Ernie Dumas writing about a health care plan 20 years ago, in a column on the eventually doomed Clinton plan for universal health insurance. (Aug. 18, 1994)

Best 15-year-old sentiment to re-use for headline next year

"Hillary Clinton ... is beginning to benefit from the residual modern-day Democratic advantage, which is the buffoonery of Republicans."—John Brummett (Sept. 22, 2000)

Best new history

Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 changed everything, writes Max Brantley. "An exorcism was what it was. Of hillbilly jokes. Of decades when we had only Mississippi to thank ... Arkansas is no longer, first, the home of Lum and Abner and Orval Faubus. It is the home of Bill Clinton. History now begins in 1992, not 1957." (Nov. 5, 1992)

Best copy and replace statement

"People ask me all the time, 'What do you want to be doing five years from now?' ... And I always tell them, 'I don't think like that. I don't see my life that way," Arkansas First Lady Hillary Clinton tells Mara Leveritt. (October 1989)

Best improvement

"I mean, back in the late '70s, if you remember, people were saying, 'Oh my gosh, she's going to keep working. I can't believe it.' ... This issue has been played out at every level except the presidential one. I haven't had questions like this in Bill's last three campaigns ... so in a funny kind of way, the presidency is the last step to recognize the transition that has already occurred in both our private and public lives," Hillary Clinton tells Mara Leveritt. (Aug. 27, 1992)

Best lookalike

Leslie Newell Peacock profiles a local Clinton lookalike, North Little Rock bolt and screw sales rep Terry Kent. "Thick white hair is combed neatly back, blue eyes peeking out of crinkled bags. His head waggles when he laughs; pride turns his mouth into an upside down U. When he waves to the crowd, he rejects Nixon's V signs for hitchhiker thumbs. 'Thank youuuu,' he chokes, 'thank youuuuuuu.'"

Reception is as sharply divided for Kent as it is for the president: "When he entered a Batesville restaurant recently, a woman told him he looked like Bill Clinton and then added, 'If I had a gun I'd kill you on the spot.''She wasn't smiling,' Kent grimaced." (Nov. 25, 1994)

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There have been around 1,300 issues of the Arkansas Times by now, which means our genetic code includes, say, 20,000 stories in print and another 30,000 online. We'd like to think we share some of that code with the great magazines and newspapers of our time. Are we as close to the New Yorker as humans are to chimps? Or are we more like the News of the World? Or the leftist Dissent? The neoconservative Commentary? Or, as Woody Allen would say, their JOA, Dysentery?

Whatever, there are a few stories that we think are forever bound up in our history, the ones we free associate with the words Arkansas Times. They're political stories, crime stories, sometimes political crimes stories. There's government and guns. Issues of gender and immigration. These bits of our genetic code changed Arkansas's makeup in one way or another. Among them:

Our 1975 story about a police officer's scheme to plant marijuana in the car of then-Prosecuting Attorney Jim Guy Tucker. Check out the oral history story to get the details on this story, which got a cop fired and almost got an editor shot.

Our 1978 stories on a police sting set up to catch liquor distributor Harry Hastings, an action later ruled by a federal judge as tantamount to entrapment, and our transcriptions of incriminating tapes never put into evidence.

Our no-holds-barred coverage of the antics of the Arkansas legislature, including the story that brought Sen. Nick Wilson down, about legislators getting million-dollar contracts from legislation they created.

Our series of stories in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, stories less about cigars and more about the political motivation behind Whitewater and Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and the collateral damage done to partisan targets in Arkansas.

Our stories on the crisis at the state's juvenile holding center (1998), where one teenager hanged himself and others suffered abuse, including sodomy, from older inmates and staff. Part of our reporting was on the Democrat-Gazette's decision not to report what it knew about the abuses, withholding the news for packaging later in prize-entry form.

Our stories on the abuse of the Mansion Fund by Gov. Mike Huckabee (1998), who on the advice of his chief of staff used the account meant to operate the public mansion on things such as Velveeta, laundering of jeans, dinners out and the like. Huckabee survived a suit over the use, but the account was no longer used for cheese dip.

Our Arkansas Blog, which has broken stories as diverse as Frank Broyles' retirement as athletic director at the University of Arkansas, to news that the West Memphis Three would be released from prison, to the news that the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences was considering merging with St. Vincent Health, to the private option compromise to expand health care in Arkansas, to Bobby Petrino's female company on his motorcycle ride, to the intemperate postings about women and cases by Faulkner County Judge Mike Maggio, who has now been banned from the bench, to the list of concealed gun owners (earned a few death threats with that one) ...

Our ongoing stories ... on the struggles of undocumented Hispanics against bigotry and the ways in which their culture, intelligence and work ethic have enriched our state. Our coverage of inequality of education in the schools. Our longtime advocacy journalism on gay rights, starting our first year in print with an editorial by Alan Leveritt on gay rights as human rights and continuing with our work on gays as loving couples, gays in church, gays in the military, gays battling for their right to foster children, their battle to marry. We hope to continue to write until all the battles are won.

Our clear-eyed reporting of the West Memphis Three case, from Bob Lancaster's reporting on the trial of Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin in the deaths of three little boys in West Memphis —"The Devil on Trial"— to Mara Leveritt's continuing crucial investigative stories on the crime, the judicial system and efforts to free the men.

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Long and long
The Arkansas Times reflects on 40 years.

How the Arkansas Times survived poverty, the Dixie Mafia, the U.S. Supreme Court and Mike Huckabee
An oral history of the first 40 years.

The best and worst of Arkansas Times' first 40 years
From sexy camping to horseradish souffle.
By Benjamin Hardy, David Koon, Lindsey Millar, Leslie Newell Peacock and David Ramsey

40 years, a lot of ink
Some of it left a permanent mark.

What were we thinking?
A survey of Arkansas Times covers from yesteryear that make us say, "WTF?"

Looking at 40
The Arkansas Times celebrates 40 years of publication this week. I feel a little like Jimmy Buffett's pirate of song.
By Max Brantley

The time machine
The Observer and the rest of the editorial staff of the Arkansas Times spent the last couple of weeks flipping through the bound archives of the stick-it-to-the-man underground rag-turned-magazine-turned-weekly newspaper we work for, finding stories and tidbits of yesteryear to put on display.

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2014 Arkansas fall music preview
Your guide to the rest of the year in live music.

A variety-packed fall theater season
From 'The Game's Afoot' to 'A Quiet End.'

Art in America
Converging at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Hot docs at Hot Springs fest
Luke Wilson, George Takei and 'Hoop Dreams' at this year's Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.

Arkansas fall arts calendar
(Oct. 2-Dec. 25)

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With summer come and gone, it's time to mark your calendars for the best of the fall concert season, from Bret Michaels and Kool Keith to Justin Moore, Killer Mike, Slipknot and Rodney Crowell. It's like William Cullen Bryant once said: "Autumn ... the year's last, loveliest smile." Or as Rick Ross put it, "Middle of December, I will melt your fucking snow."

The first weekend in October is a crowded one, with Minneapolis jazz trio The Bad Plus (Oct. 2), known for covering Neil Young, Aphex Twin, Stravinsky and whatever else they feel like, at South on Main as part of the Oxford American's Jazz Series. Little Rock native and Nashville transplant Adam Hambrick (Oct. 2) will play at Stickyz with fellow local country singer Cliff Hutchison; Austin roots-rock group Band of Heathens (Oct. 2) will be at Revolution with Charlie Mars; and synth-pop band Polica (Oct. 2) will play Juanita's with Web of Sunsets. The next night, local indie rock group Collin vs. Adam (Oct. 3) will play an album release show at White Water Tavern (free CD with the price of entry), while former Poison frontman, reality TV star and frequent bandana-wearer Bret Michaels (Oct. 3) will play Juanita's.

Charlie Wilson (Oct. 4), the R&B legend and former lead singer of funk greats The Gap Band, will be at Verizon Arena. Local metal favorites Mothwind (Oct. 4) will play their long-awaited album release show at White Water Tavern alongside Peckerwolf and Jab Jab Suckerpunch. Brooklyn by-way-of Atlanta indie rock group Gringo Star will be at Maxine's in Hot Springs (Oct. 4) and Stickyz (Oct. 5), and singer, producer and L.A. ratchet pioneer Ty Dolla $ign (Oct. 5) will be at Juanita's. Mega-star Santana (Oct. 5) will play the Walmart AMP in Rogers.

The King Biscuit Blues Festival, which this year features Sonny Burgess, Bobby Rush, Guitar Shorty, Delbert McClinton, James Cotton and more, will be held in downtown Helena Oct. 8-11.

Remember 38 Special? Enjoy betting on horse races? Well, don't miss the iconic arena rock group ("Caught Up In You," etc.) at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs (Oct. 9). Everyone else should make their way over to the Joint in Argenta to see the legend Kool Keith (Oct. 9), formerly of the Ultramagnetic MCs and a genuinely bent, brilliant person. "In my real world," Keith once rapped (under his Dr. Octagon guise), "orangutans dance for Thanksgiving with skeleton bones and skunk tails."

Alt-country stalwarts Cody Canada and The Departed (Oct. 9) will be at Stickyz, and long-running Denton, Texas, punk group Bobgoblin will be at White Water. Blues harmonica legend James Cotton (Oct. 9), who's won Grammys and toured with Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, will be at Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts, and indie pop group Foster the People (who made a very famous song called "Pumped Up Kicks") will be at the Walmart AMP with Fritz and The Tantrums.

The Arkansas State Fair is set for Oct. 10-19 and will feature a series of top-shelf concerts by the likes of George Thorogood, Travis Tritt, Dru Hill, Color Me Badd and more. The Arkansas Chamber Singers (Oct. 10) will, appropriately, perform Haydn's "Mass in Time of War" at St. James United Methodist Church, and New Orleans brass funk group Bonerama (Oct. 10) will be at South on Main. Memphis redneck rocker John Paul Keith (Oct. 10) will return to the White Water Tavern, and New Orleans-based self-proclaimed "prog funk" band Earphunk (Oct. 10) will be at Stickyz.

Electronic rock duo and Big Boi collaborators Phantogram (Oct. 11) will be at George's Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville, and Austin blues rock group The Sideshow Tragedy (Oct. 11) will be at White Water. Locals The Casual Pleasures (Oct. 11) will be at Maxine's in Hot Springs with Landrest and Switchblade Razors.

Big-time festival favorites and "livetronica" stand-outs Big Gigantic (Oct. 15) will be at Revolution with Manic Focus. Yonder Mountain String Band's Harvest Music Festival, on Mulberry Mountain in Ozark (Oct. 16-18), will feature dozens of bands, including The Jayhawks, Trampled By Turtles, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Dumpstaphunk, Andy Frasco and Tyrannosaurus Chicken.

Mysteriously popular Vegas metal band Five Finger Death Punch (Oct. 17) will stop by Verizon Arena with Volbeat, while Arkansas native, country superstar and occasional NRA spokesperson Justin Moore (Oct. 17) will be at First Security Amphitheater. Anyone looking to not pay anything that night can go to South on Main to catch Americana group The Easy Leaves (Oct. 17), or stop by Velvet Kente's Reggae Dance Party (Oct. 17) at White Water Tavern.

Austin singer-songwriter Emily Wolfe (Oct. 20) will come to Juanita's, and Killer Mike and El-P (Oct. 20) will bring their electro, frenzied brand of indie-rap to Stickyz. The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (Oct. 21) will perform "Quartet for the End of Time" at the Clinton Presidential Center. Insane-sounding, anonymous Nashville funk band Here Come the Mummies (Oct. 22), whose existence I've only just learned of and who Wikipedia claims are "best known for their live performances in which band members perform in full mummy attire," will be at Juanita's. Bearded prophet Adam Faucett (Oct. 23), whom you may also recognize for his floor-quaking vocal range, will be at White Water Tavern with Iron Tongue and Them Witches.

Later on in the month, raucous Alabama redneck rapper Yelawolf (Oct. 26) will be at Juanita's, and beloved alt-country band Drive-By Truckers (Oct. 28) will come to George's Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville. Seminal hardcore band 7 Seconds (Oct. 29) will play a rare show at White Water, and Amasa Hines'Joshua Asante (Oct. 30) will play the Pow Wow Radio Show launch party at The Joint with Big Piph and Sean Fresh.

In November, Creed singer Scott Stapp (Nov. 1) will come to Juanita's, and masked nu metal icons Slipknot (Nov. 4) will come to Verizon Arena with Korn. Barry Hannah-referencing Oxford, Miss., indie rock group Water Liars (Nov. 4) will return to the White Water Tavern, and enduring alternative hip-hop group Atmosphere (Nov. 6) will come to Juanita's.

The Blue Man Group (Nov. 3), which, for the uninitiated, is exactly what it sounds like, will be at Reynolds Performance Hall at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, and self-styled "nerdcore" rapper MC Chris (Nov. 8) will be at Juanita's. The North Mississippi Allstars (Nov. 8), fronted by Jim Dickinson's sons, will be at Revolution, and blues rock guitarist Joe Bonamassa (Nov. 11) will stop by Verizon Arena the following week. Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's Italian Serenade (Nov. 11) will be at the Clinton Presidential Center.

Cincinnati indie-pop band Foxy Shazam (Nov. 15) will come to Juanita's, and folk-rock singer-songwriter John Kilzer (Nov. 20) will play a free show at South on Main. Locals Knox Hamilton (Nov. 20), who recently got a big-time record deal off the strength of a hugely catchy song called "Work It Out," will play Juanita's, and trippy blues-ish rock group Tyrannosaurus Chicken (Nov. 28) will return to Stickyz.

In December, former pre-teen star Aaron Carter (Dec. 4), famously a better basketball player than Shaquille O'Neal, will be at Juanita's, and Grammy-winning country legend Rodney Crowell (Dec. 4) will come to South on Main. Meanwhile, in Fayetteville, country star Clint Black (Dec. 4) will be at the Walton Arts Center. The Arkansas Chamber Singers will perform their annual Holiday Concert (Dec. 12-14) at the Old State House Museum, and the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (Dec. 19-21) will present its Swinging Holiday Extravaganza at the Pulaski Academy Performing Arts Center. Lubbock, Texas, country songwriter William Clark Green (Dec. 19) will come to Stickyz, and, just in time for the holidays, yacht rapper Rick Ross (Dec. 21), a.k.a The Teflon Don, a.k.a. Ricky Rozay, will be at Barton Coliseum.

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Whether you're looking to hear "76 Trombones," get drawn into a thriller, laugh yourself out of your seat, or catch some award-winning dramas, you'll most certainly find something up your alley with one of Arkansas's many excellent production companies this season.

Heading up the Broadway fare is the Meredith Wilson classic "The Music Man." Shirley Jones, who played Marian the librarian in the original film, will be hosting and playing the role of Marian's mother, while Jones' son Patrick Cassidy will play the title role of Harold Hill. Celebrity Attractions will present the musical Oct. 3-5 at the recently christened Maumelle Performing Arts Center (inside Maumelle High School), which is hosting performances while Robinson Center undergoes renovations.

Need more musicals? The University of Central Arkansas's Broadway series at Reynolds Performance Hall will present a production of everyone's favorite singing nun story, "Sister Act," which features original music by eight-time Oscar winner Alan Menken, on Oct. 23, and the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville will show the throwback pastiche "Nice Work If You Can Get It" Oct. 21-26, which features several classics by George and Ira Gershwin originally heard in other films and plays.

Finally, if you haven't seen it yet, there are still a few days left to catch "Memphis," which runs through Sept. 28 at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. This Tony award-winning musical about Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips will have you dancing in the aisles with its 1950s R&B soundtrack.

Also on the fall stage: The Rep's production of Frederick Knott's thriller "Wait Until Dark" (Oct. 22-Nov. 9). Knott is also famous for "Dial M for Murder," which was later adapted for the screen and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The finale of the film version of "Wait Until Dark" was recognized by Bravo as the No. 10 scariest scene of all time, so you might want to bring someone along to cling to. The Halloween performance is sure to sell out so make sure you get your tickets early.

The Weekend Theater promises a host of excellent dramas with a social justice bent this season, starting with "A Quiet End" by Robin Swados (Sept. 26-Oct. 11), a groundbreaking 1980s play that was one of the first to address the AIDS epidemic. It explores the lives of three men who live together in a Manhattan apartment and struggle in the face of their illness to find hope and meaning. Next up is Suzan Lori Parks' Pulitzer-winning "Topdog/Underdog" (Oct. 31-Nov. 15), which follows two African-American brothers as they confront external racism along with internal demons. The heavy material is balanced with elements of dark comedy and exciting and dynamic performance. Closing out the season is Jon Robin Baitz's "Other Desert Cities" (Dec. 5-20), about political divisions and long-forgotten secrets within a California family.

Drama lovers in Northwest Arkansas will get a chance to see TheatreSquared's production of Little Rock Hall High School graduate David Auburn's "Proof" (Oct. 16-Nov. 2), which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Best Drama in 2001. The play is laced with themes of mathematical obsession and unconventional romance.

For those looking for more light-hearted entertainment, TheatreSquared will also be presenting a stage adaptation of the screwball comedy-adventure "Around the World in 80 Days," based on the Jules Verne classic. Phileas Fogg and company will be racing around the stage from Nov. 26 through Dec. 21.

Even though it's only September, Walmart has taught us that it's never too early to think about Christmas. Theatergoers looking for yuletide cheer during the holiday season should mark their calendars to see "Elf" at The Rep (Dec. 3-28). Yes, it's that "Elf," a musical adaptation of the well-loved 2003 Will Ferrell film featuring music by the Tony-nominated team of Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin. And, if you're still looking to find the true meaning of Christmas, check out UCA Broadway's production of the Dickens classic "A Christmas Carol" on Dec. 7 at Reynolds Performance Hall.

Perennial dinner-date favorite Murry's Dinner Playhouse rounds out the fall theater season with three fun performances. Playing now through Oct. 4 is Tony- and Oscar-winner Tom Stoppard's "Rough Crossing," a romantic comedy play-within-a-play set on board a luxury liner in the 1930s. Later, Murry's will present the Sherlock Holmes comedy-whodunit "The Game's Afoot" (Oct. 7-Nov. 8) and the biographical Hank Williams tribute "Hank and My Honky Tonk Heroes" starring Jason Petty (Nov. 11-12).

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CENTRAL ARKANSAS

BOOK SIGNINGS

OCT. 2: Charles Krauthammer, "Things That Matter."Barnes & Noble, 1 p.m.

OCT. 15: Roger Stone, "Nixon's Secrets." Barnes & Noble, 7 p.m.

OCT. 29: Nathan Englander. Temple B'nai Israel, 7:30 p.m., free.

EVENTS

OCT. 2: American Heart Association's Festival of Wines. Dickey-Stephens Park, 6 p.m., $60 adv., $75 day of.

OCT. 4: 4th annual Main Street Food Truck Festival. Downtown Little Rock, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

OCT. 5: 2014 Little Rock Pride Fest. Clinton Presidential Center, 1-8 p.m.

OCT. 9: Prentice Powell. Bless the Mic Lecture Series. Philander Smith College, 7 p.m., free.

OCT. 10-19: Arkansas State Fair. With concerts from George Thorogood, Travis Tritt, Color Me Badd, Dru Hill and more. Arkansas State Fairgrounds, $2.99-$5.99.

OCT. 18: The Weekend Theater's Oktoberfest. Food, beer and karaoke and other outdoor fun. 2210 S. State St., 6-10 p.m., $20.

OCT. 24: Arkansas Times Craft Beer Festival. With beer from nearly 50 craft breweries and food from local restaurants. 6-9 p.m., Argenta Farmers Market grounds.

OCT. 25: 2014 Stand Up to Bullying Arts and Film Festival. Ron Robinson Theater, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

OCT. 25: 4th annual "World Cheese Dip Championship." Bernice Garden, 11 a.m.-3 p.m., $10 (children under 10 free).

OCT. 31:"On the Hunt for the Texarkana Moonlight Phantom." Old State House Museum, noon, free.

NOV. 6: Talib Kweli. Bless the Mic Lecture Series. Philander Smith College, 7 p.m., free.

NOV. 8: Arkansas Cornbread Festival. With cornbread and side dish competitions, arts and homemade crafts, music and more. 11 a.m.-4 p.m., $3-10. South Main Street.

FILM

OCT. 8:"The Earrings of Madame de ..." Splice Microcinema. Few, 8 p.m., donations.

OCT. 10:"The Legend of Boggy Creek." Second Friday Cinema. Old State House Museum, 5 p.m., free.

OCT. 22: Maya Deren double feature: "Meshes in the Afternoon" and "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti." Splice Microcinema. Few, 8 p.m., donations.

NOV. 5:"Shoot the Piano Player." Splice Microcinema. Few, 8 p.m., donations.

NOV. 19:"A Night of Short Narrative and Experimental Masterpieces." Splice Microcinema. Few, 8 p.m., donations.

DEC. 3:"Stagecoach." Splice Microcinema. Few, 8 p.m., donations.

DEC. 17:"The Great Dictator." Splice Microcinema. Few, 8 p.m., donations.

MUSIC

OCT. 2: The Bad Plus. Part of the Oxford American Jazz series. South on Main, 8 p.m., $20-$30.

OCT. 2: Adam Hambrick, Cliff Hutchison. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $10.

OCT. 2: Band of Heathens, Charlie Mars. Revolution, 9 p.m., $10 adv., $13 day of.

OCT. 2: Polica, Web of Sunsets. Juanita's, 9 p.m., $15 adv., $18 day of.

OCT. 3: Benjamin Del Shreve. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $7.

OCT. 3: Bret Michaels. Juanita's, 9:30 p.m., $40.

OCT. 3: Collin vs. Adam. White Water Tavern, 10 p.m.

OCT. 4-5: Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's Acxiom Pops Live: Bill Conti's Academy Awards. Pulaski Academy Conner Performing Arts Center, 7:30 p.m. Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. $19-$58.

OCT. 4: Charlie Wilson. Verizon Arena, 7:30 p.m., $49.50-$82.50.

OCT. 4: The Dave Matthews Tribute Band. Revolution, 8:30 p.m., $10 adv., $12 day of.

OCT. 4: Mothwind, Peckerwolf, Jab Jab Suckerpunch. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

OCT. 5: Gringo Star. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 8 p.m., $7.

OCT. 5: Ty Dolla $ign. Juanita's, 8 p.m., $15.

OCT. 8: Radkey, Dead Anchors. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 8:30 p.m., $7.

OCT. 9: James Cotton. Wildwood Park for the Arts, 7 p.m., $35 general admission, $75 VIP.

OCT. 9: Cody Canada and The Departed. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 8 p.m., $10 adv., $12 day of.

OCT. 9: Kool Keith. The Joint, 9:30 p.m., $20-$50.

OCT. 9: Bobgoblin. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

OCT. 10: Arkansas Chamber Singers, "Mass in Time of War." St. James United Methodist Church, 7:30 p.m., $22.

OCT. 10: Earphunk. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 9:30 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of.

OCT. 10: John Paul Keith. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $7.

OCT. 10: Bonerama. South On Main, 10 p.m., $17.

OCT. 11: Ben Roy, Kris Pierce, Seth Dees. Juanita's, 9 p.m., $10 adv., $12 day of.

OCT. 11: Brown Soul Shoes. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $5.

OCT. 11: The Sideshow Tragedy. White Water Tavern, 10 p.m.

OCT. 12: For All Those Sleeping, Capture The Crown, Ice Nine Kills, Youth in Revolt, Palisades. Revolution, 8 p.m., $13 adv., $15 day of.

OCT. 15: Big Gigantic, Manic Focus. Revolution, 8:30 p.m., $23 adv., $25 day of.

OCT. 16: Jantsen, Dirt Monkey. Juanita's, 9 p.m., $10.

OCT. 16: Patrick Sweany, Joe Fletcher. White Water Tavern, 10 p.m., $10.

OCT. 17: Five Finger Death Punch, Volbeat. Verizon Arena, 6:10 p.m., $51.50.

OCT. 17: Justin Moore. First Security Amphitheater, 7 p.m., $25.50.

OCT. 17: The Easy Leaves. South on Main, 7:30 p.m., free.

OCT. 17: The Chris Robinson Brotherhood. Revolution, 9:30 p.m., $20 adv.

OCT 17: Velvet Kente Reggae Dance Party. White Water Tavern, 10 p.m.

OCT. 18-19: Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's "Blazing Brass": With Richard Jorgensen on trumpet. Maumelle Performing Arts Center, 7:30 p.m. Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. $19-$58.

OCT. 18: Goose. Juanita's, 9 p.m., $8.

OCT. 18: Boom Kinetic. Revolution, 9:30 p.m., $10.

OCT. 20: Emily Wolfe. Juanita's, 8 p.m., $8.

OCT. 20: Killer Mike and El-P. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $15.

OCT. 21: Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's Quartet for the End of Time. Chamber series, Clinton Presidential Center. 7 p.m., $23

OCT. 21: Brown Sabbath. Revolution, 9 p.m., $10 adv., $12 day of.

OCT. 21: Dana Louise. White Water Tavern, 10 p.m.

OCT. 22: Here Come The Mummies. Juanita's, 8 p.m., $15.

OCT. 22: Marc Ford, Elijah Ford. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 8 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of.

OCT. 23: Adam Faucett, Iron Tongue, Them Witches. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

OCT. 24: Reckless Kelly, Erik Dylan. Revolution, 9 p.m., $15 adv., $18 day of.

OCT. 25: Tim Easton. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

OCT. 26: Yelawolf. Juanita's, 8 p.m., $20-$75.

OCT. 29: 7 Seconds. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., $15.

OCT. 30: Joshua Asante, Big Piph, Sean Fresh, The Pow Wow Radio Show launch party. The Joint, 7 p.m.

OCT. 31: J Roddy Walston and The Business, Fly Golden Eagle. Revolution, 8:30 p.m., $12 adv., $15 day of.

NOV. 1: The Floozies. Revolution, 9 p.m., $13 adv., $15 day of.

NOV. 1: Scott Stapp, Cody Joe Tillman and The Wicked Truth. Juanita's, 9 p.m., $30.

NOV. 4: Slipknot, Korn, King 810. Verizon Arena, 7 p.m.

NOV. 4: Liz Longley. Juanita's, 8 p.m., $10.

NOV. 4: Moon Taxi. Revolution, 8:30 p.m., $15.

NOV. 4: Water Liars. White Water Tavern, 10 p.m.

NOV. 6: Atmosphere. Juanita's, 8 p.m., $20.

NOV. 6: Warren Wolf and Wolfpack. South on Main, 8 p.m., $20-$30.

NOV. 6: The Eskimo Brothers. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $5.

NOV. 7: Adam Carroll, Owen Temple. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

NOV. 8-9: Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's Beethoven and Blue Jeans. With Sarah Isbin on guitar. Maumelle Performing Arts Center, 7:30 p.m., $19-$58.

NOV. 8: MC Chris. Juanita's, 9 p.m., $13.

NOV. 8: North Mississippi Allstars. Revolution, 9 p.m., $20.

NOV. 11: Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's Italian Serenade. Chamber series, Clinton Presidential Center, 7 p.m., $23.

NOV. 11: Joe Bonamassa. Verizon Arena, 8 p.m., $79-$125.

NOV. 15: Project 986, Living Sacrifice, The Agony Scene, Hollow. Revolution, 8:30 p.m., $15.

NOV. 15: Foxy Shazam. Juanita's, 9 p.m., $14.

NOV. 20: John Kilzer. South on Main, 7:30 p.m., free.

NOV. 20: Knox Hamilton. Juanita's, 8 p.m., $10.

NOV. 28: Tyrannosaurus Chicken. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 9:30 p.m., $6.

DEC. 4: Aaron Carter. Juanita's, 8 p.m., $15 adv., $20 day of.

DEC. 4: Rodney Crowell. South on Main, 8 p.m., $25-$35.

DEC. 12-14: Arkansas Chamber Singers' annual Holiday Concert. Old State House Museum, 7 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 3 p.m. Sun., free. DEC. 19-21: Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's Swinging Holiday Extravaganza. Pulaski Academy Performing Arts Center, 7:30 Fri.-Sat., 3 p.m. Sun., $19-$58.

DEC. 19: William Clark Green. Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, 9:30 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of.

DEC. 21: Rick Ross. Barton Coliseum, 7 p.m., $50-$120.

THEATER

OCT. 3-5:"The Music Man." Maumelle Performing Arts Center.

OCT. 7-NOV. 8:"The Game's Afoot." Murry's Dinner Playhouse, 6 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 11 a.m. Wed. and Sun., 5:30 p.m. Sun., $25-$35.

OCT. 22- NOV. 9:"Wait Until Dark." Arkansas Repertory Theater, 7 p.m. Wed., Thu. and Sun. 8 p.m. Fri. and Sat., 2 p.m. Sun., $20-$55.

OCT. 24-NOV. 9:"Pinocchio." Arkansas Arts Center, 7 p.m. Fri., 2 p.m. Sat. and Sun. $12.50.

OCT. 31-NOV. 15:"Topdog/Underdog." The Weekend Theater, 7:30 p.m. Fri. and Sat., $16, $12 students and seniors.

NOV. 11-12:"Hank and My Honky Tonk Heroes." Murry's Dinner Playhouse, 6 p.m., $25-$35.

NOV. 13-15:"An Evening With Eddie Miles." Murry's Dinner Playhouse, 6 p.m., $25-$35.

NOV. 18-DEC. 31:"Don't Dress for Dinner." Murry's Dinner Playhouse, 6 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 11 a.m. Wed. and Sun., 5:30 p.m. Sun., $25-$35.

NOV. 28-DEC. 21:"The Velveteen Rabbit." Arkansas Arts Center, 7 p.m. Fri., 2 and 4 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun., $12.50.

DEC. 5-20:"Other Desert Cities." The Weekend Theater, 7:30 p.m. Fri. and Sat. $16, $12 students and seniors.

DEC. 3-28:"Elf." Arkansas Repertory Theater, 7 p.m. Wed.-Sat., 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sun., $20-$55.

VISUAL ARTS

OCT. 1-DEC. 12:"Faculty Biennial." Gallery I, UALR.

OCT. 6-NOV. 10:"Perception/Reality." Work by Mia Hall, Gallery II, UALR.

OCT. 10-JAN. 24:"Johnny Cash: Arkansas Icon." Butler Center Galleries, Arkansas Studies Institute.

OCT. 24-JAN. 18:"A Sense of Balance: The Sculpture of Stoney Lamar." Arkansas Arts Center.

OCT. 24-FEB. 1:"William Beckman: Drawings, 1967-2013." Arkansas Arts Center.

NOV. 14-JAN. 4:"47th Collectors Show and Sale." Arkansas Arts Center.

BENTONVILLE

MUSIC

OCT. 3: Gina Phillips and Picnic, Mountain Shore. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 8:30 p.m., free.

VISUAL ARTS

THROUGH JAN. 19:"State of the Art: Discovering American Art." More than 200 works by 102 artists, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

CONWAY

BOOKS

OCT. 2: Jericho Brown. University of Central Arkansas College of Business Auditorium, 7:30 p.m., free.

OCT. 30: An Evening with Nathan Englander. Reves Recital Hall, Hendrix College, 7:30 p.m., free.

MUSIC

NOV. 3: Blue Man Group. UCA's Reynolds Performance Hall, 7:30 p.m. $27-$40.

NOV. 6: John Corigliano. Hendrix College, 7:30 p.m., free.

THEATER

OCT. 5:"The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley." UCA'S Reynolds Performance Hall, 3 p.m., $10.

OCT. 23:"Sister Act: The Musical." UCA's Reynolds Performance Hall, 7:30 p.m., $27-$40.

NOV. 15:"An Evening with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood." UCA's Reynolds Performance Hall, 7:30 p.m., $27-$40.

NOV. 17: Cirque Mechanics, "Pedal Punk." UCA's Reynolds Performance Hall, 7:30 p.m., $27-$40.

DEC. 7:"A Christmas Carol." UCA's Reynolds Performance Hall, 3 p.m., $27-$40.

VISUAL ARTS

NOV. 6-DEC. 4:"BA/BFA Juried Exhibition." Baum Gallery, UCA.

EL DORADO

MUSIC

OCT. 3-4: 27th annual "Musicfest El Dorado." With Salt-N-Pepa, Coolio, Dash Rip Rock, The Eskimo Brothers, Jerrod Niemann, Brothers Osborne, Da Unit, Moonshine Mafia. $20 a day, $30 weekend pass.

VISUAL ARTS

THROUGH OCTOBER:"Clementine Hunter." South Arkansas Arts Center.

EUREKA SPRINGS

EVENTS

OCT. 16-19: War Eagle Mill Antique and Craft Show. Hwy. 12.

MUSIC

OCT. 3-5: Moon Wave Expo. Classes, crafts and live music. Best Western Inn of the Ozarks.

OCT. 4: Eurekapalooza. Benefit for Clear Springs Schools. Lake Leatherwood City Park, 11 a.m.-10 p.m., $2-$5.

OCT. 7-11: 67th annual Ozark Folk Festival. Various events and venues, Ozarkfolkfestival.com for more information. Downtown Eureka Springs, $12-$32.

FAYETTEVILLE

EVENTS

OCT. 17: Bill Engvall. Walton Arts Center, 7 and 9:30 p.m., $37-$67.

DEC. 5-6: The Second City's "Nut-Cracking Holiday Revue." Walton Arts Center, 8 p.m., $15-$35.

DEC. 12:"Mythbusters: Behind The Myths." Walton Arts Center, 4 and 8 p.m., $30-$125.

MUSIC

OCT. 3: Funkadesi. Walton Arts Center, 8 p.m., $10-$25.

OCT. 9: Home Free. Walton Arts Center, 7 p.m., $15-$35.

OCT. 9: Josh Abbott Band, Brandon Lay. George's Majestic Lounge, 9 p.m., $20.

OCT. 11: Phantogram. George's Majestic Lounge, 9:30 p.m., $20.

OCT. 15: Devil You Know. George's Majestic Lounge, 8 p.m., $15.

OCT. 16: Chris Robinson Brotherhood. George's Majestic Lounge, 9 p.m., $18.

OCT. 28: Drive-By Truckers. George's Majestic Lounge, 9 p.m., $25.

OCT. 30: Paul Thorn. George's Majestic Lounge, 9 p.m., $20.

NOV. 4: Fred Eaglesmith Traveling Steam Show. George's Majestic Lounge, 8:30 p.m., $20.

NOV. 5: STS9. Fayetteville Town Center, 8 p.m., $29.50.

NOV. 6: Cameron Carpenter. Walton Arts Center, 7:30 p.m., $10-$25.

NOV. 6: Stoney LaRue. George's Majestic Lounge, 9 p.m., $15.

NOV. 13: Galactic. George's Majestic Lounge, 9 p.m., $20.

NOV. 14: Jake Shimabukuro. Walton Arts Center, 8 p.m., $10-$25.

NOV. 21: The Dan Band. Walton Arts Center, 9 p.m., $18-$38.

DEC. 4: Clint Black. Walton Arts Center, 7 p.m., $32-$62.

THEATER

OCT. 16-NOV. 2: "Proof." TheatreSquared, 7:30 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sat.-Sun. $15-$45.

OCT. 16:"The Adventures of Robin Hood." Walton Arts Center, 7 p.m., $10-$20.

OCT. 21-26:"Nice Work If You Can Get It." Walton Arts Center, 7 p.m.

OCT. 31:"The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Walton Arts Center, 8 p.m., $13.

NOV. 1:"Proof." Walton Arts Center, 2 and 7:30 p.m., $30-$40.

NOV. 25-26:"Elf." Walton Arts Center, 7 p.m., $36-$72.

NOV. 26-DEC. 21:"Around the World in 80 Days." TheatreSquared, 7:30 p.m. Wed.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sat.-Sun., 7 p.m. Sun. $15-$34.

DEC. 19-21:"The Nutcracker." Walton Arts Center, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., $33-$47.

VISUAL ARTS

NOV. 3-DEC. 5:"Adorned," work by Jill Wissmiller, Lauren Kalman and Jon Eric Riis. UA Fine Arts Gallery.

FORT SMITH

VISUAL ARTS

OCT. 2:"An American in Venice: James McNeill Whistler and His Legacy." Fort Smith Regional Art Museum.

HELENA

OCT. 8-11: King Biscuit Blues Festival. With Sonny Burgess, Bobby Rush, Guitar Shorty, Delbert McClinton, James Cotton and more. Various venues, downtown Helena, $50.

HOT SPRINGS

MUSIC

OCT. 3: The Kinky Fingers, Kevin Kerby. Maxine's, free.

OCT. 3-5: Hot Water Hills Music and Arts Festival. Featuring art and live music by Amasa Hines, Kevin Kerby, Swampbird, Mandy McBryde and many more. Downtown Hot Springs, $10.

OCT. 4: Gringo Star, Reece Sullivan. Maxine's, $5.

OCT. 9: 38 Special. Oaklawn Park, 7 p.m., $30-$40.

OCT. 10: Goddamn Gallows, Zach and Big Papa Binns. Maxine's, $10.

OCT. 11: The Casual Pleasures, Landrest, Switchblade Razors. Maxine's, $5.

OCT. 18: Adam Faucett and The Tall Grass, Bo and The Locomotive, Jordan Morgan Lansdowne. Maxine's, $7.

OCT. 25: John Paul Keith, Tyrannosaurus Chicken. Maxine's, $7.

OCT. 30: The Federalis, Jacob Furr. Maxine's, free.

OCT. 31: Fart Resistor, Thelma and The Sleaze, Ginsu Wives, Hamberguesa. Maxine's, $10.

NOV. 7: The Jam Messengers, Bloodless Cooties. Maxine's, $5.

NOV. 8: Otis The Destroyer. Maxine's, free.

NOV. 15: Iron Tongue, Mothwind, Peckerwolf. Maxine's, $5.

FILM

OCT. 10-19: Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Film screenings, filmmakers, workshops, panel discussions and other events. The Arlington Hotel and Low Key Arts, $20-$200.

OCT. 23-26: Hot Springs Horror Film Festival. Film screenings, panel discussions, Q&A sessions and awards at various venues and times, $25-$100.

MOUNTAIN VIEW

MUSIC

OCT. 11: Ricky Skaggs. Ozark Folk Center State Park. $40.

OZARK

MUSIC

OCT. 16-18: Yonder Mountain String Band's Harvest Music Festival. Dozens of bands performing. Mulberry Mountain, $75-$145.

ROGERS

MUSIC

OCT. 5: Santana. Walmart AMP, 7 p.m., $39-$129.

OCT. 9: Foster the People, Fritz and the Tantrums. Walmart AMP, 8 p.m., $32.

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By now, everyone knows the story of how the exhibition "State of the Art: Discovering American Art" came to be. To bring dancing sombreros, an installation made of romance novels, dressed bird carvings and a room in which the furniture is slowly sucked into a hole and 223 other works of art by contemporary American artists to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, two men traveled 100,000 miles and visited nearly 1,000 artists over the course of a year. The result is being compared to the Whitney Biennial and the achievement of the men — museum President Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood — to Alan Lomax's thousands of recordings of American roots music. It is one of the biggest art exhibitions of the year, and we're not talking just in Arkansas: Advance stories on Bacigalupi and Alligood's travels and the idea for the show were covered in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times and arts magazines. While reviews from mavens abroad have been slightly critical of the non-shock of the new there (WSJ: "The result is a meticulously installed, technically impressive exhibition that looks like the world's largest university faculty show"), anyone who can get to Bentonville to see it should.

"State of the Art," which opened Sept. 13 and will run to Jan. 19, features work by 102 artists, four of which are from Arkansas: printmaker Delita Martin, painter Guy Bell, conceptual artist John Salvest and ceramicist Linda Lopez. Martin and Bell are from Little Rock, Salvest (whose entry is the aforementioned work in which a zillion romance novels have been arranged to spell out the title of the piece, "Forever") is from Jonesboro and Lopez teaches in Fayetteville. Bacigalupi and Alligood sought artists who aren't yet known nationally and who they thought represented, of course, the state of American art. The work does not run to the really out there — nothing scatological, for example — but that doesn't mean there's not food for thought in the show, if the show checklist and reviews are anything to go by. (See Vanessa L. German's "protection figures," folk art assemblages that make use of white dolls painted black as a commentary on African-American imagery.)

The exhibition is hung throughout the museum, both in the main galleries and the temporary gallery space, and spills out into the grounds. There are 54 male and 48 female artists in the show. The regions they come from are also nearly evenly represented: 26 artists were chosen from Western states, 27 from the mid-Atlantic, 25 from the South and 24 from the East Coast.

A postscript on the Wall Street Journal review: The writer took Salvest to task for being "obvious" by spelling out the word "forever." It seemed essential to me, unless there otherwise would have been some sort of delicious ambiguity that I'm too — oh, Arkansan — to get. Is it so wrong to be wry?

In addition to its current exhibition of the calligraphic engravings by Arkansas artist laureate Evan Lindquist, the Arkansas Arts Center has two fine exhibits coming this fall: steel and turned wood sculpture by Stoney Lamar and a retrospective of drawings by figurative artist William Beckman. Lamar's show, "A Sense of Balance" (Oct. 24-Jan. 18), includes multi-axis-turned work from 1987 to present, creating surfaces and shapes of transcendent beauty. "William Beckman: Drawings, 1967-2013" (Oct. 24-Feb. 1) includes full-scale figures (and in some cases, cattle) drawn in charcoal and silverpoint, luscious works of realism.

The annual "Collector's Show and Sale" of work from New York galleries runs Nov. 14-Feb. 4.

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I love film festivals, always have. Not the parties and the schmoozing, with tiers of variously colored festival badges conferring degrees of VIP. Just the fact that a whole bunch of movies are showing, and a whole bunch of people who love movies are going to see them. And not multiplex movies that have been so hyped and previewed that you feel like you've already seen them, that you are merely doing your mass-culture due diligence sitting through two hours of what you more or less know is coming. The great thing about film festivals is that they still baffle. They still surprise. Even the inevitable duds are part of the wonder. It's maybe what it feels like for a baseball scout to see unheralded kids play in some uncharted territory. You never know.

The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival is a particular treat, partly because festival director Courtney Pledger and her team keep putting together impressive lineups, rangy and challenging and fun. Part of it too is Hot Springs itself. It's just a good spot to watch films. One of those places where you walk out of the theater and feel like you're still in a movie. There's that veneer of splendor that has gotten a bit dingy. Hot Springs is like how Toontown might have looked decades later if the bad guys won in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Even its seediness has gone to seed.

The 23rd annual festival opens Oct. 10 with a screening of "Glen Campbell ... I'll be Me," directed and produced by James Keach. Keach was a producer on "Walk the Line," so he has some experience putting together stories about music legends. Campbell, a Billstown (Pike County) native and country-to-pop crossover star, has sold more than 45 million records (hits include "Gentle on My Mind" and "Rhinestone Cowboy," plus too many others to list here; he also played Texas Ranger La Boeuf in the original "True Grit"). "Glen Campbell ... I'll be Me" tells the story of his life and his 151-show "Goodbye Tour," his last one in light of a 2011 Alzheimer's diagnosis. The doc features interviews with Bruce Springsteen, Bill Clinton, The Edge, Paul McCartney, Jay Leno, Vince Gill, Steve Martin and Taylor Swift.

Some other highlights to anticipate, including some big names in Hot Springs for the festival (the schedule of times hasn't been finalized):

George Takei will be in town for a Q&A after the documentary "To Be Takei," which explores the life of the actor most famous for his role as Sulu on "Star Trek." Takei, who spent part of his childhood in a Rohwer (Desha County) internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, was one of the first Asian Americans to be cast in high-profile roles in film and television. "To Be Takei" covers not just his success on "Star Trek," but the cringe-inducing stereotypical roles his agents pushed him to take in the years after the show. Takei, now 77, has also been active in LGBT issues (he came out publicly in 2005) and has developed a huge cult following on social media.

Actor and filmmaker Luke Wilson's short "Satellite Beach" will screen as part of the festival's new sidebar showcasing mockumentary shorts. The whimsical short tracks the actual journey of the Endeavor space shuttle, which was transported through the neighborhoods of Los Angeles from the airport to the California Science Center. Co-directed with his brother Andrew, Wilson stars as Warren Flowers, who believes he is in charge of coordinating the move. The brothers had no clearance or permission and part of the joy is watching just how far Wilson/Flowers can get with no more than a clipboard and a tie (reactions range from bemused to totally credulous). The shots are beautiful and the vibe as playful and wistful as Wilson's Hollywood performances.

Greg Louganis! Well, maybe this only counts as a big name if you, like me, spent a significant portion of the summer of 1988 glued to your television watching Olympic diving. "Back on Board" investigates the complicated life of Louganis, one of the greatest divers in the history of the sport, who eventually came out publicly as gay and HIV positive. Louganis will attend the screening along with filmmaker Cheryl Furjanic. "Back on Board" is part of the Spa City Sports Series, a unique hook to the programming that debuted last year. This year's series includes screenings of two classics: A 20th anniversary screening of "Hoop Dreams," the meticulously crafted look at a pair of Chicago high school basketball players that stands as one of the all-time best sports docs (hell, best movies). Arthur Agee, one of the film's subjects (who went on to play basketball at Arkansas State University), and producer Gordon Quinn will be on hand for a Q&A. Also screening is the 1996 Oscar-winning documentary "When We Were Kings," on the famous 1974 heavyweight bout in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, with director Leon Gast as well as relatives of Ali on hand.

Others we're psyched to see: "Stray Dog," the story of Ron "Stray Dog" Hall, a biker and Vietnam veteran, directed by Debra Granik, director of the critically acclaimed "Winter's Bone" (Granik met Hall in Missouri while filming "Winter's Bone"— both Granik and Hall will be in attendance); "Meet the Patels," an acclaimed real-life romantic comedy about a 29-year-old first generation Indian American who decides to enlist his parents in exploring the idea of an arranged marriage (his parents will be in Hot Springs); "Kung Fu Elliot," the Grand Jury Prize winner at Slamdance, on Elliot "White Lightning" Scott's attempt to become Canada's first action hero; "Songs for Alexis," a coming-of-age love story featuring YouTube sensation Ryan Cassata, an 18-year-old transgendered musician.

There are a dozen more movies I want to mention but I'll stop here. We'll have more information on the Rock Candy blog once the schedule is made official. The festival takes place Oct. 10-19 — check out the website at hsdfi.org for ticket info. I wouldn't miss it.

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Autism spectrum disorder, which affects an estimated 1 out of 88 children by age 8, includes a broad range of developmental conditions. For many people afflicted with milder incarnations such as Asperger's syndrome, autism is simply a manageable part of their everyday lives.

Elsewhere on the spectrum, though, there are children like 14-year-old Nathan Dodson, who lives with his parents in Hot Springs. Teresa Dodson, Nathan's mother, said her son's mental development is "about on the level of a 4-year-old." When upset, he tends to throw fearsome temper tantrums, which have become more and more difficult to handle as he's grown larger. "He's unable to bathe himself. We have to prepare his meals, his drinks — he can't even open a package of snacks without help."

Other kids his age would be doing chores around the house, but that's not an option for Nathan. "We're responsible for his care all day long," Dodson said. Medicaid pays for a classroom aide to accompany Nathan throughout his school day, but at home his parents are on their own.

"Without having people trained to take care of our son, there's no time away," his mother said. "I can't go to church anymore. We can't go on vacations. We can't even go out to dinner." In 2011, it became clear she had to choose between working full time and providing care for her son. She decided to leave her 15-year career as an insurance agent. "I began working from home and took a 60 percent pay cut," she recalled.

Arkansas Medicaid guarantees couples like the Dodsons around-the-clock care for their disabled child — but only if the child is sent away to live in an institution. Arkansas maintains five Human Development Centers (HDCs) that house children and adults whose developmental disabilities are severe enough to qualify them for an "institutional level of care." There are about 1,500 developmentally disabled Arkansans currently living in an HDC or a similar facility, their care paid for by taxpayers. That sets up a cruel choice for families like the Dodsons. Simply fill out a few forms, and Nathan would be placed in an HDC within a few months.

"Two years ago I had to seriously think about placing Nathan somewhere," Dodson admitted. "His behavior had gotten so out of control that the school and myself weren't sure what to do. But after much thought, much research and a lot of prayer I knew that my son would always be the most comfortable in his own home and his own community. Despite his struggles, he has formed strong bonds with family and friends, and just the thought of taking away everything he has ever known made me sick."

Only a few months ago, it looked as if a federal reform initiative called the Community First Choice Option (CFCO) might change all of that. The CFCO would allow families like the Dodsons to pay for at-home care with Medicaid dollars. Then, in September, a committee of the Arkansas legislature abruptly put the brakes on reform.

***

It would make intuitive sense to assume the reason Medicaid pays for institutional care but not home-based care is that HDCs are cheaper. But this is not the case. The Arkansas Department of Human Services says that the cost of providing home or community-based services (think small group homes and assisted living) is generally between one-half and one-third the cost of housing a person in an institution like an HDC.

There is an alternative — for some. About 4,100 families statewide are served by a DHS waiver program that allows them to redirect Medicaid dollars to pay for home/community-based services instead of institutionalization. That program, however, is capped. Another 3,000 families are on a waiting list for the waiver, including the Dodsons. They've been waiting for about seven years now, and movement is at a standstill. From 2010 to 2014, the family has progressed from 144st in line to 131st.

Dr. Charlie Green, who until recently ran the DHS division responsible for both the waiver program and the HDCs, said the backlog is unacceptable. "All these people are eligible to be in an institution, but they've chosen not to take those services," Greeen said. "We have an obligation to serve these people and give them a choice."

The Community First Choice Option would do just that, by requiring that every family with a child who qualifies for entry to an HDC be given the option of receiving home/community-based services instead. No longer would institutionalization be the default for long-term care. The waiver program would cease to exist, since everyone would become eligible for home/community-based services. Nor would this choice be extended only to the developmentally disabled: Elderly and physically disabled individuals who require a high level of care would also be guaranteed the right to obtain home/community-based services in lieu of entering a nursing home. Because of the cheaper cost of home/community-based care and an improved federal Medicaid match rate (see sidebar), DHS said the change would save the state around $365 million over the next 12 years.

As a program of DHS, an executive agency, the CFCO does not entail a change in existing law, but its implementation still requires legislative review. On Sept. 25 the Joint Public Health committee deferred action on the issue until the 2015 session or perhaps later. The committee cited the fact that DHS is still working out technical details of the program with its federal counterpart, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Democratic Rep. Greg Leding of Fayetteville, who supports the CFCO, said that was largely used as a fig leaf by legislators who want to kill the reform.

"Personally, I think it has more to do with legislative opposition than the questions from CMS," Leding said. "They're using concerns from CMS as political cover, because they don't want to come across as the bad guy. ... I think there are legislators who are taking every opportunity to delay."

Disability activists agree, and are outraged. Dodson and other parents rallied on the steps of the state Capitol in September and packed legislative hearings, pleading for lawmakers to approve the CFCO. Now, they are moving forward with a lawsuit against the state; Dodson says there will be at least 50 claimants and that they are seeking more.

In protest of the legislature's intransigence, a national disability activist group called ADAPT staged three days of civil disobedience in Little Rock seeking commitments from the two men who are seeking to be Arkansas's governor in 2015 — Democrat Mike Ross and Republican Asa Hutchinson — to make the CFCO a priority if elected. Ross' camp was receptive, saying it supported the goals of the CFCO. After 21 protesters were arrested for trespassing at Hutchinson's headquarters, his campaign declined to state a clear position.

ADAPT activists also targeted the two major interests that it believes are behind legislative resistance to the CFCO. The first is Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Koch-funded conservative political nonprofit. The second is the nursing home industry.

***

Of these two groups, the objections of the first are more immediately clear: The CFCO is a part of the Affordable Care Act, and Americans for Prosperity is programmed to open fire on anything associated with Obamacare. That may be why the CFCO was pulled off an August agenda by Sen. Cecile Bledsoe (R-Rogers), an ally of AFP who co-chairs the Public Health committee.

On its website, AFP says the CFCO would give "more federal control" over who's eligible for benefits and implies that the change would allow enrollment to balloon out of control. But state officials say that nothing in the CFCO would expand an entitlement to a new population. Rather, it gives a choice about how that entitlement is provided.

"These folks are already eligible," Green said. He reiterated that home/community-based services are generally cheaper than housing someone in an HDC. "The average is around $43,000 annually for someone on a waiver. It costs over twice that to stay in an institution." Green explained that the higher expense of institutional care comes from maintaining a facility, including utilities, building upkeep and the cost of a round-the-clock medical staff. Most families that receive care at home only require services for a few hours each day, not around the clock.

"We're talking about services in the home to help with activities of daily living — basically attendant care and respite," said Dianna Varady, the director of the Arkansas Autism Resource and Outreach Center at the University of Arkansas's College of Education and Health Professions. "You can't just leave your child, or your adult child, with the high schooler down the street who's your babysitter." An advocate for the developmentally disabled, Varady also has a son with autism who has been on the waiver waiting list for about seven years.

The second moneyed interest behind opposition to long-term care reform is the Arkansas Health Care Association (AHCA), which lobbies for the interests of nursing homes. The AHCA's website says it represents 93 percent of the licensed long-term care facilities in Arkansas. Unlike Americans for Prosperity, the AHCA has been discreet in voicing its opinion on the CFCO; in an August legislative committee, the AHCA presented a list of questions, but did not state a position.

"I think the nursing homes have sort of identified legislators who can carry this issue," Rep. Leding said. "They've been very stealthy in their opposition, and it took me a while to figure out why. I think they see this as something potentially being a lot bigger." Indeed, since the developmentally disabled are typically served by state-run Human Development Centers, why does the industry care about the CFCO?

Varady said the answer lies in the fact that the CFCO also reforms long-term care for another population that nursing homes do depend on for business: the elderly. Like the developmentally disabled, elderly Arkansans with a sufficient level of need are entitled to institutional long-term care under Arkansas's current Medicaid program. That typically means being sent to a nursing home, but there's also a distinct DHS waiver program that allows the aged to seek home/community-based care, called ElderChoices. As of now, there is no waiting list for the ElderChoices waiver, because its cap has not yet been reached.

However, that doesn't mean institutional care and home/community-based care are equally easy to come by, Varady said.

"The way it works typically is that if, say, I'm in my 70s and break my hip, I'll go to the hospital and then I have to make a choice about going into a nursing home or seeking a waiver. The process for transitioning into nursing home is super easy and seamless. There's no paperwork, no waiting. If you want care in your home you have to fill out a waiver application and wait for it to be reviewed.

"If the CFCO moves forward, that changes. Home care becomes an entitlement benefit."

No more waiver process — instead, home/community-based care would be offered as an option for everyone. With the population of Arkansas aging, nursing homes stand to gain a great deal of business in the coming decades, but the CFCO potentially poses a threat to the business model upon which the industry is predicated. To the nursing home advocates that oppose long-term care reform, this isn't about the 3,000 people on the developmental disability waiting list at all. They're simply collateral damage.

The Arkansas Times made repeated requests for a statement from the AHCA about the Community First Choice Option, but the only response offered by Rachel Davis, the AHCA's executive director, was the following: "Due to ongoing police investigations, I am not able to comment at this time on events at our office last week," a reference to the ADAPT protests. The AHCA did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails asking for a policy position on the CFCO itself.

***

For some families such as the Dodsons, it is apparent from a very early age that their children have a developmental disability. For others, that diagnosis comes later. Doug and Julia Siemens didn't discover their son, Trenton, was autistic until he was in the fifth grade, when his difficulty communicating became more and more pronounced.

"As he grew and as his hormones kicked in, because of his lack of communication skills ... well, every kid on the disorder spectrum expresses things differently," Doug Siemens said. "We just happened to have one who reacted with anger outbursts, and that was taking quite the toll on us. We applied for the waiver when he was a freshman or sophomore in high school." That was in 2005.

Trenton remained on the list throughout high school, then after his graduation in 2009. He continued living at home for a couple of years afterward, and as his outbursts became more frequent and more violent, the Siemenses grew desperate for help. Placement in an institution seemed like their only option. They discovered that due to a quirk of DHS rules, Trenton would get bumped to the top of the waiver waiting list if he were housed in an HDC.

"Then there was an incident that happened, and ... we couldn't have him at home any longer because of what was going on," Doug Siemens said. The family got Trenton into the Jonesboro HDC — a long way from their home in Siloam Springs, but the Siemenses felt the facility was the best among what the state had to offer.

The family obtained their long-sought waiver about a year later. Trenton was placed in a transition group home, first in Jonesboro and then later back in Northwest Arkansas. He now lives in his own house in Siloam, which the Siemenses purchased with help from their extended family, and he's assisted by aides and nurses from Arkansas Support Network, a nonprofit that provides home/community-based care for individuals with developmental disabilities. Doug Siemens said it's been transformational.

"ASN is very structured, and that's what Trenton thrives under. They've been able to get him out in the community ... he's gone from a kid who wouldn't look up and would just mumble hello, and now he's one of the greeters at our church. He takes that job very seriously on Sunday mornings. He loves it, and people love seeing him, because they remember him not being that way."

He's also started playing team sports, something he could never do in school, said Doug Siemens.

"This is his fourth year playing softball with the development league over in Springdale. They're adults from all across Northwest Arkansas and they have a blast."

Eventually, the Siemenses are hoping Trenton will be able to find a job.

None of this would be possible if he were still in an institution. "Now, I'm not saying HDCs aren't needed," Doug Siemens said. "There are some people for whom that's what's necessary ... but I can honestly say that if Trenton was in the HDC, he would have regressed. He wouldn't have had enough people around him who would have challenged him to grow. Here, he is progressing. He is doing better."

It's easy to forget that the developmentally disabled, like all of us, are works in progress. Though a person like Trenton may lack the full agency to make independent decisions about where he lives, his living circumstances make all the difference between growth and stagnation. The same is true of the elderly. A massive study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association tracked 3,777 elderly people over the course of 22 years; after comparing those in nursing homes with similar clinical conditions who remained outside of an institution, it concluded that "institutionalized elderly people present a greater cognitive decline than persons remaining in the community."

But the need for home/community-based services is perhaps most pressing for parents of young children with developmental delays, as Julia Siemens pointed out.

"For the parents who have an 8- or 9-year-old, or even younger, it's really going to help them to get services," she said. "The sooner you can start getting children therapy, the better off they're going to be, years down the road. We were not able to have that luxury for Trenton because we were trying to do everything on our own."

The Siemenses have their waiver already, but they said the CFCO needs to move forward so others can get relief. "We're pretty conservative, and Republicans," said Doug Siemens, but, "we don't see this as a partisan thing. I don't care that it was attached to Obamacare or whatever. If it's going to help families, then that's not an issue for us."

***

In addition to fiscal conservatives and the nursing home industry, there's a third, more sympathetic source of opposition to the CFCO: some parents of children currently in the Human Development Centers. They worry that the shift toward home/community-based care will eat into HDC budgets. Legislators of both parties whose districts include HDCs are also fiercely protective of the institutions, which are major employers back home.

"We're not going to shake people out of HDCs — that's not the game plan at all," Green, the DHS official, said. "We're just giving them a choice. We don't have any plans to reduce budgets on HDCs."

However, he conceded, "from the numbers of people in HDCs today, we can see that demand has waned. If people don't have to wait for home and community-based services for eight years, it might go down more. The demand for these services all over the country has gone down. A lot of the parents of people in HDCs right now, their kids have been in there for 20, 30 years. There weren't a lot of options back then."

Leding, who in 2011 worked on a legislative study of care for the developmentally disabled, said that the state has to face the fact that long-term care is shifting away from places like HDCs. "We're one of the last states to use them," he said. "I do think their days are numbered ... Nobody wants to shutter the HDCs tomorrow, but as far as directing more people to the centers — I think we should do more to promote the idea of independent, community-based care."

With 4,100 families receiving waivers, another 3,000 on the list, and only 1,500 now housed in an HDC or similar institution, it's clear that — given a choice — most families would rather keep their children at home or in their communities than send them to an institution. It seems likely that most elderly and physically disabled people would prefer the same. To deny them that option is to argue, in essence, that people who could live more cheaply and comfortably in their own homes and communities should be forced to live in institutions so that the institutions can continue to have a reason to exist.

***

The plaintiffs in the class-action case instigated by Dodson and others seem to stand on strong precedent. In a 1999 case called Olmstead v. L.C., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Georgia had violated the civil rights of two disabled women by confining them in an institution for years after they asked to move to a community-based setting. The court's decision in Olmstead made two judgments explicit. First, "institutional placement of persons who can handle and benefit from community settings perpetuates unwarranted assumptions that persons so isolated are incapable of or unworthy of participating in community life" and, second, "confinement in an institution severely diminishes the everyday life activities of individuals, including family relations, social contacts, work options, economic independence, educational advancement, and cultural enrichment."

Dodson said the state's lack of action on the CFCO violates Olmstead. "We've already been waiting entirely too long. We should not have to continue waiting," she said. Lately, things have been especially rough in her household. Her older son, who helped out with Nathan, has moved out of the house. Complications from back surgery kept her husband away from work for an extended period earlier this year. "We've got behind on our bills, further and further behind," she said. (Her husband has since resumed work after recovering from surgery.

Sending her child away to an institution, though, is still off the table.

"I decided [two years ago] that I would make any sacrifice I had to make to keep my son at home and living within his own community where he is loved and protected. If it had come down to it, I never would have been able to leave him anywhere. As a parent, could you move your child away from everything they've ever known?"

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The Community First Choice Option is intended to nudge state Medicaid policy away from default institutionalization and toward encouraging home/community-based care. Much like the private option, the CFCO incentivizes states to make the shift by offering a more generous federal match rate on Medicaid dollars associated with the disabled and elderly. Arkansas, being a relatively poor state, already receives a generous federal match rate on its Medicaid spending — a 70/30 match. That is, of every Medicaid dollar spent in Arkansas, 70 cents comes from D.C. and 30 cents comes from the state budget. Adopting the CFCO would bump up the federal match by 6 points, meaning the state share would decline to 24 cents.

"We get the extra 6 percentage points on the 4,100 people we've been serving [with the existing developmental disability waiver], as well as everyone in elderly adults and physical disabilities — that's a lot," said Dr. Charlie Green of the state Department of Human Services. There are 7,300 elderly persons and 2,700 physically disabled adults currently on home/community-based waivers who would otherwise likely be in nursing homes. Those extra 6 cents on every dollar add up quickly. 

It's true that the state's higher match rate will be offset somewhat by the additional cost of paying for 3,000 families on the developmentally disabled waiting list. Those families currently do not receive long-term Medicaid at all — although they are entitled to receive it. Still, the cost of home/community-based services is one-half to one-third the cost of institutional care. Even with those 3,000 additional clients, DHS estimates that the CFCO's extra match would save $365 million out of state general revenue over a 12-year period.

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Perhaps more than any other Arkansas Republicans, Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway) and Rep. Nate Bell (R-Mena) are the bogeymen Democrats love to hate.

Rapert calls for the president's impeachment, suggests that it's "treasonous" to give medical treatment in the United States to American missionaries who've contracted the Ebola virus, rails against "the radical homosexual lobby and pro-abortionists"— and that's all before he's had his breakfast in the morning. He was the man behind the unconstitutional 12-week ban on abortion, a bill that in its original form would have required women to undergo an invasive transvaginal probe. In full demagogue mode, the camera-loving lawmaker famously said, "We're not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in" (Rapert insisted that he was talking about political minorities; the full speech in context suggests he was talking about religious minorities). Rapert was named both "Worst Arkansan" and "Biggest misuse of taxpayer funds" in the Arkansas Times' 2014 Readers Poll.

Bell has not attracted national scrutiny for a piece of legislation like Rapert has for the 12-week abortion ban, but he has made national headlines for his prodigious, liberal-bashing social media output. On Facebook in 2011, Bell appeared to equate Democrats with Nazis via a quotation misattributed to Adolf Hitler. During the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber in 2013, Bell tweeted:  "I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine? #2A." The pugnacious, unapologetically right-wing farmer from Mena likes to brag that no one in the House Chamber has pushed the NO button as often as he has ("I wore that button out"). Part of the rump group in the legislature against the state's "private option" health care expansion for low-income Arkansans, Bell voted to fund the policy in 2014, but only after securing a ban on state funding for outreach to let people know about the program. He was explicit that he still wants to kill the policy down the road. "We're trying to create a barrier to enrollment," he said, adding, "I would love to see the program fail."

But while the two have taken their share of abuse in the pages of this publication, they maintain a strong base of support in their districts. Rapert won by 8 percentage points in a hotly contested race in 2012; Bell won by 30. Rapert and Bell are no strangers to controversy — but do all of the hijinks actually make them vulnerable? Can Rapert and Bell, talented incumbent politicians running in conservative districts, actually be beaten in their bid for re-election?  

Tyler Pearson of Conway, the 28-year-old analyst at Heifer International and a political newcomer challenging Rapert, thinks so. "This is absolutely a very winnable race," Pearson said. "We're outworking our opponent. We've knocked on more doors. We have a cash-on-hand advantage. We've outraised him five out of the last six months. We have a much larger grassroots support. ... It's a testament to how passionate people are about this race. It's possible not just because of what I'm doing, but because of what the community is doing."

Meanwhile, another young newcomer, 27-year-old Chase Busch, a student at Arkansas Tech University who also helps out with his family business, Busch Tractor, is taking on Bell. He said his district is ready for a change. "I think I have a very good chance," Busch said. "People will only tolerate so much. People are proud to be where they're from, and people will not tolerate embarrassment. When we have [a legislator] embarrassing our people, they don't want that. That's kind of the situation. People want a guy who's going to serve them and try to solve a problem, not cause a problem."

The challengers face a steep climb. "The bottom line is that [Faulkner County] is a Republican county, this is a Republican district," Rapert said. Public, verified polls are hard to come by in legislative races, but internal polling show Bell and Rapert with substantial leads. "All I can tell you is that in 2010 I ran on a very clear limited government, lower taxes, less regulation platform," Bell said. "I won by 20 percent against a Democrat who was advocating the more liberal policies. In 2012, I ran again against a gentleman who ran to the left of me on a number of issues, including Medicaid expansion. He was for it, I was opposed. And I won by 30 points."

Pearson and Busch are unbowed. A prominent Democrat suggested to Busch a year ago that he consider running. "I did a lot of thinking, praying and soul-searching about it," he said. "I could feel something tugging at me, saying, 'Chase, you just started your political career.'"

Pearson decided to run just days before the filing deadline, after it became clear that Rapert wouldn't have an opponent. In a matter of days, he called everyone he knew to raise the money for the filing fee. "There was a big ice storm and I had to come up to Little Rock the night before, stay in a hotel, and walk down to the Capitol in the ice, just to make sure I could file," Pearson said. He often tells the ice-storm story, a reminder, perhaps, of his determination — and his conviction that the best way to take on an uphill battle is one step at a time.

***

Pearson, born and raised in Conway, is a graduate of the University of Central Arkansas and the Clinton School of Public Service. He first came into the public eye when he was featured in stories on the Arkansas private option by MSNBC and PBS in 2014, in the midst of a tense legislative battle over whether to reauthorize the policy. Pearson, then a graduate student, was covered by the private option, and shared his experience.

"I jumped at the chance to spread my story, because I thought it was a very critical one to be told, and I know there are a lot of people like me," he said. "I was in graduate school, and I had an internship that paid me just enough to live off of. The private option was there for me to give me health insurance that I otherwise would not have been able to afford." (Rapert voted for the private option, but Pearson has been critical of the senator for statements that he was taking a "wait and see" approach to the future of the policy —"I've said time and again that I don't know what he's waiting to see, because it's clear that this program is a success.")

Pearson said he has always understood that public policy directly affected his own life and the lives of others in his community. He recounted reading President Bill Clinton's autobiography: "I was reading about education reforms he passed as governor. I'm thinking, I had gifted and talented programs, AP courses, smaller class sizes, mandatory kindergarten programs. All of these things influenced my life. I went to college on Pell grants. I served in AmeriCorps after college. These were all things that he talked about in his book, and I realized how directly policy can impact people."

Pearson has made increasing access to pre-K education and protecting the private option a centerpiece of his campaign, as well as support for raising the minimum wage. He often cites the three-page "Jobs Now" plan on his website and said that Rapert has put too much emphasis on social issues. "He's not focused on jobs, education and health care, and that's what people elected him to do," Pearson said.

Pearson has been sharply critical of Rapert's tenure in office.

"My opponent has embarrassed our district over the last two years that he's been in office," Pearson said. "I think he's a different candidate that's running in 2014 than 2012. I've had several people tell me that they voted for him last time but won't vote for him this time, because they didn't get what they voted for. They thought he was going to be a moderate and fiscally conservative candidate who focused on the issues that mattered to our district. But it seemed that all he cared about was getting in the spotlight and focusing on himself.

"The word that I hear everywhere I go is 'embarrassment'— that Jason Rapert is an embarrassment to our district and our state. And people don't want to be embarrassed. I understand that. I felt embarrassed. That was one of the big reasons I got into the race is I was unhappy with my political representation." 

Rapert, a financial adviser, fiddle player and sometime preacher, said that Pearson was out of touch with voters in their district. "If he actually spent time in Conway, Arkansas, around the conservative people in this district, maybe he wouldn't hear that I'm an embarrassment. Sure I'm an embarrassment to he and his friends that support gay marriage and support abortion on demand all the time, but I'm definitely not an embarrassment to the good families and voters that live in Conway and Faulkner County and still believe that Arkansas values and traditional Christian values actually mean something."

Gaining steam, Rapert took on the preacher's cadence: "So I'm sure, around his friends it might be an embarrassment. But you know what, I am proud to stand up for pro-life. I am proud to stand up for good conservative policies. And if people want to vote for someone that's going to support the policies of Barack Obama ... they've got a choice in Mr. Tyler Pearson."

Rapert's most underrated skill as a politician is that for all of his bluster on the hot-button issues, he is very focused on looking out for the parochial interests of his district and ensuring that state funds flow to the powerful players. Incumbents are always hard to beat; incumbents who are adept at bringing home the bacon can be nearly unbeatable.

"I was able to help with getting $4.7 million for the University of Central Arkansas to help with capital improvement projects here locally," Rapert said. "I was able to get $600,000 for the Arkansas Education Television Network here in my community. I was able to get $50,000 for the Faulkner County Senior Citizens center. I was able to get another $50,000 for the Conway Human Development Center, and actually I've been very vocal in defending the human development centers and the people they serve across our state. When it comes to getting the job done, I've stepped up." Rapert also noted his involvement in leadership and fundraising for various organizations in his district: the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, Conway Christian School.

"I'm a father and I'm a husband," Rapert said. "So you've got a person in me that can understand the day-to-day struggles that families go through in our communities. Or you've got someone that just graduated from college and does not even own a home in this district."

When it comes to those hot-button issues, like gay marriage and abortion, Rapert remains, to say the least, not shy about his positions. He argued that Pearson, by contrast, was supported by abortion rights and gay rights groups, but avoided clear stances on those issues. "He always wants to have it both ways," Rapert said. "One of the first lessons he's going to have to learn in life is that you actually need to take a stand."

On abortion, Pearson said, the labels "pro-choice" and "pro-life" were "a little too black and white for me." Pearson, a Catholic, said, "My personal beliefs are my personal beliefs, but as a state senator, I will keep in mind that I'm representing 83,000 people and I'm not going to force my views on other people. I think it's a deeply personal issue that should be decided between a woman, her family, her doctor, her God, and not by some politician like me."

He said that he would like to reduce the number of abortions in the state, and argued that the best way to do so was to lift people out of poverty via access to high-quality education and jobs, as well as access to comprehensive sex education and contraception. Pearson said that he would have voted against Rapert's 12-week abortion ban (as well as a separate bill that banned abortions after 20 weeks) because they were unconstitutional as a matter of federal law.

"It's already costing Arkansas taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars to fight this in the court system, and to me that's not a very fiscally conservative message," he said. "It's all show — it's grandstanding on the issue just to get Jason Rapert in the spotlight but it's not getting anything done."

Pearson said he does not take a position on gay marriage. "That's going to be an issue decided by the Supreme Court, and I can't really do anything about it," he said. Pearson said he would uphold the law, whether marriage continues to be defined as between one man and one woman or the law changes via the courts. "That's not an issue in my race and that's not something I'm trying to focus on," he said.

Rapert and other Republicans have questioned Pearson's Conway residency at the time he filed, pointing to Pearson's story of walking to the Capitol in the ice and a photo caption in MSNBC's online story that mentioned him staying at a friend's place in Little Rock. Pearson said he walked from a hotel, not his residence, and that during grad school he sometimes stayed with friends overnight in Little Rock when up late studying, but maintained a permanent residence in Conway. "It's kind of like the new birther conspiracy," Pearson said. "Are they gonna want to see my birth certificate?"

"I guess you would have to say this," Rapert said. "If I'm going to have an opponent, Tyler Pearson is exactly the opponent that I would want to run against — an inexperienced, very liberal young man who does not represent the values of Conway, Arkansas, and the rest of Faulkner County."

Said Pearson, "He wants to say that I don't have Conway values? I live in Conway, I'm from Conway." Pearson said that Rapert hammering him on issues like abortion and gay marriage exposes part of the reason Pearson chose to run against him. "I'm focused on jobs, economy, health care, education, infrastructure," he said. "People want a state senator who's going to work for everybody — not take every chance he gets to grab the spotlight."

***

"Before I begin, I got to thinking, it may not be a good idea for you to do an interview on me," Busch joked the first time the Times called him. "You want to know why? Because I think my opponent gives y'all job security."

He's got a point. Save Rapert, surely no Arkansas politician has taken more heat from the Times' Arkansas Blog over the past few years than Bell (his re-election in 2012, wrote the Blog's Max Brantley, "guarantees extremist quote machine fodder").

Taking down the two-term incumbent won't be easy. Bell is more popular in his district than he is at the Arkansas Blog, and he claims that an internal poll shows him with a lead of more than 30 points over Busch (no information about Bell's poll has been released publicly, but a blowout is in line with the conventional wisdom and with Bell's easy victory in 2012).

In addition to Bell and Busch, the race also features a Libertarian candidate, Marc Rosson, a farmer and landlord from Gillham (Sevier County), who objects to Bell's vote to fund the private option in 2014 and his vote for Issue 3, the legislatively referred ballot initiative impacting term limits and pay for legislators. "There's no conservative [that] would have voted for any of those bills, not if they're really conservative," Rosson said. "A dog can call itself conservative, but it's still not conservative."

The situation has Bell, rather remarkably, casting himself as the man in the middle. "I have my Democrat[ic] opponent, who has described me as an extreme right-winger, and my libertarian opponent, who has described me in various terms, most all of which include the word Obama," Bell said. "The voters will express their opinion on Nov. 4, but from where I sit and based on the polling we have at this point, it certainly doesn't appear to be a winning message. Clearly the folks in my district have been very supportive. Actually I was fairly surprised to have an opponent at all."

Busch believes that things have changed since Bell's big victories in the past and that voters in the district have grown dissatisfied with the incumbent, who he said has been unresponsive to constituents. "A lot of people are not happy with my opponent," Busch said. "I had a guy tell me — and he's Republican to the bone — he said, 'I agree with your opponent 90 or 95 percent of the time, but I'm going to vote for you because Nate's an a-hole.' There's been a bunch of that. Voters don't like the way he treats people, and he's come across as very, very arrogant." 

Busch also believes that people have become fed up with the controversy that follows the always quotable Bell.  "My opponent has said all kinds of outlandish things," Busch said. In addition to noting the "Hitler" incident, Busch has given particular focus to the Boston tweet.  

In fact, Busch's first foray into public life was a letter to the Mena Star arguing that Bell should resign after the tweet. "This is not the view of the people of this area," Busch wrote. "I strongly believe that he should resign as a result of this comment. This is a major breach of leadership because it did not make anything better, caused problems [and] destroyed friendly relations." Busch added, "The people of this area and I do love our guns and we shall not have these rights infringed, but the power of love and prayer should be our main focus in this crisis situation."

Busch said he was inspired to write the letter because "when [Bell] said that awful, awful thing about Boston, that's when he revealed himself. ... I know that Arkansas and Massachusetts are two totally different cultures, but they are our countrymen, they're citizens. To infer someone who thinks differently than we do are cowards, that drew the line there."

"Clearly my opponent would like to run a campaign on the basis of one tweet," Bell said. "I'll just simply say that being a member of the legislature is about more than one tweet." 

Of the tweet itself, Bell said: "It's not an issue in my district. Folks there agree with my point of view on firearms and the personal use of firearms. I made it very clear that the timing certainly had a negative effect on some people. I meant exactly what I said. But sometimes tactfully it's better to refrain from saying some things at certain times." Bell added that he had counted 13 major media figures who made "the same basic statement ... without any repercussions whatsoever."

Busch was born and raised in Mena. He doesn't know Bell personally but said Bell lives about a mile from his house as the crow flies ("this love thy neighbor thing is getting tested," Busch quipped). His website highlights the sorts of things that find their way onto "'Merica!" T-shirts: "In his spare time, Chase enjoys dirt track racing, classic cars, and hunting." He's an NRA member and a devout Baptist. "I'm a religious guy and my faith is very, very important to me, but I won't beat you over the head with it," he said. 

Busch describes himself as a centrist, comparing himself to Mike Ross and to middle-of-the-road Democrats in the legislature. "I'm a moderate," he said. "I don't consider myself a conservative or a liberal. I'd be the guy that's right in the middle of that spectrum." He acknowledged that the district leaned right, but noted that Ross consistently carried Polk County when he was running for Congress. "We're conservative," Busch said. "We like our Bible and our guns. That's the way our district is. People are going to tend to be very, very conservative on gays, abortion and guns — but I think they want someone who's also going to invest in their schools, and has a positive plan to bring in jobs and bring in better health care."

Busch said that he was opposed to same-sex marriage. "I'm a lot like what the district is," he said. "I'm not anti-gay by any means. I'm no Jason Rapert." He described himself as "opposed to abortion" and said he would favor laws that made abortion illegal with exceptions for rape, incest or maternal health. However, he said he would have voted against the bills passed last year in the legislature banning abortion at 12 weeks and 20 weeks because "they were unconstitutional because of federal law, which overrides state law." On gun control, he said, "I do believe in the Second Amendment. I think if you're a law-abiding citizen, if you want to try to have a gun or get possession of a firearm, you're not hurting my feelings." 

Busch said his policy focus was on education and protecting the private option. Bell, Busch said, "has been candid about saying he does not want [the private option] to work."

Bell believes that the private option is unsustainable and unaffordable, but he did vote to fund the policy in 2014, arguing that due to the constraints of the fiscal session and the deadlock in votes, the best way forward for his side was to get what they could and live to fight another day. That tactical logic didn't satisfy Rosson, the Libertarian candidate, a gadfly who has run for numerous offices in the past. "The best tactic I can figure out is that if you're against something, you don't vote for it, you don't fund it," he said.

"He's somehow managed to be even more [right-wing than Bell]," Busch said of Rosson. If Rosson can peel off a few Tea Party diehards still smarting over the Obamacare-funded private option, "that only helps me," Busch said. (There's one thing the two agree on: "He's just about been an embarrassment," Rosson said of Bell. "He don't know when to keep his mouth shut.")

Like Pearson, Busch himself is covered by the private option. "It was designed for people like me, people who are trying to get ahead, trying to do what they can, but may not have the best health insurance available to them because of their pre-existing condition," said Busch, who has epilepsy. "[Bell] doesn't want the private option. He doesn't care if it helps people, he doesn't want it to work. That's a stark difference [between us]. We've got to do what we can to help as many people as we can." Busch noted that more than 1,500 people in Polk County have gained private option coverage, and argued that Mena Regional Health System has benefited from the policy. "It's the only hospital in the district, and when seconds count, we need the best medical facilities possible here," he said. "Without the private option, there could be a possibility that we lose our hospital." Busch, whose mother works at the hospital, said, "I don't want to see anybody laid off because of someone's extreme, scorched-earth ideology, where they don't want to help people."

Busch said that he could recall watching the news with his great-grandmother, who told him stories of how New Deal programs helped people during the Depression. He said that he was a Democrat because they "have a better record of helping the poor and middle class. Trying to help the common person, the worker and the poor. With hands up, not handouts. Opportunities, programs, jobs, helping people get on their feet and going."

But can a Democrat running to the left of Bell win in District 20? Bell said that he would not say anything negative about his opponents but expressed skepticism.

"There are major differences between the Republican party platform and the Democrat[ic] party platform," he said. "I'm going to assume that someone agrees in principle with the Democrat[ic] party platform if they decide to run on that platform." That platform, Bell said, did not have a winning history of late in his district.

For his part, Busch said, "I think we've got a shot to win, I really do." Busch said that Bell was backed by PACs and lobbyists, while the bulk of his own support was from local people. The exception: He's gotten some donations from Boston, plus an endorsement from a Boston city councilman. "For some weird reason," he said, "I've turned into a Red Sox fan."

***

Most observers view Pearson and Busch as long shots. Bell losing his re-election would almost certainly be the most shocking upset of the cycle; while the Rapert race promises to be tighter, one lobbyist told me that Republicans were ultimately a lock in Senate District 35, and a Republican would only lose if "caught with a dead girl or a live boy."

"A key mistake that Arkansas Democrats are making in this cycle is that they have devoted a lot of time, energy and money to running against people they don't like instead of people that they can beat," Bell said.

Both Ross and Democratic Party chairman Vince Insalaco have hosted fundraisers for Pearson and Busch. Pearson in particular has been a fundraising machine — a testament to his talents in that area, but also surely an expression of the local Democratic id, putting money behind rage against Rapert. There has been occasional grumbling that perhaps high-profile lightning rods like Bell and Rapert are sucking in attention and fundraising dollars that might be better devoted to tight races where Democrats are favored or neck-and-neck.

Insalaco dismissed such concerns. "We made an effort to go after quality candidates statewide and I think we've done it," he said. Rapert and Bell might get a lot of attention from the media, he argued (noting, for example, this story), but the party was working aggressively on a couple of dozen races. "I didn't set out to [target] Jason Rapert and Nate Bell. If you look at the map, we went out to deliberately recruit top-tier, quality candidates [including Pearson and Busch] and we've got them everywhere. If we win the House back it will be because of our candidates." 

Of course there could be advantages to Democrats even if Busch and Pearson turn out to be sacrificial lambs. Getting the base to turn out even in districts where Democrats are the minority could help statewide candidates like Mike Ross and Mark Pryor. Rapert, meanwhile, suggested that "the Democratic machine" wanted opposition for Bell and him in order to keep them too busy to spend time working to elect Republicans Asa Hutchinson as governor and Tom Cotton as senator.

Moreover, as several Democratic insiders pointed out to me, you never know. You can't win if you don't play. The long-term health of the party benefits from competing statewide, and the Democrats this cycle appear to be pursuing a strategy of expanding the map. Rapert and Bell attract the headlines, but Democrats are taking on other GOP incumbents and playing in other districts where they face an uphill battle. They're fielding strong candidates in Republican strongholds in Northwest Arkansas, such as Leah Williams in Bentonville and Grimsley Graham in Rogers, both seats occupied in recent years by Tea Party stalwarts; they're also mounting a challenge in Rapert country, where Frank Shaw is taking on Rep. David Meeks (R-Conway).

If nothing else, candidates like Busch and Pearson give voters in their districts a choice. As Pearson put it, explaining why he got into the race to begin with: "I just knew that I wanted to vote for somebody other than Jason Rapert."

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White Water Tavern, the nearly 40-year-old dive bar, reclaimed its crown this year as Arkansas Times' readers pick for the best bar in Central Arkansas. Last year's winner, the Hillcrest Fountain, picked up one win — for best pick-up bar — and five runners-up, while a couple of still-young restaurants, Big Orange Midtown and South on Main, received a lot of recognition for their bar scenes.

When Arkansas Times readers get a hankerin' to tie one on in the morning at Sunday brunch, they think ... U.S. Pizza? That's what the ballots tell us; David Koon investigates. For our staff pick for "Favorite 'Twin Peaks' Setting Had David Lynch Channeled Stoned George Jones," Will Stephenson profiles Jimmy Doyle's Country Club's owner and namesake and discovers he and his honky-tonk are one of a kind.

Speaking of colorful bar owners, they don't get much more fun-loving than Larry "Goose" Garrison, the long-time White Water Tavern owner who died in September. Lindsey Millar tells his story.

Finally, since this is a survey of Central Arkansas bars and booze, what better place than to preview the Arkansas Times Craft Beer Festival coming to Argenta Oct. 24? There'll be 50 breweries and more than 250 beers there. Try to read ahead and not get thirsty.

Bar

White Water Tavern

Runners-up: Dugan's Pub, Big Orange Midtown, The Pantry

Bartender

Jarrod Johnson (Big Orange)

Runners-up: David Burnette (South on Main), Kevin Creasy (White Water Tavern), David Timberlake (The Pantry)

Wine bar

Zin Urban Wine and Beer Bar

Runners-up: Crush Wine Bar, By the Glass, Cache Restaurant

Sports bar

West End Smokehouse and Tavern

Runners-up: The Tavern Sports Grill, Gusano's Chicago-Style Pizzeria, Buffalo Wild Wings

Pick-up bar

Hillcrest Fountain

Runners-up: Bar Louie, Cache Restaurant, Town Pump

Gay bar

Sway

Runners-up: Triniti, 610 Center, Discovery

Best bar for live music

White Water Tavern

Runners-up: The Rev Room, Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack, Juanita's

Dive bar

Midtown Billiards

Runners-up: White Water Tavern, Town Pump, Pizza D'Action

Hotel bar

Capital Bar

Runners-up: One Eleven, Heritage Grille, Table 28

Neighborhood bar

South on Main

Runners-up: Hillcrest Fountain, Dugan's Pub, White Water Tavern

Bar for pool, darts, shuffleboard or other games

West End Smokehouse and Tavern

Runners-up: Hillcrest Fountain, Town Pump, Zack's Place

Bar for food

South on Main

Runners-up: The Pantry, Dugan's Pub, Big Orange

Happy hour

Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack

Runners-up: Cache, Local Lime, Hillcrest Fountain

Drinking brunch

YaYa's Euro Bistro

Runners-up: U.S. Pizza (Hillcrest), Loca Luna, Red Door Restaurant

Patio or deck for drinking

Cajun's Wharf

Runners-up: U.S. Pizza (Hillcrest), Ciao Baci, Hillcrest Fountain

Beer selection

Flying Saucer Draught Emporium

Runners-up: The Pantry, Big Orange, Mellow Mushroom

Coldest beer

Twin Peaks

Runners-up: The Tavern Sports Grill, Hillcrest Fountain, U.S. Pizza (Hillcrest)

Tequila selection

Local Lime

Runners-up: Santo Coyote, Maduro Cigar Bar, Cantina Laredo

Bloody Mary

Dugan's Pub

Runners-up: Big Orange Midtown, Capital Hotel, YaYa's Euro Bistro

Martini

Capital Bar

Runners-up: The Pantry, Bar Louie, SO Restaurant Bar

Margarita

Local Lime

Runners-up: Cantina Laredo, The Fold, Santo Coyote

Liquor store

Colonial Wines and Spirits

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

Local brew

Diamond Bear Brewing Co.

Runners-up: Core Brewing & Distilling Company, Stone's Throw Brewing, Moody Brews

National brew

Boulevard Brewing Co.

Runners-up: Green Flash Brewing Co., Summit Brewing Co., Samuel Adams (Boston Beer Co.)

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The Arkansas beer community has seen a lot of changes and plenty of growth since last year's Arkansas Times Craft Beer Festival. More breweries have opened in Northwest Arkansas and others are getting ready to open. The Fayetteville Ale Trail has taken off as a popular activity for the region's beer lovers. Central Arkansas is playing catch-up with a number of new breweries making plans to open soon.

While all this has been going on in Arkansas, distributors have been hitting the hops trail pretty hard to bring many of the nation's best brews to our shelves and tap walls. End result? You'll need a scorecard — which we provide on page 24 — to keep up with this year's beer festival. You'll also need tickets, which you should buy in advance to avoid being on the outside looking in once the festival inevitably sells out. Get them at arktimes.com/craftbeerfest. A $35 ticket ($40 at the door) allows for all the sampling you want and includes food from nine restaurants, including Arkansas Ale House, Bravo! Cucina Italiana, Cafe Bossa Nova, Cregeen's Irish Pub, Crush Wine Bar, The Fold Botanas and Bar, Old Chicago NLR, Butcher & Public and Whole Hog North Little Rock.

Below, find quick previews of the participating breweries.

ARKANSAS BREWERIES

Apple Blossom Brewing Co.

Fayetteville's Apple Blossom Brewing Co. has been a welcome addition to the Northwest Arkansas craft beer community, and its beers are starting to make their way to Central Arkansas. I've visited Apple Blossom on three different occasions and each time has been more rewarding for my taste buds than the previous. You won't have to drive up scenic I-49 to try Apple Blossom for yourself as the brewery will be pouring its Fayetteweisse, Armstrong American Pale Ale, Triple IPA and possibly some Hayride Pumpkin Porter or Oktoberfest.

Blue Canoe Brewing

This upstart nano brewery and taproom is still in the planning stages for the River Market District, hoping to open later this year. Founders Laura Berryhill and Patrick and Ida Cowan plan to locally source as many ingredients as they can to create their beer. For example, Pinnacle Blossom Wit Beer is named for local honeysuckle blossoms. Berryhill and the Cowans will be pouring three beers at the festival that they hope will be mainstays year- round at their taproom: Paddler American Wheat, 4x4 Pale Ale and Whittler Milk Stout. They also plan to rotate seasonal and experimental beers.

Core Brewing

It's been a huge year for Springdale's Core Brewing. CEO Jesse Core says Core is approaching nearly 470 locations where its product is sold, and he hopes to start selling it in Mexico in 2015. Core also recently opened a beautiful new taproom in Rogers and as it's also a distillery, expect for a barrel-aging program to start gaining steam as well. Just this month Core also added another power hitter to its starting line-up with the addition of former Apple Blossom brewer Nathan Traw, as director of brewing. Despite its Northwest location, Core's beers have been easy to find in Central Arkansas since the brewery's debut. Core will pour plenty of its most popular beers, including Behemoth Pilsner, Leg Hound Lager, ESB, Hilltop IPA, Imperial Red, Oatmeal Stout and a seasonal beer.

Diamond Bear

It's been a great year for Diamond Bear Brewery, now in its 14th year of production in the state. In June, it opened a huge shiny new brewery in North Little Rock, complete with the Arkansas Alehouse, a brewpub restaurant. Also this summer, Diamond Bear jumped into the world of craft cans, canning Southern Blonde for fans to take on lake trips, golf rounds or just wandering around the Arkansas outdoors. Not only will you be able to find Arkansas Alehouse's food at the festival, you'll also get to sample Southern Blonde, plus Diamond Bear's 2007 Great American Beer Festival gold medal-winning Pale Ale.

Flyway Brewing

Here's another Little Rock brewery that's on the rise with big plans for the upcoming year. It's trying to secure a location for a brewery with an eye on opening in the early months of 2015. At the festival, Flyway will have all four of its planned year-round lineup of beers. Look for Migrate Ale, Free Range Brown Ale, Early Bird IPA and Shadow Hands Stout to all be flowing.

Fossil Cove

Ben Mills, a graduate of Gravette High School, began making wine during his college years at Arkansas Tech. It wasn't very good wine apparently. "My friends said, 'Maybe you should make something we can actually drink.' That's when I got started home-brewing," he said. He went on to complete a six-month brewmaster school at the University of California Davis before opening up Fossil Cove Brewing in Fayetteville, which recently celebrated its second anniversary. Fossil Cove's tap room is on my "must do" list every time I get up to the hills, not just for the beer, but for the wonderful laid-back environment. You can find Fossil Cove's taps around Central Arkansas already, but with the recent addition of a 20-barrel fermenter and 20-barrel brite tank carbonator, expect to see plenty more. Start by checking out Fossil Cove's La Brea Brown, Blizzle Black IPA and Paleo Pale Ale.

Leap of Faith Brewing

Sometimes when you have a dream you just have to take a leap of faith, and that's what local homebrewers Dave Ragan and Joe Mains are doing as they plan another upstart brewery in Central Arkansas. They'll be sharing some of what they hope to have in store for you soon, like Righteous Indignation, Highgarden Brown Ale, Country Monks Farmhouse and the hops monster called Thor's Hammer IPA. Take the leap!

Moody Brews

With much rejoicing from local beer lovers, former Vino's brewmaster Josiah Moody launched his own label this summer, which he cleverly dubbed Moody Brews. He's taken a proven successful route (see Evil Twin and Prairie Ales) of "gypsy brewing" by brewing and bottling his new beers at Choc Brewing Co. in Krebs, Okla. The first official beer to come out of Moody Brews is an Imperial IPA called Half Seas Over, which you can find in four-pack bottles and on draft at several Central Arkansas watering holes. It's a wonderfully aromatic tropical hop blast with a flavor to match, coming in at 80 International Bittering Units (IBUs). The 8.5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) seems big, but it sure is hidden well as the beer finishes as smooth as a session IPA.

Ozark Beer Co.

Ozark Beer Co.'s motto of "Hard Work Makes Honest Beer" could easily be replaced with "Hard Work Makes Delicious Beer" because that what you get with this Rogers brewery. Brewmaster Andy Coates worked at Great Divide Brewing Co. and Goose Island Beer Co. before moving to Arkansas in 2010 with his wife, Lacie. It was a homecoming for Lacie and a new home in the Ozarks for Andy. He made a name for himself locally as the brewer at Fayetteville's West Mountain Brewing Co. before Ozark Beer Co. was born with partner Jeff Baldwin, just north of Fayetteville. Ozark will pour its Belgian Golden and Cream Stout.

Rebel Kettle

Another Little Rock brewery in the development stages, Rebel Kettle recently announced a mid-2015 opening at space on East Sixth Street. The future brewery's location is pretty much directly between Stone's Throw (402 E. 9th St.) and Lost 40 (McLean and Capital, east of I-30), so Central Arkansas's version of an Ale Trail could have a lot more walking involved. Rebel Kettle has been pouring at festivals in recent years and has already earned a reputation for making tasty beers that ignore style limitations. See for yourself by trying Popfly Popcorn Cream Ale, Dirtbag Brown Ale, Moontower Cream Stout and Liquor & Peaches, a bourbon and peach imperial porter.

Saddlebock Brewery

Having toured the Springdale brewery a few times, I wasn't at all shocked when TripAdvisor named Saddlebock to its 2014 Top Wineries & Breweries Worth Traveling For. It's a really neat three-level brewhouse that looks like a barn and is ultra-environmentally friendly, from gravity-fed grain all the way through to a naturally cooled cellar. It's an interesting tour in a beautiful location, outside the city beside the scenic White River. I highly recommend stopping by on any visit to Northwest Arkansas. Look for Oktoberfest, Late Summer Shandy, Bock and my favorite, the super refreshing Blueberry Tart, at the fest.

Stone's Throw Brewing

At last year's festival, Stone's Throw had been open merely a few months in its downtown Little Rock location just a stone's throw from the River Market. Here we are a year later and it's doubled twice now since brewery operations began on July 4, 2013. The most recent additions in September — three fermenters and a brite tank each with a six-barrel volume — will allow the brewery to make its most popular beers available for longer periods. Beers that need more time to ferment, like lagers and high- gravity recipes, will also have increased availability. Stop by its table and check out Ichabod Pumpkin, Big Damn Horn O'Plenty Imperial Oktoberfest, Amer Belge Belgian IPA and Petit Jean Pear Cider.

Vino's Pizza Pub Brewery

There was a lot of change for Vino's this year, with former brewmaster Josiah Moody leaving to start Moody Brews, but it will continue to make consistent quality beer like the people of Little Rock have come to expect for over 20 years. Nobody else can lay claim to over two decades of beer making and selling in this state. Vino's is also one of only two breweries in the state with multiple Great American Beer Festival awards. It will be serving up Oktoberfest, Red Wolf Ale, Dopplebock and Dunbar Garden Table Beer.

Regional Breweries

Abita Brewing

For my wife and me, no trip to New Orleans is complete without a stop by this brewery in Abita Springs, La., 30 miles north of the Big Easy. Formed in 1986, it now brews 130,000 barrels (and 5,000 barrels of delicious root beer) per year. Abita is now sold in 46 states and Puerto Rico and is the 15th largest craft brewery in the country. You can try its popular Andygator, 2013 medal winner at the Great American Beer Festival in the bock category, along with Lemon Wheat, 2014 Great American Beer Festival medal-winning Oktoberfest, Restoration Pale Ale, Strawgator and Purple Haze, a very popular lager brewed with real raspberries added after filtration. If you're a fan of its Strawberry Harvest Lager — and who isn't — and are sad because it's out of season, give the Strawgator a try, as it's a fusion of that beer and Andygator.

Bayou Teche Brewing

If you like Cajun food, especially of the spicy variety, then Bayou Teche just may be your new favorite brewery. The Arnaudville, La., brewery tends to craft beers that complement the cuisine and lifestyle of Cajuns and Creoles. It's come a long way from its 2009 start in an old railway car, but still remains true to its original intent. Let's call Bayou Teche's brew beers with a Cajun accent. Stop by and try Acadie Biere de Garde, Bierre Pale APA, Bierre Noir Schwarzbier and Cocodrie Belgian IPA.

Boulevard Brewing Co.

Central Arkansas beer lovers are already very familiar with Boulevard Brewing Co. out of Kansas City, Mo., as it was one of our original craft breweries in the area when our scene was just beginning to take off. The brewery has expanded many times over the years; today, it's the largest craft brewer in the Midwest, cranking out over 600,000 barrels a year. In 2013, Boulevard was acquired by Duvel Moortgat Brewery and while terms of the deal were not disclosed, industry analysts estimate the sale price exceeded $100 million. Boulevard will pour some great beers, including Bully Porter, Bourbon Barrel Quad, Bob's '47 Oktoberfest, Entwined and Collaboration No. 4, a spiced Saison from its collaboration with Brewery Ommegang.

Charleville Brewing

What started as a winery in Sainte Genevieve, Mo., has branched into a nice-sized brewery operation with a brand new brewhouse situated in the hills just south of St. Louis, along with the winery and a refurbished 1860s log cabin that serves as a two-room bed and breakfast. I went to visit this summer. My Garmin must have forgotten it was the Show Me State, because it couldn't show me how to get there, but it was worth getting lost once I finally found my way. It's a beautiful place with some super friendly people and a lineup of quality beers (and wines). Look out for Hoptimistic IPA, Half-Wit Wheat, Tornado Amber and maybe a couple of seasonals.

Choc Brewing

Since last year's festival, a new brewing system has given Oklahoma's Choc Beer Co. a jump in capacity. It's a four-vessel, 50-barrel system was purchased from Atlanta's Sweetwater Brewing Co. that allows Choc to produce more of its own beer as well as more for Prairie Artisan Ales, who, along with Little Rock's Moody Brews, Choc brews on contract. Look for Choc Beer, OPA and Signature Dubbel as well as one or two yet-to-be announced special releases.

Coop Ale Works

Oklahoma City, Okla., has really become a hotspot in the Midwest for craft beer in the last few years, and Coop Ale Works was one of the frontrunners in that movement, opening in 2009. It's been trying to get on Arkansas shelves for about a year, but it's sold so much beer in Oklahoma it hasn't been able to make the jump. December may finally be the time it arrives, so expect some fun surrounding Coop's Arkansas launch soon. Get a preview by sampling Horny Toad Blonde, Native Amber, F5 IPA and DNR Belgian Dark Strong.

Crown Valley Brewing & Distilling Co.

Just south of St. Louis in the hill country not far from Charleville Brewery sits Crown Valley Brewing & Distilling, which not only makes a lineup of beers but also coffee, root beer, spirits and wine. Its handcrafted brews are made on location by Brew Master Jeremy Gilbert in the state-of-the-art 15-barrel microbrewery. Look for Crown Valley to pour Big Bison, Country Carriage Apple Cider, Farmhouse Lager, Gunslinger Double IPA and Strawberry Cider.

Lazy Magnolia

Lazy Magnolia Brewing Co. was founded by Mark and Leslie Henderson in 2003 in Kiln, Miss. In January 2005 its first batch of beer was brewed and Lazy Magnolia became Mississippi's first package brewery since Prohibition. It's been available in Arkansas for over a year now and has a good footprint throughout the South with a nice lineup of what could be called "Southern Style" beers. Sweet potatoes lend the Jefferson Stout an earthy, faintly sweet character similar to pumpkin, and Southern Pecan is a nut-brown ale made with whole roasted pecans. What's more Southern than pecans and sweet potatoes? Lazy Magnolia will serve up both Southern Pecan and Jefferson Stout plus Southern Hops'pitality, an IPA with "Southern Complexity."

O'Fallon Brewery

The motto of this small craft brewery northwest of St. Louis is "We Love Beer." I like that. It's just straight forward and right to the point, which goes right along with many of its beers. There's not a lot of smoke and mirrors here, just very solid representations of popular styles of beer. Try 5 Day IPA, Zeke's Pale Ale, Pumpkin, Hemp Hop Rye and Wheach, a delicious wheat/peach brew, at the festival.

Marshall Brewing Co.

Marshall Brewing Co. became Tulsa's first production craft microbrewery since the 1940s when it began operations in spring 2008. Brewmaster/founder Eric Marshall is a fourth-generation Tulsan who studied the art of brewing in Munich, apprenticed in multiple breweries throughout Germany and served as a brewer at the Victory Brewing Co. before starting his own brewery. Marshall will pour staples like Sundown Wheat, McNellie's Pub Ale, Oktoberfest Lager and also a 7.8 percent ABV Belgian IPA called This Machine IPA.

Mother's Brewing Co.

Mother's Brewing out of Springfield, Mo., celebrated its arrival in Central Arkansas in August with a week full of fun events, including a massive 23-tap takeover at The Flying Saucer, a Saucer record. Going all out seems to be the only way Mother's does things. The brewery won't be pouring 23 different beers at the festival, but it'll have plenty, including Towhead American Blonde, Lil Helper IPA, Three Blind Mice Brown Ale, Mr. Pumpkin, Squashed, Oktoberfest, Winter Grind and a brewmaster's special. If you're a coffee beer fan, make sure to try Winter Grind, which I think is one of the best coffee stouts around.

Piney River Brewing Co.

You know what I like about Piney River? Everything. I like that Joleen and Brian Durham founded Piney River Brewing Co. on their farm in South Central Missouri in 2010, after making beer on the kitchen stove and fermenting it in the basement of their 100-year-old farmhouse. I like that they revived a 70-year old barn hewn from oak trees harvested off the farm and use it for their brewery and taproom. I like that when you visit there, you leave feeling like family. Oh, and I also like that their beers are fantastic and have won medals at the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup in the last couple of years. They'll pour Float Trip Ale, Black Walnut Wheat, Old Tom Porter and Masked Bandit IPA, a delicious black rye IPA.

Prairie Artisan Ales

Chase Healey and his brother, Colin, founded Prairie in the summer of 2012. They started out by brewing their beers under a contract at Choc Beer Co. in Krebs, Okla. They called on international beer distributor Shelton Bros. when they were ready to hit the market, putting their beer in front of consumers around the country and world. Since then, they've secured their own brewery building in west Tulsa, where they brew anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of Prairie's beer — the rest is still made at Choc. They have also acquired land in Glenpool, Okla., which will become Prairie Farm, part of their vision of a massive brewery expansion combined with a tourist destination and functioning farm. Oh, and the beer? Well these guys are brewing some of the funkiest, wild and sour beers out there. They'll have a nice representation of what they do with Cherry Funk, Standard Hoppy Farmhouse, Birra Farmhouse and Prairie Bomb, an incredible dark, thick stout with hints of coffee, vanilla beans, chili peppers and cocoa nibs.

The Saint Louis Brewery

The Saint Louis Brewery was incorporated in 1989 by Dan Kopman and Tom Schlafly with a goal to create quality local microbrew beer. Their brand, Schlafly Beer, has grown into a monster in the St. Louis area and surrounding states and is now St. Louis' largest locally owned independent brewery and puts out about 50 unique styles of beer. They've been in our state for a bit and have more quality beers in their portfolio than my team, the St. Louis Cardinals, have rings. Look for Pale Ale, Kolsch, Dry Hopped APA, Session IPA, Black Lager, Tasmanian IPA, Pumpkin Ale and Tripel and Oktoberfest at the festival.

Southern Star Brewing

Southern Star Brewing Co., which arrived in Arkansas in the spring, was founded in July 2007 in Conroe, Texas, and was the first craft brewery in Texas to provide canned craft beers to consumers from its 10,000-square-foot warehouse. Southern Star is currently clearing land for a new $5 million brewery that founder Dave Fougeron, former head brewer of Houston-based Saint Arnold Brewing Co., hopes will not only expand capacity but also attract more visitors for tours, special events and, perhaps at some future date, overnight stays in an adjacent bed-and-breakfast. Southern Star will be pouring Buried Hatchet Stout, Bombshell Blonde, Pine Belt Pale Ale and Walloon Grissette, a farmhouse-style ale.

Spoetzl Brewery

Located in Shiner, Texas, Spoetzl was founded way back in 1909, and is the oldest independent brewery in Texas and the fourth-largest craft brewery in America, based on 2013 beer sales volume. It produces the popular line of Shiner Beers, including the flagship five-time Great American Beer Festival medal-winning Shiner Bock, a beer which many people claim as their "gateway beer" into craft beer (including me). Spoetzl will pour its White Wing Belgian White, Bohemian Black Lager Schwarzbier and either the seasonal Oktoberfest or Holiday Cheer, a Dunkelweizen with hints of peaches and pecans.

National Breweries

Anchor Brewing Co.

Today's craft beer craze owes a lot to San Francisco's Anchor Brewing Co., one of the original craft breweries. Founded in 1896, Anchor Steam derives its unusual name from the 19th century when "steam" was a nickname for beer brewed on the West Coast under primitive conditions and without ice. Today, Anchor Steam has trademarked "steam" as the singular process and taste of its flagship brand. The brewery will serve its namesake along with California Lager, Liberty Ale and a Porter.

Boston Beer Co.

America's largest craft brewery, based on 2013 sales volume, is better known as Sam Adams. Co-founder Jim Koch raided his savings, took out a second mortgage, and borrowed from friends and family to start the operation in 1984, brewing the first batch in his kitchen. In the 40 years since, the brewery has grown to now sell over 2.5 million barrels of more than 50 different beers per a year. Among those that'll be at the festival: Fat Jack, Harvest Pumpkin, Rebel IPA, Winter Lager and 2014 Great American Beer Festival gold medal winner Tetravis Belgian-Style Abbey Ale.

Breckenridge Brewery

Colorado has over 150 craft breweries today. Breckenridge Brewery was the state's third, founded in 1990. It's grown from a small, 3,000-barrel-a-year brewpub into one of the most successful craft beer and restaurant companies in the nation, now brewing well over 52,000 barrels of fresh beer annually, ranking it the 40th-largest craft brewer in the nation. At the fest, the brewery will pour 471 IPA, Agave Wheat, Autumn Ale, Oatmeal Stout and Vanilla Porter.

Brewery Ommegang

Brewery Ommegang, located on a 136-acre farmstead in Cooperstown, N.Y., is regarded by many as the most beautiful brewery in America. The company opened in 1997 to brew fine Belgian-style craft beers, now distributed in 45 states. Founded by Don Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield, owners of the Vanberg & DeWulf beer import company and three family-owned Belgian breweries including Duvel Moortgat, Ommegang will not only pour from its fantastic lineup of Belgian inspired beers, it will also bring some Duvel Moortgat lines as well. Look for Ommegang's Game of Thrones Valar Morghulis, Ommegang Scythe & Sickle Harvest Ale, Ommegang Three Philosophers Belgian-style quadrupel, La Chouffe Golden Ale and the incredible Maredsous 10 Abbey Tripel.

Caldera Brewing Co.

Canned beers are really popular in the current craft beer climate, and one of the original breweries to get this movement started was Caldera. Incorporated in Ashland, Ore., in 1996, Caldera was only available in draft until June 2005, when it became the first microbrewery in Oregon to can its own beer. Caldera has only been in our market since summer. Try its Lawnmower Lager, Hop Hash IPA and delicious Caldera IPA — a tribute to American hops.

Crazy Mountain Brewing Co.

A recent addition to the Arkansas beer scene, this brewery hails from ski resort heaven Vail Valley, in beer-rich Colorado. Look for Amber Ale, Lava Lake Wit, Mountain Livin' Pale Ale, Boohi Red Ale and Crazy Mountain's 10 percent ABV and an 80 IBU barley wine, Lawyer's, Guns & Money.

Evil Twin Brewing

Not a standard physical brewery, Evil Twin is more a beer production company, commonly referred to in the craft beer world as a "gypsy brewery." All the beers from Evil Twin are prepared in "10 of the best breweries around the world." Founder Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø of Denmark creates recipes for beers that are as unique as their names, possibly in competition with his twin brother, Mikkel Borg Bjergsø of fellow gypsy brewery Mikkeller. Stop by for some Evil Twin's Falco IPA, I Love You With My Stout, Freudian Slip Barley Wine and Bikini Beer, an amazing low-alcohol offering that has a big beer hoppy flavor.

Finch's Beer Co.

Chicago-based Finch's is another brewery leading the canned beer revolution with a whole line of pint cans available on local shelves. With an expanded facility established in 2013 and plans for a new brewery and tasting room by 2016, Finch's is on pace to be one of the largest microbreweries in the Midwest. At the festival you'll get to check out some of Finch's best: the robust Secret Stache Stout and super hoppy Hardcore Chimera double IPA, which clocks in at 9 percent ABV. Let's hope it will have some cans of its winter seasonal, Nuclear Winter, as well to share.

Founders Brewing Co.

Local beer lovers rejoiced back in the spring when this Grand Rapids, Mich., brewery finally arrived in Arkansas. It's the 26th-largest craft brewery in America by sales volume as of 2013 and has been ranked among the top breweries in the world by Ratebeer.com for several years running. Founders flat-out makes quality beer and will be pouring All Day IPA, Dirty Bastard, Centennial IPA, Porter, Breakfast Stout and Dissenter Imperial IPL.

Goose Island Beer Co.

When Anheuser-Busch InBev swallowed Goose Island for $38.8 million in 2011, diehard fans worried that the quality of beer would drop off. Things couldn't be farther from the truth in the three years since, in my experience. It seems deep pockets have given Goose Island brewers space to grow the brewery's more experimental lines of beer, while the quality of its staples hasn't suffered in the least. The brewery will be pouring an impressive lineup, including Honker's Ale, IPA, 312 Urban Wheat, 312 Urban Pale Ale, The Muddy Imperial Stout, Pepe Nero and three varieties of Bourbon County Stout (regular, coffee and barleywine).

Green Flash Brewing Co.

Headquartered in the Mira Mesa neighborhood of San Diego, Green Flash was founded in 2002, and its beers have garnered 10 medals at the Great American Beer Festival since, including a bronze this year for Le Freak. Green Flash's focus is on very hop-forward beers, which the West Coast is well known for delivering. You'll get to try its amazingly good, game-changing West Coast IPA (which accounts for about 50 percent of sales), Road Warrior Rye IPA, Citra Session IPA, Le Freak (a cross between a Belgian-style tripel and an American Imperial IPA) and Double Stout, an 8.8 percent ABV imperial stout.

Laughing Dog

Laughing Dog Brewing is a craft beer brewery based in Sandpoint, Idaho, run by a yellow lab named Ben. Well, Fred and Michelle Colby are really the ones behind the curtain, but the three often discuss new ideas for brews and flavors, and Ben gives his OK by one bark, or a no by two barks. He must know his beer because Laughing Dog has some good ones. The brewery will be pouring its Sneaky Pete IPA, Dogfather Bourbon Stout and Rocketdog Rye IPA.

Left Coast Brewing Co./Lucky Buddha

Left Coast began operations in its 5,000-square-foot warehouse in January 2004 in San Clemente, Calif., about three miles from the beach. In 2012, the brewery expanded operations, adding two new 120-barrel fermenters and one 120-barrel brite tank. It now distributes across the country as well as Japan and New Zealand. Stop by Left Coast's table to try Voodoo Stout, Hop Juice Double IPA and imported Lucky Buddha Lager from Sydney, Australia.

New Belgium Brewing Co.

New Belgium was opened in Fort Collins, Colo., in 1991. In 2013, it generated $190 million in revenues and is now the third-largest craft brewery in the country based on volume of beer sales. And with a second production facility in the works in Asheville, N.C., scheduled to be open by winter of 2015, New Belgium could soon become even bigger. You like winners? The brewery won nearly 30 medals at the Great American Beer Festival. Its flagship Fat Tire is very well known, but New Belgium has a huge lineup of other quality beers as well, which it'll pour at the festival: Ranger IPA, Rampant Imperial IPA, Snapshot Wheat, Transatlantique Kriek, Wild2 Dubbel, LeTerroir Dry Hopped Sour Ale, Salted Belgian Chocolate Stout and some of the Folly Pack canned beers.

North Coast Brewing Co.

Another pioneer in the craft beer movement, North Coast Brewing Co. opened in 1988 as a local brewpub in the historic town of Fort Bragg, located on California's Mendocino coast. Under the leadership of brewmaster Mark Ruedrich, North Coast has developed a strong reputation for quality, having won more than 70 awards in national and international competitions. Its beers are available in 47 states now, ranking it the 45th-largest craft brewer in the U.S. North Coast will have Acme IPA, Le Merle Belgian Style Farmhouse Ale, Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, Old Stock, Prankster and Brother Thelonious to share.

Shock Top Brewing Co.

Another brewery under the Anheuser-Busch InBev umbrella, Shock Top is focused on making sessionable, spicy wheat-style beers. Shock Top's original beer, a traditional Belgian-style wheat ale, started collecting medals back in 2006, and quite a few offshoots with different fruit twists have come along since then. You'll get a chance to try Belgian White, Raspberry Wheat, Honeycrisp Apple Wheat, Honey Bourbon Cask Wheat, Spiced Banana Wheat and Shockolate Wheat.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

I'm pretty sure the good people at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. laugh at the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks," because this Chico, Calif., brewery is one of the old dogs, established back in 1980, but it still continues to change the industry. This year it set the craft beer world on fire with an unprecedented seven-city traveling beer festival called Beer Camp Across America, followed by the year's most exciting mix-pack, a partnership with a dozen exceptional craft breweries that led to a 12-pack featuring 12 different beers. If you missed it, you can catch the beers from the 12 packs at Sierra Nevada's table in addition to its Pale Ale, a classic and the industry standard in my opinion, as well as Torpedo IPA, Ovila Tripel and Narwhal Imperial Stout, a malt-forward monster that clocks in at 10.2 percent ABV.

Summit Brewing Co.

Summit Brewing Co., of Saint Paul, Minn., is another brewery that launched with fanfare in the Natural State in 2014 and received a strong reception. It was founded in 1986 in an old auto parts warehouse and now ranks 23rd on the list of biggest craft breweries. Summit will be pouring most of its beers that are available here, including its 2014 Great American Beer Festival medal-winning flagship Extra Pale Ale, Saga IPA, Horizon Red IPA, Great Northern Porter and Herkulean Woods, which is brewed with spruce tips and Minnesota maple syrup.

Tallgrass Brewing Co.

Tallgrass Brewing Co. is based in Manhattan, Kan., a town nestled in the Flint Hills and surrounded by the Tallgrass Prairie. In 2010 Tallgrass began packaging its beers exclusively in cans instead of bottles. The beers brewed by Tallgrass are now sold in cans and on tap in 14 states, mostly in the Midwest, and it's getting close to moving into a new, larger facility across town. You can try the brewery's Buffalo Sweat Oatmeal Cream Stout, Vanilla Bean Buffalo Sweat, Ethos IPA and 8-Bit Pale Ale at the festival.

Tommyknocker Brewery

What's about 2 feet tall, grizzled, lives underground, wears miner's garb, commits random mischief and knocks on mine walls to warn of cave-ins? Tommyknockers, of course, according to Welsh folklore. So it only makes sense that Tommyknocker Brewery is nestled in the beautiful mining town of Idaho Springs, Colo., 30 miles west of Denver. The brewery has won 17 medals at the Great American Beer Festival alone through the years. Tommyknocker will pour Small Patch Pumpkin Harvest Ale, IPA and A Half, Maple Nut Brown and Jack Whacker Wheat.

Unibroue

This Canadian brewery is so good it almost makes up for the whole Justin Bieber thing. Almost. It produces a wide range of beers, although there is a focus on Belgian-style brews. Located in Chambly, Quebec, most of Unibroue's beers are bottled "on the lees," or containing yeast sediment. This practice provides additional fermentation after bottling and results in a beer that ages well if kept in the dark and unrefrigerated. It will be serving up samples of La Fin Du Monde, Maudite, Trois Pistoles and La Terrible, a 10.5 percent ABV Belgian Strong Dark Ale. Do yourself a favor and get out to Unibroue's website and read the wonderful stories behind the names of these beers.

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It's not an uncommon thing to say of a bar that "there's no place like it," but in the case of Jimmy Doyle's Country Club, this is more or less observably, even statistically true. A vast, brick, dungeon-like structure encircled by several acres of parking off Interstate 40 in North Little Rock, Jimmy Doyle's belongs to a vulnerable and dwindling species, the traditional American honky-tonk. Friday nights are for karaoke, Saturdays are for the house band. There are no other nights. There's a story some of the regulars tell, about a "great big old tall guy" who came sliding across the slick wooden dance floor up to the bandstand one night, saying, "Hey, can I come sit in with you guys?" The band said yes, because it was Toby Keith. The important thing isn't whether the story is true or not, I think, but that they tell it.

"What we do out there is a dying art," Michael Heavner told me recently. A music instructor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Heavner is a classically trained pianist who spends his weekdays among "educated musicians," as he calls them, but for the past 16 years has spent his Saturday nights playing keyboards in the Jimmy Doyle's house group, the Arkansas River Bottom Band. "I saw it happen," he said, meaning the decline. "Whenever satellite TV came along, Tunica [the gambling destination in Mississippi] came along, the D.W.I. laws changed, the economy. All of that started a downward trend for blue collar, workingman clubs."

In the peak years, some 20 years ago, they say you had to show up early to even get in the door. It was a crucial stopover for truckers and country acts both, the I-40 Galloway exit being home to one of the largest truck stops in the state and, in those days, a prime checkpoint for tour buses heading west out of Nashville. The landscape has changed now; the bar hasn't. "It's a step back in time," Heavner said. "It's kind of hard to explain."

To really understand the character of the place, its unlikely survival and what Heavner calls its "different vibe," you have to talk to its namesake, the man who founded the place in his own image and sustained it through good times and bad. And there have been bad times. On the phone with Heavner, I asked if he knew any particularly good Jimmy Doyle's stories. "Well," he said, pausing to think. "I know some tragic ones."

***

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, I met up with Jimmy Doyle himself, now 78 years old, at his bar, a place few have seen in the daytime. Originally built by Iranian immigrants, a family of grocers, the building is enormous and architecturally striking, with concrete walls 18 inches thick, faux-marble bathrooms (complete with ashtrays) and a metallic gate of ornate, Middle Eastern design over the front door. The closest other building, the place they send you if you forget to bring cash (they don't accept cards), is a liquor store called, ominously, First and Last Chance.

We met out back, where the remnants of the old sign — huge, wooden letters spelling out "Jimmy,""Doyle" and "Club," wired with 255 light bulbs — leaned against the side of the building. A tornado dislodged it a decade ago, though you can tell it must have been an impressive sight. Jimmy Doyle himself stood in the gravel lot, held out his arms and beamed, as if to say, This is it. He wore tight brown slacks, cowboy boots and a short-sleeve button-up print shirt featuring antique prop planes. "Come on in and I'll show you around," he said.

Jimmy Doyle, it should be mentioned, isn't a first and last name — it's a double first name, like Mary Catherine or John David. His family name is Brewer, as in Brewer Bottoms, the township 15 miles below Stuttgart where he was born in 1936. The son of a nurse and a moonshiner who "agreed to disagree," as he puts it, when he was still a toddler, Jimmy Doyle was shaped by the place, a 12-mile circle of swamplands along Bayou Meto. After his mother left, he helped his father make whiskey in the woods, pumping the water and making delivery runs with a little red wagon. His favorite stories from childhood involve running from "the revenue men" on horseback. "It's the only way we had to make a living," he said, though it seems they often didn't. Before he got out, he said, things got so bad that their kitchen was a 10- by 12-foot tent and they survived primarily off tree bark and "possum grapes" (similar to blueberries). He still remembers the day he joined the Navy — Dec. 6, 1954.

He wanted to show me around upstairs, an area he hardly uses anymore except as storage, so I followed him up the back staircase. The place was airy and empty, a concrete floor littered with memorabilia, holiday decorations and souvenirs from his various career ventures. It was an autobiography in junk: There were photo albums, books of handwritten lyrics, stacks of LPs, plastic Santas. He showed me the broadcast cameras he'd used for his public access TV show, "Jimmy Doyle's," back in the '70s and '80s. For a while there, he said, the show had been the heart and soul of his business, the thing that inspired him the most.

One room was filled entirely with small porcelain figurines — I counted four unicorns. By way of explanation, he said simply, "We went to Mexico a few times." Then he showed me into his old recording studio, which featured vocal and drum booths, a 32-track mixing board and an old Fostex tape recorder. Brown shag carpet covered the floors, around which were scattered broken musical instruments and boxes of unlabeled tapes. Live wires dangled from the ceiling. I asked when he'd last recorded there. "Hell, I don't know, 10 years ago?" he said. "I can't keep track of time."

Jimmy Doyle started playing the fiddle for family dances in the Bottoms. In the Navy, he led a band called The Hayseeds, and played on the ship — he made three Far East cruises — and in country bars wherever they'd stop. After his discharge, he wound up in San Jose, Calif., with $35 in his pocket. One day he heard a call for musicians on the radio: "Come on out to the Corral Club. Play with the band who played with Bob Wills." He was hungry, so he answered the ad. "Come to find out, they didn't even know Bob Wills," he said. "I stayed there a long time."

Soon he was a fixture in the emergent West Coast country scene, leading the house band and either opening or playing back-up for all the artists who came through San Jose: Wynn Stewart, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Freddie Hart. He earned a regular gig in Las Vegas, a TV show in Reno and eventually became semi-well-known for his stand-up comedy. "I was Mr. Doyle on the West Coast," he told me. "Then I came back to Arkansas and they said 'Jimmy Who?'"

This is the thing that is, on the one hand, most surprising about Jimmy Doyle, and, on the other, exactly what he's been trying to tell us for 40 years: For a moment there, in however specific a way, he was a big deal. As strange as it is to say about a man who named a bar after himself, he's arguably too modest. Ask him about the time he hung out backstage with a young Tammy Wynette while they watched George Jones, whom they both idolized. Or better yet, ask him about his own records. In the late '60s and early '70s, he recorded a number of singles in Nashville with producers like Pete Drake, the great pedal steel player who worked with Bob Dylan, The Beatles and just about every Nashville star of the era.

He had a gorgeous, malleable voice, full of sharp twang, vibrato and that hard-to-define quality common to all great male country vocalists, a sense of regret tinged with resignation. He sang songs about truck drivers, burning bridges and trading a "moment of passion" for a "lifetime of love.""Without a fiddle and a steel, I don't think it's country music," he told me, and his own music is appropriately decked out in all the trappings of the Nashville Sound's golden age. His records are also, without exception, un-anthologized and out of print.

There is only one way to purchase music by Jimmy Doyle, in fact, and it's as strange as you might expect. In 2009, he self-published a novel titled "If The Whole World Was Blind," based on a song he wrote in 1967 about an interracial relationship ("Then I heard somebody whisper/The girl she's not our kind/Should somebody tell him?/The poor boy he's blind"). He showed it to the legendary singer-songwriter Mel Tillis, who told him it sounded more like a book than a song, advice he took literally. He named the main character, a white Army veteran blinded in Vietnam, after his own son, Charley Bob.

A well-meaning and odd book, every page is filled with public domain clip-art to illustrate the story. It's sold exclusively at Jimmy Doyle's, and comes with a CD of his music, the only one currently available. The CD alone is worth the price of the book, which might be of interest only to Jimmy Doyle completists, though there are sections that approach something like self-revelation, mostly those that draw on his military experience and his love of flying (he owns a Mooney single-engine plane, which he still flies regularly).

"As the airplane gained altitude, things were getting smaller on the ground," he writes of one of Charley Bob's flights. "He thought, 'If we get any higher, we will be in heaven.'"

The book is also tinted with tragedy given the fact that the real Charley Bob was killed three years ago, shot four times by his wife in their home (she claimed it was self-defense and was convicted of manslaughter; the sentencing hearing is later this month). The younger Brewer performed regularly at Jimmy Doyle's and had even gone to Nashville briefly to try and make it as a country singer. "He was a guitar prodigy," Michael Heavner said. "A real product of his environment." One of his songs was reportedly a hit on the Christian Country charts, a song written by his father and inspired by 9/11. It's on the CD as well, track 4: "A Teardrop in the American Eagle's Eye."

***

We walked downstairs into the bar proper, and Jimmy Doyle switched on the lights, shading the whole room a dark, eerie red. His wife and business partner Patsy Gayle stood at the bar. They met in 1974, when Patsy's mother, then in the hospital, saw him on TV and insisted her aspiring-singer daughter seek him out. "You got to go out and see this guy," she told her. "He's a nut." She found him playing at the Red Gate Supper Club and ended up singing with him onstage that very night. "We met and that was it," Patsy told me. "We never really parted after that."

While we talked, an older man in a baseball cap walked in and sat down at the bar, which wouldn't be open for business until the following Friday, not that anyone seemed to mind. "What's up, Black Jack," Jimmy Doyle said, saluting the man. That was the only time Black Jack was acknowledged in my presence, and I soon forgot he was there. While I spoke to Patsy, Jimmy Doyle climbed up onstage and took up his fiddle, which is pure white. The stage is long and backed by velvet curtains, which seem all the more dramatic in the red light.

"We don't know which way to go with it," Patsy said, gesturing around the bar. "We've thought about giving it a face-lift. Making it something that could appeal to younger people." Jimmy Doyle started fiddling, slowly at first and then furiously shredding. It was some sort of improvised concerto, beautiful and startling. "But then people tell us not to change the place," she went on, a little louder so as to be heard over her husband. "So you don't know what to do."

She stared idly at the stage and recalled an old routine Jimmy Doyle used to do with a friend, something they called "Chester the Chicken," where a giant chicken puppet would dance around the crowd while they spoke for him. There were other memories too, like the time Alan Jackson played there before anyone knew who he was. Or the time Ray Price's bus broke down in the parking lot, and his whole band came inside and spent the night. She ran through a whole list of old friends, forgotten Grand Ole Opry stars, veterans of the Arkansas River Bottom Band (which, she estimates, number in the hundreds). "We're talking about them like they're here," she said laughing, "like they're still here with us."

Jimmy Doyle had reverted back to country and was singing now. His voice was magnificent. "Jimmy says he's not gonna get old, and I sometimes think he never will," Patsy said. Michael Heavner had told me the same. "The future remains to be seen," he'd said. "I know Jimmy Doyle, though; he'll stay there till the end." When I'd asked the man himself about the future of his bar, he'd shrugged and said, "I like the smell of smoke." I remembered the chorus to one of the songs from the CD I'd liked best, track 2: "I don't want to be a millionaire," it goes, "I just want to live like one."

Onstage, Jimmy Doyle started making strange, atonal sounds with his fiddle. "That's a train coming!" he shouted, and it did sound like a train. We all laughed. "That's a mule!" he said, switching it up, and it was. "Mule," he said gently, addressing the imaginary animal, "do you want some oats?"

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Everybody has stories about White Water Tavern, longtime owner Larry "Goose" Garrison told the Times in 2011. "Course we can't tell them all." Even now, a month after he died at 63, ask his friends for their best story about Goose — a nickname he happily carried with him from high school after he killed tame geese — and they smile and say, "I got stories, but you can't print them."

Peter Read, publisher of the live music guide Nightflying, met Garrison in the mid-'70s.

"It was weird at his funeral because everybody got up and talked about growing up with Larry. The most beautiful thing about the man is that he never grew up. He was a wild-eyed child of a man. That's really what made the difference."

His first bar, Slick Willy's, was a playland for adults, with air hockey, foosball, miniature golf, snooker, darts, pinball and more. He and David Corriveau opened it in 1977 in Little Rock Union Station (Corriveau and Buster Corley, who owned Buster's, next door to Slick Willy's, went on to open the similarly themed national chain, Dave & Buster's).

"I went down to Slick Willy's once on a Friday afternoon," Read remembered. "Larry walked up and said, 'Have you ever seen $10,000 in quarters?' On the floor of his office was an enormous pile of quarters. He said, 'Get down there and play in it.' He hopped down on the floor with his big butt and started picking them up with each hand and pouring them over himself." Read asked why the pile was there. "So I can play with it," Read recalled Garrison telling him.

Why the bar business? "I was out of my fuckin' mind," Garrison told the Times in 2011. Before Slick Willy's, he made a living by gambling — especially in whorehouses.

"One right over on State Street. The madam — Mama Lou, she lived in Searcy — she'd leave me the key. I'd stay there two days and gamble all night and win my ass off. I'd wait until these guys were drunk and then clean them out. I'm a decent card player, but I'm not a fool."

His luck didn't hold when he bought into the White Water Tavern in 1979. A month after he became part owner, arsonist Ron O'Neal burned it down. It was the first of three fires that nearly destroyed White Water — O'Neal set it on fire again in 1982, and in the late '90s a drunk motorcyclist crashed into the back of the building and busted a gas line. Each time, slow insurance payments kept him from promptly reopening. He never understood insurance companies' suspicions.

"You don't burn a bar that makes money. You burn a bar that loses money."

Garrison didn't have much more success with the short-lived White Water Tavern in Fayetteville, located in the former home of The Swinging Door, an iconic bar on Dickson Street with a two-story painting of a cowboy straddling the entrance.

"I come to town and I don't know anything about Fayetteville and there was this big ugly-ass cowboy on the front," Garrison said in 2011, "and I tore the cowboy down. Then I come in with a sledgehammer and knock the swinging doors off the front and stomped on them and broke them. No one told me they'd just gotten 'em fixed. Everybody in Fayetteville hated my guts. ... That cowboy cost me a lot of money."

Within the Arkansas music community, however, Garrison was beloved. He booked a mix of blues, folk, country and rock 'n' roll. Burger, The Cate Brothers, Larry "Totsy" Davis, CeDell Davis, Blind Mississippi Morris, Mojo Depot, Go Fast and The Salty Dogs were among the regulars over the years.

"He treated musicians with respect," said Amy Garland, a singer-songwriter who began playing at White Water 20 years ago and remembers nights when crowds didn't materialize, but Garrison still gave her a sizeable "cut of the door.""Goose never said anything," she said, "but I knew. ... He always kind of protected me. He was just a protector of a lot of people."

"He'd give people chance after chance," said Marianne Taylor, a bartender at White Water who knew Garrison for more than 35 years.

"He always took care of people even when they didn't deserve it," former promoter and doorman T.J. Deeter said. "People always say that about people when they're dead, but he really did those things. If you were his friend and you turned to him, he would help you out. He once gave me a car when I didn't have one."

In the mid-2000s, Deeter hosted the Arkansas Rockers Review, a showcase for local musicians of all genres: punk, hip-hop, metal, rock. He remembers regulars being turned off by the lyrics of some of the younger acts and of punk rock kids spitting on each other. But Goose would come to the bands' defense, Deeter remembered.

"[T.J.] got the bands that would never get to play anywhere else," Garrison said in 2011. "I thought they were the weirdest and most fucked-up people in the world until I got to know them, and shit, I loved them. I loved them."

In 2007, after his health deteriorated and the stress of running a bar got to be too much for him, Garrison began leasing the building to Matt White, Sean Hughes, Nick Coffin and M.C. Ferguson — the latter two left the business within a year. They were in their early 20s at the time.

"When they were training, Sean and Nick had big beards and wore those Castro caps," Garrison said in 2011. "And one of the old guys, a regular, said, 'Goddamit, Garrison, you're leasing the bar out to Palestinians. Those are terrorists.' I said, "Motherfucker, they're from Conway.'"

"He gave us a shot and we became friends for life," Matt White said. "Just about everything you did with him turned into an adventure, and I'll always be grateful for his huge generosity of spirit. He was simultaneously very tough and a huge sweetheart. Just hanging out with him made you feel better."

Last Saturday, White Water Tavern hosted an all-day tribute concert for Garrison, where some 15 bands performed. The event doubled as a fundraiser for a scholarship for local musicians that Garrison's family is setting up.

Bart Angel, drummer in Big Silver, The Salty Dogs and backing bands for his wife, Amy Garland, said the hours spent hanging out with Goose after gigs when the bar was closed were precious memories, even if the details have grown fuzzy.

"I've forgotten the jokes and tall tales, but ... I can perfectly picture Larry's cheeks glistening with tears and that whole big head just beaming. A big, pasty, blinding white light of pure joy and happiness."

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