My Redacted LIfe: Chapter Ten (Cont._2)

As I went about my business in 1971, the country and the world began to change. Some changes affected me. Some didn’t. Some would later.

I approached, but hadn’t quite reached, the average income in the United States of $10,600 per year. By the year 2018, that would equal about $65,700 per year. The “sailor home from the sea” was making progress.

Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed that a young upstart named Fred Smith, with ties to Little Rock, had developed a wild dream of starting a business offering overnight delivery of packages first by air, then by ground. “Crazy,” the leaders of Little Rock said. “Hmm,” the leaders of Memphis said. “That would sure be something,” those of us said who had been using the Greyhound Bus system for that purpose.

Up in Northwest Arkansas, things were quiet. The architect Edward Durrell Stone, a native, had once described, Fayetteville, the key city, as a “hotbed of tranquility.” Aside from occasional rowdy football games, it still was. But not far from Fayetteville, an obscure retailer had gone public with his company in 1970. Its initial stock price was $16.50 per share. Had one purchased 100 shares at that price then, by 2018 stock splits would have created 204,800 shares worth more than $17 million, with annual dividends reaching around $400,000.

The Ozarks would never be the same.

Ah well. Back at the apartment, I was going to work every day in an exciting, vibrant city in a respected, by most, profession and was moving up the ladder of success with amazing speed. I was making new friends in the neo-hippie community called Riverside Drive. An old college classmate named Cooper Burley introduced me around, and I was considered a close-enough neighbor to be deemed socially acceptable, particularly if I provided an occasional jug of wine and abided by the stricture that the street was a closed community and society at large had no reason whatsoever to even know of its existence.

Cooper had eased out from under his legal problems through a combination of luck, confusion, and family connections, mostly those of the young girl he had once quartered and whose parents saved the couple with understanding that she would not cross the Arkansas River Bridge into Little Rock without parental supervision.

The Vietnam war dragged on, even though 60 percent of Americans had turned against it. Returning vets were, as I did, joining a group calling itself “Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” The stage was set for disruption. None of it bothered me, though. I had laid down “my sword and shield,” for a gentler life, a life that would be nothing but a fast ride to success.

Beneath this peaceful surface though, swam a political creature, spawned in 1971 and destined to grow to city-destroying proportions with an insatiable appetite for destruction. In that fateful year, the U.S. Supreme Court of the United States upheld, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education 402 U.S the concept of using school busing to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States.

Rarely, in American history, had an event so created the epitome of the earlier mentioned “Miles Law,” or, where you stand depends on where you sit. No attempt will be made herein to broach the social implications or equitable justification of the case. Those discussions still divide Americans.

Suffice it to say that the ruling, and its aftermath, would have one of the greatest impacts on urban development patterns this county has ever seen.