My Redacted Life: Chapter 28

Early in my career as an urban planner, Jim Vines and I had an opportunity to work for the City of Hot Springs. Tom Ellsworth was mayor. His predecessors had eschewed the opportunity to seek help with urban development from HUD. Though it was late in the game, he called us in to help reverse that policy.

We worked on "the come,” which meant that we wouldn’t get paid unless we were able to generate a federally funded project for the city, one that included planning or engineering work. Oh, he did allow us the use of his family box at Oaklawn Park Race Track, on days we finished work early. The box wasn’t perfect. It was a few rows from the front and, maybe, 20 feet or so past the finish-line.

We withstood such imperfections and had a number of pleasant late afternoons there. The experiences only served to bolster my lifelong aversion to gambling. I was worse at it than I was at sports.

Anyway, we did well in our courting of HUD. We had made enough progress that two representatives from Washington, D.C. flew in to review some projects we had in mind.

Mayor Ellsworth prepared well. Always immaculate, he was more so that day, even carried a flower in the lapel of his tailored suit. At that time, City Hall had a large landscaped entryway with steps leading to the entrance to municipal offices. The Mayor’s office was on the left and large floor-to-ceiling windows offered a pleasant view of the entrance. All was set, including a nice coffee service the Mayor had brought from home.

The HUD representatives arrived and staff showed them in. A woman in, maybe, her early thirties and a man who looked a little older entered. They wore tailored business attire and an air of professionalism so typical of federal representatives in those days. Both looked as if they could have enjoyed successful careers in modeling. We all made introductions and sat for coffee.

The Mayor did the talking by prearrangement. He extolled the natural wonders of the city and stressed the investment the federal government had in them. He moved, again according to plan, to connect the vitality of municipal government to the success of the national park. He stressed how the city had always, even in ancient times, been a place of peace and harmony for diverse cultures. It carried the reputation as a welcoming place for all.

This seemed to interest the Washington duo. As a staffer served coffee, they began to ask questions that we, silently, viewed as “buying signals.”

The Mayor was “in his element” as they say. He offered a short, but vivid, history of the city and its marvelous treasures. All was going according to plan. The female of the duo straightened the edge of her skirt and leaned forward. The man wrote notes on a leather-covered pad. The Mayor had them in the palm of his hand.

Then it happened.

From outside, a body seemed to fly through the air and land, with his back to us, against the plate glass window. It stuck there, arms out, in sort of a “reversed crucifixion” pose.

The hitherto calm urban setting reverberated with a string of profanity that I hadn’t heard used with such fluency, description, and eloquence since I left the Navy. It erupted from the mouth of a large woman in a flowing dress who had suddenly appeared. She peeled the man from the window by an arm and flung him across the building’s entry plaza. She continued the string of profanity that, more than adequately, expressed her distaste for her victim.

This had taken maybe 15 seconds and Mayor Ellsworth had yet to move. By the time he did, a crowd had separated the woman from her hapless victim, but only after she had delivered a couple of hard blows to his chin, a move simplified by the fact that he was half her size.

As the police led the still-screaming woman away, the Mayor, ashen-faced now, attempted to regain his composure. The visitors stared. The man folded his notepad. Jim Vines and I saw the chances for a substantial piece of business being dragged away with the still-screaming woman.

It was to be true. Despite his being rumored as a possible candidate for Governor, and despite his election as President of the Arkansas Municipal League, we never again, Jim and I, saw the mayor in top form. He succumbed later to an early death from cancer. Too bad. He was one of the best.

He served well, his only defeat coming as the result of a case in divorce court going bad. Feelings over it had flowed from City Hall to erupt in plain view of very important visitors to the city. How does one plan for that?

A city staffer told us much later that the protagonists in the altercation reconciled and remarried. I never bothered to verify it, but it sounded probable. That’s how things work out sometimes in our state, maybe in others as well.