We had but one regret. There was excitement in Little Rock
that day. Two icons of Arkansas history were to be imploded that morning and
the whole city was prepared to watch, either in person or live TV. The majestic
Marion Hotel and its neighbor, the Grady Manning, had been fixtures in
the city for ages. Our schedules would force us to miss their end.
Jewish businessman Herman Kahn broke ground on the Marion
Hotel in 1905. The hotel bore the famous nickname "The Meeting Place of
Arkansas." The Marion Hotel had five hundred rooms, a marble fish pond in
the main lobby, green carpets, and green leather couches. The bellboys also
wore green twill uniforms. Interestingly, Kahn’s great-grandson, Jimmy Moses,
as a dreamer and developer, is making a significant impact today on the physical
setting of Little Rock.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Ford, before he was a
famous writer and during summers as a boy, lived in Room 600 of the Marion,
where his grandfather, Ben Shelley, was manager. Other famous guests of the
hotel included Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Douglas McArthur, Will Rogers,
Helen Keller, and Charles Lindbergh.
In our time though, the Marion and Manning had been more
widely known for phenomenon tinged with notoriety. They were favored meeting
places of the Arkansas legislature. In an infamous bar, in the Marion, known as the
“Gar Hole,” many, in not most, of the legislative decisions that determined our
state’s future were made during that era. Note to my out-of-state friends: the
gar is a trash fish, native to Arkansas lowlands, that grows to great lengths.
They say the bar had a stuffed one on the wall, but I never saw it.
Stories abound, some even repeatable. I’ll share one that I
heard years after the Gar Hole ceased to exist. An old barber, who had worked
in the Marion during the heyday of legislative history, told it to me. It occurred,
this story, during the reign of State Representative Paul Van Dalsem, one of the
acknowledged bosses of the legislature for years. Yes, he’s the one who became
locally infamous for his remark about some female detractors. All he said was
that in Perry County (his home), such would-be troublemakers were kept “barefoot
and pregnant.” Arkansas women were a little touchy back in those days. Many
still are. Others have become inured to such degradations.
Anyway, according to my barber, the representative became
outraged when he heard that the Gar Hole was raising the price of a beer from a
quarter to thirty cents. Almost immediately, a bill appeared on the legislative
agenda that would seriously and adversely affect bars in our state fitting the
description of the infamous Gar Hole. Next day, it was announced that the price
of beer stayed at a quarter. The bill disappeared into the dustbin of
legislative history.
So that was what the City of Little Rock and the State of
Arkansas were going to lose that day. One might say it was the end of an era.
One would be more accurate in saying that the day would begin the evolution of
an era.
As William Faulkner once observed in his famous novel, Requiem
for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
The Paul Van Dalsems and his pals from the Arkansas
Legislature still hang out here, in spirit, if not in body. They all changed political
parties a few years ago. Don’t ask me to explain. The answer is highly
complicated but terrifyingly simple. Decisions affecting our state are still
being made in bars and secret meeting places. Those places just aren’t in our
state, where innocent-looking barbers might overhear.
But John Woodruff and I knew nothing of all that on this
fine winter morning. All we knew was that we were off on an adventure in a city
that we both loved.
 |
| Our seat of government? |
No comments:
Post a Comment