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Hanger, Frances Marion Harrow

Frances Marion Harrow Hanger was a clubwoman, civic volunteer, and writer who was central to the cultural and public life in Little Rock (Pulaski County) from the 1870s until the middle of the twentieth century. Frances Marion Harrow was born on March 13, 1856, in Ottumwa, Iowa, to Francis M. Harrow and Harriet F. Humphreys Harrow. After she was orphaned at eight years old, she and her brother were raised by a collection of relatives, and both were afforded a fine formal education for the times. Harrow attended the women’s program at Iowa State University, the first coeducational university in the nation’s new land grant system. In 1877, she married Frederick Hanger, a prominent member of Little Rock’s farming and …

Harper, Tess

aka: Tessie Jean Washam
A Golden Globe and Academy Award nominee, Tess Harper has become a consummate actress known for portraying Southern women of grace and dignity. She is best known for roles in Tender Mercies and Silkwood. Tess Harper was born Tessie Jean Washam on August 15, 1950, in Mammoth Spring (Fulton County). She attended Arkansas State University–Beebe (ASU–Beebe), where she performed in several plays, as well as Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University) in Springfield, where she graduated with a degree in education. She married Ken Harper in 1971; the couple divorced in 1976. In the late 1960s, Harper began acting in theater productions and made appearances in theme parks, dinner theater, children’s theater, and commercials. Her first feature film …

Hartman, Ena

Ena Hartman is an unsung trailblazer of Hollywood whose smaller roles in 1960s media productions helped create a path for African Americans in film and television. African-American actresses working in the 1970s benefited from the trail Hartman helped blaze. Ena Hartman was born on April 1, 1935, in Moscow (Jefferson County). The daughter of sharecroppers, she was raised by her grandparents. At age thirteen, she moved to Buffalo, New York, to live with her mother. She dropped out of high school to open a restaurant, handling the duties of cook and waitress as she tried to earn money to go to New York City to become a model. She was discovered by a photographer in the lobby of a modeling …

Heiskell, John Netherland

aka: J. N. Heiskell
John Netherland (J. N.) Heiskell served as editor of the Arkansas Gazette for more than seventy years. During his tenure, he headed the newspaper during two world wars, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and thousands of other events. He was an active civic affairs activist and used his influence to guide the state through decades of change. J. N. Heiskell was born on November 2, 1872, in Rogersville, Tennessee, to Carrick White Heiskell and Eliza Ayre Netherland Heiskell. He was the elder of two sons. Heiskell’s father—a former Confederate officer, lawyer, and later a judge—moved the family to Memphis shortly after the Civil War. Heiskell, whom his family and friends called …

Helm, Levon

aka: Mark Lavon Helm
Mark Lavon (Levon) Helm was best known as the drummer and singer for the Canadian rock group the Band. Following the demise of the Band, he continued to have a successful music career leading his own band, as well as acting in numerous motion pictures. Levon Helm was born on May 26, 1940, outside Elaine (Phillips County) to Nell and Diamond Helm. He had two sisters and one brother. He grew up in Marvell (Phillips County) working on the family cotton farm but was always encouraged to play and sing music at home and in church. Helm knew that he wanted to become a musician at age six, after seeing bluegrass musician Bill Monroe perform. He began playing guitar at …

Henry, Orville Monroe, Jr.

Orville Monroe Henry Jr., the best-known newspaper sportswriter in Arkansas history, worked for the state’s two largest newspapers, the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat (later the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette). Although he covered other sports, he is most identified with writing about Arkansas Razorbacks football at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). Orville Henry was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on February 19, 1925. His father, Orville Monroe Henry Sr., was a traveling salesman who later became a farmer; his mother, Frances, raised eight children and took care of a very active home. When Henry was in the ninth grade at Pulaski Heights Junior High, he decided he wanted to be a newspaperman and worked on the …

Hill, Jack Edward

Jack Hill was a broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker who won national awards with station KAIT in Jonesboro (Craighead County) and eventually founded his own company in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to produce some sixty long-form features. Jack Hill was born in Rogers (Benton County), the only child of William Radus Hill and Grace Fields Hill. He attended Rogers High School, graduating in 1958 as senior class president. As a junior, in 1957, he played forward for the school’s only state champion basketball team. At the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), he majored in speech, participated in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program, and served as chaplain of his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapter. After obtaining …

Hogan, Dixon Howard (Dick)

Dick Hogan was a singer and actor whose entertainment career began in the mid-1930s and ended in the late 1940s. He is remembered mainly for his many film appearances during the 1940s, which included notable supporting roles in several popular war-themed motion pictures. Dixon Howard Hogan was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on November 27, 1917. His parents were Dixon Henry Hogan and Agnes Smith Hogan, and he had an older sister, Margaret. His father and an uncle, Ben M. Hogan, owned construction businesses that contracted for numerous Arkansas road construction projects. After graduating from Little Rock’s Central High School, he attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1934–35 before moving to California to further …

Holt, Georgia

aka: Jackie Jean Crouch
Actress and singer Georgia Holt had small parts in the movies and on television, but she was best known as the mother of pop superstar Cher and actress Georganne LaPiere, as well as being the grandmother of musician Elijah Blue Allman and LGBTQ+ rights advocate Chaz Bono. Georgia Holt was born Jackie Jean Crouch on June 9, 1926, in Kensett (White County). She was born in poverty; her father, the teenage Roy Malloy Crouch, was a baker, and her mother, Lynda Inez Gulley, was reportedly thirteen years old at the time she gave birth. Crouch would later have a younger brother, Mickey. Her father taught her how to sing and play guitar during her early childhood. After her parents separated, …

Home News (McCrory)

Walter Wilson Raney, an enterprising newspaper publisher, is credited with helping shape McCrory (Woodruff County) into a business center. Raney founded the Home News in McCrory in 1915, establishing the News as a Democratic paper published on Fridays. Raney printed on the masthead that the paper was “edited in the interest of McCrory and Woodruff County” and wrote in the first issue that citizens had solicited him to “give us a home paper.” In 1918, for printing the News, Raney installed the first and only typesetting machine in the county. Raney had begun his newspaper career in the printing office of the Woodruff County News (1901–1910), run by Gustave W. Kramer. After working for the Woodruff County News for two …

Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (HSDFF)

Billing itself as the longest-running documentary film festival in North America, the internationally recognized Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (HSDFF) takes place each fall over about nine days in Hot Springs (Garland County). Since its inception in 1992, sponsored by the Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute, the HSDFF has become renowned as a prestigious venue for showing documentary films and attracting celebrities, filmmakers, industry figures, and audiences from across the nation and around the world. It bills itself as the oldest nonfiction film festival in North America. The festival is a qualifying event for filmmakers competing for Academy Awards in Best Documentary Short Subject. The festival is one of about three dozen such qualifiers among thousands of film festivals. Celebrity …

Hot Springs Medical Journal

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hot Springs (Garland County) was home to the Hot Springs Medical Journal, first published in January 1892. Although medical journals were published in nearby locations including Little Rock (Pulaski County), Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri, the founders of the publication felt that the natural hot springs for which the city was named provided a great resource for many patients. They stated in the first volume: “The city of Hot Springs, Arkansas is…the greatest sanitarium on earth, and in a few years is inevitably destined to become the most universally frequented health resort in the world.” At that time, Hot Springs was already quite a tourist area. The resident population was 15,000, …

Hot Springs Village Voice

The Hot Springs Village Voice, founded in 1990, is a weekly newspaper in Hot Springs Village (Garland and Saline counties). The publication’s major emphasis is producing feature stories and covering local news, community events, feature stories, newsworthy area residents, recreational activities, and sports, along with locally oriented business reports, political coverage, display advertisements, and classified advertisements. Having an estimated circulation of 4,500, it is published once a week, with subscribers receiving their copy via the U.S. Postal Service each Tuesday. Jennifer Allen bought the newspaper from the Gannett Company in 2021. Hot Springs Village is the largest gated community in the United States. By the 2020 census, its population was 15,861, reflecting a growth from 12,807 in 2010. In the …

Hughes, David Terry

David Terry Hughes Sr. was a longtime journalist, photographer, and newspaperman from Benton (Saline County). Hughes’s newspaper career began with freelance photography for the Benton Courier at age fourteen. In addition to newspapers in Arkansas, Hughes worked for papers in Texas, Virginia, Florida, Illinois, Saipan, and Guam. He was the grandson of noted Arkansas poet and columnist Anna Nash Yarbrough. David Terry Hughes was born on February 8, 1948, in the Panama Canal Zone to Frank Hughes and Jessie Shaver Hughes. His father served in the U.S. Army; when he was stationed in Panama in 1949, he was killed while crossing the street when Hughes was only a year old. Hughes’s mother remarried but soon separated. His three half brothers …

Humbard, Alpha Rex Emmanuel

Alpha Rex Emmanuel Humbard was a traveling evangelist from Arkansas who became a well-known gospel singer, pastor, and pioneer in Christian television. Born on August 13, 1919, in Little Rock (Pulaski County), Rex Humbard was one of six children of Pentecostal evangelists Alpha and Martha (Childers) Humbard. In the summer of 1932, young Humbard watched a Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus tent fill with crowds in Hot Springs (Garland County). Although he would not attend such “worldly” diversions, he decided that he wanted to attract crowds like that to share the gospel. At age thirteen, he began broadcasting on KTHS radio in Hot Springs by singing gospel songs and inviting listeners to come hear his father preach at …

Hunnicutt, Arthur Lee

Personifying the rustic but savvy characterizations of his home state, Arthur Hunnicutt became one of the most sought-after character actors in Hollywood, being nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in 1952’s The Big Sky. Arthur Hunnicutt was born on February 17, 1910, in Gravelly (Yell County) and attended school in the Yell County area. He attended Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway (Faulkner County), now the University of Central Arkansas (UCA). The Depression forced him to drop out of college when he ran out of funds. Even so, Hunnicutt was already perfecting the ability to project his Arkansas drawl and persona into a character he played in many plays and movies. He began his motion picture career …

Hunting of the President, The

The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons was published in 2000. The book formed the basis for a documentary film titled The Hunting of the President first shown on January 23, 2004, at the Sundance Film Festival. The ninety-minute film, narrated by Morgan Freeman, was directed by Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason. The book examines the motives behind the investigation into what has been termed the “Whitewater Scandal,” as well as the news organizations and advocacy groups that tried to mire President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton (along with several of their associates) in scandal. Initial book sales were brisk, and the book was extensively …

Hussman, Walter E., Jr.

Walter E. Hussman Jr., who is best known in Arkansas as the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a third-generation newspaperman whose family acquired a chain of newspapers stretching from Tennessee to Missouri. As publisher of the Arkansas Democrat, Hussman went head to head with the larger Arkansas Gazette and won the so-called Little Rock (Pulaski County) newspaper war in October 1991. He purchased the assets of the Gazette from the Gannett Corp. and began publishing the Democrat-Gazette. Walter Edward Hussman Jr. was born in Texarkana (Miller County) on January 5, 1947, to Walter E. Hussman Sr. and Betty Palmer Hussman and raised in Camden (Ouachita County) with his two older sisters. His parents moved to Camden in 1949 when …

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Detailing her childhood in Stamps (Lafayette County), as well as in St. Louis, and San Francisco, Maya Angelou’s autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was first published in 1970 by Random House and nominated for a National Book Award. It was the first of a series of eight autobiographical novels that cemented her place as one of the great voices of African-American literature. The title of the book comes from the poem “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, which describes perseverance in the face of oppression. The book chronicles the racism Maya, a young incarnation of Angelou, encountered in the segregated town of Stamps and other places she lived, along with the sexual abuse she faced at the …

I’m from Arkansas

With a screenplay by Marcy Klauber and Joseph Carole (based on a story by Klauber), director Lew Landers attempted to blend romance, rustic Ozark comedy, and country music into the 1944 film I’m from Arkansas. Unfortunately, some of the Arkansas characters are portrayed as ignorant hillbillies, and the numerous musical numbers tend to muddle the story line. The plot centers upon Esmeralda, a sow, who has excited the tiny town of Pitchfork, Arkansas, by giving birth to yet another massive litter of piglets. The news quickly spreads and draws a number of visitors to the town for myriad reasons. Bob Hamlin (Bruce Bennett), a citizen of Pitchfork who has become a country music star on the radio, takes his orchestra—including …

It’s Alive!

Larry Buchanan was a producer and director of very low-budget films, with titles such as Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1966) and Mars Needs Women (1967). In his autobiography, Buchanan cheerfully called himself a “schlockmeister.” In the late 1960s, Buchanan formed Azalea Pictures to make cheap films for American Independent Television, the TV arm of American Independent Pictures (AIP), which specialized in low-budget B movies (though not as cheap as Buchanan’s) made by Roger Corman and others. Buchanan recalled that his instructions from AIP were: “We want cheap color pictures, we want half-assed names in them, we want them 80 minutes long and we want them tomorrow.” By “half-assed names,” AIP meant actors whose names would be familiar to audiences …

Joan of Arkansas [Television Show]

Joan of Arkansas was a 1958 unsold television pilot about a woman from Hot Springs (Garland County) who is selected by a government computer to be the first person on the moon. The pilot, written and directed by Philip Rapp, is the last filmed appearance of Josephine “Joan” Davis, a comedic actress who starred in a number of radio, film, and television projects in her life, most notably the television series I Married Joan. The episode opens with Dr. John Dolan (John Emery), Professor Henry Newkirk (Ben Wright), and Dr. Curtis Short (Wilton Graff) in an “impregnable vault” in Washington DC that houses Cerebright, a “top secret electronic brain” that is about to offer a “hope for peace” in the …

Jobe, John R.

John Russell Jobe worked as a newspaperman and then for state government, serving as Arkansas state auditor from 1909 to 1913. John Russell (John R. or J. R.) Jobe was born on August 24, 1855, in Ringgold, Georgia, to David Jobe and Sarah J. Harden (or Hardin) Jobe. He had seven sisters, as well as a brother, Benjamin F. (B. F.) Jobe, who also later worked in media and government. The family moved to Arkansas in early 1858 and settled near Searcy (White County), though Jobe had at least one cousin living in Marion County. The family seems to have had strong ties to the Cumberland Presbyterian Church: two of Jobe’s sisters married Cumberland Presbyterian ministers, and his brother married …

Johnson, Billy Farrel (Bill)

Billy Farrel Johnson of Conway (Faulkner County) is a well-known banker, broadcaster, and civic leader in Faulkner County. He has served as president of three financial institutions, broadcast athletic events on the radio since 1961, served as a justice of the peace, and sat on numerous local and state boards. Johnson is also a development associate for the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) athletic department and raises money for the Purple Circle Club, the primary source of outside funding for UCA athletics. Bill F. Johnson was born on May 15, 1939, in Conway, one of two children of Hulon Johnson and Norma Warbritton Johnson. Johnson attended Conway public schools from elementary through high school and graduated in 1957. He then …

Johnson, John Harold

John H. Johnson rose above abject poverty and racial discrimination to build a publishing empire that helped forever change the perception of African Americans in the United States. Johnson Publishing Company became the largest Black-owned and -operated publishing company in the world and launched Ebony and Jet, two very successful magazines that gave a voice to millions of Black Americans. Born Johnny Johnson on January 19, 1918, in Arkansas City (Desha County) to Leroy Johnson and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson, a cook in a Mississippi River levee camp, John Harold Johnson was a third-generation descendent of slaves. After the death of Johnson’s father in a sawmill accident when Johnson was eight years old, his mother married James Williams, who helped raise him. …

Johnson, Kenneth Culver (Kenny)

Kenneth (Kenny) Culver Johnson Jr. is a television writer, producer, and director. He is the creator of numerous Emmy-winning projects including The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk, the original miniseries V, and Alien Nation. Kenny Johnson was born on October 26, 1942, in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) to Kenneth Culver Johnson Sr. and Helene Maye Brown Johnson. His father was an electrical engineer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who helped build the Pine Bluff Arsenal. Johnson and his family left Pine Bluff after his father was transferred to the Pentagon near the end of World War II, and he was raised in Washington DC. His parents divorced in 1946, and his father moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). …

Jones, Jerry Louis

Jerry Louis Jones was an actor, screenwriter, and playwright best known for his collaboration with fellow Arkansan Rudy Ray Moore on the 1975 film Dolemite. He also had roles in such films as M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, The Human Tornado, and Disco Godfather. He was played by Keegan-Michael Key in Dolemite Is My Name, a film about Rudy Ray Moore and the making of Dolemite. Jerry Jones was born in Varner (Lincoln County) on February 16, 1927, to Louis (also spelled “Lewis”) Jones and Marie Jones. His father was a native of Arkansas and a railroad laborer in the Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) area. His mother was a native of Mississippi. His parents divorced when he was young, and his …

Jones, Oscar Eve (O. E.)

Oscar Eve (O. E.) Jones Sr. was a successful Batesville (Independence County) newspaper publisher and a state senator representing Independence and Jackson counties. O. E. Jones Sr. was born in Newport (Jackson County) on June 20, 1905, to Dr. Oscar Eve Jones and Frances “Fannie” Redman Jones of Newport. He had one brother, Lacy R. Jones. O. E. Jones was educated in the public schools of Newport and received a degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). His mother died when he was in his teens, and his father died about two years later. Jones went to live with his maternal uncle and aunt, Harry Brandenburg and Minnie Redman Brandenburg of Newport. On January …

KAAY

KAAY (AM 1090) has been one of Arkansas’s most influential radio stations since it came into being on September 3, 1962. The station incorporated a successful mixed format of music, religion, farm reports, and news that was innovative for the time. Shortly after it had come on the air, KAAY was also utilized by the U.S. government to broadcast propaganda to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1966, KAAY also successfully brought a new musical format to mid-America on the program Beaker Street. KAAY was born out of KTHS, the state’s first 50,000-watt AM broadcast station. KTHS (which stood for “Kum To Hot Springs”) officially came on the air in 1924 and was granted its new increased-power operating privileges …