Entry Type: Person - Starting with S

Glenn C. Swedlun was a popular twentieth-century regional artist active in Arkansas and Illinois. For almost forty years, Swedlun lived and worked in Eureka Springs (Carroll County). Glenn Swedlun was born in Illinois (either Cairo or Elgin, depending upon the source) on May 11, 1902, the first child of Frederick Ernest Swedlun and Cordella Florence Cayle Swedlun. He had one sister. Swedlun grew up in the Chicago area, where he completed one year of high school. For five years while a young man, Swedlun played professional baseball. At age twenty-seven, he gave up baseball to become an artist like his father. His father, a well-known Illinois landscape painter who worked under the pseudonym Ernest Fredericks, taught Swedlun the fundamentals of …

Barry Switzer is a native Arkansan who became one of the most successful football coaches of all time. He is one of only two people to win both a collegiate national championship and the Super Bowl. Barry Switzer was born in Crossett (Ashley County) on October 5, 1937, the son of Frank M. and Mary Louise (Wood) Switzer. Frank Switzer was a bootlegger and money-lender who spent time in prison. Both of the elder Switzers died under tragic circumstances. Switzer graduated from Crossett High School in 1955 and won a football scholarship to the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), where he graduated in 1960 with a degree in business. After a brief stint in the army, he …

Curtis Henry Sykes was a pioneering educator, community leader, and historian from the Dark Hollow community in North Little Rock (Pulaski County). Remembered as a “champion for justice, equality and motivation,” Sykes served as one of the first black principals in the Little Rock School District in the 1960s before the district became fully desegregated. He was also a driving force in legislation requiring the teaching of African-American history in Arkansas public schools. Curtis Sykes was born on December 21, 1930, to Clarence Jerrod and Arlene Sykes Jerrod at the home of his grandparents, Lee Andrew Sykes and Ella Sykes, on Pine Street in Dark Hollow. Lee and Ella Sykes adopted Curtis following the death of his mother two years …

Roosevelt Sykes was a leading blues pianist in the 1930s and is considered by many in the music world to be the father of the modern blues piano style. Sykes’s early musical experiences in Arkansas provided the blues background that served as the foundation for his later recording successes. He was a professional bluesman for more than sixty years, recorded on a dozen different labels, and played in St. Louis, Missouri; Chicago, Illinois; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Europe. Roosevelt Sykes was born the son of a musician on January 31, 1906, in or near Helena (Phillips County); many sources say he was from the sawmill town of Elmar, although that is likely due to an interviewer’s mishearing of …