September 16, 1995

Marlin Conover Hawkins, who had served Conway County as an elected official for thirty-eight years, died. One of Hawkins’s longest-running political feuds was with Gene Wirges, editor of the Morrilton Democrat. Wirges wrote several scathing stories about Hawkins on topics ranging from election irregularities, comparatively high patrol car expenses, a speed trap on Highway 64, and mishandling of fines collected. As these stories ran in the early 1960s, Hawkins enjoyed a contradictory set of headlines, which announced some positive gains for Conway County. When Hawkins retired from public office in 1978, Hawkins’s friend George Fisher, a popular political cartoonist, placed Hawkins with contemporaries such as Orval Faubus in a fictional rest home for Arkansas politicians, the popular “Old Guard Rest Home.”