Entries - Time Period: Divergent Prosperity and the Arc of Reform (1968-2022) - Starting with S

Located at 13600 I-30 in Benton (Saline County), the Saline County Career Technical Campus (SCCTC) offers courses in automotive technology, construction, cybersecurity, health sciences, HVAC-R, industrial technology, manufacturing, medical professions-CNA, networking, and welding, in addition to allowing regional high school students to earn college credit hours during their junior and senior years. The SCCTC was created through a partnership of several school districts, Saline County municipalities, the Saline County judge, state legislators, the Saline County Economic Development Corporation (SCEDC), and Arkansas State University Three Rivers. In 2015, Saline County leaders began considering a temporary 3/8-cent sales tax to fund the construction of a new career technical education center that offered ten pathways to high school students from the school districts …

Cecil Ross Scaife was an actor, record producer, music promoter, and businessman who worked with some of the biggest acts in country and rockabilly music. Originally from Arkansas, Scaife worked with Sam Phillips in Memphis, Tennessee, before moving to Nashville, where he started his own record labels. Though not a musician himself, Scaife was a success story for those working in the business side of the industry. Scaife was born on April 13, 1927, in Marvell (Phillips County) to Brooks Scaife and Elsie Lumpkin Scaife, both natives of Arkansas. The couple divorced in 1929, and Scaife’s father died suddenly a few months later in 1930. Scaife attended what is now the University of Arkansas at Monticello, where he was elected …

Monroe Schwarzlose was an Arkansas farmer and politician who was a perennial candidate for governor during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. In 1980, Schwarzlose stepped up to challenge Governor Bill Clinton, who had committed numerous missteps during his term. The seventy-eight-year-old turkey farmer’s improbable bid for the nomination in the Democratic primary garnered thirty-one percent of the vote, not enough to throw Clinton out of the race but giving a boost to Clinton’s Republican opponent in the general election. Monroe Alfred Julius Schwarzlose was born on September 6, 1902, to Hermann and Nathalia Schwarzlose, and there were two children younger than Monroe: Melanie, born in 1905, and Biance, born in 1907. The family hailed from Seguin in the …

Helen Elizabeth Boyd Selig was active in the business world and in civic matters, serving as mayor of Hot Springs (Garland County) from 1994 to 2000. During her tenure as mayor, the Hot Springs Convention Center was constructed. She was the first woman to chair the board for the Greater Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce, was named Woman of the Year three times, and was an influential leader of the 1992 effort to select Hot Springs as the site of the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts (ASMSA). Helen Elizabeth Boyd was born in Siloam Springs (Benton County) on July 16, 1937, to Ryland Samuel Boyd and Catherine Elizabeth Bell Boyd. After her high school years in Siloam …

Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets is a four-episode documentary television series that premiered on the Amazon Prime streaming service on June 2, 2023. Co-directed by Olivia Crist and Julia Willoughby Newton, the series uses the Duggar family of Arkansas, and the fame they acquired through the TLC reality television series 19 Kids and Counting, as a means of exploring the broader impact of Christian fundamentalism on American society and culture. The series attracted particular attention due to the involvement of Jill Duggar Dillard, who, as an adult, distanced herself from her parents and their ideology and publicly remonstrated her father for controlling the family’s lives and not allowing other family members a share in the monetary earnings their television …

Pamela A. Smith became the first African American woman to head the United States Park Police when she was appointed in 2021. She served for a little over a year before resigning to take a position with the Washington DC Police Department, later rising to the position of chief of police. Pamela A. Smith was born on January 4, 1968, in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) to Walter Lee Smith Sr. and Eddie Mae Bass Sanders. Her parents divorced when she was young, and Smith was raised by her mother and her grandmother, Ellatrise Bass. Growing up on the east side of Pine Bluff, she went through the local schools—Forrest Park and Oak Park Elementary Schools, Southeast Middle School, and Dial …

Robert Hardin Smith was a former Arkansas attorney best known for his string of high-profile thefts at archives in Arkansas and across the South and Midwest between 1995 and 2002. Born on February 19, 1959, in Prescott (Nevada County), Robert Smith was one of three children and the only son of Norman Murphy Smith and Nancy Ann Hardin Smith. Smith’s father served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War and went on to become a respected judge in several jurisdictions in central and southern Arkansas. Smith’s maternal grandfather, Buren Hardin, served as sheriff of Clark County between 1955 and 1958. Robert Smith attended high school in Stuttgart (Arkansas County), graduating in 1978. He attended the University of Central …

Snake Eyes: Murder in a Southern Town is a true crime nonfiction book written by Bitty Martin of Hot Springs (Garland County) and published by Prometheus Books in 2022. The book received much acclaim, garnering positive reviews, brisk sales, and requests from across the nation for the Arkansas-based author to appear on true crime media programming. Over the six years she spent writing the book and interviewing more than fifty sources, Martin uncovered underlying secrets about the death of a teenage girl in what was originally called an accident but later revealed to be a murder. The book’s title is evocative not only of the scene of the crime but also the era in Hot Springs history when it was …

In his long career as a journalist, Bob Lancaster wrote a single novel, Southern Strategy, based upon and perhaps inspired by his experiences as a young reporter during the crisis that followed the showdown between Governor Orval E. Faubus and the federal courts over school desegregation at Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1957. Southern Strategy, published in 1981 by Seaview Books of New York, followed the moral journey of its picaresque main character, Amos Shellnut, a contented sawmill worker whose life in a small town outside Little Rock is disrupted by the sudden flight of his sweetheart Norma to Hollywood to seek her destiny and also by discombobulations in his town caused by Faubus’s racial demagoguery. In the novel, Shellnut, …

Thomas Stacy was one of the world’s most accomplished masters of the English horn, performing with the New York Philharmonic for thirty-nine years, as well as appearing as a guest soloist with other orchestras in the United States and abroad. Upon Stacy’s retirement from the Philharmonic in 2010, famed conductor Lorin Maazel said Stacy was “without peer for decades. Many have tried to match him, none have succeeded.” Thomas Jefferson Stacy was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on August 15, 1938, and grew up in Augusta (Woodruff County). His father, Thomas Stacy, was a farmer and involved in the cotton business. (Later in life, Stacy joked that he was probably the only member of the New York Philharmonic who …

Star of India, an award-winning restaurant in western Little Rock (Pulaski County), has become a renowned part of Arkansas’s cuisine scene since its establishment in 1993. It is said to have been the state’s first Indian restaurant and has become known not only for its food but also for its service under the charismatic personality of chef/owner Sami Lal. Born in the Indian state of Punjab in 1956, Lal has said that he took an interest in cooking at an early age by watching his mother prepare the family’s meals. In 1979, he left for Hamburg, Germany, to attend cooking school. While a student, he found work at a local restaurant, starting as a dishwasher and quickly working his way …

Cyrus Arden (Cy) Sutherland was a professor at the College of Architecture at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), a leader in the movement to preserve the historic buildings of Arkansas, and a professional architect who designed numerous homes, libraries, churches, and school buildings in addition to directing historic restoration projects around the state. Cy Sutherland was born on January 6, 1920, in Rogers (Benton County) to James William Sutherland and Lena McSpadden Sutherland. He became an Eagle Scout before graduating from Rogers High School. He studied radio broadcasting at the University of Arkansas and the University of Iowa before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941 during World War II. Rising to the rank of …

James William “Jock” Sutherland Jr. was an ROTC student at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) who rose to command the U.S. Army’s XXIV Corps in the Vietnam War and retired as a lieutenant general. James W. Sutherland was born on February 8, 1918, in Bentonville (Benton County) to James William Sutherland Sr. and Lena McSpadden Sutherland. After growing up in Rogers (Benton County), he attended UA, where he was in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). After graduating in 1940, he was inducted into the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant through the Thompson Act, which provided regular army commissions to outstanding ROTC participants. Sutherland fought with the First Armored Division in Africa and Italy during …