Descriptions of Johnny Sain vary wildly. Some in the Arkansas River Valley know him as a local writer specializing in the outdoors. Elsewhere, he’s better known as the baseball icon who pitched Babe Ruth’s last at-bat and Jackie Robinson’s first. Ask enough questions and you’ll realize they are, of course, different men. But for all their differences, they’re really just … one and the Sain.
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THE TRAIL was quiet. There was little wind to disturb the silence deep in the woods of Alaska’s interior. A single beam of light cut into the sub-Arctic darkness as Allen Moore’s headlight bobbed its way through dense pine forest. Hours ahead of the other mushers, he was making good time as he neared the…
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“Even knowing nothing of the story but the end, it was interesting to stand in the space, to take in the scene as it was. But to understand why things were as they were—why a woman wearing a purple coat roamed the space with tears welling her eyes as each item was cataloged and stuck with a little red auction tag—for that, you would need to go back to the beginning.”
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Our lives play out in places. Home is one. Work is another. “Third places,” however, tend to vary—and everyone has a place they call their own.
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An inside look at how, after four years in the making, the Arkansas Arts Center’s “Becoming John Marin” became the exhibition it is today.
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What does it take to brew a beer made exclusively with Arkansas-grown ingredients? Flyway Brewery’s Matt Foster is looking for the answer
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In 2011, at the age of 22, Seth Eli Barlow was told that he was dying, that stage 4 cancer was ravaging his body. When he moved from Washington, D.C., back home to Arkansas for treatment, he had only one friend in the state he could turn to. Collected from journals written at the time and interviews in the present, this is their story.
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At first glance, it seems there’s a rift between Tim Hursley’s professional and personal work. For nearly four decades, the renowned architectural photographer has developed a portfolio of clients with names like Warhol, Gehry and Safdie, while his personal work, in contrast, has taken him into brothels and funeral homes. But spend time with him, and you understand it’s all the same.
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“On May 23, 1961,” Dr. LaVerne Bell-Tolliver writes in the opening lines of her new book, “the Little Rock School Board designated twenty-five students to be the first African-Americans (then called “Negroes” or “Coloreds”) to attend four of the five public Little Rock junior high schools.”
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For years, this map-dot Delta town of 610 souls was home to two of the biggest names in Arkansas pie: “Ms. Lena” of her eponymous pie shop, and “Ms. Mary” of The Family Pie Shop.
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On April 16, 1985, then-Gov. Bill Clinton signed House Bill 132, which declared that both Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Robert E. Lee Day would be celebrated on the third Monday in January. This past year, more than three decades later, Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed Senate Bill 519, separating the two. To say that many people played a part in getting the state to that place, both publicly and behind the curtain, would be to grossly understate the point. This is the story of one of them.
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