My Life, page 4
We lived in that house from the time I was seven or eight until I was fifteen. It was fascinating to me. The grounds were full of shrubs, bushes, flowers, long hedges laced with honeysuckle, and lots of trees, including a fig, a pear, two crab apples, and a huge old oak in the front. I helped Daddy take care of the grounds. It was one thing we did do together, though as I got older, I did more and more of it myself. The house was near a wooded area, so I was always running across spiders, tarantulas, centipedes, scorpions, wasps, hornets, bees, and snakes, along with more benign creatures like squirrels, chipmunks, blue jays, robins, and woodpeckers. Once, when I was mowing the lawn, I looked down to see a rattlesnake sliding along with the lawn mower, apparently captivated by the vibrations. I didn’t like the vibes, so I ran like crazy and escaped unscathed. Another time I wasn’t so lucky. Daddy had put up a huge three-story birdhouse for martins, which nest in groups, at the bottom of the back driveway. One day I was mowing grass down there and discovered it had become a nesting place not for martins but for bumblebees. They swarmed me, flying all over my body, my arms, my face. Amazingly, not one of them stung me. I ran off to catch my breath and consider my options. Mistakenly, I assumed they had decided I meant them no harm, so after a few minutes I went back to my mowing. I hadn’t gone ten yards before they swarmed me again, this time stinging me all over my body. One got caught between my belly and my belt, stinging me over and over, something bumblebees can do that honeybees can’t. I was delirious and had to be rushed to the doctor, but recovered soon enough with another valuable lesson: tribes of bumblebees give intruders one fair warning but not two. More than thirty-five years later, Kate Ross, the five-year-old daughter of my friends Michael Ross and Markie Post, sent me a letter that said simply: “Bees can sting you. Watch out.” I knew just what she meant.
My move to Hot Springs gave my life many new experiences: a new, much larger and more sophisticated city; a new neighborhood; a new school, new friends, and my introduction to music; my first serious religious experience in a new church; and, of course, a new extended family in the Clinton clan.
The hot sulfur springs, for which the city is named, bubble up from below ground in a narrow gap in the Ouachita Mountains a little more than fifty miles west and slightly south of Little Rock. The first European to see them was Hernando de Soto, who came through the valley in 1541, saw the Indians bathing in the steaming springs, and, legend has it, thought he had discovered the fountain of youth. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson signed a bill to protect four sections of land around Hot Springs as a federal reservation, the first such bill Congress ever enacted, well before the National Park Service was established or Yellowstone became our first national park. Soon more hotels sprung up to house visitors. By the 1880s, Central Avenue, the main street, snaking a mile and a half or so through the gap in the mountains where the springs were, was sprouting beautiful bathhouses as more than 100,000 people a year were taking baths for everything from rheumatism to paralysis to malaria to venereal disease to general relaxation. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the grandest bathhouses were built, more than a million baths a year were taken, and the spa city became known around the world. After its status was changed from federal reservation to national park, Hot Springs became the only city in America that was actually in one of our national parks.
The city’s attraction was amplified by grand hotels, an opera house, and, beginning in the midnineteenth century, gambling. By the 1880s, there were several open gambling houses, and Hot Springs was on its way to being both an attractive spa and a notorious town. For decades before and during World War II, it was run by a boss worthy of any big city, Mayor Leo McLaughlin. He ran the gambling with the help of a mobster who moved down from New York, Owen Vincent “Owney” Madden. After the war, a GI ticket of reformers headed by Sid McMath broke McLaughlin’s power in a move that, soon after, made the thirty-five-year-old McMath the nation’s youngest governor. Notwithstanding the GI reformers, however, gambling continued to operate, with payoffs to state and local politicians and law-enforcement officials, well into the 1960s. Owney Madden lived in Hot Springs as a “respectable” citizen for the rest of his life. Mother once put him to sleep for surgery. She came home afterward and laughingly told me that looking at his X-ray was like visiting a planetarium: the twelve bullets still in his body reminded her of shooting stars.
Ironically, because it was illegal, the Mafia never took over gambling in Hot Springs; instead, we had our own local bosses. Sometimes the competing interests fought, but in my time, the violence was always controlled. For example, the garages of two houses were bombed, but at a time when no one was home.
For the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first five of the twentieth, gambling drew an amazing array of characters to town: outlaws, mobsters, military heroes, actors, and a host of baseball greats. The legendary pool shark Minnesota Fats came often. In 1977, as attorney general, I shot pool with him for a charity in Hot Springs. He killed me in the game but made up for it by regaling me with stories of long-ago visits, when he played the horses by day, then ate and gambled up and down Central Avenue all night, adding to his pocketbook and his famous waistline.
Hot Springs drew politicians too. William Jennings Bryan came several times. So did Teddy Roosevelt in 1910, Herbert Hoover in 1927, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt for the state’s centennial in 1936. Huey Long had a second honeymoon with his wife there. JFK and Lyndon Johnson visited before they were Presidents. So did Harry Truman, the only one who gambled—at least the only one who didn’t hide it.
The gambling and hot-water attractions of Hot Springs were enhanced by large brightly lit auction houses, which alternated with gambling spots and restaurants on Central Avenue on the other side of the street from the bathhouses; by Oaklawn racetrack, which offered fine Thoroughbred racing for thirty days a year in the spring, the only legal gambling in the city; by slot machines in many of the restaurants, some of which even kids were allowed to play if they were sitting on their parents’ laps; and by three lakes near the city, the most important of which was Lake Hamilton, where many of the city’s grandees, including Uncle Raymond, had large houses. Thousands of people flocked to the lake’s motels for summer vacation. There was also an alligator farm in which the largest resident was eighteen feet long; an ostrich farm, whose residents sometimes paraded down Central Avenue; Keller Breland’s IQZoo, full of animals and featuring the alleged skeleton of a mermaid; and a notorious whorehouse run by Maxine Harris (later Maxine Temple Jones), a real character who openly deposited her payoffs in the local authorities’ bank accounts and who in 1983 wrote an interesting book about her life: “Call Me Madam” : The Life and Times of a Hot Springs Madam. When I was ten or eleven, on a couple of occasions my friends and I entertained ourselves for hours by calling Maxine’s place over and over, tying up her phone and blocking calls from real customers. It infuriated her and she cursed us out with salty and creative language we’d never before heard from a woman, or a man, for that matter. It was hilarious. I think she thought it was funny, too, at least for the first fifteen minutes or so. For Arkansas, a state composed mostly of white Southern Baptists and blacks, Hot Springs was amazingly diverse, especially for a town of only 35,000. There was a good-sized black population and a hotel, the Knights of the Pythias, for black visitors. There were two Catholic churches and two synagogues. The Jewish residents owned some of the best stores and ran the auction houses. The best toy store in town was Ricky’s, named by the Silvermans after their son, who was in the band with me. Lauray’s, the jewelry store where I bought little things for Mother, was owned by Marty and Laura Fleishner. And there was the B’nai B’rith’s Leo N. Levi Hospital, which used the hot springs to treat arthritis. I also met my first Arab-Americans in Hot Springs, the Zorubs and the Hassins. When David Zorub’s parents were killed in Lebanon, he was adopted by his uncle. He came to this country at nine unable to speak any English and eventually became valedictorian of his class and governor of Boys State. Now he is a neurosurgeon in Pennsylvania. Guido Hassin and his sisters were the children of the World War II romance of a Syrian-American and an Italian woman; they were my neighbors during high school. I also had a Japanese-American friend, Albert Hahm, and a Czech classmate, René Duchac, whose émigré parents owned a restaurant, The Little Bohemia. There was a large Greek community, which included a Greek Orthodox church and Angelo’s, a restaurant just around the corner from Clinton Buick. It was a great old-fashioned place, with its long soda fountain–like bar and tables covered with red-and-white checked tablecloths. The house specialty was a three-way: chili, beans, and spaghetti. My best Greek friends by far were the Leopoulos family. George ran a little café on Bridge Street between Central Avenue and Broadway, which we claimed was the shortest street in America, stretching all of a third of a block. George’s wife, Evelyn, was a tiny woman who believed in reincarnation, collected antiques, and loved Liberace, who thrilled her by coming to her house for dinner once while he was performing in Hot Springs. The younger Leopoulos son, Paul David, became my best friend in fourth grade and has been like my brother ever since.
When we were boys, I loved to go with him to his dad’s café, especially when the carnival was in town, because all the carnies ate there. Once they gave us free tickets to all the rides. We used every one of them, making David happy and me dizzy and sick to my stomach. After that I stuck to bumper cars and Ferris wheels. We’ve shared a lifetime of ups and downs, and enough laughs for three lifetimes. That I had friends and acquaintances from such a diverse group of people when I was young may seem normal today, but in 1950s Arkansas, it could have happened only in Hot Springs. Even so, most of my friends and I led pretty normal lives, apart from the occasional calls to Maxine’s bordello and the temptation to cut classes during racing season, which I never did, but which proved irresistible to some of my classmates in high school.
From fourth through sixth grades, most of my life ran up and down Park Avenue. Our neighborhood was interesting. There was a row of beautiful houses east of ours all the way to the woods and another row behind our house on Circle Drive. David Leopoulos lived a couple of blocks away. My closest friends among the near neighbors were the Crane family. They lived in a big old mysterious-looking wooden house just across from my back drive. Edie Crane’s Aunt Dan took the Crane kids, and often me, everywhere—to the movies, to Snow Springs Park to swim in a pool fed by very cold springwater, and to Whittington Park to play miniature golf. Rose, the oldest kid, was my age. Larry, the middle child, was a couple of years younger. We always had a great relationship except once, when I used a new word on him. We were playing with Rose in my backyard when I told him his epidermis was showing. That made him mad. Then I told him the epidermises of his mother and father were showing too. That did it. He went home, got a knife, came back, and threw it at me. Even though he missed, I’ve been leery of big words ever since. Mary Dan, the youngest, asked me to wait for her to grow up so that we could get married.
Across the street from the front of our house was a collection of modest businesses. There was a small garage made of tin sheeting. David and I used to hide behind the oak tree and throw acorns against the tin to rattle the guys who worked there. Sometimes we would also try to hit the hubcaps of passing cars and, when we succeeded, it made a loud pinging noise. One day one of our targets stopped suddenly, got out of the car, saw us hiding behind a bush, and rushed up the driveway after us. After that, I didn’t lob so many acorns at cars. But it was great fun.
Next to the garage was a brick block that contained a grocery, a Laundromat, and Stubby’s, a small family-run barbeque restaurant, where I often enjoyed a meal alone, just sitting at the front table by the window, wondering about the lives of the people in the passing cars. I got my first job at thirteen in that grocery store. The owner, Dick Sanders, was already about seventy, and, like many people his age back then, he thought it was a bad thing to be left-handed, so he decided to change me, a deeply left-handed person. One day he had me stacking mayonnaise right-handed, big jars of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which cost eighty-nine cents. I misstacked one and it fell to the floor, leaving a mess of broken glass and mayo. First I cleaned it up. Then Dick told me he’d have to dock my pay for the lost jar. I was making a dollar an hour. I got up my courage and said, “Look, Dick, you can have a good left-handed grocery boy for a dollar an hour, but you can’t have a clumsy right-handed one for free.” To my surprise, he laughed and agreed. He even let me start my first business, a used–comic-book stand in front of the store. I had carefully saved two trunkloads of comic books. They were in very good condition and sold well. At the time I was proud of myself, though I know now that if I’d saved them, they’d be valuable collectors’ items today.
Next to our house going west, toward town, was the Perry Plaza Motel. I liked the Perrys and their daughter Tavia, who was a year or two older than I. One day I was visiting her just after she’d gotten a new BB gun. I must have been nine or ten. She threw a belt on the floor and said if I stepped over it she’d shoot me. Of course, I did. And she shot me. It was a leg hit so it could have been worse, and I resolved to become a better judge of when someone’s bluffing.
I remember something else about the Perrys’ motel. It was yellow-brick—two stories high and one room wide, stretching from Park Avenue to Circle Drive. Sometimes people would rent rooms there, and at other motels and rooming houses around town, for weeks or even months at a time. Once a middle-aged man did that with the backmost room on the second floor. One day the police came and took him away. He had been performing abortions there. Until then, I don’t think I knew what an abortion was. Farther down Park Avenue was a little barbershop, where Mr. Brizendine cut my hair. About a quarter mile past the barbershop, Park Avenue runs into Ramble Street, which then led south up a hill to my new school, Ramble Elementary. In fourth grade I started band. The grade school band was composed of students from all the city’s elementary schools. The director, George Gray, had a great, encouraging way with little kids as we squawked away. I played clarinet for a year or so, then switched to tenor saxophone because the band needed one, a change I would never regret. My most vivid memory of fifth grade is a class discussion about memory in which one of my classmates, Tommy O’Neal, told our teacher, Mrs. Caristianos, he thought he could remember when he was born. I didn’t know whether he had a vivid imagination or a loose screw, but I liked him and had finally met someone with an even better memory than mine.
I adored my sixth-grade teacher, Kathleen Schaer. Like a lot of teachers of her generation, she never married and devoted her life to children. She lived into her late eighties with her cousin, who made the same choices. As gentle and kind as she was, Miss Schaer believed in tough love. The day before we had our little grade school graduation ceremony, she held me after class. She told me I should be graduating first in my class, tied with Donna Standiford. Instead, because my citizenship grades were so low—we might have been calling it “deportment” by then—I had been dropped to a tie for third. Miss Schaer said, “Billy, when you grow up you’re either going to be governor or get in a lot of trouble. It all depends on whether you learn when to talk and when to keep quiet.” Turns out she was right on both counts.
When I was at Ramble, my interest in reading grew and I discovered the Garland County Public Library, which was downtown, near the courthouse and not far from Clinton Buick Company. I would go there for hours, browsing among the books and reading lots of them. I was most fascinated by books about Native Americans and read children’s biographies of Geronimo, the great Apache; Crazy Horse, the Lakota Sioux who killed Custer and routed his troops at Little Bighorn; Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, who made peace with his powerful statement, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever”; and the great Seminole chief Osceola, who developed a written alphabet for his people. I never lost my interest in Native Americans or my feeling that they had been terribly mistreated. My last stop on Park Avenue was my first real church, Park Place Baptist Church. Though Mother and Daddy didn’t go except on Easter and sometimes at Christmas, Mother encouraged me to go, and I did, just about every Sunday. I loved getting dressed up and walking down there. From the time I was about eleven until I graduated from high school, my teacher was A. B. “Sonny” Jeffries. His son Bert was in my class and we became close friends. Every Sunday for years, we went to Sunday school and church together, always sitting in the back, often in our own world. In 1955, I had absorbed enough of my church’s teachings to know that I was a sinner and to want Jesus to save me. So I came down the aisle at the end of Sunday service, professed my faith in Christ, and asked to be baptized. The Reverend Fitzgerald came to the house to talk to Mother and me. Baptists require an informed profession of faith for baptism; they want people to know what they are doing, as opposed to the Methodists’ infantsprinkling ritual that took Hillary and her brothers out of hell’s way. Bert Jeffries and I were baptized together, along with several other people on a Sunday night. The baptismal pool was just above the choir loft. When the curtains were opened, the congregation could see the pastor standing in a white robe, dunking the saved. Just ahead of Bert and me in the line was a woman who was visibly afraid of the water. She trembled down the steps into the pool. When the preacher held her nose and dunked her, she went completely rigid. Her right leg jerked straight up in the air and came to rest on the narrow strip of glass that protected the choir loft from splashes. Her heel stuck. She couldn’t get it off, so when the preacher tried to lift her up, he couldn’t budge her. Since he was looking at her submerged head, he didn’t see what had happened, so he just kept jerking on her. Finally he looked around, figured it out, and took the poor woman’s leg down before she drowned. Bert and I were in stitches. I couldn’t help thinking that if Jesus had this much of a sense of humor, being a Christian wasn’t going to be so tough.
