As I said to the wife several times during the last few months, “I need a goddamned time machine.”
We historian types get this feeling on occasion. After all, the sources that come down to us in this benighted present often hidden more than they reveal. The past is replete with mysteries; how satisfying would it be to venture back and be a fly on the wall? The moment time travel is invented, I suspect the Texas Book Depository and Dealey Plaza will be so packed with tourists that Oswald won’t be able to get off a single shot.
But I don’t care about the JFK assassination or any other huge mystery. Nor does the idea of meeting the “great men” of the past much appeal to me. I have a very local reason for my desire to travel back in time: I desperately want to visit Bimbo’s Old Fashioned Restaurant and Wholesale Plant Shop in 1970s Little Rock.
You see, earlier this summer, the good folks at the Arkansas Times approached me about helping put together the 50th Anniversary issue you now hold in your hands. They wanted me to go through past issues and find compelling and critical pieces for reprinting or excerpting, from groundbreaking journalism to early reviews of classic restaurants. Anything that spoke not only to the history of the Times itself but also to the larger culture and community of Little Rock and Arkansas, they said.
August 1978 ad for Bimbo’s Old Fashioned Restaurant and Wholesale Plant Shop
Which is how I encountered the advertisement for Bimbo’s Old Fashioned Restaurant and Wholesale Plant Shop in the August 1978 issue, Page 36. Every issue after that, I kept watch for another Bimbo’s advertisement. But that was the only one I ever saw.
How did this business operate? What did it look like? I like to imagine a huge greenhouse dotted with the occasional restaurant table. You might say to your waiter, “Excuse me, but could we sit in the rhododendron section?” The menu would include not only the daily lunch specials, but also the latest perennials, and your inevitable to-go box might come with a flat of pansies or some precious orchid. Does that not sound wonderful?
What happened to Bimbo’s? Was it unable to overcome the general public’s unwillingness to conduct their burger-eating and plant-purchasing transactions under the same roof? No amount of historical research will get me any closer to the answer.
I have asked around, interrogating the old-timers (well, the older-than-me-timers). I showed one woman the advertisement I’d found, and she said, “Oh my gosh, 12th and Rodney Parham? We never drove that far in the 1970s. That didn’t even feel like Little Rock back then.”
Indeed. The Nov. 12, 1992, issue of the Times asked the question, “Should Little Rock accommodate Chenal Valley pioneers?” If Chenal residents were pioneers in the ’90s, 12th and Rodney Parham in the ’70s must have been a veritable wilderness on the mental maps of many in Little Rock.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” novelist L.P. Hartley wrote. That’s the feeling I had as I worked my way through those years and years of back issues. Sometimes I found myself longing for the past. For example, I learned that Little Rock in the ’70s was home to multiple Middle Eastern restaurants that featured lunchtime belly dancing performances, along with establishments called “Tramps Restaurant and Backgammon Club” and “Saddle Tramps Cowboy Disco.” Yippee-kai-yay.
But other articles made me realize just how precious is our present moment. In 1974 and 1975, what was then still called the Union Station Times published an article about a woman denied car insurance due to her reputation as “promiscuous,” and a moving piece on gay relationships, in which everyone was quoted anonymously for fear of reprisals. In a February 1976 article on mixed-race relationships, back then still considered scandalous, one parent said, “By the time he is grown, this world will have changed enough so that he won’t have to worry about being a mixed child.”
Though the past is alluring, it is not some golden age from which we have fallen. A time machine might get me to Bimbo’s, but it would also wind me back to a point in history in which sexism, racism and bigotry of all kinds were taken for granted much more than today.
Progress is not basic, and it is certainly not inevitable. But it is possible. The Arkansas Times has been here, through the decades, making that progress a little more possible — not only through journalism that exposes wrongdoing, but also through profiles of the people and groups working to bend the moral arc of the universe in their own little corners of Arkansas. Consider the Southern Baptists ministering to migrant laborers at a center down in Hope (the September 1981 issue), or AIDS patient Chris Beckham trying to support rural Arkansans struggling with the same disease (August 1986), or the school leaders in the Northwest Arkansas town of Lincoln attempting to address the problem of teen pregnancy with more than exhortations to keep those knees crossed (February 1988).
The folks at the Times have been doing that work for 50 years, or trying to. May they continue for 50 more.
Guy Lancaster is the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System, and has produced several books on state history.
P.S. And if you ever went to Bimbo’s, do drop me a line!
