The Arkansas Times officially turns 50 this month, and our golden anniversary issue is on Central Arkansas newsstands now. It’s packed with curated archival material from the last 50 years, loosely arranged by decade.
It’s intended to be neither a history of Arkansas nor the Times — instead, think of it as a scrapbook, with all the randomness that entails. Unless otherwise noted, all images below are from challenging copies of the Arkansas Times published in the 1990s. Without further ado, here’s the third installment in our by-the-decades tour of a half-century of the Arkansas Times.
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In the 1970s and ‘80s, the River Valley town of Dyer was home to the headquarters of a cult established by Tony and Susan Alamo, a pair of would-be Hollywood entertainers turned evangelists who used their flock of followers as free labor to build a business empire that spanned multiple states. This report appeared in the August 1991 Arkansas Times under the byline “P.K. Kidd,” several months after federal authorities had seized Tony Alamo’s 268-acre compound overlooking Interstate 40 and auctioned off its contents to fulfill a court judgment in a suit brought by former disciples in California. By that time, Susan was long dead, and the FBI had been chasing Tony — described by Kidd as a “master of disguise” — for over two years.
Alamo’s criminal record also includes an arrest for statutory rape in 1953 in Montana and grand larceny and mail fraud charges in Los Angeles in 1953 and 1964. And Alamo has substantial tax problems stemming from the untold millions he accrued on the backs of religious followers who worked for free because of what federal authorities describe as “mind control and strict discipline.”
Alamo had used his uncanny ability to disguise his looks and probably roamed among a national network of homes that served over the years as cult havens for disciples whose parents were trying to find them. He is 5 feet 9 inches, but he wore boots that added 6 inches to his height. When arrested July 5 at a rented house in Tampa, Fla., where he lived with a few followers … [he] compared his persecutions to Christ’s. …
Alamo is a self ordained “world pastor” of a so-called Christian ministry — a cult, say the authorities — that hates the Vatican, teaches that the Pope is homosexual, has dominated the minds and bodies of youthful followers, physically abused its disciples, and used followers as free labor in violation of labor and tax laws to build a multi-million-dollar conglomerate. The Alamo Foundation enterprises include tape ministries, television and radio ministries, a restaurant, a cement mixing plant, a pig farm near Chester, and a retail operation to sell glitzy designer denim jackets … .
Those denim jackets, hand-decorated by the Alamo faithful, sold for as much as $1,400 at a Nashville, Tennessee, retail outlet operated by the cult. An April 1991 auction drew bidders from New York, California and elsewhere in search of “jackets featuring city skylines, patriotic themes, and likenesses of entertainment stars such as Ronnie Millsap or Dolly Parton,” Kidd wrote. “Some of the celebrity faces on the jackets sported human hair, earrings and sunglasses. … Some went for thousands at the auction.”
Part of the auction was held at the recently vacated Alamo compound, Kidd wrote:
The flock had abruptly left … leaving meals half-prepared on the stove or half-eaten on the table, abandoning thrown-down bicycles in the middle of the road.
It was as if Jesus had called the Alamo-ites home. But the call had come one February evening from Tony Alamo in exile — by word of mouth through a true chain of command. He said federal authorities were getting ready to seize the compound and that they would kill the followers. He ordered someone to get Susan’s coffin out of there because the feds wanted either to sell it or desecrate it.
Fish still swam in aquariums that were almost black with algae. Clothes still hung in closets. Boxes of family pictures lay scattered about … . The most striking sight was a kitchen table, still set for dinner, with dried, molded, discolored food in the plates. …
It appeared that the followers were energized by caffeine. Giant plastic bags of coffee, 200 to 300 pounds, were found in the administrative offices. … Bibles were everywhere. …
Alamo gained notoriety after Susan’s death [in 1982] by forcing their followers … to pray continuously for her resurrection. He kept her embalmed body on display in the dining room of their plush mansion for nearly two years before he allowed the casket to be moved to the specially built marble mausoleum.
Robert Miller, one of the former disciples who won the judgment against Alamo, recalls that Alamo kept the casket in the house “to transfer Susan’s power over the Foundation to himself.”
Former followers agree that Susan was more active, charismatic, and personally persuasive — more spiritual — and that Tony provided the muscle and business oversight … .
“[S]he could preach and make you feel like you were in the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus. In retrospect, they are absolutely evil,” [Miller said.]
The Tony Alamo saga didn’t end there. He served prison time for tax evasion in the ‘90s, but set up shop at a up-to-date compound in Miller County upon release. He took to the radio waves, broadcasting his gospel in the U.S. and to followers in Africa and Asia. In 2005, Tony Alamo was arrested for trafficking underage girls across state lines. Several victims testified they had been sexually abused by Alamo, forced to become his “wives” when as youthful as 8 years ancient. Alamo was sentenced to 175 years in prison, where he died in 2017 at the age of 82.
MAGAZINE TO TABLOID: Leslie Newell Peacock (center) and Max Brantley joined Mara Leveritt (standing) at the Times.
Leveritt raised an initial $680,000 to fund the mission of keeping the Gazette’s voice alive. But with a vast staff and a restricted subscriber pool, the money soon ran out. The solution: Give the product away. Here’s Leveritt in the 2014 oral history, recalling those dicey days in the mid-’90s:
We were doing 30,000 copies a week selling them, mostly through subscription statewide, which is challenging because your advertisers aren’t statewide, they’re mostly in Little Rock.
We were down to about $20,000 in the bank. I was losing $220,000 in circulation annually, and I talked to the publisher of the Memphis Flyer, who was distributing a free weekly, and he was making money. So we went free, we moved our circulation more into Little Rock, and we bought news racks and suddenly we were evident all over the city. Advertisers started seeing results. We hit the mountain and got the nose back up and started making money again.
Political cartoonist George Fisher was yet another longtime Arkansas Gazette staffer who migrated to the Arkansas Times in the wake of the Gazette’s 1991 closure. His beloved panels ran on our editorial page throughout the following decade. A look back at Fisher’s work from the ‘90s reveals plenty of similarities to our own era, such as this May 21, 1992, cartoon depicting the precarity of the Roe v. Wade decision at the time.
In a landmark 5-4 decision issued later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right to an abortion enshrined in Roe but allowed states to impose some restrictions. Thirty years later, in 2022, a more conservative Supreme Court finally struck down Roe, allowing Arkansas to impose a near-total ban.
Like the Arkansas Times, KABF-FM, 88.3, is celebrating a substantial milestone in 2024. Still helmed by longtime program director and Wrightsville native John Cain — now 87 — Little Rock’s community radio station turned 40 in August. “A DJ person is the last person I’ll consider to host a show on KABF. They do things the DJ way. We don’t want that. The people here have to be interested in larger issues,” Cain said in a 1999 piece by Times writer Doug Smith on the occasion of the 100,000-watt station’s 15th year. The profile spotlighted enduring shows like “Bharati Sangeet” and “Heartbeat of the Nation” (hosts of the two programs pictured above), both of which continue to take over the airwaves on Saturday mornings.
A up-to-date listener tuning in on Saturday morning might think he’s picking up Bombay, through some freak of reception. What he’ll hear from 7 to 9 is Indian music — Indian Indian, as opposed to American Indian — a music that sounds fairly weird to most Arkansans, or most Americans for that matter. Mixed in with the music is Hindi elated talk by the host, his friends and guests.
After the Indian Indians leave, the American Indians take over, and now there is a lot of drum beating and chanting, interspersed with discussion of public affairs from a Native American viewpoint. Here is more stuff unheard on other radio stations in these parts.
This must be some kind of canned programming, the up-to-date listener thinks; these people can’t be from around here. He is very wrong.
Little Rock’s community radio station celebrated its 15th anniversary in August, still doing pretty much the same thing it has always done: giving voice to people who don’t get heard elsewhere, allowing the expression of unpopular opinions, exposing the community to cultures and ideas that it wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise, and catering to the fans of various musical genres (blues, jazz, gospel, bluegrass, etc.) that don’t get played on the commercial stations. KABF does all this with unpaid volunteers who give up their own time to keep the station on the air 24 hours a day, and with listeners — many of them low-income — who must contribute most of the money to sustain the operation. Even people who were sympathetic in the beginning never thought the noble experiment would last so long. It may not flourish — life for KABF will always be a struggle — but it endures.
WEST MEMPHIS THREE: A drive to convict somebody, anybody, of the unthinkable triple murder led to guilty verdicts for Damien Echols (left), Jason Baldwin (far right) and Jessie Misskelley.
In the early ‘90s, the state was riveted by the murders of three youthful boys in West Memphis and the trial of three local teenagers accused of the crime. Arkansas Times reporter Mara Leveritt, who eventually authored two books on the West Memphis Three, is rightfully remembered as the driving force behind our coverage of the case over almost two decades. But it was another Times writer, Bob Lancaster, who attended the murder trials of Jessie Misskelley (in Corning) and Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols (in Jonesboro) in 1994.
Lancaster’s brilliant report in the April 7 issue that year (the full version is here) foretold the problems that would bedevil the case in the following years and ultimately lead to the release of Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley in 2011. Thirty years later, Echols continues to fight for further DNA testing of physical evidence to prove his innocence.
Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin are tried together here, much to the disadvantage of youthful Baldwin, since much of the focus of the prosecution is on Echols, the “ringleader,” as one of the prosecutors called him, trying to portray him as a Devil-driven monster who was capable of the crime and therefore must have done it. He’s sardonic and remorseless, but what he conveys isn’t cold-hearted menace; it’s a disturbed boy lost in a theatrical posture that he’s tried to fashion into an identity. More pitiful than scary. Baldwin throughout the trial has the slightly drained look of a kid who’s been called to the principal’s office and isn’t quite sure how earnest his situation is. …
About the only thing anyone ever asked me about the trials was whether I thought the defendants were really the murderers. I vacillated on this. Some days I thought yes, sure as the world they did it. But then the doubts would return — the suspicion that these boys were being tried because somebody had to be, and theirs was the misfortune of having been convenient when the plausible leads came to nothing: the serial-killer transient, the psycho trucker, the bloody black guy, the brutal stepdaddy of one of the victims. I never got the sense that the trials were an earnest exploration of the question of whodunit. They were, bottom line, show trials — by people under pressure to “do something” — something tidy and legal — about a right-here-in-River-City atrocity. By two sides each looking to win the case by showing up the opposition as just a little more incompetent and ineffective than itself. … It’s only too fitting that HBO filmed the entire trashy production, for a TV movie. …
Toward the end of the second trial, the Jonesboro trial, another question arose more pressing than whodunit. It was, had these boys been proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in this court of law? This one was easier to answer, the answer being no. They hadn’t been proved guilty. They hadn’t been proved anything. When the prosecution rested the state’s case, about all it had proved was (1) that the murders had indeed occurred, and (2) how the victims died. It had proved the deed and the how, but not the who, the why, the where, or even the when. Its who, why, where, and when were supposition, guesswork, rumor, and bad courtroom Vaudeville. No motive, opportunity not clearly established, time of death disputed, and not a single shred of real evidence linking any of the defendants to the crime. What case? …
The burden on the Jonesboro jury was, further, knowing there’d be no more defendants in the West Memphis murders; no additional trials. Either these boys would be pinned with those murders or nobody would, ever. And if no one was, it wouldn’t be the prosecution that would be said to have failed; it would be the jury. It would be the jury who’d have to look those mothers and daddies in their strained and tearless and hollowed faces and tell them, “Sorry about your babies, but the demands of the law, the presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt, etc. etc.”
You might’ve got up a California jury that would’ve and could’ve done that. Not here.
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The prosecutors in the West Memphis murders didn’t establish a motive, and didn’t try to very challenging or very long. They looked foolish, and actually jeopardized their case (risked letting it slip over into absurdity) when they did try. Sporadically they portrayed Damien Echols as a novice dabbler in the occult, suggesting he choreographed the murders of those little boys as a kind of ritual blood sacrifice. Satanism would endow the case with a motive. But the prosecutors never produced any evidence to show that Echols had anything beyond a jerkoff Metallica-level interest in witchery and hobgoblins, and they could only conjecture (or hint around about it, in slightly embarrassed fashion) that his “beliefs” in regard to these matters might have inspired or driven him to contemplate murder, much less actually commit it. The one “cult expert” they put on the stand was a melancholy ancient retired cop from up North somewhere who got his expertise via correspondence courses from some California academy that’s undoubtedly a post-office box, and he couldn’t rightly say — though he was willing to guess — whether the murders might have been “cult-related” since there was no evidence pointing in that direction, or in any direction. The prosecutors convicted Echols of checking certain suspicious books out of the public library, and copying off murky passages (“full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”) from the likes of William Shakespeare. God lend a hand him if he’d ever discovered Poe. And yet this vague proposition of the murders as an expression of an uninformed boy’s conception of the demands of demonology was the state’s entire case. That’s all we had. And an obliging jury — and a judge as dedicated to bringing forth convictions as he was to looking good — called it enough.
In March of 1996, Judith M. Gallman reported on the inception of the River Market District, the “decrepit warehouse district” aspiring to architectural and cultural renaissance via real estate magnate Jimmy Moses, Little Rock City Director Dean Kumpuris and a boatload of taxpayer dollars. “Total cost to the public: multimillions. Private contributions: multimillions. Public-private benefit: unmeasurable,” Gallman wrote.
Dust is flying and bulky equipment is grinding as walls go down and buildings go up — a farmers market, library and museum. … There’s more to come: an entrance to lure customers to what developers sell as a dynamic retail-office district, expansions at the Statehouse Convention Center to the west, trolley-style buses, a link to North Little Rock by lithe rail vehicle and a pedestrian footbridge leading to a spanking up-to-date arena and a up-to-date and improved North Little Rock riverfront.
Reactions to the upheaval, Gallman noted, were varied. Patrick Henry Hays, then-mayor of North Little Rock, dreamed of an aquarium, or “a gondola under one of the river bridges.” An “unhappy taxpayer, Skip Cook, sued the city for spending tax money on a farmers market when, he contends, voters thought they were approving park improvements.”
A few months later, the Arkansas Times reviewed the up-to-date attractions in an article called “Rating the River Market,” at the time home to Andina Cafe & Coffee Roastery, Shaka Smoke Lodge, an Emerald Coast outpost, River China, a condiment shop called Great Southern Sauce Co., at least two boutiques selling live plants and herbs, and something called Double D’s Bodacious B-B-Q. “After a rocky start — the market opened before all vendors were ready, one food stall had already folded and sidewalk construction continues to cause migraines,” our Oct. 15, 1996, issue said, “the place has a finished and alluring look inside.” Two stalls that were there at the beginning remain open today: Big on Tokyo and Casa Mañana.
Nearly three decades later, the food court still lures downtown office workers and Statehouse Convention Center tourists in need of a quick lunch, and the weekend bar scene attracts crowds, but the River Market District is struggling. As restaurants like David’s Burgers and Cannibal & Craft shutter or move elsewhere, city leaders are pondering upgrades to the market. The city’s first tourism master plan, introduced in January 2023 by the Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau, proposes a reimagined Ottenheimer Hall with live music, extended hours, dinner service and alcohol sales.
In May 1995, we selected our first Arkansas Times Academic All-Star Team, a collection of the top-performing high school students in the state. Out of more than 300 nominations from schools and districts across Arkansas, judges selected 50 finalists and 20 winners from the class of ‘95. “They stand as living proof that good things are happening in Arkansas schools,” the Times said back then. After three decades (and God knows how many nominees) we’re still proud to honor a up-to-date class of Academic All-Stars every spring.
When Vino’s started brewing beer in 1993, the Arkansas Times “greet[ed] the arrival of Little Rock’s first microbrewery with something like the euphoria that accompanies papal visits to South American countries.” But upon sampling the pale ale, our reviewers, self-proclaimed “authorities” on the subject, declared the now-classic Vino’s beer to be “OK.”
“It’s insipid. It still far outstrips 90 percent of American beers, but as a gourmet brew it leaves much to be desired,” we sniffed. Thirty years later, Vino’s Firehouse Pale Ale is still going robust, and we’re eating our words. (In fact, we’re proud to say Vino’s is brewing a restricted edition “Bottom Feeder Lager” in honor of the Arkansas Times’ 50th and our catfish mascot.)
Vino’s owner Henry Lee described the early brewing process in an oral history published by the Arkansas Times in 2022: “We piecemealed a system together. Our first kettle, a steam kettle that we modified, came from Cummins Prison. We were mashing out with an ice chest with a copper screen bottom and fermenting in open 50-gallon trash cans upstairs. We didn’t have a lot of temperature control. The beer was either really good or really bad.”
In November 1992, the Arkansas Times and its newly famed squadron of journalists were riding high. Bill Clinton’s ascent to the presidency spelled vindication for a state haunted by its shameful past. “Remember 1957? The era it ushered in ended Tuesday,” Mara Leveritt wrote in the Nov. 5, 1992, issue. Senior Editor Richard Martin documented the “carnival atmosphere” that prevailed in Little Rock on Election Day, snagging valedictory quotes from celebrities from Richard Dreyfuss to Hunter S. Thompson that night as the results poured in.
CENTER OF THE WORLD: The week after the election, our cover spoofed The New Yorker’s classic illustration of a Manhattanite’s view of the country.
The entire world had questions about Bill Clinton, and babyfaced columnist John Brummett had answers in his column the following week. A Boston radio station put him on the air and in the scorching seat with a question about Gennifer Flowers: “How do the people of Arkansas feel about their governor carrying on a 12-year affair with a woman and rewarding her with a state job?” A Connecticut psychologist whose specialty was to analyze presidents’ childhoods for the whys behind their attitudes and behaviors wanted Brummett to find out who tripped baby Bill on the kindergarten playground, an answer the psychologist suggested could hold the key to Clinton’s politics. A German magazine writer marveled to Brummett at Hot Springs nightlife: “I went to what you call this honky-tonky. All these people, poorly dressed, looking inbred, doing primitive dances and drinking heavily. Were they what you call your hill people … ?”
Bob Lancaster fielded similar questions, and shared some in the cryptically titled, “Arkies spurn possum guts: Outsiders have outlandish ideas about us.” A sampling:
“How did your capital city get a name like Little Rock?”
La Petite Roche (“little rock”) was an Indian maiden who threw herself off a cliff near the Arkansas River because of her love for a rascally French explorer named Petit Jean (“tight-fitting denims”). Some think this is just a legend. It might have been a mythical account of a prehistoric landslide in what is now the Little Rock area.
“Are there other cities in Arkansas besides Little Rock?”
Yes. Pine Bluff is perennially acclaimed by the places-rated publications as one of the most liveable and picturesque cities in the South. Fort Smith is sort of the Arkansas Sparta to Little Rock’s Athens — a Republican, kick-butt town where they dispose of baby girls and other undesirable sissy infant types by leaving them exposed on flat rocks in the wilderness. Fayetteville used to be an Arkansas city, but it seceded some years ago on grounds that it was a lot smarter and more civilized than the rest of us.
