Star posted on my profile asking about my projects. So the update to the Jester ONS, is its on hold, not forgotten, just trying to re-organise my mind. Need to find untagged Jester names.
The Tri-State and Liberty tornados of March 18, 1925 is also still in the works, Sometimes identify the victims and their families and trying to find them in the aftermath on the following census is difficult. So many died as a result of that day, if not immediately in the storms, but from the diseases that followed.
And the same for the Arkansas Civil War soldiers, however that may be revitalized soon as I am coordinator for the Arkansas project for OPS and US History. Along with transcribing some census pertaining to AR.
I'm looking for stories.. especially of the legends, tall tales, hauntings, sightings, camp fire tales, and other things that go bump in the night, tht pertain to AR. I found Col. Sanford Faulkner's tale of The Arkansas Traveler as well as images the two Currier and Ives lithos of of Washburn's paintings of The Traveler and Turning of the Tune. The younger people here might know the tune as a Barney the Dinosaur song about finding a bumblebee and squishing it when it stings.
I've started a page on the Boggy Creek Monster because my folks were from Fouke. When I saw the movie, I told my Dad all the names I could remember, and he told me stories about them. He believed there was something in those woods and river bottoms, and one brother says he saw 'something' crossing just outside the headlight beams, and it wasn't 4 legged.
Growing up hearing about the Tucker Pea Farm... altho nothing really, just my uncle mentioning it. Numerous times. I know very little about it. And information on the net is really scarce, altho I was led to a few pages. But stories handed down from possibly former prisoners before the "reformation" would add a lot of fleshing out to the story. I know that between the Louisiana and Arkansas prisons, all the bodies still haven't been found. The Robert Redford movie Brubaker was loosely based on the prison at Pine Bluff. But if we can collect those stories, even if they ended good or bad, they were about people and would be a wonderful addition to the history of Arkansas.
My eldest brother, who doesn't care much for AR, but his favorite author, Donald Harington, who was from AR, has a book called Let Us Build Us a City. It about the ghost towns of AR. He was impressed I wanted to use it.. but its buried under 10,000 others in the den. But he was even more impressed when I told him about the Tucker Telephone, which he had never heard of, but when I told him how it was used and even into using it on Vietnamese prisoners, he is the one who suggested collecting the prison stories. It piqued the anthropologist in him.
I think I have a full plate.
