Jack McCall was born in 1911 in his grandfather’s house east of Eureka Springs. His grandfather was George McCall, a widower and Justice of the Peace for the Kings River Township.

Justices of the Peace in those days had expanded powers. For instance, Jack remembered his grandfather holding court in the parlor. Two fellows might be brought in for fighting and disturbing the peace, and George McCall would ascertain the facts of the altercation and levy a fine as he deemed necessary.

The historic house has been gone for several years now, but what brought it to mind was a book I happened across at the Eureka Springs Carnegie Library titled Ozark Vernacular Houses: A Study of Rural Homeplaces in the Arkansas Ozarks 1830-1930 by Jean Sizemore. It turns out that the McCall house was a particular type of Ozark house called a “Central Hall Cottage.”

I know very little about architecture, but I fell in love with the McCall house at a young age. It’s interesting how some houses have character and personality, while others do not make an impression. The front of the white frame house had a portico in the center with square wooden columns. The screen door behind lead into the Central Hall or “breezeway.” The front was in perfect balance, each side a mirror of the other. Equal distance from the portico, on either side, were tall narrow windows, and equal distance from the windows were handsome limestone chimneys.

I’m told that the house began as a one room cabin when the family returned to Arkansas following the Civil War and then evolved as the size of the family fluctuated from generation to generation. At one time, the kitchen was outside in a separate building, so that the cooking could be done away from the house, especially in the oppressive heat of summer. I remember the antique window panes were thick and flawed and that the scent of nearly a dozen decades of wood fires greeted visitors. Though the house is gone forever it does continue to live in a small way as the home of Max McCaver in my novel Murder in the Ozarks.

My wife’s grandfather, Bill Groblebe, worked for the electric company in the early days of electricity in Eureka Springs. In those days, a power outage meant Grandpa Bill would set out on foot carrying all the tools, equipment and wire that he might need to look for the problem. He would follow the power line from Eureka Springs toward Rogers checking it out. At the same time, a lineman from Rogers would start out walking toward Eureka with the same goal. Whoever reached the outage first spliced the line and climbed the pole to put everything right. Grandpa Bill spent cold winter nights in the woods miles from town with a lantern looking for the cause of outages and restoring power.

Recently, late one night, I heard the muffled crash of a large tree falling followed by the lights blinking out. I pulled on my boots and tromped around outside in the rain with a flashlight. I found the power line resting on top of our old concrete spring house instead of being pulled taut between two electric poles. Dripping water, I returned to the house and called Carroll Electric. While I was outside, my wife had lit candles and oil lanterns. Since I didn’t expect to hear back from Carroll Electric until morning, I headed for bed.

Half an hour later, a utility truck came crawling down our little road. I jumped out of bed, pulled my boots back on and stumbled out the door. A Carroll Electric man was using a spotlight to look for downed power lines. I told the fellow the little I knew about the situation and we set out on foot. I hovered nearby at first, but then backtracked, knowing that standing ankle deep in spring water wasn’t the safest situation. The man returned to say that a sizeable white oak had brought the lines down and that he’d call his crew. The electricity was restored at approximately three in the morning. Lots of things have changed in the electric utility business over the years, but linemen are still out in the middle of the night turning on the lights.

The first time I heard of the Premier Fire Apparatus Company of Eureka Springs, Arkansas is when Duane O’Connor mentioned that Tommy Walker had seen one of the company’s fire trucks in a museum in Sheridan, Arkansas. The reason that we were even on the topic was because I’d seen an obituary for Minnie Barbee that listed Duane O’Connor as a pallbearer. He told me that Minnie’s husband had owned the fire truck assembly plant that was located on White Street at the top of Owen.

Having learned the name “Barbee,” I did what I do: I searched for the name on the internet and looked it up in my paltry collection of reference books. It turns out that Minnie Barbee’s late husband was Roscoe Barbee and he was a big deal, both in Eureka Springs and in the region. He not only owned the Premier Fire Apparatus Company, but he was also in a partnership with Sam Leath for a number of years. (They owned Camp Leath, now the location of Inn of the Ozarks.) On a wider scale, Roscoe Barbee came from a family that was widely known in Missouri politics. Online, I found a copy of Roscoe Barbee’s 1942 Draft Card. From this, I learned that his middle name was Cleveland and that the odds of his being drafted for World War II were slim: he was 57 and had only one leg.

I then talked further with Duane O’Connor about Mr. Barbee and his fire truck company. He remembered hearing that the trucks were delivered to Eureka Springs without a body or cab before being outfitted into a fire truck. He recalled a story about one such truck being driven to town in the middle of winter and that the driver was covered with icicles when he arrived.

Tommy Walker kindly emailed me a photograph of the sign at the Grant County Museum that described the fire truck that he’d seen on display. It was a 1939 Chevrolet (with a six-cylinder engine) modified by the aforementioned Premier Fire Apparatus Company. The truck was purchased by the city of Sheridan in 1940 and was the first motorized fire truck in Grant County, Arkansas.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about trees. I do that sometimes. What triggered it this time was a trip to the track behind the Eureka Springs Elementary School. A man stopped me to ask if I had ever seen a chinquapin tree. To be honest, I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen one or not, but I’ve heard about them all my life. The man showed me one growing in the edge of the woods that skirt the track’s parking lot. He gave me details about the once ubiquitous Ozark Chinquapins and how they were wiped out by blight, similar to what happened to chestnut trees. This led me to thinking about trees and the local forest.

Trees have always been important to the western side of Carroll County. I believe that the beauty of our forested hills still help bring in tourists and the cutting of firewood and sawmilling still employ several on a part-time basis. Once upon a time though, this area was part of the largest white oak forest in the world. For decades, millions of trees were cut for stave bolts (for barrel making) and for railroad ties.

The 1870 Federal Census was the last census taken before the founding of Eureka Springs and the tourism industry that we now take for granted. Timber was king. If you skim down the occupations listed for the approximately 1,200 locals on this side of the Kings River, you’ll see many lumber jobs and ancillary occupations such as blacksmiths, teamsters, and farriers.

All of this thinking of trees led to the memory of a conversation I had with a lady in town years ago. She asked how I could be a tree hugger when my family had cleared more trees than any other family in the history of Eureka Springs. I don’t think that she was correct on either point, but I do like trees. There is a good reason why I don’t live out on the treeless plains or tundra. But, as much as I am fascinated by trees, I still burn them in the woodstove every winter.

My obituary won’t boast that Steve Weems never met a stranger. I am not a master of social dynamics; I’ve never made friends easily.  I’m more comfortable observing than participating and I’ve been accused of being anti-social a number of times. And yet, inexplicably, I find myself having friends.

What all my friendships have in common is that I did not consciously choose them. In every case, I was brought together with someone by circumstance and a bond was formed. Perhaps I’m a little superstitious about the process. Some of my friends are blood relations, some date back to my time in school. Some are of more recent vintage, met through jobs or because of my writing one way or another. Some of my friends I met while in the military.

I had a buddy in the army from when I first arrived in Schwaebisch Gmuend, West Germany. He trained me in my job and we often worked through the night hours together. I still remember the intense feeling of freedom the day we rented a Volkswagen Golf and started driving without a single destination in mind. After an impromptu tour of the Augsburg Zoo, we became hopelessly lost in Bavaria. My friend was happy as long as he had cigarettes, so we drove until we hit Munich late at night and had to turn around and head back for duty.

Just like me, my friends are flawed. Just like me, my friends do things they shouldn’t. Sometimes friends will do something that will turn your soul to ice. My buddy returned home from a tour of Iraq and murdered his wife and then committed suicide on the front lawn while his children played inside the house. Ever since that event I’ve wrestled with questions of friendship and what it means, like when is it correct to end a friendship? What is the tipping point? In this case, my buddy is already dead. Too late to disown him, except in my mind. And yet, despite his actions, I continue to feel loyalty to him. Is that wrong? I do not know.

With the fragrance of lilacs flirting with my nose, I lay open the April 27, 1967 edition of the Eureka Springs Times-Echo. The lead story is the upcoming county-wide vote on issuing bonds to fund the construction of a $720,000 hospital in Berryville. There is a full-page advertisement signed by 84 local residents against it, and a quarter-page advertisement in favor of the bonds. I guess we know how the election turned out.

Of course, Holiday Island wasn’t always called Holiday Island, but did you know it was once called Hollydale Island? I didn’t. A front page article announces the change of name from Banach Island to Hollydale Island. This makes sense because the 4800-acre property that includes the island was owned by the Holly Corporation of California.

Reby Nelson’s house on East Mountain burned down and both she and her daughter Rose Brown were hospitalized with burns. Reby Nelson was my wife’s great-grandmother.

Two spelunkers exploring Onyx Cave at the invitation of owner Ralph Schmidt discovered 425 additional feet of passageways and an underground waterfall. J.D. Fletcher and family purchased the Devil’s Dive Resort on Table Rock Lake. Mr. and Mrs. Cecil R. (Pete) Birchfield are congratulated on the April 20th birth of their daughter Stephanie Lynn. The Eureka Drug Company is having a close out sale on all record albums, including their one remaining copy of the very popular The Sound of Music.

Local family doctor Ross Van Pelt spoke to the high school on the dangers of using narcotics not prescribed by a physician. He especially warned against falling prey to heroin.

In Berryville, both the Oklahoma Tire & Supply and the Ben Franklin Store are selling all their merchandise and fixtures and calling it quits. Also in Berryville one can attend showings of A Fine Madness starring Sean Connery and Joanne Woodward.

The US Army is in need of volunteers, especially those with previous military experience. The recruiters in Fayetteville say to call collect if interested in joining up.

And so I close the April, 1967 newspaper and take a moment to admire the blossoming redbud trees on the hill.

The way I heard it, it was about 1937 when Burt Hull lost his hand in the sawmill accident. He was cleaning sawdust out from under the machine when he raised his hand and the spinning blade caught it. His son Curtis rushed him to the Eureka Springs Hospital in a Model A Ford. That night, Burt was unable to sleep because he could feel worms eating into the severed hand. He had Curtis go back to the sawmill, collect the hand from the sawdust pile, and bury it.

I don’t remember ever seeing Burt Hull, but he’s one of those people I’ve heard about all my life. As a kid, stories of a one-handed sawmill operator grabbed my attention. I understand from the stories that he could do as much work or more with a hook than others could do with a fully functioning hand.

I ran across an article about Burt Hull in a 1975 Carroll County Historical Society Quarterly magazine, written by Coy Logan shortly before Mr. Hull’s death. As I expected, his first job off the farm was sawmilling for Franzisca Massman down at the bottom of Oil Springs Road. But, it turns out that Burt Hull was much more than just a hook-handed saw miller. He was a butcher, a blacksmith, an entrepreneur, and a progressive farmer intrigued by modernization and machinery.

Always for trying new things and for improving what he had, Burt Hull invested $175 in a Case steam tractor as a young man. He bought it up in Joplin and had to get it back to Arkansas. He and his brother and a cousin drove the machine home, gathering wood along the way to fire the engine and hauling water in a barrel for the steam. At night, they’d camp by the side of the road. It took seven days to drive the contraption home from Joplin to Eureka Springs.

Like many in the Hull family, Burt is buried in the Shady Grove Cemetery east of Eureka Springs not far from where he grew up on Kings River.

Milton Wright Masters and his wife Melany bought 338 acres of hills and hollows just outside Eureka Springs in 1927 for $700. Mr. Masters is reported to have been a kind, progressive man. At a time when children were seen more than heard, he encouraged conversation with them at the dinner table.

We have a small part of his farm. Our little farmhouse in the hollow was built about 75 years ago as a replacement for a much larger home of his which had burned. Besides the house, we also have the barn and other outbuildings. The main spring behind our house is said to have never gone dry and it supplies our water, just as it did for the Masters family.

Before there was electricity at the farm, Mr. Masters built a spring house to cool their food and farm products. He had several kinds of livestock and grew various types of produce, everything from potatoes to apples. The Masters were especially known for their strawberries and people came from miles around to pick their own or to buy from the family. During the Great Depression, when the farm wasn’t paying enough to get by, Mr. Masters took employment at the ice plant in Eureka Springs. He worked the night shift and farmed during the day. Because it was summer and he had a house full of kids, he had trouble getting any sleep. Luckily, down the hollow is a small cave under a sizable bluff. Milton Masters put a bed in the cave and had a nice cool quiet spot to rest.

My understanding is that the original home built by Milton Masters was out of materials from a boarding house torn down in Eureka Springs. The rebuilt home was supposed to be quite a place, two stories tall with large rooms and an impressive staircase. The only problem was that the building materials had been infested with bedbugs. Melany Masters fought the bedbugs over years in every way known to man. Later when the house caught fire and burned down, Melany is reported to have said, “Well, at least we got rid of the bedbugs.”

In the spring flowing behind our house, there are little bitty crawdads. I’ve not seen one for awhile, but I trust that they are still lurking in the water. I’m glad that they are there, as I’ve read that crawdads are an indicator of healthy water. As you probably know, if you played in creeks as a kid, crawdads are small crustaceans, miniature freshwater lobsters with pincers. Though usually called crawdads in the Ozarks’ vernacular, they’re also called crayfish, crawfish and mudbugs.

When I was young, my Uncle Dana Scott came over from Rogers and took some of us out to catch crawdads. The way I recall it, we walked several creeks that day carrying buckets, looking under rocks and logs until we’d caught a mess of them to eat. We used our hands to catch them and, with practice, I didn’t get pinched. Dana cooked them up and they were quite tasty.

There are supposed to be approximately 60 different species of crawdads in Arkansas, and most are found in the cold springs and creeks of either the Ozarks or the Ouachitas. They come in a variety of sizes and colors: the ones in my spring are brown and smaller than two inches. Bigger ones can also be found, though.

Local outdoorsman Jared Mourglia has caught crawdads in the 8 inch range. Wearing goggles, he dove into Kings River and captured them by hand under the piers of the old US 62 bridge. I believe crawdads that large would have to be the long-pincered variety that are found only in the White River Basin of Arkansas and Missouri. I’ve read that some experts say the long-pincered crawdad is the largest in North America. While catching crawdads by hand is always an option, I’ve heard of others locally using baited traps to capture these big crawdads by the dozen.

Though commercial operations are more common in Louisiana, Arkansas does have crawdad farms. The crawdads are raised as food and, prepared correctly,  they not only taste great, but are very high in Vitamin B12, which is essential for proper brain function.