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: Romantic oil painting 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 Sport oil painting 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 Storefront oil painting 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 mid-nineteenth 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* Venice oil painting 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. Watercolor oil painting For example* the garages of two houses were bombed* but at a time when no one was home.
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10-11-2009, 05:20 AM
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