UNION PACIFIC’S LAST STOPS IN CONWAY

From the Log Cabin in late October 2016 – Article by Marisa Hicks – Log Cabin Staff Writer

Marisa Hicks Staff photo

The “Living Legend” No. 804 was the last steam locomotive Union Pacific purchased. It was bought in December 1944 and has yet to be retired. At 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, the high-speed passenger engine made a pit stop in Conway before leaving back home to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

 

Union Pacific’s “Living Legend” rolled through Conway on its way home to Wyoming on Tuesday, making a brief stop at the Main Street crossing.

“People are fascinated with steam locomotives, young and old,” Ed Dickens Jr., engineer and senior manager of heritage operations for Union Pacific, said.

Union Pacific purchased the “Living Legend” No. 844, a high-speed passenger train, in December 1944. It was the last steam locomotive built for Union Pacific.

“The engine has run hundreds of thousands of miles as Union Pacific’s ambassador of goodwill,” a Conway Police Department press release states. “It has made appearances at Expo ’74 in Spokane, the 1981 opening of the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans and the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Los Angeles Union Station in 1989.”

Conway resident Sam Ledbetter stopped by Simon Park on Tuesday to catch a glimpse of No. 844.

Ledbetter, who is a train enthusiast, said his interest in trains arose in 1981, noting he was a fan of big steam engines.

“Just the aura of the engine itself is amazing,” he said.

No. 844 last traveled through Conway in 2012, Dickens said.

He said steam locomotives “are an iconic symbol of the greatness of America,” noting the “Living Legend” has yet to be retired since its 1944 purchase.

Marisa Hicks Staff Photo

Union Pacific workers watch as the “LIving Legend” pulls into Conway while keeping onlookers at a safe distance from the old steam locomotive.

“You don’t have to be a train enthusiast to appreciate [it],” he said.

The locomotive made a 15-minute pit stop in Conway at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday before leaving for home in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Dickens said that while trains are remarkable to see, he wanted to caution onlookers to always be safe around railroad tracks.

Me and the train

Miller Williams – AETN Men and Women of Distinction

Excellent 30 minute production from Arkansas Educational Television Network on an Arkansas Treasure! Go here! http://www.aetn.org/programs/menandwomenofdistinction/millerwilliams

 

Will Mayflower ever be the same after the Exxon spill?

(From the Arkansas Times)

It’s all fun and games until the world’s richest corporation spills 200,000 gallons of goop in your backyard.

by David Koon and Leslie Newell Peacock @eyecandypeacock

 

Two weeks ago, it might have been hard to imagine sleepy Mayflower, population 1,631, at the center of a growing international debate over corporate influence, the multi-billion dollar Keystone XL pipeline project and the environment. That was before ExxonMobil’s Pegasus Pipeline burst in the backyard of a middle-class house in the Northwoods subdivision there on March 29. Though the site around the breach was soon clamped down tight, video and photographs taken just after the rupture show a black horror emerging from behind houses and pouring over perfect lawns before snaking down the gutters of Starlite Drive like something out of a nightmare. An Exxon spokesperson said the current estimate is that 5,000 barrels of Wabasca heavy crude — or 210,000 gallons — spilled from the breach.

From there, at least some of the crude went into the storm drains and ditches, crossed under Interstate 40, and drained into a sensitive wetland area and a picturesque, nameless cove, lined with fishing cabins, that lies south of Highway 89. That cove connects to the main body of Lake Conway through a series of culverts. Those culverts were quickly blocked with plywood and gravel — before, officials say, oil contaminated the lake — but they can’t stay blocked forever.

Families in 22 homes in the subdivision had to evacuate to area motels; by Monday, 10 days after the spill, Exxon said four families could return, but the state Department of Health recommended that they wait until air quality tests confirmed it was safe. Residents Kathryn Chunn and Kimla Green of 38 Ledrick Circle have filed a class-action lawsuit against Exxon to recover the loss in the value of their property.

At this early stage of the game, real answers to what’s going on in Mayflower would be hard to come by, even if a mega-corporation wasn’t on the ground in full damage control mode, and local and county officials hadn’t largely ceded jurisdiction to them, with workers and Faulkner County deputies barring the public and media from the scene. The emerging picture, though — a picture that includes wildlife coated in oil, devastated ecosystems in ExxonMobil’s “restricted areas,” residents who say they are sick, and the still-ticking time bomb on the shores of Central Arkansas’s primary water source, Lake Maumelle, where the Pegasus Pipeline comes within 600 feet of the shoreline — might be even uglier than a neighborhood coated in crude.

Even a week after the spill, the smell of crude oil lingers near the cove area east of I-40, a turpentine/diesel stench that makes your head go a little swimmy if you breathe it too long. Residents we talked to say it was much worse right after the spill happened, but it still makes you wonder how the hive of more than 600 ExxonMobil responders who’ve been working there 24/7 since the pipeline rupture, rushing around in hardhats and hazmat suits and working at night in a swamp lit by tall, powerful lights, can stand it, especially given that many of them we saw weren’t wearing respirators.

Howard “Duck” Sentney lives near Dam Road, which divides the cove from Lake Conway. A former Army survival instructor who has lived on Lake Conway for more than a decade, Sentney said the smell of oil was almost unbearable soon after the breach.

“The first thing we smelled was like natural gas,” Sentney said. “My nose was burning, my eyes were burning, it gave me a scratchy throat. Then all of a sudden Friday evening, the smell penetrated into the house. … Friday evening and Saturday evening, it was bad. Sunday evening, we had a cookout and Sunday night it ran us off the porch.”

As we spoke, a helicopter was flying slow circles over the cove. It was probably owned by ExxonMobil or someone working for the company, since on April 1, the Federal Aviation Administration had issued a NOTAM, or Notice to Airmen, which placed a five-nautical-mile flight restriction around the Mayflower site. All aircraft flying below 1,000 feet, the NOTAM said, were prohibited from entering the area unless given permission by Tom Suhrhoff, an aviation advisor with ExxonMobil. The ban came after KARK-TV sent a helicopter to capture aerial footage of the spill. Many critics of the response immediately seized on the NOTAM as an ExxonMobil effort to create a “media blackout” of the site, but the company has denied that anything other than air safety over the spill was the goal. The FAA ban was lifted April 5.

Sentney said his sinuses have been acting up and he’s had a sore throat since the spill. As a homeowner, he wonders how the spill will affect the property values on homes along Dam Road. An avid fisherman, he wonders if it will be OK to eat the fish from Lake Conway in coming years. “It’s a big question,” he said. “I fish quite a bit out there and we eat a lot of fish. So, is it going to be safe? … Personally, I think Exxon is not going to tell us the truth. They’ve got more money than we’ve got.”

Sentney’s fears about the future quality of the lake are shared by biologist Dr. Ben Cash, a herpetology specialist at the University of Central Arkansas who has taken on the job of cleaning snakes that have been rescued from the marsh that feeds the cove. (Wildlife Response Services, hired by Exxon to clean the dozens of mallards, teal, coot, beavers, muskrats, raccoons, turtles, nutria, grebes, squirrels and ducks too coated to identify in a facility in Sherwood, draws the line at snakes; it’s delivered cottonmouths, water and mud snakes to Game and Fish to take to Cash.) “We know from other events like this that there is wildlife that moves back into the degraded habitat,” picking up contaminants and spreading them, Cash said. Also, he said, “there may not be black crude” in Lake Conway, but the naphthalene in the crude will leach into the cove’s water, which can’t be fully blocked from the lake.

Today, the focus is on clean-up. “What will be important,” Cash said, is what kind of shape the area is in “two years from now.”

Ryan Senia has lived on North Starlite, a few houses away from where the breach occurred, since 2009. He said his house was actually listed for sale on the day of the pipeline rupture, but he’s since taken down the listing.

Senia said he was at work in Little Rock when he got a text message about the spill from a friend and rushed to Mayflower to find his neighborhood already blocked off. He was able to get in to his house from 10 a.m. to noon March 30, the day after the spill. Oil had run up his driveway and seeped into the edge of his lawn.

Like the press and public, Senia was warned away by local authorities acting under the instructions of Exxon. “When I came out, there was a police officer there and he said, ‘If you don’t have everything you need right now, if you leave, you can’t come back.’ ” He said he tried to go back to his house with a journalist in tow on April 1, but was turned away by sheriff’s deputies. “It’s easier to get onto a military base than it is to get into that neighborhood right now,” he said.

Senia, who claims the neighborhood’s proximity to the oil pipeline was not disclosed to him when he bought his house, said he thinks no one will want to buy a home in the Northwoods subdivision for a very long time. He estimated that half the neighbors he’s talked to said they want to move out.

“Even if not a single drop of oil got on my property, because my address is on that street, I just think no one is going to buy that house now,” he said. “Even if I’m not personally scared of contamination, a buyer might be unless there is someone to document the cleanup process, and know that everything was removed.”

Since the spill, Senia’s been educating himself about pipeline safety. He said he hopes other residents will talk to reporters who are trying to cover the spill.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel toured the Northwoods subdivision on April 3, and called the scene “very disturbing.”

“The people in the surrounding communities are very concerned about what this will do to their health and property values,” McDaniel said. “I still remain with more questions than answers. I have yet to be told what the opinion of the company is with regard to the cause of the rupture to begin with. I’ve yet to be told when their last inspection was. I’ve yet to be told when they first identified that section of pipeline as having some integrity questions.”

McDaniel, like many others who have visited the site, said he came away with a headache that lingered into the next day, which he credited to the fumes there. He said his thanks and sympathies go out to both the homeowners who have been displaced, and to the cleanup workers.

McDaniel had told members of the media that they could “tag along” as he took his tour of the neighborhood. Ninety seconds into the tour, however, Faulkner County sheriff’s deputies appeared and told reporters they would have to leave. One of the reporters who was there, KUAR’s Michael Hibblen, said that reporters were threatened with arrest if they didn’t comply. Hibblen has audio of at least part of the encounter with deputies.

In the audio segment, a voice Hibblen identified as that of Faulkner County Judge Allen Dodson directs media members to stand near a yellow pole. Thirty seconds later, however, another voice says: “You all have to go. Sorry. Exxon media, uh, Mobil has changed their minds. You have to leave.”

“The Faulkner County deputies started telling us ‘ExxonMobil doesn’t want you here and you have to leave.’ ” Hibblen said. He said the deputies became “more agitated” after reporters began asking to speak to someone in charge, and the deputies then told them they had “ten seconds to leave” or they would be arrested. Hibblen said he’d already turned his tape recorder off by the time reporters were threatened with arrest.

“It did raise the question of who is running the show,” Hibblen said.

Hibblen returned to the neighborhood for a media tour held by ExxonMobil on Sunday, April 7 (the Arkansas Times didn’t receive a notice of the tour), but said it was “disturbing” that the press wasn’t given a tour of the spill site for nine days.

McDaniel said that during his tour on April 3, he and their staff were there “doing our jobs,” so he didn’t get involved when the press was removed from the site. “I was not told why the press was turned away,” McDaniel said. “We were asked by the press if they could tag along with us, but we told the press that they were on their own for credentials, and whatever they go to do on a normal day, they should be able to do.”

McDaniel has issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil, requiring them to preserve and produce documents related to the Mayflower spill and the subsequent response. Exxon’s deadline to produce documents was Wednesday. McDaniel, who said private and public litigation over the Mayflower spill is “inevitable,” said he believed the company would comply and meet the deadline.

“I’d like to think that we’re not going to start out litigating with a motion to compel compliance with a subpoena,” he said.

A community meeting on Sunday, April 7, at the Faulkner County Library sponsored by the Sierra Club was well attended, with almost a hundred people there to share their concerns and ideas on how to make a grass-roots stand going forward. There weren’t many good things said about ExxonMobil or their response in Mayflower.

One of those in attendance was Tony Dawson, who was there with his wife, Charity, and their son, Camden. A resident of the Dawson Cove subdivision, which lies across I-40 from the spill site, Dawson said he and his daughter have had sore throats since the spill.

Dawson’s father, Delbert, is a homebuilder, and built most of the houses in Dawson Cove. Tony Dawson said he built his family’s “dream home” there with the help of his father, choosing the site because of the animals that come through the area.

“The wildlife comes right there to drink that water,” he said. “Now they’re not going to be there. That’s what we bought that for. We have deer coming down there, we’ve got turkey, beaver, raccoons. Everything comes down through there. Now it’s going to be gone.”

Dawson said he came to the community meeting because he’s worried about what the spill will do to the lake, the local environment and property values in the area. He said he lost his trust in ExxonMobil early in the process, following a meeting between residents and response officials the night after the spill.

“Let me put it this way,” Dawson said. “At the community meeting they had that Saturday, they guaranteed us that it wasn’t in the cove — guaranteed us. Sat right there, a panel of four … Guaranteed it wasn’t in the cove, and they’d stopped it before it got to the cove. When we got back to the house, my neighbor went out into the woods, and there was oil out there. He said it was 250 feet behind his house. That Sunday, me and my wife got dressed in our boots and we went out there and got pictures of it.”

Dawson said that it doesn’t seem feasible to him that the oil can be contained in the cove area and kept out of the lake. He said that the last time it rained, he saw workers pumping water over Highway 89 into Lake Conway to keep the cove from overflowing. Having come to live in the area because of the natural beauty, he believes the next phase in the woods behind his house will have to involve clearing the trees so ExxonMobil workers can excavate oil-soaked dirt. He fears that process has already started nearby.

“They’ve already cleared a space on Interstate Drive that’s 200 feet wide,” he said. “It’s a mess.”

One of those trying to get the word out about Mayflower is Eric Moll with tarsandsblockade.org, which Moll said is a “sustained, direct-action campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline.”

Proposed by oil company TransCanada, the 36-inch Keystone XL pipeline would run more than 2,000 miles from Alberta, Canada, to refineries near the Texas/Louisiana border, pushing 800,000 barrels per day of heavy diluted bitumen from Canada’s “tar sands” region to the Gulf of Mexico. The project has become an environmental and political football, with critics of Keystone XL saying that construction will disrupt sensitive areas, increase the possibility of a catastrophic spill, as well as boost the supply of tar sands oil, which the National Wildlife Federation calls “one of the most polluting and carbon-intensive fuels in the world.”

We met Moll on Friday of last week at the spillway on Bell Slough, a state Game and Fish property less than a mile south of the spill site. Nearby, a flock of buzzards ignored us, feasting on something unrecognizable. Moll and three friends had driven over from East Texas a few days before. Since then they had been canvassing the area, knocking on doors, talking to residents about their health issues, and shooting photos and video to upload to the web. The day after we talked to him, Moll and several activists slipped into the cove area near I-40 and shot photos and video of a lake of gooey black goop, a flat bottom boat floating on top of it, that stretched away into the marsh scrub. One person who was there dipped his hand in, and it came out completely black with oil.

“A lot of the people who are right near the spill, even closer than some of those who were evacuated, didn’t even get told about it and they are very sick,” Moll claimed. “Some of them haven’t even been able to talk to us because they can’t come outside. We’re going around today talking to people, going door-to-door.”

Though ExxonMobil says that what spilled in Mayflower is conventional “heavy oil” (see sidebar), Moll contends it’s the same kind of bitumen-heavy material that will flow through the Keystone XL pipeline. He said Mayflower should be a wake-up call for those who are on the fence or have never heard about Keystone XL.

“This stuff is not crude oil,” he said. “It’s a lot more dangerous than crude oil. It’s harder to clean up. Crude oil floats so you can scrape it off the top of water or get it with a boom. Dilbit — diluted bitumen, or tar sands — sinks, so it can never really be cleaned up. We’re seeing from the Kalamazoo River spill of 2010 that it still isn’t cleaned up. People are still sick. People are still getting sick.”

Annie Dill, a college student from Little Rock (disclosure: Dill is a student in the author’s Fiction Writing class at UALR), was there when the photos of the marsh standing full of oil were taken last Saturday. She said the group had been given permission to walk into the area by the person who owned the property, but the property owner had warned them beforehand that having permission hadn’t kept others from being run off by ExxonMobil workers. Dill called the sight of the wetland full of oil “horrifying,”

“We were like: ‘Oh my God. This is supposed to be marshland,’ ” she said. “It smelled so bad.” Earlier on Saturday, Dill and others found a mallard near Dam Road, its feathers and head matted with crude. Dill said when they called the ExxonMobil hotline to request someone pick up the duck so it could be cleaned, they were told it would be 24 hours before someone could respond. Dill said that after they called Arkansas Game and Fish and the HAWK wildlife rescue group in Russellville, a wildlife specialist with ExxonMobil eventually did come and pick up the duck, placing it in a plastic bin in a car trunk before driving away.

To read more about Wabasca heavy crude, click here.

To read more about ExxonMobil’s Pegasus Pipeline, click here.

F.R.E.S.H. FOOD HERE IN CONWAY!!

This article from the Log Cabin Democrat 12/11/12 gives some encouraging news on local food at local restaurants!

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Panel to discuss adding local food to menus

By COURTNEY SPRADLIN LOG CABIN STAFF WRITER

The Faulkner County  Cooperative Extension Service will host a panel discussion in January with the goal of connecting local farmers to restaurants and food vendors. The aim of the connection, termed F.R.E.S.H. Foods, Farmers and Restaurants Eating Sustainable Healthy Foods, is to streamline the process of integrating locally raised, processed or grown food into restaurant menus.

“This is a huge movement right now,” said Kami Marsh, cooperative extension agent. “People are wanting that fresh produce when they go to a restaurant. It’s also a good marketing tool. When you’re eating potatoes at a restaurant and there’s a sign up front that says they came from Mr. Smith today, people make that connection. People want to know where their food comes from, and this creates the relationship between farmer, food and customer.”

Marsh said incorporated foods could include fruit, vegetables, meat, cheeses and value added products.  A value added product, she explained, could be blackberry jam processed locally by Maria Bradbury using blackberries grown at Phyllis Strack’s farm on Lower Ridge Road.

A number of restaurants in Conway have used two options already in place to incorporate local goods into menus. Conway Locally Grown, an online market, and the Conway Farmer’s Market, in season May through November, have been resources for restaurants.

Kim Williams, executive director of the Con-way Downtown Partnership, said Oak Street Bistro, Mike’s Place, Michelangelo’s, JJ’s Grill, Cross Creek Sandwich Shop, and ZaZa’s have been local customers.

Cross Creek Sandwich Shop owner Chris Jennings said she uses the farmer’s market in season for her recipes.  “I get whatever I can. I get any fruit, tomatoes, zucchini. It’s wonderful to use fresh and local when you can, and I advertise it when we do so people know it’s from the farmer’s market,” Jennings said. To people who love tomatoes there’s nothing like a home grown tomato. If there’s a home grown tomato on your sandwich, it’s going to taste really good. It’s just delicious.”   Jennings said her customers are excited to see fresh, local produce on the menu.  “You do pay more for it than you do from the store or from food reps, but you know you’re getting good quality,” she said.

John McNamara, general manager of Mike’s Place, said the restaurant gets local products from Conway Locally Grown and the Conway Farmer’s Market.  Free-range chickens and locally grown lettuce have been integrated into specials, he said.  “The customer base isn’t quite yet understanding of the extra cost. Local lettuce costs twice as much, and less than I hope for picked that option because it’s an extra dollar,” he said.

“We’d love to do more but there’s an availability issue. They can’t always supply us with what we’d use.”  The larger scale effort will take some planning, Marsh said.  “For example, if we pair a farmer with a restaurant, we’d need to know what the restaurant wants and the quantity. The farmer may have to change the way he grows to meet the demand, but it should be doable. It will just take planning, and that’s why we want to get these people together to figure this out,” she said.  Benefits are for the customer, the farmer and the restaurant, Marsh said.  Customers eat fresh, restaurants capitalize on the items, and farmers move more of their products.  “It’s another avenue for our farmers to sell. We don’t want farmers throwing produce away. Restaurants are another outlet, and we also want farmers to take their fresh produce to food banks to have it distributed,” she said.

Members of the panel, slated for Jan. 22 at 1 p.m. at the Faulkner County Extension Service office, 110 S. Amity Rd., Suite 200 in Conway, are those from other communities around Arkansas who have already implemented a program like F.R.E.S.H. Foods.

Marsh said the cost effectiveness of incorporating fresh, local goods will be discussed by the panel.

The meeting is not limited to farmers and restaurant representatives, and all are invited to attend.

(Staff writer Courtney Spradlin can be reached by email at courtney.spradlin@thecabin.net   or by phone at 505-1236. To comment on this and other stories in the Log Cabin, log on to www.thecabin.net  . Send us your news at http://www.thecabin.net/submit  )

Erin Enderlin Article

This article ran in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette on 5/31/12.

Conway singer/songwriter pursues dream in Nashville

BY CAROL ROLF
Contributing Writer

CONWAY — Erin Enderlin sometimes feels like she should pinch herself to see if her life is real. The Conway native is in Nashville, Tenn., pursuing her dream of becoming a country music star. She’s already worked with some of the best in the industry and has had several of her original songs recorded by some well-known artists.
“I’ve sat in the front row of the Grand Ole Opry listening to Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, sing,” Enderlin said with a smile. “I’ve had a song recorded by Alan Jackson. My music’s been played on WSM (a country music radio station in Nashville).
“I’ve been very fortunate. Sometimes, I just have to sit down and ask myself, ‘Is this all real?’”
Enderlin, 30, is the daughter of Garry and Carol Enderlin of Little Rock, formerly of Conway. She attended the Conway Public Schools through the 10th grade, then transferred to the Arkansas School for Math and Sciences in Hot Springs. After high school graduation in 2000, she moved to the Nashville area to attend college at Middle Tennessee State University at Murfreesboro and pursue her dream. She graduated from Middle Tennessee State in 2004 with a degree in recording industry.
“I grew up in Conway,” she said during a recent rehearsal for an appearance with her longtime friend Jeff Clanton of Conway at Conway’s First United Methodist Church. “My family’s roots are here. My grandparents, the late Paul and Mildred Enderlin, ran the Enderlin Cotton Gin and Feed Store in Conway, along with Paul’s brother, Harvey.
“My mot her’s parents, Wanda Clinton and the late H.D. Clinton, who lived in Little Rock for many years, are the ones who introduced me to country music. Wanda now lives in Hot Springs.
“I spent time with them, and we would listen to country music. It was always a big deal for me. I always asked to listen to Patsy Cline, even if it would be for the 20th time.”
Enderlin, who calls herself a “traditionalist in the spirit of Waylon Jennings and Emmylou Harris,” has written many songs over the years. She gets ideas from a variety of sources, making mental notes as she goes.
“I go play shows around the area, play for publishers and producers, hoping someone will pick up one of my songs,” she said. “Alan Jackson’s producer heard one he liked and took it to Jackson to perform.”
Jackson recorded “Monday Morning Church” in 2004 on his album What I Do.
“I actually got to meet Alan,” Enderlin said. “A while after he cut my song, early one morning, a girl called me and said Alan would like for me to come to his show.
“Half-asleep, I couldn’t recall anyone named Alan who would invite me to his show, plus I had 15 people coming to town to see me,” she said with a grin. “After I woke up, I thought to myself, ‘This couldn’t be Alan Jackson.’ I called her back and apologized, and she said she would gladly send me the 15 tickets for me and my friends. I felt like such an idiot.”
“I wrote ‘Monday Morning Church’ when I was 19, and Alan cut it for his album when I was 22,” she said. “I co-wrote it with Brent Baxter of Jonesboro, who now lives in Little Rock.”
“Monday Morning Church” won a Nashville Songwriters Association International Award as one of the 10 Songs I Wish I’d Written in 2005. Enderlin won the same award again in 2009 with Lee Ann Womack’s hit recording of Enderlin’s original song “Last Call.”
Randy Travis, Terri Clark, Adam Brand and Luke Bryan have also recorded Enderlin’s songs. The most recent is Bryan’s recording of “You Don’t Know Jack” on his album Tailgates and Tanlines.
In 2011, Enderlin traveled with the Country Throwdown Tour with Willie Nelson and Jamey Johnson, and plans to do so again this year. She has opened shows for Trent Tomlinson, Jason Michael Carroll, Josh Gracin and Marty Stuart. She has also been a part of a television show featuring country music duo Joey and Rory. The show will air on RFD-TV.
When Johnson performed at this year’s Toad Suck Daze festival in Conway, he invited Enderlin to perform onstage. She sang “Baby Sister,” which is featured on her EP Erin Enderlin, produced by Johnson and Jim “Moose” Brown.
Clanton, 34, who calls himself a “sideman” or an accompanist, will join Enderlin in Nashville for two weeks in June to perform at various venues, including Joey and Rory’s fourth annual Bib and Buckle Fest on Saturday in Pottsville, Tenn. Clanton plays slide guitar and mandolin.
Clanton is the son of Dan and Kay Clanton of Conway.
“Jeff ’s mother taught me science in junior high school,” Enderlin said. “ Then she introduced me to her husband, Dan, who helped me in the early days play shows around central Arkansas, including Advent Café here in Conway.”
Enderlin said she likes to come back to Arkansas “every now and then” to perform and see her friends and family, which include her parents and her siblings Ross and Amy, who both live in Little Rock.
“I’m trying to get a recording deal,” Enderlin said. “That’s my biggest dream.”
For more information on Enderlin, visit www.erinenderlin.com.

SUBMITTED
Erin Enderlin grew up in Conway and now lives in Nashville, Tenn., where she is pursuing her dream of becoming a country music singer. Among her latest songs to be picked up by a Nashville star is “You Don’t Know Jack,” which Luke Bryan recently recorded on his album Tailgates and Tanlines.

SoLost from the Oxford American

SoLost (So Lost in the South, actually) is an award winning video series from the Oxford American.

I was made aware of its existence through the Paper Trails column in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (3/18/11). Linda Caillouet mentioned it without offering any details as to what it is actually about.  I was curious and went to the Oxford American website and found it. It’s a series of videos, most no more than 5 or 6 minutes long, related to their favorite subject, what it means to be southern. I watched two or three and plan to watch them all. They are definitely worthy of the awards.

I heartily recommend spending some time to drink it in…

examples:

• Legendary rockabilly frontman and session player Billy Lee Riley died this summer and was honored with a benefit concert at the equally-legendary Silver Moon Club in Newport, Arkansas, which lies along the newly-dubbed “Rock ‘N’ Roll Highway 67.”

• another focuses on Dyess Arkansas and Johnny Cash…. good stuff!!

SoLost

 

Conway Arkansas has a lot of Geeks!!

Okay, it’s not just me saying it… Check out this blog article from OnlineUniversities.com on the Top Ten Geekiest Cities in the United States.

I must say it does sort of make you a proud resident!