An Arkies Musings

This article was published in the June 26, 2013 issue of The Polk County Pulse.  The article was written by Michael Reisig.  I sat down for an interview with him last week. The mission of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church on Fairgrounds Road in Mena is to make disciples of all the people, communicating the everlasting gospel in the context of the three angels' messages of Revelation 14:6-12, leading them to accept Jesus as their personal Savior, discipling them to serve Him, and preparing them for His soon coming.  The Seventh-Day Adventists believe particularly in the soon coming of Jesus Christ and that is essential to their philosophy. The history of the area church goes back over a century, to 1905, when it was first organized by Elder L. W. Feltner. In 1957, the congregation purchased the old school building in Dallas Valley.  The church met there until 1990 when they moved to the current church building on Fairgrounds Road.  The construction was fu...

X is for Xenia. X is a very hard letter and I usually have to resort to a word with X in it instead of starting with X. I recently learned about a car built in 1938 called the Xenia Coupe. The car was built by Andre Dubonnet to show off his new independent suspension. He used a Hispano Suiza H6C chassis and modified it to include his enclosed coil spring suspension. Hispano Suiza was a European manufacturer of the finest luxury cars up until 1936 when they turned from the manufacturing of cars to aviation engines.  The cars that they built in the 1930's were considered some of the finest in the world at the time. For his creation, Xenia, Andre Dubonnet used a Hispano Suiza H6C chassis and chose Jaques Saoutchik to form the one of a kind body. The result was an avante-garde interpretation of the teardrop, and was different from any other cars of it's time. The Xenia's styling was inspired in part by art deco architecture. Jaques Saoutchik was the founder of...

When my son was a young boy he belonged to the DeQueen Pioneers Pathfinder Club, and I was a Pathfinder leader.  One weekend I took the Pathfinders on a backpacking trip.  We left in the evening and headed to Alexandria, Louisiana. We made it to Alexandria at about midnight.  There I took the eastbound exit off of the interstate instead of the westbound exit.  I wandered around Alexandria for an hour trying to find the right road.  By the time we found the campground it was 1:30 and we still had to pitch our tents. I would have loved to have some way of knowing the right way to go to reach the campground.  I'm not the only one who has wished for such a device.  For centuries, navigators and explorers have longed for a system that would enable them to locate their position on the globe with the accuracy necessary to avoid tragedy and to reach their intended destinations. The answer came about because of the Cold War.  U.S. scientists b...

W is for Water.  As in too much water.  In our area on May 30th there were severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, and heavy rain.  My wife and I were on our way home from Little Rock when we encountered the storms. We stopped in Hot Springs and waited in a Walgreens store for about an hour until the Tornado Watch expired. As we traveled home we saw where a tornado had crossed Hwy 270. Crews had cut trees so that traffic could pass but power lines were still down.  We listened to the scanner and heard about tornadoes in our county. When we reached Mt. Ida we were under another tornado watch, so we stopped at the Dairyette to wait out the storm. I took this video of the heavy rain from the front door. We arrived home safely, but not before seeing tornado damage near Oden.  The next day we learned that the heavy rains had caused flooding in the Y-city area and that there had been loss of life. In the early morning hours, Scott County Sheriff Cody Carpenter a...

Today is Daddy's 58th Father's Day.  I know because I have been around for every one of them.  I have spent most of my life working along side my Daddy.  Here is proof.  I learned the auto body trade very young. Through the years some of the things that I have learned from my Daddy are the importance of having God in your life, and how to work.  Here are some photos of Daddy working through the years. Happy Daddy's day.  Some people have fathers, but I have always had a Daddy.