Guestatorial: The community camel

I miss the old Legion Hut.

Thanks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Walker-Wilson Post #9 and the late Warren Keck, the old log building in the heart of town served Eureka Springs for years as a lively community center. It wasn’t grand, it was just a big, affordable, funky old room with a kitchen, a stage, a wooden dance floor and a couple of bathrooms, but hundreds of Eureka residents enjoyed dozens of different activities there every month. In Berryville they used to have the same thing in an old one-room church just off the square.

One of the best things about being a small town newspaper reporter/photographer is that it gets you out of your circle of daily acquaintances. Working for various local newspapers over the past 46 years, I’ve had a chance to observe a lot of different tribes in Eureka, many of them within the log walls of the old Legion Hut.

I wasn’t a Cub Scout, or a Brownie, but I was privileged to cover some of their meetings there. Likewise, through the Legion Hut, I got to know some of the veterans, local theater groups, and members of various family reunions, weddings and other celebrations.

The weekend indoor yard sales were a great mixer. It seemed like, sooner or later, every Eurekan went to one of those, on one side of the table or the other. There was plenty of free, unmetered parking and the Legion Hut was just a short walk for everyone who lived downtown.

Gumbo Ya-Ya!

Eureka’s old Legion Hut Community Center reminds me of something Trixie told me as we watched a Rex parade roll down Canal Street. “The parades are like a gumbo that blends New Orleanians together. You got your coonass cousin from the swamp standing next to a white banker from the Garden District standing next to an exotic stripper who’s standing shoulder to shoulder with a black priest, all jumping up and down screaming, ‘Throw me somethin’, mister!’ Parades show that, as different as we all are, it’s OK to be neighbors in the same community.”

The de-evolution of Eureka’s Folk Festival parade, the highlight of America’s oldest continuing folk festival still held in its original location, is a sad barometer of the demise of community spirit that started around the time the Legion Hut was sold and turned into a disco.

Believe it or not, Spring Street merchants used to close their stores so they could march in the parade, with their children and their neighbors! Today, the Highlander marching band is sadly absent, as are the floats and entries packed with what seemed like just about every kid in town. Mostly today it’s swells riding in expensive cars and merchants complaining about people clogging the sidewalks in front of their stores instead of buying whatever they’re hawking.

Eureka’s sense of community has been further eroded by a number of extinctions. Gone are the annual Thanksgiving and Christmas community meals at the Legion Hut, where all were welcome and neighbors contributed what they could. Gone is the Sunday Starlight Cinema and Charlotte Buchanan’s parking lot flea market. Gone are the Hillfolk who performed on weekends in Basin Spring Park until the highway music shows squashed the free competition. Gone is the Ukulele Club and Virginia Tyler’s Hiking Club. Gone are the music festivals that Verna Maberry used to host at Lake Leatherwood City Park.

Long gone is the Ozark Music Festival that drew 30,000 visitors to Eureka in 1973, and with it went the Ozark Institute think tank. Gone is the Eureka Brotherhood Cooperative that served as a hiring center for local workers and a wood shop and foundry housed in a donated downtown building. Gone is the Eureka Springs Art Guild, which secured funds to commission and install local artwork in public areas. Gone is the city’s July 4th community birthday celebration at Lake Leatherwood. Gone are nationally prominent entertainers like Ray Charles and Willie Nelson who loved performing at the city auditorium opened by John Philip Sousa.

I miss all those wonderful community-building events but I miss the Legion Hut the most. It’s the only place where I played drums for Greasy Greens at a wedding where everyone came dressed in outrageous costumes! A lot of local musicians honed their chops in that funky old building.

Gone are city council meetings in a room large enough for the community to participate. Gone are elected representatives who put the rights and hopes of the community above the right-wing goals of the city’s homophobic Chamber of Christian Commerce.

Sometimes you do need a weatherman

“Times change,” is often heard from city aldermen when reminded of previous services and opportunities once freely available to Eureka’s residents but that glib generalization throws the baby out with the bathwater. Many of those bygone events and organizations provided important services for those who call Eureka home. They probably didn’t do that much to boost tourism profits but they gave a big lift to the city’s spirit and sense of community.

After the Legion Hut was killed and the city’s most powerful banker no longer had to see hippies and queers traipsing in and out of the Legion Hut across Main Street from his office window, some community activities tried to relocate at the Auditorium or Harmon Park and some just curled up and died. Eventually, the rent for use of The Aud was jacked up so high that even the popular Eureka Players rang down the curtain and disbanded.

The building used for community dinners and other gatherings at Harmon Park became Eureka Kids but its after-school program petered out for lack of city support and is now used to store the city’s Xmas decorations. Kids who used to attend Lane House were sad when it closed but were looking forward to resuming community activities at Main Stage until its directors changed direction and opted for more adult activities with economic potential.

Now we have no after-school programs for kids or community center activities for older Eurekans. We don’t even have a municipal swimming pool! Eureka’s many swimming pools are “tourist only.”

The party line … and Shuggie

The trend that’s destroying our community is driven by one big lie, “Tourism is Eureka’s only source of income.” This self-servingly overlooks the fact that a sizable portion of the resident population has no dog in that fight and is tired of subsidizing those who do.

Half the people who live on my street do not depend on tourism revenue. Some of them arrived with money, some commute to work outside Eureka, some live on “mailbox money” and some are just comfortably poor.

If all we’re about is selling knickknacks, how come we have four banks for fewer than 2,000 people, and dropping? That’s a lot of pet rocks and T-shirts! It also overlooks the big dogs in Eureka’s economy: banking, real estate and insurance. And, as Shuggie Tucker recently pointed out on Geekfest, “booze.” The last time I did the math, this little town had more than 60 businesses that sold alcohol. That’s gotta be a per-capita record for Arkansas cities!

 Gone are some of the oldest churches where neighbors once walked to worship. Gone are the stores that sold, and repaired, useful items. Gone are the downtown utility company offices where pedestrians could drop off bill payments. Gone are Harps and Clarks, the small downtown grocery stores you could walk to. Gone is the Hi-Hat, a kid-friendly bar where bankers, hippies, rednecks, dope growers and busking musicians were welcome and well behaved, mostly. Gone are the school children who formed life-long acquaintanceships with older neighbors they used to walk past on their way to and from school.

The city’s hospital is on life support and spring water that once won medals at World’s Fairs has been condemned by the State Health Department. Unfortunately, the tap water is worse. The city continues to spend our tax money on tourism promotion instead of infrastructure repair.

One hump or two … or three?

The more I look at the plans for the new old high school visitors and convention center the more I’m reminded of that hoary definition of a camel: “A horse designed by a committee.”

The proposal to develop the old high school property calls for so many “revenue-producing” components that I wonder where the activities that used to be held in the old Legion Hut might occur. How much money does it take to keep the utilities turned on in a one-room community center like the Legion Hut?

We don’t need a zillion-dollar project that falsely calls itself a “Community Center” when it is actually just another cog in the tourism industry that will benefit the same old good old boys that have monetized so many aspects of Eureka that should be freely available to those who think of this town as a place to simply live or possibly raise a family.

The late Paisley Livingston is one of my local heroes. He, and his wife Nell, were stalwarts in the Eureka Springs Preservation Society when a local motel owner wanted to lean on his old college roommate, a well-connected congressman, to relocate Eureka’s downtown post office up on the highway to anchor a strip mall. Paisley wisely warned, “You can only take so much out of a town before it stops being a town.”

Hillbilly gumption

Most Eurekans are sharing and creative people, as is typical of many who live in remote areas with cyclical economies. We don’t need much to make a real community center work, just one good-sized room, a kitchen and bathrooms. We still remember how to do the rest.

You know, something like the old Stone Church atop Mountain Street, which is closed half the year and “land-banked” for appreciation as a magic theater during tourist season. Instead, we’re being offered a chance to boost convention tourism with a so-called “Community Center” which is actually just the latest in a long line of tourist-industry moneymakers.

I have no problem with Eureka’s lodging industry asking for zillions of dollars to boost hotels’ convention and banquet income potential by developing the old high school as a “Visitors’ Center” as long as we don’t let it blind us to the crucial need for just a few bucks to open a real “Community Center.”

Please do the town a favor and don’t insult Eureka Springs’s children and older residents by calling it a “Community Center.” That would be another lie.

Vernon Tucker