Well, there ya go. It had to be Arkansas!
AND…just so Flintknapper knows why I can occasionally / luckily be correct…. I was BORN in Hot Springs!
(but just as an embarrasing note …and to give some more ammo to Flintknapper and a few other of my supporters….and provide a bit more thread-drift….
On our honeymoon we stayed a few nights in the Arlington Hotel in downtown Hot Springs….
After a day or so I suggested we visit the old St. Joseph Hospital where I first arrived in this world… Sooo….we walked around the corner to find a building typical of the later ‘40s… Terrazzo floors… Elevators of the period… small windows of 1940’s nursing stations, etc etc….
…but the St. Joseph Hospital of Today is relocated South of town in a modern Hospital District… The place of my birth…is now known as the “Bill Clinton School of Mathmatics”.
Maybe explains why I’m really bad at math.
More Arkansas thread drift: My great grandfather was George Anderson Tackett, a backwoods farmer but also once the sherriff of Montgomery County, AR just to the SW of Hot Springs.
Family story says that one day he had to deliver a prisoner to Hot Springs jail for trial. He did so by horse-back….. after-which he thought he’d visit the newly-famous bar/lounge of the Arlington Hotel where liquor was served to wealthy patrons.
He tied his horse and walked up the grand entrance stairs to the hotel and into the plush lobby and passed into the lounge wearing muddy boots, a slouch-hat, and a heavy jacket. The high-class well-dressed patrons of the hotel were aghast at his appearance.
He ignored them and walked up to the bar and asked for a glass of whiskey…. and the bartender refused to serve the disheveled man. The bellman called for the Hotel Clerk who arrived with Hotel Security…a big, brawny character…. and they demanded G.A. (as he was known to those in Montgomery county), they demanded he leave the premises.
“Not until I get a glass of whiskey!”, he replied.
The security man pulled his coat-tail aside to show a pistol in his belt and ordered GA out of the hotel. So, GA walked out and down the steps to the street where his horse was tied, mounted the horse and rode the horse back UP the steps,
through the lobby and into the lounge up to the bar….. with his short-barreled 12ga across the pommel… and demanded “I’ll have that whiskey Now!”
The Hotel manager suddenly arrived and Ordered him Out Of the Hotel …” OR I‘LL CALL THE LAW!”
G.A. pulled HIS coat back to reveal his badge and said, “HE’s ALREADY HERE! AND HE WANTS WHISKEY!”
The family story ends there but it’s assumed he got his whiskey and left peaceably.
