75 years ago
(1934)
Mrs. W.E. Jumper has as her guest father Sam Miller of McAlester, Okla. He will spend some time in Conway. Henry Ford said in Detroit that the Ford Motor Company was out of the depression and that its 1935 production schedule would set at 1,000,000 units more for the first time in four years. “The depression,” Mr. Ford said in a statement, “would be over for the whole country very soon if American Industrialists would just forget the alphabet schemes and take hold of their industries and run them with good, sound American business sense.”
50 years ago
(1959)
A barn filled with baled hay was destroyed by fire, causing at least $2,000 damage. The barn was located off the highway on the former Will Seiter property about three miles south of Conway. The property was sold recently to a Little Rock attorney. Inside the bard were 2,500 to 3,000 bales of hay owned by Tommy Lewis. He estimated the loss at $1,600. Another 380 bales were lost by Sam Moix.
The Lilac Junior Garden Club met at Fairside Elementary School. A program on leaves was given. Mary Owen and Debbie Bentley gave reports on why leaves turn different colors in the fall. Each member displayed a booklet of leaves and flowers that they had made.
25 years ago
(1984)
Three representatives from the Vilonia chapter of the Future Business Leaders of America attended the FBLA fall leadership conference in Nashville, Tenn. They were Wendy Hill, Troy Ashby and Bronnie Rose, chapter advisor.
Remodeling work was continuing to turn the old Conway Corp. building into a new business and office headquarters. The plant was located on Prairie Street, just west of Missouri Pacific Railroad Co. tracks. The $767,000 job would result in a remodeled exterior and an interior containing two floors of office space for management staff and daily business operations and a third floor for storage and additional office space.
10 years ago
(1999)
While casing kids his line from a friend’s property along the Arkansas River, Eric Dunn got a different kind of bite. The resident of the Happy Hollow community near Enola noticed something unusual along the banks, did some rudimentary examination and after confirmation from a paleontologist at the University of Central Arkansas, discovered he had found the tooth of a mastodon. Mastodons were relatives of the modern elephant that roamed North America from at least 10,000 to 3.75 million years ago. The species died out about 10,000 years ago. The tooth was roughly the size of a softball. After consulting with Dr. Ben Wagoner, a paleontologist and assistant professor of biology at the University of Central Arkansas, the age of the tooth was thought to be about 100,000 years old. Dunn planned to mount the tooth to make it more conducive for display. “It was a neat find,” he said.
