A downtown reborn

— As I ate lunch at the Honeycomb on Main Street in Arkadelphia, my thoughts raced back to March 1, 1997. Mike Huckabee was in his first year as governor, and I was a member of his staff. It had been a long week with meetings at the state Capitol at 7 a.m. each day Monday through Friday. My plan for Saturday was to stay home with my wife and two sons—our older son was 4; the younger son had been born five weeks earlier—and catch up on my reading.

When the tornado sirens went off in Little Rock that afternoon, I left my reading perch downstairs and called for my wife and the baby to come down from an upstairs bedroom. As my wife walked down the stairs, she said: “Channel 11 just reported that downtown Arkadelphia has been destroyed by a tornado.” With the innate skepticism of the print journalist I once had been, I answered: “Those folks on TV tend to exaggerate.”

Still, I decided to call my parents in Arkadelphia. When calls were met with the “all circuits are busy,” recording, I began to worry. About 15 minutes later, our phone rang. It was my father, who had been a downtown businessman in Arkadelphia since the early 1950s. His business was fine. Less than a block away, it was a far different story. “Call the governor and tell him to bring in the National Guard,” my father said. “The buildings on Main Street are pretty much gone.”

Tornadoes had cut a swath from southwest to northeast Arkansas that Saturday, killing 25 Arkansans along the way.

Three days later, President Bill Clinton took a walking tour of downtown Arkadelphia. Sixty city blocks in a city of fewer than 11,000 people had been partially destroyed by the F4 tornado. A reception was held for the president in a room at Elk Horn Bank & Trust (now Southern Bancorp). There was no electricity. Candles lit the room. Knowing Arkadelphia was my hometown, the president walked over at one point and said: “You know, most towns in the south half of our state might never recover from something like this. Arkadelphia will because it has two colleges and strong banks.”

Almost 16 years later, it is clear Clinton knew what he was talking about. I’m in Arkadelphia on this November day with Skip Rutherford, the man who headed efforts to build the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock and now serves as dean of the Clinton School of Public Service. He has invited me to lunch so he can discuss a project being carried out by four Clinton School students. Two of the students—Jacob Perry of Fayetteville and Cathrine Schwader of Rogers—are Arkansans. The other members of the team are Nick Provencher from Maine and Aliyah Sarkar from Saudi Arabia.

Thirteen teams from the Clinton School are spread across Arkansas, working on projects as they seek to earn a master’s degree in public service. Each year, the staff reviews proposals and narrows those proposals down to about 30 finalists, who are then interviewed by faculty members.

Jane Lucas of Group Living Inc. in Arkadelphia, a nonprofit organization formed in 1973, decided to apply. The interesting thing about the revitalization of downtown Arkadelphia since the 1997 tornado is that it hasn’t been driven by retail establishments. Indeed, as is the case in many towns its size across the region, most retail establishments have been replaced by big-box stores or moved out of downtown to be near the big boxes. Downtown’s resurgence has been spurred instead by the fact that it’s the home of two of the state’s largest bank-holding companies (Southern and Summit), Group Living and the Dawson Education Cooperative, which provides support for schools and professional development opportunities for teachers.

Group Living opened the Honeycomb in 1995 to provide training and jobs for developmentally disabled adults. The restaurant rebounded quickly from the 1997 tornado. In August of 2005, however, a fire destroyed the adjacent Beehive Store, and the Honeycomb suffered severe smoke and water damage. In November of 2006, the Honeycomb moved across the street into a building that had housed the Otasco store when I was growing up. In 2010, Group Living completed construction of a two-story building across the street to house its offices and the Beehive Store. The Group Living offices, the Beehive Store and the Honeycomb are helping to transform downtown Arkadelphia.

The Clinton School students’ task is to come up with a marketing plan to increase awareness of the restaurant and drive up revenue. Sales almost doubled November 6 when there were Election Day specials featuring Mitt Romney’s favorite meatloaf recipe, President Barack Obama’s favorite chili recipe, Ann Romney’s recipe for oatmeal cookies and Michelle Obama’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It was a sign of what’s possible for the restaurant.

If future applications are approved, Rutherford can see other Clinton School students playing a role in making downtown Arkadelphia a draw for the more than 5,000 students who attend college there, further enhancing the vision a president from Arkansas had in those bleak 1997 days.

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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 12/05/2012

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