Other days

100 YEARS AGO Dec. 13, 1913

Frank Bennett, a white man, who says that he is wanted in Bloomington, Ill., for forgery, walked into police headquarters yesterday afternoon and surrendered to Chief of Police Fred M. Cogswell. Bennett told a Gazette reporter last night that he had forged a check for $11 on J. M. Roebuck of Bloomington, by whom he previously had been employed. When asked why he had surrendered, he said that he wished to go back to Bloomington and “square” the matter.

50 YEARS AGO Dec. 13, 1963

The city of Fort Smith will fight the closing of Ft. Chaffee. The Defense Department announced Thursday that it would close the post, moving 5,000 soldiers to other installations, cutting off 700 civilian jobs, eliminating 600 military jobs and eliminating 250 part-time civilian jobs. Northwest Arkansas will lose the $2 million monthly payroll generated by Chaffee. Only one other military post in the United States will lose more personnel - 812 at Stead Air Force Base, Reno, Nev. A total of 26 installations in 14 states will be closed.

25 YEARS AGO Dec. 13, 1988

Sen. Knox Nelson of Pine Bluff suggested Monday that schools require students to pay for textbooks they misuse. “I thinkyou ought to put accountability on the schools to make youngsters take care of books,” Nelson said in a meeting of the Education Subcommittee of the Joint Budget Committee. “If you tear up the book you ought to pay for it.” Nelson asked for a special subcommittee meeting to go over $12 million budget requests for schoolbooks in the proposed Department of Education spending plans for the next two years. The amount spent on textbooks has escalated $4 million in five years.

10 YEARS AGO Dec. 13, 2003

A district judge in Oklahoma on Friday said a pollution suit filed two years ago against Tyson Foods Inc., the world’s largest meat processor, and two other Arkansas poultry companies merited class-action status. The decision by Judge James Goodpaster, whose 12th District includes Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees in northeastern Oklahoma where the alleged contamination occurred, opens the way for thousands of lakefront landowners to pursue the complaint against the companies. The ruling, among other things, stated that individual issues didn’t predominate over plaintiffs’ common issues, enabling a class-action suit against Springdale-based Tyson Foods, Siloam Springsbased Simmons Foods and Decatur-based Peterson Farms Inc.

Arkansas, Pages 14 on 12/13/2013

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