100 YEARS AGO Jan. 5, 1914

FORT SMITH - Among the grounds for attacking the legality of petitions filed under the new anti-liquor law for licensed saloons, will be one charge that signatures to liquor petitions must be made after the law becomes effective, and not before, according to an announcement by counsel for the Fort Smith Anti-Saloon League today. The petitions filed here were circulated and signed before the law became effective.

50 YEARS AGO Jan. 5, 1964

Some visitors to Little Rock private hospitals are apparently under the impression that rules and regulations governing them have been suspended. The hospitals recently decided to drop a “pass” system, set up to help control the visitors problem in the hospitals about a year ago. “They all converged on us,” Allen Weintraub, assistant administrator at St. Vincent Infirmary, said. “A good visitor is really a tonic to a patient,” Weintraub explained, but situations where about 10 jocular, cigar-smoking “Good Time Charlies” pile in to sit on beds, interfere with hospital routine and don’t know when to go home leave patients worse off instead of better. The hospitals set up the pass system in an effort to control this sort of thing, but found they would need a full-sized police force to enforce the rules.

25 YEARS AGO Jan. 5, 1989

Assessing operations of the Urban League of Arkansas Inc. and getting the league’s long-awaited 1987 audit released are top priorities for Harold Barrett, the National Urban League officer sent in as interim manager. Barrett said he would be staying through this week and either he or someone else from the National Urban League would be in and out of Little Rock managing the affiliate.

10 YEARS AGO Jan. 5, 2004

More than three years after its conception, plans have finally stopped spinning for a $9.2 million pedestrian-bicycle bridge to span Murray Lock and Dam on the Arkansas River. Nearly completed designs and a recent infusion of money have given traction to the project to connect 14 miles of trails on both sides of the Arkansas River. At roughly 4,300 feet long, it will rank among the longest pedestrian-bicycle bridges built for that purpose in the United States, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Arkansas, Pages 16 on 01/05/2014