My mother was a native of the Arkansas Grand Prairie. She was born at Des Arc in 1925, two years before the Great Flood of 1927. That flood would inundate much of east Arkansas and bring hundreds of evacuees to live in tents in her hometown.
Rice already was an important crop on the Grand Prairie. Bill Hope had planted a plot as an experiment near Stuttgart in 1902. The results were good enough that other farmers followed his lead. The Stuttgart Rice Mill Co. was incorporated in March 1907 and was completed in October of that year, just in time for the harvest. It made a profit of $16,000.
In 1921, the farmers' cooperative that's now Riceland Foods Inc. was formed. By 1926, the year after my mother's birth, the University of Arkansas had placed its Rice Research and Extension Center at Stuttgart. With rice came ducks--millions of ducks. The world championhip duck calling contest, now part of Stuttgart's Wings Over the Prairie Festival, began in 1936 since duck hunters across the country already had come to consider the Grand Prairie as the mecca of their sport. In 1943, the year my mother graduated from high school, Producers Rice Mill was established at Stuttgart.
Duck season began in Arkansas on Saturday. Thanksgiving week marks the Wings Over the Prairie Festival. It's the time of year when Arkansans in all 75 counties read about and think about the Grand Prairie region and its rich culture.
I was raised in southwest Arkansas, but the Grand Prairie always has been a part of me because of my mother. She read the weekly White River Journal from Des Arc until she died at age 90 two years ago this week. My grandparents had lived into their 90s in their big house on Erwin Street in Des Arc. Thanksgiving, Christmas and large parts of my summers were spent there as a boy, soaking up the traditions of the region. Rice and gravy were always served at holiday meals rather than potatoes and gravy. And though my grandfather wasn't a hunter, he would trade items from his hardware store in downtown Des Arc for fat mallards to go with the cornbread dressing, turnip greens, peas and rice.
Unlike my grandfather, my father was a duck hunter, and I was fortunate that he would take me on Grand Prairie hunts as a boy. It was on a brutally cold November morning in 1976 near Stuttgart, in fact, when he killed three ducks with one shot. And they were three different types of ducks. I have a witness to that feat, my boyhood friend Trey Berry, now the president of Southern Arkansas University at Magnolia. We all know that a college president would never lie.
For many Arkansans, the day after Thanksgiving means leftovers and shopping. For our family, it meant the short trip from Des Arc to Stuttgart to watch the duck callers compete. The Grand Prairie is unique. I think not only of the ducks and the rice but of the Eastern European influences, the Tollville Turkey Fry, the Slovak Oyster Supper, the good fishing in the spring, the mosquitoes in the summer. I think of barbecue eaten at Craig's in DeValls Bluff, catfish consumed at Murry's near Hazen and the fine meals at the Pam Pam Club in Stuttgart, which unfortunately no longer exists. The Pam Pam Drive Inn opened in 1946. In 1966, it became a private supper club and served visiting duck hunters from around the world steaks and hash browns with cheese until 2008. I also have fond memories of the Pam Pam salad dressing. Don't even ask about Glynadean Thomas' famous punch.
I also think of world-renowned duck clubs that have called the Grand Prairie home through the years. My grandfather had once been the Prairie County judge and would treat us to stories of formal dinners eaten at Edgar Monsanto Queeny's Wingmead farm south of DeValls Bluff. Wingmead was established in 1937 by Queeny, the son of the founder of Monsanto Chemical Co. in St. Louis. By the time Queeny retired from Monsanto in 1960, it had become the third-largest chemical company in the country and the fifth-largest company of its kind in the world.
Queeny's passion away from work was duck hunting. He began hunting in the 1930s on Mill Bayou near DeWitt with a man named Elmer "Tippy" LaCotts. It was LaCotts who introduced Queeny to Jess Wilson, reputed to be the state's best duck caller and hunting guide. Queeny later found land to buy on LaGrue Bayou. He formed an irrigation district and used the power of eminent domain to acquire 11,000 acres.
Plans for the home at Wingmead were drawn in 1937 by a prominent St. Louis architect. The house was built in 1939. Queeny and his wife would come to the Grand Prairie each October and often would stay until March. Guests--including the likes of Walt Disney and Nash Buckingham--would arrive on Friday in time for a black-tie dinner. They would hunt ducks on Saturday and Sunday mornings, hunt quail on Saturday afternoon, and depart by Sunday afternoon. What I wouldn't give to be able to go back in time and experience one of those Grand Prairie weekends. It was on a Dec. 1, 1948, hunt near Clarendon that Buckingham (a man that many people consider the finest outdoors writer ever) lost his famous 12-gauge shotgun that he had nicknamed Bo Whoop after the deep sound it made upon discharge. Buckingham later would lament in print the loss of his gun, which finally turned up at an auction several years ago and is now housed in the Ducks Unlimited national headquarters at Memphis.
Many of us who didn't grow up there share a love of and fascination with the Grand Prairie, not only its duck hunting holes but also its culture, geography and the colorful characters who call it home. There's no other place in America quite like it.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 11/19/2017