DOGPATCH DAYS OF YORE

After 50 years, fun finally wearing off

Park souvenirs going to museum

HARRISON -- People have been slowly loosening their grip.

For decades, they have clung to their Dogpatch USA memorabilia -- troves of hillbilly artifacts displayed in living rooms or stashed in attics and barns throughout the Ozarks.

But now -- 50 years after the theme park's first full season in 1969 -- there has come a reckoning with time and space.

Luckily for the collectors, there is a repository for all things Dogpatch -- the Boone County Heritage Museum in Harrison.

Toinette Madison, the museum director, said the number of Dogpatch items at the museum has increased from about 50 in 2011 to about 200 now, warranting an expansion last year from a display case to a Dispatch room, where theme-park kitsch shares space with what is billed as the world's largest parking meter collection.

Madison believes Dogpatch donations have increased with the graying of baby boomers who visited or worked at the theme park, which was open from 1968-93, about 10 miles to the south in Newton County.

They're finally reaching a point where they can let go of cherished memorabilia.

"At least for me that's exactly what it was," said Van Younes, 73, a retired Harrison lawyer. "It was just time in my life to start cleaning out the barn so to speak. I didn't want to keep those things, and I didn't have a place to display them."

Younes had a dozen signs from Dogpatch in his garage. Last year, after hearing about the museum's efforts to collect Dogpatch items, he took the signs to Madison. The cache included a large sign of Mammy and Pappy Yokum -- the fictional parents of Li'l Abner -- with the faces cut out, allowing impersonators to jut their faces through the holes for souvenir snapshots.

Younes visited Dogpatch a few times when he was a teenager. He got the signs in the early 1990s when, as an attorney, he represented a Dogpatch owner, C.L. Carr.

"We were over there one time doing something," said Younes. "I just noticed a few signs. A lot of signs had been carried off. I spoke to Mr. Carr, saying I would like to preserve some of the signs. So I went back and picked up a few."

Dogpatch USA was a theme park based on Al Capp's Li'l Abner comic strip, which was published in more than 700 newspapers across the country between 1934 and 1977.

Constructed in 1967 for $1.33 million (about $10 million in today's dollars), Dogpatch originally featured a trout farm, buggy and horseback rides, an apiary, Ozark arts and crafts, gift shops and entertainment by Dogpatch characters, according to the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Amusement rides were added later.

Dogpatch had about 300,000 visitors in 1968 but never publicly reported more than 200,000 a year after that, according to arkansasroadstories.com.

An economics study had predicted that 1.2 million people would be going to Dogpatch annually by 1978, but that seems in retrospect to have been overly optimistic. Al Capp stopped doing the Li'l Abner cartoon strip in 1977 and died two years later.

Dogpatch USA opened at a time of great upheaval in American culture. Young people were protesting the Vietnam War. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, sparked riots in more than 100 American cities. And in August of 1968, protesters clashed with police outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Still, in Arkansas, there was a backwoods oasis of sorts, an economic boon based on a stereotype the state was trying to leave behind.

Dogpatch provided jobs for Arkansans who wanted to be actors or musicians, or just take tickets at a ride called Earthquake McGoon's Brain Rattler.

People who worked at Dogpatch in the early years seem to remember it in the golden haze of youth.

"We were just young and dumb and in love and living life," said Mike Bishop, 62, of Harrison.

Originally from Wilson, Bishop was a drummer for the band at Dogpatch. Later, he became the entertainment director. Also, he occasionally played a Luke Scragg, scruffy cousin of the comely Daisy Mae.

Bishop met 16-year-old Dale Fisher of Harrison while working at Dogpatch. She played Mammy Yokum and Dateless Brown, a character who had trouble getting dates.

Bishop and Fisher later married and have been together ever since.

"It was a special place for us," he said of Dogpatch. "So many things that came out of that are still healthy today. I have good friends that I met there."

Bishop recently gave the Dogpatch entertainment logs to the museum, but he's not ready to let go of the rest of his Dogpatch stuff.

"I have two little shelves in my den of shot glasses and game boards and things that came out of the park," he said. "My wife has mentioned a time or two 'What are we going to do with that stuff? I'm tired of dusting it. Maybe we should take it to museum.'

"No, not yet," Bishop told her. "I haven't reached that point yet."

Jim Sprott, 70, another Harrison lawyer, also met his future wife at Dogpatch. Jan Greene of Forrest City played Daisy Mae, a voluptuous blonde who was always chasing Li'l Abner, the handsome hillbilly hero of Dogpatch.

Sprott played Luke Scragg and Earthquake McGoon, the "world's dirtiest rassler," to quote McGoon himself in the Li'l Abner comic strip.

Sprott said he began working at Dogpatch in 1969, the theme park's first full season. The fact that it was 50 years ago has him thinking. Man first walked on the moon that summer in 1969.

"Somehow it's just a commemoration that's brought to mind because it's 50 years," Sprott said. "It's not 49. It's not 46. It's 50."

Sprott isn't ready to relinquish his Dogpatch artifacts, which include a few signs.

Jan Sprott, 69, his wife, said she told their two daughters that when the time comes, "Go through the Dogpatch stuff, and what you don't want, give to the museum."

The Sprotts like to show the Dogpatch items to their grandchildren and tell them about that time in their lives. Jan Sprott still has some of her Daisy Mae costumes, including a red shirt with black polka dots, and a black skirt.

The Sprotts recently took a granddaughter to Mystic Caverns, near Harrison. When Jim Sprott overheard young people there talking about Dogpatch, he said, "Well, Daisy Mae's up in the gift shop," referring to his wife.

They didn't know who Daisy Mae was, Jan Sprott said.

Dogpatch is slipping from the collective Arkansas memory into history.

"It's not going to be of interest I'm afraid to a lot of young people," Jan Sprott said of the old theme park. "It is definitely an important part of the history of our area."

Daisy Mae was a main attraction at Dogpatch.

Wendy Johnson, 55, originally of Los Angeles, now of Green Forest, played Daisy Mae at Dogpatch in 1982. She was 17 or 18 years old at the time and the reigning Miss Carroll County.

Johnson said many of the female actors, including Daisy Mae, had to wear short skirts and "falsies" at the family themed park.

"It was very sexualized," she said. "This was the '80s. It wouldn't work now."

Johnson said the actors' job was to engage with people in the park. Characters would walk up to people and strike up a conversation.

"All it was was public relations," she said. "You were making the guests feel at home."

"Your teeth would get sunburned, practically," Sherie Thompson Cormack, a former Daisy Mae, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2003.

Few of the actors were locals, said Johnson, but many locals had other jobs at the park.

"I had people I would go see every day," she said. "You had to walk that valley all day long and you would see people over and over again that you'd fall in love with."

Madison, the museum director, thinks people who worked at the park had a special connection to it.

"I think the experience of the park was really special for the kids and especially the workers, you know, my generation," she said. "And I always say, if you weren't there, I'm sorry because there was nothing else like it."

Madison was there.

She worked at Dogpatch in the summer 1989 running a T-shirt shop. By that time, things had changed and the Li'l Abner comic strip was becoming a more distant memory for many.

Madison remembers people at the park saying things like "We used to bring our kids here when this place was awesome."

The Dogpatch property has changed hands several times since 1993.

"There's been a lot of talk about the park being revived or opened up again," Bishop said. "Me, personally, I think we're past that. It was a magical time out there."

NW News on 07/21/2019

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