Carry The Rock by Jay Jennings

Author:Jay Jennings [Jennings, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale Inc
Published: 2010-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

Interstate 630 is also called the Wilbur D. Mills Freeway after the former Arkansas congressman. Because of an affair Mills conducted with a stripper named Fanne Foxe (the Argentine Firecracker) that brought down the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee at the apex of his career in 1974, the road has also been known colloquially as the Fanne Foxe Freeway. At previous times in its stop-and-start existence, it has been called the East-West Expressway, the Eighth Street Expressway, and, in its one incarnation when only a mile-long section between Pine and Dennison had been completed in 1969, the World’s Shortest Highway. “I remember when I was a kid,” said Dr. Jay Barth, the Hendrix College professor who has studied the effects of I-630 on the community, “you’d come out of the city and get revved up to go on the interstate for a mile, and then you’d go right back in the city. It was kind of a bizarre traveling experience through Little Rock.”

As long ago as 1930, access into and out of the city by car was deemed a problem. An urban plan by John Nolen of Cambridge, Massachusetts, proposed a “Thoroughfare System” that included widening Eighth Street and making it continuous. Over the next twenty-five years, a major corridor that would connect east and west Little Rock seemed always to be on the drawing board, but the idea gained urgency after the 1957 integration crisis. Businessmen in the city worried that attracting companies to Little Rock would be impossible amid the education turmoil and racial strife, and their fears were justified. By most accounts, no new industry chose to locate in Little Rock for four years after the conflict at Central High made international headlines. A major road project might be perceived as a sign that Little Rock was pointing toward the future. Bill Bowen, a local banker and community leader at the time, wrote in his autobiography that “Little Rock was in dire need of positive programs to bring it out of the crisis—both economically and psychologically.”

Financing the road was the real problem. The city couldn’t get a bond issue approved and the state wouldn’t fund it, so by 1969 the orphaned one-mile stretch was all there was of the highway. Federal money was the only option, and city leaders were fortunate to have a powerful friend in Congress in Wilbur Mills. In a 1971 article in Life magazine, presidential columnist Hugh Sidey called him “The Republic of Wilbur Mills” and wrote that he was the “literal coequal of the president, as far as money matters are concerned.” Mills was able to bring the road into the interstate system with a clever bit of budgetary legerdemain that was his specialty: The mileage allowance for interstate highways had already topped out, but by rounding down the allocations of other states he found enough excess mileage to apply the balance to the 7.4 miles for I-630 in Arkansas. The approval had been in the works for a

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