Hillary the Other Woman by Kyle Dolly;

Author:Kyle, Dolly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WND Books
Published: 2016-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

27

THE GANGSTER ON THE CORNER

When my parents moved to Hot Springs in the late 1940s, one of the first things my daddy noticed was that the town lacked a city library. Having decided in 1948 that I was a smart little infant and would soon grow up to be a smart little girl, my father strongly believed that I would need access to a substantial library in addition to the many books we had at home.

He immediately embarked on a crusade to build a city library. He met and networked with all the right people.

The City Fathers in Hot Springs, however, had more on their post-war minds than making sure there were plenty of books for the baby boomers they had already begun to produce.

My daddy finally came to the conclusion that the city wasn’t going to do anything about building a library.

Then my daddy started working on Q. Byrum Hurst, who was the county judge. Garland County was a fairly large and prestigious county in Arkansas, ninth by population at the time. It’s easy to remember that because Arkansas license plates on cars back then started with the digit of the county and then a dash; we were 9.

The county judge carried a lot of clout, and he had a fairly substantial budget. My daddy and Byrum soon became, and remained, best friends.

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but the Garland County Library was constructed. It opened in 1952. That was two years before I would enter the first grade, would learn to read, and would need that library.

My daddy never mentioned his pivotal role in having the Garland County Library built, but I’m sure he was pleased to see how much I used and enjoyed it. Byrum told me the library story many years later, while we were sitting alone at his lake home after the funeral of his oldest daughter, my friend Nancy. I was still in law school at the time, and Byrum was so pleased that I had cut classes for a couple of days to go to Hot Springs.

It’s too bad that Q. Byrum Hurst died without writing his memoirs. Fantastic treasures of fascinating Hot Springs stories and Arkansas political folklore were buried with Byrum a few weeks before Christmas in 2006.

Byrum and my daddy and their accountant-friend Jimmy Dowds shared an office building across the street from the new Garland County Library, immediately south of the courthouse.

My almost-daily, after-school trek included a delightful stop at Byrum’s, Jimmy’s, and my daddy’s office where the ever-gracious Natalie Martin always offered me a cup of chilled water. I was fascinated with the pointy-bottomed paper cups that I could pull from a chute all by myself (I was six!) and fill with cold Mountain Valley Mineral Water by pushing a button. That refreshing water was an especially wonderful treat on a hot summer morning or afternoon.

My daily trek to my daddy’s office, and then to the Garland County Library across the street, always took me past a very nice, pristine, white frame house on the curving corner of West Grand and Hawthorne.

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