Kane Webb

A little more gambling, but a whole lot different town

LITTLE ROCK — HOT SPRINGS - If this city were a movie, it’d be an old-fashioned, big studio epic, with a cast of thousands, produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille and written by Mickey Spillane. It’d be in colorful VistaVision, with dramatic flashbacks and paeans to the past in grainy black and white.

If this city were a movie, it’d be a series of blockbusters-although, like many serialized dramas, the latest sequel may seem tame compared to the notorious premiere. But it represents a new chapter with an interesting old twist, and it might go something like this: As opening credits roll, FADE IN to CLOSE UP shot of a jack-hammer gnawing into concrete at a construction site.

PULL BACK to reveal the main entrance into Oaklawn Park, the venerable horse racing track. Cars roll by on busy Central Avenue. The hard hats are at work on a track expansion. Another 60,000 square feet is being added to the southwest part of the building. Up and out, it’ll hug Central like a turtleneck sweater.

SUPERIMPOSE over the workers an artist’s rendering of the new Gaming Center.

VOICE OVER: At a cost of some $20 million, the new facility will allow Oaklawn to add another 500 machines dubbed Electronic Games of Skill. All perfectly legal and voterapproved, the construction work outside the racetrack represents the biggest expansion of machine-style-some might say casinostyle-gambling in Hot Springs since the days of Owney Madden and the Southern Club, Dane Harris and The Vapors, the good ol’ bad ol’ colorful days when the town was built on illegal gambling and precious little else. It was 40 years ago this spring that the last gasp of illegal gambling in the Spa City was snuffed out by Carl Miller and Ken McKee, the heads of the Arkansas state police who carried on the clean-up work of the legendary Lynn Davis and his boss, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller.

DISSOLVE to a shot of Eric Jackson in his general manager’s office at Oaklawn.

VOICE OVER: Jackson is not a stereotypical racetrack breed. His affection for his hometown, and his civic involvement in it, runs deeper than the groundbreaking of his employer’s newest expansion. A native of Hot Springs, he holds an economics degree from Hendrix College in Conway. Besides running the racetrack, Jackson has served on the city’s advertising and promotion commission and as president of both the chamber of commerce and the rotary club. He was a founder and early president of Fifty for the Future, a group key to turning around the city’s economic fortunes. He now sits on the board of the Sisters of Mercy Health System. He played a part in getting the so-called Hamburger Tax passed in the 1990s, as well as several other publicly-funded projects, including the city’s civic center and Summit Arena.

He was a cub reporter at the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record when Rockefeller and Davis finally slayed the one-armed bandits.

“It was a strange town then,” Jackson remembers. “There was one set of laws for some people, and a different set of laws for other people.” VOICE OVER: These days, the law is clear enough. Pari-mutuel betting is allowed at Oaklawn and Southland Greyhound Park in West Memphis as are the new Electronic Games of Skill-a euphemism that’s impossible to say without laughing. Even the locals call ’em slot machines.

CUT to Orval Allbritton, town historian, author and resident of Hot Springs for all of his 80 years. “I know they’re very sensitive if youcall them slots,” says Allbritton. “But if it looks like a skunk and smells like a skunk, you’ve probably got a skunk on your hands. But they’re running, so somebody’s letting ’em do it.” VOICE OVER: But if some in Hot Springs expect the new expansion at Oaklawn to be the second coming of a Wide Open era, well, some better lower their expectations. Or heighten them. With apologies to Faulkner, in Hot Springs, the past may not be dead, but it does finally seem to be past. It’s a tourist town these days, a place for retirees and cyber-workers looking to relocate. The notorious past? It’s now Fun For the Whole Family.

Look at the new Gangster Museum. Or the postcards from city promoters that feature Al Capone. Is this Hot Springs or a ride at Disney World?

CUT to Allbritton: “We still have some diehards who believe the [casino] gambling will come back. And maybe some day it will. But the city is different.

It’s just filled with families. . . . We’re doing well.” CUT back to Jackson: “[Hot Springs is] looking at something like $100 million in commercial construction over the next 18 months, maybe more. I believe that is the largest amount ever for Hot Springs.

As an example, we have six hotels under construction or soon to be. Between now and the end of 2009, we’re expecting 2,000 new jobs to develop. Ask employers in town today, and they’ll tell you that the true unemployment rate right now is zero. . . . Most young people these days don’t even remember that [Hot Springs was notorious for its illegal gambling]. I mean, we’re talking 50 years ago.”DISSOLVE to a scene from the sepia past of a half-century ago. An 11-year-old boy named Mike Dugan is hanging out at his uncle’s bar and pool hall at the corner of Golf Links and Central. Dugan’s Oasis, reads the sign, with a neon palm tree beckoning customers.

But the only folks coming by tonight are the state police. Mike’s uncle has been tipped off. Dugan’s Oasis may be a bar and pool hall, but like lots of other businesses and some private homes in the city, it’s also a place to gamble.

With cops on the way, the Dugans must get the slots loaded onto the truck and moved to a relative’s lake house.

CLOSE-UP of Dugan, present-day, now a Hot Springs business owner, over a lunch of Reuben sandwiches at Mollie’s Restaurant. The restaurant is just a stone’s throw from the Widow Madden’s old place. “The state police got there,” Dugan remembers, “but we didn’t have the place cleared out yet. As my uncles were carrying the slot machines out the side door, the police stayed out front. Every once in a while, they’d look around the side to see if we were done clearing out the slots.” VOICE OVER: Once the slots were gone, the cops would come in to find the place as clean and quiet as a church chapel. It was all part of a carefully choreographed dance in those days. A slow waltz of benign neglect. When Lynn Davis’ boys finally shut down the gambling halls for good in 1967-68, the director of the State Police noticed something about the slot machines confiscated by his team. They’d been seized by state troopers in an earlier raid. The troopers had marked the machines, then turned them over to the city police department in order to be destroyed, but they’d just been returned to their owners. Slots and roulette wheels weren’t the only games played in Hot Springs.

SUPERIMPOSE image of a city tax ledger from the first quarter of 1963. It runs nine pages and tallies up the revenue from 104 establishments, which were taxed monthly per slot ($5 each), bar ($25), large casino ($500), small casino ($200), poker game ($25) or bingo ($50)-and ran the gamut from the The New Southern Club on Central (large casino, bar, bingo, 81 slots) to the Town Talk Bar-B-Q #2 on Malvern (3 slots).

CUT to Allbritton: “Before that tax, the gamblers went down every two weeks to municipal court to pay a fine.

And they’d pay them under false names.

One week they might be named after flowers. Mr. Tulip. Mr. Rose. The next week it might be automobiles. Mr. Buick.

Mr. Chrysler. That’s how they hid it.”FADE IN to a scene at the city airport, circa 1970s. The assistant manager of the airport is leaving the grounds in his pickup truck, the bed full of toys. The assistant manager, Mike Dugan’s father, had bought the toys from folks who were selling belongings at the airport before they left town for good. “All these people had lost their jobs when the casinos were shut down for good,” Dugan remembers.

“They had to sell stuff just to afford to move. We had four major airlines running daily flights all over the place. That dried up.” Over a shot of an airplane lifting into the clouds, SUPERIMPOSE a headline from the Saturday Evening Post: No Dice In Hot Springs: With the flow of $100 bills shut off in a crackdown last spring, this historic spa is betting its life on a role for legal gambling.

VOICE OVER: With the exception of the races and games at Oaklawn, the legal gambling never came. Not after the politically expedient shutdown brought about by Orval Faubus in ’64. Not after Rockefeller’s final raid in ’67-68.

CUT to Mike Dugan. “As a kid, I remember seeing the population sign on the city limits and it was up to 40,000,” he recalls. “It got down to something like26,000 in the 1970s. The end of illegal gambling almost took a fourth of the population away.”

DISSOLVE to present-day outside the Hot Springs Convention Center. It’s Friday, the day before the Arkansas Derby concludes the live race meet at Oaklawn, and the weather is as perfect as it’s been cantankerous this spring.

CUT to Steve Arrison, behind the wheel of his SUV, adjusting the volume on a Tracy Byrd CD through a button on the steering column. Arrison is CEO of the city’s advertising and promotion commission. Byrd is a country singersongwriter from Texas and frequent vacationer to Hot Springs who’s in town to tape some radio and television commercials for the city. Byrd is flying out soon, and Arrison wants to swing by his hotel to say good-bye. But first, Arrison gives a visitor a tour.

CLOSE UP of Arrison, pointing out landmarks as he drives along. “We have six hotels under construction or soon to be,” he says, then lists them. Included is a 142-room Holiday Inn that’ll go up in downtown on the grounds of the old Ouachita Hospital.

“The old hotel there,” he says, pointing to a prime entry point along Central Avenue, “was torn down and the land is for sale.”

“We had 17,000 people on a Monday night for our First Ever Fifth Annual Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Bridge,” he says, pointing out Bridge Street, a blink-and-miss-it stretch of pavement. At one point (odd Hot Springs history again), Bridge Street made Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as the world’s shortest street. Is it still?

“Who knows?” Arrison shrugs.

WIDE SHOT of Central Avenue, the soul of Hot Springs, as Arrison lists changes, all for the better: The renovation of the Quapaw Bath House, which will give the city two fully functioning bath houses (the other is the Buckstaff) as well as the Fordyce bath house/visitors’ center; the new gangster museum farther down Central, past the Arlington; the grand old Majestic Hotel and adjoining properties, which will be restored and re-opened as apartments. Arrison mentions some promising news that a developer from California is interested in buying several of Central’s neglected buildings and converting the top halves into condos. Just off Central but still in downtown, a bigger, better, more permanent farmers’ market will go in near the old train station.

CUT to Eric Jackson: “I trace a lot of [the progress] to some extraordinary bootstrapping the community did in the 1990s. . . . Out of all that came a renewed commitment to tourism and economic development. . . . In my opinion, Hot Springs is one of the best kept economic secrets in the South.”

VOICE OVER: Over the last two decades, the residents of Hot Springs have voted in special elections to change the form of government, pass a tourism tax, pay for police and fire stations, civic centers, save Magic Springs, institute Sunday racing at Oaklawn and allow for Electronic Games of Skill. Almost all the proposals passed.

DISSOLVE to shot of Arrison behind his desk. On the desk sits a fist-sized duplicate of a ring that commemorates the national basketball championship won by the University of Louisville back in the 1980s. At the time, Arrison worked in Louisville running a hotel. Louisville, home of Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby, racing town. Hot Springs, home of Oaklawn Park, racing town.

“Here, racing has a bigger impact,”Arrison says. “We’re a city of 37,000. Louisville is much bigger and its impact was largely relegated to Derby Day.”

And the new Electronic Games of Skill? How will more gambling affect this post-post corrupt Hot Springs?

“All of us saw the numbers,” he says of the estimates on economic impact. “We were awed by the numbers. Even if you cut them in half, it’ll have a tremendous impact. Plus, it gives us another product.”

VOICE OVER: The numbers. Hot Springs has always been a city of numbers. Here’s a big one: In 2006, some 2,400,000 tourists visited, up almost 400,000 from six years earlier. Among other attractions, the out-of-towners attended the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (some 14,000 strong annually) and visited eight art galleries along Central Avenue. Top tourist stops: Oaklawn and Magic Springs, the resuscitated amusement park.

DISSOLVE to a scene at the office of Clay Farrar-lawyer, estate planner, civic activist. A fellow in his 50s walks into the office and asks to meet with Farrar. The visitor is a software engineer and is interested in relocating to Hot Springs.

“How did you find us?” Farrar asks.

The man says he did a computer search. Looked at cost of living, climate, taxes, housing costs. Hot Springs scored best.

“He’s since moved here permanently,” says Farrar.

CUT to Chris Polychron, a Little Rock native who’s been in the Hot Springs realestate business since 1979: “The housing market is still pretty good but obviously not what it was. The condo market made us look good, but there’s a three to four year supply now. We’ve been overbuilding on the condo end. The problems in the housing market have been reflected here in the number of early retirees, those folks with a laptop who can do their job anywhere. Now their stock portfolios are down, their houses aren’t worth as much. They’re waiting a little longer. So we’re something of a victim of the housing market because the major industries in Hot Springs now are retirement and tourism.”

A few years ago, Polychron says, a retirement-relocation committee put up a website designed to attract newcomers. Until the last year, the site received 800 to 900 hits a month, and these were folks asking for information. Now it’s about half that.

“Residential real estate has slowed down all over Arkansas,” says Polychron. “But as far as commercial real estate, we’re still booming.”

VOICE OVER: As one example, the prime real estate across Central Avenue from Oaklawn becomes only more valuable with the gaming expansion. While Oaklawn officials promised not to compete with local hotels by buying and building on that land, at least one major investor has inquired about cobbling together the parcels for a first-class hotel. So far, the price has proven too steep.

SOUND ON TAPE: The chatter of a busy hotel lobby, breakfast dishes being cleared, the ping of an elevator reaching ground level.

MEDIUM CLOSE-UP on Tracy Byrd, country-western star, sitting with friends as he sips coffee and signs promotional photos of himself.

PULL BACK to reveal lobby at the Embassy Suites Hotel as Steve Arrisonapproaches Byrd. “The great thing about Tracy is he’s been a visitor to Hot Springs for years,” Arrison says before he reaches the table. “He’s actually a user of this city, a consumer who likes to come with his family to hunt and fish and relax with the kids.” The Embassy Suites went up in the 1990s, a byproduct of the convention center. Arrison says it’s one of the busiest of the national chain’s hotels, and it evokes absolutely no memories of the old, dodgy but memorable Hot Springs as run by the Owney Maddens and frequented by the Al Capones. It could be the lobby of a hotel in Topeka, Kansas.

The scene FADES AWAY to another time, another place. A local teacher and his wife are out enjoying the entertainment and gambling offered at the posh new Vapors Club. The teacher looks up and spots a familiar face across the room.

It’s one of his students. He salutes him with his beer and both go back to their business. Meanwhile, at a lonely spot in the road leading into town, a lookout keeps watch near a pay phone. If he sees the cops motor by, he’s supposed to call with word.

VOICE OVER: Now, the Vapors is the Tower of Strength Ministries. Now, the unofficial town greeter isn’t a sentry watching for Johnny Law but a wholesome country-western star.

FADE IN to a man sitting in a chair on the porch of the Fordyce Bath House, visitors’ center, museum. The chair looks wooden, but it’s hard plastic, surprisingly comfortable. The man holds a photocopy of a story from Sports Illustrated dated March 19, 1962: The Hottest Spring In Hot Springs: That’s the forecast for this jumping Arkansas town where gambling is wide open, the track is fast and the fishing is fine by Robert H. Boyle.

The man has read the story several times, and its paragraphs swim in green Highlighter. He reads some of the excerpts: “The most unusual spa in the United States, Hot Springs is also, pound for pound, the greatest sporting town anywhere.” . . . “the Paris of the Bible Belt” . . . “At times it seems as though the town was dreamed up in a collaboration of W.C. Fields and the Mayo brothers.” And get a-load of this lede: “Sarge the Syrian was there, and so were Amarillo Slim, Bones Martin and The Dreamer, gamblers all. Atlantic City Red, the pool hustler, was there, though he kept denying his identity. … Texas millionaires were there, along with some moonshiners from the Possum Kingdom in the hills nearby. Chicago cloak-and-suiters were there, to say nothing of arthritics from St. Joe, Mo.” The man smiles, puts aside the story, and stares at Central Avenue. He halfexpects to see Jack Dempsey stroll down the avenue, angling toward the bath houses for a rub down. Or Mickey Rooney. Or the Babe in town for spring training. Maybe Tony Bennett is playing over at The Vapors or the Black Orchid, putting the final touches on his new song about San Francisco.

But no. The sidewalks are packed with folks in their tourist uniforms of loud tshirts and jeans, miniature cameras in hand. It’s spring break for many, and the kids are in tow. A little girl runs to play ahead of her parents in the park behind the bath houses-feeling safe in a town that once seemed for Adults Only. The man watches the action, witnessing the slow decay of age mixed with the infusion of new blood, with the knowledge that much of this was all here decades ago, half-centuries ago. Imagine the postmodern-ness of it then, the cutting-edge, on-the-edge city in full. An of-the-flesh Shangri-La amidst the mountains and steamy, underground springs.

“Everything considered,” SI’s Boyle sums up, “there isn’t anything in the world like Hot Springs-or the people in it. This is not to say the town couldn’t be improved. Part of it could use a couple of coats of paint; there are junky signs and assorted clutter disfiguring some of the land around Lake Hamilton; and a local restaurant may mar a good meal by serving the Chianti ice-cold. But perhaps it would be better not to tamper with Hot Springs, and that goes for the FBI, too. As Nate Schoenfeld [local lawyer and civic booster] says, ‘We have bounty.

We have many things no one else has.

We want to share it with all the world.

We invite you.’” PULL BACK from Central to a WIDE SHOT of the sad old buildings that could use a couple of coats of paint, at the assorted clutter and junky signs, at the artdeco Medical Arts Building-Arkansas’ first skyscraper!-that cries out for a good scrubbing and some TLC.

LONG SHOT of the Arlington Hotel, which seems to sag under its reputation and history. PAN toward the Wax Museum and DISSOLVE to the 1940s Southern Club, to the Guys in tuxedos and the Dolls in sequined dresses.

VOICE OVER: Boyle, the old sportswriter, had it exactly right-and wrong.

Not even a decade after his story ran, all his color turned to black and white.

The authorities did tamper with Hot Springs. She nearly died. But she’s still here, still getting her feet under her, still an Arkansas anomaly with her legal gambling, her bath houses, her scandalous past-turned-marketing future but with an economy now built on the lasting, not the illicit. She has bounty, maybe more now than ever.

She has many things no one else has.

She wants to share it with all the world.

She still invites you.

FADE TO BLACK.

Perspective, Pages 95, 100 on 04/27/2008

Copyright © 2008, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc.

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