Oh, those Baptists!

I love history. It was my favorite subject in school. That's probably why I went into journalism which, after all, is the writing of contemporary history - one day at a time.

So I was utterly fascinated this week when I discovered that Jonesboro, Ark., our new hometown, was the scene of religious violence in the 1930s.

Here's the account of the Jonesboro Church Wars I found on the

website of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture:

 

Jonesboro Church Wars

The Jonesboro Church Wars were a series of early 1930s religious conflicts within the Baptist community of Jonesboro  comprising attacks on the mayor and the police chief, public gunfights, and the calling of the National Guard to restore order. The conflict attracted national attention and poisoned relations among some townspeople for generations.

At the center of the Jonesboro Church Wars was Joe Jeffers, an actor-comedian turned traveling evangelist who, at the invitation of the First Baptist Church and Jonesboro Bible College, began a series of tent revival meetings on June 29, 1930. Jeffers proved to be so popular as he preached through July that, when First Baptist pastor A. W. Reaves resigned in early August, the congregation elected Jeffers his replacement. But a large faction of the church body claimed not to have been represented at the election, and Jeffers took a leave of absence while the congregation worked on a compromise. They eventually chose as their pastor Dow H. Heard of Big Spring, Texas, and Jeffers left Jonesboro to continue his ministry elsewhere.

In August 1931, Jeffers announced that he would return to Jonesboro to inaugurate an ongoing revival meeting. His sermons included prophetic warnings that the Second Coming was to occur in May 1932, as well as charges of immoral conduct against Heard and Mayor Herbert J. Bosler. On September 9, a brawl occurred at First Baptist Church between supporters of Jeffers and Heard. George L. Cox Jr., a supporter of Jeffers, was arrested and charged with being the aggressor; he was scheduled to be tried the next day. The morning of the trial, Jeffers led a large group of followers to the courthouse in protest; during a prayer there, he asked God to strike the mayor dead, and his supporters physically attacked Bosler and Police Chief W. C. Craig.

To restore order, Governor Harvey Parnell authorized the use of troops stationed at Arkansas State College (now Arkansas State University), reinforced by other troops from around the state. Until they were withdrawn on September 14, the soldiers stationed themselves throughout town, mostly near Jeffers’s tent, which at times held 5,000 people. Two days after the soldiers left, someone dropped a tear-gas bomb outside Jeffers’s tent; each faction blamed the other. Tensions grew between the two Baptist factions until twenty-one followers of Jeffers were expelled from First Baptist and, on October 25, Jeffers’s revival tent was burned down. But the preacher had already planned to establish a tabernacle, named the Jonesboro Baptist Church, at Matthews and Cobb streets, and soon his congregation was meeting there.

Shortly after the church was built, Jeffers left again, and at his suggestion, the church hired as its pastor Dale Crowley of Denton, Texas. Eleven months later, Jeffers returned to Jonesboro and demanded his church back. He had veered from his fundamentalist beliefs, and he and Crowley fought as much over theology as over the control of the church. Sometimes, the two factions of this new church would hold services at the same time, with two sermons and two choirs going simultaneously. After an August 14, 1933, scuffle in which a fistfight occurred and shotguns were brandished, the two men decided to leave the matter to the courts. On October 9, 1933, the Chancery Court ruled in Crowley’s favor.

The next day, when Crowley went to claim possession of the tabernacle, he found himself in a shootout with J. W. McMurdo, whom the Jeffers faction had hired as a watchman and janitor. Crowley was unharmed, but his bodyguard, L. H. Kayre, was wounded; McMurdo was shot twice in the legs and once in the abdomen and died later. Crowley was arrested and, at his October 14 hearing, claimed to have acted in self-defense. On October 17, an unknown assailant tried to assassinate Crowley by thrusting the barrel of a machine gun through the bars of his cell at the Craighead County Jail and firing; Crowley was not harmed. His trial began on January 3, 1934, in Piggott (Clay County), the venue having been changed because of the emotional climate in Jonesboro. After four days, Crowley was acquitted on the murder charge and set free.

Jeffers left for Miami, Florida, shortly after the shooting and later renounced his Baptist ministry, becoming a leader of the Pyramid Power Yahweh group and a self-proclaimed prophet in Missouri. Heard and Crowley soon left Jonesboro, too, but the absence of the chief figures in the conflict did little to alleviate people’s strong opinions of them. Scholars and others have had difficulty researching the Church Wars, as few people through the years have been willing to talk about the events. The main treatment of the subject, written by Dusty Jordan, contains information from four individuals who, even fifty years after the fact, refused to be identified in print.

For additional information:
Jordan, Dusty. “Baptists Bring War to Jonesboro.” Craighead County Historical Quarterly 21 (Winter 1983): 1–9.

Guy Lancaster

Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture

It's Toosday

We've noticed the TV newspeople and others around here pronounce Tuesday differently than we Hoosiers.
They say Tyewsday - not Toosday or 2sday - but with a "yew" twist to it.

Road Trip

We took a 120-mile road trip yesterday to Mountain View where we left Morgan and Lance to camp and hike for a couple of days.
This is Blanchard Creek Falls where the creek emerges from a cave of the same name.
Much of the trip was on 2-lane state roads, with lots of twisties and elevation changes, which explains why it takes three hours to go 120 miles. We got deep enough into the Ozark area to appreciate how different the terrain is from here.
Everyone but I took the cave tour. I've been feeling a bit claustrophobic lately, didn't want to shuffle through a cave with a bunch of annoying old people and found the idea of dozing in the car with my iPod pretty attractive. So I did. And when Maria and the kids returned, they regaled me with horror stories about annoying, slow old people.
During the course of the afternoon, we also met a gregarious guy in bib overalls who was on a mission to deliver a chilled glass gallon jug of homemade liquor (aged a whole day) to a friend. The friend turned out not to be home, so he gave each of us a sip of white lightning before he returned it to its hiding place in a white plastic grocery sack and went on his way. I just wetted my tongue, since I was driving, but the 100 proof stuff wasn't all that bad.
Dinner was a the Anglers where we feasted on catfish. Excellent food and excellent service and the view of the creek is spectacular.
We left the kids with their rental car to roam around the mountains for the next couple of days and Maria drove us home.

Company's coming

Maria's daughter (my stepdaughter) Morgan and her boyfriend Lance are coming to visit and then tour Arkansas. We expect them sometime tomorrow afternoon.
And we are very excited.
This will be Morgan's second visit and the fourth time we have hosted guests from Indiana since we took up residence here and we loooove to have guests.
(I pirated this image from Morgan's Flickr account and tweaked it Photoshop, so I hope she doesn't mind.)

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the office.

I'm blogging from the back porch on our Sony VAIO laptop because it's just too damned hot up in our office.
The office, as you may recall, is what folks around here call a bonus room above the garage.
The room was unfinished when we bought the house last year. The previous owner used the space for storage and had it piled high with boxes that had never been unpacked when he and his family moved in two years earlier. Sorta like the wall of boxes downstairs in the garage that we've been working on for months.
Even though there are a couple of heating/cooling vents up there, our inspector opined that they wouldn't work properly because there was no cold air return. So, as part of our purchase offer, we required the seller to have a cold air return installed. That was no big deal, because the furnace/heat pump is on the other side of the wall in the attic.
Even so, the room remained disturbingly cool during the winter months.
Now that warmer weather is upon us, the afternoons have become increasingly uncomfortable up there. Even when I climb the stairs late at night, I'm greeted by stifling heat when I reach the top.
While the cold air return probably helps, I think the real problem is that it never occurred to anyone to insulate the roof above the bonus room.
Considering that we've already thrown a considerable amount of money into woodwork, paint and carpeting, there's really no choice but to call a home insulation outfit and have them see what can be done about getting insulation up there.
We've only seen temperatures in the mid-80s here so far, but we know the summer will bring some triple-digit heat. Nothing like what Steve and his family are seeing in Las Vegas, but hot enough to fry our computers and make the office unusable.

Out for a Monday morning drive

Maria doesn't have to be at work until 1 p.m. today, so we took the top off of the del Sol and went for a drive.
After stopping at the Brookland Post Office to dispatch a couple of Ebay sales, we went exploring on Crowley's Ridge, cruising up and down county roads we'd not driven before.
The weather is damn near perfect again today - cloudless sky and upper 70s.
Maria cut some roadside honeysuckle with an eye to cultivating it along our backyard chain link fence.
We checked out Frierson Lake State Park, which was mostly deserted. Since we'd left our serious cameras at home, we used my cell phone camera to record the moment.
Here's an intentional "tourist" shot of me and the lake. Notice that the horizon isn't level and that I'm way too far away from the camera, not to mention looking unnaturally stiff and posed.

The second shot was Maria getting it right. The third is Maria in black-and-white taking in the scenery. My Treo smartphone camera often produces photos that require a lot of Photoshop color correction. The one of Maria was so skewed toward the magenta, with other weird imbalances, that I just gave up and made it grayscale.

Just right...

Unlike my son in blistering Las Vegas or our snowbound friends in Alama, Colo., we're enjoying perfect weather here in northeast Arkansas.
We had the outdoor fireplace going this evening while Maria sat on the porch and read by the light from the kitchen.
The temperature is a delightful 70 degrees.
The fireplace is turning out to be an ideal way to dispose of the twigs, branches and limbs our trees have shed over the last six months.

Arkansas motorcycle safety: welcome to the 1980s

We dropped by the Arkansas State University campus yesterday where Kent Gibson was teaching the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's Basic RiderCourse.
Maria wrote a column about motorcycle safety that pointed riders to the course and we wanted to introduce ourselves to Kent and see how the course was working.
I was an MSF instructor with the ABATE of Indiana rider education program for 10 years back in the 1980s and '90s, so I have an appreciation for rider ed.
I was stunned to discover that Arkansas is more than 20 years behind Indiana in offering motorcycle rider education to its citizens. Only three states - Arkansas, Mississippi and Alaska - do not have legislated rider ed programs. Alaska, which has about a 10-minute riding season, can probably be excused for this oversight, but there is no excuse for Arkansas and Mississippi.
Indiana's legislators tacked on a modest increase in the motorcycle registration fee back in the 1980s and earmarked the funds for rider education. The program is conducted under the oversight of the Indiana Department of Education and the funds go to subsidize the cost of the Basic RiderCourse to students. Consequently, the course that costs Arkansans $175, is a much more affordable $50 to Hoosiers.
So on a weekend when Kent was conducting a course with only five students, rather than the 12/instructor allowed by the MSF, the classes at all 14 ABATE locations in Indiana were booked solid through June and a few had classes already filled into August. Typically, the ABATE of Indiana classes involve at least two instructors and 24 students.
Kent told us the Arkansas State Police have received some funding for motorcycle safety programs, but nothing has been done with it and there is a risk of losing the funding through bureaucratic inaction.
Arkansas requires helmets on riders under 21 and I am told a more comprehensive helmet law will be introduced in the next session of the Arkansas legislature.
But anyone who has spent any time in rider education knows that helmet laws are a Band-Aid approach to the problem of motorcycle safety. Yes, they will save lives. The Hurt Study, done more than 30 years ago by UCLA Prof. Harry Hurt established that a helmet substantially increases your chances of surviving a crash.
But the sad fact is that an untrained, unskilled rider is still a huge danger to himself and everyone else on the road whether he wears a helmet or not. The best remedy, in my opinion (and I happen to be right about this), is mandatory universal rider training. After all, we don't turn self-taught pilots loose with airplanes. Why do we do it with motorcycles? And, come to think of it, why do we do it with cars and trucks?

Getting legal

This is Georgia, a cashier at the State Revenue Office, and she's issuing license plates for our 2 motorcycles. I got Arkansas plates for both cars yesterday, so we're up to speed now.



Who knew, this time last year, that our vehicles would be wearing Arkansas plates?
BTW, it cost $81.50 to plate our two cars and two motorcycles here in Arkansas. It would have cost us $296 in Indiana. Of course, the Indiana total includes excise tax and the Arkansas total does not. We pay the tax on our vehicles to Arkansas later this year, but it's my guess that we'll still get off cheaper.

Ridin' with the gecko

We've had our vehicles insured with Progressive for the past several years.
When we moved to Arkansas, we discovered that our rates would change when it came time to renews. Turns out, the motorcycle coverage lapses at midnight tomorrow and the car coverage lapses at midnight May 6.
The auto rates will remain about the same, but the motorcycle insurance premium increases substantially because of the relatively longer riding season in Arkansas, compared with Indiana.
So I went insurance shopping last week and finished the task this morning.
We shifted our car insurance to State Farm because that's where our homeowners insurance is and we get a price break for consolidating. State Farm's rates for our two BMW motorcycles, however, were not competitive with Progressive.
I got quotes from AARP's insurance partner Foremost last week. This morning I checked out the outfit recommended by the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America (bmwmoainsurance.com) and Geico.
Geico's rate was $755 a year. The BMWMOA outfit came through with a premium almost three times that amount - $2,167 a year. WTF? Why did the BMWMOA hook up with these clowns?
So Geico wins and we're ridin' with the gecko.

Soaking up the local history

Maria's parents headed for home yesterday, but not before we introduced them to the Arkansas Tenant Farmers Museum at Tyronza.
The museum, operated by Arkansas State University, chronicles the events surrounding the organization in 1934 of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union - the first of its kind in the nation.
You can read all about it at this page on the Encyclopedia of Arkansas website.
Maria's dad has a keen interest in history and culture and tries to soak up as much as possible whenever he travels. I think he thoroughly enjoyed his visit to the museum.



We had driven separately to Tyronza so they could continue their circuitous journey back to Indiana via some Civil War sites. Maria and I took the top off of the del Sol and took the scenic route home via Lepanto, where we discovered the famous "Painted House" from John Grisham's novel "The Painted House," Caraway, and Black Oak (population 286).
We got our first sunburn of the season.

Furniture shopping, Arkansas style

Maria's parents are visiting from Indiana this weekend, so we decided to give them an immersion course in Arkansas styles.
Here they are considering the purchase of a cammo loveseat, complete with cup holders and an armrest cooler.

Event 2008qza6

The U.S. Geological Survey has some interesting data on this morning's magnitude 5.2 earthquake in southeastern Illinois.
Thus far, their website has received 32,853 reports from all over the central United States concerning what the USGS is calling Event 2008qza6. The reports include 5 from Jonesboro, Ark., and 11 from Paragould, Ark. Our place lies between those two cities.
Here's a map showing the intensity by Zip code for the area from which reports were received. If you want to read more or add your report, here's the link to the USGS site: http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/cus/index.html

Got gas?

I can't drive past a gas station these days without checking the posted prices.
Maybe that's odd. Maria says she never looks.
Anyhow, I've started sharing the information with my fellow Arkansans (feels really weird to call myself that) by posting my observations on arkansasgasprices.com, a web site that lists the 15 stations in the state with the cheapest gasoline and the 15 that are charging the most.
I was on indianagasprices.com when I was in Indiana and was pleased to note that the Admiral station in Crawfordsville was on the low-price honor roll on a consistent basis.
The numbers in Jonesboro are decent, but not exceptionally good. That said, the $3.25/gallon price I noticed at a Conoco station here compares pretty well with the $3.33 being charged today by the MotoMart in Evansville, which happens to be the cheapest reported gas in Indiana.
I've noticed that Jonesboro gas prices are consistently lower that those in the Thorntown-Crawfordsville-Lebanon area. The average price of a gallon of regular today is $3.343 in Arkansas and $3.469 in Indiana.

Mister Hanky is sooooo popular!

Since I installed the Feedjit Live Traffic Feed widget on this site a week or so ago, I've been able to tell how people get here.
Some, who know where they're going and maybe even have it bookmarked, come in directly to the blog's URL. A few get here through our friend Lauri's blog link.
And the rest come via a Google search for a subject that I've written about at one time or another.
Guess what the most frequent Google search is that bring people to my blog.
An Oct. 15, 2007, post titled "Unfortunate Resemblance" in which I noted how much the Goobertown Tree Farm Christmas peanut looks like Mister Hanky, the Christmas Poo, from South Park.
Well, now I've given Google yet another Mister Hanky reference to find.
And just for good measure, here's a photo of a larger-than-life (think about it) image of Mister Hanky that adorns a commercial building down at the west end of Front Street in Fairplay, Colo., which is where the real South Park is. I shot it about three years ago while visiting our friends Tim and Linda in nearby Alma.
Come to think of it, we're overdue for some Colorado mountain air.

Probing the Parkway

I explored farther north on the Crowley's Ridge Parkway scenic route yesterday afternoon on a pleasant 125-mile motorcycle ride.
I took the route as far north and east as Piggott before picking up U.S. 49 for a quick run home.
It was a sunny day with temperatures in the low 70s and the crop dusters were out by the squadrons spraying the cotton fields. I managed to avoid getting sprayed, but did catch a whiff of agrochemical as I rode past one freshly dusted field.
The parkway is really just a series of Arkansas and U.S. highways and lacks the consistency and elegance of the Blue Ridge Parkway or the Natchez Trace. That said, it is a great twisty road with lots of elevation changes with the occasional digression out into the flatlands to the west of Crowley's Ridge.
There's rain in the forecast for the next few days, but I hope to explore the southern section of the route later this spring.