Other days

100 YEARS AGO Feb. 13, 1919

TEXARKANA — A. B. Hervey, aged 66, proprietor of the Garland Mercantile Company, and Fay D. Searcy, aged 33, a bookkeeper for the company, fought a duel to the death last night in the company’s office at Garland City, six miles south of here. Both men fired five times, both were struck by five bullets, and both fell dead to the floor with their bodies crossed. 50 YEARS AGO

Feb. 13, 1969

■ Representative Jimmy Doyle Hunt of Jonesboro is still trying to get action on his bill (HB 204) that would require the University of Arkansas football team to play the Arkansas State University football team every year. Hunt tried Wednesday to persuade the House to remove the bill from the Rules Committee, where it has been since it was introduced last month, and transfer it to the State Agencies Committee. Hunt said it seemed that this bill was in a “tombstone committee.”

25 YEARS AGO

Feb. 13, 1994

■ Many poor parents, especially in Arkansas Delta counties, willingly are having their normal, school-age children certified mentally “disabled” just to get added monthly payments under a federal welfare program. And educators say many of those parents also urge children to misbehave and flunk tests intentionally, just to enhance chances for getting more benefits under the federal Social Security Administration’s supplemental security income (SSI) program. Some east Arkansas educators and officials say the children’s disability portion of SSI has been so widely abused the past three years that benefits — paid to parents on behalf of children, supposedly “disabled” — now are popularly referred to as “crazy checks.”

10 YEARS AGO

Feb. 13, 2009

■ When Shawn Small found the body last week of the elderly woman who paid him from time to time to rake her leaves and take care of her lawn, he did the right thing, calling North Little Rock police. It’s what police contend he did the next day that they thought was so wrong. On Feb. 6, the day after Small found 70-year-old Alice Denson dead on the floor of her living room, Small ransacked Denson’s tidy house in the leafy, quiet Lakewood neighborhood, stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry, her car and a check register from which he later tried to cash a $7,000 check he wrote to himself, police said. Foul play is not suspected in the woman’s death.