Other days

100 YEARS AGO March 20, 1920

■ An old-fashioned pound cake, big enough to hold 100 candles, is being baked to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of Mrs. Mary A. Liemberguer, 604 North Martin street, which occurs today. Mrs. Liemberguer came to Pine Bluff from Tennessee at the age of 15, when Arkansas was a territory. She met her future husband the first day she was in Pine Bluff. He had come over to this country from Switzerland as a boy. Mrs. Liemberguer remembers the Indians in Arkansas, and she tells a tale of a time when word was brought that the “Indians were coming,” how the men gathered their guns to meet them, and one man gathered all the women of the place into one house and “read the Bible to them.”

50 YEARS AGO March 20, 1970

CAMDEN – Fire destroyed buildings housing three businesses in downtown Camden early Thursday. Officials said the buildings of the Mullins Barber and Beauty Shop, Stroopes Bakery and the Shoe Shack were destroyed in the blaze. The Shoe Shack was to have opened for the first time Thursday. Assistant Fire Chief Bryan Monroe said the blaze started in the beauty shop. He said the cause of the fire was undetermined.

25 YEARS AGO March 20, 1995

FORT SMITH —The Arkansan who heads the Federal Highway Administration said Sunday that completion of the four-laning of U.S. 71 along the state’s western edge is important to the nation, not only Arkansas. Federal Highway Administrator Rodney E. Slater toured a recently completed 11-mile stretch of the new, four-lane highway north of Alma, and then joined several other dignitaries at a rally outside the Fort Smith Chamber of Commerce. Slater cited the North American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. He said a fourlane U.S. 71 would act as a major economic route for trade that NAFTA is expected to boost.

10 YEARS AGO March 20, 2010

■ The Arkansas State Police named Special Agent Kevin Brown the agency’s Trooper of the Year, presenting Brown with a medal of valor during an awards ceremony Friday in Little Rock. A five-year state police veteran, Brown, 31, is assigned to the criminal investigation division’s Company E based in Harrison. He lives in Van Buren County. Brown was a passenger on an Arkansas National Guard OH-58 helicopter June 4, 2009, when it lost power over the Buffalo National River. Brown was working with the 20th Judicial District Drug Task Force to identify a marijuana farming operation on the boundary between Marion and Searcy counties.