Maintaining a memory
Hines reflects on keeping father’s memorabilia intact
Preserving artifacts is a challenge whether it is keeping precious family heirlooms intact for future generations to see or fragile items that might otherwise be lost to history if they aren’t taken care of.
For the family of the late Glen Ray Hines, an El Dorado graduate who went on to star at Arkansas and in the professional ranks on the gridiron, protecting his keepsakes from a storied career was done simply and also speaks to the nature of the person Hines was.
“Part of that is because he just wasn’t the kind of person to have a big trophy room or display that kind of stuff,” said Glen Ray Hines Jr. “We sort of knew that he had this stuff from seeing it when we were kids, but kind of lost track of it and didn’t pay much attention to it.”
Hines recently donated two varsity jackets from his father’s playing days along with pictures to the Union County Sports Hall of Fame, which the elder Hines was inducted into back in 2012.
Randy Ross, the researcher and historian for the Union County Sports Hall of Fame, said Hines’ El Dorado letterman jacket is the first from the school.
The jackets are in terrific condition considering their age, and Hines attributed that to them being stored properly.
“That’s because it was literally wrapped up in a box for 30, 40 years,” Hines said. “They didn’t have this stuff hanging up in a closet. I’m sure my mom was the one who was responsible for taking such good care of it. To give you an idea, the Arkansas letter jacket, I maybe saw once the entire time I was growing up. He didn’t have his honors hanging on the wall or stashed in a closet. I probably saw it when we were
moving and then never really saw it again until I saw it over at my mom’s house when she was going through his stuff.”
Hines said it was his mother who started getting the vast amount of mementos gathered over the years and getting them cataloged.
“She’s a retired English teacher and very meticulous about labeling things and knowing where they’re stored,” Hines said. “She had gone through at some point and had got all this stuff together because I think she saw what was coming down the line with my dad.
“She’s about a year younger than him, so I think she wanted to get us together so that if something happened to my mom and dad, my brother and sister wouldn’t have to go digging around wondering where everything was. She had it all cataloged. She didn’t really tell us about it until after he was gone, but she took really good care of it.”
The family moved several times, but Hines said none of the memorabilia got damaged in the process.
“I was in the military for a long time and did a lot of moves and had moving companies lose stuff in moves,” Hines said. “I guess they didn’t trust the moving companies because they never did a move like that, so that explains why they never really lost anything.
“They always rented a truck, and when my dad was healthy, he would drive it. They’d get people to help them load it on the front end and unload it on the back end, but they weren’t going to trust their stuff with a moving company, so that probably explains why none of it was lost or really damaged.
“We lived in Houston for a number of years. Then they moved out to Katy, Texas, when my mom finished her teaching career, and they were there for maybe five or six years, then around 2005, they moved back up to the Northwest Arkansas area.
“That was the biggest move they had made because it was the first time they had moved from Houston back up here. I think that’s the first time where she really had to go through a bunch of stuff and figure out what all did they have and what were they going to do with it.”
Ross said he is always on the lookout for memorabilia, particularly from bygone eras.
“We’re always looking for older memorabilia from older school districts in the area,” Ross said. “Especially from schools that are no longer around anymore.”