Other days

100 YEARS AGO Oct. 15, 1917

FORT SMITH — Grass fires probably claimed one life and destroyed two barns in this city yesterday. Anna Burrows, aged nine, playing “keeping house” with other children, is in a hospital and may die. Her clothes ignited, from a grass fire the children made to do their “cooking.” The barns caught fire from burning grass that was ignited from a trash fire. The city has no fire alarm wire service, except the business district, a result of the strike of the telephone operators and the authorities today issued an appeal to the citizens not to start fires in the open.

50 YEARS AGO Oct. 15, 1967

■ Twenty-five aircraft searched a corridor roughly 100 miles wide from Little Rock to Hope Saturday for a missing private plane piloted by Marvin Melton, 65, a prominent Jonesboro businessman and farmer. Melton was last seen at 9:36 a.m. Friday when he took off from Jonesboro in his single engine black and white Beechcraft Debonair, bound for a lunch in Dallas with Edward Marcus, vice president of Neiman-Marcus Co. there. He was last heard from at 10:40 a.m. when he asked the control tower at Grider Field at Pine Bluff for information on the weather at Texarkana.

25 YEARS AGO Oct. 15, 1992

■ A former North Little Rock video store owner who allegedly used the code words “X-rated movies” to refer to crack cocaine sales was convicted Wednesday of four drug charges. A jury convicted Samuel Oliver, former owner of Sam’s Video Express at 3711 E. Broadway, of four counts of delivery of a controlled substance. Pulaski County Circuit Judge David Bogard imposed the jury’s recommendation of 10 years in prison — the minimum — on each count. But Bogard said he will set a hearing to determine if Oliver should serve the sentences consecutively or concurrently.

10 YEARS AGO Oct. 15, 2007

■ Two national wildlife refuges in Arkansas will be expanded by nearly 1,300 acres for the protection and preservation of migratory birds, U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s office announced Thursday. The expansion and purchase of the lands was approved by the national Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, of which Lincoln is a member. The commission establishes new waterfowl refuges and expands existing refuges. The Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Arkansas will expand by 1,140 acres, according to a news release.