Other days

100 YEARS AGO Feb. 2, 1918

HELENA — Attempts to raise the ferry boat Ed Myer have been abandoned by the government boat Macomb and the steamer Hardwood, which have been working on the sunken boat for several days. The owners of the Ed Myer commenced yesterday the work of dismantling and salvaging timber and fittings. The small steamer Edna Riley, which formerly plied the St. Francis river, has been employed to operate as a ferry here.

50 YEARS AGO Feb. 2, 1968

CUMMINS PRISON FARM — “I just thought that baby would have more love here,” Mrs. Beatrice Crawford said Thursday as she explained why she and state prison Superintendent Thomas O. Murton went to Little Rock and brought it back to live at the Women’s Reformatory at Cummins Prison Farm. The baby, who will be a month old Tuesday, now has a makeshift nursery — a corner of the white women’s dormitory curtained off with sheets — and his inmate mother has her bed beside it. The mother, who shows the strain of her 38 years, has named the baby Woody Dwayne.

25 YEARS AGO Feb. 2, 1993

■ U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright vowed Monday to begin using “a heavier hand” with the Little Rock School District, where officials are “just not getting the message” about her court orders and the importance of the desegregation plan. Wright, who is presiding in the 10-yearold Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit, held a daylong hearing Monday to review a Little Rock district study on junior high school capacity and on the district’s efforts to develop a budget linking desegregation funds to desegregation programs. She found neither satisfactory.

10 YEARS AGO Feb. 2, 2008

■ After less than two hours of deliberations, a federal jury on Friday acquitted Michael John Gavin of Palm Beach, Fla., of helping kidnap a woman in November 2005 outside Alltel Arena and forcing her to ride a freight train to Memphis. The woman claimed that Gavin and another man raped her aboard the train, before it left the Union Pacific rail yard in North Little Rock. However, Gavin was never charged with rape in federal court, where there is no rape charge, and the woman never pursued the allegations with local authorities. A second suspect was never identified.