The things you hear sometimes
Traveling over to Harrison Friday last to catch the Goblins/Blackhawks game was a new experience for me.
I had not been to their new stadium, having only experienced the old one when my son and daughter competed on Bentonville’s track and field teams in the 1990s. The new place is an athletic marvel, with a very nice rubber track around the pro-turf football field with a indoor fieldhouse similar to the Blackhawks’ own.
I took note of the dedication name on the indoor facility “Mosco F. Cash” and noted to myself that this Mr. Cash was also the one who paid for the nice track surface circling the field.
Getting to the press box a bit later than I would have liked because of the traffic getting out of Rogers and getting through Eureka Springs, I was relegated to sitting in the hospitality room that was actually situated high above the 50-yard line in the center of the row of rooms, a most excellent vantage point.
I took my seat next to an older gentleman who was extremely polite and welcoming. As I was the only non-Goblin in the room, I thought I might be needing to find another spot to watch from but this fellow assured me I was welcome to stay.
A bit into the game, he introduced himself and to my surprise, he was Mosco Cash himself, a 94-year-old local businessman who donates quite a bit of money and material to Harrison schools.
After chatting a bit, I also learned that he was the “Cash” of Cash Village shopping center in Rogers and that he was and had been involved in a whole bunch of varied business endeavors throughout his long life in the Harrison area. And, I found out later that he was worth in the neighborhood of five million dollars.
He had a childhood not too unlike Sam Walton, whom he knew back in the day. As a 10-year-old, he developed a problem with one of his legs and was taken by his mother to the Mayo Clinic when the local health professionals wanted to amputate. As they had no money in the late 1930s, his mother got a job working to keep them fed and housed at the Minnesota facility and the doctors did not charge for their services and saved his leg.
Years later, when his dad considered closing his ice business, Cash took what some thought was a dying business and made it grow. His dad provided ice for people’s ice boxes in their home, and when refrigerators began to become popular, the elder Cash thought it time to change professions. Mosco thought otherwise and began packaging and selling ice in other ways and soon was making lots of money.
He also got a bottling plant up and going along with other businesses and currently owns nearly 400 billboards all over Northwest Arkansas along with a lot of real estate.
The short version of his life that I got to hear told me that he was a man who has always sought to help other people get what they need or want. The kind of generous entrepreneurial spirit he embodies is how the United States grew into the economic engine that it has.
Mr. Cash regaled the folks sitting around that room with lots of stories and it was obvious the love and respect that all those people had for this gentleman was impressive.
He decided to go a little early to beat the traffic, and there were some who were
concerned for his safety. The four-story tall press booth had an elevator which was out of order, forcing everyone to have to leave down the stairs. He laughed when those people asked if he would be alright because, as he said “Well hey, I walked up those four stories to get here so I will probably be alright to walk back down.”
With that, he left us. He got a jump on traffic and I got a chance to spend a little time with one of the founding fathers of the economic success stories that is Northwest Arkansas.
I decided to go home and Google Mr. Cash and read a very interesting story about his being in the hospital three years ago hooked up to machines and tubes for some illness. There was a City Council meeting that he wanted to attend so he set up a camera in his hospital room and talked to the council via video screen.
It seemed that council made some mistakes in designing traffic flow in downtown Harrison. Cash let them know that he and others had pledged enough money to fix the mistakes, and that he felt strongly enough about the situation to make a personal appearance even though it was from a hospital bed. The problem got fixed.