Other days

100 YEARS AGO

June 14, 1923

PINE BLUFF — Ed Davis… serving a life term at the state farm at Cummins… and J.W. Goodwin…escaped from the farm Sunday night, but were captured before daylight Monday morning by guards, who trailed them with bloodhounds. The men, it is said, had been given some privileges about the farm, although not given all the privileges of trustees. They escaped into the woods about 8 o’clock Sunday night. Their absence soon was discovered and guards went in pursuit of the fugitives.

50 YEARS AGO

June 14, 1973

PINE BLUFF — Pine Bluff garbage collectors quit Wednesday after a demand for increased wages. The city appeared headed for a garbage crisis unless the men returned to work. Forty-eight employees of Mobile Waste Controls, Inc., “quit” after a 6 a.m. meeting with company officials, at which time the employees requested immediate wage increases. Oscar O’Bryant, of Dallas, a company vice president, said the men were entitled to a wage increase in August according to terms of their contracts they signed last year.

25 YEARS AGO

June 14, 1998

■ Some of the state’s largest banks, stung by a surge in check fraud, are debating whether to force customers who don’t hold accounts to give thumbprints in order to cash a check. Bankers argue that thumb-printing is a crucial step toward reining in forgers and counterfeiters. “If somebody’s honest and a bank’s trying to help them cash a check, giving a thumbprint isn’t going to hurt anybody,” said Joe Ford, chief executive officer of The Capital Bank in Little Rock, one of the few small banks that’s leaning toward the idea. But the idea has outraged some consumers and privacy advocates, who see it as another step in the steady erosion of individual rights. It’s also divided large banks, whose forgery losses are substantial, and credit unions and small community banks, who say fraud isn’t a problem for them.

10 YEARS AGO

June 14, 2013

■ Federal prosecutors announced Wednesday morning the arrests of eight central Arkansas residents on federal charges regarding a conspiracy to use, sell and distribute prescription pills…The arrests, which occurred Tuesday, were the result of a coordinated investigation by the Conway Police Department and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration that began in 2011 when Conway anti-drug detectives unearthed a prescription-drug distribution ring operating in Faulkner, Pulaski, White, and Van Buren counties, according to federal court filings. Between May 17 and June 3, a confidential informant went on five “controlled buys,” according to federal prosecutors, purchasing Opana pills, a brand of oxymorphone, from Smith at his home as well as other locations. On Tuesday, a drug raid at [a] home at 196 Arkansas 365 in Conway yielded four firearms, including a defaced .357 Magnum revolver in [a] bedroom, as well as Opana pills and tablets of Dilaudid, a hydromorphone brand, stashed in baggies behind a TV in the house. Investigators also found digital scales and a pill cutter in [the] kitchen.