Mena on the map
Iwas watching the 2017 Tom Cruise movie “American Made” at a Little Rock theater when I suddenly felt the urge to text my wife.
As the characters in the movie visited a Contra camp in southern Honduras or northern Nicaragua, I wrote to her: “I bet I’m the only one in this theater who actually visited a Contra camp in the 1980s.”
She quickly replied: “That’s probably a safe bet.”
The movie is based on the life of Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot who flew missions for the CIA and became a drug smuggler for the Medellin cartel in the 1980s. Seal became a Drug Enforcement Agency informant to avoid a prison sentence.
In the movie, Seal relocates to Mena, and the town becomes a hub for cocaine trafficking. Seal is asked by the CIA to transport guns to the Contras.
According to an internal FBI document released in 2020, an “extensive joint investigation” by the FBI, Internal Revenue Service and Arkansas State Police found that Seal used Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport for smuggling activities from late 1980 until March 1984.
In February 1986, Seal was murdered outside a Baton Rouge Salvation Army halfway house after having reportedly crossed Pablo Escobar and other members of the Medellin cartel.
According to the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas, there also were allegations that the CIA “used the airport as a base of operations to help train pilots and troops for the intervention in a Nicaraguan uprising by the Contras during the 1980s.”
In the summer of 1988, I was the Washington bureau chief for the Arkansas Democrat, and Contra aid was a major issue in Congress. U.S. Rep. Tommy Robinson (D-Ark.) was the whip for the so-called Boll Weevils, conservative Democrats who worked with Republicans to give President Ronald Reagan a working majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Robinson invited me to accompany him on a fact-finding mission to Honduras that summer, which is how I ended up in Contra camps. I wrote a series of front-page stories for the newspaper, accompanied by photos I took. They’re the only photo credits I’ve ever received in a newspaper.
The Iran-Contra scandal engulfed the Reagan administration when I was in Washington. The first time a lot of Americans heard of Mena was during investigations into that affair.
We’ll never know the full story of what happened at Mena. As people’s memories of the Iran-Contra affair fade, more Americans may soon know Mena as one of the country’s best places for mountain biking. That’s the subject of my cover story for today’s Perspective section.
It wasn’t airplanes or mountain bikes that first put Mena on the map, however. It was the railroad.
“Mena was among the many towns founded along the route of Arthur Stilwell’s Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railroad (later the Kansas City Southern), stretching from Kansas City to Port Arthur, Texas,” the Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes. “Mena takes its name from the nickname of Folmina Margaretha Janssen deGeoijen, the wife of one of Stilwell’s financiers. Janssen Park is also named after her.
“The first train pulled into Mena on Aug. 19, 1896, the same day the New Era published its first edition. Mena was incorporated the following month. The Bank of Mena opened its doors May 5, 1897, and the Polk County seat was moved from Dallas to Mena in 1898. By 1900, the population was 3,423. The city advertised itself both as a spa city situated in a healthy environment and as a center for agriculture and extractive industries such as timber and mineral resources.”
Stilwell donated four blocks of land in 1906 for Janssen Park. In 1910, his railroad moved its division shops from Mena to Heavener, Okla., a decision that cost Arkansas more than 800 jobs. The bad news continued when Mena was hit by a tornado in April 1911. A small Black community known as Little Africa was east of Mena along Board Camp Creek. Mena later gained a reputation as a place that was off limits to African Americans.
According to the encyclopedia: “There were 152 Black residents of Mena in 1900 but only 16 in 1910. By 1920, the Black population for Polk County had fallen to just nine. The March 18, 1920, edition of the Mena Star proudly advertised the city as ‘100 percent white.’ In 1922, a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was organized with between 2,500 and 4,000 people turning out to hear state kleagle D.E. Rhodes speak at a ballpark on the principles of the Klan.
“Though the population of Polk County as a whole dropped in the 1940s and 1950s as people sought work elsewhere, Mena gained population. Mandates for school desegregation didn’t affect Mena. By the 1960 census, not a single African American resided in the county. The 2020 census found the Black population to be 0.4 percent.”
In 1924, Commonwealth College, an institution run by socialists, moved to Mena. By 1940, the college had closed. Future Gov. Orval E. Faubus, whose father was an avowed socialist, studied at Commonwealth College for a time.
“Arkansas’ most famous attempt at radical labor education was the accidental byproduct of natural beauty, cheap land and desperation,” writes historian William Cobb. “Commonwealth was established in 1923 at New Llano Cooperative Colony near Leesville, La. Its founders were Kate Richards O’Hare, her husband Frank, and William Zeuch, all socialists and lifelong adherents of the principles established by Eugene Debs.”
Faubus’ middle name was Eugene in honor of Debs.
“Drawing on their mutual experience at Ruskin College in Florida, where they had been impressed with the possibility of higher education combined with cooperative community, the O’Hares and Zeuch decided to create a college aimed at the leadership of what they designated as a new social class, the industrial worker,” Cobb writes. “As an established cooperative community, Newllano appeared to be the ideal host for this experiment. Alas, strong personalities and conflicting priorities made for immediate conflict between college and colony.”
A site near Ink in Polk County was found. It was known as Commonwealth Community of the Ozarks, even though it was in the Ouachita Mountains. A falling out between those involved led to the college renting property in Mena in December 1924 and then moving 13 miles from Mena to what was described at the time as “a wonderful valley, perhaps a mile or more wide, running up to the edge of Rich Mountain, watered by a beautiful creek.”
“Like pioneers, the Commoners carved a campus out of the wilderness while carrying on with schooling and tending crops,” Cobb writes. “The serenity of these exhausting early years was shattered in 1926, however, when the American Legion charged Commonwealth with Bolshevism, Sovietism, communism and free love, and moved to investigate and close the little school.”
From Arthur Stilwell and his Dutch investors to Commonwealth College to Barry Seal, the Mena area has a colorful history. The next chapter—the mountain biking chapter— could be the one that really puts Mena on the map.