Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Oral histories ready for listening
BELLA VISTA — Two Bella Vista women are coordinating a history project that will live forever in the University of Arkansas archives. Oral histories are a unique way to tell the story of Northwest Arkansas.
Connie Fetters and Camille Hatcher have been training and coordinating a small group of volunteers. They recently became a nonprofit group — The Northwest Arkansas Oral History Project — and are working with the Pryor Center of Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the U of A. Their interviews are posted there and will become part of the archives.
In 2018, former Mayor Frank Anderson told about how they “got some pretty decent people to run for jobs that didn’t exist.”
“That was an interesting time,” he said, about the months spent planning how the city of Bella Vista was formed. Bella Vista is probably the largest community in the state to ever incorporate, he said. On Jan. 1. 2007, it instantly became the 13th largest city in Arkansas.
There are also stories from much earlier times, Norma Clark remembered when her father worked for C.A. Linebarger at the Wonderland Cave.
Tommy K. Croxdale tells about growing up hunting and fishing in Hiwassee and Gravette. He and his friends wore penny loafers to school.
“Back in the time you could look at a boy’s shoes and tell how well off he was. If he had quarters in them, he was really in the money … pennies
he was just about broke … no coins he was broke.”
They work with several area museums to find their subjects and the interviews cover other towns in Benton County. There are interviews with a former director of the Rogers Chamber of Commerce and a Bentonville teacher who had a school named after her. Wanda Roe, a well-known artist and art teacher from Pea Ridge, did an interview.
“We are proud of the fact that we work with a variety of people,” she said. While not all the subjects are natives of Arkansas, all have Arkansas stories to tell.
They are helping a Carroll County group get started in its area, Fetters said. Many of the interviews were done at
the museums, but the coordinators are now working on a way to do interviews online.
The coronavirus interrupted their plans last spring. They had already trained volunteers and lined up subjects when they had to stop for the virus. Right now, they have 30 people waiting to be interviewed.
Although they borrow photographs from their subject to scan and save with the interviews, they have no plans to change to videotapes. People respond differently to video, Fetters said. Some of their subjects don’t want to be involved in videos but they’re fine with telling their story with a tape recorder running. Also, it’s easier for the volunteers to run just audio equipment.
Although the group has its own website, nwaoralhistory.org, the stories are also available on the website for the Pryor Center, pryor center.uark.edu. It was partly a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council that helped finance that project.