Molly smells a rabbit in Knoop Park

Molly the beagle gets very excited when she smalls the fresh scent of a rabbit. It doesn't happen very often, which is good since she bays and barks for several minutes while trying to follow the scent. The usual place it happens is in Knoop Park during her daily walks. I was able to film the last part of such a performance recently when I was walking her.

Main Street Pine Bluff photos July 2020

Cohen's Fashion Shop Sign...

... and storefront, 504 Main Street.

View looking south from 400 block of Main. Facades of Simmons Bank building and former Hotel Pines are barely visible behind the tops of the Bradford Pear trees. The Streetscape project (see north views below) has removed these overgrown trees in the 300 and 200 blocks of Main, and will later remove these, among other good things it's doing for Main Street.

Looking south again, now in the 300 block.  Simmons Bank and Hotel Pines are more visible here.  The old Kress department store is on the right, with only its walls and support beams remaining.

Looking north now, from railroad tracks. Streetscape project in full view.  Four photos below are close-ups of buildings on the right in this photo (east side of Main).

Sign and stairway leading to African-American attorney William Howard's former office, plus a currently unused storefront.

Wouldn't wanna have to live in this living refuge (this is on the west, Kress Building, side of Main).

Collapsed ceiling in building just south of alley next to Barre building (below). 

Former department store of Abraham Barre.

Pop's Barbershop, with customer leaving looking at his cellphone at left. The Barre building is just out of view to the right.

Mural of north view from 3rd and Main in 1888. Located catty-cornered from Pop's.

Current north view from 300 block of Main.

Current north view from 4th and Main, with a pile of paving bricks that date to around the 1880s.

New Pine Bluff-Jefferson County library under construction, west side of 6th and Main.

Farm, summer 2019; Matthews returns from Alaska

 Cattails up close, my truck in distance, near US Highway 79B on Trulock Bros' farm.

Tractor with treads and disking equipment near rice field. Cornfield in far background.

Same road as in previous photo, now with corn up close on right.

David Matthews in Little Rock airport trying to figure out where his bags got off to after returning from visiting his 34-year-old son, daughter-in-law and their two kids in Alaska.  The wonders that DNA testing can reveal!  

Dogs with physics books; farm fields in 2015

DOCTOR 

                   She is troubled by thick-coming fancies

    that keep her from her rest.

MACBETH      Cure her of that. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain 45And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?
DOCTOR      Therein the patient Must minister to himself.
MACBETH Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.

 Molly, Rita Henry's beagle, with the American Journal of Physics

Jessie, my former dog who died of acute congestive heart failure on 12 Oct 2015, with Intro to Cosmology.

 Clouds and similar looking ice on former rice field on Trulock Bros farm, Jefferson County, Feb 2015.

A different rice field on Trulock Bros farm, almost ready to harvest, Sept. 2015

Once upon a time in ... Austin

December 1999

Two Pine Bluff buildings 1976, 1980

At the top is the National Building, 2nd Avenue and Pine Street, circa 1976.  Next is the Jefferson County courthouse after it burned in April 1976.  It was restored with additional wings added.  Governor Bill Clinton was on hand to give a talk at the re-opening ceremony in May 1980. This was his first 2-year term as governor, and he was defeated in November by a Republican, Frank White.  The year 1980 was a tough one for Arkansas, for the U. S., and for the Democratic Party.  There was the failed and fatal attempt in May to rescue American Embassy hostages in Iran (George Holmes, a Marine corporal from Pine Bluff was among those killed), and the leaked-fuel-vapor explosion of a Titan nuclear missile silo near Damascus (Arkansas) that killed one worker and injured others while propelling the 9 megaton nuclear warhead several hundred yards away so that it was temporarily lost.  At least it didn't explode, but the Air Force wouldn't even say whether the missile in the silo was armed (at some time since then they acknowledged there was a nuclear warhead on the missile).  And Reagan was elected president.

Getting back to Pine Bluff:  after a fire in May 1996, the almost 90-year-old National Building was demolished, along with buildings shown next to it in the photo, because the owner(s) decided it wasn't economically feasible to repair it.  Probably he was (or they were) right, since so many businesses had begun migrating out of downtown in the early 80s.  The Donald W. Reynolds Community Center now occupies the block where the National Building was.  At least there's not a vacant lot there. Downtown Pine Bluff is now getting a facelift of sorts via a new "streetscape" project which seems to me like a good thing to do.

Me on 10th, 33rd, 35th, and 50th birthdays

My first birthday in the house on Cherry Street, August 1964.  We'd been living there about six months. Starting in the left foreground of the photo, that's the back of my younger brother Steven's head,  two unidentifiables next to him, then Trip Martin leaning in mischievously, Betty Trulock, me, and I think Jeff Jones with watch on, but don't quite recognize who the pensive one is (possibly Phillip Stone, Steven's age). Lastly, far right, Mark Davis, already looking like an attorney.

 Jim Kennedy (center, white shirt) added to group, others subtracted.

Glenn King (a first cousin of my mother's) and me at 205 Barton Street, Little Rock, on August 22, 1987, my 33rd birthday and the day I moved with Karen  Jo (after marriage on Aug 8th) to Austin.  Photo by Betty Trulock.  For details of that day, see August 28, 2017 entry in my Ink on His Face journal.

This is from my birthday dinner in 1989, at Mexico Chiquito restaurant in Little Rock.  I guess I'm drinking Dos Equis because they didn't have Negra Modelo, which now goes by the more grammatically correct name Modelo Negra. That was a year of divorce, depression (well that had been going on a couple of years at least) and my dad's death (May 24), so this is a pretty accurate photo for how I was feeling at the time.

On the deck at Bruce Somebody's house (Steven's friend) near the White River at Goshen, near Fayetteville.  Mike McKenzie, former guitar player and singer with a 1980s Little Rock band I was in, Nun Of The Above, brought the drums for me to play.  He also brought a friend, also named Mike, who played a keyboard, and Steven played his acoustic guitar, so we had some live music during this birthday celebration of mine 15 years ago.