Arkansas – where we got into hot water in more ways than one, learnt all about American gangsters and travelled to a galaxy far, far away.
Travelling from Memphis to Hot Springs.
Arkansas is the home of Bill and Hill’ Clinton and, before them, the Arkansa native Americans. The state got its name from the native Arkansa tribe but it made me wonder why it is pronounced “ARK-an-saw” rather than “Ar-KAN-sas”? It stems from the French occupation of the area back in the 1700s. In the French language, the final plural “s” is often silent. When the state was eventually sold by Napoleon back to America, many Americans began to pronounce the state like Kansas as “Ar-KAN-sas”. This infuriated many of the old-timers and led to a debate in the Arkansas State Senate where some argued in favour of the old pronunciation and others in favour of the new. The old guys won and introduced a resolution requiring the name to be pronounced in the original French way.
Hot Springs
We had originally planned to stay in Little Rock in Arkansas but we met a couple from Arkansas on our Caribbean cruise and they advised us to go to Hot Springs instead. They both said that there was nothing to do in Little Rock except drive through it. Faint praise indeed. Well, the wife actually said you could visit the Clinton Presidential Center but then quickly dismissed that while her husband just shook his head at her foolishness. Well the choice between Clinton and a relaxing spa wasn’t a hard one. So we took their advice and drove through Little Rock to stay in Hot Springs.
Hot Springs was established in the 1830s as a health retreat where Americans could take advantage of the healing properties of the natural geothermal springs. The town gained notoriety in the early twentieth century as the vacation spot for gangsters such Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. Competing gangs agreed to declare it neutral territory (even gangsters need a break) and this was enforced through a corrupt mayor, Leo P. McLaughlin.
McLaughlin was Hot Springs’ longest serving mayor, staying in office for over twenty years with landslide victories at each election. It helped that many of the voters for McLaughlin could be found on the tombstones in the Hot Springs cemetery and that those who sought to oppose him would end up there too. McLaughlin assembled a police force made up of local thugs and ex-gangsters who would make sure the visiting gangsters kept the peace while in town. Other important duties for the Hot Springs police were making sure the prostitutes were not hurt, that the gambling houses were not looted and that the supply of liquor flowed as freely as the hot springs themselves.
Bill Clinton often got himself into hot water possibly because he graduated from Hot Springs High.
The beautiful Bathhouse Row.
The hot springs themselves.
In a fiercely capitalist country like America, it was refreshing to see Hot Springs supply free spring water. We saw lots of people filling up bottles to take home.
Buckstaff Baths
Michelle and I had a traditional 1800s “bathhouse routine” in Bathhouse Row at the Buckstaff Baths.
On entering the bathhouse I was shown to a change room where I was told to disrobe. I was then assigned a personal (clothed) bathouse attendant who led me down a long corridor to a large room. The room was both beautiful and scary in that it housed a series of Heath-Robinson-like (or given that we are in America, that should be Rube-Goldberg-like) bathing apparatuses that could have doubled as torture devices. First I sat in an old Victorian bathtub rigged up to strange pipes and gauges. Suddenly, bubbling spring water gushed into the tub and my attendant vigorously scrubbed me all over with a hard loofah. I was then taken to a “sitz bath” which was a weird heated bidet-like bath that you sat in for ten minutes. Imagine perching your bum in a low toilet full of scorching-hot water and you will get the idea. Following the sitz bath, I went into an ancient and claustrophobic steam container (also known as a vapor bath) before getting a needle shower in a weird water machine that looked like it might have been used in Guantanamo Bay. Then I had a massage (still naked which was unsettling when I was lying face up). It was both relaxing and not-relaxing in equal measure. Maybe I needed to get over my inhibitions of being naked in front of an attendant as well as my fear of what each bit of equipment may inflict.
The Buckstaff Baths
Naturally enough (and being naked it was naturally enough), I couldn’t take any photos of my bathhouse routine at the Buckstaff Baths. The following pictures are from the Fordyce Bathhouse which is now preserved as a National Park historical building. The gauges and hoses you see in this picture would have been connected to a bath and this is similar to the one I sat in at the Buckstaff.
Not an iron maiden but a vapor bath. I sat in one of these at the Buckstaff. Apparently, the native Americans used to call Hot Springs “The Valley of the Vapors”
The painful-as-it-sounds needle shower
The beautiful stain glass ceiling of the Fordyce Bathhouse.
A statue of Spanish conquistador Hermando de Soto receiving a pot of spring water from an Arkansa native. De Soto returned the favour by conquering the area for Spain and killing several Arkansa natives.
A Hubbard Tub. This was filled to the brim with either water or water and mercury (which was thought to cure Syphilis and other diseases). Bathers would either lie on the metal slab below and hold on to one of the hand grips or be strapped to the wooden gurney above. They would then take a deep breath and be lowered underwater for as long as they could stand it. Bathers had a rope that they would tug on which signaled to the attendant above that it was time to raise them out. Let’s hope the attendant hadn’t ducked out for a smoke.
The guy above looks like he might be dead. Drawing from the quote, I’m guessing the body’s vitalities are either aroused or snuffed out.
The Fordyce Bathouse has beautifully maintained all the old treatment rooms with period equipment.
The Beauty Parlor.
The plain old Parlor.
This is the lounge area where bathhouse folk would socialize in between treatments.
The zany Zander Machine.
The Wellenbad Schaukel or Wave Swing. It truly is well and bad.
The charming old wooden gymnasium in the Fordyce Bathhouse. Apparently boxing legend Jack Dempsey spent a lot of time training here.
Hot Springs Shooting
While Michelle indulged in her bathing routine at Buckstaff Baths, Harrie and I went off in search of a laundromat. Like a wayward Jack sent off to sell a cow but instead being bedazzled by beans, we ended up fighting each other as Jedi. But let me take a step back. We started the day with the mission of finding a laundromat to wash our clothes. The first two laundromats we went to didn’t have self service and couldn’t wash our clothes by the afternoon which is when we needed them. We got the same story from the third laundromat, but when we walked out to return to our car, we instead found police cars and an ambulance surrounding us with lots of people looking distraught. Unbeknownst to us, we had walked right into a crime scene.
The police saw us exit the building and immediately started to move towards us. I would be lying if I didn’t say I was nervous, as I thought they were going to subdue us under suspicion of whatever crime had taken place. Instead they approached and warned us to stay put as this was officially a crime scene. We waited while we watched the cops put police tape around a nearby building. After waiting a short while, the police let us go. It was only that evening that we found out what had happened. It turned out that there had been a shooting just moments before we arrived where three people were seriously injured. You can read about it here and here. Pretty scary stuff.
News reports of the shooting.
The Galaxy Connection
Harrie and I then decided to abandon our search for a laundromat and return to meet Michelle. We desperately needed something to soothe our jangled nerves after the shooting incident. Harrie spotted it on the trip back in the form of a big warehouse called The Galaxy Connection. It looked fun, so we pulled in to have a look.
It turned out to be a Star Wars museum run by a Star Wars fan whose collection had grown too big for his home. His wife gave us a guided tour which was hands-on and lots of fun. As the tour went on, she confided to me that her husband actually runs a pest control business (which is where he was) but she agreed to run the museum if he would keep all of his Star Wars collection out of their home. She had only watched the Star Wars films two years ago, mainly so that she would know what she was looking at when she gave the tour. Bizarrely, we ended up having a long, and surprisingly interesting, chat about the extensive range of micro-taxes that Americans pay while Harrie perused Star Wars merchandise.
The Galaxy Connection and Advanced Pest Control wife and husband businesses.
Obi Wan Simonobi and Darth Hazza.
Harrie sharing a joke with his stormtrooper pal. Who said that all stormtroopers are bad?
Jabba the Hut’s appalling carbonite emissions.
Doing a deal with Darth.
People often said R2-D2 looked like a trashcan. Pepsi made it happen.
An L-plater in an X-Wing
The Gangster Museum of America
We had an interesting guided tour through Hot Springs’ Gangster past at the Gangster Museum of America where we learnt more about corrupt mayor Leo P McLaughlin. There was a great quote from McLaughlin when asked by a journalist whether the Hot Springs Police Chief was honest, McLaughlin is reported to have replied “Of course he’s honest, he does everything I tell him to do without question.”
We also learnt of the sophisticated prostitution racket that was put in place for visiting gangsters. The Hot Springs Business Men’s Social Club (also known as Maxine’s Bordello) ensured that there were women that met every possible physical criteria. A gangster (or should that be a business man) could request a five foot redhead with specific bust and hip measurements and ten minutes later, she would be waiting for him. And apparently the gangsters did drill down to that detail in their requests and Hot Springs prided itself on delivering. The old guy who ran the tour looked like he had stepped off the set of Goodfellas. When Harrie saw him, he whispered to me “did he work for Al Capone?.” We both lacked the courage to ask.
The Gangster Museum of America at Hot Springs
The gang is all here. From the left: Harrie the Hacksaw, Shady Sim, Scarface Capone, and Machine-Gun Shelly.
A classic old slot machine from one of the Hot Springs gambling houses on display at the Gangster Museum.
A 1935 Evans’ Galloping Dominos slot machine.
When Prohibition was introduced in the 1920s, alcohol could still be obtained legally. The Volstead Act allowed for doctors to prescribe alcohol to a patient for medicinal purposes. Needless to say, in Hot Springs, there were a lot of prescriptions filled out at the local pharmacy.
This is a doctor’s liquor prescription form. I can imagine the sort of prescriptions filled out by dodgy docs – Mr Charles “Lucky” Luciano suffers from frequent bouts of depression. I prescribe two quarts of whiskey to be taken orally on a daily basis.
It’s easy as taking money from a kid.
Handling a 1920s Thompson Submachine Gun also known as a Tommy Gun, aka The Chicago Organ Grinder or as they called it in the army, The Trench Broom.
On the road in Arkansas
Our brush with guns at the laundromat wasn’t the first sign that we were in a gun-toting country. We had seen guns before in a Walmart in Memphis but driving from Arkansas to Oklahoma we began to see lots of scary pro-gun stickers on the back of cars. Then, as we pulled into towns, we started noticing lots of gun & ammo shops which we hadn’t seen before. We also saw more trailer parks which is seemingly where a lot of people live.
It surprised me how much the redneck stereotype that you see in movies is actually true and how proud these Americans are of their lifestyle which seems to include a fierce love of guns. My pet theory on this is that I think this gives people who are otherwise downtrodden, a real sense of power.
Driving from Hot Springs to the Oklahoma border.
The things you see while out driving in Arkansas.
The wife & I luv the freedum of ridin’ in tha car wit our feet blowin’ in duh breeze.
A common bumper sticker in these here parts.
Consulting the road map beside a nice lake in Arkansas on our way to Oklahoma.
Time to say goodbye to the hillbillies of the Ozarks and the the BillHillies of Little Rock and head west to Oklahoma.
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