Trout Capital News, Cotter, Arkansas, January 2006

Fire Department Chili Supper March 4^th !!

The Cotter Volunteer Fire Department and Auxiliary is hosting its Annual Chili Supper and Baked Goods Auction of Saturday, March 4^th at the school cafeteria. Please plan to attend and support this major fund raiser to help purchase equipment, to pay for the new fire truck and to buy educational materials used in community outreach programs.

Starting at 5:00 pm, chili will be served. The price is $5 for adults, $3 for children ages 5 to 12, and children under age 5 are free. Volunteer auctioneer Dave Gilpen of Dave’s Auction will begin the bidding for baked items at 5:30pm.

All bakers are encouraged to donate their favorite items for the auction. It doesn’t have to be an award winning cake.

Chocolate chip cookies, pies, brownies, muffins, breads, etc. are welcome and NEEDED! These items may be dropped off at the school cafeteria any time after 1:00 pm on that Saturday or you may call Sue Whittington (435-6989) to arrange a pick-up. If you can not attend and wish to support the Fire Department, please send your donation to CVFD Auxiliary, P.O. Box 312, Cotter, AR 72626.

This is a wonderful opportunity for new-comers to get involved and meet your new neighbors. We all would like to meet you so come out for some GOOD FOOD AND GOOD FUN!

Growing Up in Cotter
By Betty Hinton Wright

Betty (Hinton) Wright and her brother.
Photo taken on McLean, Cotter, in the 1940s.

This is how we met and returned to Cotter.

On New Year’s Day, 1951, Daddy drove the family to Batesville, where his job with the railroad had transferred him from Cotter. My brother, two sisters and I started school a couple of days later. It was the second semester of 7^th grade for me. Everyone there already knew everybody, so, as I was the new one, I had to tell everyone where I was from. In Cotter school I had been second highest, with Peggy Ragsdale always having the highest grades. In Batesville I was the highest, and that was a great feeling. Then Peggy’s dad transferred too. We graduated in that order in 1956. I went into the Navy, thinking nobody in town would miss me, except maybe my parents.

Fast forward to early 2000. I had moved from Maine to Orlando and was again telling everyone where I was from and what brought me to Florida (two of my five “kids” were there, and two more moved there within five years). An older lady asked me if I was really from Batesville, AR. When I said yes, she asked if I knew her nephew - probably not, I thought. She told me his name, Ricky Wright.

We were in the same class from 7^th grade through graduation. Of course I knew him! We even went to the same church (First Baptist) for a number of years. She said she would write to him (he was called Rick now) and ask if he wanted to correspond with a former class-mate. He was a professor at a college in Oklahoma, teaching and also doing cancer research, so she didn’t think he’d have a lot of time for writing letters. About a month later she handed me a rather thick letter from him. She said she’d already answered it and I could keep it to write to him or not. It included a photocopy of a page from one of our yearbooks, with his picture on one page and mine on the reverse.

We wrote a couple of letters and then we started e-mailing. It was fun to be in touch with an old friend. He had been in the group I hung around with at school and we were in the same youth fellowship at church, but we’d never talked much, and certainly never seriously or privately. He started his adult life as a framing carpenter. Later he finished a degree in chemistry at ASU, taught high school at Wynne, AR, did four years in the Air Force, then went back to school to earn his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Ole Miss. For 31 years he taught biochemistry and astronomy at Southeastern Oklahoma State U (SEOSU).

The April after our first contact, some of his students were going to be in Orlando to present papers at an American Chemical Society meeting. He and another professor were going to drive down. He arranged to meet his aunt and me at church, we would attend the service and then go to lunch and visit the remainder of the afternoon. He showed up early at the church and one of the ladies in my adult Sunday School class came into the room reporting there was a guy out there asking for me and saying he hadn’t seen me in 40-something years. The next Sunday all the old ladies were asking me, with big grins, how the meeting had been.

After he had returned to Oklahoma with his students, I received a letter from him that we still call “the bomb”. In it he told me he had loved me ever since he first saw me in 7^th grade! He said he was the boy who got butterflies in his stomach every time he saw the tall girl with long hair. I never knew!

The following June we arranged to meet at a Batesville high school reunion. We spent the time between meetings e-mailing “remember whens." It wasn’t long before we were sending pictures of our other life before we met again. During one lengthy e-mail, he mentioned that he’d found a great place to retire to in the Ozarks in Arkansas. I thought he was putting me on, because surely he knew where I was from. When he finally told me the name of the town he picked out, my reply was something on the order of: “Growing up in Cotter is something every kid should have a chance to do.” I went on to tell him a couple of my stories. I used to hang out with a group of boys because their games were more fun. Girls just played with dolls, but the boys climbed trees, played cowboys and Indians, played marbles and something called mumbly-peg. I told him about being tied to a tree at school. When the recess bell rang, they all went inside leaving me tied to the tree. One of the teachers came out and untied me, mumbling about all the different knots they used to tie the small ropes together.

Cotter Rhythm Band: C.C. House, Bobby Brickell, Carl Thayer, Clyde Bradley Anglin, Jerry Stackhouse, L.T. Flippin,
Peggy Jean Ragsdale, Miss Gist, Betty Jean Hinton, Charlene Watson, Bonnie Mae Queen, J.B. Dewey, Dale Trivit

He hadn’t known I was from Cotter! Several years earlier, he had picked Cotter as a retirement possibility. So my e-mail set him back a bit. I started sending him pictures of me in Cotter. One was of me in front of the rock wall down on what was Front Street at the time, right across from the roundhouse. I was about ten. He had that picture with him when we came here during the reunion and walked around a little. One thing I discovered right away – distances are much shorter than they were when I was a kid. The huge hill, down by the depot, we dared each other to ride down on our bikes without touching the brakes wasn’t so huge after all. I was looking for the roundhouse (I hadn’t been back here since 1969) and he was looking for the house where I’d lived and the rock wall, When we walked by the school, he wanted to know which tree I had been tied to – I’d forgotten I told him that.

We were married in Melbourne on March 16, 2004. He retired in July and I the following February. We closed on the Florida house on March 15^th and spent our first anniversary on the road. For the past two years we had always been saying goodbye and traveling away from each other, at least this time we were traveling in the same direction.

In comparing notes during the past couple years or so, he had been in Cotter several times with his Grandmother and probably saw me with the gang of boys. He remembers coming here on the train, when the locomotives were still driven by steam, seeing the bridge and feeling the sense of serenity and security. Several times while in Oklahoma he would drive through this area and think it would be a wonderful place to retire. He was born in Batesville and his mother still lives there, so he’s made the trip many times.

I’ve always called Cotter my home town, no matter where else in the world I have lived. Rick is still in part-time employment with SEOSU, teaching an internet course in astronomy – from Cotter! One of his students lives in Australia. He is putting together a minimal backyard observatory to protect a clock driven mounting that receives three different telescopes. The larger instrument will be used to patrol for meteoric impacts on the moon and it can detect the flash from a fairly small impacting object (less than a pound) if it hits the dark side of the moon. This will be a serious video imaging patrol coordinated with other observers, not just casual viewing.

We hope you will enjoy this series of stories celebrating life times and memories of growing up in Cotter.
We thank Betty Wright for sharing her story.