Luck of the draw
On Kansas Street, off the beaten path for tourists, lies the remains of Eureka Springs’ historic school building: the Old Red Brick.
Even most Eurekans have never known it as anything but ruins. Longtimers might remember the night it burned down in 1988 after being struck by lightning. Fewer still remember when it was an apartment complex, or before that a hippie ashram, or before that, long abandoned.
Genevieve Bowman went to school there.
A sprightly 94 years young, Genevieve is a living treasure. I am forever grateful that I was lucky enough to interview her for my upcoming book, Welcome to Eureka Springs: The I-Sh*t-You-Not History of America’s Quirkiest Town.
Born here in 1930, with a memory still sharp as a tack, Genevieve provided firsthand accounts of people I’m writing about from decades long past.
“We had lots of characters, and we loved our characters,” she told me. “It was a good place for characters to be.”
We talked about her personal encounters with political boss Claude Fuller, eccentric sign painter By Golly, gospel composer (with a secret) Thoro Harris, sham cancer doctor Norman Baker, and renowned artists Louis and Elsie Freund.
And that was just through the Forties.
We also discussed writer Cora Pinkley-Call, last survivor of Eureka Springs' historic Black neighborhood Richard Banks, one-step-beyond-the-law hustler Joe Parkhill, and beloved newspaper columnist (with a past) Virginia Tyler.
Beyond those were a wealth of more anecdotes about daily life and quirky Eurekans across nearly a century that, sadly, go beyond the bounds of my book.
So, consider this next one my early holiday gift to you.
A few years ago, a deep sinkhole in a Main Street parking lot exposed a mess of junk: box springs, bottles and cans, even an antique car. Early townsfolk had thrown it all in the ravine there before covering it with a wooden deck. Later, it was filled in and paved over to become today’s ground level.
Genevieve remembers looking down at that car between the slats of that deck.
She went there every Saturday for the excitement of the Lions Club drawing. Anyone who shopped downtown got a ticket for the drawing that week. The prize was five dollars.
FIVE DOLLARS! That was a lot of money. (Actually, it was. It’d be the equivalent of more than a hundred dollars today. I shit you not.)
Though on the surface the drawing was random, Genevieve said that even as a child, she noticed a heartwarming pattern. The town’s poorest residents made up most of the winners.
“Every once in awhile they’d throw in one that wasn’t,” she told me. “To make it look legit.”