ESSAY
Hot Springs, Arkansas
by Keith Maillard
Although the name of the townHot Springs, Arkansashas been in my head for as long as words have been in there, it never occurred to me to think about the meaning of those words, to say to myself, Oh, there must be hot springsas, indeed there are. The thermal waters flow from an ancient watershed at over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but if my mother ever soaked herself in them, she never told me about it. Men drinking mineral water at hot spring no. 29, ca. 1906, Hot Springs, Arkansas, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.
Although the name of the townHot Springs, Arkansashas been in my head for as long as words have been in there, it never occurred to me to think about the meaning of those words, to say to myself, Oh, there must be hot springsas, indeed there are. The thermal waters flow from an ancient watershed at over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but if my mother ever soaked herself in them, she never told me about it. By the time that she and my father, Gene, were living there in 1942, the town had been transformed from a popular spa for folks with arthritis into a rehabilitation center for sick and wounded servicemenbut she never told me about that either. The Hot Springs I heard about is the town as she remembered ita miserable rural dump in the middle of the ignorant, stinking hot, crapped-out, nowhere South. She agreed to go there with Gene, she told me, to save the marriage.
There was no great love between us... either Gene for me or me for him. It was a matter of convenience at that point. I was pushing thirty and panicking. The fellas that I had run around with in Wheeling, I didnt want to marry. They were... stupid. I dont know. Gene had been around and in things. He was a different personality. We got along all right. But I couldnt live with his damned tight... His worshiping the dollar is what broke us up.
That is her summary, her official public statement delivered a lifetime later, but she also said, Mothers the reason that your dad and I didnt get along, and even once, dropped as a sad aside while she was talking about something else, I dont know what happened to us.
To say that they were trying to save the marriage implies that theyd talked about it, knew they were in trouble. I doubt that either she or Gene saw their marriage as a matter of convenienceat least not when they first went into itbut later, after it was over, she would hang that label on it to trivialize the experience, to push the pain away from her. The reason they split up is nothing that can be summarized in a few sentences. I grew up listening to her stories, and I dont believe that she ever really understood what happened in Hot Springs.
However much my father might have fancied himself an artist, a footloose entertainer, he liked his income to be reliable. Except for the last two years before the Crashwhen he was playing comedic roles on the stage in Cleveland and then doing whatever he did in 1928he always had a day gig. His first job of any consequence had been with the engineering firm of Sanderson & Porter in 1921. He worked elsewheremost notably at Wheeling Steelbut Sanderson & Porter continued to employ him off and on for years. He must have proven himself as reliable to them as they had always been to him; wherever they needed him, he packed his suitcase and wentto half a dozen towns in Pennsylvania; to Lake Charles, Louisiana; to Biloxi, Mississippi; to Hot Springs, Arkansas.
I can find no record of Sanderson & Porter doing anything in Hot Springs, but as soon as the war started, they landed a fat government contract to build and operate the Pine Bluff facility sixty-three miles away. Magnesium and thermite incendiary bombs were manufactured, assembled, and stored at Pine Bluff. Just as the name implies, incendiary bombs are designed to set things on fire. Some of the bombs used to torch Dresden might well have been manufactured there.
Pine Bluff didnt have just a weapons plant; it had an arsenal and an airbase. The minute the word had gone out that the big bucks were coming to town, folks from all over Arkansas converged on Pine Bluff looking for work. They camped by the side of the road, crammed into boarding houses, as many as fourteen men to a room. When the plant was fully operational, over six thousand people were employed there, and there was no housing to be had. The situation got so bad that the Army Corps of Engineers towed quarter-boats up the Arkansas River from Memphis and stuffed a thousand workers into them. My parents didnt live in Pine Bluff, but that didnt necessarily mean that Gene wasnt working on the Pine Bluff project.
As a draftsman attached to the engineering department, Gene must have been one of the elite. The engineers might have set up offices in Hot Springs, close enough to Pine Bluff to send plans back and forth, or even commute when they had to, but well away from the overcrowded, frenzied activity of the weapons plant. They would have found adequate housing in Hot Springs, not just for single men but for whole familiesand Gene had an entire house assigned to him. I imagine him walking to work to save money. I imagine him sitting in an office in his shirtsleeves. Maybe theres a Betty Grable calendar on the wall. I see Gene dipping the sharp nib of his pen in India ink and leaning into his drawing board. Ive set this scene in the stifling heat of the Arkansas summer, so the windows are open, and a huge rotary fan is going overhead. I step closer and see that Gene and the other draftsmen are drawing bomb casings.
Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor, my mother says on my tape, the tone of her voice adding, What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was a Sunday. Theyd never heard of Pearl Harbor. It was out around Hawaii, in that part of the world, I guess. They sent our boys to Hawaii and then on and out into the Pacific, then people got concerned. But really, the war didnt touch little towns like-Wheeling.
What on earth is she talking about? Of course the war touched little towns like Wheeling. It touched everybody. But that unfocused reaction to the war and her disclaimer of any involvement in it is typical of my motherindicative of the distance she felt from nearly all of the great affairs of the world. One of the roles she had learned to play superbly well was that of the dumb little thingas she occasionally referred to herself. It would have been an easy role to pick up as a girl growing up in the Teens, as the baby in the family. Dumb little things arent ever quite sure who is fighting whom, where, and for what purpose. Playing the dumb little thing would have appealed to men, would have appealed to Gene.
As soon as the war started, they landed a fat government contract to build and operate the Pine Bluff facility sixty- three miles away. Magnesium and thermite incendiary bombs were manufactured, assembled, and stored at Pine Bluff. Some of the bombs used to torch Dresden might well have been manufactured there. U.S. Army photograph of the Pine Bluff Arsenal assembly line, ca. 1942, courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.
