We’ve been traveling to Benton County, Arkansas, since just after we married in 1972. Karen’s family had moved there a couple of years earlier.

At that time, the county’s population was around 56,000.  By the time we moved to Pope County, Arkansas after I got out of the Navy in 1980, Benton County’s population was up to 78,115.

Benton County’s average population increase since 1960 has been about 41% per decade.  The population in 2020 was 284,333.¹  With that kind of population rise, long-term infrastructure planning and construction² has been and continues to be essential.

In 1966, Benton County, Washington County, and the cities of Benton­ville, Fayetteville, Rogers, Siloam Springs, and Springdale formed the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission (NWARPC). In 1983, it was designated as the region’s “Metropolitan Planning Organi­zation (MPO) under U.S. DOT regulations for transportation planning purposes. The MPO is designated by the Governors of Arkansas and Missouri to conduct the federally mandated 3C (Comprehensive, Continuing and Cooperative) planning process necessary for transportation projects to qualify for federal transportation funds.”  With the continued growth of the region, today “NWARPC’s membership includes 35 units of govern­ment in Benton, Madison, and Washington Counties, Arkansas; McDonald County and Pineville, Missouri; the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department (AHTD); the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT); transit agencies; and Beaver Water District.”³

The Arkansas Economic Development Institute (AEDI) in 2019 projected that by 2045 Benton County will reach a population of 545,893 people with 428,382 in neighboring Washington County for a total of 974,275.⁴

In the 80s, our normal  150 miles or so drive to my in-law’s home was west on Interstate⁵ 40 to Alma and, from there, north over the Boston Mountains on mostly two-lane highways that sometimes saw heavy traffic.  The route went through every town along the way, big and small.  With the top speed limit 55 mph, even on the interstate, depending on traffic we’d be lucky to get up there in under 4 hours.  Needless to say, we didn’t drive up and back the same day.

Over time, our trips’ duration shortened as new four-lane roads were added bypassing many of the towns and cities, with the first being a bypass around Fayetteville.  Today all but 16.5 miles of the original trip would be by interstate highways.

Recently, our youngest daughter, Jessica, and her husband and daughter, Shane and Ciera, moved back to Arkansas, buying a place in Benton County that is 8 miles further from us than Karen’s parents’ place was.  All but 12.5 miles is by the interstate.  The speed limit is 75 mph over most of the route and driving time is about 2.5 hours.

On September 30, a ribbon-cutting ceremony will mark the completion of the Belle Vista Bypass, also called the Missouri-Arkansas Connector, opening a new 18.9 mile part of Interstate 49—connecting the previously completed portions of the interstate in Missouri and Arkansas.  The governors of Arkansas and Missouri will join other state officials and legislators at the Arkansas-Missouri state line for the celebration.  The completion of the project links 265 miles of Interstate 49 from Fort Smith, Arkansas to Kansas City, Missouri. It will officially open on October 1.⁶

1. “Benton County, Arkansas.” Wikipedia, as of edit of August 27, 2021. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org…Benton_County….
2. Through the 1980s into the 1990s, highway and street construction companies in Northwest Arkansas had an off-season during the cooler months where most of their employees were laid off because of lack of demand.  The explosive growth of the region has kept road construction workers employed year-round for many years.
3. “About NWARPC.” Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission. Accessed September 28, 2021. https://www.nwarpc.org/nwarpc/.
4. “NWA Metropolitan Transportation Plan.” Chapter 3, Population, Housing, and Landuse. Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission. Accessed September 28, 2021. https://www.nwarpc.org…Chapter 3.
5. The U.S. Interstate Highway System is a network of controlled-access highways.  A fully controlled-access highway provides an unhindered flow of traffic, with no traffic signals, intersections or property access. They are free of any at-grade crossings with other roads, railways, or pedestrian paths, which are instead carried by overpasses and underpasses. Entrances and exits to the highway are provided at interchanges by ramps, which allow for speed changes between the highway and arterials and collector roads. On the controlled-access highway, opposing directions of travel are generally separated by a median strip or central reservation containing a traffic barrier or grass. Elimination of conflicts with other directions of traffic dramatically improves safety and capacity.
   • “Interstate Highway System.” Wikipedia, as of edit of September 10, 2021. Accessed September 28, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org…Interstate_Highway_System.
   • “Controlled-Access Highway.” Wikipedia, as of edit of September 25, 2021. Accessed September 28, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org…Controlled-access_highway.
6. Della Rosa, Jeff. “Bella Vista Bypass to OPEN Oct. 1 as Part of Interstate 49.” Talk Business & Politics, September 17, 2021. Accessed September 28, 2021. https://talkbusiness.net…bella-vista-bypass….

Royalty-free images by Mike¹ — No. 156 of over 1200 images



McClellan–Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System²

The McClellan–Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System (MKARNS) is part of the United States inland waterway system originating at the Tulsa Port of Catoosa and running southeast through Oklahoma and Arkansas to the Mississippi River. The total length of the system is 445 miles (716 km). It was named for two Senators, Robert S. Kerr (D-OK) and John L. McClellan (D-AR), who pushed its authorizing legislation through Congress. The system officially opened on June 5, 1971. President Richard M. Nixon attended the opening ceremony. It is operated by the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).

While the system primarily follows the Arkansas River, it also includes portions of the Verdigris River in Oklahoma, the White River in Arkansas, and the Arkansas Post Canal, a short canal named for the nearby Arkansas Post National Memorial which connects the Arkansas and White Rivers.

Through Oklahoma and Arkansas, dams artificially deepen and widen the modest-sized river to build it into a commercially navigable body of water. The design enables traffic to overcome an elevation difference of 420 feet (130 m) between the Mississippi River and the Tulsa Port of Catoosa. Along the section of the Arkansas River that carries the McClellan–Kerr channel, the river sustains commercial barge traffic and offers passenger and recreational use. Here, the system is a series of reservoirs.

Post Endnotes

1. 1. I am sharing some of my public domain images in periodic blog posts.
   2. “McClellan–Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System.” Wikipedia page as of  July 29, 2021edit. Accessed September 26, 2021.  https://en.wikipedia.org…McClellan-Kerr.

Series Notes:

• This image is also shared as public domain on Pixabay, Flickr, and Pinterest.
• Images are being shared in the sequence they were accepted by Pixabay, a royalty-free image-sharing site.
• Only images specifically identified as such are public domain or creative commons on our pages.
• All other images are copyright protected by me, creative commons, or used under the provisions of fair use.

Royalty-free images by Mike¹ — No. 155 of over 1200 images

Fairfield Lake State Park, Texas, January 27, 2007

We visited Fairfield Lake State Park on our first post-retirement trip.  Retirement wasn’t actually official yet—I was burning up accumulated vacation time and would be returning to check offsite at the end of February.  We planned to travel further but I had developed problems with one of my feet and legs so we headed back home.  It turned out to be cellulitis² and we ended up staying home until an early summer trip to Wisconsin.

Fairfield Lake State Park is a state park located in Freestone County, Texas, United States, northeast of Fairfield on the shores of Fairfield Lake. The park is 1,460 acres (591 ha).²

History³

Fairfield Lake State Park, 1,460 acres, is northeast of the city of Fairfield in Freestone County. The park was acquired in 1971-1972 by lease from Texas Utilities and was opened to the public in 1976.

The history of the area around Fairfield Lake State Park resembles that of much of rural eastern Texas. Long occupied by Native Americans who hunted and fished its waterways, the land was first plowed in the mid-19th century and planted in cotton and corn by Anglo farmers and, about a third of the time, their African-American slaves. Following the Civil War, the crop-lien system took root. Blacks and whites alike worked in the service of the cotton crop until after World War II, when changes in American agriculture and increased employment opportunities away from the farm brought an end to the era of widespread cotton farming. Since that time, cattle ranching has prevailed throughout the region. The human population of the Brown Creek area, never large, is now widely scattered over the region. In this sparsely populated area, Texas Utilities built its dam, creating Fairfield Lake.

Post Endnotes

1. I am sharing some of my public domain images in periodic blog posts.
2. “Cellulitis.” Mayo Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, February 6, 2020. Accessed September 21, 2021. https://www.mayoclinic.org.
3. “Fairfield Lake State Park.” Wikipedia, as of September 10, 2021 edit. Accessed September 21, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org…Fairfield_Lake_State_Park.
4. “Fairfield Lake State Park.” Fairfield Lake State Park History – Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, August 27, 2018. Accessed September 21, 2021. https://tpwd.texas.gov…park_history.

Series Notes:

• This image is also shared as public domain on Pixabay, Flickr, and Pinterest.
• Images are being shared in the sequence they were accepted by Pixabay, a royalty-free image-sharing site.
• Only images specifically identified as such are public domain or creative commons on our pages.
• All other images are copyright protected by me, creative commons, or used under the provisions of fair use.

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 19¹

Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs²

Photographers working for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 made approximately 1,600 color photographs that depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working.

The original images are color transparencies ranging in size from 35 mm. to 4×5 inches. They complement the better-known black-and-white FSA/OWI photographs, made during the same period.

I first came across this photo in 2005.  I cropped and digitally enhanced it on 11/26/2005 and posted it on an earlier blog—North Farnham Freeholder— on 12/13/2005.

Library of Congress Information for this photo:

Title: [Display of home-canned food]
Date Created/Published: [between 1941 and 1945]
Medium: 1 transparency : color.
Summary: Photo shows jars of yellow squash, peas, beets, and other vegetables.
Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-fsac-1a35476 (digital file from original transparency) LC-USW361-949 (color film copy slide)
Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.
Call Number: LC-USW36-949 [P&P]
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
Notes:
…..Transfer from U.S. Office of War Information, 1944.
…..General information about the FSA/OWI Color Photographs is available at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.fsac
…..Current, corrected title devised by Library staff from information provided by the source: Flickr Commons project, 2008.
…..Original title from FSA or OWI agency caption: Unidentified stacks of home-canned food.

Library of Congress permalink

_____
Mike’s notes:

Image restoration note – This image has been digitally adjusted for one or more of the following:
– fade correction,
– color, contrast, and/or saturation enhancement
– selected spot and/or scratch removal
– cropped for composition and/or to accentuate subject matter
– straighten image

Image restoration is the process of using digital restoration tools to create new digital versions of the images while also improving their quality and repairing damage.

1. Each blog post in this project is an exploration of something from the almost 16 years between the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the end of World War 2 in 1985—no limits, no specific focus. The arc of the project will be the depression, the dust, the drought, and the war, but there were a lot of other aspects in the America of those times.
2. “Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs – about This Collection.” Library of Congress. Accessed September 22, 2021. https://www.loc.gov/…fsac/.

50 Years Ago No. 2

“Viceroy cigarettes ad” Life volume 71, no. 13, September 24, 1971.

angst: \ ˈäŋ(k)st , ˈaŋ(k)st \
: a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or insecurity

The last eighteen months mark a period unlike any that most people living today have ever experienced. While the United States has been one of the countries hardest hit, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been worldwide.

With an estimated population of 332,762,582,³ 12.6% of the U.S. population have been infected and 0.2% have died.⁴

That’s one in eight people in this country that are documented as having been infected.  One in four hundred and ninety-three have died.

A much larger percentage of the population suffered from other pandemic-related effects. In the spring of 2020, 43 states ordered residents to stay home and required the closure of nonessential businesses, precipitating an economic crisis. In April 2020, unemployment rose to 14.7%.  Millions lost jobs, struggled to pay rents, mortgages, and other bills, and had to rely on food banks—in 2020 one in seven individuals were food insecure. Over 2 million households fell at least three months behind on their mortgages. Many Americans continue to suffer from mental health challenges that are “a result of financial hardships, illness and death, social isolation, and a remote/virtual work and school environment.” In February, it was estimated that over 20% of adults were experiencing some kind of pandemic-related psychological distress.⁵

Complicating matters further, in the U.S., the public health crisis got caught up in the divisive politics that has overwhelmed the country in recent years.

The exact impact politics has had and continues to have is difficult to assess because pandemic tracking data—what there is of it— is subject to delays and uncertainties.  Mask-wearing opposition is sometimes political, but determining the extent of mask use and how that affects the spread of COVID is hard.  Vaccination rates at the county level can be correlated to the current pandemic status, including hospitalizations and deaths, all of which can also be correlated with the 2020 county-level election results. This epidemic has been turned into a pandemic of the unvaccinated and vaccine opposition is highest on the political right.⁶

Even though we mostly stay home, are vaccinated, and wear our masks when we do go out, all of this is exhausting.  We pay attention to what’s going on and are generally COVID knowledgeable.  It’s disheartening to see the trends, disheartening to hear the excuses, disheartening to hear vaccine-hesitant and anti-vaxxers changing their tune after getting deathly sick or after a loved one has died.

It’s disheartening to see political positions on vaccination and masking affect public health.

…disheartening.

…angst.

1. Morehead, Allison. “Why ‘the Scream’ Has Gone Viral Again.” The Conversation, May 25, 2021. https://theconversation.com…the-scream…viral-again.
2. Spinney, Laura. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018.
   The nineteenth century saw two flu pandemics. The first, which erupted in 1830, is said to have ranked in severity – though not in scale – with the Spanish flu. The second, the so-called ‘Russian’ flu that began in 1889, was thought to have originated in Bokhara in Uzbekistan. It was the first to be measured, at least to some extent, since by then scientists had discovered what a powerful weapon statistics could be in the fight against disease. Thanks to the efforts of those early epidemiologists, we know that the Russian flu claimed somewhere in the region of a million lives, and that it washed over the world in three waves. A mild first wave heralded a severe second one, and the third was even milder than the first. Many cases developed into pneumonia, which was often the cause of death, and this flu didn’t only claim the elderly and the very young – as in a normal flu season – but people in their thirties and forties too. Doctors were unsettled by their observation that many patients who survived the initial attack went on to develop nervous complications, including depression. The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch may have been one of them, and some have suggested that his famous painting, The Scream, sprang from his flu-darkened thoughts. ‘One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below,’ he wrote later. ‘I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord – the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream.’ By the time Munch wrote those words, the pandemic was over, and so was the millennia-long struggle between man and flu. In the next century, the twentieth, science would conquer the crowd diseases once and for all.
3. “U.S. and World Population Clock.” United States Census Bureau. Accessed September 19, 2021 23:52 UTC. https://www.census.gov/popclock/.
4. “ COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).” ArcGIS dashboards. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://www.arcgis.com….
   As of 10:21 UTC, 42,085,958 had been infected in the United States and 673,763 had died
5. Dhongde , Shatakshee, and Brian Glassman. “Multidimensional Hardship in the U.S. during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division. United States Census Bureau, August 17, 2021. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://www.census.gov….
6. Bump, Philip. “Analysis | Republicans Are Still a Bigger Obstacle to Vaccination than Black Americans.” The Washington Post, September 15, 2021. Accessed September 20, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com….

50 Years Ago No. 2
Vintage Camping No. 2

Popular Science vol 199, no. 3, September 1971. page 29

So… printer ink cartridges ain’t cheap!

A set of replacement cartridges runs about $40 on Amazon for my current all-in-one printer.

I’ve been having problems with my 8-year-old printer and, as inexpensive as printers can be, replacing it would likely be cheaper than having it fixed — though I have no clue on where to take it to get it fixed.¹

A good rule of thumb is, if the printer repair costs more than half of what it would cost to get a new machine, then perhaps you should buy a new one.²

Buying another similar inexpensive printer that uses expensive ink cartridges is a path I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down again.  I knew that there are printers that use ink tanks instead of replacement cartridges, so included them in my research.

Epson has multiple models of their EcoTank printers. Each has four tanks: black, yellow, magenta and cyan.  The ink that is provided with each printer prints the equivalent of what about 90 individual cartridges would.

I ordered the Epson EcoTank ET-3760.  With an auto document feeder, a high-resolution scanner, and auto 2-sided printing, it’s certainly more than we need for a home printer, but with the immense savings we should see with not having to replace cartridges, I thought, “Why not?”

A question I have, though, is “Why was this delivered by the US Postal Service?”

A large box like that is normally delivered by UPS.

Hmmmmm…..

1. I just did an online search and there are several places locally.  However, I’ve already got the new printer and I doubt that getting the old one repaired would have been cost effective.
2. Wiffler, Ross. “Should You Consider Printer Repair or Just Get a New One.” Common Sense Business Solutions, January 27, 2019. https://commonsensebusinesssolutions.com….

    

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 18¹

1. Each blog post in this project is an exploration of something from the almost 16 years between the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the end of World War 2 in 1985—no limits, no specific focus.  The arc of the project will be the depression, the dust, the drought, and the war, but there were a lot of other aspects in the America of those times.
2. Historically, the word missile referred to any projectile that is thrown, shot or propelled towards a target; this usage is still recognized today.
   • “Missile.” Wikipedia, as edited August 19, 2021. Accessed September 13, 2021. https://en.wikipedia…Missile.
3. “Smoke and Fire Reach Toward the Sky as Atomic Bombs are Dropped on Japanese Cities.” The New York Times. August 12, 1945. page 28. Accessed September 13, 2021. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com…page28.
4. “War News Summarized.” The New York Times, August 12, 1945. page 1. Accessed August 13, 2021. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com…page1.
5. One of my sources for inspiration for posts is a randomized list of about 365 dates between Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, and September 2, 1945, the end of the Second World War. Today’s post started from that list—August 12, 1945.  I then did a Google image search and a Google topic search on the date but found nothing of immediate interest there.  The next stop was The New York Times online archives for August 12, 1945. There are a lot of potential candidates in those headlines.  I generally look for something that is relatively short or something that leads to another avenue of research, such as the USS Thresher (SS 200) blog post.