What Are You Reading this Weekend? Find out how long you’d last in BATTLEFIELD Z COMPLETE BOXSET
"That's my old high school," I told her.
She wanted to know more about me, where I came from and my side of the family.
She didn't feel connected to them and why would she?
We moved to Florida when she was only three years old, and my father made it clear he didn't approve of her mom.
It was easier to cut ties and close that chapter in my life than deal with the constant little digs and reminders that he didn't like her mother.
For some reason, people feel like they're stuck with family and they have to put up with the abuse they heap or the way they treat them.
People will cut out bad friends, they will cut out bad habits, but they will cling to family members that weigh them down like anchors all for the simple title of "family."
My mother and stepfather placed their addictions over the needs of their children.
My father did the same.
As an adult I came to learn these things and as a Father I came to wonder about the reasons behind them.
And my discovery, my decision was to eliminate that from my life.
I can see it replaying though, as just another version of my father's life.
I hardly knew my grandfather (my dad's dad) who had another family in Jackson MS and I didn't feel a loss for it.
I had Papaw and Mamaw as a constant in my life, rocks to cling to when the waters of mom's stormy relationships threatened to drown us, or once I was a teen and moved in with my dad, his constant absences.
I mentioned my mom's poor choices, but don't think she was alone in making them.
My father was only 21 when I was born, barely more than a hippie child himself.
What could he possibly know about being a dad?
Especially when he was consumed with being a rock and roll star, or poet, something other than staying home and taking care of the children.
Except that as I grew older and learned, he didn't really have a problem taking care of children, just his own.
When I was fourteen, I moved in with my dad.
He travelled every other week to Oklahoma or Louisiana or Mississippi to work on an oil rig.
Seven on, seven off they called it.
He did this for years.
We always seemed to struggle for money.
There was just enough for beer and cigarettes for the adults, and chili and lasagna and bologna for the kids.
My step mom would make a big pot of chili on Sunday's and we would eat off it for a couple of days, then a lasagna on Wednesday which would carry us to Friday.
Friday or Saturday she would make homemade pizza with a Bisquick crust.
But the priority was the same.
Cigarettes first, two cartons.
Beer next, one case.
Then bills.
Then food.
At sixteen we learned Dad had another family out of state.
A young mom and her two children, neither his.
He was supporting them too.
So it turns out the priority was cigs, beer, other family, bills then food.
My stepmother left him and moved back to her home state.
Her daughter moved in with friends so she could graduate from high school in Pine Bluff.
I'm not sure how my dad reacted.
His attitude was always stoic to me, a feigned toughness.
I'm not even sure he felt guilty about it, but perhaps just bad that he was caught.
Then the oil industry took a header and he was out of job.
My junior and senior year of high school was my dad looking for work, working in a factory or working at a gas station.
He did make an effort to go back to school and learn electronics, and he graduated from trade school at the same time I graduated from high school.
He and my brother moved to Texas after I graduated to start a new a job at Texas Instruments.
When I came to visit later, it turns out my brother was raising himself, working at Applebee's and going to high school, while Dad was settling in to his new job, and supporting a new single mom he had started dating.
Order was established, at least the order of cigs, beer, new family, bills and food.
My brother could pay for his own.
Rich's Hamburgers was crowded.
I wanted to take Tristan there but she was hungry now and we missed beating the lunch rush by thirty minutes.
Cars were stacked and there were two lines ten people deep.
We got caught up in a detour downtown.
A year ago a building collapsed on Main Street downtown, and the city shut off a couple of blocks while they determined the structural integrity of buildings around it.
Turns out, not only is Pine Bluff dying, the Main Street is rotting at the core.
The politicians came out in force against the state of Main Street, but a year later, not much is being done.
I've read reports of buildings changing hands, and one building owner who keeps pushing back inspection dates and meetings with the City Council.
Simmon's Bank rode to the rescue with a ten million dollar fund, but the big question is, why?
Why are they trying to save the main street of a dead downtown.
Business won't move there, and people won't go.
Pine Bluff is rife with examples of poor business ownership, and I think a lot has to do with my parent's generation.
I compare them to my Papaw's generation and my own.
Papaw was a carpenter.
He built things.
When the Pine Bluff Arsenal was being built, the government needed houses moved or torn down on the property.
My grandfather heard about it, bought six houses for ten dollars each, plus moving cost.
He then bought land out in the country south of Pine Bluff, and two lots he owned in town.
He drove out to the arsenal, jacked up each house onto a trailer, and moved them through town.
Three went to the land in the country, three went to the lots in the city.
He used his carpentry skills to fix up the houses, and then rented them out.
Papaw was a deacon in his church, which he and other parishioners built on their own.
The Church was located four blocks from the house where he lived, which he and his Dad built in the late 60's.
As I think back, Papaw owned eight houses plus twenty acres.
He was constantly building in Pine Bluff.
He knew carpentry, plumbing, welding, electrical work and grading, and he knew the movers and shakers who built and expanded the town.
My Dad and Mom's generation did not.
They built businesses that were unsustainable and refused to evolve with the town.
As I grew older and see how much politics comes into play in small towns like Pine Bluff, I can also see how the Boomer generation there refused to learn basics, and subsequently made a series of failures that led to a cascade of defections in my generation.
The Baby Boomers kids didn't want to stay in Pine Bluff and departed in droves, leading to a decline in almost fifteen thousand population since 1988.
Those left behind haven't built anything in the city, rather they've moved it further South along Highway 15, and Highway 79 toward Watson Chapel or further north into White Hall, edging closer to Little Rock.
When people left, it created a vacuum and Pine Bluff had an abundance of trash to move in and fill the void.
"There was a house there when I was growing up, it's torn down now. And there. And there. And there."
We drove down 32nd Avenue past my grandparents old place.
The house my grandfather built belonged to someone else now, a stranger.
The house beside it, where his mother and then sister lived out the last years of their life was gone, as was his barn and two storage sheds along with a lot of history from the property.
My aunt, uncle and dad were always complaining about what a pack rat Papaw was, and it was true.
The barn was stuffed with material and memorabilia, the two car garage only had room for Mamaw's Buick and the storage sheds were stuffed to overflowing with what they all saw as junk.
Papaw would go to estate sales and auctions sites, and make low bids.
Sometimes he won, and he would bring it back, pack it tight on a just in case I need it basis.
Anyone who studied the Great Depression or lived through it knows that mindset.
You find uses to fix almost anything.
When Papaw died, everyone agreed that all of his stuff was garbage, so they rented a dumpster and shoveled everything in from each of the buildings, the garage, barn and his office.
It's an example of extremely short sighted thinking on their part.
They used money to pay for a dumpster and hauling, when if they realized what they had, they could have turned his junk into six figures or more.
At the time of his death, a new store was coming online called ETSY. Vintage and handmade items were listed and sold to collectors.
Papaw had over a thousand postcards sent to him by his travelling sisters, and ones he collected as he and my grandmother travelled. He packed them all away and after he died, they were thrown away in mint condition.
It was junk to them.
I can see now they resented him.
He was a harsh man.
He was a know it all and a story topper, meaning if you did something, he did it better, faster or had seen something more.
He hated to loan his equipment because it often came back broke, and the family would argue over the state of the equipment and who was responsible for repair.
But if they had expanded their minds beyond Beer, Cigarettes and just cleaning out the house cause Mamaw wouldn't be able to, they would have seen so much opportunity it was insane.
But they were lifelong residents of Pine Bluff, except for my Dad, and as such couldn't think that way.
Their generation destroyed the town, just as they destroyed the opportunity to make money from "collections" my Papaw held on to.
Magazines, political pamphlets, little slices of historical bric brac secreted away in drawers and crannies since the early sixties.
Furniture that had been purchased in the seventies, and when gone out of style moved to one of the houses in the country was now back in vogue.
Rather than categorize and list on Etsy or Ebay, his kids just tossed it in the dumpster. Instead of cleaning up and listing on Craigslist, they just tossed it all away.
That was a bad mentality.
As if the folks who came before them couldn't understand this new world, and therefore all the rules need to be tossed out.
It's as if the principles were ignored, and then my generation absconded from Pine Bluff because our parents made such a mess of it.
Better to build our own version of tomorrow somewhere else.
Even now I wonder why I was so anxious to get out.
I travelled the State, travelled the States and set my sights on far flung parts of the world.
I also married young, made my home in the state capitol and even though I graduated college did my best to avoid the corporate track.
I considered law school, I considered sales management, and all the while I wrote books and movies, and short stories and comic books.
I never once considered becoming a home grown film and authorprenuer. Downtown Pine Bluff, in decline since '88, and honestly if you're looking at building occupation, probably since the late 70'[s was a ripe plum for plucking up old buildings for a song.
I never asked Papaw what he thought of buying a building or a block downtown.
I wondered what advice he would have offered.
Forty year old me considers urban redevelopment a priority, though looking at Little Rock they're not doing it any better than Pine Bluff.
Main Street in LR is so slow to develop because a bunch of Dallas immigrants bought up abandoned property, jacked up the prices and waited.
Now buildings are so expensive to buy and rehabilitate into new property, it takes a consortium of investors to pull it off.
Then they jack up the rent so high, small businesses can't cover the overhead on the meager foot traffic that Main Street generates.
It becomes a revolving door of new experiments, where want to be business owners try to open up their restaurant in the same spot where three others failed.
There are success stories, and those are the ones people pin their hopes on, but one cafe on a corner of the block with limited hours and mostly serving the business lunch crowd does not a mogul make.
It's like hunting for gems at the crater of diamond state park when looking for what works.
It takes a lot of digging and there might be more to the story than just the fifteen dollar cheeseburger on the menu.
At least Little Rock can rely on the convention traffic and annual visitors to keep the businesses in the River Market District afloat.
And LR has done some wonders between the Clinton Library and the Broadway Bridge.
The Splash pad is a popular summer attraction and turning two of the old railroad bridges into pedestrian paths linking North Little Rock and Little Rock as arteries of the River Trail was genius.
Little Rock has something to offer as the state capitol of Arkansas, and even if there is still so much work to be done my generation and my children are left to wonder still, is Pine Bluff worth saving?
Papaw may have suggested buying up a block at a time in Downtown PB.
He may have said rent out the bottom to a coffee shop or Starbucks knock off, and turn the top two floors into loft apartments.
He would have suggested that with the completion of the 530 corridor that turned old 65 into an expressway to Little Rock, PB could have set itself up as a bedroom community, much as Conway and Mayflower did.
They're the same distance, and they're both close to the AR River, both attributes shared by Pine Bluff.
Can you imagine driving into PB from LR, turning off at the gold domed Courthouse and parking because Main Street is now a pedestrian walkway?
Art Galleries and small cafes line the street, a photographer's studio, and museums, with residents who call the upper floors home populating the area for the first four blocks to the train tracks that cut through the middle of town.
The entire downtown area is served by free wi-fi towers hidden discreetly on top of the buildings, nestled among the solar panels and bee hives that pollinate the rooftop flower gardens and the window boxes on every building.
A street band plays, street performers show up on weekends to wow the small crowds that gather for a farmer's market in the parking lot outside of the courthouse.
When we were driving around, ideas popped out on almost every corner, and with the assistance of UAPB and the Pine Bluff High School, the mayor and city council have a real opportunity to make a difference.
Unfortunately there's too much infighting and bickering among the generation of politicians that has to this point failed the city, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
Even the announcement of a new billion dollar plant moving into the south of town is tempered by the reality that PB is just one location in the possible running.
That announcement translated means that "maybe" the company might pick Pine Bluff.
But if those business leaders hit Main Street today, do you seriously think they would pick the city?
Main Street on Monday was still blocked after a year of deciding who was responsible for the building that fell into the street.
Was it the building owner?
Was it the city?
Piles of bricks shut off one of the forgotten main corridors of the dying town while the city tries to decide who should clean up the mess.
A leader would have sent trucks and workers to clean up the bricks, hauled them to an empty lot at least, and billed the building owner.
The problem is downtown Pine Bluff building owners are absent and allowing the buildings to fall into decay and disrepair.
I told her about eminent domain and an eleven year old child gets it.
When the city finds abandoned and derelict property in residential areas, they can order the property torn down because it's a nuisance and danger, and bill the owner of record for the service.
Why doesn't a leader in PB do the same?
This creates a vacant lot problem and a number of studies have shown that vacant lots lead to an increase in crime and decrease in property value, but again, a real leader would see this as an opportunity instead of a problem.
In six months time, a real leader could make serious inroads in repairing PB and it's image.
1. Establish a timeline with a move it or lose it deadline.
a. Create an immediate list of all property owners who owe back taxes in the city on residential and commercial property
b. Create and send an immediate payment due certified letter to the business owners with a fourteen day response window.
c. Track response rate. Property owners who contact the tax office can make payment arrangements, or sell the property to the city for back taxes owed. This relieves the property owner of the financial burden of maintaining the property.
d. Property owners who do not respond in fourteen days get a certified "intent to sell" letter. The city will sell the property for the cost of back taxes.
e. The tax office lists each property for sale for the tax cost. The real estate contract stipulates that the property must be built upon within 60 Days. Failure to live up to the terms of the contract reverts ownership back to the city with all monies forfeited.
But what will the new owners build on their new property?
And why would they want to build in PB?
The death of the middle class across America and the decline of affordable housing options for new home owners that is plaguing the rest of the country doesn't need to apply in Pine Bluff.
I wonder what the silent generation would say about it.
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What Are You Reading this Weekend? Find out how long you’d last in BATTLEFIELD Z COMPLETE BOXSET
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