Best years of my life

Arkansas has sure been good to me. A combination of bad luck, good luck, and fate brought me here.

In 1979 I had just finished a sevenstate tour, performing a musical program for school assemblies throughout the Midwest. It was three programs a day, 15 each week, for seven weeks in the fall and eight weeks in the winter and spring. Me, my 12-string guitar, violin, and Chevy wagon put on some miles.

After the tour I had to move in with the folks because the Chevy bit the dust. I had no job, no money, and no car. Dad told me I couldn’t stay. I was miserable, broke, miserable, embarrassed and, in addition, really miserable.

A friend of mine, Margaret Myers, mentioned a job opening in El Dorado, a six-hour drive from Parsons, Kan., but she offered to lend me her second car and arranged for me to stay with friends of hers in El Dorado, so I put my pack and guitar in the back seat of her VW and left.

When I got to Little Rock the engine light came on, but I was so desperate to get that job I just wasn’t thinking straight, so I kept going. The engine seized close to Dixon Road. I picked up my things, stuck my thumb out, and began hitchhiking. When I got to Fordyce, the highway patrol told me I couldn’t do that so I got a room in the 4-Dice Motel, curled up in bed and went to sleep watching The Exorcist.

I got up the next day, thumbed the rest of the way to El Dorado, interviewed, and got the job. Margaret’s friends took me to a production of Paint Your Wagon at the South Arkansas Arts Center that night. Great show. Next day I hitchhiked back to Kansas, got my dad to co-sign a car loan for me, drove to El Dorado, got an apartment, a wife straight out of heaven, four expensive kids, and spent some of the best years of my life there.

Arkansas has sure been good to me. It still is.

JOHN C. JARBOE North Little Rock