We were planning to take few days in the eastern Sierra before the campaign season really gets hot and heavy, but events took us back to Arkansas for a few days. I wanted to be present for the memorial service for my friend George Coppage (Remembering George Coppage 1944-2012, August 28, 2012), so we did that instead.

The timing put us back in Fayetteville just in time to pick up the last two days of the Fayetteville Roots Festival. We got in to Fayetteville at 1:00 AM Saturday morning and in the next two days managed to get in about 18 hours of music at the Square, the Walton Arts Center, the Greenhouse Grill and the Kingfish Dive Bar.

There was also a Woody Guthrie exhibit and tribute as part of the festival. Below is the original manuscript for “This land is your land…” The original last line of each stanza was “God bless America for me,” but he later changed it to “This land was made for you and me.”

There is a memorial garden named for my mother at the Walton Arts Center.

My brother Jack and his wife Anne on their back porch with Shirley.

The service for George Coppage at the Fayetteville National Cemetery was attended by about 40 people, mostly high school classmates and their spouses, along with George’s sister. A high school friend, Gary Lunsford, now a pastor, officiated. George Faucette and I told stories; a bugler played taps, and that was it.

The Fayetteville National Cemetery dates from the Civil War. The first interments were remains moved from battlefield cemeteries of the Battle of Prairie Grove and the Battle of Pea Ridge. By 1871 there were 1,200 interments made in the cemetery, most of which were unidentified. This is where the Union dead were buried.

There is a separate Confederate Cemetery in Fayetteville where the Confederate dead are buried.

Only a few feet away from the location of George Coppage’s service is the headstone of my brother, Martin Andrew Butt (Letters From a Marine in Vietnam 1967, August 6, 2012). This was the first time I had been in the cemetery since 1969 when Martin was buried and the first time I had seen my brother’s headstone.

Below, the three Butt brothers, Jack, Tom and Martin.

We never miss the Buffalo River when in Arkansas in the summer. We took a day trip over near Ponca and had lunch at the newly refurbished Low Gap Café, where rumor had it there was a new chef. It wasn’t up to California standards, but for Ozark Mountain fare, it was pretty good.

Then down to a swimming hole at the Steele Creek access po
int. The river is almost dried up here, but cold springs and a deep hole keep make for a great spot.

I had never been to Hawksbill Crag,
touted as the most photogenic spot in Arkansas, so we walked about a mile in and had a picnic dinner there.

On the way back, we stopped in Kingston, where I did a sketch on the town square, such as it is. In 1980, Jim and Susan McDougal bought the Bank of Kingston, a small state-chartered bank, which was renamed Madison Bank & Trust. For years, Clinton critics tried to tie the Clintons into the ensuing bank fraud connected with Madison Bank & Trust but were never successful.