I have been in the full-time workforce 32 years, and exactly half of that time has been spent coming to a desk in downtown Little Rock. For a year and a half, I worked as a reporter for the old Arkansas Gazette. For 14 and a half years, I’ve had my current gig as editor of Arkansas Business.
I have not, however, ever actually lived in Little Rock. I grew up in North Little Rock — in Indian Hills, the epicenter of the baby boom. When my husband and I moved back to Arkansas after a decade in Nashville, Tenn., we never considered moving to Little Rock. We headed straight for Lakewood, the neighborhood that I had envied because my school friends who lived there could walk to the magnetic center of teenage life in North Little Rock in the 1970s: McCain Mall.
You might, with some effort, be able to take the girl out of Dogtown, but you can’t take Dogtown out of the girl.
For me, therefore, a day in Little Rock is almost always a workday. I cross the Interstate 30 Bridge most weekday mornings, unless backed up traffic on Highway 67/167 encourages me to go through town — down North Hills Boulevard, through Dark Hollow and across the Main Street Bridge.
Even though I cross it at least 10 times a week, the Arkansas River remains for me a bright line of distinction between home and work. It’s just a couple of blocks from where I work, but as soon as I cross the river in the evening, mentally I’m practically home.
I recognize that my persistent mindset of separateness is functionally obsolete — I’m not even sure a city merger wouldn’t be a good thing in the long run — but old attitudes die hard.
When my father was a boy, trips to Little Rock from his home on Harmony Mountain at Bee Branch were exceedingly rare. (His favorite memory was newsboys on the street singing out “Ar-kan-saw Dem-ee-oh-kee-rat.” It made him want to grow up to be a newspaper reporter, and he was delighted when his youngest child actually did.) My dad was past 40 when he moved our family “to town,” and even then, he and my mother both worked in North Little Rock, so going across the river was not a daily routine — or even weekly or monthly.
When we went across the river, it was for a specific reason — something rare and exciting, like dinner at Casa Bonita or a movie at the breathtaking Cinema 150. I don’t remember going with my family to downtown Little Rock for anything, ever. When I started work for the Gazette in 1988, downtown Little Rock was no more familiar to me than downtown Pine Bluff had been when I went to work for the Commercial right after college — and vastly more complicated with its one-way streets.
In fact, my only childhood memory of downtown Little Rock seems almost unthinkable all these enlightened decades later. One Friday night in 1972, my sixth-grade classmate Toni Miller — later known as Dr. Lee Antoinette Darville — and I were given responsibility for her 6-year-old sister and dropped off at one of the downtown theaters. I don’t remember if it was the Center, the Arkansas or the Capitol — all three were still in business, but the UA Four opened that fall, sealing the fate of the one-screen movie houses.
We watched a creepy movie about rats called “Ben,” the sequel to “Willard,” distinguished only by the theme song sung by young Michael Jackson.
As we waited to be picked up after the show, we studied a poster in the lobby announcing an upcoming feature that we mispronounced as “The Poise-a-don Adventure.” Those people on that capsized ship could not possibly have had a more memorable adventure than I had that night, one of three little girls alone in the big city across the river.
Gwen Crownover Moritz grew up in North Little Rock and earned a degree in journalism from Harding University in 1982. She worked for the Pine Bluff Commercial and the Arkansas Gazette and spent the ’90s in Nashville, Tenn. She’s currently the editor of Arkansas Business, a title she’s held since August 1999. She and her husband, Rob, have two grown sons and a new dog named Scully.