Website by Jim Martin

I've just returned from Jim Martin's house where I saw for the first time the website Jim designed for me.  I'm so pleased with it, and I thank Jim for reading my mind.  It is just as I pictured it.  I hope my fellow book lovers and friends will agree with me.

Making plans

I'm so excited about the reaction to my up-coming book, Blind Rage.  I've had many people tell me they want an autographed copy (or more), and that makes my happy.  I have several autograph sessions already set up in Fort Smith, Van Buren, and Alma.  Hopefully, word will spread about my book and I can go to other places in the state.

It's hard work getting a book ready for publication.  Since it is my first, I'm realizing that perhaps the actual writing of the book was a lot more fun.

I had the good fortune to be invited for dinner with Amy Tan at USFS after her March 18th speech at 5:30 on the UAFS campus.  I represented the Fort Smith Public Library because I am a board member, and everyone knew I'd get a kick out of going.  And they were right.  Amy Tan is very small, has gray hair cut about chin level with bangs, and was dressed in varying shades of purple.  She speaks in a courteous and delicate tone.

I'm certain she has made a lot of money from her writing and her books made into movies.  She said she didn't like the business of movie making.  She much prefers writing.  She's currently working on a novel titled, Memory of Desire, which I think is a great title. 

Her most interesting story of the night was telling us about swimming with whale sharks.  They're huge, she told us, and they have a little eye on the side of the head.  The skin is very rough, and once her hand grazed the side of a whale shark, and when she climbed out of the water onto a boat, she saw blood on her knuckles.  It was as if her hand had scraped across sandpaper.

Hard to imagine such a delicate woman swimming with whale sharks.

A Gathering of New Friends

Life since retirement as branch manager of Miller Branch Library of Fort Smith Public Library has been occupied by writing my true crime novel, Blind Rage.  It seems that if I wasn't talking about it, I was thinking about it.  My long-time friends, no doubt, grew tired of hearing about each new bit of information I gleaned from a visit with one of my many contacts who ultimately became my new friends.

New friends, Rusty and Linda Myers, provided me with a special insight to the Park family.  Rusty was a childhood friend of Sam Hugh's, and his wife, Linda, remembered the kindnesses offered her by Sam Hugh when she and Rusty were dating and then married.  It was with great sadness that they witnessed Sam Hugh's decline.  I'm forever grateful to them for sharing hours of conversation with me.  We sat around their kitchen table during bad weather, which gave me the opportunity to view their comfortable home and lovely art work.  Their taste matched mine, and we had a lot of fun talking about each piece.  And on warm days, I was treated to the view of their back yard where baskets of petunias and geraniums hung from metal hangers fashioned by a local artist, who also designed some of their garden art.  Ferns stood elegantly in shady corners along with hostas and impatiens. Often I arrived a little early to find Linda on her hands and knees weeding, her face covered in a new crop of freckles that made her tanned face even cuter.   

First Interviews with Friends of the Park Family

I owe many people a big hug for helping me with this process.  I called upon my Van Buren friends from my high school days to see what they remembered about growing up with Sam Hugh and Linda Park.  I met at the Van Buren Library with Joyce Patton, Nancy Baker, and P. D. DuVall.  Each told what they remembered.  I showed them the information I had already gathered, and we discussed my growing file in which  their information would be added.

Next I met with Rusty and Linda Myers in their lovely home on North 8th Circle in Van Buren.  We sat together a total of four different times, and it was through them that I obtained my most valuable item: the scrapbook.  It was found in a home in Van Buren that was scheduled to be torn down.  Rusty was contacted by the person who found it and it had been in Rusty's closet for a long time.  He gave it to me, and I took it home.  I spent days going through each page.  There were many, many pages devoted to Sam Hugh.  The first picture of Linda was entered with no fanfare at all.  It was just a picture of Linda at age seven standing in the snow with he father, Hugh Park.  All the pictures had captions written by Ruie Ann Park in white ink that was written on the black construction type paper that compiled the scrapbook.

Kay Kincheloe Lynn was a good friend of Sam Hugh Park and she graduated with Linda in the class of 1959 from Van Buren High School.  Kay is a writer also, and she actually wrote down in her own words some of the scenes I used in the book.  She also is responsible for the title of my book, Blind Rage.


 

The Family Album




This photo of Sam Hugh standing on the front porch of the home on Logtown Hill came from the family album.

 

Since 1981, the date of Ruie Ann Park's death, and now, the year 2015, a lot has happened to me.  I wrote a fiction novel about the Park murder, but I couldn't get an agent to represent me.  I wrote four more books, and I had the same result.  I taught writing classes at Westark, the community college that is today the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, or UAFS for short.  Because of those classes, I began to get assignments for various local magazines, and now I write a monthly book review and an occasional article for Do South magazine, out of Fort Smith.  The assistant editor of Do South, Marla Cantrell, took her first writing class from me, and we've been friends ever since.

My husband died of his own hand in 1996, and I went to work at the Fort Smith Public Library, where I managed Miller Branch Library for almost fifteen years.  When I retired, at the urging of Katy Boulden, the former owner and my part-time employer, of Vivian's Book Store, I returned to my original goal of writing about the Park murder.  But this time, I was going to tell the story for real.  It would be a true-crime novel.

I re-read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and studied the way he told that story of the Clutter family massacre.  I went to the Crawford County Court House and got pertinent records.  I interviewed many people who knew the Park family, in particularly those who were friends of the Park children, Sam Hugh and Linda.  Rusty and Linda Myers gave me the Park family album that they had rescued from an abandoned home scheduled for demolition.  That album told me much about the Park family, and I studied each picture.  That album told me more about the Park family than I could ever find out from anybody. 

And then I was ready.