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Article brings back memories...

I was delighted to read in the April 7 issue of the Citizen that Christy Brooks and David Stracener has a reopened the old Rendezvous Cafe in the place where it served as a midpoint stopover between Dallas and St. Louis on old Highway 67 in downtown Searcy.

The memories that brings back.

Before the Rendezvous moved to the site of the new restaurant and bus station, the Rendezvous had opened in a spacious wide open location on North Spring Street across from the Mayfair Hotel. Earcy and Myrtle Roberson made a hit of that place during the depths of the Great Depression and I ate many a Sunday lunch there with my family.

I remember I particularly liked to spread butter on those wonderful hot rolls and then pour a little sugar on that and eat, eat, eat.

At the time, the place where the Rendezvous was built was still old First Presbyterian Church with a particularly tall, sharp steeple that looked from the ground as if it went up forever. I spent my childhood in that church and it was with some sadness that I hung around to watch the workmen pull that steeple down with lots of long ropes.

I remember that it fell just where they hoped it would ... to the northwest missing the service station across the street and the Chandler Funeral Home on the opposite corner. The dust and bricks flew everywhere.

But then the new Rendezvous opened and it was a great place where everybody went for Sunday lunch and visited around with old friends at other tables.

And every politician worth his salt made it there Sunday noon to do the same.

The Senior Prom was held there in 1949 and we danced the night away in the upstairs ballroom that was also the locale for civic club meals.

I was there once a week for Lions Club meetings for a few years after I returned from college and before we chartered a Rotary Club in 1959.

The story about the new restaurant didn't mention a special favorite meal that Corner Boyett and I enjoyed once every two weeks or so.

We went over on the day when the special was fried salt pork and white beans and cornbread, a veritable feast for those who like such things, and we did.

But that was in the days when folks weren't so health conscious and dieting was a private never-mentioned matter.

I hated to see the old restaurant close but it was a victim of the bypass on Highway 67 that no longer passed by outside and new travelers never saw the place or knew of its fame to a whole generation of people.

So congratulations new owners. I wish you well.

Eddie Best sent me an e-mail a week or so back inquiring about a pauper's graveyard not far from the old Rendezvous site where Simmons Bank is building a new building. I had not seen the site preparation but Eddie said that a member of the White County Historical Society had reported that someone told her that years earlier on that site workers pulling out an old underground gasoline tank had discovered human bones and thought there might have been a graveyard at the spot.

I replied that I had never heard the story and that I had played around that whole area as a youngster and thought I would remember a graveyard. Then again, the old Harrison Hospital, where I was born, was located on the corner northeast of Spring Park and it might just be that paupers who died in the hospital might have been buried behind it.

The longer I thought about it, though, that doesn't seem likely because this was a center of tourist hotels and boarding houses right across from the white sulfur well where thousands of visitors once flocked to take the baths and take home a few jugs of the foul-smelling water that folk thought cured most everything.

The Searcy Ice & Coal Company which produced the city's ice was located on the south side of the park and used the sulfur water as part of the brine used to make the ice. At one time the place really thrived but that was before I came along. By that time the big old three story hotels on the north and east sides of the park with their wide porches were falling into disrepair and soon were being torn down for filling stations and Peck's hot dog stand.

The Rock Island railroad station covered most of the block to the north of the park and it was a beautiful nuevo-Spanish style. The Arkansas Power & Light power plant was next to where the Rendezvous stands, just across from the park and it's huge smokestack was a noticeable landmark of the time.

Enough reminiscing. Time marches on...

Perrin Jones is editor-emeritus of The Daily Citizen. His column appears each Sunday.

A Searcy native, he now resides in Little Rock where he is employed in the office of the attorney general.