Other days

100 YEARS AGO Nov. 21, 1923 RUSSELLVILLE — The Russellville Agricultural School has had very satisfactory results during the past dry season from two forage crops that are not generally grown in Central Arkansas. They are mung beans and sudan grass. Mung beans grew right along through the long dry period and made a heavy yield of hay. The mung bean is a legume and enriches the land of which it grows, the same as a lespedeza, cowpeas, soy beans and the clovers. 50 YEARS AGO Nov. 21, 1973 m The gospel of love and peace, the song of the flower children was preached at San Francisco as early as the mid-1960s. Harry Wong, teacher in the Menlo Park, Calif. school system, brought the same message to a group of science teachers attending the Arkansas Association’s convention Tuesday in Little Rock. It wasn’t all love and peace, however. Mixed in were generous doses of “do your own thing,” “I’m okay, you’re okay” and “the power of positive thinking.” Wong discussed teaching students not headed for college, “the majority of students who will go into blue-collar fields and pay taxes to support the schools.” He said these students were usually interested in education and thought of themselves as failures. 25 YEARS AGO Nov. 21, 1998 SPRINGDALE — Sue Whiteley has worked in Romanian orphanages for years, but her heart goes out to the street children. That’s what induced her to invent a tool to make their uneasy lives a bit easier. It’s a combination backpack and sleeping bag she calls “Love Covers.” 10 YEARS AGO Nov. 21, 2013 CONWAY — One perhaps unintended function of historical museums can be to remind us that the so-called Good Old Days weren’t all that good in lots of ways. Such a revisionist notion comes to mind at the Faulkner County Museum on Conway’s Courthouse Square when confronted with a hefty vacuum cleaner, circa 1895. It bears what was likely an apt nickname: “Lady Killer.” On display elsewhere in this first-rate county museum is a 1920s kitchen equipped with a wood-burning range and a bulky refrigerator with a top-mounted motor almost as large as the food-storage area. A wringer washing machine is another throwback to the era of household blood, toil, tears and sweat. Also likely to set nostalgia on edge is a display from the early 1900s of dental and medical equipment from a time when reliable anesthesia was in its infancy. Among the vintage doctor’s implements with a menacing look are a tonsil compressor, a tonsil snare and a tonsil suction device. Tonsil removal back then was evidently something to be avoided.