Opinion

To be honest, we were starting to doubt you. You’ve arrived fashionably late before, but this year it began to border on a faux pas. You know we love you and mean all this in love. At least I hope you do. Welcome to your intervention, Fall. Let’s just cut to the chase. ...

Some days are busier than others here at Carroll County Newspapers. Mondays can be pretty hectic, then the pace slows down for the rest of the week. Wednesday afternoons are typically fairly quiet, so when my friend David Bell (he’s also a pretty fair photographer) asked me if I’d like to tag along with him and another gentleman for a catfish lunch in Harrison last Wednesday, it didn’t take me long to think it over...

Dear Editor, The Berryville Public Library gets by with a little help from our Friends … actually, we get by with a lot of help from our Friends! Re-established three years ago, our Friends of the Library group has raised nearly $30,000 to fund children’s programming, provide new furniture, purchase new and emerging technology and help support the building of a new library...

Today is my 28th birthday –– I am officially a member of the Late 20s Club. Birthdays aren’t usually a big deal to me, but finding a place in the world certainly is. That’s what this birthday represents to me. Five years ago, I celebrated my 23rd birthday just a few months after I started working at Carroll County News. ...

One hundred and 14 to zero. That’s the combined score of Shiloh Christian School’s last two high school football games. The Saints won 56-0 at Berryville on Sept. 27 and then posted a 58-0 home victory last Friday against Green Forest. Both Berryville coach Doug Shott and Green Forest coach Bobby Bishop say this year’s Shiloh Christian team is exceptional even by Shiloh’s high standards. That’s saying a lot for a program that boasts seven state championships in football...

May 24, 2004, is a day I will never forget. It’s the day my childhood ended. It’s the day I realized the people we love can choose to leave this world. It’s the day I fully grasped what it means to die. On that day, my papaw died by suicide. Jimmie Lynn Campbell was born on Feb. ...

One of the challenges — and one of the perks — of being in the news business is that you never know what a particular day will bring. I like to say that I’ve covered everything from elementary school spelling bees to executions at the state prison over the course of 30 years as a journalist. ...

I enjoy and often agree with editorials by Scott Loftis, but I must offer an alternative view to his “Fall Fantasies,” (Carroll County News, 9-17-2019).  I believe the condition of “sweating … through spring and summer …waiting for the respite of fall” is a condition perpetuated by the relatively recent proliferation of air conditioning. ...

Four weeks ago, I wrote that it was too early to accurately assess Chad Morris’ performance as head football coach at the University of Arkansas. The proper time to evaluate Morris, I wrote, would be two or three years in the future. I was wrong. Now is a perfectly appropriate time to judge Morris’ performance, and it’s time to make a change...

Tomorrow night marks a yearly milestone for a group of my close friends. It is the finale of Big Brother 21 — a critical two hours of reality television that will reveal the winner of our fantasy draft teams.  Dora, Kasey, Gideon and I started out the summer with four contestants each. ...

According to the fine folks at Google, the first day of fall is now less than a week away. The autumnal equinox — that is, according to the equally fine folk at Wikipedia, one of two days each year when the plane of Earth’s equator passes directly through the sun, thus resulting in approximately equal durations of daytime and nighttime across the planet — will occur on Monday, Sept. 23...

This past Saturday, Gideon and I celebrated the marriage of two dear friends. It was a full weekend of wedding events, with the rehearsal dinner Friday night, the wedding Saturday afternoon and an after-party that night by the river. The wedding was beautiful from beginning to end. ...

They say if you go shopping with cash, you’ll spend less than you would if you were using a credit card. It has something to do with seeing the money leave your wallet versus just swiping your card and going on your merry way. Apparently spending money is different when you literally feel it slipping out of your hands...

Regular readers of this column know that I’m a devoted baseball fan. More accurately, I’m a devoted Chicago Cubs fan. This year, that means baseball season for me will likely be finished sooner than it has been for the past four years. This Cubs team isn’t making the playoffs and if it somehow does get in, it won’t be for long...

It’s birthday season in the Loftis family. My youngest son, Ryan, turned 22 on Thursday, Aug. 29. My daughter-in-law, Christi, is celebrating a birthday today, on Labor Day. My older son, Ronnie, will be 27 on Sunday, Sept. 8. And five days after that, the old man will be 50...

Most people would complain about working on a holiday, but I’m happy to come to the office on Labor Day every year. Monday is a production day –– that means we have to come in to put out a newspaper. Fortunately, we make our own holidays here at Carroll County News...

A little less than a year ago, I wrote in this space that it was premature to judge Chad Morris’ performance as the University of Arkansas’ head football coach after an ugly road loss at Colorado State. As it turned out, Colorado State was just an omen of things to come for the Razorbacks in 2018. ...

There’s a dead snake in my car, and I can’t do anything about it for the rest of the week. A dead snake, you ask? Why can’t you remove it if it’s, you know, dead? Well, it’s wrapped around my air conditioner motor, where it has been taunting me since last Tuesday...

Will you vote in the 2020 election? Our democracy is struggling right now. We are a divided country. Many people don’t care about their voice in our democracy — they don’t vote. Our freedoms come with a price — it is a duty to vote! A democracy works only if its people participate...

On Aug. 19, 2015, Alison Parker turned 24. One week later, the morning reporter at WDBJ in Roanoke, Va., was shot dead, along with cameraman Adam Ward, on live TV no less. The shooter then uploaded his own video of the murders on Twitter. It was a dark day in our country’s history, one many of us remember...

As I write this, on Monday, it’s my dad’s 72nd birthday. Or, more accurately, it would have been. Dad died more than seven years ago, in July 2012, after surgery to remove a portion of his lung where doctors had discovered cancer. Dad was a smoker for most of his life, and likely was exposed to harmful asbestos both during his service in the U.S. Navy (he was a Vietnam veteran) and his long career as a service technician with Sears Roebuck and Company...

Carroll County students will be heading back to school this weekend, and while some of them may not be happy about it, I sure am. Covering our local schools is a priority for both of our newspapers — the Carroll County News and the Lovely County Citizen. We’ve made it a priority because we believe it’s important, and because we know folks want to read about their children’s accomplishments...

Despite the unbearable heat, this week marks the end of summer break for our students, teachers and school administrators. Some kids are experiencing their very first day of school and all the excitement and fear that comes with that. My husband Gideon has something in common with those kids...

At the end of the school year, Karen Johnson resigned as librarian at Eureka Springs Elementary. She’ll leave some very big shoes to fill. When I worked for Carroll County Newspapers in the late 1990s, we had the luxury of spending more time covering school news. That gave me a chance to see teachers in action, especially in the elementary school. My kids went to Berryville schools, so I also knew something about teachers from my kids and their friends...

Another day, another mass shooting. Scratch that. Another day, another couple of mass shootings. This past Saturday, a man wrote a racist, anti-Hispanic manifesto before opening fire at Walmart in El Paso, Texas. More than 24 people were injured and at least 20 people were killed in the shooting. Less than 24 hours later, a gunman murdered nine people and injured 27 others in a popular nightlife district in downtown Dayton, Ohio...

A co-worker told me earlier today that I should write about the mass shootings that occurred over the weekend in Texas and Ohio. I agree. I should. The problem with that is, I don’t know what I can say that I haven’t already said. I don’t know what I can say that will be productive. I don’t know what I can say that will change one mind. I don’t know what I can say that will change a single thing. I don’t know what I can say that will make any difference...

Kudos to Superintendent Matt Summers and the Green Forest Public School System for fully honoring the “free” in Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). While Public Law 94-142, passed in 1975, established FAPE to ensure that children with disabilities would have the same access to a free education as their non-disabled peers, the implication is that a public education for any child is, in fact, free. ...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with reality shows. It started with Survivor in 2001. I still remember watching when Richard Hatch was named the very first sole survivor. And I wasn’t the only one — the finale of Survivor: Borneo had an average of 50 million viewers, the most of any episode of Survivor to date. (Yes, that show is still on and going strong, depending on whom you ask.)...

Some people think politics has no place in everyday conversation, that it shouldn’t be discussed on social media or even on the Opinion pages of this newspaper. I’m not one of those people. I believe it’s important that everyone who lives in this country pay attention to what’s going on around them — whether that be at the local, state or federal level. ...

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to speak to the Holiday Island Rotary Club. They served me breakfast, gave me a new pen and were great company. I talked too long as always, but the best part of my presentation was hearing from the Rotary members about the kind of coverage they’d like to see in their community newspaper...

I was finishing my book, “I Can and I Will,” when we were discussing how to promote the book. Some wanted to aggrandize the self-help category, but I saw it as a “success” story. I was born poor, raised in a mobile home until I was 10 years old, and from there we moved into a one-bedroom, one-bath home. I wanted to succeed, and frankly, would do anything it took...