Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics: A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans

Norm McLeod

Norm McLeod Arkansas has always been a land of eccentrics.Many of these eccentrics were also among the state’s most valued contributors to business, politics , and culture. Would not most people who knew the late Paul Klipsch, the great sound engineer and businessman of Hope, agree that he was a wee odd? How about Dr. Charles McDermott, the man after whom Dermott in Desha County was named? The good doctor was successful in many fields, not including his persistent efforts to invent a pedal-powered airplane. Then there was the one-eyed sheriff and boss of Conway County, the late Marlin Hawkins. Among the most widely known Arkansas eccentrics was Norm McLeod, proprietor of the Happy Hollow Amusement Park in Hot Springs.I have been fascinated by McLeod for decades,ever since I saw one of his commercial photographs made at Happy Hollow. To say that McLeod was a photographer is absurdly simplistic. He was a wild man with a camera.His photographs,often  x  inches and mounted on stiff cardboard with advertising printed on the back,can be located on Internet auctions. Each McLeod photograph is instantly recognizable. In almost every picture,tourists are placed in outlandish,highly theatrical poses. Most of McLeod’s scenes involve animals, such as donkeys, oxen, goats—even a black bear.But,it was the poses that were so outrageous. “Many of his poses are grotesque, but all are artistic,” a  biographer said of McLeod’s work. McLeod might be as much to blame as any individual forArkansas’s long association with the backwoods and the emerging hillbilly stereotype .Throughout the s and well into the twentieth century,McLeod made thousands of pictures of well-off tourists posed in the most incongruous hillbilly scenes imaginable. These pictures then traveled across the United States and around the world.Occasionally,a McLeod picture will turn up in Australia. Norman E. McLeod was born on a farm in Sumter County,  Georgia,in .At nineteen,he moved to Florida and learned the jeweler and photography trades. Unlike few young men of the time, McLeod won a scholarship and attended college in his native Georgia for two years.At that point,like many young men before and long after him, McLeod became a wanderer. “During the  years after leaving college, he was showman, photographer, orange grower, fisherman, and trader in general, and during this time he had many wild and exciting experiences on both land and sea,” one source says. Norm McLeod  Norman McLeod, a Hot Springs photographer and huckster. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries. In  he landed in Hot Springs,a village with more than its share of eccentrics already. McLeod started out in Hot Springs as a photographer with a regular studio, but he soon added a shooting gallery, an extensive souvenir shop,and a large petting zoo.Small horses,donkeys, and goats wandered around the grounds.McLeod also rented carriages and carts, as well as the animals to pull them. Happy Hollow was an early tourist trap. Tourists could choose from a variety of backdrops,one of the most popular being the Wild West theme. In early pictures a live bear was often chained to the stage or the roof of a crude log cabin, but when the bear died McLeod had it stuffed, and it continued as a prop even after its fur became thin and moth eaten. A born promoter, McLeod mounted his pictures on cardboard frames that prominently carried his name on the front, with a picture of himself in his typically exaggerated pose along with florid advertising copy on the back.McLeod also distributed lyrics to a song he wrote about himself and Happy Hollow. McLeod always had an American Indian in residence. Or, at least, he claimed that the man in the photos wearing the pathetic Indian headdress and laconic look was a red man of the West. One might suspect Norm McLeod was part huckster. Certainly, he had the scent of patent medicine about him. Happy Hollow was McLeod’s own little carnival, except he did not have to pack it up and move every few days. It also gave him the excuse to dress flamboyantly every day of his life and strike the most theatrical poses for his selfportraits . Plus, he made a good living at it. McLeod was far more than huckster. He was a man fulfilling a dream. Happy Hollow...