Hot Springs, Arkansas

“Although the name of the town—Hot Springs, Arkansas—has been in my head for as long as words have been in there, it never occurred to me to think about the meaning of those words, to say to myself, ‘Oh, there must be hot springs’—as, indeed there are. The thermal waters flow from an ancient watershed at over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but if my mother ever soaked herself in them, she never told me about it.” Men drinking mineral water at hot spring no. 29, ca. 1906, Hot Springs, Arkansas, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Although the name of the town—Hot Springs, Arkansas—has been in my head for as long as words have been in there, it never occurred to me to think about the meaning of those words, to say to myself, “Oh, there must be hot springs”—as, indeed there are. The thermal waters flow from an ancient watershed at over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but if my mother ever soaked herself in them, she never told me about it. By the time that she and my father, Gene, were living there in 1942, the town had been transformed from a popular spa for folks with arthritis into a rehabilitation center for sick and wounded servicemen—but she never told me about that either. The Hot Springs I heard about is the town as she remembered it—a miserable rural dump in the middle of the ignorant, stinking hot, crapped-out, nowhere South. She agreed to go there with Gene, she told me, “to save the marriage.”

There was no great love between us . . . either Gene for me or me for him. It was a matter of convenience at that point. I was pushing thirty and panicking. The fellas that I had run around with in Wheeling, I didn’t want to marry. They were . . . stupid. I don’t know. Gene had been around and in things. He was a different personality. We got along all right. But I couldn’t live with his damned tight . . . His worshiping the dollar is what broke us up.

That is her summary, her official public statement delivered a lifetime later, but she also said, “Mother’s the reason that your dad and I didn’t get along,” and even once, dropped as a sad aside while she was talking about something else, “I don’t know what happened to us.”

To say that they were trying “to save the marriage” implies that they’d talked about it, knew they were in trouble. I doubt that either she or Gene saw their marriage as “a matter of convenience”—at least not when they first went into it—but later, after it was over, she would hang that label on it to trivialize the experience, to push the pain away from her. The reason they split up is nothing that can be summarized in a few sentences. I grew up listening to her stories, and I don’t believe that she ever really understood what happened in Hot Springs.

However much my father might have fancied himself an artist, a footloose entertainer, he liked his income to be reliable. Except for the last two years before the Crash—when he was playing comedic roles on the stage in Cleveland and then doing whatever he did in 1928—he always had a day gig. His first job of any consequence had been with the engineering firm of Sanderson & Porter in 1921. He worked elsewhere—most notably at Wheeling Steel—but Sanderson & Porter continued to employ him off and on for years. He must have proven himself as reliable to them as they had always been to him; wherever they needed him, he packed his suitcase and went—to half a dozen towns in Pennsylvania; to Lake Charles, Louisiana; to Biloxi, Mississippi; to Hot Springs, Arkansas.

I can find no record of Sanderson & Porter doing anything in Hot Springs, but as soon as the war started, they landed a fat government contract to build and operate the Pine Bluff...