University of Arkansas Press Publishes 'Things You Need to Hear'

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The University of Arkansas Press has published Things You Need to Hear: Collected Memories of Growing Up in Arkansas, 1890 – 1980 ($24.95 cloth), by Margaret Jones Bolsterli.

The book is made up of both original interviews conducted by Bolsterli and excerpts from published memoirs and is the basis for an Old State House Museum exhibit opening in Little Rock on Friday, Feb. 17.

Some of the 41 “informants,” as Bolsterli calls the people she quotes, are famous – Johnny Cash, Maya Angelou, Levon Helm, Joycelyn Elders, William Grant Still – but many more are not. They all tell stories that might remind older Arkansans of their own childhoods, and that might remind younger Arkansans of stories told by their parents or grandparents.

“Informant” Leta Drake Parker, born in 1917 in rural Madison County, humorously recollects the term “weaner house,” which means “a little bitty house that kids lived in when they first got married until they [their folks] could wean them off.” Pearl Lu Mattmiller Katz from Arkansas County recalls her home where “we had the walls papered then with old copies of the Dewitt New Era newspaper. It wasn’t pretty, but it was very efficient and I learned to read before I ever went to school by reading the newspaper tacked on the walls.” Stories of playing with the neighbor kids until dark, going into town to shop, riding on top of wagons filled with cotton bales, attending one-room schoolhouses, and many other fundamental Arkansas experiences fill the book.

Bolsterli began to think about Things You Need to Hear when she was selected to guest-curate an exhibit on the subject of growing up in Arkansas

“Bill Gatewood, director of the Old Statehouse Museum, wanted a text for the museum staff to illustrate with physical objects,” she said.. “I happened to have a box full of interviews on that very subject that I had taped for other projects over the last forty years. So I selected some of those interviews and put excerpts from them with similar videotaped interviews made by Scott Lunsford for the Pryor Center and excerpts from several published memoirs to develop a collection centered around the topics of community, family, work, school and play.”

Gatewood, in his introduction for the book, said, “The oral histories collected here are amazingly comprehensive in exploring a variety of themes abundantly evident in the Arkansas experience. Such themes include class, race, education, family values, religion, child rearing, economic development and cultural life. Issues featured in this work are familiar to many of us. Margaret Bolsterli has placed them in an Arkansas context that makes them especially fascinating to Arkansans and students of the rural South.”

Bobby Roberts, director of the Central Arkansas Library System, said, “Margaret Bolsterli’s judicious selection of the memories of dozens of Arkansans provides fascinating glimpses into what it meant to grow up in a poor rural state. It is a story of hard work, humor, friendship and talking around the dinner table.”

Margaret Jones Bolsterli is the author or editor of four University of Arkansas Press books: Born in the Delta, During Wind and Rain, Vinegar Pie and Chicken Bread, and A Remembrance of Eden. She is professor emerita of English at the University of Arkansas and taught at the university for 25 years. She will be discussing and signing her new book at the Old Statehouse Museum in Little Rock on Thursday, Feb. 16, from noon to 1 p.m., and through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, 2 East Center Street, Fayetteville, Room 410 on Tuesday, April 17, from 2 to 4 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.