The second installment of the speaker series Ozarks at Small is tonight at Crisis Brewing in Fayetteville. District Judge Clinton Casey Jones will discuss Ozark stories, and he'll talk about Fayetteville as it has changed in the past 40 years. Last week, we recorded a brief conversation at Crisis as a preview to his talk. Judge Jones also had tenures as a public defender and city prosecutor. He also happens to be a writer and a collector of great stories.
Clinton Casey Jones: And that's what I propose to do, is tell stories about some of the jobs I've had, especially looking at the Ozarks. This is supposed to be Ozark-centric, but it's basically looking at the Ozarks in the last 30, 40 years through the lens of the type of law that I've practiced or I've been involved in. I started out as a public defender. I ended up being the city's first full-time city prosecutor, did that for many years, and I've been a judge for a long time, not only in the city of Fayetteville, but out in the rural parts of the county. And so as a result of that, I've picked up one or two stories and hopefully they'll be interesting.
Kyle Kellams: You came to Fayetteville when?
Jones: My family's from here, but I came back here to go to college in 1975. I was 9 years old. I was a savant.
Kellams: So '75 — I think people hear Fayetteville, 1975, and they think Swinging Door, they think George's Beer Garden and things like Rogers Rec when you could enter off Dickson Street.
Jones: Yep. Yeah. Oh yeah.
Kellams: And I think those of us who were around near that time might have a nostalgia for it. Will you touch on that?
Jones: Yeah. It's easy to have nostalgia for it because it was great. Dickson Street was great. I mean, Fayetteville was — it's hard for people to imagine who have lived here even in the last 15 years. Fayetteville was, I don't want to say a depressed town, but it was not a wealthy town. It was a college town. Now it seems we're a town that happens to have a college. But it was truly a college town. You could go down to Rogers Rec and there would be a judge there having a beer. There were two or three, four, five, six weed growers there, a lot of construction guys. Nothing was getting built, but we had a lot of construction guys. For some reason, the Swinging Door — you could go in there on a Friday night and you might have Jerry Jeff Walker show up. And we had great local music. There were probably six or seven music venues on Dickson Street alone. And George's was this weird place that had tables full of brilliant history professors. It was the closest thing we had to a gay bar, but it was also the rugby bar.
I see these bumper stickers — Keep Fayetteville Funky. You and I, long in tooth, might say, well, those days have come and gone. But boy, it was then fair to say it seemed egalitarian. If you look at some of those old photographs, everyone looked a little rougher. But there was the sense that if you acted a little bit above your raising, if you acted like you had a little bit more than the next guy, that was just, at the very least, impolite. And so everyone kind of faked it the other way. Everyone wanted to be a cowboy. Everybody wanted to be a good old boy — and not quite the good old boys that you think of nowadays. Part of it was the musical taste at the time. Bands played in Austin and Tulsa and Fayetteville and out in New Mexico. And so there was that circuit.
Kellams: You're going to talk about this through the lens of law. Is that a good lens to look at how a place has changed or how it's evolved?
Jones: Yeah. I mean, it's the only lens I can look through. Things have changed. The type of cases that we see have changed. Sadly, we went through the ravages of methamphetamine and what that did to this area — it's hard to overstate. Now we see opiates in the same way. But when I first was a public defender, we didn't really have that. And I know this sounds like a little of Andy and Mayberry, but there were basically four or five — if a backhoe got stolen, you knew what family stole the backhoe. If a house got broke into, you knew which family broke in. And you represented these folks. That was their job, was to be criminals. And our job was to defend them or to prosecute them or sit in judgment of them. And it was all kind of, in a weird sort of way, all right.
Kellams: In defense of more contemporary times — I remember when our biggest wish in Fayetteville or Northwest Arkansas was to have a Thai restaurant. We couldn't get Thai food, or we wanted to get the movie that wouldn't be here for six months that we only heard about. God forbid you'd want someone like Annie Leibovitz to come and lecture. I mean, there have been benefits to the growth.
Jones: Yeah, absolutely. And food is one of them. I remember when the first Chinese restaurant — Ming Dynasty — opened. The thing about when new restaurants opened back then, no matter how bad they were — and Ming Dynasty was good, by the way — no matter if the restaurant was bad, you'd go, well, let's give it another shot. And you'd give it another shot. If it was bad the second time, you'd go, well, maybe they had just two bad nights. Because everybody went to the new restaurant. Whereas now restaurants open and close without you knowing it. We have better food. We have different and maybe better entertainment — I guess that could be debated. Growth has a whole lot of benefits. And do we have more crime? Yeah, in numbers. But percentage-wise, we really don't.
Kellams: You're going to be telling stories. You love stories. You love hearing them, you love telling them. What's the value of a collection of stories, or the value of a place having stories?
Jones: Well, I think without them — I mean, do you really have a community? When people are sitting here, you look at where we are now at Crisis. Liz and I have not put TVs up here. There's not a TV in this bar. And nothing wrong with going and watching a ball game at this place. All these people sitting around at all these tables here — we're sitting in the back in the garden — all of these people, one way or the other, are telling stories. What would they talk about if they didn't have those?
Kellams: I look forward to it. Thank you.
District Judge Clinton Casey Jones is the next speaker in the Ozarks at Small series at Crisis Brewing in Fayetteville, beginning tonight at 6 p.m. Our conversation was recorded at Crisis last week.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
