Top 5 cultural stories — No. 4: Elvis museum/haircut anniversary

Editor’s note: With the days, weeks and months seemingly passing faster than ever, it can be difficult to remember what happened yesterday much less the past six months. To that end, The City Wire will review the top 5 Fort Smith regional stories of the first half of 2009 in the following categories: Business/economy, political, and cultural. Link here for the top business stories, and link here for the top political stories (the list of stories are at the bottom of each linked story).

One of the more surprising museums in the Fort Smith area is the Barbershop Museum in the same building at Fort Chaffee where some fella known as Elvis Presley received his U.S. Army induction haircut.

A large crowd gathered March 25 to commemorate the anniversary. Jimmy Don Peterson, the son of James Peterson, the barber who cut Presley’s hair, was on hand to provide free “G.I. haircuts.” Jimmy Don, a licensed barber, was accompanied by his mother, Edith Peterson.

The museum is open on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and is staffed by volunteers from the Fort Smith Convention and Visitors Bureau. The museum opened Aug. 22, 2008.

One of those volunteers is Jack Cleavenger, who was a photographer at the Southwest Times Record when Presley had the haircut. It was Cleavenger who suggested Presley blow his freshly shorn hair out of his hand. Presley obliged, and it became one of the most famous pictures of Presley.

“(Presley) was the nicest person. Everything with him was ‘Yes sir’ and ‘No sir,’” Cleavenger said prior to the March 25 ceremony.

Ivy Owen, executive director of the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority, praised the efforts of Jan Honeycutt, a teacher at Beard Elementary in Fort Smith; Linda Seubold, a long-time journalist in Fort Smith and Carolyn Joyce and Claude Legris, both with the Fort Smith Convention & Visitors Bureau, for helping make the barbershop a reality. He also thanked the FCRA staff, including FCRA Finance Director Janet Menshek, who Owen said was the “director of all things Elvis” for the staff.

Over the years, Beard Elementary students under Honeycutt’s tutelage studied the economic impact a museum about Presley’s stay at Fort Chaffee might have. They also raised money for the museum, eventually donating $1,119.58 to the effort. It was their efforts that generated the idea of a museum. Seubold wrote an article about their efforts in the mid-1990s and it began to gain momentum from that point.

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No. 5 — John Bell/UAFS painting