Arend Arts Center celebrates 10 years

BENTONVILLE — Debi Havner remembers her mother, the late Jane Arend, as the woman in 1960s Bentonville who was always encouraging others to get involved in the arts.

So it’s fitting that one of the area’s largest performing arts venues is named for her and Havner’s father, early Wal-Mart exec Ferold Arend.

Arend Arts Center, located at Bentonville High School, hosted its first production in December 2002 and is on track to welcome the 1 millionth patron through its doors this year. Though slightly smaller than the Walton Arts Center’s Baum Walker Hall — just 11 seats shy of Baum Walker’s 1,201 — Arend Arts Center’s place in the school district and community is far-reaching.

“The idea behind it for my mom and dad was to establish a place and program for music and the arts in general,” Havner said recently over a latte at a downtown Bentonville coffee shop.

The Arends donated $5 million toward construction of the center. The late Jack Shewmaker, whom Arend had hired at Wal-Mart, kicked in $1 million for furnishings, which included the center’s grand piano.

Though Jane Arend has passed, Ferold Arend remains involved, mostly through the center’s managing director, Garry Bruch.

“This was quite a venture for Bentonville,” Bruch recalls of the center’s beginnings. “And Bentonville hasn’t been overly supportive of the arts over the years.”

The center gives priority to school events — band and choir concerts, graduations, plays and the like. Nearly 1,300 school events have taken the stage since the center opened, says Bruch.

“I’m entertained all the time, believe me,” he said, laughing.

However, the center has also become the home for marquee performances, such as those by Opera in the Ozarks, the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra and many military bands coming through the area.

The community reacted with “amazement” when the center held its grand opening in January 2003, Havner said. The acoustics were even better than that of the Walton Arts Center because it was built some 10 years later.

Havner said her father’s biggest source of pride has been the back-stage training available to BHS students — instruction in set design, training in how to operate a high-quality sound system and classes in theatrical make-up and costume design. As president of the Bentonville Public Schools Foundation, she knows more students are participating in forensic, theater, band, orchestra and stage (jazz) band than ever before. None of the programs would be flourishing like they are without the state-of-the-art performance hall made possible by her parents.

When the Arend family moved to Northwest Arkansas from Omaha in 1966, Bentonville’s population was just a couple thousand. The family of six stayed at the former Ogden Motel for two weeks while looking for suitable housing.

“I couldn’t believe my parents brought me here,” recalls daughter Debi, who was 13 when her father answered Sam Walton’s call to become a bookkeeper — eventually to become the company's first president.

With her mother as her role model, she’s “bloomed where planted,” and is heavily involved — and well-connected — in her community.

Havner and her husband, Galen, now live in the home her parents built for themselves downtown. The house is just a stone’s throw from Sam and Helen Walton’s homestead. It was just a short walk through some woods to get to each other’s homes. Havner recalls her father and Walton often conducting business at the Arends’ kitchen table.

In the decades since, Wal-Mart has gone global, the Arends made a name for themselves in the arts community and the city of Bentonville and its school district has benefited in the form of a world-class arts center.