The Year’s Best and Worst

It was an unusual year in more ways than one. For one thing, lots of stuff turned up missing. Whether it was the baby Jesus from a nativity scene in Eureka Springs (and one in Bentonville, too) or a $7 million jet taken for a “joy ride,” people had a tendency in 2005 to wander off with things that didn’t rightly belong to them. (Please see this cover story on Wal-Mart for more on this topic.) It wasn’t all bad news, though. Here’s our list of some of the more interesting things that happened in 2005.

Worst Case of Going A Little Too Upscale

The Market at Pinnacle Point of Rogers closed in the summer after the owners filed for bankruptcy saying the company was $13 million in the hole. Meanwhile, owner Richard Donckers was being investigated by the Kmart Trust for billing Kmart $2 million in consulting fees as Kmart careened toward the largest bankruptcy in U.S. retail history.

Best Place To Build An Upscale Store

Apparently, it’s Pleasant Crossing in Rogers. At least that’s what Saks decided. The upscale clothing company bypassed Rogers’ heavily promoted Pinnacle Promenade and decided to build its Parisian store at the competing shopping complex four miles to the south.

Worst Way to Pad Circulation Numbers

The Audit Bureau of Circulations docked The Morning News of Springdale early in 2005 for padding its 2004 circulation figures.

ABC said The Morning News, which is owned by Stephens Media Group of Little Rock, had counted 150 papers it delivered to a Head Start program. The problem? The kids were too young to read.

Worst Way to Win Newspaper War

Shayla Carter was arrested for theft of property after she allegedly stole $17.50 worth of newspapers.

Carter, a carrier for The Morning News, allegedly stole the Arkansas Democrat-Gazettes and Benton County Daily Records along her route in Bella Vista to get back at a Daily Record district manager who had fired her. The newspaper circulation managers told us such petty pilfering is an ongoing problem but they usually handle it in-house.

Best Inadvertent PR Move

We were impressed with the speed and kindness Wal-Mart exhibited by sending supplies to the Gulf Coast after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Worst Grandma Heist

Virginia Voiers, a 70-year-old grandmother, was nabbed by police after she stole the baby Jesus from the nativity scene in Eureka Springs’ Basin Park.

Voiers was ticketed for misdemeanor theft after the alleged crime was recorded by a security camera. The maximum penalty is a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

“It was a lark. It wasn’t any serious stealing,” Voiers told the Lovely County Citizen newspaper of Eureka Springs. “My granddaughter commented that no one had taken the baby Jesus this year and said, ‘Grandma?’ I said, ‘Oh, what the heck.'”

The annual theft is somewhat of a tradition in Eureka Springs. Usually, the baby Jesus is returned by the thief.

Voiers is a Sunday school teacher at a Methodist church.

Best Surprise Wedding

At the age of 80, University of Arkansas Athletic Director Frank Broyles married Gen Whitehead in a quiet ceremony at Fort Smith on Dec. 1. Broyles and Whitehead met seven weeks before the ceremony. Whitehead, a Fayetteville nurse, was married to Jim Whitehead, one of the founders of the UA creative writing program. He died in 2003. Broyles’ former wife, Barbara, died in October 2004.

Best Real Estate Revelation

In June, Arvest Bank Group Inc. of Bentonville began to share gobs of information with the media (and therefore the public) from its commissioned Skyline Report. The bank hired the University of Arkansas’ Center for Business and Economic Research to look into various details about the real estate market in Benton and Washington counties so it would have data to support future lending.

Worst Case of Leaving Keys in the Ignition

Pinnacle Air LLC of Springdale lost a $7 million Cessna Citation 7 jet for a few hours on Oct. 8 after a 22-year-old took it for a trip from Florida to Georgia, then took friends for a “joy ride.”

Worst Case of Whining

Fayetteville liquor store owners raised a stink about Wal-Mart getting a permit to sell liquor at a proposed Sam’s Club store. The state Alcohol Beverage Control Division granted the permit in July, but the opposition group appealed the decision in August to the Pulaski County Circuit Court.

Worst Track Record

Former Razorback basketball star Ron Huery has had more than his share of ups and downs. He was convicted on a cocaine charge in Memphis in 1994 and given eight years probation. In 2002, he sold his Final Four ring from the NCAA Championships on eBay for $1,500 to pay off debts.

Since then, Huery left his job at a sawmill and went to work at a Wal-Mart store in Rogers. Jay Hunt of Jonesboro, who bought the Final Four ring, gave it back to him after Huery received his bachelor’s degree in secondary education from the University of Arkansas in May.

Then, in July, Huery was charged with rape, false imprisonment, domestic battery and obstructing governmental justice in a situation involving an ex-girlfriend. But the alleged victim decided not to pursue the charges.

On Aug. 15, Huery was arrested for fleeing from police in West Fork after allegedly violating a woman’s protection order there. Huery pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison with five years suspended.

Huery, who played for the Razorbacks from 1986 through 1991, ranks in the top 10 in five categories, including fourth in assists. He ranks 12th in the school’s career scoring list.

Worst Case of Cuisine Confusion

Dennis and Darlene Charlebois changed the name of their restaurant in Fayetteville’s Fiesta Square shopping center from Belvedeer’s to Magnolia Grill in May, then sold it in August to Joe and Jennifer Utsch, who renamed it Joe’s Bistro. Within three months, the restaurant went from being upscale Italian to down-home Southern cooking to upscale Italian/French.

Best News for the Artsy Crowd

Alice Walton announced she will build the 100,000-SF $50 million Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

Best News for Dickson Street

Joe Fennel finished his two-story, 13,000-SF building for Bordino’s Italian restaurant and reopened in the new location.

Second Best Wal-Mart Joke

On Sept. 30, Jay Leno of NBC’s “The Tonight Show” gigged Wal-Mart after news came out that the Bentonville company might buy Tommy Hilfiger Corp. of Hong Kong.

“I didn’t know Tommy Hilfiger made muumuus,” Leno said.

(For the best Wal-Mart joke, see the media outtakes column here.)

Best Face-the-Facts Quote

“There were times I would consume two bottles of wine in an evening. At the time, I didn’t think I had an alcohol problem … Why did I need a certain kind of single-malt scotch to have value? Well, I didn’t. But that was the confusion in my mind. I wanted to be larger than life. I’d just like to be life-sized today.” — former Arkansas Attorney General Steve Clark, who now teaches law at St. Thomas University in Miami and speaks at conferences held by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

Best Flippin’ Quote

“You’d have to be a total village idiot not to make a lot of money if you had a couple of million dollars [to invest].” — Lee Ward, owner of Realty Concepts of Fayetteville, about how it is to make money by buying and quickly reselling land in Northwest Arkansas. The process is known as flipping.

Best Television Commercials

The best locally produced ads we’ve seen on TV are two “image” commercials shot by Five Star Productions of Fort Smith for ANB Financial. Both spots use montage sequences, a mixture of duo-tone colors and high visual contrast to capture viewers’ attention. In one ad, shots flow seamlessly from a buffalo in a field to sparks flying from a welder’s torch.

The spots are produced without the help of an ad agency and were worked out between ANB’s Nat Bothwell and Five Star’s Mike Hart. A third commercial was released in early December, and a fourth is in the works.

Worst Television Commercials

Take 2 Video and Foghorn’s restaurant, both of Fayetteville, tied for worst TV commercial.

The Take 2 commercial pushed pics of Jessica, the store’s spokesmodel, in a series of suggestive, scantily clad still shots.

A TV ad for Foghorn’s restaurant also got two thumbs-down. The commercial was built around customers sticking their middle fingers in the air. We see enough birds in traffic around here. We don’t want to see them in our living rooms.

Best LLC Names

There were several interesting names this year in the filings for limited liability companies.

2 Winks And A Nod LLC was registered to Robin Workman and Kerry Workman of Eureka Springs.

3 Pink Monkeys LLC was registered to Lori Atwood, Dania Gamer, Timothy Olainey, John Atwood and Joseph Nichols of Little Rock.

Little Deuce Coupe LLC was registered to Herschel Spivey, Marsha Spivey, Milton Edmund Scott and Patricia Scott of Bentonville.

Best Tech Advocate

Fayetteville’s Virtual Incubation Corp., headed by Calvin Goforth, brought in more than $3.9 million in grants for its seven clients, fostering the continued development of a knowledge-based industry in the area. Many of VIC’s clients happen to be working on potential health care applications.

A close runner-up was the Fayetteville Economic Development Council, headed by Steve Rust, which helped reel in 19-acre deal for BioBased Technologies and BioBased Systems of Rogers.

Best Tech Success

University of Arkansas Genesis Incubator client Space Photonics Inc., headed by president and CEO Chuck Chalfant, landed a $16 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.

The 6-year-old company will develop networking capabilities for spacecrafts and satellites using lasers.

Best Surprise Buyout

On Feb. 28, Garrison Financial Corp., run by Tom Garrison, announced it had purchased Garner Asset Management, owned by Rebecca Garner. The merger combined to make the largest SEC-registered investment firm in the area with $250 million in managed assets.

Worst Hire?

A critical player in the Garner/Garrison merger, president and CFO Brian Vaughn, later sued the company for breach of contract. But in the countersuit GFA said Vaughn misrepresented himself to the companies to gain employment, that he attempted to use $500,000 of the company’s funds to fulfill his obligations to his previous employer.

Outcome of the suits is still pending.

Best Stock Performance

USA Truck Inc. had a 68.8 percent increase in its stock price this year. The Van Buren-based trucking company’s stock went from $17.50 per share in January to $29.55 per share as of Dec. 5, making it the highest increase out of Northwest Arkansas and the River Valley’s public companies.

Worst Stock Performance

Since 2004, PAM Transportation Services Inc.’s stock performance has been on a downslide. As of Dec. 5, PAM’s stock price was $16.50, down 10.8 percent from $18.50 in January. The drop made the Tontitown-based trucking company the biggest decrease among public companies in Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas River Valley.

Worst Closing

Leon Fowler and Don Loftis closed McRoy & McNair Inc. in June. The office supply store in Fayetteville had been in business for 113 years.

Best Movie News

It sounds like the residents of Rogers will have two stadium-seating movie theaters if not three. And one is eventually coming to Fayetteville.

All three are allegedly being built by Malco of Memphis.

Rogers already has a 12-screen Malco stadium-seating theater at Scottsdale Center, so two more in the same town seems like overkill, but we’ll see.

Best Sign

“Price Cutter, where Christmas is still Christmas.” Apparently, it’s a reference to Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which has shifted to “Happy Holidays” as a greeting to include religions other than Christianity.

Best Proposal

A light-rail transit system for Northwest Arkansas sounds great. Whether anybody would ride it is another matter. We hope the $250,000 to $350,000 for a feasibility study can be raised in time to take a good look at the idea before the land prices become too high and the countryside is paved over with highways.

Best Bank Performer

ANB Financial topped the Northwest Arkansas charts for calendar 2003 when it ranked as the top performer in return on assets (an adjusted 1.82 percent) and in return on equity (22.85 percent) on the Business Journal’s largest private banks list in April.

Best Environmental Advocate

Rogers developer and architect Collins Haynes and his company Haynes Limited have gone the extra mile to protect habitat in Fayetteville’s Springwoods development and in Cave Springs around Lake Keith. The firm has donated or granted easements on more than 130 acres of land in various spots that will keep development from encroaching on threatened and endangered species, such as the Ozark blind cave fish, the Indiana gray bat and the Arkansas darter fish.

Best Mad Scientists

University of Arkansas professors Russell Deaton, Jin-Woo Kim and Steve Tung are researching ways to manipulate DNA in an effort to create a “DNA computer.” The trio foresees a time when they can direct DNA molecules to “build” nano-scaled products.

Best Going-to-the-Dogs Move

In January, Shirlie and David Romans shifted their Van Buren cremation business from humans to pets.

“The pet business was doing so well, we figured we would focus on that one thing and do it well,” Shirlie Romans said.

Funeral homes charge $1,500 to $3,500 for a cremation, and the Romans would get about one-tenth of that. Now, they do the pet cremation and burial without having to pay the middleman.

Worst News for Local Restaurants

Chain restaurants took the Top 10 slots in Fayetteville restaurant sales for the first half of 2005. It was the first time since the Business Journal began publishing in 1997 that the Top 10 didn’t include one local restaurant. Part of the reason was that Joe Fennel had sold Jose’s Mexican Restaurant to Neal Crawford. Fennel previously commingled Jose’s sales with his Italian restaurant, Bordino’s, but those are now reported separately to the city.