My two next door neighbors during WWII later became famous - Ada Mills & Fannie Lou Spelce:

In 1939 we moved to Clarksville, AR, (from Goose Camp) to 208 Thompson Street. Our next-door neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Joe Mills and daughter Mary Tom (Mary Tom was my classmate and became my 1st girlfriend. Photo of us at 8th grade graduation.). They lived at 210 Thompson Street (on the left - Photo 2016). We lived at 208 Thompson Street (on the right) during World War II.

As many in the Clarksville area know, Mrs. Ada Mills was a Republican political activist in Arkansas. In 1980 she was the only delegate initially committed to the candidacy for President of former Texas Governor John B. Connally, Jr. He was a Democrat and was shot while seated next to President John Kennedy in Dallas. Later, Governor Connally switched parties and became a Republican and Secretary of Treasury.
Connally spent some $11 million in his 13-month primary campaign, which ended in withdrawal following his loss to Ronald W. Reagan of California in the South Carolina primary. Mrs. Mills received national media attention and is known as the “$11 million delegate.” Google for more information.

For more than four decades, Mrs. Mills spearheaded the campaign to build a replacement bridge on Arkansas Highway 109 over the Arkansas River. It was between Clarksville and the community of Morrison Bluff in Logan County. This 1.6-mile (2.6 km) bridge claims to be the longest over the Arkansas River and also the longest bridge in Arkansas.

When they had the formal opening of the bridge, the governor of Arkansas was Bill Clinton. It was told that he only sent a low-level government delegate to the ceremony and did not invite Mrs. Mills. They must have had many disagreements while he was in office. The bridge was later named the Ada Mills Bridge.

Mrs. Mills dedicated much of her life to her beloved alma mater, the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville. On Christmas Eve, 1933, she and Mr. Mills were the first couple to be married in the then-new chapel on the University of the Ozarks campus. She was president of the university’s alumni association for many years, a member of its board of trustees, and was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in 1970.

Mrs. Mills is know for many other significant achievements including President of the Arkansas Republican party for 2 terms and National Businessperson of the Year (1973).

From the internet: Miss Ada said it could be like this - Talk Business & Politics by Michael Tilley.

Nov 5, 2014 - The discussion of how Arkansas Republicans swept the 2014 .

The discussion of how Arkansas Republicans swept the 2014 election cycle will be woefully incomplete if not wholly inaccurate if it does not include in the opening paragraph this name: Miss Ada Mills. The 2014 election is one of the top five events in Arkansas’ political history.

Ada Mills, and her husband Joe, ran several successful businesses – oil, lumber, packaging – from their Johnson County headquarters. She was Texas Gov. John Connally’s million-dollar delegate when he ran for President. She was the small business person of the year in 1973 for the U.S. Small Business Administration. The stunning and long bridge spanning the Arkansas River and connecting Johnson and Logan counties would not have happened without her incessant lobbying. It’s now called the Ada Mills Bridge.

Rex Nelson, who in 2001 was a spokesman for Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee, said she was an “icon” in Arkansas political history and “was Republican when Republican wasn’t cool.”

Rich or poor, right or left, black or white, it didn’t matter. Miss Ada wanted more people involved in the system.
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Fannie Lou Spelce:

Sometime after Joan Mills was born her family moved to a larger home. I remember the day they moved because Mrs. Ada Mills baked a pan of Brownies for my brother Leon and me. She was always doing nice things for people.

After the Mills moved, Mrs. Fannie Lou Spelce and her sons Neal and Bennett moved in. Mrs. Spelce was a nurse for Dr. Siegel, who was our family doctor. She later gave me 14 rabies shots when a cat bit me and was later found dead, foaming at the mouth, in her shrubbery. There was a big open field behind our houses, and my brother Leon, Neal, Bennett, and I dug a trench and played war games.

Mrs. Spelce, a professional nurse, worked in Houston from 1955 through 1959 with Dr. Michael DeBakey, as his head nurse in pioneering his first open-heart surgery. In 1972 at age 64 she retired from her 42-year nursing career, and then devoted her talent and interest in fine art painting. This began her career as an artist late in life. Her emergence as an artist came about by accident.

When a friend signed up for an oil painting class at a gallery and asked Mrs. Spelce to join her, she agreed, saying she had always wanted to draw.

The first day, according to family legend, when the teacher arranged a classic still life and told his students to go to work, Mrs. Spelce spent the first part of the class working in a tiny area at the center of the canvas until the teacher told her she was supposed to use the entire surface. Too ashamed to make a new start in public, Mrs. Spelce spent the rest of the class cleaning off her work, then took the canvas home, painted the still life from memory, took her work in the next day and sheepishly asked the teacher if that was what he had in mind. The teacher was so thunderstruck by the painting and by his student’s raw, unschooled talent that he blurted out that she was a primitive. “I may be old,” Mrs. Spelce retorted, “but I'm not primitive.”

Encouraged to paint what she wanted, Mrs. Spelce drew on her childhood, sometimes using old photographs as a guide but mainly relying on her memory to create scores of paintings marked by painstakingly detailed foregrounds and shimmering, impressionistic backgrounds.

Her best known painting, “The Quilting Bee,” took a year to produce, partly because Mrs. Spelce, using a magnifying glass and a single-hair brush, painted the scene’s window curtains thread by thread. Later in 1972 she made her debut in the art world with a one-woman show at the Kennedy Galleries in New York City.

In 1997 her painting “The Quilting Bee” and some of her other paintings were on tour with the University of Texas exhibit “Spirited journeys: self-taught Texas artists of the twentieth century.” Fannie Lou Spelce transcends being a Texas folk artist. She has earned her place as a pre-eminent American folk artist. She is fondly known as “The Grandma Moses of Texas.”

Her son Neal is also famous. He broke the news about the University of Texas tower shooting in1966 that killed or wounded 47 persons in Austin. He was a young reporter for Austin’s KTBC-TV.

The Spelces were close friends to President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson. When Lady Bird died in 2007, Neal was the family spokesman for the Johnson;s.

Ada Mills and Fannie Lou Spelce both died at the age of 89 after remarkable careers. Arkansas Governor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee officiated at Mrs. Mills funeral which was held at the same chapel where she was married. The New York Times published Mrs. Mills obituary.

I ALSO HAVE A STORY ON MY TITANIC SHIP PAGES AND BASEBALL BLACK SOX.