My life

The city’s attraction was amplified by grand hotels, an opera house, and, beginning in the midnineteenth century, gambling. By the 1880s, there were several open gambling houses, and Hot Springs was on its way to being both an attractive spa and a notorious town. For decades before and during World War II, it was run by a boss worthy of any big city, Mayor Leo McLaughlin. He ran the gambling with the help of a mobster who moved down from New York, Owen Vincent “Owney” Madden. After the war, a GI ticket of reformers headed by Sid McMath broke McLaughlin’s power in a move that, soon after, made the thirty-five-year-old McMath the nation’s youngest governor. Notwithstanding the GI reformers, however, gambling continued to operate, with payoffs to state and local politicians and law-enforcement officials, well into the 1960s. Owney Madden lived in Hot Springs as a “respectable”

citizen for the rest of his life. Mother once put him to sleep for surgery. She came home afterward and laughingly told me that looking at his X-ray was like visiting a planetarium: the twelve bullets still in his body reminded her of shooting stars.

Ironically, because it was illegal, the Mafia never took over gambling in Hot Springs; instead, we had our own local bosses. Sometimes the competing interests fought, but in my time, the violence was always controlled. For example, the garages of two houses were bombed, but at a time when no one was home.

For the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first five of the twentieth, gambling drew an amazing array of characters to town: outlaws, mobsters, military heroes, actors, and a host of baseball greats. The legendary pool shark Minnesota Fats came often. In 1977, as attorney general, I shot pool with him for a charity in Hot Springs. He killed me in the game but made up for it by regaling me with stories of long-ago visits, when he played the horses by day, then ate and gambled up and down Central Avenue all night, adding to his pocketbook and his famous waistline.

Hot Springs drew politicians too. William Jennings Bryan came several times. So did Teddy Roosevelt in 1910, Herbert Hoover in 1927, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt for the state’s centennial in 1936. Huey Long had a second honeymoon with his wife there. JFK and Lyndon Johnson visited before they were Presidents. So did Harry Truman, the only one who gambled—at least the only one who didn’t hide it.