(Since I was on vacation this past week, I decided to take a one-week vacation from this column and not worry about Monday’s press deadline. So, what follows is a repeat. This column appeared in the bulletin of January 19, 2014)

Last week I spent a few days down South. This was my annual trip to Memphis to visit my cousins as well as my cuzzins (people that you are close to but not related to). One day, though, there were no family visits scheduled; so I took a drive over to the Arkansas resort town of Hot Springs. Hot Springs is an interesting place. It is a city built on flim-flam that is trying to make an honest living in its old age. Long before there was Las Vegas, there was Hot Springs. For over a century the city thrived on illegal gambling, illegal drinking, and the highly touted healing powers of its thermal baths. Representatives from the competing bath houses would board incoming trains to induce visitors to sign up for a complete health treatment at their facility, making all kinds of outrageous claims about diseases cured and aches and pains obliterated.  If you ever wonder why President Clinton was so good at working a crowd, look no further than the town in which he was raised. Something of the old rhetorical eloquence still lingers in the air. Today, only one of the bathhouses in Bathhouse Row still promises “therapeutic healing and relief from various ailments using thermal water.” However, the rest of the bathhouses have been preserved and some have found other purposes. Walking down Bathhouse Row, you can still see all the intangibles designed to convince you that something life-changing might happen beyond their front doors: the handsome architecture, the mosaic tile porches, the cool inviting awnings, and the line of stately magnolia trees in the median strip that separate the bathhouses from the noise and the bustle of the city. Modern medicine may be able to do a lot more to cure disease, but it only wishes it could do it with as much style.  

Hot Springs has both a family connection and a Chicago connection. In 1941 my parents had saved up fifty dollars on which to get married. Twenty-five dollars covered the church, the organist, the wedding dress, and the wedding cake (The reception was at my grandparents’ house and they provided the coffee and Pepsi); and the other twenty-five covered the honeymoon: tickets on the Greyhound bus and three nights in the Pullman Hotel in Hot Springs. Hot Springs was a favorite hang-out of Chicago crime figures like Al Capone; but it also has an even deeper Chicago connection. In 1886 Cap Anson brought his Chicago White Stockings baseball team (ancestor of the Chicago Cubs) to Hot Springs for the first ever “spring training” by a baseball club. Other ball clubs followed. Through the 1920’s and 1930’s, Hot Springs remained the favored place for ball players to come and get into shape before the season started. Of course, “getting into shape” has to be understood in the broadest possible sense: soaking in hot tubs to remove impurities that had seeped into the body during the winter, and then spending the evening drinking and gambling and visiting the horse track. The track remains and is a major source of revenue for the city. The racing season began this past weekend; and the day I was there, horses were being exercised on the track, even though icicles from a recent ice storm were still dripping from the trees.

With several large resort hotels standing vacant, there is a lot of talk about Hot Springs “coming back.”  Leaders seem to be looking for salvation in casinos, which is where almost every other state and municipality is looking. But if Hot Springs ever does “come back,” it will not be the Hot Springs of old. Not only have our ideas about health and fitness and entertainment changed; but our nation itself has changed. The old Hot Springs was a resort for white people. This Monday we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose leadership profoundly altered our country. Like all of us human beings he had flaws, but what is important to remember about Dr. King is that his words and actions grew out of his religious convictions. Like many a prophet in Biblical times, Dr. King undertook his role as civil rights leader with reluctance; but once he was in, he was “all in.” As I was walking past the landmark Arlington Hotel, a very elderly black couple was checking out. I wondered later if staying at the Arlington had long been an ambition of theirs: something that would have been illegal when they got married.   

                                                                                    Fr. Joe