Touring the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas

A typical Ozark road sign

We took a scenic route

It wouldn't do to fly back to America without spending more time with my girls than just graduation weekend. I picked their brains about what we could do that was in the area because who knew when we would be back in the center of America again.

Should we go to St. Louis and see the Arch? One of them had already done it. Go to Hannibal, Missouri and celebrate Mark Twain? My girls failed to see how that would be interesting (obviously, they need to read more Twain as he's hilariously funny). Drive the river road along the Mississippi? Go see the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Salina, Kansas?

The gorgeous Ozark Mountains

on the way to Little Rock, Arkansas.

They reminded me of the Lubéron in Provence.

All they need is their own Cézanne to paint them.

Of course, then the real estate prices would quintuple.

We settled on driving down to Little Rock, Arkansas to see the Willliam Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library. All three of us love American presidential libraries because they are so evocative of the times and teach us so much about the American political experience.

Small town riverside dinner view

in Allison, Arkansas

When I first visited my youngest daughter at Mizzou her freshman year, I couchsurfed with a fun couple in Columbia, Walt and Mary. I joked then that I would be back in four years when my child graduated. I was!

Mammoth Spring

See how the water springs up out of nowhere?

My girls and I took the route Walt recommended down to Arkansas because he had suggested such outstanding local history sites during my last visit.

One of the highlights on the trip down was stopping just across the Arkansas border to see Mammoth Spring State Park with a beautiful natural spring. My girls had both loved their geology courses in college and so it was fun for them to see the water come pouring out of the ground there.

The beautiful Arkansas river trail

perfect for runners and walkers.

Eventually it will be 17 miles long.

Isn't it beautiful?

Blessed to share

American democratic heritage with my girls -

like my Mom and Dad did with me

The William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library -
First Federal building certified by the
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
(LEED) program

The next day we woke up bright and early to devote the day to the museum and library. I remember when the museum was first built, critics derided it for having the appearance of a 'double wide' mobile home. I snickered when I saw pictures of it on TV because it did sort of look like one.

Having been to it in person now, I consider that a cheap shot. President Clinton wanted the old historic railroad bridge, built in the 19th century, to represent the bridge to the 20th century. His library and museum, right next to it, represented his administration of America as a bridge to the 21st century. The metaphor works. Listening to him explain it on the audioguide, I was grateful for politicians who think in 100-year cycles rather than to the next quarter or election. Where can we find more of those?

There's that 100-year cycle again.

Diagonally across from the museum

is this magnificent old railroad station

where the University of Arkansas

Clinton School of Public Service

is housed.

Let's all say this gorgeous phrase together

from the building:

"The Choctaw Route."

Even more gorgeous,

the name of the passenger train

that did this route was:

"The Choctaw Rocket."

A glorious view of the Railroad Bridge

from "42,"

the elegant cafe in the library.

A pretend shiny dime to whomever can guess

why the cafe is named '42!'

Clinton's stump speech

What's not to like?

I was Bob Dole's Story County, Iowa campaign co-chair in one of his presidential campaigns. I admired Dole's wartime service to his country, his moderate Main Street Republican views, and his biting sense of humor. It was fun to host Elizabeth Dole for a coffee at my mother's home. That was when I was still a Republican.

Even though Gov. Bill Clinton beat Senator Dole in the presidential campaign, Bob Dole was later asked to give the Inaugural Lecture at the University of Arkansas Bill Clinton School of Public Service. I love that about American politics. I admire the stature of Bill Clinton inviting him to do so, and the equal virtue of Bob Dole accepting. As citizens, we should demand our politicians not polarize us and find the common ground.

It's easy to understand why librarians

would support Clinton.

He is a famous practitoner

of recreational reading

(reading for the fun of it).

The library showcased the books that influenced him.

One of them was "Creating a Nation of Readers."

A nation of readers can continually renew themselves.

I came around a corner

 and had my breath taken away

by this fine assemblage

of young American talent.

How can we not have hope for the future, America?

Their teacher told me they were the

"The Gentleman's Club,"

2nd and 3rd grade

from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Norman Rockwell, did I

"do good" with this picture?

Look at those faces!

Two future leaders

thoughtfully take in

a reproduction of the Cabinet Meeting Room.

The pace of change can seem so slow in America that I forget how much things can change in one generation. Examples from the library include: it was during the Clinton Administration that gay people were first eligible for security clearances. The introduction and benediction to Clinton's inauguration seemed so overtly Christian. America would be much more inclusive now. There were photos from the Little Rock school desegregation episode that said, "race mixing is communism." Laughable. Everything seems to get labeled communism or socialism these days. This is a long tradition of over-the-top political rhetoric.

Three stellar staff members at the museum.

The lady on the right told me

that she was halfway through a PhD

but never graduated from high school

because she was a member of the senior class

of Central High School that lost their senior year

when the Governor chose to shut the high school down

rather than integrate.

 2,914 other seniors lost their senior year as well.

Zany gifts to the Presidential family

 are always a popular exhibit at these libraries.

Hillary Clinton and Socks...as a bench!

One of the things you could look up

 was the Presidential Daily Schedule

and see what the President did on any given day.

I looked up the days surrounding Vaclav Havel's State Visit.

The menu for the Czech Republic State Dinner

with President Vaclav Havel

The best description of this whole event is in

Hillary Clinton's book, "Entertaining at the White House."

While Presidents have to consider things on a level beyond the personal, one thing the Museum brings home is how the personal stories of those from foreign countries inform the President about their nations.

I know President Clinton knew far more culturally about the Czech Republic than necessary (given the 10 million population) simply because of his friendship with Vaclav Havel. Havel had taken President Clinton to the Reduta and even to Czech novelist Bohumil Rabal's favorite pub "The Golden Tiger." The pub keeps Clinton and Havel's picture on the wall.

Nelson Mandela gave the Clintons a personal tour of his prison cell at Robbins Island and described to them what it had been like there. Do Presidents still have the time to invest in that level of personal narrative in understanding a country? I hope so. The Robbins Island visit is detailed in the museum.

One thing I felt the Library and Museum couldn't do justice to was President Clinton's biggest success. His fiscal discipline resulted in the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history. That discipline unleashed a period of enormous creativity in American business. How do you exhibit fiscal restraint in a museum? Maybe the best exhibits of the output created during this time of fiscal restraint are out in the Computer History Museum in California!

President Clinton wanted his library

to echo the bones of

Trinity Library in Dublin.

My one disappointment with the library was the temporary exhibition space was devoted to promoting a corporation instead of hosting an exhibit that would teach us as citizens more about politics. I appreciate that the majority of the population loves sports, but what do the St. Louis Cardinals have to do with a presidential library? It seemed wierd that there were season ticket promotions as a sidebar to the Cardinals exhibit. Respectfully, our experience could have been that much richer with a political exhibit.

You might also like:

An Evening of Jazz at the Reduta

Entering the Land of Lincoln

What Inspires Stories?

The Springfield Race Riots of 1908

Sites outside my blog:

C-Span's coverage of Clinton's Presidential Library

William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library websitehttp://www.clintonlibrary.gov/

Yea! I'm the mother of two college graduates!

Me and my girls

This month I had the occasion to go home to the United States to see my youngest daughter graduate magna cum laude from the University of Missouri with a Bachelors Degree in Journalism. Her emphasis was Strategic Communications. I'm proud she graduated with honors and equally proud that she graduated debt-free. She worked really hard at that, at one time holding down two assistantships and a part-time job while going to school full-time. She plotted her classes out carefully so that she graduated in exactly four years.

My daughter "relishes" her new role

as a hotdogger



On June 3rd, she starts her new job as a hotdogger for the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile.  It's been fun to learn about that opportunity as over 1,500 people apply every year and exactly 12 young people are hired to drive six different Weinermobiles around America promoting the Oscar Mayer brand of hot dogs. I'd like to think my daughter inherited a bit of my sense of adventure and desire to see parts unknown.

Suzy, the Dancing Pancake

People who have worked as a mascot are frequently hired as a hotdogger for the Oscar Mayer company. Who knew that  my child's time as IHOP's "Suzy the Dancing Pancake" or Papa Murphy's " Pizza Slice" in high school would pay off so well? Maybe, she did. Kelly makes opportunities everywhere she goes.

The Papa Murphy Pizza Slice

Two years was too long a time for me to be gone! I think it's important to probably go home once a year if that's doable. Or if I can't go home, it would be nice if my family could come visit me here. Vacation time is so short and precious in America though, I can't imagine that will be soon.

While I enjoyed my time home in America, and was pleased that every city I went to looked like it was doing great, it did feel like I was coming "home" to Istanbul when I came back after 10 days. I couldn't wait to enjoy the Turkish spring bounty of new cherries. I wondered when the Turkish peaches would hit the shelves. I hoped the climbing roses and the honeysuckle were still fragrantly blooming in my neighborhood and that I would get to enjoy them.

Yea! She finished!

I have confidence in my child's ability to thrive post-college. If she needs me, I'm just a phone call away. Maybe my highly conscious decision to designate this period of my life as my time to be an "Empty Nest Expat" has rubbed off on her highly conscious planning of how to use her most agile years.

Kelly's already set her next life goal as running a race in all 50 states of the nation by the age of 25. I think she's up to seven states now. She did her first marathon the Saturday before graduation. That's another hard part about me being an expat: I wasn't there to cheer her on. Luckily, the people of Cinncinati, where she ran the Flying Pig Marathon, made her feel like an Olympian! "Best day of my life, Mom! The people were fantastic, the neighborhoods were adorable, and they made me feel so proud."

You can read about her adventures at the University of Missouri at her freshman year blog "First Steps of a Freshman" or at her new blog "The Race for All 50 States," or at the official "Hotdogger Blog" where she will be contributing.


You might also enjoy:

Wonderful food eases newly empty nest

Happy Blog Birthday to Me!

Enjoying the Fruits of My Parenting Labors

Hello Great Big Beautiful World! (first ever blog post)

Wacky Missouri History

While leaving central Missouri, I passed a community called Kingdom City. If I hadn't been told by Walt, my couchsurfing host, what the name referred to, I would have assumed the community got that name through a religious reference.

Turns out that during the American civil war, Calloway County, Missouri decided to succeed from the union and become it's own kingdom. Now that's wacky.

So can you guess where I'm going next? Here's two hints:

1) I'm not driving in a straight line to Colorado.

2) I'm going to learn about the human being, who second only to Jesus Christ, has more books written about him than anyone else in the history of world.

"An Iron Curtain has descended"

Driving through Missouri is a pleasure because the glaciers did not make it down this far from the North to flatten the earth. All the county roads are hilly and curvy. Walt, my Couchsurfing host, told me about a terrific one, Road WW, that I should use to arrive at my next destination. I felt like I was in a car commercial, such was the pleasure of the drive!

Just 30 miles from Columbia, Missouri, where daughter #2 goes to university, is the charming small town of Fulton, Missouri. It looks like the kind of community that would be terrific for raising children. It's small enough to be safe for riding bikes all over town but with intellectual stimulation for the community from the local college.

The Winston Churchill Memorial

It was here that the local institution of higher learning, Westminster College, took advantage of having a Missouri native son in the White House, to see if they could finagle Winston Churchill as a speaker for their annual address on international relations. President Harry Truman wrote a handwritten note on the bottom of the invitation telling Mr. Churchill that he would introduce him. Winston promptly accepted.

In 1946, in this small town in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill named and described what was happening to Eastern and Central Europe after WWII. It was forever to be known as the "Iron Curtain" speech.

This is the actual hard copy of Winston Churchill's speech describing "the iron curtain" that had descended over the ancient capitals of Central and Eastern Europe. It's impossible for me to look at the page without reading it mentally in my best Winston Churchill imitation. How about you?

Winston Churchill's life experience is shared through the exhibits. A recurring theme is the ability to foresee what would happen before others could.

The exhibit makes the point again and again that no Czech was present
when the Munich agreement was negotiated
between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler.

Which immediately begs the question: what if one had been?
Would the outcome have been different?
Or would that poor Czech and his descendants have had to live with that?
What do you think?

It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway --
this was not the West's finest hour.

What is that quotation?
"Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it."
The museum described that when Churchill assumed leadership of his country,
it was exhausted by war and broke.
He had to decide if he could afford troops on the ground in Iraq
or mere influence. He accepted reality and chose influence.

To commemorate this important speech, Westminster College administration and trustees, pursued importing and reassembling an English church designed by the great Christopher Wren to memorialize the wisdom of Winston Churchill. There were so many churches damaged in the Blitz that the English could not restore them all and were happy to let this one go.

The stones, while marked, became all jumbled when they were used as ballast in the ship's hold coming over (using them as ballast lowered the shipping cost). Then they were jumbled a second time when they were transported across country. Walt's uncle was the lead stone mason on the project. He had the job of puzzling which stone went where.

Winston Churchill's granddaughter created an additional commemoration entitled "Breakthrough" utilizing a segment of the Berlin Wall.

The West German side

The East German side lacking any individual expression

Winston Churchill is my hero so I can't recommend this visit enough. I'm excited to know that I haven't read everything he has published. His writing gives me strength and inspires me.

Great leaders who have followed Winston Churchill to this site include Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, British Prime Ministers Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, and Sir John Major, Polish President Lech Walesa, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Touring this site takes about three hours. Admission is $6. I would like to recommend a lively restaurant downtown with great value. A local told me about it. It's called Bek's.

Mizzou Parent's Weekend

Daughter #2 chose University of Missouri at Columbia as her university of choice because it's rated #1 in the nation for her major: journalism. She was not alone. The freshman class has experienced a double-digit growth rate with a record class of 5,812 students.

So on my way to Colorado, and eventually to Prague, I stopped in Columbia, Missouri for parent's weekend to celebrate her choice. And how do American families celebrate their university? Football!

On the way to the game, we walked by the new $50 million student recreation center, voted #1 in the nation by Sports Illustrated. That must have been an incredibly tough label to earn because student recreation centers have been a collegiate focus of investment nationwide. Mizzou students voted to increase their fees to pay for it.

One of the swimming pools -
students can swim inside to one of the other ones.

Beach volleyball, 1,500 miles from a beach!

Some of the tennis courts
There is much more to see inside the facility
But on to the game!

People put their tiger tails on their backside,
hanging out their car trunks,
from their car antennas, everywhere!

One year, Nebraska students changed the "M" to an "N."
Mizzou staff found it and changed it back before the game.
Those sneaky Cornhuskers!

Mizzou Golden Girls

The football team takes the field!

Every time the defense sacks a quarterback
or sets back the other team
they play a REALLY LOUD man-eating Tiger roar
throughout the stadium.

Truman, the Mizzou mascot (named after Harry Truman,
the American President born in Missouri) and the ROTC boys
(students studying to be military officers) do a pushup
for every single point the football team scores.
So by the end of the 42-21 game against Buffalo,
they've done a huge cumulative total of push-ups. Yea team!

Yes, that spells TIGERS!