Real deal
Budget Office Furniture Warehouse, which has occupied the historic building at 411 President Clinton Ave. for the last 34 years, has sold it to the Central Arkansas Library System. CALS also recently purchased the Farrell & Schaer building next door, and the two buildings will be combined into a complex housing the papers of several Arkansas governors.
The deal between Budget and CALS will close on Nov. 30, and Budget will have 2 to 3 months to vacate the building, although they still don’t have a new home. They want plenty of parking and room for 18-wheeler deliveries, both lacking as the River Market area developed.
Budget’s impending move would leave La Harpe’s Office Furniture as the lone holdout from the days when the River Market was a warehouse district.
Blogging updatez
The Arkansas Times has been “live” for more than a week now with its new Arkansas Blog (click the Arkansas Daily Blog headline on our web page www.arktimes.com to see it). Readers of the blog have had the jump on these items that still have not appeared elsewhere:
o Arkansas Democrats had raised $108,000 at last count for TV ads supporting John Kerry, a nice substitute for the Kerry campaign’s decision to bypass Arkansas advertising. The ads will feature Dale Bumpers, Wesley Clark and Rodney Slater. They were to go up Wednesday.
o If last Sunday’s Washington Post is accurate, Bill Clinton himself will arrive in Arkansas soon to recuperate further from his bypass operation and to prepare for his library opening. The Post article suggested Clinton might make a campaign appearance or two for Kerry.
o And Barry Travis’ successor as director of the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau will be hired early next year. Travis, whose coming retirement we announced earlier, will stay on through the end of the year to aid transition.
Goat power
More national exposure is coming for Little Rock-based Heifer International: a feature story on the CBS news program “60 Minutes.” Heifer communications director Ray White reports that last June, he accompanied reporter Bob Simon and a six-member CBS film crew to Uganda, where they collected footage about the Kisinga Women’s Goat Project. Also along for the trip in June was Beatrice Biira, a native of Kisinga, who wrote a children’s book called “Beatrice’s Goat” about finally being able to go to school because of the changes a Heifer-supplied goat made in her life. Now 19 and a freshman at Connecticut College, Biira had previously appeared on “Oprah,” Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, in October 2002.
White said that in the decade since Heifer delivered 12 Irish milk goats to Kisinga, the isolated town has seen its standard of living go up, installed a water pump and community hydrants, and has become a center of goat breeding. White said “60 Minutes” has finished the segment and it will be aired soon.