Thinking about Donald Harington

Donald Harington was much on my mind last Saturday, November 7, as I attended a wedding in the vicinity of Murray, Arkansas, a place well off the paved roads, southwest of Jasper, the county seat of Newton County. On this spectacular day–an outdoor wedding in November!–I watched Julie Brown and Dan Osterkamp start their married life in the midst of family and friends, against a stunning limestone bluff accompanied by gurgling stream.

On this lovely day, Donald Harington died of pneumonia at the end of a long battle with cancer, in Fayetteville, where he had lived and worked for many years as a professor of art history at the University of Arkansas. The New York Times obituary of Donald Harington is as thoughtful as any I’ve read. If you know of others, please add them below.

Harington is well-known in the Ozarks for his novels that are set in Newton County, Arkansas, around the community he called Staymore. The quality of Harington’s fiction seems erratic to me, except that it is always endearing and often hilarious. He created characters who settled Staymore, or were born there, leaving and returning, over the last few hundred years. One branch of my ancestry, led by Ezekiel and Talitha Shaddox, homesteaded in Newton County in the 1850s, just below Pruitt, where Mill Creek spills into the Buffalo River. Harington’s ability to evoke what Newton County was like in times past adds color and detail to my own mental pictures of the lives and surroundings of my forebears.

The fiction of the Ozarks is rich but not deep.

Harold Bell Wright’s novels, such as The Shepherd of the Hills (1907), are the prototypes of romance novels, immensely popular but without great characterization. Thames Williamson’s short novel The Woods Colt (1933) tells a gripping story of a family involved with an illegal distillery and rough characters in northern Arkansas and is enhanced by Williamson’s great ear for dialect and dialog. The finely-crafted novels of Douglas Jones describe the Civil War in the Ozarks.

Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows (1961), set in the Oklahoma Ozarks near Tahlequah, is a powerful story, up there with and in the genre of Shane and Old Yeller: I’ve been told that the 1973 movie version was shown at a local coonhunter’ association meeting, after which all the coonhunters walked out to their trucks without speaking or exchanging glances, keeping their tears to themselves.

More recently, Daniel Woodrell’s novels depict rural poverty and social disintegration in the modern Ozarks. I have not read Gary Blackwood’s well-regarded novels, such as Moonshine (1999). Dee Brown, whose historical fiction and non-fiction occasionally touched the Ozarks, consistently wrote at a high level, including in Way to Bright Star (1998), which describes a couple of young men who were hired to take a couple of camels through northwestern Arkansas and southern Missouri during the Civil War. Brown’s 1993 memoir When the Century Was Young: A Writer’s Notebook includes the comedic tale of Brown and a friend being thrown in the Newton County jail for a crime they didn’t commit.

Harington’s contribution to Ozarks literature is substantial.

If you haven’t read Donald Harington’s fiction, you might want to start with The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (1987), and work through the twelve others. I’m also a fan of Let Us Build a City, a non-fictional exploration of eleven places in the Ozarks with “city” in their names, with special attention to the aspirations of the promoters of these towns that never grew. This essay by Steve Reed, describes Harington’s distinct skills as a storyteller and gives an overview of his fiction.

Lawyers cringe when neighbors fight

If you want to see a lawyer cringe, ask how he or she likes property line disputes or fights over trees near property lines.

The case of Lau v. Pugh shows why lawyers (including trial judges and appellate judges) hate such cases. After all the fighting and expense, nobody is happy. Here’s how it often plays out.

Where to learn about consumer law issues

The blog Caveat Emptor is a great source of information for lawyers and non-lawyers about some of the issues that vex most of us, such as:

• credit card companies
• bank practices that seem to cost way too much
• telemarketing
• aggressive debt collectors

If you don’t have the money to hire a lawyer, or you want to have a better understanding of an issue before you write a letter, make a phone call or see a lawyer or credit counselor,  Caveat Emptor is a good resource.

You owed it, you paid it, but I can’t keep it?

Sounds funny. But it’s not.

Moore Equipment sells John Deere farming equipment in Chillicothe, Missouri. Moore sold Sholten a big tractor with a warranty on the drive train. Moore’s warranty to the buyer was backed by PRS, an insurance company. If Moore had to make the warranty good, PRS would pay Moore.

Sholten sold the tractor to Callen, with the warranty transferred to Callen. The tractor’s drive train failed and it was taken to another mechanic–not Moore– for repairs, and a claim was filed with PRS. PRS reviewed the claim and sent a check to Moore for nearly $20,000. Moore cashed the check. PRS notified Moore that the check was sent to Moore by mistake.

It’s time: HOA budgets for 2010

Homeowner associations (HOAs) generally have fiscal years that correspond to calendar years, which means that it’s time for HOA boards to begin work on their 2010 budgets, so that the new budget–which establishes the HOA board’s authority to collect assessments and spend money–is in place before the start of 2010.

Missouri HOAs, other than condominium owners associations (COAs), don’t have any special statutes to follow. Instead, they are governed by corporation statutes and by their recorded covenants and by their bylaws, which are often not recorded.

Here’s an overview of the sources of general and financial powers of HOAs and COAs:

The long arm of the law doesn’t always reach a guarantor

The United States is a fairly friendly and respectful federation, at least when it comes to enforcing judgments so that creditors can get paid. This arrangement encourages commerce.

If a lender gets a judgment in one state, that judgment can be registered with the court of another state, and the lender can use the local court and sheriff to apply the tools of debt collection: garnishment of bank accounts and accounts receivable and asking the sheriff to seize and sell the debtor’s property.

If the judgment from the other state is not premised on personal jurisdiction over the out-of-state defendant, then the court where the defendant or his property is located may not

It ain’t fraud if you know better

Owning a business is the dream of a lot of people, but buying a business can be a nightmare. To facilitate the process, business brokers attempt to hook up sellers and buyers, and they know that getting a worn-out seller with a naive buyer is a very tricky endeavor that often goes sour before or after the sale.

Everybody knows that nobody wants to sell a gold mine, but they do want to put the best face on what they’ve got to sell and make a plausible story for why the owner wants out. Often the sale is due to the “owner’s health,” which can mean just about anything. Sometimes, the seller or the seller’s agent pooh-poohs the scant income on the tax returns, implying that the business throws off a lot of cash that never gets reported.

Business brokers run the full gamut from extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful to pure cosmeticians. There is one business brokerage firm that I love to work with because of their expertise and integrity–the Kingsley Group, in Springfield, Missouri. Others are the pits.

The greatest E. coli risk at Lake of the Ozarks may not be from the water

Undies are in bunches in Jeff City.  Gov. Nixon is embarrassed that his lawyer-laden government has been caught not protecting the public from health risks of E. coli, a family of bacteria whose presence in water is a marker of fecal contamination from human and animal sources. Department of Natural Resources officials, and perhaps the governor, judged that the political risk of stating that the lake water was polluted apparently outweighed the public health risk of water contact, at least until after Memorial Day weekend.

The blame game is in full swing, but nobody is explaining

Default judgments: sometimes they stick

A September 25, 2009 decision of the Missouri Court of Appeals’ Southern District, First Community Bank v Hubbell Power Systems, underscores that the trial judge doesn’t have to set aside a default judgment, even if it’s promptly requested, and even though Missouri’s court rules and case law disfavor default judgments in favor of giving the litigants their days in court.

When a civil lawsuit is filed in a Missouri’s circuit court and the defendant is served with a summons and copy of the plaintiff’s petition, the defendant has 30 days to file a response. If the defendant does not file a response,

The Tri-State Mining District continues, producing poultry, not lead and zinc

The Tri-State Mining District, comprising adjacent portions of Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, is generally thought to be out of business, other than for its massive legacy of environmental damage, notably the Tar Creek Superfund site, but also involving water and soil contamination in several counties in all three states.

But mining continues with no royalties being paid. The mineral is groundwater, exported not as “pigs” of lead, but as chickens and eggs. A major portion of the groundwater drawn from the Ozark aquifer in several Southwest Missouri counties is used for