Eureka Springs Has Ex-Hippie Mayor, 70-Foot Christ Built by Famed Anti-Semite : Dropouts Find Ozarks Town a Place to Fit In

Until a couple of years ago, Richard Schoeninger was a dropout. He figured the system could get along fine without him and vice versa. His address used to be a post office box with an assumed name--Schoe. No first name, just Schoe.

Then he decided he wanted to be mayor of Eureka Springs, a town of 2,000 nestled in the Ozark Mountains. He registered to vote at about the same time that he filed to run for office. He cut his hair and put on a pair of wing tips and a suit. He campaigned like crazy and won, wearing out the wing tips in the process.

The drifter became the keeper of the public trust. The “tick hippie”--as the back-to-nature variety is known--became the politician. And Eureka Springs once again lived up to its motto: “Where the Misfits Fit.”

Former Carpenter

“Eureka is the only place I’ve ever been where I felt like joining,” said Schoeninger, a one-time carpenter and Forest Service tree planter who tools around town astride a vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “I don’t have much in common with the rest of the world, but I have a great deal in common with people here because they don’t have much in common with the rest of the world.”

Or, to use a phrase the new mayor coined during his campaign last year: “Eureka Springs is a psychological Noah’s Ark. There’s two personalities of every bent here.”

Now, some of those personalities aren’t all that keen on the mayor and his view of the town.

“He’s an airhead,” one more conservative resident said.

Long Way to Anywhere

So it goes in Eureka Springs, a place so out of the way it’s a long drive to anywhere, a place built on hills so steep that all seven stories of the downtown Basin Park Hotel are at ground level.

The town began as a turn-of-the-century spa and is now, for many of its citizens and visitors, an escape from the rules and roles of the everyday world. And its odd-ball citizenry makes it one of the most eccentric towns in the country--no brag, just fact.

Bank President John Cross has described the acrimonious debates that can go on among the citizenry as being akin to “a bunch of cats in a sack.” But a national convention of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang here recently sparked only slightly more concern than a Boy Scout jamboree. (The leather shops, incidentally, did a brisk business, as did the liquor package stores. But the most common comment about the gang by residents was: “Boy, are they old!”)

More than 1.5 million tourists passed through Eureka Springs last year, about 260,000 of them to see the Great Passion Play--the brainchild of the late Gerald L. K. Smith, the famed anti-Semite, who first created it in 1968. The play is performed just outside town next to the 70-foot-tall Christ of the Ozarks that Smith had constructed. The play and the statue, along with country-and-Western music shows along Arkansas 62, account for much of the town’s summer cash infusion from tourists.

But Eureka Springs is also a place where there are many people like the mayor--dropouts from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s--and they, along with retirees, make up a major part of the Eureka Springs population. Many still wear long hair and beards, and, when they converge at one of the local pubs, the scene is reminiscent of Aquarian days.

Tammy Bakker ‘Jammies’

Eureka Springs does have other oddities. Take Joe McClung, the owner of the $1-million Colonial Mansion Hotel. He offered a half interest in the place to fallen evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, complete with a suite and limousine, if they would come and live in Eureka Springs. He lays claim also to the invention of “Tammy Jammies” sleepwear, which is selling at a brisk pace in Eureka Springs gift shops.

McClung said he had received more than 400 letters, both pro and con, about his offer to the Bakkers. One woman volunteered to be his forever, and several cult types threatened to kill him. “It has been a riot,” McClung said of what he described as “a great publicity stunt.”

So accepting is the town of individuality that it tolerated a city parks commissioner who wore a beanie, complete with propeller, bangles on his arms and a ring through his nose.

And then, of course, there is Crescent Dragonwagon, proprietress of the Dairy Hollow House, a bed-and-breakfast inn, as well as a novelist and author of children’s books. Yes, it is her legal name--she gave it to herself 18 years ago when she and her then-fiance decided to rename themselves before they got married. She changed Ellen to Crescent, which means “the growing,” and Zolotow to Dragonwagon, which doesn’t mean anything at all.

Sometimes Regrets Change

There have been times when she has wished she had not changed her name, but by then there were a couple of Dragonwagon children’s books on the shelves. And, as she says, it is fun to get letters from American Express addressed to ‘Mr. Wagon.’

Dragonwagon, who has lived in Eureka Springs for 15 years, says her editors would sometimes ask her when she was going to move back to New York and become a real writer, even though she has 30 or so books to her credit. She, in turn, would tell them about the beauty of the town, about how safe it was, about how doors could be left unlocked.

“That never quite got through,” she said. “Then, last fall, I finally figured out what to say--that I owned two houses before I was 20 on a free-lance (writer’s) income. That, they could understand.”

Dragonwagon was sitting in the parlor of one of the two homes that combine to make up the Dairy Hollow inn, talking about her town and the craziness of the place. For one thing, she said, no one snickers at her name.

“How many places do you know where no one would laugh when someone named ‘Crescent Dragonwagon’ would ask to address the council?” she asked.

Movie Stirs Controversy

She said that, only this year, the town had been in an uproar over a number of issues, the first being the news that a development company was going to build a Disneyland-size amusement park nearby. That rumor was put to rest, but it sure got the letters to the editor flying.

Then there was the movie being shot here last winter about a fundamentalist preacher gone bad. Again, the letters piled up--saying that the movie mocked religion, that it was great for business, that it was going to give the town a bad name, that it was going to portray the people of Eureka Springs as hicks.

Somewhere in that controversy, it was even suggested that the mayor be hanged.

“Everyone cares passionately about the good of the community,” Dragonwagon said.

Why is Eureka Springs the way it is? Dragonwagon lists the local theories: The town is sitting atop a mountain of crystals that concentrate energy; it was at one time a sacred healing ground to the Indians who once roamed the Ozarks; Eureka Springs was built between two mountains and the trapped energy vibrates back and forth.

Whatever.

But all the residents concede that Eureka Springs would not be the same were it not for the passion play that draws thousands of people to the town. In the early 1900s, Eureka Springs’ heyday, the town had a population of 20,000, and lovely Victorian homes ran up and down the hillsides. Then the spa business slacked off, and the Great Depression made things worse. A major part of Eureka Springs was boarded up, and it stayed that way for decades.

Mountaintop Monument

But, in the mid-60s two things occurred that would change Eureka Springs. The first was its discovery by the ‘60s counterculture. The second was the decision by Gerald L. K. Smith to make a nearby mountaintop a monument to Christ.

Smith, known for fiery bigotry aimed primarily at blacks and Jews, first purchased a stone castle in Eureka Springs. Then he went to a mountaintop and marked an “X” where he wanted to build his Christ of the Ozarks, which was completed in 1966. Two years later, the production of the passion play began. In that first year, 28,000 people attended the play, and attendance has since increased almost tenfold.

Smith died in Glendale, Calif., in 1976. Charles Robertson, the president of the foundation that produces the play, remains a staunch defender of the rabble-rousing Smith, who first caught the public eye when he delivered Louisiana Gov. Huey Long’s funeral oration in 1935.

“The term ‘anti-Semite’ doesn’t apply to him,” the 72-year-old Robertson insisted. “He was pro-American, pro-United States. He spent much time defending the Constitution, as well as our Christian heritage. He wasn’t against anyone, but he wasn’t for foreigners’ coming in and taking over.”

Anti-Semite Is History

These days, the passion play goes on without much controversy and Smith’s deeds are not a hot item for discussion in Eureka Springs--the local bookstores don’t even carry anything about him. Bob Purvis, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce, said people no longer talk about Smith, that his life is history. He said also that the town might have eventually attained its present success as a tourist center but that Smith’s passion play certainly helped to speed the process.

“It gave us kind of a jump start,” he said.

Purvis worries, though, that too many people are coming to Eureka Springs convinced that they can make a good living, what with all the summer tourists and the passion play and the country music halls and the scenery and the slew of bed and breakfast inns.

Business Failures Cited

One of those music hoedowns just went out of business, Purvis said, because the people who owned it didn’t have enough cash to weather the first couple of years. He said he has seen a number of similar failures.

“If there is any way to make money in this town, someone is doing it,” he said. “Most people come here and see it and like it. They see the streets paved with gold--but there is also the opportunity to fail.”