Iola is one huge step closer to opening a new dog park, courtesy of Ray Shannon’s equal parts persistence and patience.
Shannon recently spent the better part of three days bouncing around Arkansas in what became a successful effort to find the owners of a plot of land along South Chestnut Street.
The land has been targeted by Iola City Council members for the dog park, citing its remote location from neighboring landowners.
The owner, Earlene Still, long had abandoned the property, which contained a trailer house destroyed in the 2007 flood. Earlene is the widow of the late Wayne Still, a long-time firefighter and Iola’s fire chief in the mid 1990s.
Shannon’s effort led him initially to Mammoth Spring, a small community just south of the Arkansas-Missouri state line.
He visited Earlene Still’s last known address, “at the end of a nine-mile gravel road,” Shannon said, to no avail.
Still had apparently moved some time ago, so Shannon went to Mammoth Spring’s public utility office and local school district, where word came that a granddaughter of hers attended schools in nearby Thayer, Mo.
No dice.
But a worker in the Thayer post office recalled Still’s family, noting she had a son who lived in either Sheridan, south of Little Rock, or in Helena, along the Arkansas-Mississippi border.
The most promising lead was in Helena, where Shannon spent a full day visiting “about every public person or office I could find” in an attempt to find either Still or her son.
By then, Shannon had been on the road two full days.
When the Helena search ran dry, he headed to Sheridan in south-central Arkansas.
There, he visited the county assessor’s office, finding an address for Still’s son.
The end was near — or maybe not.
Shannon stopped by the home. No one was there.
He located a neighbor, who said the son worked for a contractor and usually was gone from dawn to dusk. The son’s wife worked at a convenience store several miles away.
While Shannon couldn’t find her son that day, he had the next best thing — his address.
