Sometimes people say it’s a small world. Usually by that we mean that although the world is big, things sometimes happen that we would only expect in a small world, like running into someone you know in a faraway place, or discovering that someone you never knew before actually has connections to people and places you are familiar with.

I’ve had things like that happen to me in several places. Back in 1966, when I was a student in Kansas City, Mo., I was doing hospital visits for our church there. One evening I discovered that the people I was visiting were Bentonville people, and that they knew my relatives there.

Several years later, my wife and I made a trip to Israel. In Jerusalem we were visiting the gold-domed mosque which stands where the Biblical Temple of Solomon once stood. As I stood with our tour group, listening to the speaker tell about the Dome of the Rock and its connections with Mohammed, someone touched me on the arm, and said, “Nichols, what are you doing here?” I turned and saw that it was a friend I had known three years before in Des Moines, Iowa. Here we were, halfway around the world from where we had last seen one another.

Another occasion of this kind took place a few years ago when we were visiting our son Jeff and his wife in Iowa. We were sightseeing around Ames, where Jeff and Mary live, and had driven out north of town, when we decided to stop at a roadside fruit and vegetable stand. We bought a few things, tomatoes and onions, and as we were talking with the people, they asked us where we were from? We told them we were from Pea Ridge, Ark.

They responded, “Well, isn’t that something! We used to live there ourselves!” We discovered that their name was Roney, and that they still had relatives living at Brightwater. We had known the Roney family for a long time. They were neighbors to my grand-aunt Anna Nichols back in the 1940s.

Aunt Anna lived alone, and the Roney’s always took her with them to church and to Avoca or Rogers for shopping.

You never know who you’ll run onto when you are out and about!

A few days ago, I was looking up some web sites on the Internet, just to see if I could find anything about the old Pea Ridge College of the 1880s and 1890s. I came across the name of a gentleman by the name of William H. Hughes, whose papers are archived at Fayetteville as part of the University of Arkansas Special Collections. The index to his papers indicated that Mr. Hughes had attended the Pea Ridge College way back then, that he had been a school teacher and a school administrator, that he had at one time been superintendent of schools at Huntsville, and that later he entered politics, went to Washington, and served as U.S. Representative for our part of Arkansas. I just happened to notice that Mr.

Hughes’ papers had been donated to the U of A by hisdaughter, Helen Hughes of Conway, Ark.

Seeing that name, Helen Hughes, made me realize that this Miss Helen Hughes was my teacher for a Shakespeare course I took back in 1965 at Hendrix College in Conway. She collared me, as we say, and had me play the part of Lord Montague in “Romeo and Juliet,” the Shakespearean play, which she directed for the Hendrix Theater. Now I never thought of myself as a Shakespearean actor, and I doubt that others did either.

I was almost too bashful to speak in public, let alone act in a play as Romeo’s father.

But Miss Helen needed a Lord Montague, and finding myself faced with an unbudging insistence, I surrendered to do it.

Now the Montague’s and the Capulet’s didn’t get along, and Lord Montague had lots of acid things to say about Juliet’s father, that foul Capulet! In my real life, I was always taught that if you can’t say something good about somebody, then don’t say anything. But when Miss Helen Hughes got me on stage, I was soon ripping that foul Capulet up one side and down the other!

Now I’m wishing I could go talk to Miss Helen about her father, and see if I could learn more about his student days at the Pea Ridge College long years ago. But she passed away several years ago, and that opportunity is lost. I wonder, too, if I had gone to school at Pea Ridge in 1890, would Miss Nanny Roberts have had me playing Lord Montague on her stage? She was known for helping bashful boys achieve things they never thought they could.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 4 on 03/23/2011