Reach for the stars, you land on a cloud

Reach for the stars, you land on a cloud

Years ago, I worked at Southland Greyhound Park.

This was in “The Dark Times”… no, not the Dark Ages, we’re not talking about back when you were a kid, Michael. This was in the early 1990s. It was in 1994, in fact, when I began working there as a dog walker. It was about a year after Splash Casino opened, the first casino in Tunica.

Well, that was a hard blow for the track. Remember, at that time it was just dog racing. And after being the only game in town for thirty-something years, there was a new place to go an gamble… “real” gambling, with card and dice and such.

And the entire time I worked there, from 1994 to 2002, I watched what had been at times a million-dollar-anight business lose money, lose customers, lose jobs, and lose hope. There were times when I sat in management meetings (I worked my way up from dog walker to Director of Racing Operations) and we basically had to figure out how to keep the doors open.

And it wasn’t easy. In fact, when I stopped working there and went back to college, I honestly thought it might shut down. But they did not shut down. They had a plan. It wasn’t going to happen overnight, but the plan, as I’m sure you know, has paid off handsomely.

In 2006, they got the gaming license they had sought for more than a decade. But even that didn’t completely turn things around. That would come in 2011, when floods shut down the Tunica casinos (Splash was gone by then, but there were 10 more taking its place). That started the wheels turning, and now, here in 2019, more than a quarter-of-a-century after Splash Casino looked to be the death of Southland, they’re putting up a quarter- of-a-billion-dollar full-blown casino and hotel that will bring more money and more jobs to this community than in the dog track’s prime.

So, Michael, if you haven’t figured out what all of this has to do with this week’s topic, allow me to explain…

2040 is 21 years from now. If you had told the employees, the management and the owners of Southland Greyhound Park 21 years ago, when the daily handle had dropped from a million dollars a night to a million dollars a week (and was still dropping) that they’d be building a $250 million hotel and casino one day, they’d laugh you out of the building.

But here we are.

And as we look at West Memphis in 2019, it’s hard to imagine what the city is going to look like in 21 years.

It could be a wasteland. Crime and blight could ruin the city. The strong-minded, strong-willed leaders that are emerging in the next generation could leave for greener pastures. They could hop across the river into Tennessee for lower taxes, they could head for the hills of northwest Arkansas to the land of milk and honey. They could look at where we are now and go anywhere but here. One shooting too many. One racially-motivated loudmouth too many. One panhandler, one stalled train, one shuttered business too many to stay.

Or, they could stay.

They could stay and be a part of something great. They could look at the vision offered by the “Grow 2040” initiative and join in. While working at Southland, one of my old bosses told us, “If you can’t be a part of the solution, at least don’t be a part of the problem.”

You might not think this plan will ever work, Michael, and it might not, but you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.

Be a part of the solution.

By Ralph Hardin