1930's Newport Arkansas

Photographs made by by father, James E. Doherty III (1923-2003) when he was a boy in his hometown of Newport on the White River in NE Arkansas. My great grandfather James E. Doherty (an orphan from Ireland) was the first Doherty in Newport and he ran a saloon, owned an ice house and managed the Newport Opera House around the turn of the century. He was hassled so much by prohibitionists that he quit the saloon business and began working in the cotton seed business. 





My Grandfather, James E. Doherty Jr. was born in 1890 and except for a brief stint in Chicago as a cub reporter at the Chicago Tribune, spent his whole life in Newport as manager of the Southern Cotton Oil Company, a division of Wesson. He married Ida Josephine Parish when he returned from Chicago and they had one child, my father, James (Jimmy) E. Doherty III in 1923. My grandad was a very active community member and had a weekly column in the Newport Daily Independent called Newport Plus and Minus under the pseudonym Blub Ubberson. Dad left for College in 1941 and graduated from UAMS  in 1946 while in the U.S. Army. He also studied with with Company "B", 12th Basic Medical Field Service School.  After residency he  began his 50 year career as a Professor of Cardiology and Pharmacology at UAMS in 1951. He saw patients at the Little Rock VA and published and spoke internationally about his research on digitalis in the 1960's and 70's. He had a darkroom built in our family home in Little Rock in 1957 where he taught me fundamental darkroom techniques. My daughter Dr. Kate Cohen was slack-jawed when she heard her grandfather's name mentioned in a lecture at Vanderbilt Medical School in reference to a paper he published in the 1960's.  Dad was an exceptional physician and his med students spoke highly of him. I credit Dad for sparking my own interest in photography.