University of Arkansas Monticello - Boll Weevil Yearbook (Monticello, AR)

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under the unyielding sun. Tomatoe plants dried up, causing all the fruit to ripen at once, leaving rotting tomatoes on the vine. About the only crop not effected by the heat was cotton, which continued to thrive in spite of the heat and drought. ¢ ¢: 4.64 oa e eee @%, Left: Temperatures climbed above 100 degrees to break a state record of 10 consecutive days. Above: UAM students were forced to peel out of sweat-soaked clothing while enjoying some of their favorite pasttimes. Arkansas poultry farmers buried millions of breeder hens that died of suffocation in the intense heat. Milk production from dairy cattle dropped dramatically, while in Texas, ranchers shipped their steers to the northern plains to find grazing land. Temperatures rarely dropped below 80 degrees at night, and rose to the mid 90’s by 9 a.m. About the only people who enjoyed the summer of 1980 were swimming pool operators, ice cream vendors, and air conditioner salesmen. Student Life 121 ne

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120 Student Life UAM students who attended summer school in 1980 will look back someday and remember they survived one of the hottest summer’s ever experienced in southeast Arkansas. The searing heat wave began in Texas in mid-June, with temperatures in Dallas and Wichita Falls reaching 113 degrees. The heat gradually moved into Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, setting records and causing serious damage to crops, livestock and poultry. Temperatures in Arkansas climbed above 100 and stayed there for days. Little Rock reached 107 while the mercury climbed to 104 in Monticello. Grass turned January- brown, electric circui ts overloaded, air conditioners broke down, and no one ventured outside unless they had to. The heat wave of 1980 reminded old timers of the terrible summer of 1936, when over 15,000 people in Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma died due to the heat. With air conditioning, the death toll in 1980 still climbed well over 150 mostly older persons in homes with no cooling systems. For Southeast Arkansas farmers, the heat meant the threat of losing their crops. With water supplies drying up, soybean farmers watched their fields wilt The extreme heat of the summer of 1980 caused UAM grounds workers problems. Water sprinklers worked overtime trying to prolong the life of the campus landscape.

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Son tS ON HIS VACATION THERE 122 Student Life Decade of Crisis Decade of Decision The sixties were a decade of social turmoil, of antiwar and civil rights protest, of social upheaval. The seventies were a decade of change. The eighties will probably be remembered as a decade of crisis, a word which has come to be used as much as is the word “apathy.” Individual situations vary about the nation. Some people fare better than others, but as Americans we are becoming more ALSO... affected as a whole by occurances abroad. As the eighties begin, we face a crisis in leadership, a crisis in Iran, a crisis in Afghanistan, and fuel and inflation crises. As of this writing, there is no end in sight to any of the crises, unless possibly to that of leadership, and apparently it will not be resolved until November, when we’ll face another four years under Jimmy Carter or a change to a somewhat ominous Ronald Reagan. Old-timers assure me that we’ve yet to experience “‘hard times’ despite all of our economical woes. Perhaps that is the only optimistic assessment available in regard to our current situation - we’ve a long way to go before we sink to the low of the Great Depression. It’s true that we continue to zoom around in our cars, though gasoline prices have nearly doubled in the past two years, we continue to pay our rent and put food on the table, though inflation rose to over eighteen percent last year. We continue to feel a modicum of security though the Soviets have surpassed us in ground, sea, strategic air and nuclear strike capabilities. Our Middle-Eastern ace-in-the-hole, Iran, has been wrenched from our grasp. It’s next-door neighbor, Afghanistan, is under total Soviet control. The Soviets have established strongholds in Yemen, Somolia and other strategic points in the Mideast while we’ve condescendingly turned our backs with such iron-gutted statements as ‘‘the status-quo is unacceptable” (Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). We’ve lost our credibility, and consequently power, among our NATO allies and Japan through a flaky hit-and-miss (mostly miss)