Jul
21
Have you Noticed all the Flags at Half-Staff? New State Law Requires Flags to be lowered more often.
Filed Under AFB Press Releases, AFB in Print, AFB's Community Service, Current Events | Leave a Comment
Little Rock, AR – July 16, 2010 – As your driving around our wonderful state this summer you might have noticed how often the flags, both the US and Arkansas are at Half-Staff. A new law on the books requires that the Arkansas flag be lowered upon the death of a soldier killed in action.
Arkansas Code Annotated, Section 1-4-128, states “The State of Arkansas shall honor and pay tribute to a member of the armed services who is killed in action by lowering all state flags located on public buildings to half-mast from the time notice of the death of a member of the armed services is received and for a period of three (3) days thereafter.”
So with this new law and the existing Federal flag code, requiring the US flag be flown at half staff on the day of interment for a soldier killed in action, we are seeing both flags down much more often.
Kerry McCoy, President of Arkansas’ FlagandBanner.com says, “Calls about the flag being at half staff is one of the questions we get the most. I really think it is wonderful that we now have a law that honors our fallen heroes, but it is hard for people to stay informed.”
Because of this law, Arkansas’ FlagandBanner.com now offers flag alerts for Arkansas to go along with their national flag alerts.
“We have offered notifications for when to fly the US flag at half staff for years and it just made sense for us to now offer the state flag notifications for Arkansans that want to honor our fallen heroes”, says Kerry McCoy.
You can sign up for either of Arkansas Flag and Banners Half Staff Flag Alerts at http://www.flagandbanner.com/mlsubscription.asp or email brian@flagandbanner.com and ask to be added to their list.
For information: http://www.flagandbanner.com or
Contact: brian@flagandbanner.com
Phone: 1-800-445-0653
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Feb
18
Buying in to the Dream
Filed Under AFB Press Releases, AFB on TV, AFB's Community Service, Dreamland Ballroom | Leave a Comment
KARK4 did a nice piece on the Dreamland Ballroom’s book fair last Sunday at Barnes and Noble. Here is the article and click on the link below to see the TV footage!
A group of Arkansans, set on restoring an old performance hall to its former glory, got a big boost over the weekend.
The Barnes and Noble on Financial Center donated 10% of its proceeds today to “Friends of Dreamland Ballroom.”
The Dreamland Ballroom was a premier venue in Little Rock for soul, R and B, and jazz musicians.
This group wants to rehab it and preserve it as a place to hold events and performances.
“I’ve had offers to turn it into a restaurant, a school, apartments. But it just needs to stay what it is, an events center which is not necessarily a real prosperous business, it almost has to be a non-profit,” says Kerry McCoy with Friends of Dreamland Ballroom.
The group hopes to fund raise this year, start construction next year and re-open the venue in 2012.
For more information on how you can get involved, click here.
Feb
3
Want to Know Where Cab Callaway Played in Little Rock?
Filed Under AFB's Community Service, Current Events, Dreamland Ballroom | Leave a Comment
Come hear more at Barnes and Noble on Sunday, February 14th 2010
February 3, 2010
Little Rock, AR – The Friends of Dreamland Ballroom, the non-profit group dedicated to the restoration of the historic Dreamland Ballroom is telling their story at the Barnes and Noble on Financial Center Parkway on Valentine’s Day, Sunday, February 14, 2010, from 1-5 pm.
There will be period music, reading by local author Berna Love from her soon to be released book about the historic Dreamland Ballroom, and some original story telling by local history buffs.
Kerry McCoy, Chairman of the Friends of Dreamland says, “Barnes and Noble is gracious enough to let us come out and tell the story of the Dreamland Ballroom and 10% of all purchases made by folks who mention the Dreamland Ballroom at checkout will go to the Friends of Dreamland Ballroom’s restoration project.”
More about the Friends of Dreamland Ballroom-
The Friends of Dreamland is a newly formed non-profit group dedicated to the restoration and preservation of the historic landmark, Taborian Hall and its famous Dreamland Ballroom located at 800 West Ninth Street in Little Rock, Arkansas. Concurrent goals include the collection, conservation, and celebration of Taborian’s unique history relating to Arkansas’ African American heritage. Friends of Dreamland incorporated in the State of Arkansas July 31, 2009. We plan to do most of our fundraising in 2010, and begin renovations 2011, our projected Grand Opening 2012.
For information: http://www.dreamlandballroom.com
Contact: friends@dreamlandballroom.com
Facebook: Dreamland Ballroom
Contact Person: Kerry McCoy
Phone: 501-255-5700
Nov
12
Veteran’s Day Open House
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Little Rock, AR – On Veteran’s Day, November 11th Arkansas Flag and Banner held an open house and free chicken dinner (lunch) for veterans. We served fried chicken, potato salad, rolls, and apple pie
We had a great turn out with veterans representing every service and several campaigns.
We want to thank you again for your service to this great country we call home!
AFB Staff
Oct
26
AFB participates in the ’09 Race For The Cure!
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The 2009 “Race For The Cure” was a huge success! Take a look at some of the photos of the event.
Sep
9
Kerry visits The Zone on 103.7 The Buzz
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Kerry McCoy, owner of Arkansas’ FlagandBanner.com was a guest on The Zone radio show on 103.7 the Buzz last week (Aug 26th). They spent the noon hour discussing the upcoming Razorback season opener and all the Razorback gear available at www.FlagandBanner.com! Below are some photos of the event – Enjoy.
Jun
15
Kerry visits the Bob Robbins show on KSSN
Filed Under AFB on Radio, AFB's Community Service, Current Events | 1 Comment
Kerry McCoy, owner of Arkansas’ FlagandBanner.com was a guest on the Bob Robbins radio show on KSSN 96FM last Friday morning (June 12th). They spent the morning handing out free Stick Flags and discussing the meaning of Flag Day… among other things! Below are some photos of the event – Enjoy.
FYI – President Obama issued a presidential proclamation recognizing… “the week beginning June 14, 2009, as National Flag Week.”.
So be sure to proudly fly your flag all week in honor of National Flag Week!
May
1
Project Runway Designer holds Photo Shoot at the Dreamland Ballroom
Filed Under AFB in Print, AFB's Community Service, Dreamland Ballroom | Leave a Comment
While the Dreamland Ballroom is not quite ready to book events, she (I think “Dreamland” is a girl) has been garnering quite a lot of attention. Word of Dreamland’s enchanting aura has spread among photographers and she has been getting a lot of press. I have always felt that I could feel the ghosts of Duke Ellington and other great musicians that once played within her walls, but apparently the custom woodwork, faded and chipped plaster, and abundant windows make for a fantastic photo shoot.
When Photographer Jason Masters called requesting a photo shoot, we were more than happy to oblige. Dreamland is a national treasure and such treasures should be shared. And when we learned that the photo shoot was for Little Rock’s own designer, Korto Momolu from Season 5 of Project Runway, we were ecstatic. We had a little photo shoot of our own to record the event. Take a look. I think this proves that while it’s true that “One day you are in, the next you are out,” it is also true that beauty endures. And as sure as Dreamland was once magnificent, even in decay she is still beautiful. Soon she will be restored to her former grandeur and get a second chance at fame.
We took a few pictures to show you how cool it was.
Jan
2
Dream A Little Dream
Filed Under AFB in Print, AFB's Community Service, Current Events, Dreamland Ballroom | Leave a Comment
by Kyle Brazzel
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Dec. 30, 2008
Eclectic Band Takes Under Its Wing A Battered Dance Hall With A Glorious Past
Onzell Wright has a keen nostalgia for Little Rock’s Ninth Street, similar to the feeling some people have about Main Street. In both cases of these intersecting corridors, this is mostly nostalgia for one’s youth and for crowds. But the way Wright tells it, his particular strain sounds like an anomalous wistfulness for one-stop shopping.
Ninth Street, by Wright’s careful enumerations, was once a place where you could get your clothes dry-cleaned and study to be a beautician. You could buy a life insurance policy and a chili dog. He makes the type of businessmen who tack their business cards to laundromat bulletin boards sound like old friends.
In a way, it’s loneliness talking. Wright graduated from high school in 1962 and proceeded almost directly to The Line, in those days the nickname for Ninth Street. “That’s when I was really partying,” he says with the hint of a grin. In those days Ninth Street was the center of commercial and cultural life for Little Rock’s black population, and it was also the place to party. But when Wright returned in the 1970s to open wright’s Shine parlor near Ninth and Arch streets, the vitality was fading. Now its history is a museum exhibit, literally, at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, which opened in the fall.
As someone who came to Ninth street first to play and later to work, Wright is an exception. But it’s not only neighbors whose absence he feels “There was a lot of neon lights down here, just about as many as there was on Main Street,” Wright recalls. And there was sound, plenty of it, spilling out onto the sidewalks. wright has always situated himself near music, whether at work or not: When he operated a shoeshine stand in Little Rock’s erstwhile Sheraton Inn, he could hear Gennifer Flowers’ night club act from inside the Pebbles Lounge.
Up and down the Ninth street of his youth,” you could hear the blues, you could hear rock’n'roll, you could hear band music,” Wright says. Bass guitar hung in the air, but so, he remembers, did the bright tones of saxophone and clarinet. These days, it can be difficult to hear Wright speak over the whir of a shoe polisher and the somber chords that announce that The People’s Court, broadcast over a television set so blurry the picture is practically scrambled, is in session.
But one the right night on the Ninth Street, music- even the brassy sounds from Wright’s most distant memories- still carries over to a marginally more bustling Broadway. One can hear guitar and drums, tambourine and even trumpet and euphonium spill from the former Doc’s Pool Hall on the ground floor of the Arkansas Flag and Banner building when a band is playing, the beer keg is flowing and the door to the garage bay is thrown open.
These jam-filled parties, of which there have been a small handful, would earn Wright’s approval for more reasons than their role in bringing a groove back to Ninth Street nights. They are also pushing toward a resurrection that would provide an even more direct link between Wright’s boy hood in the area and his advanced adulthood.
The music, under a street-fair-style string of lights and within a circle of ecstatic dancers, has largely been the instrumental sound of the newish Little Rock band Eclipse Glasses, and outfit whose official motif, according to its promotional materials, is a stew of “funk, soul, electro Afrobeat, reggae and weirdo disco.” The quintet is playing in the former Doc’s tucked underneath the red-brick structure constructed in 1846 as the temple of the Pulaski County chapter of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor because they can’t yet play on the top floor.
Jazz Age Gem
But the band hope that the proceeds from the concerts will help boost Kerry Mccoy, owner of the Flag and Banner building, closer to her goal of restoring the former Dreamland Ballroom. The ballroom, later known less memorably as the Morocco Club, occupies the uppermost story of the building McCoy took over in 1991.
Obscured by peeling plaster and ribs of exposed beams it retains only a glimmer of its sequins-and-spats shine from days when it hosted Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and the proms of Dunbar High School and Arkansas Baptist and Philander Smith colleges.
“Being an admirer of all those people who played there before, I would love to be able to play there too,” says Lorenza Harrington, who supplies the horn sounds for Eclipse Glasses and methodically sets up photo collages showing Dreamland’s promise b3fore each fund raising show. “It’s a beautiful venue. The old ’30s and ’40s architecture is all around you.”
Indeed, it’s still there, although evidence is strong of the weather beating it took before McCoy’s extensive refurbishing. A scrapbook of the buildings’ evolution contains photos in which the diamond-patterned panels edging the balconies sit underneath such gaping holes in the roof that what were then downtown Little Rocks’ First Commercial Bank and TCBY towers loom int he open air. A patina the color of dried mustard has settled on the rosettes ornamenting the band-stand, lending the room a garish quality of glory gone shabby, like a once-grand dame whose hair rinse is beginning to yellow and whose lipstick applications stray off the mark.
In fact, knowing what to keep and what damaged flourishes to cut have proven so tricky that MCCoy has already fired two architects whose conceptions woud have, she felt, takent the Dreamland too far from its original design.
“The sstinking historical people that do the tax credits- they told me I had to take all the plaster out fo the way and spray it with clear shellac,” reports McCoy, who originally bought the building for $20,000 from restaurateur Mark Abernathy, who had bought the property at auction on the Pulaski County Courthouse steps.
“I said, ‘You’re missing the whole deal!’ I’m not going to loose my peachy-pink color just so I can get those tax credits.”
In some ways – coinciding, as it does, with a mini-Ninth Street revival as well as the movement to rebrand South Main Street as SOMA – the Dreamland may be the right project at the wrong time. McCoy was prepared to go before loan officers with her revised business plan for Dreamland’s eventual profit ability as a for-rent event center and concert venue the week of the initial bank-industry financial crisis.
McCoy says she is grateful for the money that goes into Dreamland restoration coffers after Eclipse Glasses organizes a charity concert. “They get me a couple thousand dollars,” she says. “But I need a million-two.” Members of Eclipse Glasses understand that they aren’t going to move the mountain of big-ticket financing with proceeds from the occasional late-night get-down. “just having music there at all brings about an awareness of that place,” Harrington says. (The next fundraising concert is not yet on the calendar, but progress on the restoration effort can be followed at the
ballroom’s Web Site, www.dreamlandballroom.com.)
Trumpeting the Cause
And the devotion to the Dreamland held by Eclipse Glasses, as well as other bands of their ilk, casts them as much Generation O as the successors to the bluesmen and rock’n'rolers who lugged their instruments cases through stage doors in Ninth Street’s heyday. Generation O is the nickname that has been applied to people college age on through their early 30s who helped president-elect Barack Obama reach unprecedented levels of campaign fundraising, one relatively minute, Internet deposited contribution at a time. The tag also signifies a new order of social consciousness, and members of Eclipse Glasses – Harrington, Zach Reeves, Kyle Carpenter, Andrew Morgan and Collin Miles – in addition to playing in other bands also volunteer for causes like the Arkansas Sustainability Network and the No New Coal Environmental movement.
Harrington, 26, learned to play on a trumpet given to him by his grandfather when his parents couldn’t afford the drum set he requested as a teenager. A leader of kung-fu-centered after-school tutorials for the Little Rock School District, Harrington is cautious about appearing opportunistic in his Dreamland Boosterism. “I don’t want it to seem like I’m just playing there so whenever it does get remodeled I’ll have my food in the door,” he says. “Before it’s established as a legitimate music venue, people should be aware of its history and not just use it as a place to make money, or boost their own popularity.”
McCoy, for her part, understands the ballroom’s appeal to emerging young musicians. “It’s part of the music heritage of Arkansas – that same bond that ties musicians together generation after generation,” says McCoy, who adds that she bought the property primarily because of the ballroom. (At one time, her goal was to have Dreamland restored by 2000.) “I want to move forward while they’ve still got time on their hands and don’t have families yet,” she says of the current youthful gravitation toward the Dreamland. “But even if they get off of it, there’ll be somebody else that falls in love with it. It’s just that kind of place – as long as I don’t mess it up. I don’t want to sell ownership of it,” she continues” but it may have to someday be Coca-Cola’s Dreamland Ballroom. But I’d like to see it before I’m 80!”
But even if she doesn’t, as Onzell Wright might tell her, it’s never too late to recapture reveries gone by. Wright’s wife maintains a collection of 45s that preserve the type of tunes that once provided the Ninth Street soundtrack. “I’m in church now,” wright says. “I’m a deacon. But every now and then, we spin some old records at the house and dance.”
Oct
20
Supporting TOMS Shoes
Filed Under AFB Press Releases, AFB's Community Service, AFB's Philanthropy | Leave a Comment
When Kerry McCoy heard about TOMS shoes for tomorrow and their new line for the upcoming election she was intrigued, until she found out more about the company. “When I heard that for every pair of shoes sold, they give a pair to children in need, I told my employees to sign us up.”
TOMS shoes was founded in 2006 by Blake Mycoskie. The original TOMS shoe has a unique slip-on design comprised of clean lines and lightweight fabrics in vibrant colors and prints. The idea for TOMS was inspired by Blake’s trip to Argentina where he saw the traditional Argentine alpargata. Struck by the poverty and health issues of the country, he set out to reinvent the alpargata for the U.S. market. His goal was simple: to show how together, we can create a better tomorrow by taking compassionate action by providing shoes – One for One.
To realize this purpose, Blake made a commitment to match every pair of TOMS purchased with a pair for a child in need. There are no complicated formulas- it’s simple: If you buy a pair of TOMS, the company will give a pair on your behalf. “I was overwhelmed by the spirit of the South American people, especially those who had so little,” Mycoskie says. “And I was instantly struck with the desire – the responsibility – to do more.”
During his first year in business, TOMS sold 10,000 pairs of shoes and Blake returned to Argentina to lead his first Shoe Drop during which he gave to the children who had inspired him. In November 2007, TOMS had its second Shoe Drop, hand-placing 50,000 pairs of shoes on children in South Africa.
Ms. McCoy said, “I was so inspired by this story. I couldn’t help but want to sell these shoes.”
FlagandBanner.com offers TOMS’ Vote Democrate and Vote Republican shoes. We hope that you will know for every step you take, a child you’ve never met is better off.
If you would like to participate in a shoe drop off, please contact Friends Of TOMS, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to give further aid to communities by the TOMS One for One mission.