• Tony Bennett debuted his signature song “I
Left My Heart in San Francisco” at the Black Orchid Club in
Hot Springs. With encouragement from the club’s bartender, Bennett
added the song to his act the next evening at the Fairmont Hotel in
San Francisco.
• Hot Springs has long been a favorite of professional
athletes:
• During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Hot
Springs served as the off-season capital of Major League Baseball
with the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates,
Brooklyn Nationals, Chicago White Stockings, and Boston Red Sox
all holding their spring training camps in the area;
• Babe Ruth first visited as a young Red Sox
pitcher and returned often to bathe in the waters and play golf;
• Heavyweight boxer Billy Conn trained for his
1946 rematch with Joe Louis in the gym at the Fordyce Bathhouse.
Conn lost, just as he had in the 1941 fight with Louis that was
billed as “The Fight of the Century;”
• James Braddock, the heavyweight boxing champion
of the world known as “The Cinderella Man,” was a frequent
Hot Springs visitor and worked out with the town’s high school
football team in October of 1935;
• Other notable boxing figures, including Jack
Dempsey, John L. Sullivan, Jim Corbett, Joe Louis, and Jess Willard,
were frequent visitors to the area.
• St. Louis beer baron Gussie Busch was married
in a civil ceremony in the lobby of Hot Springs’ Majestic Hotel.
• Bill “Bojangles” Robinson celebrated
his 66th birthday in Hot Springs by dancing down nearly two miles
of downtown streets as a thousand onlookers cheered him on.
• Hot Springs’ Alligator Farm was the first
of its kind to open in 1902 and is Arkansas’ oldest tourist
attraction.
• Hot Springs is the childhood home of former President
William Jefferson Clinton, who graduated from Hot Springs High School
in 1964.
• Hot Springs’ other noted presidential guests
included Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, John
F. Kennedy, and Harry Truman, who enjoyed playing small stakes poker
at his favorite Hot Springs’ club where he was known as a notoriously
bad tipper.
Hot Springs held appeal for many gangsters, who came to
town to enjoy the baths and partake in the town’s plentiful gaming
opportunities:
• Illegal casino gambling in the 1920s and 1930s
brought many wealthy show business celebrities and mob figures to
town;
• Al Capone maintained Suite 443 in the Arlington
Hotel;
• Lucky Luciano’s last arrest took place
on the promenade behind the Ozark Bath House;
• Illegal gambling reached its peak in the 1950s
and 1960s in night clubs such as The Belvedere Club, The Southern
Club, and The Vapors;
• The U.S. Justice Department concluded that Hot
Springs had the largest illegal gambling operation in the country
in 1961;
• Illegal gambling was eradicated from Hot Springs
in 1966 under the reform administration of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller.
