Some stories find their way to us at just the right time—and this is one of them.
When a reader reached out to share her mother’s simple idea—reconnecting with childhood classmates from Carnall Elementary—it immediately struck a chord. What began as a small act of invitation has grown into something far more meaningful: a reminder of how powerful connection, memory, and community can be.
As Fort Smith prepares to say goodbye to Carnall Elementary, this story feels especially timely. Before you read the full feature, we wanted to share the letter that first introduced us to Mary McCain and the group now lovingly known as the “Carnall Kids.” It’s a story that begins with one invitation—and unfolds into something none of them could have quite imagined.
Hi, Catherine!
I have been thinking of writing to you for a while to tell you a fun and sweet story about my mom that may be fitting for Do South Magazine.
My mom, Mary McCain, retired a few years ago after teaching kindergarten at Fairview Elementary in Fort Smith her entire career. My mom has always been very social. She wasn’t one of those people that worried about what she would do in retirement. She is very athletic and loves to play tennis and pickleball. She comes from a large family, so she is constantly meeting up with her siblings and cousins to visit. She also has chickens at home and loves to garden.
Why I think you might find her interesting is because one of the first things she did in retirement was get out her elementary school yearbook. See, she and her 8 other siblings (9 Hamilton kids), grew up on South Savannah Street in Fort Smith, and they all attended Carnall Elementary. My mom used her yearbook to look up every single person in her class from Carnall. She started a Facebook group for them all to join and invited them all to start meeting once a month for lunch. This may seem like a small thing to do, but what has been truly inspirational is how this group has grown. She has had people drive in from all over the country to attend these lunches and most recently had a classmate fly in from Washington State. As she so often explains to me, these people grew up in an era where they were very best friends. They all walked to and from school together each day and played until dark every day rain or shine. They were all friends with each other’s siblings, childhood loves, and truly raised each other up.
What is also so sweet is they also included their former principals at these luncheons. They are in their upper 80’s and have loved getting to reconnect with these students. The stories they tell are endless! It’s always so funny to hear who got swats and who ran away from school and so much more. The nostalgia of it for me as her adult daughter is just so wonderfully heartwarming.
I read an article recently about how loneliness has become an epidemic of sorts in this modern age. We are so connected online so we feel like we keep up and know each other well, yet no one picks up the phone to call anymore. People don’t stop by other’s homes just to knock on the door to visit on the front porch. Everyone is so worried about inconveniencing one another because we are all so “busy.”
Are my mom and her friends’ age group the last ones who truly know how to connect? I sure hope not, and personally have loved the example she is setting for me to be the inviter. I had a good friend tell me one time when we were making a guest list for a party, “It always feels good to be invited or included.” My mom has shown that making the smallest gesture of an invitation goes such a long way, and her classmates have proved by showing up each month just how good it feels to connect with your old childhood friends. They probably truly know us the best anyways, right?
Fort Smith Public Schools have voted to close Carnall Elementary this May. My mom and her friends are sad but are also hoping to be allowed to have one last school lunch together before they close the doors for good. I just feel like if other retirees heard my mom’s story and idea that maybe they would be inspired to reach out to friends who may need something to look forward to each month and help fight this loneliness epidemic.
Thank you, Catherine, for your time and consideration. My mom and I always love reading your magazine and it is a blessing to our community. Have a great week!
~ Sarah Garner
Inspired by this story, we asked writer Marla Cantrell to take a deeper look at the friendships, memories, and lasting impact of Carnall Elementary.
The Return of the Carnall KidsWhen school ends for the 2025/2026 session, Carnall Elementary will close permanently. The decision to shutter the school was made due to declining enrollment and underutilized buildings. Spradling Elementary will also close. The affected students will attend other Fort Smith schools in the fall, but they will carry their memories for the rest of their lives. The following story about a group of former Carnall students shows how carefully we carry the days of our childhood.
Carnall Elementary, on Tulsa Street in Fort Smith, Arkansas, hadn’t been open long when Mary Hamilton (now-McCain) started first grade. School was a new adventure, and even now, at 68, the memories of those early years are among her sweetest.
“It was a different time,” Mary says. “The dads worked. The moms stayed home. We’d walk to school with our friends and walk home with them. We’d change into our play clothes and be right back outside again.”
Before starting first grade, Mary’s only playmates were her siblings. Her parents, Ralph and Lena Hamilton, welcomed nine children before the family was complete. The boys shared a bedroom, and the girls shared another. “There were bunkbeds in every corner,” Mary says.
The family had chickens, cows, and a horse named Lady. There was always a family dog in the picture. One year, all nine kids played baseball or softball, a fact that landed them in the local newspaper. They were good, too. One of Mary’s older brothers, Jim, attended Ouachita Baptist University on baseball and basketball scholarships.
For a tight-knit family like the Hamiltons, there was little need for the outside world. It wasn’t until Mary attended elementary school that she had playmates who weren’t kin. “I always called the kids at Carnall my first friends,” she says.
Mary played baseball and tetherball with her classmates, learned the history of Arkansas, and attended birthday parties, including one in sixth grade, where the highlight of the festivities was a game of spin the bottle. Classmates gave each other small trinkets to show affection, such as the plastic, animal-shaped charms they’d saved from soft drinks bought at Beverly’s Drive-in, which was a hopping place in its day.
When sixth grade ended, many of the same students went on to attend Ramsey Junior High and Southside High School before going their separate ways. After that, there were colleges to attend, partners to marry, careers to begin. Not everyone stayed in touch.
After Mary retired from teaching kindergarten at Fairview Elementary, she decided to organize a group of her former grade school classmates. The friends she contacted were on board, and in September 2022, they had their first lunch together. Since then, they’ve created their own Facebook page where they share updates on their lives and plan their next monthly lunch meeting.
So far, the smallest group totaled 8; the largest 26. Classmates have come from near and far to reconnect. Even the group’s principal, Mr. Jimmie Daniels, now 93, and their fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Eddy Hill, now 81, attend, along with their wives. Mary laughs when she describes hearing her classmate Roger call Mr. Hill by his first name. “I almost fell out of my chair,” she says. “Roger explained that he’d played golf with him for years.
“Another classmate and friend named Phillip came in once, and Mr. Hill was sitting there. Mr. Hill said, ‘There’s trouble!’ He said, ‘How many times did I use that paddle on you?’ and Phillip said good-naturedly, ‘At least once a day.’”
In the 1960s, paddling was still the norm.
Mary describes her younger self as a quiet, obedient rule follower. Memory, though, is mercurial, and her childhood friend, Leigh Ann, claims there was at least one exception. The two of them sneaked out one day to get burgers at the nearby Reed’s Drive-In. They ate them quickly on the walk back, fearful of being caught. It was a memory Mary had repressed until Leigh Ann brought the story up at one of their lunches.
Doug Kelley, a writer and retired pilot, now living in Texas, recalls his first time attending one of the lunches. “It was revelatory to walk into the La Huerta Mexican Restaurant on Old Greenwood Road and see a long table of friends I had not seen, some of them, in decades. The opportunity to renew dormant friendships has provided entirely new threads to the fabric of our lives. And to tell Mr. Hill, in person, how he may have inadvertently affected my entire life’s work was especially satisfying.”
Mr. Hill’s influence came in a roundabout way. When Doug was in the fifth grade, he developed a temporary habit of not completing his homework. As punishment, Mr. Hill, who was only 23 at the time, would make Doug stand by the wall during recess. The school was in the flight path of the Fort Smith Municipal Airport, and with little else to do, Doug searched the sky for planes.
“So it was,” Doug says, “when asked how I became interested in flying, I always give credit to Mr. Eddy Hill, tyrant though he was,” he says, tongue in cheek, “for playing a role in the direction my life took.”
A classmate named Steve, who came to one of the lunches from his home in San Antonio, told the group about his time in the service. On the ship at night on the high seas, he’d think about his days at Carnall. Those were his fondest memories, he said. His classmates, his teachers, his principal.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Mary says. “Even Mr. Hill was crying. It was so emotional. Who knew you could make such an impact on a person?”
Mary believes the elementary years were the most influential of their lives. There are a thousand reasons why that might be. That era allowed children to explore freely. The friends she made at Carnall roamed in and out of each other’s houses. As a bonus, they got to know their friends’ families. The kids climbed trees and played impromptu games of softball and lay on their backs considering the shapes the clouds made. Their day didn’t end until their parents called them home.
In the background of that idyllic time in South Fort Smith, the world was changing. Rock and roll grew in popularity. To the chagrin of the establishment, miniskirts, bell-bottom jeans, and men wearing long hair infiltrated the younger generation. Suddenly, there were hippies.
When Mary’s group was in first grade, the United States trembled from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When they were in the sixth grade, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. And all during their grammar school experience, grim news from the frontlines of the Vietnam War invaded every household that sat down to watch the evening news.
Children look to the adults to make sense of chaos. It’s possible that, along with good parents, the staff at Carnall Elementary did an exceptional job guiding those in their charge. Classmate Doug Kelley says it in a more poetic way. “An oak tree does not remember when it was an acorn, but it does know the ground from which it grew.”
A short while from now, the doors to Carnall Elementary will close for good. The empty hallways, the silent classrooms, the once-loud cafeteria, will have gone quiet after more than 60 years. Even so, no one can take away the students’ memories of a different time when the school was the vibrant center of their world. For some of them, like Mary’s lunch group, it is sacred ground. A forest disguised as a school that protected them as they struggled upward and allowed them to grow into such mighty oaks.
