Museum open house turns up new history

Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Kathy Cox looks through one of the many scrapbooks on display at the Bella Vista History Museum during the annual open house last week. Cox promised to donate some family items that help tell the history of one marketing effort devised by John Cooper in the 1970s.
Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Kathy Cox looks through one of the many scrapbooks on display at the Bella Vista History Museum during the annual open house last week. Cox promised to donate some family items that help tell the history of one marketing effort devised by John Cooper in the 1970s.

The Bella Vista History Museum held their fourth annual open house on Thursday with about 60 people stopping in, said Xyta Lucas, president of the Bella Vista Historical Society.

"I heard positive comments repeatedly about how much they enjoyed their visit to the museum. It really makes all of us volunteers feel really good about what we are doing," she said in an email.

Several of the visitors were not regulars at the museum. It was only the second time Kathy Cox had been there, but she promised to find and donate newspaper clippings about how her family arrived in Bella Vista.

They came on one of the promotional trips arranged by Cooper Communities in the early 1970s, Cox said. She remembers her parents dropped her and her brother off at the pool -- "The Plunge" located near Lake Bella Vista. The water, she remembers, was very cold. Their parents went off to tour property.

A couple of weeks later, Kathy Cox answered the family's home phone in Oklahoma and intercepted a call for her mother. The caller was from Bella Vista and wanted Cox's mother to know that she was the big winner. She won a house in Bella Vista.

Cox said she didn't want to move to a place where you couldn't get decent television reception. She was about 14 then.

Her family didn't move right away. They were offered a model home that would be built on their lot, as long as they bought a lot. But buying a lot and supervising a house being built in the next state was intimidating, so Cox's father agreed to accept one of the model homes that was already built.

It wasn't a very practical house, Kathy Cox remembered. It had a sunken living room with a fire pit in the middle. Because he was still working, Cox's father decided to rent out the house. They didn't move to Bella Vista until they retired in 1981, she said. Kathy Cox lived in Houston and then Los Angeles, but moved to Bella Vista to be close to her parents in 2004. By then her parents had first remodeled and then sold the model home they won, but when she was cleaning out their last home in Bella Vista she came across newspaper clippings about the house John Cooper gave away.

General News on 10/18/2017