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But most of the commission's efforts have gone into its real job: to attract out-of-state industry. Armed with voluminous research material and aided by state departments, the commission has zealously uncovered prospects, wooed them with hard facts and friendly talk and dinners at Winrock or the governor's mansion. Many a wavering industrialist has been won over by personal visits from Rockefeller, e.g., Akron's Mohawk Rubber, which built a $2,000,000 plant after a little personal persuasion.
A Lake for Expansion. Nothing is too good for prospective industries. A new state plan allows communities to build plants for industry; local citizens put up 20% of the cost themselves (at no interest), raise the balance by selling bonds to private investors and the state. For example, residents of Greene County put up a $700,000 plant for Emerson Electric in Paragould at no immediate cost to the company. (The company pays off the cost of the building over 20 years at 5% interest.) They floated bonds, sold $50 membership certificates, got loans on pledges of future contributions. When Duracraft Boat Corp. of Monticello could not expand because there was no water nearby on which to test and demonstrate its boats, Monticello residents dammed up a stream and created a 20-acre lake. The company expanded—to the tune of $350,000.
As it expanded industrially, the state also found it necessary to broaden its cultural and educational opportunities. After several Northern firms rejected the commission's blandishments simply because they did not want to bring wives and children into a cultural desert, Rockefeller and his associates set out to match Arkansas' industrial revolution with a cultural revolution. They scurried all over the state, sparked community playhouses, libraries, symphony orchestras, opera, even established a commission-sponsored Concert Hall of the Air to broadcast classical music. After losing out on a $100 million Glenn Martin guided-missiles plant because Arkansas lacked technical schools to provide advanced training for workers, the commission began agitating for a graduate school of technology at the University of Arkansas. Result: the senate has passed a $1,000,000 bill to establish such a school, and approval is expected in the house.