Mercy Health used an innovative walking program to become one of the healthiest workplaces in the country.
Ozarks At Large
A roundup of events and news for the next few weeks include an alternative way to deliver a Valentine.


An administrative law judge with the Arkansas Public Service Commission on Friday ordered SWEPCO to proceed on its proposed plan to build a massive new power transmission line through portions of northwest Arkansas. Also, Governor Mike Beebe says that recent cost analyses of operating the state's Private Option expansion of Medicaid justifies the program's passage during last year's session of the state legislature. And the state Attorney General's office warns residents about rapid-refund tax providers.

Ahead on Ozarks, a conversation with young adult author An Na. Also, we learn what it takes to become a police officer.

We speak with An Na, author of A Step From Heaven, a book that was awarded the Michael L. Prince Award when it was published a decade ago. Critics and reviewers commended the book's characters for speaking like a child without being too precocious or condescending. The author will speak in Fayetteville later this month.
Latest Edition of Ozarks at Large
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Ahead on this edition of Weekend Ozarks, we visit the kitchen of Jen Lewis, take a spin in a state-run clinic that aids veterans in rural communities, and we meet a recovering opiate addict who has found hope with methadone.
Last June, a flash flood along the Little Missouri River swept through a remote portion of the Alpert Pike Recreational Area on the Ouachita National Forest, west of Hot Springs. Twenty campers were killed. The USDA Forest Service ordered an inquiry. As Jacqueline Froelich reports, what emerged was a nationwide plan to better protect visitors on national park recreation sites.
October is American Archives Month. This will be noted tomorrow afternoon at three inside Mullins Library. Keynote speakers for this event devoted to history will be a pair of teenage historians. Sarah and Emma Bailin attend Central High in Little Rock and have been making short documentaries since they were eleven years old. They'll screen their film "Return to Sender" about the 1980 Cuban refugee crisis at Fort Chaffee and how that event changed Arkansas' political landscape.
What are American political third parties? Our history doctor, Bill Smith, explains.
"Royal Garden Blues" by Don Byron
Mahalia Jackson, the OK Corral and more in our history capsule for October 26.