Changing times.(Editorial)(Brief article)

THE LOSS OF AUTO DEALERS throughout the state, some of them shutting down voluntarily and others not, may be just one more sign of the recession, but it's likely to affect towns in more ways than most can imagine.

Some of us can remember when the small towns across Arkansas in which we grew up had two or three dealerships.

Those dealerships contributed to the life of the community by providing jobs, supporting the youth sports teams, buying advertisements in the local school yearbooks or newspapers and joining the local chambers of commerce.

As Senior Editor George Waldon points out in this week's cover story, Forrest City, the largest city between Little Rock and West Memphis, with a population of some 14,000, has no new-car dealerships. That would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

With the loss of a third of the dealerships in the state over the past decade, the times they are a changin'. Whether for the better, we don't yet know. We do know many communities will miss them.

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