Bob Burns House

The Bob Burns House is a small Victorian cottage on Jefferson Street listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Burns (1896–1956) grew up in this house and returned to it throughout his career as a radio personality and actor. The house is privately owned and not open to the public, but it is visible from the street and a historical marker explains Burns's significance.

Burns is largely forgotten outside Arkansas, but in his heyday he was as well-known as Jack Benny or Fred Allen. The Van Buren connection gives the town an unexpected piece of entertainment history, and the bazooka story is one of the more interesting incidental connections between folk music and military hardware in American history.

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A story
Bob Burns — "The Arkansas Traveler" — was one of the most popular radio comedians in America in the 1930s and 1940s. His regular appearances on the Bing Crosby radio programme and his film work made him a major celebrity, but he always identified publicly with Van Buren and Arkansas. He also invented a musical instrument he called the bazooka — a slide trombone made from plumbing pipes — and the weapon was named after the instrument in World War II because its projectile tube looked like the homemade horn.