Kim Hendren degree in engineering from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He is an Independent Protestant who has been active since 1963 in the Gideons International, the men's group which distributes Bibles in such public places as hotel rooms. He is active in Kiwanis International. Hendren is married to the former Marylea Hutchinson, a sister of former U.S. Senator Tim Hutchinson and former U.S. Representative, former head of the DEA, and current Governor Asa Hutchinson. In 2002, Tim Hutchinson lost his reelection bid to Mark Pryor for the other U.S. Senate seat from Arkansas. Asa Hutchinson lost a Senate race in
Beecher's Bibles and possibly in boxes identified as "machinery" and even in German immigrant trunks. Beecher himself contributed funds for the purchase of Sharps carbines and, after the interception of shipments by pro-slavery men, is said to have issued bibles and carbines to individual abolitionists bound for Kansas. The weapons were intended for the conflicts fought over slavery in the Kansas Territory leading up to its induction into statehood. As decreed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the issue of slavery in the new state was to be determined by popular sovereignty, thus unleashing a wave of bloody violence between pro- and anti-slavery forces