Gazette Project

Interview with

Ernest Dumas, Little Rock, Arkansas October 24, 2000

Interviewer: Roy Reed

Roy Reed: This is Ernie Dumas and Roy Reed, October 24th. And we were just

talking about Bob Lancaster and the Gannett people. Start over, Ernie.

Ernest Dumas: Well, this was the last leg of the Gannett regime, and there was an

editor from Florida who came up, Keith Moyer, who had been, as I

recall, the editor at Fort Myer, Florida, which was another Gannett

paper. Generally, he kind of left the paper alone, but he had this

idea, he wanted some features about people, profiles of ordinary

people. And so he told Bob Lancaster, who was kind of a feature

writer on the state desk, to pass the word along, go out and find

just a down-to-earth, ordinary old guy, or people, to write about

and write some features. So Bob struck out and went down to

south Arkansas and he found this guy named Ora Golden. O-R-A,

G-O-L-D-E-N. And Ora was living in his car, in a car, and I think

the car was not running, but that was where he was living. So we

interviewed this guy, and it was a long interview. And this guy

tells all these tales. I mean, everything in the world has happened

to this guy. He just had one stroke of bad luck after another, year

1 after year after year after year. Just incredible things happened to him. Now, sooner or later, you began to disbelieve most of this stuff. This guy’s just got such horror stories to tell about himself.

I mean, he’s just been impaled on spikes and bitten by rattlesnakes and shot at and fallen off a bridge. Everything has happened to him. And he’s been through a couple of wives and all kinds of things. And then he’s obviously kind of crazy as well. Well, Bob relates all this stuff kind of matter-of-factly. It was a long, funny piece. It’s just hilarious. You find yourself laughing at all this guy’s hardships. So Bob wrote this thing, and it was a huge piece that ran in the Gazette. And a lot of people just thought, “What in the world is the Gazette doing running this huge piece about this no-account bum?” And then one day, Bob got this call. A couple of days later. And it was from the current husband of Ora

Golden’s ex-wife. And he calls up — and this was a pretty rough character himself — and he’s going to “whip Bob Lancaster’s ass.”

In fact, he just may “goddamn it kill him” because he’s written about all this stuff that this lying Ora Golden’s done. He’s just a terrible, good-for-nothing liar. And he’s going to come whip his ass. So Bob tries to diffuse it, and said, “Well, why don’t you get her to tell her side of the story?” And so they finally had some meeting, and Bob is kind of, he’s pretty scared that this guy’s

2 going to come shoot him or whip him or something. But he called

me and said, “Look, if we get a letter to the editor from this person,

will we run it?” And I was in charge of the letters, and I said,

“Okay, if it’s going to save your life, we’ll run this letter. We

don’t care about having you shot to death here.” So she wrote this

letter, and the letter is as good as his stuff. I mean, she starts

telling terrible things about Ora Golden and then the terrible things

that had happened to her. And even worse things had happened to

her. I mean, it’s a medical miracle either one of them was alive.

[Laughter] And so it’s a bitter, nasty letter, but I kind of edited it

up a little bit and pretty much ran it as is. Here it is. Here’s the

letter to the editor from Pauline Davis from Kingsland and Bob’s

original piece about Ora Golden. It’s a typical Bob Lancaster kind

of piece, just kind of straight forward and wonderful reporting.

RR: The kind of thing that would happen to Lancaster, as I remember. Didn’t he once

take his golf clubs and lay them across the railroad track? He was so mad at his

golf game. Did you ever hear that story?

ED: Well, I’ve heard something about that, yes. I’m not sure just what happened.

RR: He got so disgusted he took his clubs, left them on the track, so it was said. I

don’t know if it really happened or not.

ED: I don’t know whether I’ve ever related this story about Bob Lancaster. When I

knew Bob first, — he grew up someplace in south Arkansas and, I think, maybe

3 he had worked at Crossett. I’m not certain. But he wound up at the Pine Bluff

Commercial when he was, I don’t know, nineteen or twenty years old. And he’d married his high school sweetheart from Sheridan. He was from Sheridan, that’s right. Bob Lancaster was from Sheridan. And he had married his high school sweetheart, and they’d had one child. And Bob, I think, had gone down to

Southern, at that time it was Southern State College and now Southern Arkansas

University. And I think, he’d, maybe, been down there a year or two or something, and he had gotten a job. Anyway, he wound up at the Pine Bluff

Commercial. And this would have been in 1965. The legislature was in session, and they sent Bob up to cover the legislature for the Pine Bluff Commercial. And this was Faubus’s last term, and it was the last day of the legislature. And, as you recall, Roy, on the last day, you have a lot of ceremony in the House and Senate, and the Governor comes over and makes a little speech to the House and goes over and makes a little speech to the Senate and tells them, “It’s been a historic session and you’ve done all these wonderful things for the people of Arkansas who owe you a great debt.” And sometimes they’ll have a little ceremony. Well, this day they had this thing, and they had the choir from Arkansas A&M College up. And I think they were singing in the rotunda of the Capitol — now I may have the facts on this a little bit off, but this is my memory of it — the choir was singing in the rotunda, and that day the Student Non-Violent Coordinating

Committee, this kind of Southern-based civil rights organization, kind of the radical wing of the civil rights movement, called “Snick,” S-N-C-C, commonly

4 known as “Snick.” And it was directed in Arkansas by a guy named Bill Hansen.

H-A-N-S-E-N. And on that day they were coming up. They had already

announced they were coming up to protest the conversion of the Capitol cafeteria

into a private club. In order to prevent integration of the little cafeteria in the

basement of the Capitol, Faubus and Kelly Bryant, or whoever the Secretary of

State was, said to make it a private club. And the president of the private club

was Clarence Thornbrough, T-H-O-R-N-B-R-O-U-G-H, who was executive

secretary to Governor Faubus and he was president of this private club in the

basement of the Capitol. So SNCC — and there were about ten or twelve of them

coming up — and they were going to integrate the Capitol cafeteria, the private

club. So all the ceremonies were going on upstairs. The choir was singing “The

Battle Hymn of the Republic,” as I recall as we headed down to the elevator to get

down to the basement because the word was the SNCC people were coming up 7th

Street and they were crossing the Capitol grounds and coming up the steps. So

we headed off down there. Of course, they had alerted the state police, and there

were a whole bunch of burly state troopers coming down the hallways. They

were filling up the basement of the Capitol. Remember the basement had these

little tiny, narrow hallways, only about five feet wide, barely enough room for

two or three people to pass. And the Capitol cafeteria was a terrible place.

Rotten food. You remember.

RR: [Laughs] Yes.

ED: And it didn’t get any better when it became a private club. But we headed down

5 there, and so the SNCC people came in and got to the door and whoever met them at the door of the cafeteria — I don’t know whether it was a state trooper or

Clarence Thornbrough or whoever it was — and they said, “We came here to eat.” And they said, “Well, this is a private club. You’re not members, so you cannot eat here.” And they said, “Well, we’re members of the public. This is a public facility, and you can’t have a private club in the state capitol. It’s ridiculous.” And they tried to make their way around and get into the cafeteria.

And first thing you knew, the state police were swinging their billy clubs, and they were knocking all these kids down, right and left, and grabbing them and dragging them up the stairs. They picked them up by their feet and dragged them up the stairs out of the Capitol cafeteria, where these old marble steps . . . At some point in the melee, Bob Lancaster was clubbed. Of course, at the Gazette, you remember, we had to wear suits and ties, and so I had a gray suit on and a white shirt and a tie and, I guess, was familiar to the state police, but Bob was not. Bob had just a regular shirt on and no tie and no jacket. And he was about twenty-one years old and — didn’t have long hair or anything else, but he was about that age.

At any rate, he was clubbed himself. They split his lips. He broke a couple of teeth and split his gums. He had to have stitches taken to sew up his mouth. So they dragged him out bleeding as well, and so Bob was all covered with blood.

We got him out to the emergency room and got him fixed up. So the stories that afternoon — this happened in the morning, about 11:00, and so the stories all across the country that day were about this melee in the Capitol. And the stories

6 mentioned that even a young newspaper reporter was beaten up by the state police. Well, that night Faubus went on television to denounce the — to explain what happened and denounce these civil rights workers and these, they were

“trouble makers” and I’ve forgotten what he was saying about whether the commies were behind it. I don’t think so, but, anyway, he made a pretty inflammatory speech on television that night. And he brought up Bob Lancaster.

“Now,” he said, “it’s been reported that a newspaper reporter was injured. That’s

Bob Lancaster. He’s not really a newspaper reporter. He was one of the leaders of this group. And, besides that, he’s no-account. He abandoned his wife and child,” and put out this terrible story about Bob Lancaster by name. As I recall he used his name. And so, anyway, Bob called a few minutes after the address. Bob called and he was just, he was in tears. He was crying, and he said that the deal was that he and his wife had been having some problems and she had moved back home. And he thought what Faubus did was going to be a permanent breach. It was going to be impossible for them to get back together, and I think that the deal was that her daddy was, I think maybe, a big Faubus man or something. I always suspected that he or some member of the family had called Faubus and told him about Lancaster and his family problems at that time. But it was a brutal thing for

Faubus to do. And I forgave Faubus a lot of things, but I never forgave him that.

What he did that night. Of course, the marriage did heal, and they got back together and had a happy marriage, but I never forgave Faubus for what he did that night.

7 RR: Did Bob ever do anything about that?

ED: No, he didn’t. Not that I know of.

RR: His wife’s name was Martha, wasn’t it?

ED: Martha, yes. And their child, was it Laura? She later went, I think, to the White

House with Clinton. You know, Bob later came to work at the Gazette and then

got a Nieman Fellowship. Or maybe he got the Nieman Fellowship while he was

still at the Pine Bluff Commercial. I’m not sure.

RR: I think it might have been.

ED: I think he got a Nieman Fellowship, but anyway, at some point, he came back and

he came to work at the Gazette and, of course, wrote a column for us for a while, I

think the “The Arkansas Traveler” column. And then went to Philadelphia. Gene

Foreman hired him at the Philadelphia Inquirer and he went there and wrote a

great column for the Philadelphia Inquirer which was during the time of Mayor

— What was his name? Luzzo or something?

RR: Rossi?

EE: Rizzo.

RR: Rizzo.

ED: Mayor Rizzo. R-I-Z-Z-O, as I recall. He was this old ex-cop, an ex-police chief,

who tried to run the city like Milosevic, for example. But Bob then got crossways

with that guy, and I think he had the cops tailing Bob everywhere he went in

Philadelphia. He moved back to Arkansas and worked for the Pine Bluff

Commercial for a while — No, he worked for the Arkansas Democrat for a while

8 and then back to the Gazette — went to the Arkansas Times, I guess, for a while.

It’s a magazine. He became the editor there. And in the latter days of the

Gazette, he came back, I guess, probably for the Gazette’s last year and wrote for

the Gazette again. Some of the best stuff that ever appeared in the Gazette, I

think, was stuff that Bob Lancaster wrote that last year.

RR: He’s a terrific writer.

ED: Oh, it was just . . .

RR: Although I didn’t see his column in the Times last weekend.

ED: Wasn’t one in there, unless they moved it someplace. I skip over all that

entertainment section. It wasn’t in its customary place.

RR: I’m pretty sure it was not there. You mentioned H.E. Harvey a while ago, and we

were talking about Mike Trimble. Did you get Trimble to talk about that Harvey

story?

ED: No, I didn’t. Didn’t get him to talk about H.E. Harvey.

RR: Tell about that, would you?

ED: Well, I guess to tell about H.E. Harvey — There was this old guy who lived on

Stone Mountain Road, out a few miles in the mountains outside Clarksville. And

he wrote letters to the editor, and we got them every day. He wrote a letter to the

editor of the Arkansas Gazette every single day. Seven days a week, so that early

in the week you’d get two and sometimes three letters from H.E. Harvey. He had

a beautiful hand, but the letters were always typed, and it was obviously on a

very cheap typewriter because the letters were not on, were not even. And they

9 were, in a way, wonderful letters because they were written in some florid style,

frequently winding up with a prayer at the end. He would get wound up in this

letter, and it would get more and more florid, and, finally, at the end just break out

into prayer: “Oh, God, please preserve the Republic and smite down the great

press lords.” And it would go on. And he was always, usually, denouncing the

press . . .

RR: Yes.

ED: . . . and Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, whom he called “Big Wilson.”

And all the letters would have, usually, about the same theme. It was always the

press lords. And he’d find a way to attack Roosevelt, Churchill and Woodrow

Wilson. And he loved Richard Nixon. And he was a great defender of Richard

Nixon. And, of course, we couldn’t run all of those letters, but we would try to

run one — Jerry Neil had been the letters editor before I did, and he loved to dress

up H.E. Harvey — it required a little bit of editing and typing — and ran one

about once a month. And so when I took over, I did the same thing. And, I think,

Jerry Neil had read in the paper once that H.E. Harvey’s wife died. So Jerry

wrote a nice letter to H.E. Harvey about his wife’s death, which, I think, greatly

touched Harvey. Anyway, he continued to write those letters over the years and, I

think, still writes them to the Democrat, but the Democrat is not going to let this

guy, not going to let some crank like that get his letters in the paper. Unless it’s,

you know, good old right-wing claptrap, they won’t publish him, but he’s now

turned around, and he’s a Bill Clinton admirer for some reason. But, anyway,

10 Trimble was a feature writer — he wrote for the feature section of the Gazette.

And he got the idea of going up and finding out about H.E. Harvey. Nobody

knew anything about this guy. All we had was the address, and that’s all we

knew about him. And so Trimble journeyed up there and found Stone Mountain

Road, and it was, apparently, nothing but ruts, and made his way up to H.E.

Harvey’s house and interviewed him. And wrote a beautiful piece. It is really

one of the great profiles. And Harvey, it turns out, lived alone in this little shack

up in the woods. And, I think, he had a horse and, maybe, a couple of cows and a

few pigs and chickens running around in the yard. And maybe the chickens

would be in the house as well. But what H.E. Harvey did, and he did it for

Trimble while he was there, is that every morning he would get the Arkansas

Gazette and he reads it. From start to finish, he reads the whole paper. And, once

having read the paper, he crawls up in the middle of his unmade bed, with this

little Japanese typewriter that he got for, maybe, five dollars someplace. It was a

little tin, portable typewriter. And he crawls up in his bed and puts a piece of

typewriter paper in there and writes that letter. Every single day. I mean, it’s a

routine with him. And he signs it with this great, fancy signature. Then he goes

down and mails it. It’s a big part of his life. And I’m amazed that H.E. Harvey’s

still alive, if he is, because the Democrat will not publish his letters. I see one

about every six or seven months in the Democrat, maybe once a year.

RR: Yes. I remember seeing that piece after I moved back to the state. And didn’t

Harvey’s style change after that? Wasn’t there some speculation that Mike’s

11 piece sort of puffed him up or something and added a dimension to his letter-

writing style that hadn’t been there?

ED: I think so. As I recall, he wrote longer after that, so we had to do a little more

editing to keep him down to the right space. He really was quite a good writer in

a way. He was just totally undisciplined, but he had some good ideas and some

clever turns. But I don’t know where he adopted this florid style from. He’d read

something at some point and adopted it. I’m not sure who it was.

RR: Maybe it’s the same place he got his antagonism toward Franklin Roosevelt and

Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson. That’s an unusual trio to be against!

ED: Yes. I don’t know. And it was not — He didn’t think Roosevelt and Woodrow

Wilson were Communists or anything. It wasn’t really a right-wing [ ? ] to those

guys. It was — he just didn’t like them. They were big shots. So it was not so

much an ideological thing because, otherwise, he seemed to be kind of a populist

in many ways. He was — big railroads and big industries and power — He just

hated power and here were powerful men. Churchill and Roosevelt at that time

were men of vast power, and he just resented people, anybody who had any

power.

RR: What was that about Murray’s catfish?

ED: Another Trimble?

RR: Yes.

ED: Well, there’s this great catfish restaurant at Devall’s Bluff, Arkansas, called

Murray’s. And, of course, everybody, I suspect most people in Little Rock or

12 central Arkansas, at one point or another, have been to Murray’s. It’s down on

the banks of the White River, down the bluff. Devall’s Bluff, of course, is a bluff,

and if you go down the bluff by the river, there’s this little ramshackle house. I

think it, maybe, started off as a railroad car, and things have been kind of built on

so that now it kind of rambles. And when you go in it, it’s real narrow, and the

rooms are very narrow, and you have to kind of step down, step up, and things are

always, when you are walking through it, it’s kind of rocking a little bit. It’s kind

of unsteady on its base, but it’s run by this black guy named Olden Murray.

RR: Olden?

ED: Olden Murray. I think it’s O-L-D-E-N. I think it’s not so much anymore. Olden

hangs out there, but I think his son may run it now. But he had catfish, and

everybody loved to go eat catfish at Murray’s. And Trimble thought it was the

best place to eat in Arkansas. He loved to go to Murray’s. So he went there once

to write a feature about it. Trimble loved to write about food, and this was — I

guess, he and Max Brantley always loved to write about food — and he went

down and did a big feature on Olden Murray and his wonderful catfish and how

he cooked it. And he told Murray’s life. Murray had been, used to work on boats

on the Mississippi River. He was from the Helena, over in the Helena area. And

he had suffered some kind of injury working on the boat and had been disabled.

And so that’s kind of when he retired and started this little restaurant. At any rate,

he told about a day in the life of Olden Murray. And here was this guy getting up

early every morning and doing all this and that, and all the chores he did all day,

13 and it was obviously a lot of physical labor and getting the catfish and doing all this work. So it was a beautiful piece of work by Trimble. At any rate, there was a guy who had formerly worked at the Gazette whose name was Bill Shadle. S-

H-A-D-L-E. And Shadle had worked maybe for a year at the Gazette as a reporter, and he was a young man who was disabled. He had, I think he had lost both legs and was on crutches. And he had left the Gazette and taken a job with the Social Security Disability Administration. And so he picked up the paper that morning and sees that story, and he calls Trimble, who had been his seat mate there at the Gazette for a while. Mike said, “Well, I read this piece about Olden

Murray. Is all that true?” And asked him a whole bunch of questions about —

“Oh, yes, yes,” and he went on and on about it. Shadle said, “Well, I just hate to hear that because,” he said, “he’s been drawing 100% total and permanent disability for twenty years, but yet you describe this whole long activities he does every day, seven days a week.” And so Trimble said, “Oh, well, you know, I was hung over that day.” [Laughter] “I was hung over that day, and I might not have heard everything just right.” At any rate, the upshot of it was they went to

Murray and said, “With this article as evidence, you owe us twenty years of disability payments,” which came to some huge sum of money. And, of course,

Murray didn’t have any money. He still lived hand to mouth, but I think he really couldn’t dispute that he actually did some work. So they cut off his disability payments, and they suing for all this — they lodged, I think, a formal petition for him to repay all of this. And so, I can’t remember whether Mike was responsible

14 or Murray himself did it, but they got Bob — the bankruptcy judge?

RR: Bobby Fusell?

ED: Bobby Fusell. Bobby Fusell was a big Murray’s fan, and so Fusell had been in

the U.S. Attorney’s office, formerly, and I think by this time maybe he had left

the U.S. Attorney’s office, but he took up Murray’s cause. And filed a bunch of

pleadings with Social Security Administration and so forth about it all. But the

end of it was that — the Social Security Administration had been persistent about

it. They were going to start proceedings against him and foreclose or whatever.

So Bobby’s final order was he just called him up and said, “Okay, Murray’s

Catfish House is yours. Just come get it. It’s yours. It belongs to you folks.

Murray can’t pay it, and he’ll never be able to pay it. And he has no money and

no other assets and so just come get it. You can take possession whenever you

like.” And so there was silence for a while, and finally, he gets a call back and

says, “Well, let’s forget about it. He’s not going to draw more benefits, but let’s

just forget about it.” So after he gets that, Murray tells Fusell to “Bring your

friends over and let’s have some catfish.” So Bobby leased a bus, one of those

big, giant buses, and we all got on, including Trimble, who had never been back

there since he caused so much trouble. Trimble went with some trepidation back

to Murray’s. [Laughter] It had been about year or more, maybe a year or two

years preceding. And so we all loaded up and went over to Murray’s, and he took

us back to a big, long room back there. There must have been twenty-five of us.

Jack Meriwether, as I recall, and a whole bunch of others. And we had a massive

15 catfish feast. He brought out tons of catfish and slaw. And I bet there were ten

different vegetables. Fresh okra, fried; turnip greens and mustard greens and

hushpuppies and potatoes and just endless — he brings out all these vegetables!

Then he brought out catfish. Then he brought out crappie. All this fried crappie

— which is illegal. [Laughter] So we had all kind of — we couldn’t talk about

that. We had the crappie. And then when that was all over, we were all just

stuffed. We were just dying. Everybody was about to split. Then he brought out

these hot chocolate pies. And so we all dined on chocolate pies. And Trimble

had to get up and make a kind of confessional there and formal apology to

Murray, and he told Murray had it gone to court, he was ready to perjure himself

and stand up in court and say, “I made every word of it up. I never met Murray.

I’ve never talked to him in my life.” [Laughter] “I made it all up.”

RR: [Laughs] That’s wonderful. Is Murray still going?

ED: Murray’s Catfish is still going, and the last time we were over there, about, it’s

probably been a year since we were over there. Maybe not that long. We went

over there maybe seven or eight months, maybe back late last winter or early

spring. We went with Fusell again, and this time we took Jack Meriwether and

took the U.S. Attorney over there and Paula Casey.

RR: Paula Casey.

ED: Paula Casey. And she went, she was along. And so they pulled Murray aside at

the outset and said, “Don’t bring out any crappie.” [Laughter] “. . . U.S. Attorney,

don’t put her on the spot. If she spots a felony perpetration in her presence, it

16 might cause you some more grief, so you need not to bring out any crappie.”

RR: What Bobby Fusell acted — was he a private lawyer at that time?

ED: I think he was. I think he was a private lawyer or, hell, he might have just done it

while he was still at the Assistant U.S. Attorney’s, I don’t know.

[Phone interrupts. Tape stopped]

RR: We’re picking up here after a little break. You started covering the Capitol

sometime in ‘64, and pretty much started doing the same thing that I had been

doing and that is working with Ernest Valachovic, who had been the chief Capitol

reporter for years. What do you remember about Val, as we called him?

ED: Yes, we called him, “Val.” Ernie, I guess, he had gone to work at the Gazette

about 1956 or so, does that sound right? He had been at the Texarkana Gazette, I

think. I think he had been a reporter at the Texarkana Gazette. And I think he

was the guy in 1954 who found out about, who first discovered Orville Faubus’s

ties to Commonwealth College. I think he was one of the early people who — of

course, Johnny Wells exploited it later as well, but I think . . .

RR: No, I think that was somebody else.

ED: You think that was somebody else?

RR: Yes.

ED: But Val had something to do with it, vaguely, but anyway he came to the Gazette

probably sometime in ‘56 and then was sent out to the Capitol in 1957, and, I

guess about the time of the integration crisis and maybe shortly afterward when

Shelton sent him out there to cover . . .

17 RR: Sounds right because I think Matilda was still covering it when I went to work in

‘56.

ED: Yes, she, Matilda Tuohey had been out there and then about that time Valachovic

went out there to cover it and stayed there until his death in 1968. Val died right

before the general election in 1968. And he was a great reporter in many ways.

He was a great beat reporter because he had a disarming way about him, and he

got to know every secretary at the Capitol. And that was kind of his philosophy.

If you didn’t make it to the head of — the employment security division is

meaningless. In those days, particularly, because he was a member of Orval

Faubus’s cabinet, he wasn’t going to give the Gazette shit. So he didn’t pay much

attention to him. If he could get in to see him, all right. But the key to it was

knowing who the career people were, the peole who had been around for years

and who were going to be around, who actually ran the government, ran all these

various agencies, and to know their secretaries and the file clerks and everybody

else. So Val made a point in all of these agencies to go around and flirt with all

the women and get to know everybody around. Particularly all the deputies, the

people who were career people. And they were helpful always to him. They

knew where the files were and would tip him on things and kept him abreast of

things so that during that period after 1957 when Faubus put out the word that

nobody was to cooperate with the Arkansas Gazette, Val continued to beat the

Democrat day after day after day because he had all these connections. Plus he

just worked harder at it than George Douthit at the Democrat. George had

18 everything handed to him. He covered the Governor’s office and the Attorney

General’s office and went around and checked a couple of baskets during the day and if anything was going to happen, Faubus would let him know. And all the

Faubus press conferences were on the Democrat’s time. They were on, they were held early in the morning so that George would get the break on them in the afternoon Democrat. And nothing — I think from 1957 until Faubus left office, there was only one instance in which there was a press conference to make an announcement of some kind on the Gazette’s time. And Valachovic forced that because he found out in advance that there had been some negotiations to re-open the Reynolds Metals plant down around Benton, which had been closed for something. And Fulbright had been involved in it and so forth, but at any rate, they were going to make that announcement. Valachovic found out about it, and

Faubus found out that Valachovic had the story fairly early in the morning, and so he hastily that afternoon, late morning, about 11:00, called a quick press conference so that the Gazette would not have it first. And I think Valachovic told me that day that was the only time — this was probably 1965 or 1966 — but that was the only afternoon press conference. No, wait a minute. I’ve forgotten what the deal . . . Anyway, he had it to try to beat the Gazette, and I think he still failed to beat the Gazette on it. But I’ve forgotten what the deal was. Oh, no, no, the deal was he had it in the afternoon on the Gazette’s time so he could get credit for it. Valachovic was going to write the story and give Fulbright credit for it, and that’s where he had gotten the story, but then, in order to do that and to get

19 his own name connected with it, he went ahead and had an afternoon press

conference anyway. That’s the story. That clears it up a little bit.

RR: Right.

ED: Okay. But that was Valachovic. He was a terrible writer. He couldn’t spell. His

sentences, his stories were frequently disorganized. He had everything there. He

had all the information there, but nearly everything he did had to be re-written.

And Shelton was happy to do that because Valachovic, because Shelton ordinarily

was irritated with people for their flaws in their writing, but not Valachovic

because he got all the facts and Shelton would sit down and re-write it or give it

to Jerry Jones or somebody to re-write most of Valachovic’s stories. Because I

remember sitting with Valachovic everyday and the common thing all day long,

Valachovic would turn around and say, “How do you spell ‘accommodate’?”

And I’d say, “A-C-C-O-M-M-O-D-A-T-E.” And he’d say, “No, it doesn’t look

right.” [Laughter] “It doesn’t look right.” He never acknowledged that he had,

didn’t have [ ? ], not a single time. “Doesn’t look right.” But he was a great guy,

and I loved working with Valachovic. One morning — Valachovic was always

there early in the morning. He always beat me there. Only one time did I come

to work ahead of Valachovic and that was the last day. I’d gotten there one

morning and Valachovic wasn’t there. He was usually sitting there drinking

coffee and making telephone calls, reading the paper in the Capitol press room.

And so he didn’t come to work. So an hour passed, and I got to worrying about

him, so I called him at home. And he picked up the phone, and I said, “Val,

20 Dumas. I was just worried about you.” And he said, “I’m just in a lot of pain, a

lot of pain. I don’t have time to talk. Sorry, it just hurts too much.” And he hung

up. And an hour later, Shelton called and said, “Ernie Valachovic is dead.” He

had died of a heart attack. Apparently they had called the doctor, and the doctor

had told him to take some Tums or something, that he had extreme indigestion.

Anyway when they finally got him to the hospital, he was dead. And he was

about forty-five or something.

RR: A war veteran.

ED: He was a World War II, or Korean War, I guess. Was it Korean or World War II?

RR: I thought it was World War II because he was older than I was.

ED: Yes. Okay. But he was about, probably in his late forties.

RR: Where was he from?

Ed: I’m not sure. I remember talking to him about that, but I’ve now forgotten what

he . . .

RR: Somewhere in the north because he still sounded like . . .

ED: Yes, he sounded like, maybe, he was from Brooklyn or someplace, but I’m not

sure whether he was from New York someplace. He married Betty. His wife was

from Texarkana. I think that’s why he wound up down there.

RR: I think they met while he was in the army.

ED: I think so. Maybe he was stationed someplace. And Betty’s still alive. I see her

from time to time. And they had three . . .

RR: My recollection is that Val didn’t drive a car.

21 ED: No, he did not drive. And I don’t know whether he never learned how to drive or

if he just had some kind of vision problem.

RR: He had a vision problem, I believe.

ED: Some kind of distance — he couldn’t judge distances, so he couldn’t drive, but he

rode a bicycle. So sometimes he would — I lived over on Crystal Court at that

time and on Sunday afternoon he and Betty would go bicycling, or he would go

bicycling, and he would come by on his bicycle. And so, that was what was kind

of shocking. Ernie was a little overweight, but he exercised a lot with the

bicycling. But he had no knowledge of heart trouble.

RR: Striking appearance. Dark hair, kind of stocky.

ED: Stocky. Kind of dark skinned.

RR: Yes. Handsome, I guess.

ED: Yes, he was kind of handsome. As I say, he was a little bit pudgy, but had a kind

of breezy manner. Everybody at the Capitol liked him. All the old Faubus guys.

And I think Faubus kind of liked him in a way, kind of liked Valachovic.

RR: Oh, yes. He spoke very fondly of him to me when I interviewed Faubus, you

know, all those years later. In fact, if you didn’t know any better, you’d have

thought the two of them were big buddies.

ED: Well, I think he liked Valachovic quite a lot and wished he did not work for the

Gazette. Although Faubus himself didn’t have too much to do with this at this

point, but I’ll kind of relate this anecdote about Faubus and the Gazette. And this

was in one of his efforts to come back into politics. I think it was either 1970 or

22 1974. He didn’t run again in 1966. He got divorced, came back and made another effort in 1970, and was defeated by Dale Bumpers in the run-off in the

Democratic primary. And then he was defeated again by David Pryor in 1974.

And it was one of those two races, and I was covering him. And I remember we had wound up some evening — it was a big evening rally right before the election at Heber Springs. And he was speaking out on the back of the courthouse square in Heber Springs. And I got there late, and there was a crowd, eight or nine hundred people gathered out there on the back, and he had a little platform or something, or truck, up there, and he had gotten up and was speaking. And I kind of was out in the crowd and under a tree or something and he got to reminiscing, as he occasionally did. It was not altogether a typical campaign speech. And he got to kind of reminiscing about his life and his career in the governor’s office.

And he talked a little bit about the Gazette, how the Gazette had worked so hard against him. But he said, “But, you know, I always liked the Gazette.” And he said, as far as news coverage, it was the best newspaper in Arkansas. It always told things fairly. And he said, “Now, the editorial page is another matter.” He had a lot of grievances with the editorial page, but he always thought the news side treated him fairly, and their reporting was accurate and balanced and fair.

And it was a strange — I’d never heard him say that before, and why he said it at

Heber Springs, why he would have — if it was for my benefit, I see him every day. He never said it to me personally or any other time. It was kind of mystifying about why he said it that particular day. And I don’t know. Might

23 have been nobody from the Democrat there or the Commercial Appeal there to

take offense by it, but I don’t know. But I remember where it was and everything.

It was in the courthouse, back of, behind the courthouse at Heber Springs.

RR: Do you remember a conversation that you and I had with him one evening at the

governor’s mansion?

ED: 1964.

RR: Was that when it was? Late in his career.

ED: Well, it was — he had been elected. He had beaten Winthrop Rockefeller in

1964. And so probably December, about a month after the election or so, or

might have been a little longer, but seemed to me, it was between the election and

the time that he was inaugurated for his last term. He invited all the press who

had covered him to a party at the governor’s mansion. He had never done

anything like that before. So we all went out there. You and I went out there for

the Gazette, and Harry Pearson was there for the Pine Bluff Commercial. I think

George Douthit was there. John Robert Starr, I remember, was there, from the

Associated Press. And some people with tv stations and radio stations, or

whatever. I recall Bob Troutt had been there although he’d been on — I think he

had joined Faubus, I remember, as his secretary or some kind of federally paid

position. And so we had dinner that night, or we had hors d’oeuvres. I think we

had dinner. And Harry Pearson showed some slides. Harry Pearson, for the Pine

Bluff Commercial, had taken a whole bunch of pictures during the campaign and

had slides, so we had to sit through a thirty-minute slide show, narrated by Harry

24 Pearson. Pictures of Winthrop Rockefeller and pictures of Orval Faubus and

snapshots all over the state. So we sat through all of that with the lights out. And

Faubus said some reminisces for a while, and everybody began to filter out. And

you and I were kind of close to the door right at the end, and I think maybe by

that time you and I might have been the only ones there.

RR: I think that’s right.

ED: You and I were the only ones there. And Faubus was kind of at the door and kind

of asked, “Come back.” And, as I recall, we kind of went back in the living room

for a couple of minutes and chatted. And he started talking about his — see if this

matches your memory of it — about, he was kind of boasting that he was the real

Southern liberal. That of all the Southern governors, he was the most progressive

of the Southern governors. You had Leroy Collins of Florida. You would bring

up another of one of these, and he’d say, “Well, yes, but . . .” And he’d talk about

all the great things he did for poor people and improving state benefits for poor

people and the state hospital and getting rid of the snake pit that the state hospital

. . . and starting an employees’ retirement system, a retirement system for state

employees, and getting benefits and improving benefits for teachers and working

people and workers’ compensation. He had a litany of all these fairly

progressive, liberal things that he had done. And then you had to do the — raise

the obvious question, “But, Governor, what about . . .?” And to my recollection,

you were obviously going to ask about ‘57, the calling out the troops in ‘57, and I

don’t know whether you finished the question or what, but my recollection after

25 all these years was it went something like this: He said, “Well, you can’t do great

things unless you are in office. You can have great ideas about things you’re

going to do and run and never get them done, but if you are going to get things

done, you have to hold office.”

RR: That’s right.

ED: “And you have to trim your sails to the wind.” That’s a phrase, I think, he used.

“You have to trim your sails to the winds and you gain office and you get things

done.” And that was his kind of justification, I thought, the strongest I think I’d

ever heard him make, kind of acknowledging that he did it for political reasons in

1957 and not because he heard that there was going to be violence.

RR: That’s interesting. Your memory of it has a lot more detail than mine, but

everything you said rings a bell. I think that’s right.

ED: And he talked about the effect that Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas had on . . .

RR: On Sam [Faubus].

ED: On Sam and also on Roosevelt. He said if you go back and look at what

Roosevelt did, there wasn’t a fresh idea in all of it. He said it was Norman

Thomas and, mainly, Eugene Debs. That Eugene Debs was talking about a

system of universal social security. It was Eugene Debs who talked about all of

these things, and that years later Roosevelt adopted these things. And he said,

“That’s how these things work.” People with kind of radical ideas and then

generations pass and then it becomes acceptable in a crisis to do these kinds of

things. And that was kind of, I thought it was kind of a remarkable evening. And

26 I didn’t know how frank and how really honest he was, or whether he was just

trying to impress us because he knew we were kind of liberals and whether he

was just trying to make us feel good about him.

RR: There was one other thing. In fact, I must have gone back home that night and

typed up some notes on that conversation because I came across those notes on

that old yellow newsprint that we used at the office. When I did the Faubus book,

I came across this note. It was over a page long, maybe two pages, about the

conversation you and I had with him, and what I remember from those notes now

is what he had to say about his father being a member of the Socialist Party, or

not saying about it. Do you remember we tried to get him to tell us that Sam had

been a member of the Socialist Party? We’d been hearing that. And he dodged

around the question. He never would answer.

ED: Yes, he was arrested for that in World War I.

RR: Yes. We didn’t know that at the time. We didn’t know about his being arrested

until much later. But Pat Owens had picked up somewhere — in fact, Owens and

I had talked a little about doing a book about Faubus and even talked about going

up to see Sam and we actually drove up there once and missed him. Anyway, you

and I were trying . . .

ED: Didn’t Owens once talk to Sam though?

RR: He did, yes. Yes. But Orval, that night, talked all around that. And we went

away, in my memory of it, we went away from that conversation convinced that,

yes, his daddy had been a Socialist and that he stopped just short of telling us that,

27 yes, but he still wasn’t ready to because he was still in office, and he wasn’t ready

to damage his future prospects or whatever. He just wasn’t going to talk about it

at that time. But he came awfully close in part of the conversation that was done

about Debs and Norman Thomas and the, in other words, the socialism he had

learned at his daddy’s knee. But I had wanted him to say, “Yes, my daddy was a

Socialist,” but he wouldn’t do it. Do you remember that part of it at all?

ED: Vaguely. I don’t remember it as specifically as the other. And my memory may

not be too sharp on the other, but I’m almost positive about that quote “to trim

your sails to the wind” [as] a politician. “To trim your sails to the wind.”

RR: Yes, I’m pretty sure I remember that.

ED: And had you been able to print all of that, it still would not have been entirely

clear that he was acknowledging that. But it was clear to you and I, to us, that he

was acknowledging he did it for political reasons in order to stay in office. Which

we all knew, but he had always maintained that he did it to forestall violence.

[End of Side One, Tape One]

[Beginning of Side Two, Tape One]

RR: We’ve been talking about Orval Faubus. Back to Valachovic, in a way. There

was a peculiar interlude of sorts during the — I guess it was the 1964 campaign,

when the Gazette got some reporting help from a non-staff person. I’m talking

about your friend and mine, Mamie Ruth Williams. Do you remember her going

out to the Capitol, day after day, searching the files?

ED: She did some research — what was it about? There was . . .

28 RR: Well, various . . .

ED: There was a commodities — some kind of a . . .

RR: Mo Ca Ben . . .

ED: Mo Ca Ben. Capital M-O, capital C-A, capital B-E-N. The M,C, and B are

capitalized. Mo Ca Ben. And I guess that was — A.C. Mowery was the “Mo,”

A.C. Mowrey, who was the head of the Agricultural Stabilization and

Conservation Service. The “Ca” was, I guess, Cain.

RR: Howard Cain.

ED: Howard Cain, another Faubus man. And the “Ben” — who would the “Ben” have

been? I don’t remember who the “Ben” was or if anybody ever figured it out.

But, anyway, apparently they’d formed some kind of corporation, and she kind of

tracked it down and figured out that these three guys were bidding and getting

contracts for delivery of commodities, federal food commodities. And it would

be kind of a conflict here. The guys who were kind of administering — I don’t

know whether they were specifically administering these programs, but clearly a

conflict of interest for these government officials to be going together to get that

business. Now, that’s about all I can remember about that, but she did some other

kind of research, too, research about Faubus and some of the cronyism that was

going on in state government at that time.

RR: She and Valachovic got to be pretty good buddies during that period, didn’t they?

ED: I think so. I think she was probably helping Valachovic with that stuff. He

probably had some ideas, and she was doing some of the digging.

29 RR: She was very friendly with the Gazette throughout this whole period.

ED: Remained so. Mamie Ruth Williams, her — probably because her daddy was an

old newspaper man. I think he might have worked for the Gazette briefly, but at

the El Dorado Daily News, I think they made him an editor down at El Dorado

back . . .

RR: Do you remember his full name? Brown.

ED: His name was Brown. And I’ve forgotten what his first name was. He was an old

veteran, a big leader in the American Legion. But he had been a newspaperman,

and I think he had gone to the University of Missouri, if I’m not mistaken.

Maybe he had gone to, graduated from the University of Missouri, one of the

early first classes at the University of Missouri. And so she always had

newspapering in her blood, and when she was in high school at Central High

School, she was the editor of the school paper. She was always a frustrated

newspaper person, and so she always developed these relationships with

newspaper people. With you, with Valachovic, with me. We’ve kept a

friendship, and we still see each other every Wednesday. How many years has it

been? Forty years? I know I first met her . . .

RR: About.

ED: I first met her when I first came here in 1960 at a school board election. She was

trying to figure out if the White Citizens’ Council was supporting a certain

candidate in the school board election. And so she called me about it and

arranged for me to come over to her house on Shiller or Summit or one of those

30 streets. Wolfe Street over on the east side over near . . .

RR: That’s right. Wolfe Street.

ED: Wolfe Street. W-O-L-F-E. And we went over there, and Pat House got on the

phone and called the Citizens’ Council headquarters and said, “I’m just

wondering about this — I’m just confused about this election. Who should we

vote for in the school board election?” And “Should I vote for so-and-so?” And

whoever it was said, “Yes.” So she started asking some more questions, and they

got suspicious. And somebody got suspicious and, finally, somebody else came

on line and said, “We’re not making any endorsements in the school board

election.” At any rate, this was all done at Mamie Ruth’s house, and a Gazette

reporter went over there to listen on the upstairs phone while Pat House made this

call. And that was my introduction to Mamie Ruth Williams. So she would call

over the years with tips, and she had this network of friends also who had all

these tips, like, one of the great characters was Uncle Max Allison. Do you

remember Uncle Max Allison?

RR: Oh, yes.

ED: M-A-X. A-L-L-I-S-O-N. He was commonly known as Uncle Max. Uncle Max

didn’t work. He had been a schoolteacher back in the 30s and had been — I don’t

know whether he was bitten by a tse-tse fly or whatever, but he developed this

sleeping sickness.

RR: Yes.

ED: So that, particularly in the heat of the afternoon, you’d be talking to him, and he’d

31 just go to sleep . . .

RR: Yes.

ED: . . . in the middle of a sentence, and might wake up and resume the sentence. But

all Max did was meddle in politics and — because he got a pension, he got a

permanent disabilities pension as a result of that illness, by Johnny Miller, who

was an old Federal judge, former United States Senator who was appointed to the

Federal bench by Franklin Roosevelt in about 1941. But, at the time, he was just

a lawyer up at Melbourne, around Melbourne, Arkansas, or someplace up there,

and Uncle Max was from Batesville, and New York Metropolitan Life Insurance,

I think it was, they were refusing to pay him. So it went to trial. It was tried one

August up in Melbourne at the Izard County Courthouse. And they had the

windows open and the heat was insufferable and, finally, it got down to the last

and the government had put on its case and, as a rebuttal witness, Johnny Miller

called Max Allison to the stand, put him in the box there, and asked him a few

questions. And Uncle Max went to sleep in the box [laughter] as Johnny Miller

knew he was. His head fell off to the side. His tongue kind of hung out, and he

just — and so the judge just said the court would just kind of recess for a few

minutes, so everybody sat there. Everybody rustled in their seats a few minutes

and, finally, Uncle Max kind of came to and completed his sentence. And as soon

as he finished, the thing went to the jury and the jury came right back and gave

him a pension for life. So he meddled in politics. He was the guy that got — he

got Johnny Miller then elected to the U.S. Senate. He pulled off this great coup to

32 get in . . .

RR: Yes.

ED: . . . in a special election in 1937. He got Johnny Miller elected to the U.S. Senate

over Governor Carl Bailey, a very popular first-term governor who controlled all

the politics, the political organization, but Max — it was one of these crazy

schemes that Uncle Max cooked up and got him nominated and elected. And then

later he was Wilbur Mills’s mentor and a lot of other more unsavory characters

like Jim Johnson. But that’s all he did was meddle in politics. And he was

Wilbur’s eyes and ears in Arkansas back home, and he was a great source. He

was always a great tipster of information for me. I got a lot of stories out of . . .

RR: Did you meet him over at Walgreen’s Drug Store?

ED: I’ve forgotten now where I met Uncle Max.

RR: That’s where I always went to see Uncle Max. Usually about three in the

afternoon, you know, he’d call up and say, [gruffy voiced] “Can you meet me

down at . . . .” I think it was Walgreen’s. He had that kind of . . .

ED: Raspy voice.

RR: Raspy voice, yes. And, frequently, he’d go to sleep.

ED: Yes, he’d nearly always go to sleep. Sometimes he’d say, “Pick me up at a

certain place,” and so I had been in my car and I’d be at the Capitol and I’d go by

and I’d pick him up. He’d be at the curb at a certain place. And he always wore

this old felt hat, brown, dark gray felt hat, and a suit with a tobacco stain on it.

RR: Yes.

33 ED: And so he’d squeeze down into the car and we’d go someplace and park and he’d

tell me whatever it was he had to tell me. And, of course, it was always hot in the

car, and I’d try to roll the windows down, but it didn’t make any difference

because Uncle Max would always go to sleep in the car. And I’d have to sit there

sometimes fifteen, twenty minutes until Max woke up and finished his story.

RR: Yes. He was always mysterious. It was like meeting a spy, you know?

ED: Yes.

RR: Some information passed . . .

ED: Yes. Like you ought to — under a lamp post or something.

RR: Yes. And that hat was always pulled down over his eyes.

ED: He didn’t want anybody to know who he was although everybody knew who he

was. He walked along the sidewalk in shambles, just kind of shambling along.

RR: Yes. But he and, in fact, wouldn’t you know, he and Mamie Ruth were friends.

ED: They were very close friends. Mamie Ruth was frequently a conduit for Uncle

Max’s information. She’d call and say, “Now, a source told me this.”

RR: [Laughs] Right. When she was doing that investigation of Mo Ca Ben and other

scandals of the Faubus administration — It was during the Rockefeller campaign

of ‘64, if you remember, all the liberal Democrats went over to the Republican

Rockefeller that year, and she was working to help elect Rockefeller. And I have

this vague recollection of Mamie Ruth down in the basement of the Capitol — it

must have been files down there, old filing cabinets or something, but she would

kind of haunt the basement. Kind of like the Hunchback of Notre Dame or

34 something. You know, you’d kind of see her down there — I’m not even sure

that they had files down there. Do you remember anything like that?

ED: Well, yes, there were some — a lot of the permanent files were down there in

those old musty rooms down there. In those days there weren’t any offices down

there. There was mainly just files, and it was kind of dirty and dark and dingy

down there. Now they’ve kind of cleaned it up. It’s a lot of nice offices in the

basement. But I don’t know whether they had the commodities, some welfare

information down there. Purchasing, I think, probably, that’s where the

purchasing — the purchasing department was in the Capitol, and they probably

had a room of files down there.

RR: Purchasing. That’s the files.

ED: The State Purchasing Division.

RR: Mack Sturgis.

ED: Mack Sturgis was the purchasing agent.

RR: [He had it in for Mamie.]?

ED: Yes. Mack was one of, Mack Sturgis was, I guess, the original Faubus crony.

They were buddies together as young men up in Huntsville. They worked

together on road crews and so forth as young men.

RR: Did you cover the midnight pay raises?

ED: Not much.

RR: I don’t want to hear the whole story, but I was wondering if there was anything

about covering the story that . . .

35 ED: No, I think that was mainly Valachovic because that was — midnight pay raises. .

.

RR: That was Sturgis.

ED: Yes. He had sent — he was having trouble with the Highway Commission, so he

sent — of course, he’d stacked the Highway Commission. All the Highway

Commissioners were his men.

RR: Faubus?

ED: Faubus. They were Faubus appointees. And, I think, Ward Goodman had been

over there, so they had some professionals over there, and Faubus wanted to put

his own man over there, so he had the Highway Commission name Mack Sturgis

as the Highway Director for a time. And they got over there and cranked out

some pay raises.

RR: He and old Whelchel.

ED: Yes, Y.W. Whelchel. Whelchel kind of turned on him and ratted on him and gave

the — to Rockefeller. Young William Whelchel, I guess was his name. Y.W.

Whelchel, W-H-E-L-C-H-E-L. And he was kind of the, some administrator in the

Highway Department and knew the computers. And so they had gone over there

late at night after everybody had gone and rigged the computers for all these big

pay raises for all the higher ups in the department.

RR: A couple of thousand people, I think.

ED: Yes, there were quite a few. It was a big chunk of money.

RR: Yes.

36 ED: And the Highway Commission exploded about it, at least, some members of the

Highway Commission, and, in fact, — I’ve forgotten whether they fired Mack

Sturgis over it or — he was kind of forced out.

RR: I think Mack was getting ready to leave. He had had some heart trouble, and this

was, maybe, his last day on the job when he did this. Let me ask you about some

other stories that you have been involved in. You were there when Bumpers

became Governor.

ED: Yes.

RR: And you covered Bumpers during his campaign. What do you remember about

his campaign for governor?

ED: Well, it was . . .

RR: In covering it as a reporter.

ED: He was kind of a refreshing candidate because— I didn’t cover him in the

primaries. As I recall, in the Democratic primaries of 1970, I think I covered

Faubus. [He] was my main person that I covered. I think Bill Lewis might have

covered Bumpers in the primaries, whatever. But I run across him from time to

time and because — And I had met Bumpers. He had come down in 1968, had

thought about running for governor in 1968, and nobody had ever heard of him

then. He was an attorney in Charleston. But when Ted Boswell filed, he decided

he wasn’t going to run. He liked Boswell. So he didn’t run. I think he came

down to Little Rock, and I think somebody talked him out of it, talked him out of

running. It might have been Martin Borchert, or somebody like that. Or Ben

37 Allen. Either Ben Allen or Martin Borchert said, “No, governor, forget about it.

Keep your money in your pocket and let’s do it in two years.” And I had met him briefly down at the Welfare Department because he came down to the state

Welfare Department representing nursing homes. They were petitioning in an increase in payments from the state for medicare patients. And under Rockefeller and the old regime — the nursing homes were in bad repute in the Rockefeller administration because they were run by a guy named Charlie Stewart, kind of a creepy sleeze bag who was in kind of a bad reputation at least from the standpoint of the Republicans. So the nursing home people figured they had to get a different kind of person to represent them than Charlie Stewart. So they hired

Dale Bumpers to represent them. Of course, his family owned a little nursing home at Charleston, Arkansas. So he came down. And [at] the big meeting down at the Welfare Department I covered, he was there. He represented them and made the case for them. So that was my one time I had met Dale Bumpers, and that would have been probably sometime in ‘68 or maybe ‘69. And then he filed in 1970. Of course, I was kind of impressed with him. He was articulate, but thought, “Nobody knows who this guy is.” And this was the race in which Orval

Faubus had filed to make his comeback, and everybody was thinking he probably would win. Then you had the Speaker of the House. Hayes McClerkin was running. Hayes C. McClerkin. H-A-Y-E-S Initial C. M-C-C-L-E-R-K-I-N.

He was a state representative from Texarkana. He had been the Speaker of the

House, very progressive fellow who had put together an alternative tax program

38 when the legislature defeated Rockefeller’s tax program in 1969. Hayes and Ray

Smith had put together a modest tax program to move things forward when

Rockefeller’s mammoth program failed. And so he had a pretty good reputation.

And he was a smart lawyer. And so he was running. Joe Purcell was running, the

Attorney General who had never been beaten and had a fine — a very dull man,

but had an unshakable reputation for honesty and so forth in government. So the

favorites would, of course, have been Faubus and Joe Purcell and then Hayes

McClerkin was running and Bill Wells, who was Bill Wells of Hermitage,

Arkansas, an old radio man who had served in the House for a number of years

and who had this great radio voice, a nice looking fellow, and had been the

Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor in 1968 and had narrowly missed

being elected Lt. Governor. So he had a lot of name recognition. And then you

had Bob Compton, who was head of the state Bar Association, what appeared to

be the best trial lawyer in Arkansas. He was running. And Jim Malone, of

Lonoke, was a fish farmer, and he was a kind of flamboyant speaker who used to

go around for Faubus, as a stand-in for Faubus, in the past because he was kind of

a golden throat, golden orator. He had this great reputation as an orator. He

loved to get up on the stump. And he was running. And then some right-wing

segregationist named Bill Cheek. C-H-E-E-K, of West Memphis was running, who was the funniest guy in the race. He’d get up every day and tell stories and have the crowd just roaring. And then he had a heart attack, I think maybe two or three days after the election, and he died, right after, immediately after the

39 election. But he was the most entertaining guy, one of the most entertaining guys ever to run for the office. But you had this field, I think, of about seven or eight, so who was Dale Bumpers? But Bumpers would call me from time to time during the race, and he’d call me up and say, “I want to talk about some issue.” He wanted to talk about education funding and asking all kinds of questions. So he was interviewing me about education stuff and taking notes. So he’d take all these notes. So I kind of liked that, you know. Here he was, calling me for information about how state government operated and so forth. And if he was going to develop an issue, he’d call up, partly me and some others as well, to see exactly how this thing worked so he wouldn’t make a mistake. So, of course, he won the Democratic Primary, and in the general election he ran against

Rockefeller. And, of course, — he defeated Faubus in the run-off handily by a landside — and then in the general election beat Rockefeller by two to one.

Rockefeller spent $10 million. — Charlie Allbright said later it was probably at least $10 million, is what Rockefeller spent in that election. It wasn’t reported as much, but when you added it all up, it was easily, he thought, in excess of $10 million. — And I think Bumpers spent about a quarter of a million. And he need not have spent a single penny of it because it came out he got exactly the percentage of votes the polls showed he had when the race began. So I campaigned with him in the fall in the general election, so I traveled with him every day and riding around in cars — you know, he’d start off, make his way through the mountains and go from town to town, making these little talks or just

40 handshaking. And it was hilarious because all day long I’d sit in the backseat and maybe there’d be a driver — I think there was a young lawyer from Danville,

Arkansas driving him. — and he’d tell stories all day long. Jokes and stories endlessly. I mean, he just had endless supply of stories. And as soon as he would get in the car, something would trigger something and he’d tell stories for the next thirty miles. And he was funny. I remember specifically, do you remember Mark

Woolsey, from Ozark Arkansas? There was an old guy who was chairman of the workers’ compensation commission named Mark Woolsey. W-O-O-L-S-E-Y.

And Mark was this old guy. Mark was probably 65, most boring, dullest old guy.

I’d go cover workers’ compensation hearings and he’d sit up there and he’d just

— what a stuffy, boring guy this guy was. He was an old lawyer up there. Dale

Bumpers started telling Mark Woolsey stories, and this guy became the funniest guy who ever lived, was Mark Woolsey, the most brilliant, hilarious guy. And he would tell about traveling together, that Woolsey would hire him, Woolsey would have some case, and he might have to go to Washington to try some case in

Washington for somebody before the tax court or something and, of course, Mark didn’t want to do any work, and he’d hire Dale to do some research and go up there with him. So they’d get in the car and drive all the way to Washington to try this case. And so all the way up, he’d tell stories. And he’d emulate Mark

Woosley. And so Bumpers would just become Mark Woolsey for maybe three hours at a time, talking and what Mark Woolsey said and it was just hilarious.

We were just — Tucker Steinmetz was on the same, he was covering for the

41 Democrat-Gazette. And so, at the end of the day, he was . . .

RR: For the Democrat.

ED: For the Democrat, yes. So both of us would be so sore from laughing at the end

of the day that our sides would hurt. And he was just [carefree?]. He didn’t talk

anything about the campaign or anything else. He just told stories all day long.

Day after day after day, he’d just tell stories. And he was just completely relaxed.

I guess he knew he was going to win. And then he’d hop out of the car and go

campaigning. Of course, he met, he knew everybody. And the most astonishing

thing was his memory. Bill Clinton is the only person I’ve ever known who is

better at this. We were someplace like Conway, and we’d gotten out and he’d

hop out and hit Walmart’s. He never missed a Walmart. And he’d campaign and

go down every, throughout the aisles at Walmart, everywhere, and then the

checkout lines. He’d shake every hand in a Walmart and across the parking lot.

And he’d tell them who he was and he’d ask, “What’s your name?” He’d always

ask everybody what their name was. So I think we were in the supermarket line

or something in Conway. And we were going through the line and he shook

hands with this woman. And he said, “Wait a minute. Now, aren’t you Mrs.

Hunkapillar? I met you over at — What are you doing here? I met you at the

Walmart at Forest City last week.” And she was just, you could just tell, she was

just transformed. She was going to vote for Dale Bumpers for the rest of her life.

RR: [Laughs]

ED: And, of course, he was a great campaigner, personally.

42 RR: That was the first thing that stuck me about him was his memory for names. I had

met him one time at some place like Chidester during a campaign. A long time

went by, and I saw him again and he remembered who I was, called me by name.

And no reason he should have. I guess he still has that [?] of memory.

ED: I guess he does. I don’t know whether it has atrophied over the years or not. But

the unusual thing about Bumpers was, you know, he ran this, [to quote a typical ?]

positive campaign. He never attacked his opponents. He maintained that pretty

much throughout his political career except, I guess, the last time when he ran

against Mike Huckabee. Huckabee made him so mad that he attacked Huckabee

a time or two during that campaign. But, other than that, he never talked about

his opponent, never spoke badly of any opponent. I remember that general

election of 1970. And it was the night before the election. And we were on an

airplane coming back from Fort Smith. He had made, I think, his last — or

maybe not Fort Smith. Or maybe it was within the last two days before the

election. And we were flying back in a storm from Fort Smith. I remember

because Tucker and I were just terrified. The plane was bucking around through

the sky and there was lightening all around. And so Bumpers disavowed his

remark early in the campaign, or the thing that was widely quoted early in the

campaign, that he had once challenged the parting of the Red Sea, that it was a

kind of a myth. An AP feature story said that he had once done that in his

Methodist Sunday school class. He had challenged the class. He said, “Don’t

you think the parting of the Red Sea was just a myth and it really didn’t happen?”

43 Well, Bumpers, we were coming back to this, said, “No, no. The parting of the

Red Sea really happened!” [Laughter] But he was telling about early in that . . .

RR: I think we are being broken into.

[Someone enters the room. Tape interrupted.]

RR: Okay. Go ahead with the Bumpers story.

ED: Okay. And, again, we were flying back from Fort Smith, and he was kind of

reminiscing about the whole campaign. And he recalled that early in the race for

the Democratic nomination, he was nowhere. He was still down at 1% in the

polls and he got a call from Roger Mears. And Roger— this was Roger and

Uncle Max were a pair, you know. Uncle Max was the brains and Roger was the

front man. And Roger was the chairman of the Pulaski County Democratic

Committee, that had Jim Brandon, Roger Mears — this was the liberal reform

wing of the Democratic Party in Arkansas, and it was all right here in Little Rock.

And they had captured control of the Democratic Committee. And this was the

only place in the state, I guess, that that was true. And Roger told him, “We’re

prepared here in Pulaski County. The reform Democrats here want to go together

to back one candidate. And that’s going to be the candidate that comes out and

polarizes the race between himself and Orval Faubus.” And would come out and

denounce Faubus for permitting illegal gambling at Hot Springs, for Arkansas

Loan and Thrift, for the prison scandals — they blamed the scandals in the state

prison and the insurance fraud and all that in the insurance industry. And “If

you’ll come out, and make this your campaign, attacking Orval Faubus, you’ll

44 polarize the whole campaign between the two of you and we’ll support you. And this is your only chance.” And Bumpers said, “Well, I don’t know whether I want to do that. I just don’t like to run that kind of campaign. I want to run on my merits. My daddy always taught me politics is a noble profession and I just think it’s demeaning to go out and attack people.” And he said, “Well, if you don’t do it, you’re dead in the water. You’ve got twenty-four hours to decide. We’d like to support you, but you’ve got twenty-four hours. If not, we’ll go to somebody else.” So he had twenty-four hours to think about it, so all day thought about it.

And late that night he was at, I think he said he was at a hotel or motel or something in Batesville. And he was stewing about it. He couldn’t sleep. And he thought it was a pivotal time in the race. Indeed, he was nowhere. He was a nobody in the race, and here he had the chance to get this Pulaski County organization behind him, but it still bothered him. So he called Ted Boswell at

Bryant, a trial lawyer that he knew who had just barely been stolen out of the

Governor’s office, I think, two years earlier, and told him, “Look, this is what they want me to do. What would you do?” And he said, “Well, if it were me, I would have started off the race that way. I like that kind of stuff. That’s all I want to do is go ahead and kick ass and fight. That’s what I’d be doing. But you’re not me.” And he said, “You’ve got to do what you feel comfortable doing because you’re probably going to lose. And the day after the election, you want to be able to look back, if you’ve lost the election, and say, ‘I ran an honorable race and I ran it like I wanted to run it.” So he said, “You have to live with

45 yourself, so you do what, you have to just run your own campaign and don’t be

guided by anybody else.” So he said he felt good about it and said, “I’m not

going to do it,” and he slept soundly, got up early the next morning, called Roger

Mears and said, “I’m not going to do it.” And he said Mears told him, “You’re

the stupidest son-of-a-bitch who ever lived. You are 1% in the polls and you’re

going to be 1% on election day. And this was your only chance,” and hung up on

him and then went to Hayes McClerkin, and Hayes agreed to do it. And Hayes

spent the rest of the campaign attacking Faubus and the gambling and the

Arkansas Loan and Thrift. And the Gazette cheered him on and he finished about

fourth in the race. And so Bumpers had kind of reinforced what his daddy — his

daddy had told him the right thing.

RR: Yes.

ED: And you remember in the general election, in the runoff, he wouldn’t talk about

Faubus. In the general election, had no criticism of Winthrop Rockefeller. And

then when he ran against Fulbright, remember he wouldn’t criticize Fulbright. It

just enraged Fulbright. Fulbright could never engage him in a real argument.

That was his whole political career. Now later on, he didn’t mind attacking

Ronald Reagan and George Bush and those kind of people, but he never attacked

his own opponent in a campaign except for . . .

RR: Except Mike Huckabee.

ED: Except Mike Huckabee.

RR: Did you cover Bill Bowen?

46 ED: Not much. I remember in 1964 there was talk about Faubus might not run again.

In fact, I think he wasn’t going to run again in '64 and then wound up running

again anyway. And so, I think, at the time they were talking about Bowen and

Hardy Croxton might be candidates for governor. And Bowen never did. And I

always thought Bowen would’ve made a good governor. Didn’t know him too

well. I got to know him much better later on and liked Bowen.

RR: When he was working for Clinton?

ED: Yes, before that. The first, when I really got to know Bowen, I guess, was in

1968. By that time, I think he was head of the Arkansas Bankers’ Association. I

think maybe by that time he had left the Friday law firm. You know, used to be,

he was a partner, a senior partner, in the law firm. It used to be [Mahafey?],

Smith, Friday, Eldridge, Friday and Bowen. And he became president of the First

Commercial National Bank first and left the big law firm. He had been their big

tax lawyer. And he’d been helpful to me, privately, in a big series of articles I did

on Witt and Jack Stephens. He had been their attorney, a tax lawyer for Stephens

and so forth, but he had been helpful to me privately in developing that story

about how they built their financial empire. And then in 1968 or so, remember

Arkansas Loan and Thrift?

RR: Yes.

ED: One of the great scandals. This kind of hybrid savings and loan organized over at

Fort Smith and Van Buren and took in four or five million dollars from widows

and churches and then squandered it all. And a whole bunch of state officials

47 were involved: Bruce Bennett, the Attorney General, and Paul Van Dalsem, a

state senator named Joe Lee Anderson. And Bruce Bennett, of course, was the

Attorney General, it turns out, wrote a whole bunch of opinions to state

regulators, Faubus regulators, telling them that they could not regulate this

company, which allowed it to flourish for about four years until they’d collect

four or five million dollars and spent it all. They just split it up among

themselves, and there was nothing left for all the depositors. And during the

course of working on the story, I went over to Van Buren and spent a few days,

prowling through — once the Securities and Exchange Commission took over and

got the place, it had bankruptcied, I went over there and these SEC lawyers turned

over all these files to me. And in the course of that, I found out in the course of

that and in the trial that followed that a guy named Claude Carpenter and Kay

Matthews — Claude Carpenter had been put on the payroll of Arkansas Loan and

Thrift. And the same day he was put on the payroll — he was put on the payroll a

day after a lawsuit was filed by the Attorney General to try to put Arkansas Loan

and Thrift out of business. It was operating illegally.

RR: Not the Attorney General. The U.S. Attorney.

ED: No, Attorney General Joe Purcell.

RR: Purcell! This was after . . .

ED: Yes, he filed the lawsuit, and then two years later . . .

RR: Right.

ED: that’s when the SEC came in because the lawsuit was filed and landed in Kay

48 Matthews’s court. And the next day, Arkansas Loan and Thrift came in and hired

Claude Carpenter and put him on retainer. And he was the law partner and

business partner and closest friend of Kay Matthews, the judge. And the judge

then sat on that case for two years and did nothing. And so I developed all the

information on that and had written a story about it. And so, I talked to Bill

Bowen about it, who was, I think, at that time president of the Arkansas — I don’t

know whether it was the Bar Association or the Bankers’ Association — and he

had been an attorney involved in the case. He had tried to get them shut down

and had been squelched in Kay Matthews’s court repeatedly when he tried to get

something done about Arkansas Loan and Thrift. So, I remember, he told me that

if my story published, he would, the next day, seek the disbarment of both Kay

Matthews and Claude Carpenter, if that story appeared in the paper because he

thought it was grounds for disbarment and removal of Judge Matthews from the

bench. And so he was helpful to me in getting stuff for that story. But then, of

course, I wrote that story and the Gazette sent that story over to the Rose law

firm, and Archie House advised the Gazette not to run the story because he said it

would destroy public confidence in the judicial system. And so we never ran that

story.

RR: You mean about the connection between Kay and Claude?

ED: Yes. So those were my first dealings with Bill Bowen.

RR: I was skipping around. You dealt with every state official from Orval Faubus

through, well, Bill Clinton and even on past that. Betsey Wright is one of the

49 quick characters who inhabited our state at one time. Did you deal with her as a

reporter?

ED: Very little as a reporter because she came along — probably she moved to

Arkansas in December of 1980. Now, I had gone to the editorial page in January

1979. A week or two after Bill Clinton became governor, I went up to write

editorials. And she came along after Bill Clinton was defeated in 1980. But I met

her when she first came here. She came to put his files in order, and she’d been

down in Texas and they had known each other several years, since the McGovern

campaign. So she came up, ostensibly, to put his files in shape. And she shared

an office with Gloria Cabe, a good friend of ours who was state representative,

and so Gloria took me over to introduce me one night to Betsey Wright. And she

lived in our neighborhood for some years until she left and went to — wherever

she went to after she — I guess she went to Washington.

RR: What kind of a person is Betsey?

ED: Awfully bright and just — she was kind almost — I don’t guess she worshiped

Bill Clinton, but she was devoted to Bill Clinton like nobody else ever was. She

worked for him seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, all that time. You

know, she ran that office, ran the Governor’s Office, ran the campaign in almost

every detail of it. Tried to keep tabs on Bill Clinton’s personal life. Tried to do

the best she can to control his personal life as well. And she went to work every

morning before daylight, and she would stay there until 11:00 at night. She had

no life of her own all those years. When he was governor, she was, her life was

50 running state government for Bill Clinton and his campaigns.

RR: Did she have good political instincts?

ED: Yes, I thought she did. I thought she had pretty good political instincts. But I

never did know too much about — because she never talked about it. We saw her

socially some. Of course, she lived in the neighborhood, and she was friends with

Gloria Cabe, and we would see each other, but she was never, she would never

talk anything about internal stuff in the Governor’s Office, never breached any

confidence. So I never did know just what her role was or what kind of advice

she gave Bill Clinton.

RR: Let’s go back to the Gazette and the last of the last days of the paper, you know,

in the last years. You were there when Gannett bought the paper and right on up

to the end. I’d like for you to just tell that story from your own perspective.

ED: You mean all that five years?

RR: Yes.

ED: Well, I guess to kind of go back a little bit, after the mid-80s, it became clear,

finally, that the Gazette wasn’t going to make it, but we had all been convinced

by Hugh Patterson and others that when Hussman bought the Democrat and made

overtures to Hugh Patterson about a joint operating agreement and Hugh

dismissed it, we thought it was just a matterof time before the Democrat folds.

And then after several years and the Democrat began to grow, we really began to

get apprehensive about it and so then the lawsuit came along, when Hugh

Patterson filed a federal anti-trust lawsuit against the Democrat. And when that

51 lawsuit failed, the judgment came in in favor of the Democrat, it was pretty clear

to everybody that the Gazette could not make it because the Pattersons didn’t

have the resources to continue to fight and the paper was shrinking and we

weren’t filling vacancies on the staff, every effort being made to kind of conserve

resources, so we were all pretty bothered by it. And then there was a succession

of people who came through. There were two or three different instances, I think,

when people were interested in buying the Gazette and Hugh Patterson would

bring people around. There was a guy named Ingersoll, briefly, who was going to

buy the Gazette, and the word was it was almost a done deal and Hugh backed out

on him. And, reputedly, there were other deals like that. And particularly after

the Ingersoll thing, we found out something about Ingersoll and we were really

worried that the Gazette would be sold to some squirrelly rich guy who would, we

didn’t know what would happen to the paper. And I guess it was about — maybe

I talked to you about that time and you suggested maybe Knight-Ridder because

we’d have loved to have Knight-Ridder buy the Gazette. And you told me that if

Gene Roberts told them they ought to buy the Gazette that that might have some

influence on, was it Roy Ridder, who was running Knight-Ridder at the time?

RR: Tony, I think.

ED: Yes. At any rate, I was taking a vacation, so I went up there, I guess it would

have been in the summer of about 1986 and not long after the Ingersoll thing.

And I talked to Gene Foreman and he arranged for me to see Gene Roberts. And

I went in to see Gene Roberts. I’m sure he thought, “Here’s this crazy guy from

52 Arkansas who has no financial interest in the Gazette coming along suggesting we buy the Gazette.” So, anyway, he basically told me that Knight-Ridder would not

do it. Knight-Ridder was not going to buy a newspaper in a competitive market,

and neither was any other publicly held institution going to go into that kind of

situation. The New York Times wouldn’t, Knight-Ridder, and he didn’t think any

other publicly traded corporation would. And the best shot would be some place

like the McClatcheys in California, or the outfit, the Piedmont, that owned the

newspaper in Roanoke, Virginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina. And Walter

Rugaber. Walter Rugaber, I think, was by that time publisher at Greensboro/

Roanoke. So he said he just wasn’t going to talk to Ridder. In fact, it wouldn’t

do any good because he knew that was impossible. I think I did call Rugaber

about it as well. But, anyway, it wasn’t long after I got back that they had the

announcement that Gannett was buying the Gazette. And we all assembled in the

newsroom and word, I think, went out, kind of spread the evening before that

Gannett was going to buy it. So we all assembled in the newsroom, and Al

Neuharth was there. Hugh introduced Neuharth, who got up and made this

speech in which he’d said, “We’ve got deep pockets. You don’t have to worry.

The Gazette is going to be here from now on. We’ve got deep pockets.” So I had

mixed feeling about that. I didn’t like being owned by Gannett. I didn’t like

Gannett, but at least, we thought, one thing is certain: this war is over. Gannett,

with its vast resources, will know how to squash this guy, and we may not like the

product, but the newspaper will survive and maybe we could maintain the old

53 Gazette. Well, there was no evidence any place else. Most of the other places that they had bought, the newspaper flourished but was just a shadow of itself.

Des Moines and Louisville and Nashville, Tennessee, and so forth. Jackson,

Mississippi. So we were a little bit hopeful after that. And then they sent in, they brought in this guy, Walker Lundy, as the editor. And we checked around the day he was announced and really became apprehensive when we found out he had been a failure everywhere he’d been. He’d been run off virtually every place he had been. And wherever he wasn’t run off, he was despised wherever he had worked. Jim Powell called some friend down there someplace he had worked and this guy said, “Oh, my God. Walker Lundy. Get out while you can!” And

Lundy’s first remark — When he was introduced, he made a few remarks and then said, “Are there any questions? I’d be happy to answer any questions.” And the first question was from Chuck Heinbockel — H-E-I-N-B-O-C-K-E-L — who was our business writer, and he said, “Yes, I wonder if you could tell us something about your management style?” And he said, “Yes. The first thing you should know about my management style is that I know how to fire people, and I don’t mind doing it.” That was his first question. It was an astonishing answer. And, of course, after that, as the interview with Max Brantley tells, he was trying to get people fired. And he never really fired anybody, but he spent all of his time there trying to get others, his underlings, to fire old-time Gazette staff members. So Lundy came up and he didn’t do a lot with the editorial page, but he really wasn’t interested much in the editorial page, didn’t think the editorial had

54 much value.

RR: He came from Fort Worth, I believe.

ED: He came from Fort Worth. He’d been fired at Fort Worth. And so he didn’t have

much to do with the editorial page for a good long while, although Malone

eventually, the publisher of the Gazette, Bill Malone, became more and more

distressed with the editorial page and its kind of liberal bias and it was supporting

Democrats rather than Republicans and his wife had been on Vice President

Bush’s staff in Washington before they moved to Arkansas. They were big

Republicans and sometimes guests of the Bushes. And so, here we were in 1988

about to endorse Michael Dukakis against George Bush. And so, he tried then to

get Lundy involved in the editorial page. And Lundy really didn’t want too

much, but he did. So we began to have meetings with Walker Lundy and Bill

Malone about the editorial page and Walker and Bill Malone would meet with us

once a week and talk about our policy, the editorials we were going to write and

what our position would be, but still didn’t have much influence. I mean, we just

said, “We’re going to do this and that.” Lundy would generally agree with us.

Lundy, in a way, was, to the extent that he had any political philosophy, was

something of a liberal. And the publisher was not, so he would kind of tend to

favor our position on matters, which, it was easy to see, was distressing to

Malone. But the final straw came in the 1988 general election. . . . The 1988

general election, we had a big meeting about three weeks before the election

about who we were going to endorse. And the publisher Bill Malone was there,

55 Walker Lundy was there, Jerry Dhonau, I think Leland Duvall and maybe Doug

Smith. I’m not sure who all was involved at that time, or whether — I don’t think

Bob McCord was on the editorial board then. We went around, and each of us

said Michael Dukakis, no great shakes, but he’s far superior to George Bush. So

Dhonau and Leland and Doug Smith, if he was there, and I — all of us wanted to

endorse Michael Dukakis. The publisher didn’t really want to, thought he

shouldn’t be meddling, because I think the owner Neuharth apparently made a

commitment to Hugh Patterson that he would not tamper with the editorial

philosophy of the Gazette. So Malone was trying to deftly influence that policy without telling us, “No, you can’t do that.” And he was trying to get Lundy to be the guy who did it. And Lundy was reluctant to do it. So we would just argue and argue about it, and Lundy was trying to move us around to this position. And we would just say, “No, no, no. There’s no way we could endorse George Bush.”

And so, we’d meet again the next week about it. We’d put it off. We’d just argue

about an hour about it and then put it off till the next week. And, finally, Jerry

Dhonau asked each of us to write our thoughts about the thing and so each of us

writes a little bit about it and gives it to Jerry Dhonau. And he writes an editorial

endorsing Michael Dukakis. And so the publisher wants to see whatever editorial

we — he and Walker Lundy want to see whatever editorial we write. And so

Jerry submits this editorial, and Malone is obviously putting pressure on Lundy to

stop, to tell us we can’t do it. And so we had this meeting in which Lundy said,

“Well, what about just no endorsement at all, just saying neither of these

56 candidates quite measure up or both of them are equal or whatever and just no

endorsement. And we said, “No, no, that’s just not — there’s no way we could

say that George Bush should be President.” So it goes on like this until, finally,

we get to the week before the election and it obviously needs to run by Sunday.

And so about Thursday or Friday, Lundy has, all of a sudden, disappeared and

gone to Florida. And so Malone wants Lundy to read the editorial. And Jerry

said, “Well, we gave him the editorial, but we don’t know where he is. We

haven’t heard from him.” And so they can’t even get Lundy on the phone. And a

couple of days passed and, finally, on Friday afternoon, Jerry sees Malone and

says, “What are we going to do about this editorial? I mean, this is Sunday before

the election, and everybody is expecting us to do something. What are we going

to do?” And Malone finally said, “To hell with it and run the editorial. Whatever

you want to do with it.” He said, “Whatever you want to do with it.” And so we

run the editorial on Sunday endorsing Michael Dukakis. And I think that’s what

triggered Lundy’s demise. I think Malone was so furious with him over that and,

apparently, over other matters. I think he divined that everybody on the staff

hated Lundy and there were all kinds of other problems, things were going down

hill and so forth. It was not too long after that that Lundy was gone. He was

fired.

[End of Side Two, Tape One]

[Beginning of Side One, Tape Two]

RR: Well, this is Dumas and Reed, and we’re still talking about the Gazette and the

57 last years. You’d just finished talking about Walker Lundy.

ED: Yes, Lundy was fired.

[Tape Interrruption]

RR: Sorry about that. Go ahead.

ED: Well, after Lundy was fired, it was not long before they replaced Bill Malone

with a new publisher named Craig Moon, who came up from the Gannett paper at

Fort Myers, Florida. And he brought along his editor, Keith Moyer. So Moyer

eventually superceded Walker Lundy. And quite a different kind of personality.

Moyer was kind of, left the paper alone. He didn’t have many ideas. Mainly, he

wanted to play golf. And [he] came to work late, fiddled around, played golf,

went home and let [?] just run the paper. I mean, that’s my impression. I was not

in the newsroom, but that’s my impression from talking to people like Max

Brantley that they liked Moyer a little better because at least he left them alone.

Walker Lundy took an intense interest in the paper and meddled every day, and

everybody generally said they were dismayed. He had some ideas, a lot of ideas,

but most of them goofy kind of stuff.

RR: Like what? Now, I remember there was some . . .

ED: One of the things he did — of course, he wanted big fluffy things on the front

page, light-hearted things that had nothing to do with public policy or world

events, just kind of off-beat, light stuff on the front page. He wanted it every day.

And he wanted bright color pictures on the front page every day, preferably not

serious matter. He wanted a lot of non-serious stuff on the front page. He

58 thought the Gazette was too serious and ponderous for readers, particularly young readers. But on the editorial page, when he finally, the publisher pushing him to take an interest in the editorial page, and the one thing that he did is this thing about community writers, community columns. And he wanted us to have community columnists. So we went through this big competition. We advertised that we were going to have people from around the state, a cross section of people, to write columns for the Gazette. And it was going to be — we were going to take great pains to see that there was a cross section. There would be old people and there would be very young people. There would be rich people/poor people. There would be women and men in equal numbers. And there would be liberals and arch conservatives. And so we were going to make this a big affirmative action effort to achieve this — it was almost a quota system. So we advertised this thing, and people were supposed to submit three columns for the

Gazette. We spelled out how many words they should be, and so we just got a torrent of columns. I mean, the mail came for weeks, and we were just covered up. Hundreds of entries. People who wanted to write a column for the Gazette.

And, finally, what we’d tend to do is that Lundy gave us each a big batch of them.

He said, “Just divide them up among the editorial staff.” Each of us was supposed to read a bunch of these things and to read them for the quality of writing and the interest and not — he cautioned, “Don’t throw things out because they are right wing and so forth, but pay particular attention. We want some very conservative columnists, off-the-wall kind of columnists.” So we kind of

59 narrowed it down. Each of us was supposed to pick out about twenty-five out of

our batch and throw away those that were just totally unacceptable, hopeless kind

of thing. And so I think I narrowed it down to some still a large number and gave

those to Leland. And Leland took them all and chose the final, let’s see, I think

we had nine columnists. Nine or ten columnists. And they were supposed to be

scattered across the state geographically by race, gender, political leanings and

whatever. And then we ran them, I think, maybe three a week, on the op-ed page.

And they were in cycles. We did it, I think, for a year and then called a halt to it.

Whether that was when Walker left or what happened, but when Jerry Dhonau

said, “There will be no more community columns.” And there were a few pretty

good ones, a few pretty good ones, but most of them were just terrible columns,

dreary, and we had some right-wing guy write some crazy, some of them would

just be anti-Semitic kind of stuff. We’d have to kill it, couldn’t run it.

RR: Did Justice Jim enter the contest?

ED: I think Justice Jim entered it. I think he did. And there were some familiar

people who entered the contest, but we didn’t . . .

RR: I imagine H.E. Harvey might have tried.

ED: I don’t remember whether H.E. Harvey tried or not, but I think Justice Jim did

and got kicked out. All the rest of them were unfamiliar people.

RR: This thing about the front page, that he always wanted something — what was

that story about a picture of people in spandex or something?

ED: Well, yes, he kind of got a bad rap out of that. The first big picture — and Max

60 Brantley said he’s responsible. Max takes, with all these things, Max says, “No,

I’m to blame.” Max takes full blame for the demise of the Gazette, for the loss of

Dillard’s advertising and everything, and Max takes the blame for it. But in this

particularly there was a bunch of UALR cheerleaders or something. They were

not exactly cheerleaders, but they were pom-pom girls or something. And they

had all these colorful outfits on, reds and yellows and greens. A rainbow of

colors. And somebody had taken the picture and they were all in these tights.

The girls were in tights, spandex tights. And so we ran it on the front page. And

just people were outraged. This represented what the Gazette had become, this

one picture. That was the new Gazette. And Lundy was blamed although that

day, I think Max told me later that actually Lundy was not the one who chose that

picture, that he was. And Bill Rutherford ran it.

RR: I suppose this was after Lundy had said this was the kind of thing that he wanted

or, at least, he wanted lighter stuff.

ED: Yes, he kind of laid down the rules.

RR: What about covering meetings, governmental meetings, and that sort of thing?

ED: Well, he thought we spent too much time covering sewer commission meetings

and government meetings. He didn’t think the public had too much interest in

that kind of thing. And he thought we had too much government news. Now,

school news was another matter. He wanted school news in the paper, but he

thought there was just too much news about state government, too much news

about county government, lawsuits and trials and so forth, and that the public just

61 wasn’t interested in these kinds of things and that we should . . .

RR: Did Moyer kind of continue with that same policy?

ED: Well, a little bit, but, on the other hand, Moyer just, I don’t think, really had much

— he just really didn’t care too much. He kind of wanted the Gazette to be kind

of flashy and bright looking. I remember that it would’ve been in 1981, 1991,

excuse me, and the legislature came along. And Gannett, about that time, had

made a commitment, “We’re just, by God, going to just drive the Democrat in the

ground with spending. We’re going to cover them up. They want to talk about

coverage. Well, we’re going to cover the hell out of them.” So we had, I think,

something like thirteen people covering the legislature in 1991, including me. I

was out there writing a daily column on the legislature. And we put out a tabloid

every day on the legislature, and Max was put in charge of it. And so we had —

Max was writing a column every day, I was writing a column every day, Bob

Lancaster was writing a column every day from the legislature. And I writing

some kind of serious, ponderous thing. Lancaster was writing the stuff that was

— it was wonderful to read the bright, scathing stuff that he was writing every

day. And Max was writing the inside stuff. Of course, he was out there covering

stuff, directing the coverage. And then we had a sea of reporters covering the

House and the Senate, so we had this big — we had two or three photographers

out there every day, so it was a big, fancy tabloid kind of thing.

RR: What was the reaction to this coverage?

ED: I don’t know whether there was any reaction to it at all or not. At the Gazette,

62 people, I think, kind of liked it. It was kind of refreshing there after the Lundy

regime. And all of a sudden, he said we were just going to — “We’re going to

kick their asses.” That’s what Moyer said. “By God, we’re going to show those

people.” Because they’d been bragging that they had so many more stories than

the Gazette did and so forth, so . . .

RR: Meanwhile, John Robert Starr is running the paper down the street. How was he

responding? Or how was the Democrat responding?

ED: They were, they reacted because they sent more people out there as well. And so

the Capitol was covered up with reporters. I mean, there were as many reporters

as there were legislators in a committee room. There was a whole bunch of

reporters. Memphis Commercial Appeal, everybody else was doing it as well

although nobody could match the Gazette and Democrat.

RR: Well, this would have been in ‘91, just along toward the end.

ED: Yes, that would have been in the spring, early winter/spring of ‘91, and then the

Gazette folded in October.

RR: How were those final months?

ED: Well, I guess, there were two phases of it. When we finally hear about the sale of

the paper, or the rumor about it anyway, which comes along in, probably, August.

But before that, in the six or eight, nine or ten months before that, Moyer had

moved in, Craig Moon was the publisher. We didn’t see much of Craig Moon.

He spent a lot of time, I think, womanizing and playing golf, which were his main

interests, particularly after, I think — sometime that winter, I think the decision

63 was made that we were going to sell the Gazette and later I traced it back, I think,

to around the first of the year. Now this was just supposition on my part, based

on things that happened up in our little, in the ivory tower. Because Moon also

became — Moon was very conservative also, a Republican, and he’d been out, he

went out to the country club and was persuaded as was Malone that the editorial

stance at the Gazette was, contributed to its demise, that people were unhappy

with the liberal editorial policies of the Gazette and that if we could change that,

the thing could be turned around, and all of a sudden we’d get this huge leap in

circulation and advertising. But they’d hear this out at the country club, the

men’s grill, the locker room, or whatever, I guess. So Moon decided he was

going to change it. By that time, Neuharth was gone. Curley was in, and I think

Neuharth probably had made some kind of commitment to Patterson.

RR: That was John Curley?

ED: John Curley, yes.

RR: Neuharth, you think, had made a commitment to Patterson?

ED: I thought he did.

RR: To keep the editorial page liberal?

ED: Yes, I think that’s the case. I think Hugh told us that. I think he told me that in

the hallway once. He said, “By God, Al Neuharth told me, promised me, that

they’d keep their hands off the editorial page.” Of course, he was pissed about

some of the things that were going on. But in about, sometime, I think, my

recollection is about December of ‘90, they brought, Moyer made Bob McCord a

64 member of the editorial board at the Gazette. And Bob was somewhat more

conservative than us. Bob was not a right-winger, but he was a little more

conservative on most things than the rest of us were. But they decreed, Moon

decreed that every Monday morning we would all assemble in his office, the

editorial board of the Gazette. At that time it was Doug Smith, Jerry Dhonau and

I and Bob McCord, the four of us, and maybe Deborah Mathis. Deborah had, I

think, joined the staff and was a columnist, but she didn’t write — she

occasionally wrote a little editorial or two, but mainly she just wrote columns.

And they were to meet down there with Moyer and Moon, the publisher and the

editor-in-chief. And every Monday morning we would all come with a list of the

editorial topics that we would weigh in on that week. We’d meet at 9:00 on

Monday mornings in the publisher’s conference room. And there would be an

agenda. It would all be typed out, laying out basically what we were going to say.

And, of course, we never, you know, we don’t plan for a week like that. We react

day to day. Nevertheless, we felt it was pretty depressing. We thought, “Well,

the end is near.” This was an obvious effort to shape the editorial policy of the

Gazette. And so that first — the Friday before, Jerry Dhonau came around and

asked each of us to write out a list of things that we thought might be topics.

RR: Before the first meeting, you mean?

ED: Yes, the first meeting was going to be the next Monday morning, and this was

Friday afternoon. So with heavy hearts, we all sat down and wrote out five or six

things that were kind of on our minds and wrote a little bit about it, a paragraph

65 about it. And Jerry typed up an agenda. And so we went down on Monday

morning at 9:00 to the governor’s conference room. And . . .

RR: Publisher’s

ED: Publisher’s conference room. And we waited. And Moyer didn’t come in, and

Moon didn’t come in. So we went out to Moon’s secretary who sat right outside

the conference room and said, “Where is Mr. Moon?” And she said, “Well, he

was just here a few minutes ago. I don’t know where. You missed him. He was

here just a minute ago.” She said she’d go try to find him. And so she went off to

try to find him. So I went off to the newsroom to find Moyer. And went in and

his office was dark. And I see his wife, Marilyn, is there. She is the Gazette’s

writing coach. She’d been hired as a writing coach for the Gazette, the wife of

the editor. So I go over to Marilyn and said, “Where’s Keith? He’s supposed to

be in a meeting with us.” And she said, “Well, when I left the house, he was

getting dressed. He should have been here long ago.” So she calls, and he

answers, and she says, “Ernie Dumas says y’all are supposed to have a meeting at

9:00.” And she hangs up and says, “Well, Keith says, ‘Just cancel it. We’ll do it

next week.’” So I went back in and, in the meantime, they had been unable to find

Moon. And I said, “Well, Keith Moyer says, ‘Cancel it and we’ll do it next

Monday.’” So we all went back upstairs and wrote editorials for that week. On

Friday afternoon, we did the same thing. We all typed out this thing and Jerry

Dhonau prepares a big agenda. The next Monday morning we all filed down to

Moon’s conference room and sit down and the same thing happens. Moon

66 doesn’t show up and Moyer doesn’t show up. Moon’s secretary says, “He was here a few minutes ago. And I mentioned it to him, and I don’t know where he is.” And I go out to the news room again and Keith Moyer is not there. And his wife, I spoke to Marilyn and she says, “Well, he’s not here. If I were you, I’d just go on back to the office.” So we did. So we all filed to go back upstairs and write our editorials for that week. In the meantime, Jerry writes a memo down:

“We met and Where were you?” And the first time, I think, he got a response from Keith: well, he was sorry. Things came up and we’d do it next week and so forth. And after the second time, Jerry just waited. This is my memory, you know. And I’ve talked to Jerry about it and I think I interviewed him about it.

His memory is kind of fuzzy on it. But my memory is that we came down the third time, the third Monday in a row. And this was about, my recollection is, the first, sometime in early January of 1991. And we filed down there and the same thing happens. Moon disappears and Keith Moyer doesn’t show up. And so we wait ten or fifteen minutes and go back upstairs. We never heard from them again. There was no further communications with Moyer. They never met with us. They never asked us to meet with them again. And they never meddled with the page or said anything about it. It was just mystifying to us, but then when

August comes along and we hear that the paper’s been bought by Hussman, I figure that that’s about the time that they began to negotiate, and it took some months to work out the details, but I think they just decided, “It’s all over, so what’s the point?” And so they just left us alone. I think it occurred about that

67 time, but I don’t have any — I would like to talk to Moyer sometime to see

whether that was indeed the case if he remembered it.

RR: Yes.

ED: Because Moon and Moyer, shortly after that, they move on. And they send in

some guy named Moe Hickey to be the publisher. No, Moyer stays on till the

bitter end. Moon moves on and Moe Hickey comes in as the last publisher. And

when he is named the publisher, somebody calls from Denver, I think, and said,

“Well, that means it’s over because when Moe Hickey comes in, plan the

funeral.”

RR: He’s the undertaker.

ED: Yes, because he’s the undertaker.

RR: Why do you suppose — well, let me back up. Moon is determined, like Malone

ahead of him, but even more determined, to change the editorial policy at the

Arkansas Gazette and make it a conservative paper. He knows who the editorial

writers are. There’s Dumas and Smith and Dhonau and . . .

ED: Before that Duvall.

RR: Yes. Known liberals, every one. Why didn’t he just fire you guys and hire his

own staff as editorial writers?

ED: Well, I suspect they thought about that, but probably — Malone knew he couldn’t

do that because he had, I assume that he was aware of the promise to Hugh

Patterson. Of course, Hugh was still around there and would go in sometimes and

raise hell with Malone about it and I think later with Moon as well because we’d

68 tell Hugh about it and Carrick before that because, you know, Carrick briefly was

up there with the editorial board. They sent him up there before they finally axed

him for good, or he left. But, I think, they thought it would be such a bloody

thing, it would represent a coup, it would be distressing to the staff, it would send

a message everywhere that these guys were coming in and taking over and they

had said all along that the Gazette was going to be a local paper and local people

— although they brought in these outsiders to run it. But they were a little bit

sensitive also to this thing about outsiders because the Democrat was hammering

them on it. John Robert Starr was — they claimed to be this Arkansas paper, but

it’s being run by all these outsiders. So they were being hammered on that. And

to come in and fire the whole — and they’d have to do it. They’d pretty much

have to fire all of us because it was clear none of us was going to yield on it.

RR: It would have been written about beyond Little Rock.

ED: Yes, I think so.

RR: I can see the Columbia Journalism Review weighing in on it.

ED: Yes, it would have been a big story. And we just — the efforts to influence us

subtly and by pressure just didn’t work. We just acted like we were obtuse, that

you just had to hit us over the head with a two-by-four to get our attention. We

just — subtleties we just didn’t see. We didn’t recognize the subtle pressure on

us. Since we mentioned Carrick Patterson, I think I ought to elaborate a little

about his role in that last saga, the Gannett period. Carrick was one of the unsung

and largely unappreciated heroes of that struggle. There were a few people around

69 who doubted Carrick’s ability or at least his commitment to the newspaper business, probably because he was a classically trained singer who had gone off to one of the great universities. They thought he was a frustrated opera singer who had to fall back on the family business. But most people came around eventually to the recognition that he was a very good newspaperman. He made a great contribution to bringing us into the technological age but, beyond that, he knew what made the Gazette a great newspaper and especially what made it a valuable institution for the state, and he wanted to keep that. Now, I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I understand that he was the one member of the family who did not want to sell the Gazette to the Gannett Corporation. Rather than sell to

Gannnett, if that was the only viable buyer, he wanted to carry on the fight with

Hussman despite the big money odds. But in the end he went along with the rest of the family. As I say, that’s just what I heard and I never talked with Carrick about it. Carrick was the editor when Gannett took over and the suspicion was that he wouldn’t last long simply because he was a Patterson. He probably knew that, but I don’t know. Regardless, he never tried to endear himself to the new owners. One instance in particular stood out. Michael Gartner, I think, had been editor at Des Moines, but by 1986 he was doing a stint as what they called a

“news executive” with Gannett. I think they supplied Gartner with two or three copies of the Arkansas Gazette and he wrote a scathing critique of the paper for the company, which was circulated at the Gazette so that all of us could see our shortcomings. Basically, Gartner said the Gazette was a dull newspaper that

70 devoted far too much energy and space and emphasis to government news,

government process — state government developments, the legislature, local

planning commission meetings, that sort of thing. The Gannett formula then was

light features, television and entertainment news, lots of sports and generally just

breezy, colorful and short stories. Oh, they loved short stories. They didn’t want

stories jumped from page one to an inside page. I think Gartner wrote a critique

that he thought the Gannett bigwigs wanted to hear. Carrick wrote a blistering

response to it, point by point. He didn’t think the Gazette ever was or ever should be the kind of paper that Gartner envisioned. And he didn’t think Gartner knew anything about the Gazette. He was not diplomatic about it. Now, being on the editorial page, I was never a part of the news meetings or the big planning sessions, but Max Brantley and others told me he was the same way there.

Gannett sent a “transition team” down to help the Gazette plan the new directions in which it was to go. Carrick was not a team player. Everyone else realized pretty quickly, intuitively, that you had to keep differences of opinion to yourself.

Carrick may have realized that, too, but he didn’t keep his opinions to himself. It was pretty clear that they were going to have to find a way to sidetrack Carrick.

He was marginalized pretty soon and they brought in Walker Lundy, who had left previously paper unceremoniously and eventually would leave the Gazette the same way. Lundy never wanted to see a Planning Commission story in the

Gazette. On the other hand, he wanted instant movie reviews. I think Carrick was prophetic. All the changes they brought about in the Gazette after he was

71 shoved aside unsettled our readers. There was a big change in attitudes about the

Gazette, both among many of our old franchise readers as well as the broader

public. We went from being the most respected newspaper in Arkansas when

Gannett arrived to being a paper that was viewed as less comprehensive than the

Democrat in nearly every area. By the way, Gartner had an unhappy time at NBC

after that and then bought the paper at Iowa City, Iowa, where he won a Pulitzer

Prize for editorials that focused on the importance of such things as local planning

commission actions.

RR: Well, tell me about the last days.

ED: Well, my memory of it, of the final days — I remember much more about earlier

than the final days. Kind of a blur. But we heard about — on a Friday afternoon,

as I recall, sometime in August. The word was all over the street that the

Democrat had bought the Gazette. And I think maybe Channel 11, one of the tv

stations, and I think it was Channel 11, did something about it on, maybe, Friday

night on the news --- I think it was probably Friday night. And then maybe over

the weekend, AP might have done some kind of little story about it. And

Hussman was — the Gazette, whoever was publisher, I guess it was probably still

Moon at that time. I don’t know whether Moe Hickey was — I guess it was

Moon — refused to talk. And John Curley, nobody in Gannett, would say a word

about it. And Walter Hussman, who makes a lot of speeches about truth-telling in

the newspaper business, his comment was it was a rumor spread by the Gazette

circulation department. “It’s not true. It’s a rumor spread by the circulation

72 department at the Gazette.” Which didn’t make any sense to anybody, but that

kept appearing in the paper in these stories. But Bob Douglas called me at home

over the weekend from Fayetteville and told me, “It’s true. The Gazette has been

sold to the Democrat, and it’s before the Justice Department, and its approval

should be coming in any day. They’re just waiting for the Justice Department to

sign off under the antitrust law.”

RR: And this was in August?

ED: This was, I think, the story, I think, on Channel 11 may be on Friday night. And

either late that night or the next day, Bob Douglas told me. This was in August.

But we couldn’t find out about it because Gannett, when others called, wouldn’t

respond. Moon or Moyer, whoever, Moyer, I guess, instructed Brantley, “We’re

not going to write about this story. There is to be — nothing is to appear in the

Gazette about it because it is a rumor and good newspapers don’t write rumors.

That’s all this is.” And so, the Gazette remained silent on it. Nothing. Until

some point when it was everywhere and the Gazette finally had to write about it

and it was really right toward the end before the Gazette ever acknowledged in its

pages. At that point, Max, I think, just did it on his own and risking firing by

Moyer, but by that time Moyer didn’t give a damn.

RR: Max was city editor.

ED: Max was the city editor, the metro editor, or whatever, but they just did it. And

without even asking Moyer. You know, everybody was clear that everybody was

going to be without a job in a few weeks anyway. But we started, after that, after

73 the rumors went around and the stories, we talked to Bill Alexander, who was a

congressman from east Arkansas, and Alexander did a little snooping in the

Justice Department and told us, “Yes, it’s true. The sale is pending and the

Justice Department is evaluating the sale under the antitrust law.” And he

confirmed for us that it was true. He had some sources there in the Justice

Department.

RR: Does that appear in a story? I can’t remember.

ED: I don’t remember whether it — it didn’t immediately because the Gazette was not

writing about it.

RR: Right.

ED: We just got it confirmed for accuracy. But then, we knew it was true. And this

was probably early September. And so some of us began to talk about — well,

what about — we wondered if Witt Stephens would buy it and I think maybe

somebody even — and I don’t know whether I did or somebody talked to Witt

because, you know, he had owned some part of the Gazette at some point and sold

it, and at that time, I guess, [the devil was in me? If he had wanted?] to buy the

paper we’d have welcomed him, but Witt wasn’t really interested in it at that

point. Or Jack. Witt died right after that, I think, maybe it was Jack Stephens [ ?

] who said, “We don’t know anything about the newspaper business.” And, of

course, a couple of years later, they bought [Donney’s?]. But we talked about

employee ownership. We kind of talked around the idea of whether the

employees could do it and gave a couple of examples, Kansas City, where the

74 employees bought out the paper. And so we — I’ve forgotten the sequence of

events, but there were about six of us who kind of got organized: Max Brantley

and Scott Morris, Anne Farris, Scott Van Laningham, Mike Arbanas — A-R-B-

A-N-A-S — and I guess that’s probably it. And I don’t know why this little

group — because none of us, we hadn’t been, except for Max and I were pretty

close, but I don’t know why the other group began to get together. We — I called

John Norman Harkey at Batesville and talked to Harkey about what we could do.

We wanted to find a way to block this thing, tie it up somehow. And Harkey said,

“Call Walter Davidson and tell him I said to call.” So I called Walter Davidson,

who was a lawyer and had a common call in Arkansas, and so he became our

lawyer in this thing and filed something with the Justice Department, saying we

were exploring ways to buy the Gazette. And Scott Morris or somebody ran into

— what’s the name of the guy who’s the Hollywood producer?

RR: Harry Thomason.

ED: Harry Thomason — ran into Thomason, I think, at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport,

Love Field, someplace. And he was asking about the Gazette and he expressed an

interest that he’d like to be an investor. I mean, he couldn’t buy the Gazette

himself but that he’d like to be an investor. He had some cash and he didn’t want

to see the Gazette fold and he’d be willing to take some risks. So he kind of

threw in with us and so we wanted somebody to kind of evaluate the Gazette’s

financial position. And so Walter Smiley — I’ve forgotten how Walter Smiley

got involved, but Walter Smiley became a kind of advisor to us, and we managed

75 to get all the stuff from the Justice Department.

RR: Was he a lawyer?

ED: No, Walter Smiley was not a lawyer. He was an accountant and founded

Systematics and made a fortune. Built Systematics and sold it to, eventually, had

sold it to in 1988, 1990, I guess it was, sold Systematics to Alltel. And so he was

kind of a financial consultant. Mostly, I think he kind of started his own financial

services business. And was something of a Progressive, he thought, and so he

kind of threw in with us, or we approached him and he agreed to look at the stuff.

And so he looked at the books on a confidential basis from the Justice

Department, the Gazette’s books, and told us, “This thing is hopeless. There’s no

way the Gazette can make it.” So we were talking about what about if we, the

Gazette, cut it back and make it a Little Rock paper. Just do a Little Rock paper

and cut out the rest of the state and all this vast expense of having a statewide

newspaper. And Smiley just continued to tell us, “This is hopeless. You can’t do

it and you should abandon it.” And so I’ve forgotten what all. Smiley filed some

[previews ? ] for the Justice Department. We had these big rallies and so forth.

And there was some talk about a Gazette employee buyout. Obviously, we

couldn’t have bought the Gazette. Even talked about using the pension fund to

buy it, or part interest in it, but eventually after a couple of months or six weeks

or so of this kind of stuff, Smiley talked to our lawyer, and our lawyer told us that

it had been suggested to him that this was all frivolous, that those of us at the

Gazette were not serious about buying the Gazette and that it was costing Gannett

76 and Hussman millions of dollars, that we had already cost them millions of

dollars, like both papers were losing tons of money, to the tune of twenty to

twenty-five million dollars a year. So every week was maybe a million dollars

lost by the two and that we were liable, ourselves, could be sued by Hussman or

by Gannett or both and that we might have some liability, but at any rate, that

didn’t matter because we didn’t have any money anyway. But, finally, on

Thursday afternoon, we told Walter Davidson to tell the Justice Department that

our proposition had fallen through. So he faxed the Justice Department a letter

late Thursday afternoon. And so we came back to work on Friday and at noon, of

course, the computers all went dead and the sale was final, I guess, about mid-

afternoon. We were told to pack our belongings and get them out of the building

by 5:00. We had to be out of the building by 5:00.

RR: What date was this?

ED: It would’ve been October 18th, I think, 1991.

RR: You were told to get your stuff out by 5:00?

ED: Yes. And they piled boxes in the downstairs hallway, so we went down there to

get boxes. And they had security guards surrounding the building and all the

entrances and all the exits who watched what you brought out. And so a security

guard tried to — I had my chair. I had had some back problems and I had bought

an old cheap chair at the budget furniture place a couple of years earlier, so I was

wheeling my chair out of the building and a security guard tried to stop and make

me take my chair back in. So I kind of exploded, “This is my goddamned chair

77 and I’m taking it back home.”

RR: Didn’t you have some trouble later on getting the files out?

ED: Yes, I tried to — You know, the next Monday I realized that I had my — the

Gazette kept a big file for each of us, so you had all your bylines. They kept a

byline file for every reporter, everybody who worked at the paper, so it occurred

to me the next week that I might need something — if I applied for a job, I might

need . . .

RR: Where was that, in the library?

ED: It was kept in the library. The Gazette library kept one for each of us.

RR: You had emptied your office, I take it.

ED: I had emptied my office, yes, on Friday afternoon. I’d gotten everything out by

5:00. So the following Monday it occurred to me that I needed to do that. So I

asked if I could go back in and get my file, my own personal file from the library,

and was told I could not. Somebody said check with Walter Hussman. I called

over there and somebody checked with Walter Hussman and came back and said,

“No, no Gazette employee will be allowed in the building.” But I tried to get in.

Romeo Gatewood stilll worked, Romeo was still there, and so I went there after

hours one day and Romeo let me in, and I went up there and tried to get in, but

they had changed the locks. Romeo got me a key to the newsroom and on pain of

being fired himself, I guess, if they had discovered it.

RR: He was the building superintendent.

ED: He was the building superintendent. So I went up there after about 6:00 the next

78 week, and Romeo took me back there and gave me a set of keys to get me into the

library and the newsroom because they had put locks on. And so I unlocked the

key to the newsroom, the building was [ ? ] at night, and I went in the

newsroom. But I got back there to the library and they had changed the lock on

the library. I couldn’t get the library open. So a little bit after that, the Arkansas

Times asked me to write a big piece on Jim Guy Tucker, a cover story on Jim

Guy. Who was Jim Guy Tucker? The guy who was going to be the acting

governor. And so I needed to get in the files and so I again asked permission

from Walter Hussman to get — I called Brummett and he said he’d get it for me.

And Hussman told him, no, that I could not have access to the library to do any

research. And so I never got my byline file out of there either.

RR: Were you the one who told me that John Robert Starr stood over you while you

looked for something at the paper?

ED: No, somebody . . .

RR: Was it McCord?

ED: Somebody — I don’t know who that was — somebody went there, I don’t know,

on the weekend or something — I don’t know who that was, but somebody went

up there and — of course, Meredith McCord, rather [McCord?] and Meredith

Oakley, I think, spent a lot of time going through waste baskets and drawers, kind

of like vultures, in the days following. I am told that they were up there —

somebody went up on Saturday and they were out in the newsroom going through

desks and waste cans. And, apparently, Starr said later that he had — in fact,

79 wrote in his column once, shortly before he died, that he had all of this stuff that

he had gleaned from the Gazette computers and the editors’s offices he thought

would be interesting to old Gazette employees and he was thinking about writing

a series of columns about the stuff that he had found in the editors’ offices after

the closing. But then he died and didn’t get to write it. I think that was shortly

before he died that he wrote a column about that. But you’re right. Somebody

went up there.

RR: I think it might have been McCord. He said Oakley and Starr stood over the desk

and watched him — I think Bob might have been the one. Tell about the Faubus

obituary.

ED: My last day — and I think I might have, in the Bill Shelton tape, I might have told

this thing over there.

RR: You did. But do it again.

ED: My last day as a reporter would have been about the second week of January,

1979. Bill Clinton had just been sworn in as Governor. And so I went up to take

Jerry Neil’s place. Jerry Neil had died the previous fall. And to be an editorial

writer. And my last day as a reporter, I went to the Capitol and had written

everything, and I was cleaning out my desk there in the newsroom. And Bill

Shelton came over and said --- who was the city editor --- and he said, “Is this

your last day?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, what happened to this?”

And he tossed this old carbon of an assignment he had given me a couple of years

earlier. It was what we used to call “As Time Allows.” Up at the top it said,

80 “ATA,” and that meant “As time allows, do this.” And it said, “Do a Faubus obituary.” And as usual on those kinds of things, I’d stick them in my drawer and sometimes on a holiday, or whatever, and nothing going on at the Capitol, I’d do these assignments. But here was one that was going to take a ton of time, to write a Faubus obituary. You know that was something that was going to take a week or a couple of weeks, maybe, and so I’d never done anything with it. And

Faubus, I think, was back out at the Baptist Hospital that week. You know he’d had a pace maker put in, and I think he was back out at the hospital with some irregularities or something. We’d had a little story about it. So Shelton said,

“Faubus is back out at the hospital. If Faubus dies and we don’t have an obituary, the headline is going to say, “Faubus Dies, Dumas Fired.” And so I kind of blushed because Shelton just never — you know I think he was kind of joking, but Shelton usually [meant?] everything he said. So I thought, “Oh, shit. I guess

I’ve got to do this.” So I called Elaine and said, “I’m just going to get a bite to eat here and I’m going to work tonight.” So I stayed up there all night long and went back to the microfilm and read microfilm all night long and got all the resources I could about the ‘57 crisis. There were a couple of books about it. And got all of

Faubus’s files down, pulled all the files. And read that stuff all night and stayed there all day — stayed up all night Friday night, all day Saturday, worked on it. I went home Saturday night and got a few hours sleep and came back down and worked all day Sunday on it and, finally, finished it. And it was a mammoth obit.

Well, you’ve seen the damned thing.

81 RR: Oh, yes. You gave me a copy of it.

ED: We rolled it out. I remember when I finished it, I think at that time it was — I

don’t remember whether we had computers. I guess we had computers, but I

don’t recall whether it was all pasted up or what. But, anyway, I remember they

rolled it down the aisle in front of the city desk. Somebody did when I turned it

in. And printed it out and they rolled it down the aisle there, and it was a long,

long piece of writing.

RR: Oh, it was yards long.

ED: It was a long, long thing. I don’t know how long it would have been. And, of

course, Faubus had a career after that. That was 1979. He came back and, you

know, afterward, he divorced his second wife, Elizabeth Westmoreland, again and

got back into politics, ran for governor again in 1986 or so and was in the Frank

White administration, so he had quite a prolific career after that. And so, about

every three or four years, I’d dig this thing out and splice in some more stuff to

get all the new stuff in. And so, by then it was pretty — by 1991, when the

Gazette closed, it was an even longer article because I had written probably

another thousand or so, two thousand words added to it since then. So that

afternoon, Max Brantley — after the — you know, the computers shut down at

12:00, and they had the big thing down in the newsroom and told us the Gazette

was closed and to clean out our stuff. So I was up in my office cleaning out stuff,

and Max Brantley called and said, “Do you know where that Faubus obit is?”

And I said, “No, I guess it’s in the computer stored someplace.” And he said,

82 “Well, I can’t find it. It must be on a disk someplace.” And so he said, “Well I

don’t want the Democrat to get their hands on it. So I want to get it killed before

they come in and take over.” So he said he’d talk to one of the wombats who

were our main computer specialists there. And he told me later that he had found

somebody and they had found the computer tape and it had been killed. It had

been thrown away. I, of course, had printed out a copy of it and took it home with

me and had it at the house. So along about — when did Faubus die? About ‘96?

RR: ‘94.

ED: ‘94. So in 1994, Faubus died. And the next day the Democrat-Gazette had this

big front-page obit. That was the lead story in the paper, and it went all the way

down the right side, and inside it just filled up page after page of the paper. And I

didn’t read it. And up at the top it said, “By the Democrat-Gazette staff.” And

that night, and Doug Smith called me and said, “Was that your obit in the

Democrat today?” “No, no. Max killed that.” Well, he said he had mentioned it

to Max and Max thought it read familiar. Both of them thought it read like me.

And so I went back and picked up the paper and it did sound awfully familiar. So

I dug out the old obit that I had written. I had sent it to you and you had sent it

back to me. And, sure enough, it was. There was my obit. So I called Doug back

and said, “Yes, that was my obit.” And so the Arkansas Times did a little blurb

on it. You know, they write these little press columns, usually attacking the

Democrat-Gazette. And it pointed out that the Democrat-Gazette was claiming

credit for this obit that its staff had not written but that had been written by this

83 old Gazette [staff?]. And about a few weeks passed and I go down for a little luncheon, a Society of Professional Journalists banquet. Griffin Smith, the editor of the Democrat-Gazette was there. He was the speaker. And after he speaks, he spots me and calls me over and said he wanted to apologize for that obit. He said,

“I assumed you didn’t want your byline on it, but I personally edited it, and when

I left there, I left instructions that there was to be no byline at all on it. But when

I picked up the paper the next morning, somebody had stuck that line on there,

‘By the Democrat-Gazette staff.’” And so I said, “Oh, Griffin, it doesn’t make any difference. I was just happy to see it in the paper.” And he said, “Well, you know, we had every right to publish it because we bought the paper and we had every right.” And I said, “Oh, sure. I realize that. I don’t have any problem with it. And I didn’t ask the Arkansas Times to write that. I’m happy to see it in print.” And I told him the story about how it came about. And so months passed.

And I picked up the paper one day, the Democrat-Gazette and see a full-page ad that said, “Prize-winning Newspaper.” And it said that the Democrat-Gazette had won first place in deadline news reporting from some national organization for the Faubus obit. It’s really ironic, isn’t it? I guess somebody must have been impressed [and thought?], “All this was written . . .” — because Faubus died sometime late in the afternoon or something and all this was in the paper the next morning. But, surely, anybody who’s ever worked for a newspaper for a day would know that these kinds of things in every newspaper in the world are written in advance and are on file. Every important figure’s obituary is written in

84 advance. I was just astonished that they had won the award.

RR: So you won a prize for the Democrat-Gazette?

ED: Yes. First place in deadline news reporting. It took something like — how long?

— fourteen years to write that story!

[Laughter]

RR; But it was done on deadline!

ED: Yes.

RR: What kind of newspaper was the Arkansas Gazette? From the standpoint of

people who worked there, was it a different kind of newspaper? Was there

something special about writing for the Gazette?

ED: Since I spent my life, my career, working for a single newspaper, I probably have

a poorer basis for comparison than most newspaper people. Journalists are a kind

of itinerant tribe. Other than free-lancing and occasional correspondence for

other newspapers and my early work at the El Dorado newspaper while I was in

school, all of my experience, some thirty-one years, was at the Arkansas Gazette.

But I have known hundreds of newspaper people, including many who worked at

the Gazette and moved on or else worked at other newspapers and ended their

career at the Gazette. It reinforces my sense that the Gazette was a different

newspaper, that it was a separate kind of experience. All these interviews with

old Gazette hands deep into the last century suggest the same thing, that their

relationship with the Arkansas Gazette was somehow special, even if it was not

always happy, that it was unlike the relationship with other newspapers for which

85 they worked or other companies if they followed altogether different pursuits. All journalists, I suppose, think they are on a mission from God, to tell the world the truth, which is probably why the public dislikes us so much. But writing for the

Gazette transcended even that impulse. I think it was a sense that at the Gazette they were part of a stewardship of a peculiar time and place: Arkansas. The

Gazette had a distinctive role in the state, a special responsibility that no other newspaper filled, certainly not in Arkansas and probably not anywhere else. In no other place, I’m sure, has a newspaper played such a critical part in the entire history of the state. The Gazette and Arkansas were yoked irreversibly, from the first days of the territory through the racial crisis, and everyone was aware of it.

I came to the Gazette in 1960 when its heroic role in the school integration crisis at Little Rock was fresh, especially in my mind. I had always wanted to work for the Gazette, but by then it was a rare privilege. It may be that the sense of mission that I and others who had worked there in the last quarter-century shared arose simply from that, pride that we were part of a newspaper that stood its ground against bigotry when its own survival was in peril. But I believe it was more than that. It seems to me that it preceded 1957, even in all those years after

Ned Heiskell saved the paper, when its editorial pages stood for a principled conservatism that was considerably different from the Gazette of the final half- century. There had been other instances when the paper had positioned itself between tyranny and the community.

There may be a little arrogance in all this, and it may explain after all why the

86 Gazette didn’t survive. Newspapers are news products, and it is important to

learn how to publish a product that pleases the most people, or displeases the

fewest. You cater to popular whims and prejudices. Until near the end, that was

never on anyone’s mind at the Gazette.

[End of Interview]

87