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1 Gazette Project Interview with Ernest Dumas, Little Rock, Arkansas, May 10, 2000 Interviewer

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1 Gazette Project Interview with Ernest Dumas, Little Rock, Arkansas, May 10, 2000 Interviewer Gazette Project Interview with Ernest Dumas, Little Rock, Arkansas, May 10, 2000 Interviewer: Roy Reed Roy Reed: This is Ernie Dumas and Roy Reed in Little Rock on May the tenth. We are picking up where we left off. Tell that story about the day that you and Leland Duvall went up to Witt Stephens’ office for lunch. Ernie Dumas: Well, of course, Witt would from time to time invite people at the Gazette to come up and have lunch. He had these regular lunches in his office at the Stephens Building where they served cornbread and country vegetables and so forth, and Ike Murray, the former attorney general, and candidate for governor was usually there. Henry Woods and, usually, seven or eight people were around the table, and Jim Powell was pretty regularly invited from the Gazette and Leland and me. On this particular day, Leland and I had gone up there for lunch, and I noticed that before we went to lunch, we kind of gathered in Witt’s little office and shot the bull, and then when everybody arrived, you would go into this little dining area down the hall a few feet. And so there would be somebody, some functionary, at Stephens [who] would come up and go over to Witt and talk to him. And Witt would ponder it and shake his head, and we would go on. We went on into the dining room and this continued. And so he 1 told us, he said, “Boys, this morning I sold some bonds and I made me something like nine million dollars from selling some bonds.” And he said, “Before the day’s over I think I’m going to make me another thirteen million,” or something like that. So the guy kept coming back, and Witt would shake his head. So it finally came to — where we usually eat in the main dining room. For dessert we would all move next door into a dessert room, equally handsome furnishings in there, and we would get coffee and dessert. And Witt would pass around cigars. So it was in there that I recall that the guy comes in and whispers something to Witt. Witt nods this time that it’s ok, yes, so he does a little quick calculation and says, “Now, boys, I just made myself another 13.7 million dollars.” I forget what the figures are, but they were just astronomical figures. So Leland Duvall said, “Hell, Witt, that’s more money than I can make in a year.” RR: Who was the young guy from New York or someplace that came down to work at the Gazette and didn’t know how to drive a car? What was that about? ED: Oh, what was his name? Harvey. Harvey was his first name. He was a little short Jewish guy. He was a friend, I think, of Tom Hamburger and Eric Black, and he worked on the copy desk. He was a really wonderful guy, delightful person and a good copy editor. He really had no experience in journalism, but he got here. We hired him as a copy editor and he couldn’t drive. I was never around him on any of these occasions, but I did used to hear the stories about going on trips and weekend junkets with Harvey, Tom Hamburger, and Eric 2 Black and others. But he had been in New York City and he didn’t know how to drive. He had to rent an apartment a few blocks away from the Gazette because there wasn’t much public transportation. He had to live pretty close by because he didn’t have a car. I think they taught him how to drive a car while he was here, but they said it was scary because he had no skills at all to drive a car. RR: Didn’t he end up buying a car, not knowing how to drive? ED: Yes, I think that was right. He did buy a car without having any notion as to how to drive. RR: I knew a guy like that at The New York Times. A fellow named Paul Montgomery from New York who got sent down to south Alabama to help me cover the Selma-Montgomery March in 1965. They sent him down here to help out, and Paul didn’t tell him that he didn’t know how to drive. He didn’t even have a license. And when he got to Selma, he had to own up to it, you know. He was supposed to rent a car like everyone else. It made Claude so mad that he made Montgomery walk the whole 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery to cover the story. He had to march right along with them and sleep with them. ED: Was he with them when the shooting took place? RR: That happened the day after it was over with. It turned out to be a blessing because he got some good stories out of it. Just being there close to them. You mentioned Eric Black. That reminds me of something that I think that you told me years ago about going along with Eric and David Pryor and a trip on a boat somewhere. Tell about Eric. What kind of a guy was Eric? 3 ED: Eric was from Boston, and he had gone to Oberlin College. RR: That’s right, he was with my daughter, Cindy. ED: In fact, I think you had some role in getting him down to the Gazette. I think you --- they didn’t have a journalism department at Oberlin, but he decided that what he wanted to be was a journalist. RR: My daughter, Cindy . ED: Your daughter Cindy had him to talk to you, and I don’t know if you talked to him or he wrote you a letter or something. RR: Got him on at the Pine Bluff Commercial. ED: And you suggested he go to the Pine Bluff Commercial, that would be a good place to get started and get trained, and that’s what he did. And he worked there for awhile, obviously a wonderful writer. Really sharp young man. I was impressed with him and covered some stories with him and talked to A. R. Nelson or whoever was the managing editor at that time, and we eventually hired Eric at the Gazette. He was a general assignment reporter. He wasn’t a real popular person around the newsroom, but Eric was Eric. He was pushy, and he didn’t mind going in and telling the managing editor how much money he thought he ought to have or how his stories were not properly handled. I loved him, but he just grated on everyone’s nerves around there. He was a Boston Yankee. He had a big black beard and bushy black hair, big unkempt beard. RR: Unlike your beard and mine. ED: Unlike our beards which are trimmed. His was bushy, and I think that kind of 4 offended people, but he was a great reporter. And then left the Gazette and went to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has been one of their stars up there. I think he has done several books, and he’s the special projects editor. If any of us might have predicted — he got on well there and just intimidated everybody into giving him the top assignments and the cushiest jobs and wound up there in the last few years. I think he does two or three stories per year and nobody dares question him about that. He does what he wants to do there and would have done the same thing at the Gazette because he was better just letting him do what he wants to do. But he got upset with the Gazette at the end. He did a wonderful story; he did an expose of some corruption in a labor union. Got some tips on that and spent quite a bit of time and endured a lot of intimidation from some of these bullies from this union. They tried to intimidate him; in fact, he was scared to death when he was supposed to meet the president of this union at the Sam Peck Hotel back in a little dining room back in the back. Sam Peck, you remember that’s where we used to meet all the time. And he had been trying to reach this guy to talk to him about all of the stuff that he had on him, and this guy finally agreed to meet him at this place and so Eric was afraid. He thought of violence because this guy said, “ I am going to bring along a couple of people.” And he did, so he wanted me to go along with him as if I could protect him. You know, I was a 6'3" and 150- pound weakling. So we met up there and he did bring a couple of these real tough bully guys with him, and they did try to intimidate Eric about doing the story. They implied that if he wrote that story he’d be sorry. Well, he did write the story and 5 at some length, and there were some reservations about it at the Gazette --- I think the attorneys — and it wound up getting rewritten, substantially rewritten, and toned down. And it wasn’t the hard-hitting story that he had set out to write. He was extremely disappointed about that. He never got over that, and the Gazette eventually published the story, but the stories came out as, not an expose, but to say that here is this dispute in this union between the current leadership of the union and some people on the outside.
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