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. But Eric had the goods on them and,
subsequently, the state or federal investigations --- they were prosecuted and sent
to prison, the people that he had written about --- They found the same kind of
evidence that he had had at the Gazette.
RR: About what year did he work on that story?
ED: It would have probably been in the late 1970s or early 1980s maybe. Along in
there, maybe. I’m not sure just when Eric left. That sounds about right, maybe
1979 or 1980.
RR: Didn’t you run into Eric up in Washington on occasion, you and Tom
Hamburger? Or was it Tom telling you this that they were invited out on a boat
with David Pryor and some friends one time?
ED: Roy, I’m not recalling it right at the moment.
RR: It seems to me that Pryor invited Tom to come with him out to the coast.
Somebody had a yacht or boat or something and David had been invited, and he
asked Tom to come along. Well, Eric showed up unexpectedly and invited
himself. Does that ring a bell?
6 ED: Yes, it kind of rings a bell, but now I can’t remember much about it.
RR: Anyway, it was a pretty interesting afternoon out on the water with --- because it
wasn’t even Pryor’s party. He was the invited guest, and he had invited
Hamburger. Well, anyway, Eric doesn’t take no for an answer. In the first
interview we talked just a little bit about at least one of the Portis brothers. There
were three of them at the Gazette. Could you tell a little about the three of them?
ED: Well, Charles Portis, Buddy Portis, the novelist, went to work at the Gazette in
probably about 1958 or 1959. He had been in the Marine Corps and at the
University of Arkansas. I suppose that he graduated there. He wrote for The
Traveler. He got some recognition there. I think Time Magazine --- did he write
something for Time? Is that what it was?
RR: He wrote a piece for The Traveler that was a send-up of Time Magazine about the
terrible story that Time had done on Orval Faubus and the state of Arkansas.
ED: Then after he graduated, he went to work for the Memphis Commercial Appeal
and then in about 1959 or so, he went to the Arkansas Gazette and he wrote the
“Arkansas Traveler” column or the “Our Town” column. I have forgotten which.
The two columns, the “Our Town” column and the “Arkansas Traveler” column,
he was writing one and Charles Allbright was writing the other at various times.
Allbright went on to write editorials and then he came back to resume the
“Traveler” column or maybe it was the “Our Town” column. And then he left the
Gazette and went to New York, and I think he didn’t have a job. I think he just
quit and went to New York City and he was hired by the New York Herald-
7 Tribune as a reporter and then went to London. I think he was at their London
bureau for awhile. He covered the Queen and so forth, and he told a story about
burning his nose. You want me to tell that story?
RR: Might as well.
ED: This is after he came back from London. He was over there for awhile, and he
quit and came back and wrote a novel. He went up to Mountain Home where he
wrote Norwood, the first of the novels that he published. But I remember that
after he came home, we were sitting around one night and he was telling stories
and he told us about how one day he was --- the Queen of England would
periodically invite the foreign reporters for audiences --- So he was invited to one,
and there were going to be several of the reporters there, so the night before, they
were all sitting around at Buddy’s apartment, or somebody’s apartment in
London, and having a few beers, smoking and playing cards. And somebody
could do this trick where they could put a lit cigarette on the end of their tongue,
and it would burn down, and they would fold their tongue back in so that the
cigarette went into the back of their mouth, and they could close their mouth and
open it back up, and the cigarette would be stuck to their tongue, and they would
avoid burning the roof of their mouth. Well, Buddy was the kind of guy who
always had to take every dare, so he decided that he could do that. So he put this
cigarette on the end of his tongue and laid his head back, and the cigarette fell off
his tongue and the lit end of it landed on the end of his nose and kind of stuck
there to the flesh and burned the end of his nose. Of course, the next day, he had
8 to go to the palace for an audience with the Queen, and he had to go because it was a once in a lifetime thing, and the end of his nose was like a great big red rubber ball. And he could hardly see past this big red nose. It had gotten infected, so he was self conscious about his nose. Through this whole thing he was trying to use his napkin to try to keep the Queen from seeing his nose.
Buddy was always taking these kind of dares. I remember once when he was at the New York Herald-Tribune, one night they were in a bar in New York and — I heard about this incident from Bill Whitworth, who was a former Gazette man who was at the New York Herald-Tribune. They went into this bar one night and the people from The New York Times and the Herald-Tribune gathered. And there was this great big burly guy from The New York Times. He was either a reporter or a copy editor there, and he was going to arm wrestle. This guy was this massive person. He was just beating everybody in the bar, so he kind of dared Portis. So Portis finally took him up on it, so he went over and they arm wrestled. And there was straining there, and all ofa sudden there was this loud
POP! And this guy from The New York Times’ arm snapped. It had broken his arm and the guy, of course, went into shock and fell to the floor, and so they had to call an ambulance and haul him away. Portis was just crushed by this. Bill
Whitworth had called me and was telling me about it, and so Buddy’s middle brother, Richard Portis, who was a Gazette copy editor, was on the Gazette copy desk at the time. I told Richard about this incident and what his brother did, and he said, “I’m going to call him up.” And so he used my phone and called Buddy
9 at his apartment in New York and said, “Hey Bubba, I understand that you broke
some bastard’s arm at The New York Times.” And Buddy just slammed the phone
down and hung up on him. That’s Buddy Portis who went on to fame as a
novelist. Wrote True Grit. Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, Gringoes, and is
still publishing short stories in the Atlantic.
RR: Richard Portis.
ED: Richard had the same kind of wit that Buddy did, but he was a copy editor at the
Gazette. He was a wonderful copy editor. He was a kind of a prankster. Richard
worked there I guess four or five years and then went back and got his --- went to
medical school and became a physician. So, I guess, for the last twenty-five years
he has been a physician down at Hope and Texarkana and Prescott. The youngest
brother was Jonathan Portis who was also at one time a reporter on the state desk
and then a copy editor as well. Jonathan later became an advertising person. So
he’s in the advertising business with Cranford, Johnson and Hunt Advertising
Agency in Little Rock.
RR: Cranford, Johnson and Hunt?
ED: Yes, Cranford, Johnson and Hunt. All three of them were funny brilliant guys,
and I think Richard would be equal in writing to Buddy if he would have . . .
RR: He’s a good writer. I’ve seen some of his writings. He’s got a gift as a comic
writer. He did poems.
ED: Poems, yes. He used to write poems all the time, and occasionally he would get
one published in the Gazette. He would sneak one in, and they were always
10 parodies of the Anna Zagnoni Marinoni and the other lady poets of Arkansas. He
was called the “Trinomial Poet” because there always had to be three names.
RR: His favorite was Rosa Norfleet Parks.
ED: Rosa Norfleet Parks of Route 3, Stamps. Was that it?
RR: I believe so.
ED: And he would write under those pseudonyms, and there would be certain words . .
. certain words that had to be in the poem. They were kind of common words that
he always used in his poems and that would be the rule in writing poetry. They
were words that he had to work into the poem.
RR: Like “gossamer.”
ED: “Gossamer” was the number one. “Gossamer” always had to be in the poem.
That was his favorite word.
RR: Was Richard part of that Army Reserve Unit that you were in?
ED: Yes, the 343rd Public Information Detachment. When I was --- in 1962, I had a
deferment, won a deferment from the Army and, all of a sudden, they were going
to draft me. That’s another story. Orval Faubus controlled the draft office, and
they decided that they were going to draft the three El Dorado boys that worked at
the Gazette and sent word down to draft us.
RR: The three being you . . .
ED: Ken Danforth and Leroy Donald, but, of course, by that time they were past the
age to be drafted, so the order was that I was to be drafted the next month. I was
to be at the top of the September draft list. A guy named Caroom, who was the
11 state selective service director, Colonel Caroom. That happened because he came
down for his annual visit for inspection of the draft office in Union County at El
Dorado, and as he was leaving, Mrs. Black, who ran the draft office said, “Well,
going back to Little Rock, we have three of our finest boys up there at the
Arkansas Gazette.” That was the summer of 1962. So a few days later he calls
her and says, “You mentioned those three boys at the Gazette. Can you tell me
what their names are?” And she said, “Yes, Leroy Donald, Kenneth Danforth, and
Ernest Dumas.” So a couple of days after that, she gets a memo that says that they
have checked and found out that Danforth and Leroy have reached the age of 26
or 27 or whatever it is, and they are no longer draft eligible, peacetime draft
eligible. He said, “Ernest Dumas is to go at the top of the list in September.” At
that time I was covering the governor’s race, and I was covering Sid McMath, so
my by-lines everyday were on the front page as McMath was attacking Orval
Faubus and so forth. So I assumed that that had something to do with it. My
name getting called to their attention. So she called A. R. Nelson --- turns out
that they were childhood sweethearts, Mrs. Black and A. R. Nelson, the managing
editor of the Gazette, who is also from El Dorado. They had been very close.
And she had arranged for the three of us boys to always be deferred, I guess, but,
of course, nearly all white boys were deferred. In those days they just drafted the
blacks in south Arkansas. You could always draft enough black kids to fill the
quota. It wasn’t a high quota at that time anyway.
RR: That was before the Vietnam War had really kicked in.
12 ED: This was altogether before the Vietnam War. This was when Kennedy was
president. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred a couple of weeks after I went on
duty.
RR: We just had some advisors in Vietnam.
ED: Maybe, we might have had some advisors. Yes, we probably had some advisors
over there, but nobody at that time --- most people hadn’t heard of Vietnam.
RR: It would have mainly been a nuisance.
ED: Yes, it was a nuisance at the time. We were not at war anyplace in the world. So
she called up Mr. Nelson and said, “I am so sorry. I’ve just made such a terrible
mistake. I’ve mentioned those boys’ names to Mr. Caroom, and he wants Ernest
Dumas drafted. I am just so sorry.” I found out about it. I came in from the
campaign trail, and Nelson calls me into his office and says, “I’ve got some bad
news for you. Mrs. Black called from the draft office in El Dorado, and you are
going to be drafted next month. She’s been ordered to put you at the top of the
draft list. So I don’t know what you want to do about that. I don’t know if you
want to join a reserve.” And so I went out to the [?] Armory out at UALR and
joined the 343rd Public Information Detachment and went on active duty. I did
basic training for six months in Fort Polk, Louisiana, and then in New York City I
was stationed for the last after basic training at a little old island called David’s
Island.
RR: David’s Island?
ED: David’s Island. Out from New Rochelle just north of New York City out in Long
13 Island Sound.
RR: You were at a place called Fort Slocum.
ED: Where the Army Information school and the chaplain school were located. So
there were no weapons allowed on the island and so that’s where I did the balance
of my [QD?]. And then I came back, and for the next four and a half or five and a
half years, I was in the 343rd Public Information Detachment.
RR: How long were you on active duty?
ED: Six months, but after that a whole bunch of us at the Gazette --- anytime anybody
got in that looked like they might be drafted --- because then the war comes along
--- The Vietnam War comes along and everybody wants to avoid the draft. So
Mike Trimble [and] Richard Portis, who worked for the Gazette, joined the 343rd
Public Information Detachment. Gene Foreman was briefly with the unit when he
came back from New York during the newspaper strike and then stayed here. He
was for a time the executive officer of the 343rd. As a matter of fact, I didn’t
attend many drills when I came back. I said, “To hell with it,” and I didn’t attend
many drills till, finally, in about 1965 or 1966, Robert McNamara, the Secretary
of Defense, issued an order that non-drilling reservists were to be called to active
duty and to be sent to Vietnam. So I returned to my unit and began to attend
drills for the last couple of months of my six-year duty. And so, as a result of my
not being a very active person, I didn’t get promoted, so I was still a private first
class. I guess at that time I was about 30 or 31 years old, and I was still a private
first class. So on my last drill before I left the reserves, they had a little ceremony
14 and we were all in formation outside and Captain Foreman pinned my corporal
stripe on me. I got promoted to corporal on my last meeting and Captain
Foreman made a little speech about how dedication and hard work paid off, and
everybody had a straight face and . . .
RR: Solemn occasion.
ED: Solemn occasion and then he pinned my corporal stripe on. All of the others went
into it as kind of a joke. The 343rd Public Information Detachment didn’t do
anything. We met, and we went and had waffles, and we slept. And our only
duty that we ever performed was periodically to complete the files to show that
we were receiving training. So we typed up dummy syllabuses for our classes.
We never had a single class in all of the years that I was with them. But
somebody, every drill or two, had to type up a long syllabus showing what was
going to be taught in these classes so that the files would be complete. And that’s
all that we ever did. I say that; I suspect that is the case with most reserve men.
RR: How many years in the penitentiary could you have gotten for defrauding the
United States Government? You know those records are still in the Pentagon
somewhere.
ED: They probably are. I would suspect that there would be a thorough investigation
and millions of reservists would be in prison. I think the other units, the civil
affairs unit there, were there at the same time and, as far as I know, they didn’t do
anything either. In the Armory you would kind of go into a room and there’d be
people lying around asleep on Sunday mornings in their fatigues, and they would
15 be lying on the floor and on cots.
RR: Didn’t you all put out a paper or something, you Gazette people?
ED: Well, we’d go to summer camp. I actually went about three times to summer
camp at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Fort Hood, Texas, Fort Chaffee once. I went over
there with an artillery unit once and so what we would do at summer camp is put
out a newspaper for the summer encampment. And we put out one at Fort Sill,
Oklahoma, that was called the Dust Rag because we were all out in the field all
week and it was dusty, so we put out a weekly newspaper that was called the Dust
Rag. It was supposed to be news of all of the units drilling there. There would be
tens of thousands of reserve units and national guard units during their summer
training. And so we were supposed to put out a newspaper for all of these units,
so, actually, what we did was all the stories were fake. We didn’t do any of them.
Trimble did a thing called Poet’s Corner and we would all write poetry. Portis
would write poetry. And we had this drawing of this tough sergeant, and he was
kind of the editor of Poet’s Corner with a fake sergeant’s name. Richard Portis
was writing fillers, you know, column fillers, and most of the papers would be
column fillers, and he’d have one for example that would say, “[Bread?] was
invented by third century Assyrian when their children cried for a greasy
substance to spread on their bread.” “According to the Quartermaster, the largest
boot ever issued in the U. S. Army was issued to Private First Class Ernest
Dumas, a size 20.” Republicans have prosecuted for all of that, but most of these
guys in that unit were newspaper guys, a guy named Allen Ables and a couple of
16 others from television stations, one or two people from the Pine Bluff
Commercial, so all of the enlisted men were generally newspaper guys or other
people like Jim Schneider from the Log Cabin Democrat. He went into the
service at the same time as I did and he was in the unit. So all of the enlisted men
in the unit were old newspaper guys, and the officers, with exception of Gene
Foreman, were not newspaper people. And Craig Raines, the advertising
executive, was the executive officer, and they would come with their dress
uniforms on and their shoes shined. They could not enforce discipline in the unit,
so they just finally gave up.
RR: Sounds like “M*A*S*H.”
ED: It really was. It was a MASH unit. There was no discipline. We didn’t salute;
we didn’t call anybody sir or anything else. For awhile, it pissed off a couple
officers. There were about two or three officers and about fourteen enlisted men,
but they finally just gave up on it. The biggest project one year was to build a
stone retaining wall on the major’s house. The major had bought a new house up
here in [?] Park and it was built on the side of a hill, so we all loaded into cars and
we’d go out to the Camp Robinson area and load up stones. We’d load up cars
and the major’s truck with stone, and we’d spend a weekend going back to his
house and building rock gardens and retaining walls and stuff. That was our
project that one summer.
RR: How many of you Gazette people were in this unit?
ED: Probably, over a period of the years that I was there, probably eight or ten Gazette
17 people in all. Not all at the same time. Usually, there were three or four at a time
and, of course, when the draft ended, all of that stopped. I guess they still had the
public information detachment.
RR: There are a couple of more people that I’d like to get your recollections about
from this same era. Did you know Matilda Tuohey very well?
ED: Pretty well. When I went to work there in June 1960, Matilda --- I don’t know
whether she was a general assignment writer or she covered city hall at that time,
but we were seat mates and so we shared a telephone. Remember there were two
desks and two reporters would share a telephone. So I took Ronnie Farrar’s place
who had left the Gazette, I think, to work on his master’s degree at Indiana
University or someplace, and I took his place. So Matilda told me in a few weeks
that ordinarily she didn’t speak to reporters until they had been there for six
months but that she would make an exception for me. Now I think that she told
everyone that. She was commonly known there as Tuffy.
RR: Tuffy and Tiger.
ED: Tuffy and Tiger were two nicknames.
RR: She was pretty gruff.
ED: She had been there since the 1940s. I guess in the 1940s.
RR: She was probably a replacement during the war.
ED: And there were stories that she had never married, and there was a story around
that she was in love with the guy that she was going to marry and he was killed
during the war. I don’t know if that was true or not. It was a story that somebody
18 told me.
RR: Matilda died this year or last.
ED: No, it was last year --- well, it was 1998 or 1999.
RR: She had terrible emphysema at the end. You mentioned A. R. Nelson while ago.
He was the guy that hired you and me both. What kind of a guy was Nelson?
ED: Nelson didn’t take much of a hand out in the newsroom. He was an old copy
desk man and he was quiet. I never had a lot to do with him except at dinnertime
when he would --- every evening around there the young pups around there, like
Pat Crow and Bill Whitworth and I and a guy named Paul Brower who was an
obit writer and a crap desk man, we would all go to Buddy Breier’s restaurant. It
was an old German restaurant that had been in business since the turn of the
century. And it was where, I guess, the Excelsior Hotel is, the Little Rock
Convention Center is now [with a] beautiful, ornate bar and wonderful German
food, sauerbraten, wiener schnitzel, sausages, pot roast, and potato pancakes. We
would eat there every evening, and Nelson always had the corner table. We’d all
be back in the corner. It was Nelson’s table. He would eat there every evening
and, usually, we would join him there, two or three of us every evening, and we
spent a good part of our Saturday eating at Breier’s Restaurant. And he was an
enjoyable company.
RR: What was his favorite beer? He always drank beer. Was it Budweiser?
ED: I think it was, but I’m not certain.
RR: It was a standup bottle. He bought it by the case at home.
19 ED: Nelson did?
RR: Only person that I knew in those days that could afford to buy beer by the case.
One of the perks of being the editor I guess.
ED: We were always waited on by the same waitress. We all thought she was pretty
in a way. Her name was Pat. She had black hair and she always waited on
Nelson, and we always gave her a nice tip. Pat was from Damascus, Arkansas.
Chris Kazan would eat over there with us from time to time, and I think Chris was
always in love with Pat.
RR: Chris was bad to fall in love.
ED: He was always falling in love with waitresses or whoever. Anybody.
RR: Do you remember what year Nelson died? Or about when?
ED: What, four or five years ago?
RR: It’s been quite awhile ago.
ED: Leland Duvall has a story to tell about that and we’ll see if we can get him to tell
about it. It’s about how Nelson --- Nelson is from El Dorado --- I’ll tell it to you
really briefly, and we can see if we can get Leland to straighten it out. But he
worked at the El Dorado paper. And Clyde Palmer was the owner of all of those
south Arkansas papers, a kind of a tightwad, celebrated tightwad. And Nelson, I
think, was getting something like fourteen dollars per week as his salary, and he
would go out and there were two guys --- Clovis Copeland might have been the
other guy. I’m not certain about that. We can check with Leland. — But both of
them were getting fourteen dollars per week, and Nelson was going out and
20 covering the El Dorado Oilers, the Class C Cotton States League baseball team
that we had there in El Dorado, and he’d be the official scorekeeper. He would be
covering it anyway, so he would be their scorekeeper for which he was paid two
dollars a week to be the scorekeeper. And Copeland found out about it and,
anyway, ultimately, Mr. Palmer found out about it, so he called Nelson into his
office and said, “Arla, it’s come to my attention that you are getting two dollars
every week to keep score for the El Dorado Oilers. That’s not quite fair. I want
to keep you and Copeland at the same salaries, so I’m going to reduce your salary
by two dollars to bring it into parity with Copeland’s.”
RR: Oh, my Lord.
ED: Nelson kind of looked at him, got up, walked out the door, closed the door quietly
behind him, put his hat on and left the building and never came back.
RR: Good.
ED: Be sure to have Leland to tell that story to make sure I had it right. I guess
Nelson told him about it.
RR: Did you have much to do with Ashmore?
ED: Ashmore had left about six months before I came.
RR: You came in 1959?
ED: I came in 1960, in June of 1960 when I graduated from the University of
Missouri, and he had been gone about six months. Jim Powell was the editor of
the editorial page. Years after that he came back, and I got to be with him quite a
few times. And, I guess, the last time he came to Little Rock before his death, he
21 stayed out with Fred Darragh. When he came to town, he would stay with Fred
Darragh, and so I went out a couple of times and had dinner with Harry and Fred.
At that time I think he had had some surgery and was in great spirits although his
health was failing pretty badly. He was a great writer and a great storyteller, and
that’s all he ever did every time I was around him was tell stories. Endless stories
. . . that deep big rich voice of his . . .
RR: I can still hear it. Do you remember Charlie Davis?
ED: I remember Charlie a little bit. Charlie was the one that was way past his prime
when I went to work there. In his earlier years I think he had been a labor
reporter in Pittsburgh. I can’t remember what all of his background was. I think
his daddy had been a newspaper man himself at the Gazette. And then Charlie
was the editor of what we called the Sunday Magazine which was a kind of a
Sunday feature section of the paper.
RR: I never knew Charlie very well either, and I was looking for somebody who knew
him better. I thought Martha Douglas might since she roomed with him up there
inside the library.
ED: He had to drink. He would go off and by mid-afternoon he’d be stumbling drunk,
I think. In the last few years and, finally, — I think Bob Douglas would have to
tell this --- but I think Bob was the one who had to let him go after the incident
involving the guy who is the editor up in Fayetteville now.
RR: Mike Masterson?
ED: Mike Masterson. Masterson was, I think, the editor up at Newport and was a
22 stringer for the Gazette for that part of the state. There was a big article that
covered the whole front page of the Sunday Magazine one Sunday, and the head
on it was something like “Arkansas’s Breed of Great Young Editors.” It was a
big feature story with big pictures about three or four newspaper editors who were editors of small town dailies in Arkansas. One of them was Mike Masterson; another one was George Smith who was later an editor at Mountain Home, maybe in Hope, and is now the communications director at Alltel. At that time they were all very young men, and it was a glowing account of these guys and how they had transformed journalism in small towns. Interviews with them, mainly with
Masterson, an extensive interview with Masterson where he was quoted about his philosophies of journalism and coverage and so forth, hardhitting journalism.
And, as I recall, the theme of it was that most small town journalism was
Chamber of Commerce kind of journalism where you just kind of promote the town and stay away from controversy. But these editors were the ones really covering the news. Well, it turns out that it was --- I forgot what the by-line on the story was — but it turns out that it was written by Masterson himself under this pseudonym, and it was a big self-promoting article. Here this guy is promoting himself at the Gazette, so Douglas found out about it and — I’m thinking that it was Douglas — and he confronted Charlie who kind of finally owned up to at least suspecting that Masterson was the author of it. Anyway, I think shortly after that Charlie was relieved of his duties and he retired shortly after that, and Douglas decreed that nothing by Mike Masterson was ever to
23 appear in the Gazette again. He was no longer a stringer. But I may have some
of the facts wrong. You may want to have Douglas to confirm them.
RR: I was trying to recollect some stories that you covered at the Gazette. What were
some of the main stories that you remember?
ED: Well, some of the biggest stories were the big disaster stories when, in 1966 or so,
I was covering the Capitol and — you covered this story as well — I was
covering the Capitol, and it might have been on a Monday or something; for some
reason I was down at the office and I had covered the Supreme Court and was
bringing my stories down, but they had a police radio there at the desk and
stopped me and said, “There’s been something [that’s] happened with a missile
silo in White County. Something has happened there. And there are so many
ambulances and all kinds of stuff.” So he said, “Why don’t you and Larry
Obsitnik, the photographer, go out to Adams field and get a little airplane and see
what the hell is going on?” So we did. We went out to Adams field and got a
little plane and pilot and fooled around up there, and, sure enough, we were flying
around out in Searcy in the woods over one of these silos, and we see that they’re
in this little compound surrounded by fences. There are a lot of military vehicles
surrounded around there, people outside, and we kind of swoop down close over
the site there, and the MP’s start waving at us, so we go land the plane there at the
Searcy airport. And what happened, it turns out, was that they were retrofitting
one of these Titan Missile Silos in Central Arkansas and, I think, maybe, they
were converting them to liquid fuel from solid fuel or whatever --- I’m not sure
24 what the deal was now --- and that there had been a fire down in one of these silos
where all of these private laborers were working, and the upshot of it was that
there were fifty-three or sixty-three men who were trapped in the silo, suffocating,
who died down there. You were with The New York Times at the time and came
flying in for that. [There were] two of these big missile disasters. The other one
was ten years later. I think only two airmen were killed in the silo around
Damascus, Arkansas, and it blew the warhead out in the field.
RR: Yes, that was scary stuff.
ED: What we were dealing with, yes. Nuclear warheads down in a silo. It turns out
that they were all safe, but . . .
RR: In that first one, didn’t it develop that a worker had dropped a wrench and it had
struck a spark and set off and started a fire?
ED: Something like that, but I had determined that probably what had happened was
that one of the workers way up high had dropped a wrench, and it might have
fallen and snapped a hose or something and some gas leaked out, and there was
some kind of fire and it almost instantly consumed all of the oxygen in the silo,
which was closed off and could not get the lid off. It had a concrete lid on top of
it and so everybody died. Sometime in the night they got down in there to
retrieve all of the bodies.
RR: Can you think of any stories that happened around the Capitol that come to mind?
ED: Well, one story was the Arkansas Loan and Thrift Scandal which would have
been about 1967, ‘68, ‘69. I was at the Capitol, and I guess Winthrop Rockefeller
25 was governor at this time, but the scandal covered the latter years of the Faubus
administration. There had been some guys over at Fort Smith, a guy named
Ernest A. Bartlett, Jr., that had found an old defunct building and loan charter that
was maybe thirty or forty years old that had been unused. And he got this thing
and made a company out of that charter, not a savings and loan association, and it
was not chartered as a bank, but it was some hybrid outfit under some old law.
And he was using this, and there were a whole bunch of public officials in on it.
The charter was written in the office of the Attorney General we found out in one
of the stories. The Attorney General was Bruce Bennett, and he got stock in the
company, and one of his deputies who actually drafted the charter became a
stockholder in it. That was his payment for drafting the charter. A number of
other prominent political figures were involved, Representative Paul Van Dalsem,
state Senator Joe Lee Anderson of Helena. This thing operated for three or four
years, advertising heavily in western Arkansas, and got a lot of widows and
churches to take their money out of savings accounts, church building funds and
put them into the Arkansas Loan and Thrift because they were promised a higher
interest rate than banks or S and L’s could pay under the law, Regulation Q,
whatever it was. And so they operated pretty freely for those years, and they
would build up deposits quickly of about four million dollars. And then all of a
sudden in about 1968, it was shut down. The Securities and Exchange
Commission came in and . . .
RR: Federal?
26 ED: The Federal Securities and Exchange Commission, and they went to the federal
district court of Fort Smith and petitioned the federal district court at Fort Smith
to close it, put it out of business, and Judge John E. Miller of Fort Smith did so,
with the receivership closed it. So I went over to Fort Smith to see what had
happened because we had heard rumors about Arkansas Loan & Thrift. And so
when they closed it, we went over to Fort Smith and got into their offices —
actually not in Fort Smith, but Van Buren ---- so you had these Federal regulators
in there, lawyers from the SEC. So I checked into a little motel room down the
street from the Arkansas Loan and Thrift headquarters and so we just got all of
the records. I was making copies of all of these records and I came back and just
wrote stories day after day. And then we found out that what had happened was
that they had, the bankers, of course — Bill Bowen was with the Arkansas
Bankers Association --- they were upset about it because this place was draining
off deposits from the banks and S & L’s were upset about it and the state
Securities Division. So what happened was that the state S & L regulator who
was also the state security commissioner, a guy named Clint Jones in the Faubus
Administration, he wrote the Attorney General’s office, asking Attorney General
Bruce Bennett, “Is Arkansas Loan and Thrift an S and L and can we regulate it?”
And Bruce Bennett wrote back and said, “No, it is not a savings and loan
association and your office has no authority to regulate this company.” The state
bank commissioner, Dick Simpson, wrote a letter saying, “Is this a bank and can
we regulate it?” And Bruce Bennett writes a letter back to Simpson saying, “It is
27 not a bank. You cannot regulate it.” And so the state Insurance Department says,
“There is a thing called a savings and guaranty corporation that has been set up to
guarantee assets. Is this an insurance company that we can regulate?” Bruce
Bennett wrote an opinion back, “No, it is not an insurance company set up under
the statutes, laws of the state of Arkansas. You cannot regulate it.” None of these
opinions were put out for the public. We never saw them. Those opinions were
put in a box and recorded as so. These never made it out into the box, and I just
found a copy of them in the files at the Arkansas Loan and Thrift.
RR: Did the SEC guys help you?
ED: Yes, they cooperated with me and, in fact, they came over to my motel and made
copies of all of this stuff. I spent some time there during the day, and they would
come over there at night, and so I wrote a long series of stories about it, and all of
these guys were indicted in it. The Attorney General was indicted, and the
president was indicted and two people from Booneville were indicted, and there
were charges in Federal District Court. But Bruce was a good friend of Judge
Oren Harris, the federal judge from South Arkansas. They were both from El
Dorado and both friends, so he severed Bruce Bennett’s case from the others and
gave him a continuance. Bruce came up with cancer and lived another ten years
and was never tried. Every year or two Harris would put off the trial for another
year, so he never came to trial. But it was a great story because all of these ---
Claude Carpenter was involved and the governor’s staff and the attorney for
governor Faubus, he was involved. It seemed to me anyway that it was an effort
28 by the president to bribe a state judge.
RR: The president of the company?
ED: The president of the company, through Claude Carpenter, attempted, at least in
my mind, to bribe a chancery judge here in Little Rock to keep his company.
RR: Yes, that’s the kind of story that the Gazette was so good at. This might be a
good time to talk about the Gazette as a --- well, I’m not sure how to say — what
kind of guiding principles --- let me back up. Do you remember at the University
of Missouri there was a course called “History and Principles of Journalism” and,
I guess, it was still being taught when you were there, probably by Dean English
by then, but . . .
ED: No, he didn’t teach much when I was there.
RR: Anyway, the idea of it was to let these youngsters try to learn what it felt like to
be a newspaper person, reporter, editor. And the way that you are supposed to
look at things in the paper as more than ethics but a point of view that good
newspaper people were to have. Do you know what I’m talking about? If so, can
you kind of describe what it was at the Gazette?
ED: I think that the Gazette kind of looked at itself as a guardian of the state’s morals
or ethics. And that’s the kind of story that Bill Shelton and the others wanted to
do, to get out the corruption, the favoritism in the government. It was just kind of
a moral mission that the newspaper had.
RR: Do you remember that the people in the newsroom saw themselves as different
from the people, say, in the business office?
29 ED: Yes, I think to most of us it wasn’t like a job where you make a living because
you didn’t make much of a living there. Salaries were better any other place than
in the newspaper business in Arkansas, but it was kind of a mission that we were
on. And you couldn’t see yourself working at any other place or any other line of
work A few people would go off into public relations, but not many. Not many
left the Gazette to get into public relations unless they were really having trouble
handling this kind of work.
RR: Was there a special kind of honesty in the newsroom?
ED: I think there was. I don’t know how to express it.
RR: Well, I don’t know either, but I know that — I guess, we thought that we were
better than everybody else.
ED: I think so. And I guess we kind of exuded that because after the Gazette closed
and the Democrat became the only newspaper and became the Democrat-Gazette
and people who went over to the --- there were a few people during the years after
that who went to work at the Democrat-Gazette, I think Mike Trimble did briefly.
He had left the Gazette to go with the Arkansas Times Magazine and wound up
later working at the Democrat-Gazette. And there was this kind of resentment
that Gazette people thought of themselves as superior and they resented the hell
out of it that the people at the Gazette thought they were better, on a higher plane
of journalism, than the rest of them and they resented it. And I think that there
was a little bit of that with the two newspapers. You kind of felt that. Also,
because nearly everybody at the Democrat pretty close to the end, everybody at
30 the Democrat went to work at the Gazette. Even after they began to be
competitive in their salaries, they were hustling trying to raise salaries to be
competitive with the Gazette. But Bob Douglas told me once that he had an
application from every single person at the Democrat newsroom. There was a
period of time that that is all that we did was hire people from the Democrat. We
had an opening, and I think Bob took some pleasure in just reaching across the
street and showing them that we could hire any of them that we wanted to over
there anytime we wanted to do it. Everybody wanted to work for the Gazette.
RR: Were the standards that much higher at the Gazette?
ED: You mean the standards . . .
RR: I mean of skill and news judgement and language, you know, all of the kinds of
things that make a good newspaper.
ED: Well, it was more of editing at the Gazette.
RR: Maybe that’s what I’m getting at.
ED: There was a lot of newspapers that was just [?], but there was a lot of editing that
went on at the Gazette, and there was not much editing that went on at the
Democrat. Those guys from the copy desk used to have to put on superior airs
when Pat Crow was on the copy desk. Then he went to The New York Times and
they thought they were superior to all of us, and they took great pains with the
copy editing. Pat Crow would find some error and some slip in my copy and
would delight in standing up and shouting in the newsroom and reading
something that I had written and, of course, I would just turn red.
31 RR: Such as a failure of syntax?
ED: Some syntax failure, but they loved to catch those things.
RR: Didn’t Crow tell one of you after he went to work at The New York Times that he
used to do the same thing with David Halberstam’s copy from Vietnam?
ED: I think so, yes.
RR: He just developed a great disdain for Halberstam, one of the world’s great
reporters, but he said he couldn’t write a lick. He was always having to rewrite
Halberstam’s column.
ED: That’s true, of course, with a lot of great reporters. They aren’t the greatest
writers, and Halberstam was one of them. Elizabeth Drew apparently was another
one that Crow told me that Elizabeth Drew [?] her copy.
RR: At The New Yorker?
ED: At The New Yorker. And it would take weeks and weeks and weeks to edit one
piece by Elizabeth Drew.
RR: There was another great editor, Whitworth.
ED: Yes. Of course, he was not an editor at the Gazette. He was a writer, but he was
a wonderful writer. I guess he was one of the great editors at The Atlantic and at
The New Yorker.
RR: We’re about to get into the last go around, and it might be a good place to stop.
[End of Interview]
32