Arkansas Supreme Court Project Arkansas Supreme Court Historical Society Interview with Justice Bradley Dean Jesson Fort Smith, Arkansas January 6, 2014 Interviewer: Ernest Dumas Ernest Dumas: OK, this is Ernie Dumas; it is Monday, January 6th, 2014. We’re at (address deleted), Fort Smith, which is the home of Bradley Dean Jesson, who was chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1995 and 1996 under appointment of Governor Jim Guy Tucker. This audio recording will be the property of the Arkansas Supreme Court Historical Society and the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas and it some day will be archived at one or both places and perhaps put on the internet to be used for access for research or entertainment or amusement or whatever. Brad, can I have your consent that the Supreme Court Historical Society and the David and Barbara Pryor Center can use these audiotapes for that purpose? Bradley Jesson: So agreed ED: All right. Well, you were born on, am I right, on January 26, 1932? BJ: That’s correct. ED: At Bartlesville, Oklahoma? BJ: That’s right. ED: And your daddy and momma were who? BJ: My father was named Dean Abraham Jesson. ED: Dean Abraham, A-B-R-A-M? BJ: A-B-R-A-H-A-M. ED: Abraham? BJ: Abraham. ED: OK. BJ: A-B-R-A-H-A-M, Abraham. ED: All right. And your momma’s name? BJ: And my momma’s name was Opal Rhaye Bradley Jesson. ED: Opal, O-P-A-L? BJ: O-P-A-L. ED: R-A-E? BJ: Actually, R-H-A-Y-E. ED: R-H-A-Y-E? BJ: Yes. And her maiden name was Bradley. ED: So that’s how you got the name Bradley? BJ: That’s how I got my name. ED: All right. And what did they do? BJ: My father was a pharmacist and owned a drugstore in a small town just north of Bartlesville called Copan, Oklahoma, C-O-P-A-N. It was a town of about five, six hundred people, oh maybe eight or ten miles north of Bartlesville. And it was very near, within five or six miles of the Kansas line. ED: So this is way up on the border of Kansas? BJ: The far north, yes. Bartlesville is the county seat of Washington County, Oklahoma. It was also the headquarters of Phillips Petroleum Company and Cities Service Oil Company; it was quite an oil town. ED: Big oil town? BJ: Yes. ED: And it was the hometown of Tom Mix? Was Tom Mix from there? BJ: Tom Mix was from Dewey, Oklahoma, which is halfway between Bartlesville and Copan. ED: Well, they have the Tom Mix Museum there, right? BJ: Yes. ED: In Bartlesville? BJ: At Dewey. It’s Dewey, I think. ED: OK. BJ: His home was in Dewey. ED: OK. BJ: They always had the Tom Mix Days there. ED: All right. BJ: Used to have the big rodeo there. ED: OK. Was Tom Mix alive when you were there? BJ: He was still alive, yes. ED: Did you meet Tom Mix? BJ: I never did. ED: Never did, all right. So how did your folks wind up in Copan, Oklahoma? BJ: My parents from both sides of my family all came from Kansas, from a little town called Caney, Kansas, C-A-N-E-Y, Kansas, which is a town of about 2,500 people. And again, it was right on the Oklahoma line. My entire life I have lived in towns that were either in Oklahoma or were right on the Oklahoma line. ED: You never could separate yourself entirely from Oklahoma? BJ: As it is now, I can look out the window and see Oklahoma out there, from here in Fort Smith. ED: Yes. BJ: But the families on both sides lived in Caney. My grandfather Jesson was an interesting guy and I fortunately got to know my… I was an only child and an only grandchild. My cousins had all died earlier, so I was an only grandchild and I got lots of attention with my… ED: So you were smothered with attention then from grandparents and momma and daddy both? BJ: My Grandfather Jesson had come to the United States with his parents from England when he was nine years old; it was right after the Civil War. He had led an interesting life. At one point, his family lived in Coffeyville, which was the larger town some sixteen miles east of Caney, but, again, right on the Oklahoma line. And my grandfather Jesson had what he called a mail route. He was a mail contractor for the U.S. Mail, carrying mail from the railhead in Coffeyville, to Bartlesville, Indian Territory, in the 1880s and ‘90s until Oklahoma became a state. ED: Oklahoma became a state in . BJ: In 1907. ED: 1907. BJ: But I still have the gun that he carried, the big .44 and all that. But in addition to carrying the mail he would carry other small packages, called the Jesson Express. He would carry small packages in this mailbag kind of thing, horse-drawn. ED: Horse-drawn hack. BJ: Hack. ED: Yes. BJ: My other grandfather, my Grandfather Bradley, his father, my great grandfather, was a physician. And my grandfather went to medical school, was licensed to practice but only practiced for a few years and then went into real estate and other business developments. So he really… ED: No money in practicing medicine. BJ: There was really not any money in practicing medicine. ED: Nobody had any money to pay you. BJ: In that little town when I was growing up there, there was something like nine or ten doctors for 2,500 people. ED: Wow, wow. BJ: But all of them were, you know, up above the drugstores. We lived in Copan. Of course, this was the height of the Depression, and some of my earliest memories were going out with my father in his 1935 Ford trying to collect bills. ED: Yes. BJ: And coming back with chickens in the back. ED: Chickens and eggs. BJ: That’s right. ED: Yeah. BJ: Copan just had one doctor, one physician and the one drugstore and that physician died; that, of course, interfered with my father’s business greatly. Of course, the business was bad anyway during the Depression. So, anyway, he then sold the drugstore and we moved to Caney, Kansas, which is where my grandparents from both sides were. ED: How old were you when you moved? BJ: I was just getting ready to start the first grade. ED: OK. BJ: And so I never actually went to grade school in Copan. When I went to first grade we were living in Caney. But, as I say, they were only seven or eight miles apart. But it was a lot more—it was a bigger town, 2,500 versus 500. ED: Yeah. BJ: A nice, nice town. They had industry, a lot of natural gas and a railroad town, too. ED: So you spent all your childhood there? BJ: No, I lived there when I was in the first grade. I started in the first grade there and my father at that point was hired by his uncle in Caney, who had a drugstore in Caney, and they moved to Coffeyville. He got a job and entered into a partnership with a man with a pharmacy in Coffeyville, which was a town then of 17,000 or 18,000 people. ED: Yeah. BJ: It was a big railroad town and a manufacturing town. So I really grew up in Coffeyville. I was there from the fourth grade through high school. ED: Do you have much memory of going to school at Copan? BJ: I never started school in Copan. ED: Oh, in Copan, yeah. BJ: I was just getting ready to start when we moved. ED: Yeah. BJ: I remember going to the first three grades in Caney and riding my bicycle. ED: So you had a bicycle? BJ: Oh yes. ED: All your own, how far away from the school? BJ: I went to two different schools. One of them was probably ten blocks, twelve blocks maybe. ED: So you were riding your bike for the first grade at the school? BJ: Yeah. But, you know, it was all brick streets. ED: Yeah. BJ: A nice, safe kind of town, kind of typical of the middle west of America. ED: Did you have electricity then in town? BJ: Oh yes, yes. ED: You had electricity in town? BJ: We had electricity. ED: And running water? BJ: They had running water. ED: Indoor toilet, all of that? BJ: And sewer and all that good stuff. Now, we hadn’t had all that in Caney and Copan, but we still had the outhouse out behind the house. ED: Yeah. BJ: Because I remember my father had the newspaper delivered not to the front porch but to the outhouse, which had electricity in it. Of course, we did not have running water; we had to heat the water. ED: You had electricity in the outhouse? BJ: We had electricity in the outhouse and in our house but did not have running water. ED: You had a Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalogue in the outhouse. BJ: Yeah, and then the newspaper was thrown out there. ED: Yeah, OK, all right. So do you remember much about your teachers in either place? BJ: I remember particularly the ones in Coffeyville and in Caney some, too.