Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette: An Oral History

The Cast

CHAPTER 11 The Last Days . . . 260 CHAPTER 12 P.S. . . . 271 Suggested Further Reading . . . 279 Index . . . 281 viii Contents Preface The Arkansas Gazette was John Netherland Heiskell’s newspaper for seventy years. He became its editor and one of its principal owners in 1902, at the age of thirty. He relinquished his grip on it in 1972 a few weeks after he turned one hundred, and they buried him in Mount Holly Cemetery. In many ways, it remained his paper for several years afterward during the stewardship of his son-in-law, Hugh B. Patterson Jr., who already had nudged it into the modern age and made it financially stable. Then came the age of the corporate chains, and Mr. Heiskell’s paper went the way of many other American newspapers, good and bad. But for most of the twentieth century, the paper was one of the nation’s finest. Those golden years are called up in the first part of this book through the memories of people who worked there. The dismal years are recorded here too. They are not pleasant reading, but serious readers—people who keep abreast of public affairs—need to be reminded just how bad things can get when the messenger becomes part of the problem. The format of the book is straightforward. Most of it is excerpted and compressed from millions of words of tape-recorded interviews with scores of former Gazette employees. The interviews were conducted by about two dozen men and women with large experience in the art of asking questions. The aim of the questions was not to expose shameful or questionable conduct—as it is in many newspaper interviews—but to flesh out history and memory of a time and place that was treasured by those on both sides of the tape recorder. As the editor of the book, I have removed a few memories that I judged hurtful to this or that person. I do not apologize for that. The book follows a loose chronology for the most part. Mainly, though, the chapters explore specific subjects: what the people were like, the sounds and smells of the newsroom, parties, anecdotes, language, lore, big stories, etc. The italicized passages are my introductions to chapters or my comments interspersed to place the material in context. The Gazette was inextricable from Arkansas’s history from 1819 until the paper’s death in 1991. It reported in breadth and depth the events that led to ix statehood, the coming and going of slavery, the divisions of civil war in both the state and the nation, the pains of Reconstruction, the numerous political and economic upheavals, the constant frictions of race, and the creeping pace of progress through it all—the daily history told with patience, intelligence, and wit. The paper’s editorial advocacy ranged widely. Some years it was reactionary ; most years it was progressive. It never shrank from firm positions, not even during the bleak years of its terminal illness when a cadre of aging loyalists told the new chain owners what they could do with their unwholesome opinions about public affairs. I have strong feelings about the paper’s decline and the reasons for it, and I shall not hesitate to express them. But mainly I will let the people who were there at the end—in the newsroom, the editorial offices, the business office, the back shop—tell about the decline and fall as they saw it unfold. The memories preserved here tell a story that goes back to the early years of the twentieth century. Several of the people interviewed went to work for the paper soon after World War II. Some were army, navy and air corps veterans. Their memories were colored by the war as well as by the performance of the paper they came to love. One veteran spoke for the first time outside his family of the day when the bomber he was piloting over Germany was accidentally rammed by another American plane. He and his crew bailed out and survived. The other crew did not. The editors and reporters of that era also remembered Gazette people who had worked there before the war. Some of those postwar staffers, storytellers all, brought to life the great characters of the early years of the century: not only sober J. N. Heiskell but also his brother Fred, the bon vivant, and a...