2020.01.23 Throw Back Thursday THE AR DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE plus Class News
For those of us living in Arkansas, this Saturday will be the last day to see a Monday through Saturday Arkansas Democrat Gazette. We'll still get the Sunday edition in print form, but for the rest of the days, you'll have to ask the newspaper for an iPad if you want to keep up with the weekly news. I'll miss checking those obituaries first thing each morning! Here's a interesting Arkansas newspaper life:
When I was a kid, we lived in a four-room, flat-topped house at the end of a graveled lane extending from Stanton Road in southwest Little Rock to a dead end at woods that soon would be cleared for a subdivision. My Dad worked nights loading Nabisco cookie trucks downtown. He left the house in our only vehicle about 3:30pm, returned around 1:00am and slept late mornings.
My life was sheltered, especially in summer, when I would spend all day imagining baseball games in the backyard--acting out all the parts-- and waiting for the afternoon Arkansas Democrat to be thrown in our driveway around 4:00pm. We didn't take the Gazette because it was too liberal.
Each afternoon, at the moment I heard the crunch of tires on the gravel of our driveway, and the ensuing thud of the thrown paper's landing, I would rush to retrieve what would provide my day's highlight. I would spread the broadsheet on the living room floor, put my elbows on the pages and get them inky black, and devour the sports pages, mainly to study the box scores and standings and see how the Detroit Tigers had made out the night before.
Yes, children, it is true: It was possible in the early 1960's not to know for nearly 24 hours the score of a ballgame.
I recall my mother telling people that she never heard of a kid who loved spreading a newspaper in the floor and baptizing himself in it, though baptizing is my metaphor now, not hers then. We weren't metaphorical in our house, and we certainly weren't metaphorical about salvation.
When I was 16, a high school junior and sports editor of the McClellan High newspaper, I heard that the Democrat hired high school kids from Central, Hall and Parkview as part-time sports department staffers. I sent sports editor Jack Keady a letter of application. I came home from school a couple of days later and my mom said a Mr. Keady had called and wanted me at the Democrat the next morning at 6 o'clock to join other staffers in putting out the afternoon sports section. I and the other high schoolers worked until 8, then headed to school.
What that meant was that my dad would have to let me drive the sole family car, the 1962 Dodge Dart with the push-button automatic transmission, and extend himself financially to get another vehicle. His sister's husband, my uncle Bob Bevis, had, at that time, Bevis Dodge at Ninth and Spring Streets. Bob let a late-model yellow Chevy Impala go to my dad on a literal brother-in-law deal. It took an extended family to raise a newspaperman.
This was December 1969 and I was getting up before dawn and driving I-30 downtown to do professional journalism. I used high school algebra to size AP photos for the column width of the paper and another guy would clip local high school basketball game articles from the morning Gazette, hand me a stack to rewrite in about 15 minutes and then I'd head back out on the freeway to first-period English class.
A printed newspaper delivered daily to the drivway or porch is thus the thread and theme of my life. And now the year I go on Medicare is the year I read that the printed newspaper may soon stop coming except on Sunday. I get it. I've insisted on keeping up with the digital technology in other areas of my life. I have the fiber optics. I have the Internet TV. My life is pretty thoroughly served by a stream and a download. I read as much of this paper on my phone as on paper. But a milk May morning spent on the deck with a cup of coffee, a pair of happy beagles and the newsprint newspaper spread before me . . . it's a transcendent joy of a seamless life. So this will be the seam. A newspaper life . . . I should write a book -- a digital one, self-published, on Amazon.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame.
CLASS NEWS:
Hi, I am writing for Arless Caroline Smith Hamilton. She is at Springdale Health and Rehabilitation, 102 N. Gutensohn, Springdale, AR 72762 if anyone would like to send her a card.
NANCY RECTOR - Nancy's email started bouncing back. So when I called he I sadly learned that she is suffering from Macular Degeneration which means she's no longer able to read anything on her computer. So the only way to keep in touch with her now is through the old old U. S. Mail. Her husband had several strokes in the past year so with these two things combined, they welcomed their daughter and her husband into their home to help out.
I'm sure a lot of you know JOHN GILL who graduated in 1954, was in the Acapella Choir (that's how I knew him) and has been married to Marjem Jackson for the past 100 years. Well, John just received a very well-earned honor that I thought you would all like to know about. Congrats, John!
John P. Gill honored with Parker Westbrook Award for Lifetime Achievement from Preserve Arkansas
John Gill
Posted on January 17, 2020
Tonight (January 17), at the Preserve Arkansas annual awards dinner, attorney John P. Gill will be recognized with the Parker Westbrook Award.
Little Rock attorney and historian John Gill has long had a keen interest in the preservation of Arkansas’s history and architecture. Throughout his career, Gill has demonstrated a passion for preservation through his service on the boards of the Little Rock Visitor Information Center Foundation that restored Curran Hall and Preserve Arkansas, where he was board president in 2010 and spearheaded a large fundraising campaign for the organization’s 30th anniversary.
He has authored books about Arkansas’s historic county courthouses, Depression-era post office art, and the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Gill has been a strong preservation advocate, working on behalf of the Friends of the Historic White River Bridge at Clarendon in an effort to save and repurpose the bridge. For his efforts to research, document, and preserve the historic fabric of Arkansas,
The award is named in memory of Parker Westbrook, the father of historic preservation in Arkansas. Previous recipients include Anthony Taylor, AIA, and Bob Kempkes, AIA; Tommy Jameson, AIA; Ruth Hawkins; Cheryl Griffith Nichols; Ethel Goodstein-Murphree, and Bill Worthen.
See you next Thursday!
ML