Publisher guided Journal for decades
After a 72-year career at one of Arkansas’ longest-running local newspapers, Dean Langford Walls, publisher of the White River Journal, died Thursday at age 96.
She never took a vacation, making sure the family-owned paper that served Des Arc and the surrounding Delta area for 110 years went out each week, her son, Charles Walls, said. She had scars on her arms from the hot lead of the Linotype press the paper used before it switched to using computers in 1972.
At the time of her death, a year after the Journal ceased print publication, she was working on another project: her memoirs.
“When one’s life is near the century mark, childhood memories become blurred and somehow unreal. It’s like recalling parts of a book once read and almost forgotten — then, for some crazy, unnecessary reason you decide to try and put together past events in your life, but it doesn’t come easy. And you wonder why you spend precious time trying to remember,” she wrote. “However, I find it comforting to look back and review what has been a good life.”
Dean Walls was born Sept. 15, 1921, and grew up in Mena. After she married Charles Alfred Walls, the son of the Journal’s founder, the couple moved from North Little Rock to Des Arc to join the family business. Dean Walls started as the primary letter-type composer — when type was still set by hand — and page designer. She then took over as editor and publisher after her husband died in 1983.
“She’s always been the progressive one and the creative one and the mechanic and the force that kept the paper going,” her son said.
The last print edition of the Journal came out in August 2017, while an emailed version continued until December. Though her eyesight was failing, Dean Walls never made plans to quit working and many times said she “was going to die with her boots on,” her son said.
Over the years, she received awards and recognition from the Arkansas House of Representatives, the Arkansas secretary of state and the Arkansas Press Association. She also sang in the local First United Methodist Church choir and took care of more than 30 cats.