NOTABLE ARKANSAS Who was this ophthalmologist/politician who was once offered a job as a national football sports announcer, but turned it down for a medical career?

He was born in 1916, near Murfreesboro, to itinerant schoolteachers. His father would later became president of the Arkansas Education Association and state commissioner of Education. By his high school years, the family lived in Rector, where he graduated at 16. After attending Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas), he received an M.D. degree from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in 1939, while working part time as a radio sportscaster. In 1940, he married L’Moore Smith and they had three children.

During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Europe. After military service, he taught for a year at Emory University Medical School in Atlanta before returning to Little Rock in 1947 to become one of the leading ophthalmologists of his generation, receiving national recognition for his professional accomplishments. He served on the faculty at UAMS from 1948 to 1958 and served a term as president of the Little Rock Civitan Club.

His successful practice accepted white and Black patients. He supported the desegregation of the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas; he served as a trustee of his church. He was elected to the Little Rock School Board in 1955, taking a position of gradual integration beginning at the elementary level. He was opposed to any federally mandated plan. During the integration crisis of 1957-58, he made a televised speech endorsing privatized segregated education, suggesting that Black Southerners were being used as pawns by an international Communist conspiracy. In 1958, he ran for Congress as a last-minute write-in candidate against the incumbent, Brooks Hays. Because he handed out ballot stickers with his name followed by a boxed X printed on them, he was described in the press as the “sticker“candidate. He won by 1,000 votes and served two terms.

After the 1960 census revealed Arkansas’ population had grown at less than the national average, the Arkansas 5th District was merged with the 2nd District, represented by congressional icon Wilbur D. Mills. Instead of facing Mills in an election, he ran for governor against incumbent Orval Faubus and lost. He tried for governor once more, then for Congress again, losing in both attempts.

Who was this ophthalmologist/politician who was once offered a job as a national football sports announcer, but turned it down for a medical career?

Dale Alford

Democrat-Gazette file photo