Richard Portis, beloved servant and doctor, dies

Richard Portis, the younger brother of the late “True Grit” author Charles Portis, died yesterday due to complications from a series of strokes he had a few months earlier. He was 79 years old.

Portis was born in Camden on July 13, 1944. His family lived in Mount Holly before moving to Hamburg. Richard Portis loved south Arkansas and small-town living, said his brother, Jonathan Portis.

According to an obituary, Portis graduated from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in 1974 and practiced family medicine in Prescott, Hope and Texarkana before opening a full-time emergency medicine practice.

He also served as the medical director at Southwest Regional Medical Center in Little Rock before it closed in 2008 and a member of the Southern Medical Association and Arkansas Medical Society.

Later in the 1980s, Portis was appointed by then Gov. Bill Clinton to the Board of Directors for the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities and to the Governor’s Advisory Council for Gifted and Talented Education.

Before that, he worked in journalism. He got his start in the field with a small weekly paper in Crossett, said his younger brother Jonathan.

After getting noticed by an editor at the Pine Bluff Commercial, Richard Portis took a job there. He eventually moved on to the Arkansas Gazette before getting called up for the draft.

Richard Portis joined the Army Reserve, forcing him to leave the newspaper business, but he would soon come back to the copydesk at the Gazette.

There he was known for his quick wit and funny stories he would whip up when there was down time, said his brother.

He would eventually attend what is now the University of Central Arkansas to receive a premed degree then go on to become a doctor. A friend of his, Steve Barnes, called his medical career “spectacular.”

According to Barnes, Portis was “not a one-dimensional or simply two-dimensional figure.”

“Medicine was his passion, but he had a range of interests. He was an arts patron, he appreciated music, he appreciated literature,” he said. “He was extremely well read.”

His prowess for literature and editing made him an asset to his brother Charles, who died in 2020.

“When Charles finished a manuscript, he would ask Richard to proofread it and copy edit it a little bit,” said Jonathan Portis.

“From what I was told, Richard was pretty good at that,” he said.