Graphic was dream come true
Editor’s note: This is the fifth part to a column in honor of former TIMES publisher and editor, Jack Beisner, by his son, E. Calvin Beisner.
He showed me how a powerful and successful executive humbly refuses to protest or retaliate (even when encouraged to by board members who promise to back him if he does) when he’s elbowed out of a job by a rival and instead forges a new career, not once or twice or three times but four, among them starting the Western Newspaper Foundation to teach graduate journalism professors how to teach students to write objective news reports instead of advocacy pieces because by the 1960s most of America’s J-schools had already been radicalized and old-school publishers and editors were at their wits’ end trying to find reporters who could just write a straight story (WNF went bust when the Arab oil embargo caused a recession that dried up support from publishers) and teaching journalism as an adjunct at Pepperdine University in Malibu, then finally becoming executive director of a small Christian ministry whose finances he straightens out.
And then he taught me that money and power and fame in the rat race of southern California just don’t cut it. He sold all and moved himself and my mother to tiny but beautiful Pea Ridge, Ark., to fulfill a boyhood dream of owning and running a newspaper in the Ozarks. He bought and rebuilt a near-bankrupt weekly newspaper and within a few years won statewide awards for its outstanding news coverage and editorials.
He wrote me a few months after getting there and carefully visiting every church in the little town — many having split from each other because of family feuds — “This is the most over-churched and under-Christianed place I’ve ever seen.” But he loved the people there and served them with warmth and grace and genuine friendship for eight years, and he discovered more Christianity there than he first recognized.
That move pulled us apart for the first time in my 22 years, during which he taught me to stand on my own two feet by leaving me alone. He was there for advice when I asked it — which I should have done a whole lot more than the once or twice I did in the next two years. But he knew I needed selfdiscipline more than his guidance.
But he welcomed me with wide-open arms when I asked if I could come and work for him after I, too, got tired of the rat race of southern California — and got two weeks’ notice at work and an eviction notice from my landlord on the same day! So a week later, the night before Thanksgiving, I moved in with him and my mother in Pea Ridge, and there he taught me what it is to be the father of a grown man by treating me as his equal, even though he was so much wiser than I. He gave me big responsibilities with the newspaper, but also made time for us to fish together again, this time mostly on big Beaver Lake on the White River instead of little farm ponds, still mostly for large-mouth bass, but now also for crappie and the occasional big striped bass, including a 17½ pounder I caught entirely by accident, not even knowing they were in the lake, trolling a silver spoon for large-mouth, and first thinking I’d snagged a stump until I realized the fish was pulling the boat through the water after I’d killed the motor. We had our two most wonderful years together there before I went off to do my master’s degree — and met and got engaged to my wife at the start of that time, and he welcomed her, too, with his big arms and barrel chest and bushy eyebrows that made him look like a scarier version of Leonid Brezhnev, when I took her to meet him and my mother.
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Editor’s note: This column is the fifth in a series by E. Calvin Beisner, son of Jack and Mary-Lou Beisner, who owned and published The Times of Northeast Benton County from 1978-1989. He and his wife, Deborah live in south Florida.