Warren Kelley Bass Jr.
The director of the Museum of Discovery is an old newspaperman. The museum’s fundraiser Tuesday, Spark!, reads like a tabloid headline because in this world, fundraising means attention, and attention is fickle and fleeting.
Since 1987, Kelley Bass has lost and gained 428 pounds.
On this day, the 6-foot-4-inch man weighs in at 261 pounds, a noticeable difference from his top weight of 396. As chief executive officer of the Museum of Discovery, he’s in fighting shape for the museum’s biggest fundraiser — Spark! — Tuesday night.
“I have gained and lost several people,” he says of the amount of weight he has dropped and put back on. “A lot of people get fat and are not good at losing it. I was really good at losing it.”
In the late 1980s, he went from 350 pounds to 275 pounds on the Medifast diet.
“Then I gained it all back and I kept gaining and gaining.”
In 2002, he tried Weight Watchers, dropping from 390 pounds to 295 pounds. “Then I gained it all back.” Three years later, he went on a medically supervised, 800-calorie-a-day diet through the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He went from 391 pounds to 268.
“The crazy thing was I gained it all back,” he says. “I wasn’t even really admitting to myself that it was happening. I never stopped and went ‘Oh my God. What am I doing?’ I just kept putting bigger clothes back on.”
“Then in late 2010 I was sitting with [my wife] Ashli and I said ‘OK. I’ve regained all of my weight again. What reason do I have to expect that if I lose it all again that I will keep it off.’ And she said, ‘I don’t think you have a good reason to think you will keep it off.’”
That’s when Bass decided to have laproscopic gastric banding, commonly called lap band surgery. A band is placed around the upper part of the stomach to create a small food pouch to hold food. The band limits the amount of food that can be eaten.
“I cannot be prouder of how he has handled his health. He has really gotten control of it,” says Cindy Childers, Bass’ friend and former boss at Acxiom Inc. “I am so proud of the way he has handled his personal life as well as his professional life.”
Talking about the lap band is not something Bass did initially.
“For a while I didn’t and people would say how did you lose the weight and I would say ‘I eat less and I exercise more,’ which is true,” he says. “But I eat less because I really can’t eat more and I have to eat slowly.”
And he is about to participate in his seventh half marathon.
One thing Bass does talk about is the Museum of Discovery. He has been the director since December 2012.
EXTRA, EXTRA
The Bass family moved from Little Rock to Bryant when Kelley was in fourth grade. By then, his sister Nancy was a high school senior and sister Ellen was in college. His father, Warren Kelley Bass Sr., an accountant, bought 40 acres in Bryant and built an A-frame house. Bass learned to drive a tractor and bush-hogged the land, helping his dad create a park-like setting.
His mother, Martha Gaunt Bass, was a teacher who eventually became an administrator at the state Department of Education.
Bass got his start in journalism in the 10th grade when he was hired by the Benton Courier (now the Saline Courier) to cover Bryant High School football games. He was paid $15 a game.
“They were really long and really detailed and pretty bad,” he says of his stories. “They were almost a running play-by-play of the game.”
In the 11th grade, he was hired as a copy boy at the Arkansas Gazette, a job he says was “so far down the food chain, it doesn’t exist anymore.” Gazette managing editor Bob Douglas, a family friend, got him the job. Bass ran errands and took newspaper layouts back and forth between editors and page composers.
He worked at night, generally 5 p.m. until midnight, and earned $57 a week in take-home pay. He says the hours didn’t interfere with his homework at Bryant High School, which he found easy.
After his sophomore year at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), Bass got an internship at the Gazette in its features department. He said he mostly did “piddly stuff” but got his first byline covering a 1981 Rolling Stones concert in Dallas.
He worked the next couple of summers as a Gazette intern earning $140 a week. At the end of the summer after he graduated, Bass says he just “didn’t leave,” hoping no one would notice. He ended up getting a permanent job earning $190 a week.
One of his favorite beats was the music scene, covering shows at places like Juanita’s and the now defunct S.O.B. In 1990, he became a sports columnist going up against the Arkansas Democrat’s Wally Hall.
Bass covered national sporting events including the Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl and the World Series. About a year later, he accepted a position as the Gazette’s sports editor. Three months later, in October 1991, the Gazette closed its doors and the assets were sold to Little Rock Newspapers Inc., now Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc.
In January 1992, Bass took a job as sports editor of the Springfield News Leader in Missouri. He returned to his home state in 1995 as lifestyle editor of the Arkansas Times.
BIG DATA
Bass left newspapering in September 2000 to go to work for Acxiom, a data broker that uses information gathered from public records, shopping habits and clients to help its customers with targeted marketing campaigns. Bass ended up as the “right-hand man and mouthpiece guy” for Acxiom’s chief, Charles Morgan.
During his nine years at Acxiom, Bass traveled extensively with Morgan, accompanying him on trips to the company’s offices across the country and in Europe.
“Charles had this idea if you really wanted to know how your company is functioning, you need to talk to the real people doing the real work, so we hit every office,” Bass says.
“I thought, ‘What is this redneck from Bryant doing flying around over the French Alps in a $25 million plane?’” Bass adds of Acxiom’s corporate jet.
Morgan says Bass was hired during a “pretty crazy time at Acxiom.” He needed a “guy Friday” who could help with organization and communication.
“What I found was I couldn’t ask him to do anything that didn’t get done and get done well and get done quickly,” Morgan says. “He has an extraordinary ability to get things done.”
Morgan says Bass is “very, very articulate, smart and productive.” He also says Bass is a good writer who “with one can of beer, can write two pages and with a six-pack, he can write a chapter.”
After Morgan stepped down as head of Acxiom, Bass decided it was time to find another job. He worked briefly for a cable company before landing a spot as assistant dean for external affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His friend and mentor from Acxiom, Jerry Adams, recommended him for the job. Adams got Bass interested in supporting nonprofit work through Acxiom Cares, an organization that Adams founded to help local organizations by providing funds and goods.
“He’s got his eye on the ball,” Adams says of Bass. “He is on the clock full time. He’s always thinking about the financial situation of the Museum of Discovery. He does that with a humanity around him. It is a challenging job. He wakes up every Jan. 1 with a heavy requirement to raise money for the Museum of Discovery.”
WEIRD SCIENCE
As its CEO since 2012, Bass likes to take visitors on tours of the Museum of Discovery. He says the job is kind of like the culmination of his varied career.
“There’s a little irony for me as an 18-year journalist that my landlord is the owner of the largest newspaper in Arkansas and the guy who has funded what made us who we are today made his money in newspapers,” he says.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher and CEO Walter E. Hussman Jr. owns the building that houses the museum. The late Donald W. Reynolds founded the Donrey Media Group, and the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation provided a $9.2 million grant to the museum for a complete overhaul that was completed in January 2012.
Designed as a learning center, the museum’s more unusual offerings include a bed of nails (Bass ripped a hole in his pants trying it out), the “world’s largest bi-polar Tesla coil” and a tornado simulator. Kevin Delaney, the museum’s hirsute director of visitor experience, performs science experiments at the museum and on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
“It has brought a lot of attention and raised people’s awareness about us,” Bass says of Delaney’s national appearances. “It also validates us. If you are sitting there thinking, ‘You know, Jimmy Fallon’s people could have picked anybody in the whole country and they picked a guy from the Museum of Discovery in Little Rock, Arkansas. That’s got to be a great place.’”
As with any nonprofit organization, the Museum of Discovery relies on fundraising to pay the bills. At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, the museum is throwing Spark! for the third time, a grown-ups-only party featuring a full bar and hors d’oeuvres as well as science and technology exhibits.
“We are like a combination of a traditional nonprofit and an amusement attraction,” Bass says. “We have all of the challenges of raising money and trying to be top of mind for people because the one thing I’ve learned in my days in the nonprofit world is that the competition for people’s time, attention and money is extremely intense. There’s tons of good causes. So you have to differentiate yourself. The one thing I’ve tried to work on since I’ve been here is try to do things that are uniquely Museum of Discovery.”
So Bass scrapped the museum’s two main fundraising events — a 5K race called Dino Dash and a wine-tasting called Uncorked — and replaced them with Spark! and Tinkerfest, a day-long event with interactive activities.
“How about igniting a passion? What do science, technology and math have to do with a 5K and a wine tasting?”
Spark! raised $127,000 last year. The money is used for operating expenses and educational programs. Bass hopes it will raise that much again this year.
“I think he has found a home at the Museum of Discovery,” Adams says of Bass. “Nothing is forever, but it is a wonderful 360-degree fit for Kelley. … He is really into the program and the children. This is not an ego ride for Kelley.”