Decades in the business

Agala that even raises the prospect of black-tie being an option sounds rather uppity of people whom the late Paul Greenberg famously called “inky wretches.”

But that’s what the Arkansas Press Association is throwing the evening of Thursday, Oct. 20, at the Statehouse Convention Center.

The excuse, or context, is that the APA usually puts on a modest annual convention at which a Headliner of the Year is named and makes a talk. Any Arkansas newspaper veterans working in their 50th year get pins.

But the pandemic kept any of that from happening as usual for the last two years.

So, the lost-year headliners — Gov. Asa Hutchinson and University of Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek — will highlight this gala by picking up their awards and making remarks.

The gala also will honor the heroic local Renaud brothers, Craig and Brent, real journalists of award-winning global documentary filmmaking. Brent was killed this year in Ukraine.

As a footnote to the gala, two people will get 52-year pins on account of not having had the opportunity to pick up 50-year or even 51-year ones.

One is the publisher of this newspaper, Walter Hussman.

The other is the inky wretch who started a few days after his 16th birthday as a part-time sportswriter at the old dying afternoon Arkansas Democrat, which the aforementioned Hussman soon bought and began to save and transform.

I’m thinking they ought to give Hussman credit for my improbable 52 years and just give him a special 104-year pin.

That’s especially so considering that he saved me again decades later when, after I’d abruptly left his employ in 2000 because something I can’t remember had ticked me off, I called him in 2011 and said Stephens Media had dumped me because of the newspaper economy and all, and that I was wondering whether I’d burned my bridge.

It was either that or a lawn-service business, and I have a devil of a time threading an edger.

It is not every publisher of a struggling mid-market daily newspaper who would part with precious funds to retain — twice — a local commentator to write opinions that he disagrees with in his newspaper.

I must thank him. You probably blame him.

Ialso must assign some of my 52 years to the late John Ward and then to assorted higher-ups at the late, great and lamented Arkansas Gazette.

While cutting classes in the early 1970s at the University of Central Arkansas, I worked as sports editor of Conway’s Log Cabin Democrat. That was until Ward, the paper’s managing editor and a political veteran of the Rockefeller administration, told me I ought to try writing about politics.

Then, in the summer of ’77, Ward called me to his desk and said the paper wasn’t doing me much good anymore — and vice versa — and that I should just go on home.

We’re not going to look at this as a firing, he said of the firing.

The next day, he called to say I had an interview in Oklahoma City with his old friend Jim Standard, managing editor of the Daily Oklahoman. He said I had an interview two days after that with the late Bob Douglas, managing editor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gazette in Little Rock.

Ward said he’d finally decided I didn’t have the gumption to make those calls myself.

Standard hired me for $195 a week. I said swell. We agreed on a start date.

Then I kept my appointment with Douglas at the Gazette. He said he was going to give me something the paper had never imposed on anyone else. That was a two-day tryout on the state desk.

After all, he said, I had shown up for work in blue jeans. And I had answered “who can say?” when he asked what I hoped to be doing in five years. And, as he pointed out, there was the matter of my coming to him by reason of a recommendation from a man who had kind of fired me.

I walked into the newsroom and saw a nice-looking young fellow wearing loafers, khakis, a blue buttoned-down Oxford shirt and a loosened tie. I soon found out the young man was the affable and now sadly departed Ralph Patterson, the publisher’s son.

I said to myself, oh, so that’s the uniform. I went out and bought three changes of the outfit and wore that — not those original pieces but the style and ensemble — for a career.

I passed the tryout and the Gazette hired me for $190 a week. I went straight to work. I forgot to tell Jim Standard in Oklahoma City.

I finally remembered that I had a deal with him and sheepishly called. He said he’d figured it out when he saw my byline on the Gazette’s front page.

Nearly 10 years later, with the Gazette in a newspaper war to the death with Hussman’s paper, the newsroom brain trust at the Gazette decided it needed a local politics columnist, and I was picked.

The rest adds up to 52 years, which is not a final sum but a running total.

P.S. — The gala officially celebrates oft-abused and taken-for-granted press freedom, which is the best reason to throw it.