Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Jesse Gatewood
Volunteer of the Year lauded at Clinton Center’s annual gala. He’s 75 and isn’t slowing down in his volunteer efforts.
Jesse Gatewood might have started out modestly in life, but the 75-year-old never let any circumstance slow him down, dull his spirit or hold him back. In fact, when Gatewood was honored Dec. 6 at the Clinton Presidential Center’s annual volunteer gala as Volunteer of the Year, it was just the latest in a long line of personal and professional accolades.
After all, it’s not every son of a Lonoke dirt farmer who can talk about multiple encounters with a former president as casually — and with as much genuine fondness — as if talking about an old high school buddy.
“I see [President Bill Clinton] about once a year,” Gatewood says. “Every year the library’s been open, until covid, he would make maybe one or two trips to the library. And there’s special events where we would definitely see him.
“I make sure to shake his hand, because if there’s one thing President Clinton will do, he will stand there and greet every volunteer. He’s an amazing man.”
In fact, the former president would have been on hand to honor Gatewood personally except he had been diagnosed with covid. While his presence would have been a scrapbook-worthy moment indeed, his absence did nothing to diminish the impact of the award for Gatewood.
“I am absolutely proud of it,” he said. “When I heard my name announced, I had to sit there for a moment. I was just, is this real? I eventually got up and started walking and didn’t realize I was talking out loud, ‘Is this real?’”
OLDEST OF NINE
Gatewood was born the oldest of nine to Lewis and Lillie Pearl Gatewood. His father pulled the family from a sharecropper’s existence to living “in town,” where his mother was a hairdresser. From his earliest memories, the marching orders at the Gatewood house were to do for others less fortunate.
“I can remember as a 5-year-old boy, I was walking around with my
Jesse Gatewood laughingly describes his active retirement as geriatric hustling, and he has served many civic organizations, including the Clinton Presidential Center, which recently honored him as Volunteer of the Year.
parents and I sort of grew up as a miniature adult,” Gatewood says. “I hung out with my mother a lot. When my mother received her certificate as a beautician, she started working in her beauty shop, which was called Streamline Beauty Shop. I was doing things with her; she was volunteering, helping elderly people, and I just hung out with her.”
Doing his mother’s bidding, Gatewood was a familiar sight around town, running errands that helped people who needed it. He’d deliver firewood by the red wagonful to elderly and shut-in neighbors whose plight had reached Lillie Pearl’s ears.
“That’s the beginning of my volunteering,” he says. “It’s just in my DNA, and I never stopped.”
Gatewood graduated from the segregated George Washington Carver High School in Lonoke and attended Grambling College in Louisiana (now Grambling State University), where he earned a degree in health and physical education. Throughout high school and college he found ways to volunteer, sometimes organizing classmates to join him in his efforts.
Even his career carried the elements of servant leadership, starting with Arkansas Rehabilitation Service, where he worked his way up to lead counselor at the Arkansas Juvenile Assessment Classification Center.
‘HOW TO HELP THEM’
“These are kids who were adjudicated through juvenile court and instead of returning them to their homes or to their community, they were sent to us for evaluation,” he says. “We had a group of people made up of psychiatrist, psychological examiner, social worker, nurse, recreation person, educational specialist. We all talked with the juveniles and tried to come up with a recommendation of how to help them through this process that they were going through.
“They could come as young as 10 years old up to 17, kids who had committed a crime or ran away from home or parents just couldn’t control them, they were incorrigible. We made recommendations that would send some of them to Wrightsville Training School, Pine Bluff Training School and Alexander Girls Training School.”
Gatewood transferred to the Office for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired, where he was a field counselor helping hearing impaired and deaf individuals improve their quality of life. He found this work so rewarding that in 1979 he applied for and landed the administrator role for Arkansas Center for Cultivating Employability, Self Sufficiency, or Deaf ACCESS for short. He’d serve in that capacity for more than three decades until his retirement in 2004.
“When I became the administrator, it was a dream that really came true,” he says. “I could direct the program as to where to go, and it was magical.” He had been troubled to see some people placed in facilities with no clear plan to help them leave. “They were just there. We brought people out of those facilities and trained them with the help of outside sources. I had a good staff, and they had an excellent, winning attitude.”
ADJUNCT PROFESSOR
Along the way, he’d complete his graduate work in psychology from Harding University and serve as an adjunct professor at a number of area colleges and universities.
“I was truly a geriatric hustler,” he says with a laugh. He worked as an adjunct at Shorter College, Philander Smith College, Pulaski Tech, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. “I did a stint for the Baptist School of Nursing. ‘Adjunct’ means you go wherever they need you to. I also did work at Philander for five years as an assistant professor of psychology under Dr. Patricia Griffin, who was the chairman of the psychology department at the time.”
Throughout his working life, his volunteerism continued unabated, with a special emphasis on organizations that served children and youth.
“I started with the William Thrasher Boys Club on 33rd Street,” he said. “I worked with children in my church. I volunteered at Children’s Hospital where I was a rocker for the babies who were sometimes literally left at the doorstep of the hospital. I would go after work and be just like, give me one. I would rock them.
“I’ve volunteered at The Watershed when there was a disaster and on holidays. I’ve volunteered at Jericho Way, a homeless center. I volunteer at [the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences] and I’m still there. I’ve done that since 2006 after my father died from cancer. I decided to stay on and volunteer.”
ONE DAY A WEEK
His decision 18 years ago to add the Clinton Presidential Center, where he devotes one day a week plus special events as a docent, was in part a way to show his pride in Arkansas.
“When the presidential library came available, I said, ‘Man, I need to get involved with this,’” he says. “I mean, this is Arkansas, and we had a man from Hope become president. Could I pass that opportunity up? And do you know that we meet people from all over the world? It was fun then, and it’s still fun after 18 years.”
Asked how many tours he has conducted in that time, he just laughs in exasperation.
“I can’t put that in numbers,” he says. “Let’s just say hundreds.”
For several years, Gatewood has made it a point to visit other presidential libraries around the country. While he’s not about to talk bad about any of them, he said the volunteers at the Little Rock attraction are by far the best.
“I love touring. I love talking about the president,” he says. “Of course, we have transcripts, and we had to study those things, but we don’t walk around reading; we walk around doing the orations with enthusiasm, with a smile on our face.
“It’s in that spirit that I do this work. ‘Come on, let me surprise y’all! Let me give you a fantastic tour of this facility!’ It doesn’t matter what your politics are, in a presidential library there’s always something good to talk about.”