David Pryor, a natural-born politician who spent thirty-four years in public offices, including governor, the state legislature and both houses of Congress, died April 20, 2024 at his home in Little Rock at the age of 89.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture called him “arguably the most popular Arkansas politician of the modern era,” although the description might have covered a much longer stretch of history. He ran for public offices 13 times between 1960 and 1996 and lost only once—a 1972 race for the U.S. Senate against Sen. John L. McClellan. 

After McClellan’s death before the end of the term in 1978, Pryor defeated two other rising political stars for the Senate seat—Congressmen Jim Guy Tucker and Ray H. Thornton Jr., both of whom would be elected to other major state offices. Pryor would hold the seat until January 1997, when he retired, owing to heart problems and his dismay over the rising partisanship, wrath and extremism in Congress and national politics.

In 2002, years after he retired from the Senate, Pryor’s son Mark, a former state representative and attorney general, won his seat by defeating Senator Tim Hutchinson and served two terms.

His nearly 35-year career in the state and national capitols were marked by passionate and sometimes lonely efforts for better and affordable medical care for the elderly and poor, peace, public safety in the nuclear age, the direct election of American presidents, reform of the state’s ancient constitution and, perhaps most markedly, for collaboration among political foes and parties.

Former President Bill Clinton, who got his inspiration for politics and public service as a 20-year-old Georgetown University student in 1966 from the “Young Turk” state lawmaker from a couple of rural counties east of him in south Arkansas, said he and his wife, Hillary, were deeply saddened by the death of their friend and collaborator, who was always “honest, compassionate and full of common sense.”

In every office he held, Clinton said, Pryor “fought for progressive politics that helped us put the divided past behind us and move into a brighter future together. He was always one of America’s greatest advocates for the elderly, waging long battles to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and to improve nursing home and home care to help more people live in dignity.”

“David made politics personal—from his famed retail campaigning to his ability to calmly and confidently explain tough votes to his constituents,” Clinton said. Clinton was Arkansas’s attorney general in Pryor’s last two years as governor. He was elected governor in the same election that voters promoted Pryor to the US Senate.

“I first met him and Barbara in 1966 when David was running for Congress and over the next 58 years he would be my mentor, confidant, supporter and, above all, friend. Having him and Dale Bumpers in the Senate when I was president was an extraordinary gift. I never felt far from home, and I always trusted the unvarnished advice he gave, especially when the going got tough. I’ll always be grateful that he served as the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, where his very presence embodied the nobility and joy of public service.”

David Pryor lived a mythical life of politics and public service, said his longtime aide in Congress, Carmie Henry—starting with his election as president of the third grade. He defined retail politics in Arkansas as a campaigner and in public office, cementing personal bonds with everybody in both parties and in every executive office, including the security workers all over the Capitol. He became easily the most beloved member of the Senate and also with Arkansas voters.

“If any one person’s career marked the changing of an era in American politics, it was David Pryor’s,” Henry said. “There are no David Pryors in Washington anymore.”

Pryor was a liberal Democrat long before it became a term of opprobrium. He was stirred to enter politics, first as a crusading weekly newspaper editor at Camden and then as a candidate for the legislature, by the rise of racial hatred and discord after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 outlawing segregation in the nation’s public schools. A senior and student leader at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Pryor traveled to the Capitol in February 1957 to testify at a dramatic public hearing on a bill creating a state sovereignty commission that would stop racial integration and find and punish people and groups that supported integration—or “race mixing,” as it was commonly called. He thought the bill was a flagrant violation of the federal and state constitutions. He was blocked from testifying, he would learn, at the instigation of university officials, notably the president, who feared a backlash against the school. The passage of a raft of bills to maintain white supremacy and Gov. Orval E. Faubus’s signing them into law in early 1957 and then Faubus’s dispatch of National Guardsmen to prevent nine Black youngsters from entering Little Rock Central High School that fall turned Pryor and his new wife, the former Barbara Jean Lunsford, into crusaders and reaffirmed his notion from early childhood that politics was the best way to spend his life.

David Hampton Pryor was born Aug. 29, 1934, in Camden, the third of four children of William Edgar Pryor and Susan Newton Pryor. His father ran a car dealership, was Ouachita County sheriff for four years and was always politically connected and influential. Governor Ben T. Laney (1945–1949) was a neighbor and family friend, although Laney’s leadership of the Southern white-supremacy  movement and his disloyalty to the Democratic Party in 1948 disturbed young Pryor, whose hero was Gov. Sid McMath from next-door Magnolia and Hot Springs, who had thwarted Laney’s Dixiecrat party and carried Arkansas for President Harry S. Truman that year. Pryor’s mother, who was known as Susie, had been a champion of women’s suffrage, and was the first woman to run for public office in Arkansas, losing a race for circuit and county clerk in 1926. She later won a school board race.

His autobiography, A Pryor Commitment, published in 2008 by Butler Center Books, gave a self-effacing and often humorous account of growing up, pursuing popularity and providential encounters with famous political figures that would shape his destiny. He was an unusually gregarious child who sought friendship with everybody and was attracted to politics almost from the time that he could read, perhaps owing to his father’s engagement in politics and with politicians. (The elder Pryor raised the money in 1942 that kept Congressman John L. McClellan from leaving the US Senate race, which he won in a Democratic runoff primary with Attorney General Jack Holt. McClellan was later shocked and embittered that his patron’s son would run against him. He had expected Pryor to succeed him when he retired.) 

Pryor wrote that he ran for president of Mary Bragg Wheeler’s third-grade class at Camden and that the teacher sent him and the other two candidates into the hall while the class voted.

“Sweating under the tension,” Pryor remembered, “I promised God that if He would let me win this election, I would never again run for political office. Our teacher called us back into the room. I had won! Before I sat down, I was already planning my race for fourth-grade president.”

His boyhood hero was the Razorback and Olympic star Clyde Scott from Smackover, 16 miles down the road from him, to the extent that 50 years later he stuttered trying to talk to the sainted old man, by then a retired insurance executive for Jackson T. “Jack” Stephens. Pryor was a football star for the Camden High School Panthers—a triple-threat tailback who made the all-district team. His memoir, however, confessed that he actually hated football and every minute of practice and the games, but social pressure forced him to stay with it. “Any Camden boy in the 1950s who entertained the slightest interest in peer acceptance—and who could circle the practice field in a heavy uniform without crumpling to earth—went out for football,” he said. Pryor dreaded “the 200-pound linemen” who smashed him to the ground nearly every play. 

Pryor wrote that after seeing the 1950 movie Born Yesterday, starring William Holden and Judy Holliday and set in political Washington, he ran home and sent a letter to Congressman Oren Harris of El Dorado, a family friend, asking if he could be a congressional page that summer. Harris agreed. Pryor drove to Washington, finally found the Capitol and reached the House doorkeeper’s office, where he was rebuked for being late and sent to the Senate, where there was an emergency—an all-night filibuster after all the Senate pages had gone home. When he reached the Senate floor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (the anticommunist conspiracist who was later censured by the Senate) snapped his fingers at Pryor, scribbled a note, fished out a ten-dollar bill and handed him a ring of keys. 

Pryor’s account: “Here, son,” he said. “Get a taxi and go to this address, and on the floor of the closet in the bedroom you’ll find my bedroom slippers. Bring them to me.” It was David Pryor’s first act of public service. 

After Pryor enrolled as a freshman at Baylor University at Waco his father died suddenly and he canceled his enrollment and went instead to Henderson State Teachers College at Arkadelphia, 45 miles up Highway 7. When he arrived on campus late he was greeted by a sign in front of Womack Hall, the men’s dormitory, saying “David Pryor for Freshman Class President.” He was elected. After a year, he transferred to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He took a horse with him and put the colt in a stable at a farm south of town. He wrote that it had been a stupid thing to do because he rarely found time to ride the animal. He figured that he had done it because the last time he had seen his father alive was when the old man was astride a horse in the 1952 Ouachita County Fair parade.

As the spring semester was ending in 1954, Pryor got a note to call Gov. Francis Cherry, who had defeated his hero Sid McMath two years earlier. Cherry wanted him to be his driver while he was campaigning for re-election in the Democratic primaries against Faubus and two other men that summer. In his autobiography and two oral histories late in life Pryor gave poignant accounts of Cherry’s grace and caring and the agonizing dilemmas the governor had faced in the historic confrontation with Faubus in the runoff primary; Cherry had decided to question Faubus’s patriotism by making an issue of his attendance at a socialist self-help school at Mena, Commonwealth College, and subsequently lying about it. It was to be an evening television speech at the KARK studio, which Pryor called “the speech of Cherry’s political life.” Pryor said he waited in the car for Cherry to leave the mansion for the studio and the governor veered into the shrubs next to the car and vomited. After his stumbling and wooden speech, Cherry returned to the car solemnly and said, “How’d I do, kid?” Pryor said he congratulated Cherry but began to realize that the speech had been a terrible mistake.

It occurred while the country, including Arkansas, rebelled against “McCarthyism,” which had been exposed as a fraud the previous month in the Army-McCarthy hearings before a Senate committee, including Arkansas’s John McClellan. It ended with Army attorney Joseph Welch’s famous putdown of Joe McCarthy, whose bedroom slippers Pryor had fetched four years earlier, for relentlessly attacking a young lawyer at the hearing: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Pryor concluded that the very decent Cherry had been a poor politician who did not sense the great shift in public attitudes and was unable to rally voters against a smart but unprincipled politician. An even bigger mistake had been the unfortunate campaign line “we’re going to get the deadheads off the welfare rolls.” Faubus made him look cruel. 

After Cherry’s humiliation, a bitter Pryor decided that politics was miserable business and changed his major from political science to business administration. He took courses in accounting, banking and statistics but found them tedious and boring. Then he became violently ill with a strange malady that required multiple surgeries—he withered to 130 pounds and partially lost his eyesight—that cost him a year of school. 

He returned to the university in 1955 as a government major again. From his arrival, he was active in student government, including serving as a senator. Led by Pryor, Ray Thornton and others who would later seek state executive, legislative and judicial offices, the students took a special interest in the conflagration over integration that was growing at Little Rock, which was under federal court orders to desegregate its schools in the fall. A number of punitive bills to head off the desegregation consumed the lawmakers in the January–March session—notably the creation of a state sovereignty commission, which was based on the long-repudiated theory of John C. Calhoun that states could interpose their sovereignty between the federal government and the people. Pryor and one of his many college roommates, Kenneth C. Danforth of El Dorado, the editor of the campus newspaper, The Traveler, and later a journalist for the Arkansas Gazette, Time magazine and The National Geographic, drove to Little Rock to carry the students’ message to the lawmakers and the state that the legislation trampled upon the human rights of American citizens, who would be criminalized for even expressing the view that Blacks and those who might sympathize with them were entitled to equality and free expression and assembly. Pryor was embittered by the experience that day but, according to his memoir, the stayover at the Marion Hotel and association with the legislators and lobbyists, sharpened his understanding that politics and government—in Ouachita County, Little Rock, or Washington, D.C.—did not follow the examples in civics textbooks.

He left Fayetteville with his degree but could not find a job. The Gazette would not hire him, even when he volunteered to work free for a few months to prove his worth. Later, as a lawmaker and law student, he would be the Gazette’s Fayetteville correspondent. He married Barbara Jean Lunsford of Fayetteville, a classmate, and in late 1957 started a weekly newspaper, the Ouachita Citizen, with a printing press acquired from a local businessman. His wife and mother wrote weekly columns and reported, and Pryor sold advertisements and wrote editorials, often criticizing local government officials but mainly Gov. Faubus and legislative houses that went along with everything Faubus sought to do. The city’s daily newspaper, like most others around Arkansas after the school crisis, rarely took issue with the governor and the legislature. Faubus took pleasure in taunting Pryor and his little paper. At a big rally at Camden in his 1958 race against the meatpacker Chris Finkbeiner, whom Pryor supported, Faubus held up copies of Life and Time magazines and Pryor’s little paper, all of which had made Faubus look bad. 

“Life is for people who can’t read,” Faubus said. “Time is for people who can’t see, and the Ouachita Citizen is for people who can’t think.” The crowd roared and Pryor crawled in his car and went home.

But in 1960 Pryor told the county’s representative, a family friend, that if he did not begin to oppose Faubus on legislation he was going to run against him. The representative demurred and Pryor ran against him. He was 26 years old. Pryor’s memoir said he got elected mainly owing to the relentless campaigning of Barbara, carrying their infant son, David, with her as she went door to door across the county asking people to please vote for her husband. The family briefly moved to Little Rock. They sold the newspaper in 1962. He was elected twice more, in 1962 and 1964, while attending law school at Fayetteville when the legislature was not in session. He finished law school in 1964.

Except for his votes, Pryor’s legislative record was unremarkable, which was not unusual for new legislators. A Civil War buff, Pryor read about battles in South Arkansas and at his first session in February 1961 he introduced and passed a bill creating Poison Springs Battlefield State Park about eight miles from his home. It was the site of one of the Confederates’ few big victories in Arkansas, a victory most notable for the slaughter of a Kansas infantry regiment that included former slaves. The Confederates took no prisoners and used wagons to crush the skulls of the captured Black men. 

Pryor became one of a handful of liberals who jousted with Faubus and the legislative “Old Guard” on a wide variety of reforms. Called “the Young Turks” in the media, Pryor, Virgil Butler, Sterling R. Cockrill Jr., Jim Brandon, Hardy W. Croxton, Ray S. Smith Jr. and Hayes C. McClerkin introduced legislation outlawing the poll tax, reforming election laws, overhauling county purchasing and spending (Pryor had been on a grand jury investigating government fraud in Ouachita County), convening a constitutional convention, and overhauling highway administration. They got nowhere with the legislation. In 1961, Pryor introduced a bill to require competitive bidding on county purchases of more than $300, but he could get only few votes for it each year. Faubus had another legislator, Harry Colay of Magnolia, put his name on a similar bill in 1965, it passed, and Faubus signed it.

Pryor opened a law practice in 1964 at Camden with his friend Harry Barnes. He liked to mention a case where he represented a man in a dispute over who owned a coon dog. It was finally resolved by bringing the disputed mutt into the courtroom, which wandered around until it spotted Pryor’s client and put a paw on his knee. The judge immediately awarded him custody. For a different reason, the Arkansas Gazette cartoonist George Fisher later always put a happy coon dog at Pryor’s side. But Pryor never got to practice a lot of law.

Faubus’s enmity toward Pryor took a bizarre turn in the summer of 1965. Late in life, Faubus and Pryor would cement a friendship, and he told Pryor that one of the joys of his life had been setting in motion the events that year which sealed Pryor’s long career. In law school at Fayetteville, Pryor had become a close friend of Faubus’s son, Farrell, a shy, portly and tormented young man who would take his own life in 1977 at the age of 36. Farrell had felt shunned and ridiculed by the other students and some of the faculty. The two students studied, played golf, drank beer and got their law degrees together.

In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Congressman Oren Harris to a federal judgeship, creating a congressional vacancy that Faubus was supposed to fill for the last 16 months of Harris’s term by calling a special election. It was Pryor’s dream, but there was no time to put together a campaign organization throughout the large Fourth District. State Auditor Jimmie “Red” Jones, who was known to every voter in the state, would be the automatic winner. Pryor mentioned his dilemma to his friend Farrell. He would learn later that Farrell told his dad that Pryor had helped him get his law degree, was the only person at the university who befriended him and about the only true friend he ever had.

Faubus dawdled about calling the special election for weeks and finally announced that the district did not really need a voting representative for the next year and a half, so he called the special election for the same day as the general election in November 1966. Voters would simultaneously fill the seat for the last two months of the year but also the following two years—two elections for the same seat on the same day. It gave Pryor more than a year to build a campaign organization. Red Jones then chose not to run because he would have to give up his safe lifetime job at the Capitol for a risky congressional election. Pryor won the special election and the general election handily. He defeated Richard S. Arnold of Texarkana, a future federal district and appellate judge, and three other prominent politicians from around the district, John Harris Jones of Pine Bluff, Charles L. “Chuck” Honey of Prescott and Dean Murphy of Hope. 

Pryor’s three terms in the seniority-driven House of Representatives were hardly notable, except for a controversy that he engineered—a crusade over the mistreatment of the elderly and disabled in nursing homes—and his personal dilemma over the Vietnam War, which he eventually came to oppose. 

His mother told him that after visiting friends in nursing homes over the years she had concluded that the warehousing of people in the profit-driven industry had to be a national scandal rather than a local one. Now that her son was a congressman, he ought to do something about it. Having little else to do as a freshman, Pryor started volunteering on weekends as an orderly in nursing homes in the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland and Virginia, and recording the lack of staffing and lapses in medical care that he saw. His mother was right. Nursing homes often were just profitable warehouses for those waiting for the grave. Government inspectors often gave owners notice of their inspections, which rarely found lapses and, when they did, nothing was done about them. The industry had lobbyists who kept Pryor’s congressional colleagues and other government monitors at bay. 

Pryor made a speech on the House floor revealing his secret work. He said he had encountered only two nursing homes where he would put his mother, but he couldn’t have afforded either one on his $42,500 salary. He was attacked by Maryland’s state mental-health director and people in the industry. Pryor called for the House to create a select committee on nursing homes and homes for the aged. A majority of the House voted for his resolution, but it was non-binding and Congress did nothing. The House, led by the 80-year-old Mississippian who headed the Rules Committee, would not provide space or staffing for the committee. Pryor decided to do the work himself, after finding a vacant lot beside a gasoline station near the Capitol. The station’s owner found two house trailers that became the site for Pryor’s investigations and hearings. Pryor tried and failed to set up a permanent Committee on Aging, as the Senate had done in 1959. President Richard M. Nixon joined Pryor’s cause in 1971, deploring conditions in nursing homes and proposing to end payments to substandard homes.

In 1974, two years after Pryor left, the House joined the cause and established the Select Committee on Aging. For the next 50 years, Congress, federal and state administrators and the industry would wage a continuous battle over standards of care for the aged and the degree of regulation that government should provide.

When Pryor went to Washington, the Vietnam War had engaged the United States for ten years. (President Eisenhower sent the first US troops in 1955 and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had raised the commitment.) After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Congress gave Johnson new authority to dramatically expand America’s commitment, still without a declaration of war. By 1968, congressional and public opposition to the war had grown. Vice President Hubert Humphrey asked Pryor to make a short speech to the riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago—Humphrey was the presidential nominee—in support of the Vietnam plank, an oblique statement that neither endorsed nor opposed the war effort. Pryor went to the convention as an Arkansas delegate and had already alienated other Southern congressmen, especially Mississippians, by voting as a member of the Credentials Committee to seat Mississippi’s Freedom Democrats—Blacks and liberals—instead of the white delegation picked by the party in Mississippi. In his two-minute speech, he urged an end to the war but called for unity and wisdom. Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright had already decided America’s war policies were improvident and conducted hearings that began to turn public sentiment against the war.

President Johnson, who had had misgivings about the war from the first, had then made himself the champion of the war against communism after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He became more and more sorrowful and morose as tens of thousands of Americans a year died, but he could not become the first president to lose a war. In 1967, Johnson asked Pryor to fly to Texas with him for rallies to pump up flagging support in his home state. Pryor would write that Johnson seemed glum and introspective the whole trip. Pryor understood why. As they were flying back to Washington at night in Air Force One, Pryor looked out the window and figured that the lights below were his hometown of Camden. 

“Mr. President,” he said, “it looks like we might be flying directly over Camden, Arkansas. That’s my hometown. If you look straight down at the ground, you might see Jim’s Café on Washington Street.”

The president leaned across him and looked out the window. He slumped back in his seat and shook his head.

“God a’mighty!” he sighed. “I wish I was at Jim’s Café right now.” He was silent the rest of the trip.

For Pryor, the climax to the moral struggle over the war was more personal, as he would recall in A Pryor Commitment and oral histories. On an airline trip from Washington to Arkansas he fell into conversation with a young serviceman from his district who was headed to Vietnam. Many months later, he got on a plane for the same flight back home and recognized the young man, in uniform. He asked the soldier about his tour of duty. The soldier pulled back a blanket across his lap, which showed that he had lost a leg in combat.

 “Congressman Pryor,” the young man said, “I would not have minded losing my leg, if only someone had told me why we were there in the first place.”

Pryor sent constituents a newsletter announcing that he would thereafter oppose any further funding of the war and calling for troops to be brought home. It was not an altogether popular step. At a fishfry at the Carlisle High School stadium soon afterward, a man ran out of the crowd, jumped on Pryor’s back and began hitting him and calling him a traitor. Mayor Bobby Glover, later a state representative and then a senator, pulled the man off Pryor. Two decades later Pryor would write a letter to his son Scott, explaining his dilemma over the war and the consequences. He likened it to the contemporary dilemma over the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In 1972, McClellan, by then chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which had funded the development of the navigation dams on the Arkansas River in Arkansas and Oklahoma, announced he was running for a sixth term. His hearings on labor racketeering had made enemies of organized labor. Unions representing wood, paper, oil, chemical and electrical workers in South Arkansas had supplied much of Pryor’s political strength. He announced that he was running for the seat, too, along with Ted Boswell, a liberal trial lawyer, and Foster Johnson, a book salesman who for the third straight Senate election went around towns wearing clanging metal campaign signs over his shoulders. 

Pryor survived a rough campaign in which he was accused of being a friend of draft dodgers and a supporter of gun control. (As a freshman legislator, he had sponsored a bill making it illegal to carry a loaded weapon in a vehicle inside city limits—a reaction to a neighboring boy accidentally killing himself with a loaded shotgun on a Safeway parking lot.) But Pryor was a close second in the preferential primary and entered the runoff as a heavy favorite, certain to get all the votes that had been cast for the more liberal Boswell. W. R. “Witt” Stephens, the gas baron and investment banker, summoned a meeting of the state’s banking and business leaders with McClellan in the board room of the Union National Bank at Little Rock where everyone ponied up tens of thousands of dollars for McClellan or pledged to collect it.

The two-week runoff ended with the famous televised debate. McClellan, wearing a white suit, taunted Pryor for his support by unions, particularly “labor bosses” from outside the state. Pryor responded that the money reported on his campaign finance forms came from the cookie jars and overall pockets of hardworking men. McClellan responded that Pryor had gotten $79,000 from “bosses” from outside the state. 

“David, David,” he taunted, shaking a finger, “this is no cookie-jar nickels and dimes!”

Pryor’s campaign gifts paled alongside the money from businessmen and bankers in McClellan’s campaign, but McClellan’s commanding performance showed him as anything but a doddering 76-year-old man. But his victory in the election the next week depended more on the massive get-out-the-vote effort by political leaders commanded by Witt Stephens. Pryor got only 20,000 more votes than in the first primary, McClellan 22,000 more. On election night, Pryor faced the TV cameras early, conceded and said the voters had elected the right man, a typical Pryor reflection on his opponents.

Witt Stephens was watching television that night and was struck by the Pryor’s magnanimity. Two years later, when Gov. Dale Bumpers announced he was not running for a third term as governor but instead for the Senate—against Fulbright—Stephens picked up the phone and called Pryor, suggesting that he run for governor. Pryor said he was about to call Stephens and urge him to run (they had served in the House of Representatives together as freshmen in 1961). Stephens said no, he was serious, and promised his full organizational support if Pryor announced. He did, and so did former governor Faubus and Lt. Gov. Bob Riley. Faubus, making his second comeback attempt since retiring in 1966, was shocked to discover that nearly his entire political machine marshaled by Stephens had been diverted to Pryor. Pryor won without a runoff. For the rest of his life, Faubus remained bitter about his old friend and supporter’s betrayal while also warming to the young man whom his son Farrell had asked him to help. 

Providence seemed always to shine on Pryor at election time—but with actual governance, not so much. Bumpers had raised income and motor-fuel taxes and closed tax loopholes. Furious economic growth filled the state treasury so that Bumpers could enhance public schools and higher education, build many state parks, improve highways, expand medical care and build hospitals and college classrooms. Bumpers called a special legislative session to spend the big surplus that had accumulated in the treasury. The moment that Pryor moved into the Governor’s Mansion the nation was hit with a long recession complicated by inflation, and the treasury was depleted. Pryor had to slash budgets and freeze hiring even for filling job vacancies. In his four years, Bumpers had carried out all the reforms prescribed by the liberal group Democrats for Arkansas during the late 1960s—nearly everything but a new state constitution, which became Pryor’s biggest goal. It was never fulfilled.

Pryor proposed a dramatic refashioning of state spending—a 25 percent reduction in state income tax rates and empowerment of local governments to implement the income tax themselves to address all the problems of cities, counties and schools. The Arkansas Plan, as it was called, consumed a legislative session. Pryor traveled the state promoting the plan, explaining to a group at Jonesboro that he was cutting state taxes and allowing people locally to use it in whatever way pleased them—jokingly suggesting that if they didn’t want to levy taxes to build roads and streets they could spend the money on “a new coon dog.” Gazette cartoonist George Fisher labeled it the “Coon Dog Plan” and thereafter always put a grinning mutt at Pryor’s side. The Arkansas Plan failed.

Another passion was litter. Pryor hated the trash along the state’s streets and roads. He started a “Pick Up Arkansas” campaign and proposed a bill levying a small tax on soft drinks, pet foods, newspapers and plastic wrappers to discourage littering; the money would be used for highway and street cleanup. Local governments were encouraged to dispose of solid waste like abandoned cars and refrigerators. The bill passed, but a letter from the state Revenue Department to businesses on how to collect the tax warned that they might go to prison for failing to remit the litter tax. Legislators who had voted for the bill heard from merchants and demanded that Pryor call them back into session to repeal the bill before it took effect on July 1. He did but always regretted it when he saw sandwich wrappers and soft-drink containers strewn along streets and on the roadsides.

Constitutional revision, an obsession with an aging legislator who had been the leader of the Young Turks, was Pryor’s biggest failure. Voters had defeated a liberalized constitution drafted by a popularly elected convention in 1970. Pryor decided to try again after taking office in 1975. The solution had to be to avoid the pitched battles over a few issues such as the state’s antiunion law (the Right to Work Amendment), usury, judicial elections and county-government reform. He offered a bill calling for the appointment, by the legislature and the governor, of 35 delegates who would write a new constitution but leave those and a few other features of the 1874 constitution untouched and then submit the document to the voters in September. On the day the delegates convened, the state Supreme Court voted four to three to abolish the convention because the delegates were prohibited from changing some parts of the constitution. It had to be all or nothing. In 1977, Pryor tried again with a bill that called for the election of 100 delegates in 1978 and a vote on the document in 1980. But voters defeated that new constitution decisively. 

McClellan died in November 1977 and Pryor appointed Kaneaster Hodges of Newport, a lawyer and minister, to finish his term, which ended Jan. 1, 1979. Pryor soon announced that he would run for the seat. So did US Rep. Jim Guy Tucker of Little Rock and Rep. Ray H. Thornton Jr. of Sheridan. It would be a race between three friends and philosophical triplets. A. C. Grigson, a Texarkana accountant, joined the race claiming to be McClellan’s philosophical successor. Pryor barely led in the first primary and Tucker edged Thornton for the second spot. The runoff would also be amiable until its final days when Tucker accused Pryor’s campaign manager of trying to persuade a friend on the state Public Service Commission to approve a rate increase for Witt Stephens’s western Arkansas gas company in exchange for the Stephens family’s support in the runoff. Pryor won by a safe margin. Tucker later shrugged off his defeat. No one, he said, was going to believe that David Pryor did anything even slightly deceitful, and wouldn’t blame him if he had.

The Senate years were Pryor’s most pleasurable. His Arkansas colleague, Dale Bumpers, was a close friend and an ally on most but not all issues. After their retirements, they became a popular team for television and political events, taunting and telling tall tales about each other.

During the eight-year administration of President Ronald Reagan, both senators opposed much of the Reagan program, including the tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981 and later the big binge of military spending. Bumpers, a deficit hawk, publicly opposed the tax cuts, and Pryor finally joined him by voting “present” on the roll call, the same as a no vote. The month after the tax cuts passed the nation fell into a deep 14-month recession with double-digit unemployment, the deepest since the 1930s, although the charming Reagan was never blamed for the longest and deepest recession in modern times or the staggering budget deficits and debt that he ran up for eight years or for the repeated tax increases that the Reagan administration described as “revenue enhancements” instead of taxes.

But Pryor also became a leading critic of Pentagon spending, calling attention to such excesses as the orders for thousands of ball-peen hammers and toilet seats at hugely inflated prices. He also veered from Bumpers and the state’s four congressmen in his opposition to the development of binary chemical weapons. He opposed developing and storing the chemical weapons at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. Vice President George H. W. Bush, a friend who went to Congress the same time as Pryor, went to the Senate to cast the tie-breaking vote for the arsenal.

Even before Reagan’s election, the Pentagon already suspected that Pryor was not a votary, especially after he called attention to the perils of the Titan II missile system after a series of dangerous failures around the country and two catastrophes in Arkansas. When the Defense Department developed the Titan II system—54 underground intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads—US Rep. Wilbur D. Mills agreed to vote for President Kennedy’s tax cuts if he agreed to put a ring of 18 of the new missiles in Arkansas. A fire in a silo with a nuclear warhead near Searcy in 1965 killed 53 workers who were retrofitting the missile’s fuel system. In January 1978, a fuel transporter at a missile silo at Damascus overheated and sent thousands of gallons of deadly nitrogen tetroxide vapor over the countryside. In 1979, after more such leaks in the Arkansas and Kansas missile networks, Pryor and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas were regretting having Titan sites in their states and talked about whether they should be anywhere near American citizens. 

After rumors of incidents at the silos, Pryor in the summer of 1980 did his own secret investigation and found nine major incidents in the previous 14 months that could have endangered Arkansas lives around the silos. Clearly, the Air Force had been lying about the safety at the Titan sites in Arkansas, Kansas and New Mexico. Pryor gave the detailed results of investigation of the eight incidents to two Arkansas Gazette reporters, who described the incidents and Pryor’s conclusions. Surrounding residents were never informed about any of them, despite an Air Force vow that residents would always be informed.

Pryor and Dole went to Congress to push an amendment to the Defense Department appropriation that called for an early-warning system around all the silos. The amendment passed. Three days later, on Sept. 18, 1980, the missile in a silo at Damascus exploded, blowing the nuclear warhead and two technicians into the air. One of the men died almost instantly and the other’s health was permanently impaired. Two years later, the Pentagon decided to abandon the Titans for more advanced, and perhaps safer, missile systems. But Pryor’s negativity about defense weaponry and spending took a political toll, at least nationally.

The payoff came in 1984, when the White House and the party leadership persuaded Congressman Ed Bethune of Searcy—the Pryors and Bethunes were social friends—to run against Pryor with the promise of financial backing. More than 20 Reagan administration officials and Republican senators came to Arkansas for fund-raising events for Bethune. Rev. Jerry Falwell, the right-wing leader, came to Arkansas to call for Pryor’s defeat. Pryor eschewed the same strategy, feeling that Democrats from out of the state would hurt rather than help him. Bethune’s ads said Pryor had voted against the popular former movie star, Ronnie Reagan, on 77 percent of the issues in the Senate. The Saturday before the election Reagan, who was approaching a landslide win of his own, made a speech at the packed Excelsior Hotel ballroom. 

“Don’t send me back to Washington alone,” Reagan said with the smiling Bethune beside him. Reagan carried Arkansas with 60 percent of the vote. Pryor got 57 percent.

In 1994, Pryor ran for re-election and no Democrat or Republican opposed him—a rarity in any state. Betty White, a homeless woman, ran as a write-in and got 832 votes. (Pryor’s son Mark also had no opposition, except for a Green Party candidate, in his second race for the same seat in 2008.)

Pryor spent much of his second term fighting for a taxpayer’s bill of rights, to curb abuses by the Internal Revenue Service. Reagan signed Pryor’s bill into law in 1988.

Pryor’s last crusade was against the pharmaceutical industry. In 1990, he introduced the Pharmaceutical Access and Prudent Purchasing Act, which sought to end the spiral of drug prices; it would have allowed Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate with drug makers on prices that would be charged to Medicare and Medicaid patients. The industry fought back. 

Pryor had a massive heart attack on April 15, 1991. The illness hobbled him for the rest of his career. Majority Leader George Mitchell and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas took up the cause of drug pricing but they never were able to pass a bill. President Joe Biden finally took up Pryor’s cause in 2023.

Another passionate reform effort was to end the electoral college so that the winner of the popular vote would always be the next president. The most important job in the whole democracy was president, but it also was the only political job in the country, from members of the county quorum court to the top, that might go to the loser. In 1992, sensing that the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot could tilt the election of George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton regardless of the size of Clinton’s election victory, Pryor again introduced a Senate resolution for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college and assure that election winners always took office. The Senate never sent the amendment to the states for ratification. Only one election loser had ever failed to become president—Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 —but two subsequent losers, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016, became president. Trump lost the actual balloting to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.

Like Bumpers, Pryor found the relationships in Congress profoundly different after radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh and Republican House leader Newt Gingrich turned American politics into a war of saintly Republicans vs. evil Democrats. Friendly Republicans departed and were replaced by politicians who called Democrats socialists and radicals who were out to destroy the country. Pryor did not run again in 1996; Bumpers made the same choice in 1998. The Capitol, they said, was no longer an enjoyable place to be.

Pryor’s retirement did not end his engagement with politics and government. In 2000, he was director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He taught courses at the University of Arkansas and gave his unexpended campaign funds to form the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History at the university. He was the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at Little Rock, serving for two years. After the murder of Bill Gwatney in 2008, he was chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party for a spell. In 2009, Gov. Mike Beebe appointed him to a 10-year term on the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, where he did not enhance his popularity by protesting the lavish spending on athletics and stadium additions. A massive stroke in 2016 curtailed his activities for good.

Survivors include his widow, Barbara; his sons and their wives, David Jr. (Judith), Mark (Joi) and Scott (Diane); his grandchildren, Hampton, Adams, Porter and Devin; and his great-grandson, Raven. 

The post In Memoriam appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

There’s just something about Arkansas’s rural landscapes, where the rhythm of life is measured by the seasons. Here, neighbors still greet each other with a warm smile and a firm handshake. Community is built from shared hardship and triumph. It is a place where the simple pleasures of life take precedence over the clamor of ambition.

Yet it is exactly a clamor that threatens our rural way of life. 

The threat is the insidious, unending hum of technology — crypto mining — which is encroaching upon the sanctity of the Arkansas countryside.

Rural life is when humanity beats in harmony with the land. Despite modern technological advances in agriculture or the expansion of commercialism, rural life in Arkansas is still rooted in simplicity and connection to the earth. It is still a place where the land lives and breathes. 

But now our rural spaces are menaced by crypto mining, which interrupts the balance between humans and the land. 

Crypto mining, with its voracious appetite for energy and its relentless pursuit of profit, has set its sights on our rural spaces. Drawn by the promise of cheap electricity and vast expanses of available land, crypto mining operations — large swaths of computer farms —descend upon our communities like modern-day prospectors, seeking to extract digital gold from the blockchain.

As a result, Arkansas’s rural landscape is turned into fields of digital industrialization. And the noise, the relentless white noise of these computer farms… the tranquility that is rural life is shattered by the ceaseless hum of machinery, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

But perhaps the greatest danger these crypto mines pose is not just the physical transformation of the land, but in the erosion of rural culture itself. In the rush to exploit the resources of Arkansas’s land, we risk losing something more precious — the intangible sanctity of rural space. 

Arkansans are deeply rooted in their rural communities. They understand that the beauty of these places lies not solely in their economic potential, but in their ability to nourish, to abide, and to connect us to something greater than ourselves. They remind us that rural Arkansas is not just a landscape to be exploited, but is rather made up of living, breathing spaces.

As we confront the threat of crypto mining in our rural communities, let us recognize the value of what we stand to lose. 

The post a clamor that threatens Arkansas’s rural life appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

My students can tell you the danger of answering a question I ask in class. I am known for trick questions, such as, “Tell me about a wedding in the Torah,” or “Where is a conversion ceremony in Tanach?”

The answer in both cases is that there isn’t one.

And an abortion in the Torah? There isn’t one.

This week, though, we read about a physical altercation that ends in unintentional assault of a pregnant person. That assault is a crime. If a miscarriage results, the offense is more severe. What comes next, though, makes the essential point: If the pregnant person were killed in that fight, the penalty would be infinitely harsher. Killing a fetus is not homicide. 

When our sages began to codify Jewish law in the Mishnah, published around 200 C.E., they taught that, if carrying the fetus endangers the pregnant person’s life, the fetus must be destroyed, right up to the moment of birth.

Arkansas lawmakers are apparently less concerned than the sages were about pregnant people’s welfare.

Yes, Arkansas law permits abortion to save the pregnant person’s life, but only in a medical emergency. Arkansas law puts pregnant people at risk.

The matter is not theoretical. For example, a person with cancer can become pregnant, and a pregnant person can be diagnosed with cancer. Many forms of cancer treatment endanger the welfare of a fetus. Physicians will not prescribe those treatments to pregnant patients, which would be malpractice. The patient’s life is in danger, which would be exacerbated by delaying treatment.

In a state with compassionate abortion laws, the pregnant person could choose: Endanger their health to sustain the fetus or terminate the pregnancy to pursue prompt cancer treatment. Absent a medical emergency, though, Arkansas law does not permit the pregnancy to be terminated. A doctor who performs that procedure could be imprisoned. A Jewish doctor who declined to perform the abortion—you know, to stay out of prison—would be violating the Jewish law that requires terminating a pregnancy that threatens the pregnant person’s life. 

In 2023, in the first session of the Arkansas General Assembly after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, overthrowing Roe v. Wade and permitting states to limit or prohibit abortion in ways they could not for a half-century, Arkansas lawmakers had an opportunity to consider exceptions to the state’s near-total abortion ban. However, they rejected a proposal that would have permitted terminating a pregnancy conceived through incest and another that would have empowered parents to end a pregnancy after the diagnosis of a fatal fetal anomaly. These concerns, too, are not merely theoretical. 

USA Today reports that, before Dobbs, approximately one percent of American abortions were for pregnancies conceived through rape, whereas one-half of one percent were to terminate pregnancies conceived through incest. Those are small percentages but they represent significant human suffering. The same newspaper reported the findings of a highly esteemed medical journal that “there may have been more than 64,500 pregnancies resulting from rape in the 14 states that have enacted near-total abortion bans since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.” 

Meanwhile, a study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology indicated that diagnosis of a fatal fetal anomaly is accurate more than ninety-nine percent of the time and that some two-thirds of people pregnant with these fetuses chose to terminate their pregnancies, mindful that the fetus was destined to die in utero or within the first four weeks after birth.

Different rabbinic authorities, studying the same sources, have come to different conclusions about the conditions under which Jewish law permits abortion. All agree, though, that the welfare of the pregnant person is the determining factor. A person who has been sexually abused should not be forced to carry their abuser’s crime with them for a lifetime. After receiving the diagnosis that a lovingly planned pregnancy has resulted in a fatal fetal anomaly, Arkansas law would compel the pregnant person to carry the pregnancy to term and then watch the baby die days later. Many would call that torture.

To be clear, pregnant people in a wide variety of circumstances—not all of them as horrifying as rape, incest, or a fatal fetal anomaly—need abortion care. Even though Jewish law permits only some abortions, American Jews do not expect that our religious requirements should be codified as laws of the United States or any state. With the First Amendment, we also oppose the imposition of abortion bans driven by other religious traditions, as is indisputably the case in Arkansas. Abortion bans are, quite literally, against our religion.

Now, Arkansans have the opportunity to sign petitions to place the Arkansas Abortion Amendment on the November ballot. That amendment would not reimpose Roe v. Wade on Arkansas in its purest form. It would “only” forbid the General Assembly from enacting any restriction on abortion in the first eighteen weeks of pregnancy and would require the state to permit later abortions in cases of threat to the pregnant person’s life, even absent an emergency, and also in cases of threat their physical health or subsequent to the diagnosis of a fatal fetal anomaly.

Arkansans for Limited Government, which has organized this effort, points to polling indicating that fifty-one percent of Arkansans support this return of limited abortion rights in Arkansas. The campaign will be hard-fought. Polling also indicated that an attempt to do even more would have little chance at success.

The Trustees of Congregation B’nai Israel have endorsed the Arkansas Abortion Amendment. Our congregation will be supporting this effort with petition drives and get-out-the-vote efforts.

We will not be alone. In my decades of advocacy for reproductive healthcare, I have learned that clergy and congregations can change the conversation from one in which religious groups uniformly oppose abortion to one that more accurately demonstrates that religious people are divided on the issue. To that end, I have invited local clergy to begin organizing a faith effort in support of the ballot initiative. The response is almost overwhelming, so many Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran, and Unitarian ministers are eager to be included. 

The Arkansas Abortion Amendment would legalize some ninety-nine percent of the abortions that were taking place in Arkansas before the Dobbs ruling. Moreover, the amendment would expand abortion access for people in parts of all six states that border Arkansas. Some say that it’s not enough. We will have to make a lot of compromises in this campaign. 

And, we must acknowledge, we will engage in this sacred endeavor to save lives and protect people’s dignity with the full knowledge that we may not win.

Our rabbis teach: Lo alecha ham’lacha ligmor. We cannot be required to complete the task, v’lo atah l’hibateil mimeina, but that is no excuse to desist from it.

We must not be lazy. God is knocking at our doors, urging us to act, for the welfare of every pregnant person who desperately needs abortion care in Arkansas.

Amen. 

The post Abortion in Torah and in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

My Papaw is no longer living, may God rest his soul. But if he were, I am certain he would be ashamed of what has become of the Grand Old Party. Papaw was a hardworking business man with stories for days of growing up on a Louisiana farm with dozens of cousins. He always spoke to me and my cousin about hard work, individual responsibility, and the value of a dollar.

My papaw fostered within me a sense of accomplishment and pride in any work I was doing. When I grew up and became a voter, these values, to me, reflected the heart of the GOP.

So what changed?

If you pressed me for an answer to that question, I’d have to say it was Donald Trump.

At some point in the last eight years I started to realize that my family members were deviating from the conservatism that raised us. With each new story of a disgusting joke, sexual assault allegation, or racist soundbite I would watch for a shift — Would they take their Trump flag down? Might they stop sharing Trump’s outlandish messages on social media? Could they be trusted to talk about social issues without parroting his deceitful talking points?

For some – too many – of them, the answers were no, no, and no. And that is the heartbreaking place we find ourselves in 2024.

Donald Trump has amassed a following of millions who believe everything he tells them, will do anything he asks, and even cause harm and distress to their own families for the sake of his mission.

There is no word for that besides “cult,” and that’s exactly what it is.

Donald Trump is going to be the Presidential nominee for the Republican Party. His influence will only grow, and the impact on our families will continue to be traumatic. Here in Arkansas, it’s especially difficult to confront the loss.

Trump’s face is on billboards across the state and the gospel of his elusive plan to make America great is preached in many of our churches. “Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen?” is a litmus test when political conversations arise. Answer a definitive, “no,” and you might lose another friend, or miss your chance to make a new one.

I know I am not alone in the complex grief of losing a loved one to the cult of Trump. There are thousands of us in states like Arkansas. We aren’t trying to change anyone’s mind— we just want our people back.

The post Losing Loved Ones to the Cult of Trump appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Come to Arkansas and find seemingly contradictory values represented: hospitality and rugged individualism, grit and obedience, candor and a hefty dose of minding your own business. We are a beautiful collection of perspectives, wouldn’t you agree?

Arkansans are also stubbornly proud, especially in their mistrust of government. Rural Southerners have an especially unique skepticism of government intervention, which is as ingrained in us as the right to bear arms and looking out for your neighbors.  

But despite our diverse opinions and our indignation with nosy government, we have a problem standing up to overreach with one specific issue. Why? Well, it’s simply impolite to talk about certain things.

Chief among the “impolite” topics is the issue of reproductive freedom. In other words: abortion. Or women’s healthcare. Or murdering babies. Or the right to choose… depending on who you’re asking. 

Earlier this week, I read that the Arkansas Abortion Amendment was certified by the Attorney General. According to Arkansans for Limited Government, the group behind the Amendment’s effort to restore some abortion access in the state, politicians make for bad doctors. Regardless of how one feels about abortion, the group argues, we don’t need politicians regulating reproductive decisions. We don’t need government in the exam room, so to speak, regulating things as personal as pregnancy.

I cannot help but agree.

Regulating people’s healthcare, especially a woman’s organs, is not only a divergence from our cherished values of personal freedom and individual liberty but a stark example of burdensome—even deadly—government overreach. 

The notion of limited government has been etched into our consciousness and our traditions, but the regulation of reproductive healthcare challenges this ethos. It forces us to question whether a government that we already view with suspicion should extend its reach into the most private corners of our lives. 

Personal independence is not just a value, but a way of life in Arkansas, and interference should be seen as an affront to the principles that make us who we are—people in control of our own lives. Personal liberty means we alone decide our destiny. And we alone know what is best for ourselves and our families. 

The regulation of abortion is a logical paradox, even outside of a morality paradigm, because of its relevance to government overreach. And I’d like you to bear with me for a minute. I know it’s a polarizing issue; I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about how they morally feel about abortion. What I’m aiming to do is reinvigorate a healthy skepticism of government.

I would never presume to know what is best for another person’s health or for the choices their family must make.

Now extend this to the Arkansas state government, which has proven that it  cannot be trusted on matters of the collective or individual good. When the government regulates our healthcare and steps into our doctors’ offices, the government undermines our trust, implying that the entity of the state knows better than we do when it comes to decisions about our own lives. This is antithetical to what it means to be an Arkansan—a self-reliant, responsible individual.

And speaking of responsibility: government overreach, well-intentioned as it may be, often brings about its own unintended consequences. In Arkansas, regulations disproportionately affect our rural communities. It is our duty to ensure that any policy reflects a commitment to fairness and justice for our rural communities rather than perpetuating already awful health disparities between urban dwellers and rural folk.

I’m not here to change minds on how people feel about abortion. Your judgment of the issue is yours, and yours alone. You are entitled to your opinion, and oftentimes, those opinions are rooted in compelling and valid experiences. 

No, this is not about changing minds. But it’s about keeping the government out of our homes and hospital rooms, out of conversations with our families and our doctors.

It’s not my business, or the government’s, to know the myriad of factors going into a person’s decision regarding the trajectory of their life. I don’t know if a person was raped. I don’t know if a person suffered a miscarriage. I don’t know if a family got a terrible diagnosis. 

The point is, I don’t know what’s best for you. 

The government doesn’t know either and it sure as hell doesn’t have any business telling people what’s good or right. That’s between them, their doctor, and the Good Lord above. 

Let’s get back to our Arkansas roots and keep government where it should be: out of our doctor’s office and back in the business of governing policy, not people’s lives. 

The post Mind your Biscuits: The Case Against Government Overreach in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

“In addition to Little Rock and the surrounding areas, it is our pledge to serve the diverse population in the rural areas of Arkansas,” said Little Rock VA Regional Office Executive Director Sammie Quillin. “We are working to connect with these Veterans along with those unable to reach us by other means.”

The VA also wants veterans and their families to know about their Visitor Reporting Engagement Application (VERA), an online tool to help appointments. For those who don’t have a VA clinic accessible to them, it’s a great way to stay on top of healthcare needs.

You can find more details, provided by the VA, below.

WHAT: Monthly Virtual VA Claims Clinic for Arkansas Veterans

WHO: During the upcoming Virtual Claims Clinic, Veterans may speak one-on-one with staff at the Little Rock VA Regional Office who are ready to assist with specific questions regarding their claims for VA benefits.

WHEN: Thursday, January 25, 4 – 6 p.m.

HOW:  To reserve a time slot, Veterans are asked to call 501-370-3829 by COB, January 24.

MORE INFO:

Little Rock VA Regional Office is located at 2200 Fort Roots Drive in North Little Rock and open Monday – Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Veteran Assist Phone Line, 501-370-3829, is staffed Monday – Friday, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Two VA satellite offices are located at 1) the John L. McClellan VA Medical Center, Room 1C-151B, open Tuesdays, 8 a.m. – noon, and Thursdays, noon – 4 p.m, and 2) the Eugene J. Towbin VA Healthcare Center, Room 1C-149, Bldg. 170, 2200 Fort Roots Dr. in North Little Rock, open Wednesdays, 8 a.m. – noon.

VA Regional Offices provide financial and other forms of assistance to Veterans and their dependents. This includes disability compensation, survivor’s benefits, pension and fiduciary service, education and training, vocational rehabilitation and employment assistance, life insurance coverage, and home loan guaranties. VA disability compensation (pay) offers a monthly tax-free payment to Veterans who got sick or injured while serving in the military and to Veterans whose service made an existing condition worse. 

During the upcoming Virtual Claims Clinic, staff members of the Little Rock VA Regional Office will answer questions about PACT Act benefits, existing VA benefits claims, and assist with filing new claims.  

For more information about VA benefits, go to http://benefits.va.gov/benefits/ or call 800-827-1000. For information about PACT Act benefits, visit www.va.gov/resources/the-pact-act-and-your-va-benefits.

The post VA offers next Virtual Claims Clinic for Vets appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Among the little heads are my two, Rosie and Beau. They are four and five years old, respectively, and they wear their disabilities on their bodies and voices. Beau, with his almond-shaped eyes, short stature, and precious few intelligible words and phrases and Rosie, with eyes that match her brother’s and a wheelchair that offers a kind of independence that only families like ours can understand.

It was the lack of wheelchair accessibility in most public spaces that first gave me a wave of now familiar grief in a very public place. It was a stormy day, so we had to do an indoor activity after preschool. We decided to walk around the mall as a family, trying to get Beau’s energy out before we grabbed dinner at a restaurant in the building. When the time came, we rounded a corner toward the fast-casual place we planned to eat.

I instantly noticed the layout of the restaurant was not accessible. All tables on the lower floor, where we’d entered, were taken. To order our meal, we would have to scale four-or-so steps before being in the queue. The restaurant had two entrances: one from the inside of the mall, which is where we approached, and another from the sidewalk outside of the mall. In order to access the restaurant and eat when we arrived we would have to walk outside, where rain was pouring buckets, and enter from the other door.

Inaccessible space making often goes unnoticed until it impacts your family directly. My father was also a wheelchair user, so as a child I experienced my fair share of disappointment due to his absence simply because a space lacks a ramp or a clear path to move through. I learned implicitly that the world did not want people like my dad to join abled people in spaces where we congregate. The world was not created for my dad.

Based on my unique parenting experience, the world was not created for my children either. This brings a familiar grief that you can only imagine until you experience it.

Grief disappears at storytime. We enter with everyone else using a visible ramp at the main entrance. Space is made for Rosie’s wheelchair, and Beau can spin and stim until he’s regulated enough to sit for the story.

We are with the world, among new friends.

The faith of my youth taught me that the world is broken, in need of redemption. A new heaven and a new Earth are an end goal for believers, and in this new heaven and Earth all will be at peace, and the grief and tears of today will be no more.

The closest thing I have experienced to this peace of the Scriptures is storytime with my kids. Heaven is a library— a public library. And we never want to leave. 

The post Heaven is a Library appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Around the time I pass through Bee Branch, the quirky town near Greers Ferry Lake, the cattle pastures of central Arkansas give way to what was once an ancient plateau. I wind through long switchbacks and creep up in altitude. It’s a sneaky climb, and if you’re not paying attention, you can miss the experience. 

Long ago, this land was a mesa. What emerges before me now are gentle peaks and valleys — the Ozarks — which water and time have carved into something of a mountain range, but also something different. 

It’s late December and shadowy gray clouds blot out the sun. There’s a heavy mist coming down but somehow it’s still beautiful, achy almost. I feel a deep sense of longing, a thirst for primitive beauty. I think about the opposite equinox and how next year this stretch of highway will flood with party barges and lake people smelling of sunscreen and summer. But today, it’s sleepy out. Blurry and wet. Quiet. 

There are more diminutive pieces of farm land along the roadside now. I spot cattle, horses, chickens. Animal husbandry defines Ozark agriculture because the land is inhospitable to crops; it takes grit to live in these parts, which lack fertile soil and quick thoroughfares. Winding county roads hug the rugged landscape, and for the willing, each stop offers its own treasure for the patient and curious traveler.  

Bee Branch looks like it could be the town that birthed the first Sonic Drive-In. It’s charming; old grain silos and mill equipment flank the road, its shoulders heavy with flea markets signs and kitschy garden ornaments made from scrap metal. I sneak farther north, and the morning’s opaque mist lifts a little, revealing sweeping Ozark vistas, valleys, and hollers. I spy hideouts for hillbillies tucked into the mountainside, humble dwellings of those who know what it takes to make a life here. 

This land requires a different kind of tenacity than other places in the state, and that is neither good nor bad. To be honest, I never felt connected to the land in Arkansas when I was younger. I was told my father’s family came from the heart of the Ouachitas down in Garland and Hot Spring Counties. Dense, tall forests of shortleaf pine blanket the ground in needles there. The forest is farmed at every turn, and the highways are clogged with menacing tractor trailers, hauling logs that threaten to spill at the next pothole. 

Growing up we spent Thanksgiving holidays just outside of Malvern, another town where the Sonic Drive-In could have been born. Beside the highway sat my grandma’s trailer, which smelled of mothballs and pine cones. When we’d visit, my sister and I would make mud pies with old plastic planter trays. My great uncle lived on the other side of the road, which we were forbidden to cross lest we get hit by a car. His home was a pre-war shotgun with bad lighting. It had just a few bedrooms and more than a few taxidermied deer whose faux dead eyes followed my every move. The yard was spacious with buried vintage cars and tractors. There was also an old school bus where my second cousin slept. My dad’s people were money-poor but rich with family, ritual, and pie.

Even then Arkansas didn’t feel like home. But this changed the first time I laid eyes on the Ozarks. What I felt then was what I feel right now — that sense of achy longing, a bewitchment with its melancholy. It’s a curiosity to explore and understand. It’s a profound sense of place and time, sandwiched in ancient layers of shale and limestone. A few years ago, because of my sister’s diligent research, we learned that my father’s people are actually Ozarkian. I now have a photo of my 19th century ancestors posing along the edge of a bluff shelter— a revelatory confirmation of my place in the Ozarks.

Highway 65 turns into two lanes, and I start a curving descent into a valley. My ears pop from the forgiving attitude change. Just as the sun breaks through the clouds, I’m officially in the Ozarks. A mile up ahead is the Serenity Farm Bread bakery, the point of my detour on my way home to Fayetteville. Serenity sells crusty loaves of sourdough bread made via bygone methods. The bakery and its provisions exude hillbilly hippie, two identities that are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they compliment quite nicely. I think of the book my friend Jared wrote about the counter-cultural bohemians who forged a land revolution in these parts. Are Ozarkians the original hippies? Perhaps. 

The bakery is in an old, pale yellow farmhouse with a green roof. It’s the Saturday before Christmas, and they’ve sold out of nearly all their bread. What’s left is Ozark black apple walnut. I pick up a few danishes and some oatmeal raisin cookies, also made with sourdough. I buy a funky piece of pottery. A couple of locals pop in to grab a pastry and lightheartedly complain about the holiday traffic. The highway seems quiet enough to me, but I suppose even a sporadic stream of cars makes it feel congested this time of year. 

Behind the farmhouse, lower in the valley, a striking pale oak tree catches my eye. It’s bleach white and looks like a static lightning bolt that’s suspended in midair. The albino bark is probably caused by some kind of parasite or fungus, but the tree stirs up that achy longing in me, that bewitchment. What stories does it hold? What changes has it seen during its long life? I linger for a minute or two, staring with curiosity and wistfulness. 

Despite being stripped bare, the tree is hauntingly beautiful. It’s knotted, tangled, and without its skin. It’s vulnerable, yet it endures. 

What, I ask myself, is more Ozark than that? 

The post An Ancient Ozark Longing appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

A man returned home to Ashley County after his service to our country. 

His hands, once calloused from farm work, were now marked by a different kind of labor.

He carried the weight of a soldier. It left small reminders, indelible marks.

In the mornings he would stand with the fields stretched out before him, admiring the amber waves in the early light. The air was crisp and welcoming.

The man was amidst the familiar landscape but felt a stranger. This lines on his face were apparent, ones from service to country, not to land like his mother had wanted. 

The man hummed in his mind: This land is my land, this land is your land.

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters.

In the house, the man’s walls held memories of simpler time. The day to day solitude was both a comfort and a burden.

The man spent his days tending to the fields and listening to the wind. Nature had a way of offering solace.

He found a companion in a new but old dog, one that reminded him of a beloved friend from long ago.

This land was made for you and me.

In the evenings, the man sat on the porch, looking at the stars that were somehow closer in the Arkansas sky. The constellations were old friends. He knew that, like him, they had witnessed the passage of time.

The man didn’t have the words to describe the things he had seen, the weight he had carried and will carry.

The good people of his hometown didn’t press. They understood the language of silence.

The days turned to weeks; the man found rhythm and place. 

It wasn’t the same as it had been, and he knew he wasn’t the same either.

The fields, the house, the dog, the stars. There’s a gentle healing with the cadence of country life. 

Little by little, the man would find his way back to himself.

I roamed and rambled, and I’ve followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts

All around me, a voice was sounding

This land was made for you and me.

The post Homecoming appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

The American Library Association says there were almost 700 attempts to censor library materials nationwide from January to August, and more than 1,900 challenges of specific book titles.

In Saline County, Patty Hector said she was removed from her position as library director for not banning books.

She said a county judge and Quorum Court wrote a resolution advising her to pick out “harmful” books and move them so children couldn’t access them. Hector said her response led to her being fired.

“There’s no place in the library that people can’t get to. So I said no, and then that was what got me in trouble,” she said. “I said no to them. And you don’t say ‘no’ to a bunch of men. And the books they picked out are LGBTQ and race – two-thirds of them are.”

As Hector described it, a resolution accusing her of fraud “was written by the Saline County Republican Committee.” She added that after the committee reported her for “violating the Freedom of Information Act 90 times,” she had to spend many months answering questions about her job and library expenses.

Hector said the committee also put up a billboard on Interstate 30 that said “Stop X-Rated library books, SalineLibrary.com.”

She said some Arkansas lawmakers worked to pass a bill that would criminalize librarians – but that law was blocked by a federal judge this year.

“Act 372 was going to make it a felony for a librarian to give anybody a book that’s ‘obscene,’ which they couldn’t define,” she said, “and that has been determined by a judge to be unconstitutional.”

Hector noted that several books with topics on sex education and homosexuality were under scrutiny. And a book entitled “The Talk”, about conversations that Black parents have with their children, was another title the committee objected to.

This story is brought to you by the Public News Service, an independent, member-supported news organization.  

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