The state’s longest-serving newspaper veteran, Dean Walls, publisher of the White River Journal in Des Arc, died Aug. 16 after an amazing 72 years in the industry. She was 96.
“From hand setting to linotype to offset press to pagination, the method changed but the work didn’t” for Walls, the Arkansas Press Association’s Arkansas Publisher Weekly said. She and her husband, Charles J. Walls, became editor and publisher of the weekly in 1930. After Charles Walls’ death in 1983, Dean Walls kept at it for another 34 years, until the paper ceased regular publication last August.