On Sunday, if true to his expectations, Arkansas Times Senior Editor Max Brantley signed off after 50 years of journalism in Little Rock, an era that stretched from Martha Mitchell’s pronouncements on Watergate to Bill Clinton’s White House to the cusp of the inauguration of Arkansas’ first female governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
This edition of Arkansas Business went to press on Thursday.
Brantley hit town in 1973, a 22-year-old reporter going to work for legendary editor Bill Shelton at the venerable and Pulitzer-honored Arkansas Gazette. He worked there until the place was shut down by Gannett in 1991 and sold to Arkansas Democrat Publisher Walter Hussman, who began his own retirement at the first of this year.
Since 1991, Brantley has been working for the Arkansas Times, initially as its first editor as a weekly newspaper and more recently as it shifted to a monthly magazine format. In 2004, he began breaking news with his widely read and indispensable Arkansas Blog, one of his publication’s biggest attractions.
Arkansas Business broke the news of Brantley’s impending retirement back in June. “I’m nearing the end of my string,” Brantley said then. He’ll turn 73 this year. “In January I will have been working here [in Little Rock] for 50 years and that seems a good stopping point, though I likely will contribute in some fashion when I’m not traveling, as I hope to do,” he said.
Last week, he shared with Whispers a preview of his parting remarks:
“In the first week of January 1973, I loaded my car in Lake Charles, La., and headed north toward a new home — Little Rock — to work as a reporter at the Arkansas Gazette. It took me a few days to get my first byline … and longer than that to get a haircut.
“The 50th anniversary of my work in Little Rock — almost 19 years at the Arkansas Gazette and more than 31 at the Arkansas Times — also marks my retirement. I expect to continue occasional contributions. But seven-day superintending of the Arkansas Blog we created in 2004 will fall to the talented crew Lindsey Millar has built since he succeeded me as editor of the Arkansas Times in 2011.”
From there, Brantley summarizes his Arkansas half-century. “I dropped out of grad school eager to chronicle the ‘New South’ at a newspaper with a progressive editorial page and a record as defender of the rule of law in the dark days of the Central High crisis. When I arrived, Dale Bumpers was governor of the most Democratic state in the country. As I retire, Donald Trump’s former press secretary is preparing to lead a state dominated by ultra-conservative Republicans. The Arkansas Gazette is no more.
“To borrow from what George W. Bush said about the man who handled his administration’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster: ‘Heckuva job, Maxie.’”
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