After an Arkansas journalism career spanning 65 years and an estimated 10,000 articles, columns and editorials, Ernest Dumas tells Whispers he may have written his last.
Spied at the Jan. 31 launch of the Arkansas Times’ new monthly glossy edition, which doubled as a preview of the new Atlas Bar on Main Street, the dean of the state’s reporters was at a crossroads.
The El Dorado native and former ace political reporter and editorialist for the Arkansas Gazette won’t be taking his thoughtful columns and deft analysis, seen for decades in the Arkansas Times weekly, to the pages of the monthly.
“I don’t know whether I’ll write anymore,” Dumas said in a Feb. 1 email to Arkansas Business. “I had about decided to hang it up when I reached 81 in December, and then the Times sort of decided it for me by ending its weekly paper. They want me to continue to write for the online [blog]. I may do it or may not.”
If Dumas does push away his keyboard, his work will go down as perhaps the last from a remarkable bunch of Gazette journalists who came up covering the Central High integration crisis of 1957 and the tumultuous years that followed.
That fraternity included the late Roy Reed, who became a New York Times correspondent; “True Grit” author Charles Portis; Atlantic Monthly Editor Emeritus William Whitworth; former Philadelphia Enquirer editor Gene Foreman; and the late editor Pat Crow of the New Yorker.
Dumas, who commands a lifetime’s knowledge of Arkansas politics and culture, has a project to finish before making a final decision. He has written for The New York Times and numerous other publications, including the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture.
“I’ve got this project to finish so I just postponed making the decision,” Dumas said. “Now I’m leaving the country for three weeks so I’ll probably decide in March if I’m going to do it fairly regularly, occasionally or not at all.”
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