
Jerry McConnell
Jerry McConnell, who helped legendary Arkansas Gazette Sports Editor Orville Henry shield the besieged paper financially when it stood up for Little Rock school integration in the 1950s, died June 25 at home in Greenwood, his beloved western Arkansas hometown.
Born in the middle of what is now Fort Chaffee, McConnell was 92 and one of the last of a generation of Gazette staffers who endured threats and boycotts for the newspaper’s unpopular stand supporting the rule of law in the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
McConnell, later managing editor of the rival Arkansas Democrat under his old University of Arkansas schoolmate Bob McCord, was Henry’s lieutenant as the Gazette sports staff made college and high school sports coverage essential reading in the 1950s. Many fans resisted segregationist calls to stop subscribing to the paper, helping stem a readership decline that threatened the business.
McConnell, under Henry’s direction, hired the Gazette’s first black sportswriter, Wadie Moore, who replaced McConnell as the staff’s top high school sports chronicler when McConnell left to run the Democrat newsroom in 1971.
McConnell eventually led the Daily & Sunday Oklahoman and the Oklahoma City Times as executive editor, and was a career-long supporter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Known for precise writing and colorful interviews with sports figures like Ted Williams, Dizzy Dean and Brooks Robinson, McConnell started the state’s first listing of top track and field performances, and helped create the overall state high school track meet, the Meet of Champions, in 1958.
He wound up a charter member of the Arkansas Track & Field Hall of Fame, and kept on his wall at home a picture of himself, arm-in-arm, with Olympic sprint champion Florence Griffith-Joyner, who died in 1998.
“Jerry was a sportswriter well into middle age and he was great,” said Ernest Dumas, dean of Arkansas’ political reporters and a longtime colleague of McConnell’s at the Gazette. “He was part of a superb team, with Jim Bailey and others, that Orville Henry built at the Gazette after the wars, World War II and Korea.”
Dumas told Arkansas Business that McConnell was a lifelong friend of Jim Bailey, the greatest of all Arkansas sportswriters, who died early last year. Bailey’s widow, Peggy, was buried last week.
McConnell “developed the Gazette’s massive coverage” of high school sports, Dumas said. “But he was just an excellent all-around newspaperman, genial but exacting, as managing editor of the Democrat and then as an executive editor at Oklahoma City.
“When McCord became the editor of the Democrat and was searching for a managing editor, he went to the guy who he thought was the star of a talented bunch of journalists from the University of Arkansas program in the early fifties,” Dumas added. That bunch included McCord himself; former New York Times writer Roy Reed; and Charles Portis, the author of “True Grit,” “Norwood” and “Dog of the South.” McCord died in 2013, Reed in 2017 and Portis in February.
McConnell helped lead the UA’s oral history projects on the Gazette and the Democrat, which culminated in a 2016 book, “The Improbable Life of the Arkansas Democrat: An Oral History.”
Jerry E. McConnell was born Nov. 21, 1927, in the Cornish community of Sebastian County, where his father ran a country store until plans for Fort Chaffee cleared out local residents when McConnell was 14. He was a multi-sport star at Greenwood High School and was on a football scholarship to the UA until a stint in the U.S. Army in the 1940s.
When he returned to Fayetteville in 1948, he studied journalism and joined the staff of the student paper, The Traveler, where he met his wife, Jo, also a journalism student. She predeceased him after 66 years of marriage. He is survived by a son, Mike McConnell of Seattle, and two grandchildren, Jerri Riley and Dylan Riley of Fort Smith, as well as a sister, Joicie McConnell Gilbreath.
After McConnell left Arkansas for Oklahoma in 1978, he was replaced as the Democrat’s managing editor by John Robert Starr, the bombastic and combative columnist who claimed victory over the Gazette in the great Little Rock newspaper war in 1991. Starr was pictured on the cover of McConnell’s book, shirtless and helmeted with a knife in his teeth, squatting on a Gazette coin box.
McConnell, who retired back to Greenwood in 1992, was a lifelong Democrat who kept near his picture with FloJo a portrait of himself and Jo with President Bill Clinton. In lieu of flowers, he asked for donations to charity or to the Joe Biden for President campaign.