When Ernest Dumas started writing newspaper stories, Elvis Presley was making his first records and Bill Clinton was starting the third grade.
In this digital age, Dumas remains an old-school newspaperman. He doesn’t tweet or scan headlines on his Facebook feed. “I don’t have a cellphone,” he says.
Yet at age 78, he carries on the career he began as a high schooler at the El Dorado News-Times in 1954 and cemented at the Arkansas Gazette from 1960 till its closing in 1991. He dispenses weekly doses of clear writing and deft analysis in the Arkansas Times, and is a vigorous liberal voice on state politics and history. He appears on public television’s “Arkansas Week” and writes entries for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, while “syndicating” his column to the Jonesboro Sun for the grand fee of $5 a week.
In a two-hour, laughter-filled talk at a Little Rock coffee shop near his Hillcrest home a few weeks ago, Dumas held forth on Hillary Clinton’s likability problem, the infamous Arkansas Democrat editor John Robert Starr and the jumbled state of journalism.
But mostly he reminisced, told tales and digressed, recapturing the point with his trademark “At any rate …”. The funniest printable stories were about Clinton and notorious former Gov. Orval Faubus.
Even as Arkansas’ first lady, Clinton tangled with the press over what Dumas calls her “obsession” with privacy and secrecy. This mindset, Dumas said, has contributed to most of her political problems over the years, including Whitewater, Travelgate and the current imbroglio over her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
“She always said things were nobody’s business — the Madison Guaranty billing records and all that,” Dumas said. “I saw all those records at the Rose Law Firm, and there was nothing there to be secretive about. Maybe she was embarrassed for people to know the piddling little stuff she was doing for her legal fees. But that’s what the digging into Whitewater and all those consequences flowed out of, her tendency to say, ‘That’s private.’”
Clinton’s distaste for the press, and particularly for Starr and Democrat Publisher Walter Hussman Jr., led Dumas to try a joke on her in a chance encounter in a hallway of the old Little Rock YMCA on Broadway after Bill Clinton’s election as president in 1992.
“There she was, the first lady in a couple of weeks, and my impulse as always was to try to be funny,” Dumas said. “I was thinking I could get this woman to like me. So I told her, ‘Tell Bill I want to be commissioner of the IRS, and I’ll promise that I’ll audit Walter Hussman and John Robert Starr every year.’ She looked at me with just utter contempt, then without a word turned and walked off, as if to say ‘do you think we’d put you in a position like that?’ ”
Dumas also recounted a great story from the Little Rock newspaper war.
Assigned to write an advance obituary on Faubus, Dumas procrastinated until he was leaving reporting for a job upstairs as an editorial writer. Faubus was hospitalized, and City Editor Bill Shelton warned Dumas: “If he dies and we don’t have an obit ready, the headline is gonna say, ‘Faubus Dies; Dumas Fired.’”
So he worked through a frantic weekend on a detailed obituary, and then rolled out the printout on the floor. “It stretched from the city desk to the end of the newsroom,” he said. The old governor recovered and the Gazette was shut down in 1991, but not before editor Max Brantley ordered the Faubus obituary purged from the computer system. He didn’t want the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to have it for future use.
By the time Faubus died on Dec. 14, 1994, Dumas had forgotten about the obituary. So he was surprised to find it anchoring the front page of the Democrat-Gazette under the byline “Democrat-Gazette Staff.”
“They had found a copy somehow,” said Dumas, who discovered that the published piece was his work except for a few added reactions and one reworked segment: “They had taken my account of the Central High crisis and replaced it with the account from Faubus’ book.”
A week or so later, Dumas got an apology from Griffin Smith, then the Democrat-Gazette editor. “He knew it had been my obit, and said he had left instructions for it to appear with no byline. I told him there was nothing to apologize for. I was glad that they ran it.”
Later, the Democrat-Gazette won an award for deadline news writing. The winning story, Dumas said with a chuckle, was the Faubus obit — a “deadline” article written years before, for a different paper.
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