LITTLE ROCK — It’s been nearly three years since Leroy Donald passed away.
Leroy was an institution. He had a gentleman’s memory of Arkansas history, businesses included.
He died at 73, and he was a newspaperman in this state, helping to write the first rough draft of its history for a half-century.
He was my first editor at the Arkansas Gazette. I wasn’t on the staff at the Gazette atthat time. I was stringing for the paper. “Stringing?” I suppose that sounds quaint and maybe puzzling.
Like a tin-cans-and-yarn contraption.
Let’s fancify it and say I was a nonstaff correspondent. My regular job was reporter for The Courier News in Blytheville, where I worked for Hank Haines, the best first boss anybody could have in this business of ours.
Hank made you believe you could get there from Blytheville. And I was trying.
Leroy was state editor at the time, and I was thrilled to call in my stories to Leroy. Yep, called ’em in.
There were no fax machines. Only chattering wire machines. The Internet was an H.G. Wells dream. I used a 1930s Underwood manual typewriter, and a telephone.
That was in the mid-’70s.
Leroy started as an obit writer in 1959, and his career at the paper ended in 1991 when the Old Lady said good-night and blew out her candle.
I was on the Gazette staff for nearly a decade starting in late 1977. I left four years before the bitter end to work for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as copy chief on the metro desk. Then I was chief editor and bottle washer at the weekly in my hometown of Kosciusko, Miss., for a few years, then business editor for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., for a few more years before returning to Little Rock, where I had met mybride and where we started our family.
Imagine my pleasant surprise when I came on board here, for what was to be 10 years as business editor, and saw Leroy, floppy disk and printout of his rough draft in hand, amble into the department.
I felt I had come full circle.
Let’s say that he wasn’t exactly a wordsmith, but he offset that by being real easy to edit.
Many of you will recall that his column was called “Everybody’s Business.” And, by golly, if he didn’t know somebody, he knew somebody who did.
So what’s this column about? I can’t say I know nearly as many Arkansans as Leroy did.
But I do know that he relied on people to tell him something, which he determined to be newsworthy, or not.
I’ll be counting on you to do the same.
If you have a tip, call (501) 378-3518 or e-mail jweatherly@arkan sasonline.com.
Business, Pages 63 on 06/24/2012