FAYETTEVILLE — Family and friends remembered Robert “Swifty” Reynolds as a public servant who’d go out of his way to get things done for people.
Had a plumbing problem? Hit a pothole that needed patching?
Reynolds would often make a house visit to check it out himself. Or he’d at least make sure the right city employee responded to the call.
“They were still calling him, and he’s been off the City Council since 2006,” said Sandra Reynolds, Robert Reynolds’ wife of 47 years.
Reynolds, 69, died Monday at his south Fayetteville home.
He served as Ward 1 alderman for eight years: from 1999 through 2006. Before that, he was a Fayetteville planning commissioner. For 20 years, he and his wife ran Roger’s Rec, a staple of Dickson Street since the 1950s. Reynolds could often be found playing dominoes or shooting pool at the bar before selling it to Zac Wooden in 2006.
By several accounts, Reynolds got his nickname from a job with Swift & Co., a meatpacking firm that sold to area restaurants and grocery stores.
“I never knew someone who could cut meat like him,” Bobby Ferrell, former Ward 3 alderman, said Monday. “He could take a full rib-eye or sirloin strip and cut beautiful, congruent steaks.”
In his rounds throughout Northwest Arkansas and, later, as a bar owner, Reynolds came to know — and be known — by many.
“We’d be in New Orleans or Florida and you’d hear people holler, ‘Swifty,’” Sandra Reynolds said.
Several people who knew him well said Reynolds had a soft side, too. He was a volunteer firefighter. He would drive elderly people around to see Christmas lights. And he coached little league baseball. Brenda Boudreaux, who sat next to Reynolds on the City Council for six years, remembered him clearing her driveway and giving her a ride to a meeting after the 2009 ice storm when she didn’t think she could get out.
Ferrell, as a member of a group of men who would meet for coffee at McDonald’s most mornings, recalled Reynolds discreetly giving clothing to a disabled worker who didn’t have clean clothes to wear.
“When somebody does something like that — and doesn’t want any fanfare or recognition — that always sticks out to me,” Ferrell said.
Reynolds served as a member of the City Council and Planning Commission during a period of significant growth in Fayetteville.
Former alderman Don Marr, who now serves as Mayor Lioneld Jordan’s chief of staff, said he advocated for a Dickson Street enhancement project that provided a new street surface, sidewalks and crosswalks in the entertainment district. Jordan said it was Reynolds who came up with the idea of extending Van Asche Drive in north Fayetteville as a way of drawing development to the area around the Northwest Arkansas Mall. Marr remembered Reynolds’ strong opposition to his proposal to ban smoking in restaurants, but, he said, Reynolds always heard him out even if he stayed true to his convictions.
“He was just a guy — whether you agreed with him or not — when he told you something, you could take it to the bank,” Jordan said.
“When he did something, he did it correctly,” Denny Tune, the former owner of Tune Concrete Co. said Monday. “I think he made his legacy in the city of Fayetteville, because he really took that to heart. Of anyone on that council, he worked just as hard as any of them.”
Reynolds’ family will receive visitors between 4 and 6 p.m. Wednesday and from 10 to 11 a.m. Friday. A funeral service is scheduled at 11 a.m. Friday at Beard’s Funeral Chapel, 855 S. Happy Hollow Road.