High Profile: William Russell Meeks III

As a kid, he pedaled to the former Ray Winder Field for Arkansas Travelers games not knowing that he’d one day play a role in building the team’s new home in North Little Rock.

“Excuse me, this is like my church.” -- Russ Meeks
“Excuse me, this is like my church.” -- Russ Meeks

It's early in an Arkansas Travelers afternoon baseball game, and Russ Meeks takes one of his customary walks around Dickey-Stephens Park in North Little Rock. He greets fans, concession stand workers, media members, the ballpark organist and anybody else whose path he crosses. With a grin on his broad face, he watches schoolchildren attending the game on a field trip dance in their seats for a chance to win prizes. He sees a piece of trash and swoops down to pick it up.

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“Russ gets very involved. But to go along with that, he has a way of getting along with folks. It’s a people business, like almost every other business.” — Bill Stoneman, former general manager of the Los Angeles Angels, the Travelers’ major league parent club about Russ Meeks

"If somebody sees a napkin down there, they'll drop another one and not think about it," Meeks says, depositing the offending article in a trash can.

Self Portrait

Russ Meeks

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Nov. 22, 1949, Little Rock

MY FAVORITE BASEBALL PLAYER: Mike Trout. My favorite former player is George Brett.

FAVORITE BASEBALL STADIUM: Fenway Park, Boston

MY FAVORITE CANDY is a tie between gumdrops and jelly beans.

MY COLLEAGUES WOULD SAY I’M respectful of others, cooperative and congenial.

I’M NEVER WITHOUT my index cards. MY PET PHRASE: “Let me sleep on it.”

MY IDEA OF A PERFECT WEEKEND IS with my wife, family and baseball if possible … and with my wife in the nursery and preschool area of my church on Sunday morning.

FANTASY DINNER PARTY WOULD BE at home with my wife and family. Sounds pretty boring to some, [but] perfect for me.

ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE ME: patient

Meeks, a 66-year-old lawyer, is the minor league baseball team's president. It's a voluntary position, but you couldn't tell it from his approach. He hasn't missed a home game in four years.

"In my eyes, Russ Meeks is the Travelers," says Greg Johnston, director of stadium operations and the team's longest-tenured employee.

Others say it's hard to imagine the ballclub existing, at least in its present form, without him. Just a decade ago, the Travs were in danger of losing their affiliation with a major league team because their stadium, the former Ray Winder Field, was obsolete. Meeks played an integral role in the team's move across the Arkansas River to a ballpark that's rated among the best in the minor leagues.

"He was just able to bring together people at every level, he's such a good negotiator," says Rex Nelson, director of communications for Simmons First National Corp. and a member of the ballclub's executive board.

"Russ gets very involved," says Bill Stoneman, former general manager of the Los Angeles Angels, the Travs' major league parent club. "But to go along with that, he has a way of getting along with folks. It's a people business, like almost every other business."

As much time as Meeks spends at the ballpark, the place to really get a feel for him is his law office, where baseball, political and personal mementos vie for space. There are mounted geese he shot with his father and hero, Bill Meeks Jr., on their last hunting trip together, photographs of politician friends, a baseball autographed by Angels players who spent time with the Travs and 27 glass candy jars filled with jellybeans, suckers, gumdrops and more.

One photograph is of Meeks' longtime law partner, former Arkansas Secretary of State George Jernigan, who had a debilitating stroke in 1998 and now lives in a long-term facility. Meeks visits Jernigan several times a week and keeps Jernigan's name on their law partnership, although Meeks primarily practices with another firm, Kilpatrick, Williams, Smith & Meeks.

"He's my lifelong friend," Meeks says. "We communicate. He can understand things. The Lord has allowed me to kind of guess what he is talking about based on what he's saying and how he points."

Meeks has long played a behind-the-scenes role in state politics. For years, he was president of the Political Animals Club of Little Rock, a group of political activists who've been meeting since 1983. He has raised money for numerous candidates and served as campaign treasurer, finance chairman or co-chairman for all of high school friend Chris Piazza's judicial races, including the one that landed Piazza his current job as Pulaski County circuit judge. Meeks was part of the brigade of Arkansans who fanned out across the country to campaign for Bill Clinton, his former law professor, in Clinton's first presidential race.

In 1979, Meeks went to work for then Attorney General Steve Clark as chief of the AG's trial division, handling boundary disputes between Arkansas and adjoining states, among other cases.

"It was an opportunity to serve," he says of his two-year stint. "I had that bug really bad."

There's a framed photo of Clark on his wall, taken long before Clark's 1991 fraud conviction led to his resignation. Piazza, who prosecuted Clark while serving as prosecuting attorney, recalls running into Meeks during that period.

"I remember Russ told me, 'I respect what you're doing, but he's a friend of mine, and I'm not going to abandon a friend who's in trouble,'" Piazza says.

Meeks returned to private practice after leaving Clark's office and found the niche he has occupied ever since, defending insurance companies and self-insured businesses in lawsuits involving product liability. It's the kind of practice where the ability to compromise and negotiate is key.

"The emphasis in the defense, in any civil litigation, is to fully prepare and to also prepare the other side," Meeks says. That way, "both sides are in a position to assess and ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of the case, and then decide whether or not they should attempt to negotiate and settle without the necessity of a trial."

Meeks' father, who died in 1994, was a businessman, civic leader and original source of his son's love for the Travs. The older Meeks was among more than 2,000 Arkansans who bought stock in the team in 1960, as part of a drive led by Ray Winder to bring a franchise back to Little Rock. There are few such fan-owned teams in professional sports, the Green Bay Packers football team being the best known.

Russ Meeks rode his bicycle to Ray Winder Field to meet his buddies, either climbing trees to watch the game or sneaking in with the help of an obliging gatekeeper. Regarding his own prowess on the playing field, Meeks calls himself "the worst second baseman in the history of Optimist Baseball at Lamar Porter Field."

Teachers at Little Rock Hall High School encouraged him in debate. After getting a business degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and participating in ROTC, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army but took a deferment to attend UA law school. He started practicing law in 1974.

Meeks began providing the ballclub free legal help a few years later and started serving on its board in 1984 and its executive committee three years later. He became acting president in 2010 and was elected to that post by fellow shareholders four years ago.

Meeks said he and others had long known that the club needed a better stadium to comply with major league standards for minor league operations. Ray Winder Field cost the Travs their long affiliation with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2001 when the Cardinals team said it was going to shop around for a city with a better stadium.

"My negotiation skills weren't too good then, I guess," Meeks says.

But when the Cardinals refused to renew their contract with the Travs, Meeks and other executive committee members quickly came to an agreement with the Angels.

"If we did not decide, they would have gone somewhere else. They liked us, we liked them."

The Angels were content with Travelers officials' assurance that they would try to build a new stadium, and Meeks went about doing just that. His first inclination was to improve Ray Winder Field, or find another site in Little Rock, but the money necessary for either wasn't available.

Then he heard from Patrick Hays, mayor of North Little Rock at the time and a former fraternity brother at UA, that his city was interested in the ballclub. Hays "locked me in an old police car for three hours" while the two drove around North Little Rock looking at possible sites, Meeks said.

THE CANDY MAN

The turning point came when Little Rock businessman Warren Stephens made it known that he would donate land in North Little Rock for the stadium if the city would find the money to build it. Meeks vividly recalls the meeting in Stephens' private dining room, where he says Stephens made the offer and urged civic leaders to "work it out."

"One of the great lines I ever heard came from Mr. Stephens. He asked everyone to look out the window and he said, 'Do you see the Arkansas River? I have never thought that we should be divided by a 350-foot-wide drainage ditch.'"

North Little Rock voters approved a two-year sales tax to finance construction, and the $32 million stadium opened in 2007, winning rave reviews for its design.

Meeks is known as "the sucker man" in some circles. "Which is better than being the Dum Dums man," he says.

He takes candy to Immanuel Baptist Church, where he and his wife, Brenda, have volunteered in the preschool and nursery for 28 years. More than a few adults get some, too.

"We stand at the end of Sunday School, when parents come to pick up their children. I try to get to know them and get a smile."

Brenda works down the hall from her husband in his law office -- she handles his finances -- and attends just as many Travelers games as he does.

"To be honest, I think she's the biggest fan," Meeks says.

When Angels team officials visit, Meeks often invites them to eat at the couple's home.

"They fall in love with Brenda, especially her blackberry cobbler and Sunday afternoon roast," he said.

"It's neat to see him every day," Brenda Meeks says of working with her husband. "People say, 'How do you do that?' We just click."

Brenda describes her husband as energetic and patient, a man who gets up in the middle of the night to think about things, and a huge John Wayne fan.

"He'd be a horrible retired person," she says. "He has too much energy. He wouldn't know what to do with himself."

Meeks has two children from his previous marriage -- Melissa, an art consultant in Dallas, and John, a banker in Fayetteville. He and Brenda have a son, Rusty, whom Meeks coached in youth baseball and who's assistant general manager of the Travs.

"He grew up at the ballpark and loves the Travelers as much as I do," Meeks says.

When Meeks gets up in the middle of the night, it's usually to open his Bible, he says. "I've made mistakes, we all do." One was becoming an "angry person" after his first child -- William Russell Meeks IV -- was born with a serious birth defect. He lived 24 months and 24 days.

Angry no more, Meeks makes himself available to counsel other parents who've experienced a similar loss.

"That changes how you look at things, and what's important," Meeks says of his child's death. "Children are the most important."

Meeks possesses a laugh that often dissolves into something like a giggle. Among other things, he laughs at the index cards he carries in his pocket, color coded and plastered with sticky notes as part of a system that only he understands.

"One color is for what I know I need to do today, another is for what is coming up in the next week or so," he says. "Another color is for things that were on those cards that I should have done but haven't. Another is for whatever comes up with the Travelers today. How is that for being technologically efficient?"

Back at the ballpark, Meeks moves from his seat behind the backstop to talk to a major league scout who's checking out prospects. He enjoys some of the perks that come with his role, such as hobnobbing with top baseball officials at their annual winter meeting.

But pressed on what really drives him, Meeks says it's simply a desire to pass on what was given to him.

"My benefit is we've still got baseball, and we're going to have it for my grandchildren," he says. "I'm a fan, no different [from] any other fan, other than if something goes wrong, I try to fix it."

Even if that means picking up trash.

High Profile on 06/26/2016

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