Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: Farewell, old friend

In the early evening of Jan. 16, 1975, nearly 42 years ago, Stanley Russ of Conway was worried that a Democratic runoff that was tantamount to election was about to be stolen from him.


I was the cub sportswriter for the local newspaper, the Log Cabin Democrat, assigned to make my political reporting debut. I was to write what we called a "sidebar" on Russ, his activity and attitude, on this historic evening.

It was historic because Russ, a local community leader, insurance man, cattle farmer, Baptist and Kiwanian, and an acknowledged good man, was the reform candidate against the so-called machine that had long dominated local politics.

We were in the Faulkner County Courthouse. Russ was checking on his massive majority vote in his home county in the special runoff with Bill Sanson of Enola. The race was to succeed the ousted Guy H. "Mutt" Jones as the local state senator.

Russ' victory margin in his home county, while overwhelming, might not be enough, he told me. He said it depended on how many votes they would steal from him in Sheriff Marlin Hawkins' Conway County up the road.

I thought I might rather like this political reporting. This was real human drama.

When the local basketball coach took his Wampus Cats to play Morrilton, he didn't talk about the game being stolen, but about how good the Devil Dogs were. And I didn't hang out on the bench with the coach, privy to his every candid expression of real-time fear.

Sanson wound up with more than 80 percent of a large Conway County turnout. But Russ' advantage from the more heavily populated Faulkner turned out to be enough by 500 votes in more than 12,000 cast.

Russ told me that the article I wrote from that night was maybe his all-time favorite in his personal scrapbook. He said it captured his anxiety about whether he, and electoral integrity, would prevail.

In 1978 Russ ran in the middle of the state Senate term for Congress from the Second District. By then a state desk reporter for the Arkansas Gazette, I got assigned to cover the race.

Russ missed the Democratic runoff, and he and I didn't get along so well this time. I fancied myself as a hot-shot statewide reporter who needed to compensate for a pre-existing provincial relationship.

Russ went back to the Senate and I became a state Capitol reporter for the Gazette in 1980. The most powerful memory along the way was when Sen. Nick Wilson, chairman of the Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee, was so determined to block an ethics-reform bill that he openly leaned on Sen. Bud Canada of Hot Springs, practically raising Canada's hand, to join him and two others in decisively voting against it.

Russ, who was for the bill, stood up to Wilson, who accused Russ of performing for the TV cameras.

Stan didn't mind publicity casting him as the good guy. Indeed, he could go on a bit in a flowery way, perhaps sanctimoniously. But I knew integrity mattered at least as much to him as a flattering appearance on the evening news.

Term limits ended Russ' Senate career in 2000, after which he pretty much went ahead and became unofficially the Republican he'd always been.

One morning several years ago I took my mom to the doctor in Little Rock. The appointment ran late. I told her I had no choice but to haul her with me straightway to the Conway Kiwanis Club for my noon talk.

Which member of the club do you suspect it was who took charge of her, sat with her, charmed her, introduced her and sent her handwritten notes over the years? Why, yes, Stan, of course.

This mid-November at the Politics Animals Club, he asked about her. I told him her mind was in such decline, and her back arthritis so advanced, that we'd had to put her in a nursing home.

Stan, the same age as Mom, tried to say that he wanted me to give her a hug for him. But he cried before he could finish.

A couple of weeks ago I got word that Stan had seemed fine one week, but been diagnosed the next with a deadly condition and given 30 days to live. He was on home hospice.

A few days later an old Conway landline number showed up on my phone.

It was Stan, weak of voice. He apologized that his call was, as he put it with typically splendid vocabulary, "superfluous."

"I just want to say," he told me, "that I don't want anybody to ever say we weren't friends, because we were." His voice rose to a sob.

I'm a hard friend of a few. Stan was an easy friend of a multitude.

His farewell call confirming his place in my few and mine in his multitude was one of the great honors of my life.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 01/10/2017

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