Tommy Robinson at 75

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon in downtown Brinkley, and Tommy Robinson is showing me around his office in a small strip center. It's hard to believe that Robinson is now 75. In my mind, he will always be the brash Pulaski County sheriff and U.S. congressman in his 30s and 40s, a man who managed to make the front pages of the Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat more often in the 1980s than a certain governor who would go on to become president of the United States.

The jet-black hair, the thick eyebrows and the clenched jaw were Robinson trademarks. The hair is gray now, and the face is a bit more relaxed. But the voice remains the same. He was so famous in the 1980s that you didn't have to say his full name. "TR" or "Tommy" would suffice. Robinson, for whom I worked for 15 months in 1989-90, calls out a familiar greeting that can't be printed in a family newspaper. Coming from him, it's a term of endearment.

"I'm working harder than I ever have and having more fun," says Robinson, who's dressed in blue jeans and a navy blazer. "Not many people can work as hard as I can at age 75."

He calls his consulting firm the Robinson Group and points to his private investigator's license on the wall. His father was a fireman and his mother was a state employee. Robinson grew up in the Rose City neighborhood of North Little Rock with future Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones as a friend. After four years in the U.S. Navy, Robinson began a law enforcement career that saw him serve two stints with the Arkansas State Police and also work for the North Little Rock Police Department, the U.S. Marshals Service (where he was assigned to the American Indian Movement uprising at Wounded Knee in South Dakota), the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (where he was director of public safety) and the Jacksonville Police Department (where he was the chief). When Bill Clinton became governor in 1979, he selected Robinson as director of the state Department of Public Safety, which no longer exists. Robinson became sheriff in January 1981.

It was during Robinson's four years as sheriff that he became a political phenomenon and media darling. John Robert Starr, the Democrat's mercurial managing editor, wrote seven columns a week in those days, and the columns often focused on the sheriff. Much like ABC's Howard Cosell and boxer Muhammad Ali on the national stage, Starr and Robinson helped make each other famous on the state stage in the 1980s. The newspaper war between the Democrat and Gazette had heated up, and there seemed to be unlimited space for stories about Robinson.

Tales of Robinson's activities weren't confined to the Little Rock newspapers. Following the recent death of former Judge Lee Munson of Little Rock, I did an Internet search for stories about Munson. Up popped an article from the July 21, 1981, edition of The New York Times that read in part: "A judge declined today to issue a formal order that would keep Sheriff Tommy Robinson from chaining any more jail inmates outside prison facilities, but he told Sheriff Robinson not to do it again. 'I'm not going to chain them,' the sheriff said after the three-hour hearing before Judge Lee Munson. 'I don't need to. I've defused my emergency.' Sheriff Robinson testified that the state prisoners awaiting transfer from the crowded Pulaski County jail had been 'agitators' and 'troublemakers' who stirred up riots and escapes. He chained 14 of them to a guard tower at the prison's Pine Bluff unit last week to try to force the state to accept them--the day after 60 inmates rampaged inside the jail and rumors of a mass escape abounded."

In 1984, Robinson ran for Congress as a Democrat in the 2nd District. I worked full time as the communications director for his Republican opponent, former state Rep. Judy Petty. We lost. Less than two years later, I was in Washington covering Robinson on a daily basis as the Democrat's Washington bureau chief. On a slow news day, I could count on Robinson to say something that would give me a story.

I covered the news conference at the White House in 1989 when President George H.W. Bush announced that Robinson was switching to the Republican Party. When I was offered the job of communications director for Robinson's gubernatorial campaign a few weeks later, I found it too much to resist. After Robinson lost the GOP nomination the following May to Sheffield Nelson, I moved to his congressional staff for his final seven months in the House. I traveled back and forth to Arkansas with him each week. I went to Washington in late December of that year with one other member of his staff. A few days before Christmas, we locked the door to his office for the final time and turned in the key.

As the only person to have worked against him, worked for him and covered him as a reporter, I probably know Robinson as well as anyone outside his family. And I can tell you that he has indeed mellowed with age.

"I have six kids, 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren," he says with something bordering on pride. "I've learned that family is more important than anything. For too long, I didn't realize that."

Yes, that's the kinder, gentler TR talking. We head to Gene's Restaurant, where owner Gene DePriest serves us fried squirrel for supper. The colorful stories start flowing, and I think to myself: "I'm eating squirrel in Brinkley with Tommy Robinson. It doesn't get much more Arkansas than this."

------------v------------

Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.