Gus Berry Walton, a longtime Arkansas travel professional and a member of the historic XV Club men's group, died at CHI St. Vincent Infirmary Thursday. He was 77.
Walton, who died of complications from blood cancer, was remembered by friends and family as a quick thinker with an inquisitive mind, as well as a globetrotter in his own right who had visited far-flung destinations in Europe, Asia and Africa.
"He was, in a sense, a Renaissance man. He had this curiosity about things, about how things work," said Bob Brown, a former Arkansas Supreme Court justice who lived next door to Walton when they were teenagers. "You felt like he was getting things that other people were missing."
The son of Caroline and Gus Walton, he was raised in Little Rock. He attended high school at the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and went on to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., returning to his home state for law school at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
In 1963, he married Mary Ellis Bullion, who goes by Ellis, while they both were still in college. The pair met in Little Rock as teenagers while ostensibly on dates with other people. With partners swapped, both couples ended up marrying, and the group honeymooned together.
"They were one of the first of our high school group to get married. ... It was true love," said lifelong friend Howard Cockrill of the couple. "They were devoted to each other, and very caring for each other."
Walton served in both the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve. Later he went to work at the Wright Lindsey Jennings law firm, where he had clerked during law school summers.
But after more than a dozen years of legal practice, he changed course, switching to a career that would allow him to pursue his interest in travel. In the early 1980s, he and Ellis purchased an interest in the Poe Travel firm. Later they would sell that interest and he would join World Wide Travel as a senior vice president, with Ellis working in group sales, according to a 1995 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article.
Seeing the world, friends said, was his primary passion.
"He really did know the world well, and I think he felt like it was the mark of not just a well-educated person, but a citizen of the world and the United States ... otherwise you were going to be trapped within your narrow frame of reference," said the Very Rev. Dr. Christoph Keller III of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, where Walton was a member.
In his spare time, Walton was active with the Little Rock Zoo, where he once served on the board, and the Arkansas Bar Association. He also joined many of his lifelong friends at meetings of the XV (pronounced ex-vee) Club.
The group, founded in 1904, has just 15 members, some of whom have been prominent citizens such as governors and congressmen. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter E. Hussman Jr. is a member).
The XV Club, which identifies its members by number -- Walton was XIV -- meets regularly to present classes to one another on subjects "cultured but not too cultured, literary but not too literary, political but not too political, scientific but not too scientific, funny but not too funny, serious but not too serious," according to The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture.
"[Walton's] lectures were always superb and usually had a wry twist to them, one way or another," recalled Cockrill, who also is an XV member. "He spent months learning card tricks, and he played them all on us. That was a comical evening."
Ellis and Walton had two daughters, Cynthia and Layton. Their extended family includes five grandchildren, three step-grandchildren and a friend of the family who is an "honorary son," said Cynthia Frazier, his daughter.
She said that her father, who lived for many years at a house on Overlook Drive near the Arkansas River, was a "patriarch" and family man who brought his daughters to his law office with him on Saturdays when they were small.
He built a compound at Grayton Beach in Florida for the group to enjoy, and the family traveled around the world together throughout his life, including a recent trip to New York City, she said.
Though he had been diagnosed with blood cancer about a year ago, friends and family said Walton had been doing well and his death was unexpected.
Metro on 12/29/2018