As the state's youngest editor of a daily newspaper, I liked to tell people I "edited" Paul Greenberg. There was always a smile on my face when I said that.
In late 1982, I left my job as a sportswriter at the Arkansas Democrat to return to my hometown of Arkadelphia to edit the Daily Siftings Herald. The Siftings Herald was one of three newspapers owned by the Freeman family of Pine Bluff. In addition to their flagship Pine Bluff Commercial, they owned papers at Arkadelphia and Yazoo City, Miss.
My first goal at the Siftings Herald, which sadly no longer exists, was to beef up its editorial page. That was easy since, as a member of the Commercial family, we received Paul's columns in the mail.
Paul Greenberg, who died last week at 84, was a Shreveport native who came to Pine Bluff at age 25 to write editorials. It was 1962, and the civil rights movement was heating up in the South.
Patrick Owens, who previously had written editorials for the Commercial, considered to be among the finest papers of its size in the country, had gone to Harvard to study for a year on a Nieman Fellowship.
"I just thought I would take a year out for this job," Paul said. "It really sounded good, writing editorials for a year."
He spent most of the next three decades at the Commercial. Paul went to the Chicago Daily News to write editorials in 1966. One cold Chicago winter was enough, though, and Paul came back south to Pine Bluff after a year in the Windy City. In 1969, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials he had written the previous year.
Paul became nationally syndicated. His wife Carolyn stuffed envelopes in that pre-Internet era. Paul dedicated his 1991 book "Resonant Lives" to "Carolyn, one-woman syndicate and the most pleasant of companions." Years after her death, Paul married Sarah Brooke Malloy of Little Rock in 2015.
Newspapers in which the column ran included the Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer and Detroit News. In January 1990, opinion page editors responded to a survey by Washingtonian magazine. They included Paul among their favorite columnists, ranking him third after George Will and William Safire in the "most interesting mind" category.
Back at the Siftings Herald, our typesetters would enter Paul's columns into the system. The "editing" I joked about consisted only of catching errors in the work of those typesetters. Paul made no errors. Sometimes I would string several columns together so his writing would take up the entire editorial page.
I laughed aloud in 1983 when out-of-state journalists--judging the annual competition of the Associated Press Managing Editors of Arkansas--said the Siftings Herald had the best editorial page in the state in competition with papers ranging from the Commercial to the Arkansas Gazette. I gladly accepted the award at the APME convention, knowing it was because of Paul's columns.
I sent him what only can be described as fan letters, and he always responded. We kept up our correspondence when I lived in Washington, D.C., from 1986-89 as the Democrat's bureau chief.
I returned to Arkansas in late 1989, still young and wanting to be part of that wild chapter in Arkansas political history known as the Tommy Robinson-Sheffield Nelson war for the 1990 GOP gubernatorial nomination.
My sister has spent the past few years organizing newspaper clippings and photos my late mother saved through the decades. Recently she found a Greenberg column from 1989 that Mom had kept.
Paul wrote: "Tommy Robinson has made the first smart move in his coming gubernatorial campaign. He's hired as his press spokesman Rex Nelson, the Arkansas Democrat's correspondent in Washington, D.C. Even when Mr. Nelson was editor of the Siftings Herald in Arkadelphia, he was building a reputation for competence, objectivity, care and skill--in short, for the qualities noticeably absent in Tommy Robinson's political career.
"Now Rex Nelson is stepping down from journalism into Tommyesque politics. The odds that tommytalk will now grow more sensible are good, but not even Rex Nelson may be able to make a sober statesman out of the high-flying, low-talking congressman from the Second District. The announcement is a coup for Tommy, a loss for the Democrat and a danger sign for Sheffield Nelson."
Paul badly overestimated my talents. Nelson won the primary, and I soon was back in journalism as editor of Arkansas Business.
Soon after Paul moved from Pine Bluff to Little Rock in 1992 to serve as editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, I was hired as the newspaper's first political editor. It was during our time together here that we began a tradition of having dinner every month or so at Bruno's on Bowman Road in west Little Rock. The conversations were about much more than politics. They might be about baseball, history or books we had read.
Paul had intended to be a teacher, obtaining a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in history from the University of Missouri. He did postgraduate work at Columbia University but never completed work on his doctorate. But I regarded him as a teacher.
During dinners and through his writing, Paul always taught me. He taught me about his Jewish faith and Bradley County pink tomatoes. He taught me about American leaders ranging from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert E. Lee.
-- 30 -- Paul. It was wholly a pleasure.
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.