FAYETTEVILLE -- Jim Blair is downsizing.
He's selling his 6,000-square-foot house in Fayetteville and moving with his wife, Nancy, into a condo about half that size.
An online auction of more than 500 items from his house began last Sunday and will end today.
It includes African art, a life-size reconstituted terracotta soldier, and two campaign jackets from Bill Clinton's 1992 run for president.
While going through some boxes, Blair came across a picture of his late wife, Diane, doing a New York Times crossword puzzle with Clinton.
Diane Blair was in hospice at their house in Fayetteville at the time. She died of lung cancer in 2000.
Jim Blair said he'll give the picture, along with some other newly found things, to Special Collections at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where the Diane Blair Papers are stored. She was a prominent political science professor at the university.
"All of the stuff people want to see, I shredded," said Jim Blair. "Can't write a book until a lot of people die, and I'm afraid I'll die first, so the book will probably never be done. A lot of people breathed a sigh of relief on that, I guess."
Blair, 86, is a well-known figure in Arkansas legal, business and political circles. He's probably best known as the former general counsel for Tyson Foods Inc. and as a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Blair has lived in the house on Tanglebriar Lane in Fayetteville for 46 years.
Raised by his grandparents in Fayetteville, Blair learned to read "by accident" when he was 3 years old. By the age of 19, he had graduated from the university, and by 21 he had finished law school.
When he was 13, he said, a voice moved through him as adults quarrelled during a meeting at First Baptist Church.
"I'm sitting there on a Wednesday night listening to all this, and God tells me to go up and take the microphone and tell these people to knock it off," said Blair. "Do I think God talks to 13-year-old boys? I do not. I think it must have been some kind of auto-hypnosis. But I go up, I take the microphone, I chew out the congregation of the First Baptist Church in Fayetteville."
Blair said the incident marked him as being maybe more religious than he actually was.
By the time he was 18, Blair was an ordained Baptist minister.
A few years later, things changed.
"When it came to the segregation issue, the church in 1957 would not stand up on what was clear to me -- if you believe in the Bible and you believe in Christianity, you could not be a segregationist," said Blair, referring to the Little Rock Central High crisis.
"At that point, I just had to leave the church," he said.
While going to college in Fayetteville, Blair made milkshakes and malts at Jug Wheeler's Drive-In on Dickson Street and was a janitor at the Baptist Student Union, he said during a 2008 interview with the David and Barbara Pryor Center in Fayetteville.
While he was a young lawyer at a Springdale firm, one of Blair's major clients was Tyson Foods.
By 1980, he had become the company's in-house attorney.
Blair said he was often involved in politics but not as a candidate.
"I never wanted to hold office," he told the Pryor Center. "Well, I say I never wanted to hold office. I mean, I fantasized when I was young that the greatest job in the world would be to be a United States senator. Now as I got older, I managed to be associated with so many United States senators, I decided it wasn't a good job after all."
Blair married Margaret Gibson in 1957, according to the Pryor Center interview. They divorced in 1974, and he married Diane Divers Kincaid in 1979. After Diane died in 2000, Blair married Nancy Beth Horton, a native of Marshall, in 2005.
Blair's grandfather and great-grandfather were born in Marshall.
Blair has been a donor to many causes. In 2002, he announced a $3 million donation to the Fayetteville Public Library, which named its new building Blair Library in honor of his late wife, his grandmother and his aunt, according to the library's website.
"What little money I've had, most of it I've made out of the stock market or the commodity market," Blair told the Pryor Center in 2008. "And I got sittin' down thinkin' the other day that I've made a little over $5 million out of the commodity market, and I've given all of that money away. And I've given a substantial part of what I've made in the stock market away."
While there are plenty of things in the auction, Blair said he has already given a lot of stuff away. Much of his art went to the Museum of Native American History in Bentonville.
Rusty Brockman of Rarity Ventures in Fayetteville bought the belongings of Blair's house on Tanglebriar. Brockman said it's not the biggest estate he has bought, but it's a unique one.
"Basically, we're just trying to get his cleaned up" so he can sell it, said Brockman.
The auction is online at https://bit.ly/3k4nqUv.
Blair said work on the condo was finished almost three years ago. He and Nancy began spending two nights a week there, then three nights a week.
Three weeks ago, when he decided to get rid of the house, the Blairs started staying in the condo when they were in Fayetteville. They also have a part-time home in North Miami Beach, Fla.
Blair said he recently realized that he had accidentally been to 47 states. So he's going to make a point to visit the others. He and Nancy recently returned from a trip to West Virginia. Now he just needs to visit North Dakota and New Hampshire.
"I've been in 107 countries and I've been in 48 states, and I hear all these people on the internet giving all these world opinions about world affairs and national affairs who've never been anywhere," he said. "You don't really understand the world if you haven't traveled the world. You don't understand the United States if you haven't traveled the United States."
Blair said he won't really miss the things that are being sold in the auction. What pained him most was having to rehome Boston Blackie, the 110-pound labradoodle he's had for nine years. But the new owner has brought Boston Blackie by a couple of times to visit the Blairs.
Nancy Blair said she and her husband have discussed end-of-life wishes.
"He told me what he wanted on his headstone," she said. "I said: 'That's real good. That speaks volumes about you.' I said, 'You need to write it down for me.'
"He said: 'I don't need to. I'll remember it.'"
"What I said I wanted on there," said Jim Blair, "is 'I am content in my belief that I've done more good than harm.'"