The Arkansas Times turns 50 in 2024. To celebrate our golden anniversary, we’re looking back at the history of the publication, along with periodic excerpts from some of our favorite stories over the past half-century. This month, editor emeritus Max Brantley weighs in on his first assignment and his favorite stories.
***
I met Arkansas Times publisher Alan Leveritt in 1973 when he was a weekend obit desk relief man at the Arkansas Gazette and I was in my first year as a reporter at the Gazette. We talked in the slow hours about his dream of starting a monthly magazine.
When his dream became reality, I wrote an article for Volume 1, Issue 2 under a pseudonym [J. Wakeman Trimper]. Gazette employees were prohibited from working for “competitors.” Alan was fired as a part-time employee (on what we called “the crap desk”) for starting his new publication.
I wrote about sampling every barbecue joint in the Little Rock phone book. I took the photos, too. Alan laid it out (and jumbled the pages). I don’t think I was paid the full $35 I was promised ($25 for words, $10 for photos).
But I was a subscriber and admirer. When the mighty Gazette closed in the fall of 1991 and the Times decided to convert to weekly publication to fill the void left by the silencing of a resolutely progressive editorial voice, Alan, his then-wife Mara Leveritt and then-publisher Olivia Farrell persuaded me to join the Times as editor of the new weekly in May 1992. I accepted after Alan matched a slightly higher pay offer from the now-defunct Spectrum Weekly.
I remained editor until 2011, then continued as primary writer of the Arkansas Blog, begun in 2004. I retired Feb. 1, 2023, after 50 years as a working newsman in Arkansas. Those years included more than eight years of doing a daily live Facebook news roundup and, for several years, a weekly podcast.
Lots of memories are associated with my 31-plus years at the Times. Our reporting contributed to the demise of the careers of corrupt state legislators. I received death threats for linking to the publicly available list of concealed weapon permit holders. Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign was the subject of our first weekly cover story. His presidency and the Whitewater investigation, with the related upheaval in state government, were journalism gold and brought the Times occasional national media attention. We were not admirers of Special “Persecutor” Kenneth Starr, unlike some of his acolytes at national news organizations. That gave us some scoops large and small. (Among the small: my FOI request, fulfilled by his minion and now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that revealed the lavish expenses [including for dog food] Starr was paying for his star witness, the corrupt former Municipal Judge David Hale. (Years later, I had a chance encounter with Starr. I wish you could have seen his face when he boarded an elevator in a San Francisco hotel to find the only occupant of the car was me. I was pleased to be remembered.)
During my time as editor, the brilliance of contributors like George Fisher, Ernest Dumas, Robert McCord, Mara Leveritt, Bob Lancaster, Leslie Newell Peacock, David Koon and Lindsey Millar (to name a few) continued the Times’ historic ability to attract talent far richer than its bankroll.
For singular brilliance, I always point to Bob Lancaster’s coverage of the conviction of the West Memphis Three in the deaths of three children. His prescient analysis of the flawed prosecution case would be borne out in time by the defendants’ exoneration and release from prison (in one case, from death row).
In the past-is-prologue category, my favorite story has to be Leslie Peacock’s epic recitation of Gov. Mike Huckabee’s use of public money to pay his personal expenses at the Governor’s Mansion. It was the first of many Huckabee grifts, and our coverage of them and other political shenanigans did not endear the Times to the Huckster. He ultimately cut off press services to the Arkansas Times, an approach his daughter adopted from the outset of her campaign and which she continues, to a large degree, as governor. Happily, Matt Campbell is already at work documenting a new generation of Huckabee grifting. Early results indicate that the panty hose, dry cleaning and Velveeta loaves Mike Huckabee charged to the public will be trivial stuff indeed compared with the likes of a $19,000 lectern and State Police-escorted European trips for Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ kids.
Huckabee, like Clinton, also afforded the Times some national exposure when he made his unsuccessful runs for president. We found him less genial than some in the national press corps and I’m happy to say my compendium of the darker side of our governor, compiled from Times coverage for a national publication, got quite a bit of attention. You might read it and decide our current gubernatorial apple didn’t fall far from her pop’s tree.