Sixty Years of Arkansas Sports: An Interview with Orville Henry

Abstract

ORVILLE HENRY WAS A TOWERING FIGURE in Arkansas journalism. During his sixty years with the Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas Democrat, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the Stephens Media Group, Henry pioneered coverage of Arkansas sports, especially of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks. His popularity is credited with helping the Gazette survive a segregationist boycott during the 1957 Little Rock crisis and with helping the Democrat win the war of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Almost a year to the day before Henry's death on March 16, 2002, Jim Bailey interviewed him on behalf of the Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History's Arkansas Gazette project. Edited excerpts are published here with the permission of the Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History. Jim Bailey: Let's go back to the beginning. You grew up on the western edge of Little Rock when it was sort of out in the country. Orville Henry: Right. Across the street from where the Dillard's shopping center is now. 216 North McKinley. We called it the edge of Hickory Nut Mountain. You had to go two miles behind our house to where there was another house, which was a goat farm. JB: And the street car or trolley line ended at approximately where St. Vincent Hospital is now? OH: Where Ray Winder Field is. That was number six Fair Park, and it was 1.6 miles from our house. We would cut through the woods, but then we would walk down Markham Street and through Fair Park. JB: And your father was a salesman? OH: A traveling salesman all his life and a good one. Had to be, to raise eight kids in a depression. I was the fourth. There were five boys and three girls. JB: And you did a lot of your growing up at the Fair Park Golf Course and at Travelers Field. OH: Right. Those were the two. I joined the Knot Hole Gang at Travelers Field in 1935, I think. That would put me at ten years. I was real little. And one of my highlights was I got left behind one night, and [Arkansas Traveler] Johnny Dickshot took me home. JB: How did you happen to go to work for the Gazette just as you turned seventeen? OH: I decided when I was in the ninth grade that I was going to be a newspaper person, and I was on the school paper. And immediately when I went to Central, they had a real newspaper facsimile deal there, and you could come to work on the paper an hour before school started, and so I scheduled myself to work for it. In the tenth and eleventh grades, I would be more or less a volunteer, and then in the twelfth grade I would take a credit course in journalism. Actually, I was in journalism all three years, spent two hours or more under Helen Hall. So just when I finished high school [January 1942], I knew I wanted to work at the Gazette, so I went down there and got an interview with Clyde Dew, who was the curmudgeon managing editor and a good one, but he was really tough. But he loved [Ben] Epstein, and he loved boxing and horse racing. Oddly enough, those are the earliest American sports. All [you had] in the 1870s and 80s, you had boxing and horse racing. JB: What was A. R. Nelson then? Was he a copy reader? OH: He was a copy reader getting ready to go to the Navy, I think it was. JB: Well, Epstein was the sports editor and ... OH: Wilbur Johnson left for the Navy. JB: Also known as Sally Johnson. OH: Sally, right. Wilbur C. Johnson. He was a golf writer, and there was no golf to speak of. He didn't have much to do. Basically, there was a two-man sports staff, and Ben was full-time, and you can might say that the secondary guy was really part-time. That is about the way they paid him. He was part-time. JB: Did you have chores other than sports when you first came on staff? OH: When I joined the paper, I was a copy boy, and I didn't apply to be a sports writer. I applied for anything they had on the paper. I never thought anything about writing sports. …