The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town: A Memoir

Abstract

The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town: A Memoir. By Dale Bumpers. (2003; Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Pp. 296. Illustrations, appendix. $19.95, paper.) The Arkansas so ably revealed in this memoir is too little known those living outside its borders and too little examined by those within. Sensitively situated against a backdrop of segregation, the Great Depression, World War II, and the profound social changes brought about by the civil rights movement, The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town goes beyond the poor but proud cliche so frequently affixed this state. Bumpers's Arkansas surely is a familiar place of grins and grit, but his depiction-precise in its account of life's day-to-day hum yet philosophical about the relation of such happenings the very meaning of our place on the planet-captures a rich complexity rarely achieved in autobiography. Born in 1925 in tiny Charleston, Arkansas, Dale Leon Bumpers was a paper boy, soldier, student, country lawyer, furniture store owner, nursing home operator, cattle rancher, and member of the Charleston school board before he served as governor (1971-1975) and U.S. senator (19751999). While will disappoint some that so little space in the book is devoted these later, most public portions of his life, Bumpers relates his early experiences with such warmth and candor, such remarkable color and clarity, that most readers will delight in their mere exposure this story of the twentieth-century American South. The rest will come around when they consider the author's invaluable effort contextualize and reflect on the hundreds of events composing his life, of which played a role in propelling him elective office. In short, the volume is bursting with politics; the subject simply is presented in unexpected ways. It lives in a young boy's recognition of the tragedy of ignorance, in an inexperienced attorney's matter-of-fact conclusion that segregation was both wrong and impractical, and in a rural candidate's realization that many people don't have a prayer from the day they crawl out of their mother's womb (p. 168). Readers familiar with Bumpers's rich oratorical style undoubtedly also will appreciate the way in which such observations are made. Serious, silly, or somewhere in between, the timing remains virtually flawless, the vocabulary crisp, even in printed form. Consider for example this anecdote about helping out at his father's hardware store/funeral home: One widow wanted lie in the casket with her husband and hold him last time, he recalls with exactly the right lack of flourish. There just wasn't room, and we talked her out of it (p. 19). Or, his reflection on that first humbling foray into elective politics in 1962: I announced for the Arkansas House of Representatives, he declares, to the loud applause of no one (p. …