THE ARKANSAS CENTER FOR ORAL AND VISUAL HISTORY is conducting a series of interviews with former employees of the Arkansas Gazette. Arkansas's first newspaper, the Gazette was founded in 1819 and went out of business in 1991. The following are edited excerpts from interviews conducted on February 17, May 10, and October 24, 2000, and April 19, 2001, with Ernest Dumas, who worked at the Gazette for thirty-one years as a reporter and editorial writer. The interviews are published with the permission of the Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History. Ernest Dumas: I was born in Union County. My daddy was a log hauler, and my mother had been the school teacher-my mother actually graduated from high school. She didn't go to college, but she taught school and that is how she met my daddy. My daddy had about a fourth-grade education and was hauling logs, and my mother was teaching in that neighborhood about eight miles from El Dorado on Champagnolle Road. And then the school was consolidated, and I went to El Dorado, graduated from El Dorado High School in 1955, and I guess it was in high school that I got into journalism. My brother had been two years ahead of me and took journalism and wrote for the high school paper. That seemed like an easy thing to do, and he was an athlete himself, so I would sometimes go to the game and write the story for him. And I thought, is easy stuff. So when I was a senior, I took journalism although I was going to be an engineer. Everybody in those days was going to be an engineer, so I was taking chemistry and trigonometry and all of those kinds of things, and I needed something easy, so I took journalism under Mrs. Jenkins. It was about three or four weeks into the school year when I had written a couple of stories for the first issue of the paper, and Mrs. Jenkins came around and asked if I would be interested in working for the El Dorado Daily News. They had a position there, and they frequently hired high school journalism students. And I said sure, so she told me to go down and see J. D. Beauchamp at the El Dorado Daily News. He was the night editor. He said they'd put me to work right then, so I wrote a story or two that day and that is how it all got started. I was going to be an engineer or a scientist or something and still intended to do that. This was just kind of fun, but the job at the El Dorado Daily News turned immediately into more than a full-time job. I was working probably fifty or sixty hours a week at the paper. When school was out in the afternoon, I'd go over to the Daily News. I'd make the rounds at the courthouse and the city hall and write obituaries and everything else around until 10:00 at night. I worked there for a year, and my grades suffered. I never turned in another assignment in chemistry, trigonometry, or anything else. Roy Reed: Did you get paid by the hour? ED: Yes. Minimum wage was seventy-five cents per hour at that time, and I was paid seventy-five cents per I will never forget when Congress raised the minimum wage to eighty cents per The paper was owned by C. E. Palmer, so when they raised the federal minimum wage to eighty cents per hour-of course, I was on the desk at night and handled the copy-I was reading an Associated Press story that the new federal minimum wage takes effect today, July 1, 1955, I guess. That same week, we got a little slip attached to our paycheck. Everybody got it. I will never forget. It looked like a little mimeographed slip of paper, with purple ink, one inch deep. It said, Dear Employee, In keeping with the News Times policy of looking out for the welfare of our employees, effective this paycheck, you will be earning eighty cents per hour. They took credit for the federal minimum wage going up, and everybody was laughing about it in the newsroom. Everybody made the same, unless you were the editor or managing editor. Everybody was making minimum wage except in the back shop. They made a little better, the mechanical employees. …