Today at 3:15 a.m.
by Rex Nelson
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My best days on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s were the slow days.
I was Washington correspondent for the Arkansas Democrat, and the newspaper war back in Little Rock had heated up. The last thing I wanted was to get beat on a story by the Arkansas Gazette. So each weekday I would walk to the offices of all six members of the Arkansas congressional delegation to check in and see if anything were newsworthy.
On a slow day, Leslie Chalmers, the gatekeeper outside the office of U.S. Sen. David Pryor in the Russell Senate Office Building, might say, "Go on in."
"I don't have questions for him, Leslie," I would say. "I was just checking to see if you had any news stories."
"Go on in anyway," she would say if I were lucky. "He's bored."
Those were the days I could sit on the couch, put my legal pad down and pull Arkansas stories out of Pryor. If I were really fortunate, he might say, "Let's go down to the Senate dining room and get an ol' bowl of ice cream." You've never truly experienced customer service until you've dined with a senator in the senators' dining room of the U.S. Capitol.
Pryor, who died Saturday at age 89, was our greatest Arkansas storyteller. His tales about the presidents and Senate colleagues (ranging from Ted Kennedy to Bob Dole) were funny and at times poignant. But it was when he talked about characters back home in Arkansas that you could see the twinkle in his eye.
Pryor would much rather talk about folks from Camden like Dooley Womack, Robert E. "Bookie" Lee and Odie Vaughan than Washington figures such as Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan.
Though the senator had been born 25 years earlier than I was born, I sensed that he liked the fact that I hailed from the same part of the state, that we played along the same river as children (I was raised upstream from Camden on the Ouachita River at Arkadelphia), that we knew many of the same people and that we both had a love of Arkansas history.
I covered Pryor on a daily basis for several years, but there's little I can say about his work as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, as governor and as a U.S. senator that hasn't already been written. So let's focus on Pryor the Arkansas storyteller, the man who always kept a sign on his desk that read "Arkansas Comes First." No one loved this state and its people more. And no one ever told better stories about the unique place we call home.
On the night of Monday, April 15, 1991, Pryor suffered a heart attack. His wife Barbara was touring Thailand at the time. Pryor ate out in Washington that night and was in bed by 10:30 p.m.
"Little did I know that within three hours my life would change forever," Pryor wrote in his 2008 autobiography "A Pryor Commitment." "I woke up at 1:45 in a pool of sweat. My chest felt not in sharp pain, but in something more like massive discomfort. I'd only eaten spaghetti and meatballs. Could it be indigestion? Had I actually eaten a live porcupine? Within minutes, the pain's intensity increased."
Pryor dialed 911, walked out the front door and sat on the curb to wait on an ambulance.
"One image repeated itself over and over: our family pew at the old Presbyterian church in Camden," Pryor later wrote. "I was 14 years old, but I could have been 12. Or maybe nine. Nothing was clear. Nothing, anyway, except for the voice of Jac Ruffin, our minister in the 1950s. He had moved to Camden from Mississippi, and he spoke in deep Southern tones. I could hear him perfectly."
Ruffin would say, "This is the age of the half-read page; the mad dash, the quick hash; the short hop and the brief stop; until the spring snaps and the fun's done."
Pryor wrote: "Until the spring snaps. That's me. The spring has snapped. And the fun's done. Mr. Ruffin liked to quote this poem in his sermons on the hustle and bustle of everyday life. I had made a point to memorize it, even though I knew it didn't apply to me in any sense. I'm not in a rush or a dash. I've always taken time to read and sit down and contemplate. I couldn't imagine why that short poem rushed back at this time.
"But there it was. And along with it soared a host of other memories and recollections from my earliest years. For the first time, I understood how, in the final moments, your entire life passes before your very eyes."
We were fortunate to have Pryor for another 33 years. The heart attack happened in the month of April. He died in the month of April at the Riviera Tower in Little Rock, the same building where U.S. Sen. John McClellan lived when he died in 1977. It was McClellan who gave Pryor his only political defeat in 1972. Arkansas history is filled with such coincidences, which was one reason Pryor loved it so.
"The lasting effect of that April night in 1991, apart from my profound gratitude, is a new grasp of my childhood experience growing up in Camden," Pryor wrote. "It's as though a vivid light were cast on what had been a range of dim and uncertain shadows. They say an experience of this kind makes you stop and think, the current term being, I suppose, 'a wake-up call.' ... I saw that I would have to change my way of life, including spending more time reading food labels in the grocery store. But most important of all, I'd been given a new appreciation for the considerable array of people who helped shape my life and guide me."
Pryor never forgot the names of those men and women who made a difference in his life. He knew their life stories, shared their passion for our state and sought their input. For David Pryor, Arkansas always came first.
Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
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