Bill Lewis (1929–2024)

Bill Lewis, a prolific journalist in post–World War II Arkansas, had a long and colorful career as a newspaper reporter, reviewer, and critic. His last thirty-three years were spent writing for the late statewide newspaper the Arkansas Gazette. Although as a reporter Lewis covered many historic episodes, including events in the school desegregation crisis at Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1957–1959, he was best known for his feature stories and numerous reviews of concerts, plays, music recordings, foreign travels, books, and food. He was locally famous for the sheer volume of his writings. In an oral history late in life, Lewis said that on at least three Sundays he had accounted for more than twenty-two column feet of type in the Gazette. He often took a ruler and measured his output.

Lewis was born Willard McKinnon Murphy in the community of Talowah south of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on September 8, 1929. He was the third child of James D. Murphy, a carpenter, and Alma Swan Murphy—known as the “Whistling Swan,” after her maiden surname. His mother died of pneumonia when he was three months old, so his father gave the infant to his sister and her husband, Bennie and Webb Lewis, to raise. He was never formally adopted, but after his army enlistment he went to chancery court at Hattiesburg and got his last name changed to Lewis.

After graduating from high school in the town of Purvis between Talowah and Hattiesburg, he joined the U.S. Army so he could use the GI Bill to pay for college. He served most of his two years in Japan, which the United States occupied for seven years after World War II. During the period in Japan, he became enchanted with travel, foreign cultures, and the beauty of the earth. Later, as a reporter for the Gazette, he would visit around fifty countries and write travelogues for the newspaper about his experiences.

He graduated with a degree in journalism from Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi) at Hattiesburg. He worked at the Hattiesburg American part time as a reporter while he was a student and, after graduating, worked for six months at the Clarion Ledger in the capitol city of Jackson. He landed a job with United Press, an international wire service that later became United Press International, first in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, then in Little Rock and in St. Louis, Missouri. The UP office was on the third floor of the Gazette Building, so he quickly became well known to the Gazette staff, including the editors. Wire services—notably UP and the Associated Press (AP), which served many newspapers and radio and television stations—placed a premium on speed. Minutes counted in getting news stories on the wire to all the print and electronic news customers. No one was faster than Lewis.

After a year at Little Rock, UP transferred him to St. Louis, and after another year, he was assigned to Chicago, Illinois. Lewis did not want to go that far north and to such a big city. He called A. R. Nelson, the managing editor of the Gazette, and asked if the paper could find a spot for him in the newsroom. Nelson said he would love to hire him but that he would have to take a big pay cut because newspapers in Arkansas could not pay wire-service wages. Lewis agreed and joined the staff in October 1956. He had a few months earlier married Mary Sue Harris of Batesville (Independence County), whom he had met in Little Rock. They had two sons.

At the Gazette, Lewis was a general-assignment reporter, one who did not have a regular government beat like city hall, the courthouse, or the capitol. When he came to work each morning, he was given a list of assignments—events to cover, ideas for feature stories, and subjects for feature articles to explore when he had time, which were called ATAs (as time allows). Typically, Lewis turned in all the stories in the eight hours allotted that day. Few ever needed rewriting or editing, even small grammatical corrections. In an oral history for the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), the Gazette’s legendary city editor, William T. Shelton, marveled at Lewis’s fastidious prose, speed, and determination to carry out every assignment no matter how pointless it might prove to be.

His most famous project was the Farkleberry Follies, a biennial musical and comedic production at the Olde West Dinner Theater (later Murry’s Dinner Playhouse, named for the late attorney general, Ike Murry), where members of the media spoofed the politicians of the era, usually the governor, senators, and other newsworthy figures. Lewis had been part of a gridiron show in Baton Rouge when he was with United Press, and he assembled a group, including Gazette cartoonist George Fisher, at his house to plan periodic Little Rock shows that would be named after the Farkleberry tree. Lewis was president of the Arkansas Society of Professional Journalists and intended the sellout Farkleberry productions to finance journalism scholarships to Arkansas colleges, which they did for more than thirty years, 1967 through 1999. Lewis wrote many of the scripts for the shows along with Leroy Donald. He also, along with Gazette humorist Mike Trimble and others, produced a satirical newsletter called the Farkle Finger that was distributed at each production. Starting with Winthrop Rockefeller, every governor except one (Mike Huckabee) attended the productions to show that they could take the ribbing.

Early in his career at the Gazette, Lewis volunteered to review a concert by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra when the regular reporter was ill, and then did all the musical reviews for the rest of his career, along with reviewing classical 33 rpm records. He said he never knew anything about music—even one note from another—but he believed, or perhaps wanted to believe, that he inherited a musical gene from the mother whom he never got to know.

Nearly a year after Lewis joined the Gazette, Governor Orval Faubus dispatched National Guard troops to prevent nine Black students from entering Central High School, defying repeated orders of the federal courts to integrate the schools. Like other Gazette reporters at the time, Lewis covered many of the events in the two-year crisis, but he was not assigned to the major beats—the school itself and the state government—that produced the big international headlines. He always thought that the city editor had not assigned him to those events owing to his conservative upbringing in southern Mississippi, concerned that his stories would display support for Faubus and the segregationists. Lewis admitted that at the time he was still imbued with the common notion of white Mississippians that racial separation was God’s plan, but he later concluded that the sins were of white men and politicians like Faubus who felt they were obliged to serve the prejudices of white voters.

After a heart attack and undergoing some surgeries, and also angry over the people who were assigned to run the newspaper after it was sold to the Gannett Corporation in 1986, Lewis retired in 1990. The Gazette ceased publication the following year.

Lewis died on December 24, 2024. His ashes are interred at the First United Methodist Church columbarium in Little Rock.

For additional information:
Dumas, Ernest. “Newsroom Dynamo Bill Lewis Dead at 95.” Arkansas Times Blog, December 25, 2024. https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/12/25/newsroom-dynamo-bill-lewis-dead-at-95 (accessed April 16, 2025).

Obituary of Willard (Bill) McKinnon Lewis. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, December 27, 2024, p. 2B. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/obituaries/2024/dec/27/willard-lewis-2024-12-27/ (accessed April 16, 2025).

Reed, Roy. “Gazette Project, Interview with Bill Lewis, Little Rock, Arkansas, September 5, 2000.” David and Barbara Pryer Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. https://pryorcenter.uark.edu/project.php?thisProject=2 (accessed April 16, 2025).

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas