Bill Terry Jr. (1931–2009)

Bill Terry, an eccentric and often quick-tempered writer and editor, played a key role in the formation of the iconoclastic weekly newspaper and monthly magazine the Arkansas Times. Terry’s early exposés gave the Times recognition when it was struggling for readers and advertisers in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Before that, he had been a writer and editor for the Stuttgart Daily Leader and later for the Arkansas Democrat. Terry later contributed freelance reporting to the Washington Post.

Fred William Terry Jr. was born on July 3, 1931, in Little Rock. His father, Fred Terry, was the owner of Terry Dairy, a lucrative business for that time. His mother was Cornelia Witsell Terry. The elder of two children, Terry attended Little Rock schools, including Little Rock High School—later Central High School—but he graduated in 1950 from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He graduated from Yale University in 1954 with a degree in literature. He was a voracious reader, particularly of British and American classics. In his later years, Terry wrote and published three novels, two of them on his own imprint, Precipice Books.

After college, where he had joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), he served in the U.S. Air Force for four years and ended up at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, where he edited the base newspaper. Finishing active duty, he went to work in San Francisco for United Press news service—subsequently United Press International. After three years, he started an electronics business, but it struggled, and he closed it after another three years. He married Mary D. Young in 1959 in Monterey, California—they would have a son and a daughter—and they moved to the New York City area, where he hoped to start a career as a playwright.

They then moved to Arkansas, where he again tried his hand at journalism. He got a job at the small-town Daily Leader in Arkansas County, the heart of the farm belt, and effectively became its editor, responsible for getting a newspaper onto the press each day. When Gene Foreman, the former state editor of the Arkansas Gazette and managing editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial, became the Arkansas Democrat’s managing editor in 1968, he hired Terry as what was commonly called a telegraph editor, handling state, national, and international stories from wire services, notably the Associated Press and United Press International.

The Terrys divorced in 1971, and the next year he married Mary Lou Strait.

The afternoon Democrat, which had benefited immensely when the Gazette took an unpopular stand in 1957 against the state’s defiance of court orders to integrate the public schools, began a long decline in circulation and business in the 1960s, and efforts to reinvigorate the news and circulation operations with new talent like Foreman and Terry brought more strife with the owners. Foreman went to New York, and the Democrat’s new managing editor, Jerry McConnell, a former Gazette sportswriter, fired Terry in 1974.

More than thirty years later, McConnell interviewed Terry for one of the oral histories of former Democrat writers and editors for the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). When they reached that stage of Terry’s life, McConnell asked him why he had suddenly left the paper. “Well, you fired me,” Terry replied. “Don’t you remember?” Terry helped him remember a newsroom argument among the editors after McConnell skipped Terry, who was in the restroom, and revised the front page to reflect the sudden death of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It ended with Terry hurling a vintage typewriter at a big trash container.

Simultaneously, a much younger Alan Leveritt was fired at the Arkansas Gazette from his job as an obituary writer and collector of the paper’s daily trivia, like the river bulletin and weather forecast. Leveritt had started a paper called the Union Station Times, and the Gazette’s managing editor, Robert R. Douglas, said he had to fire Leveritt because he had started a paper to compete with the Gazette for advertising and news. Leveritt protested that his occasional paper was not competing with the Gazette for anything. However, Leveritt had also just recently signed a petition for a vote to recognize a union to bargain for Gazette news employees. The union vote conducted by the National Labor Relation Board produced a 30–30 tie, a failure for the union. Leveritt’s vote would have won the election for the union.

Terry joined Leveritt at the biweekly Union Station Times, at the beginning virtually without compensation. The paper and its freelance reporters Terry and Arlin Fields broke a few major stories, notably dealing with Little Rock police corruption and deceit. The big one was a lengthy recitation of taped conversations between an ex-convict and Harry Hastings, a rich liquor distributor whom the police alleged was linked to a New Orleans mafia figure. The tapes resulted in Hastings and his two sons being charged with dealing with stolen property after the theft of an air compressor and a load of truck tires in Senatobia, Mississippi, that was arranged by the police and the FBI. The U.S. Justice Department asked the U.S. district judge to drop the charges because the police were overly involved in the criminal activity. The Gazette first obtained the tapes, and a reporter wrote a lengthy account of the conversations, but a new attorney at the newspaper’s law firm, Hillary Rodham Clinton, recommended that the paper not publish the story because it violated the privacy rights of members of the Hastings family. The paper did not print the story. Terry and Leveritt got the tapes, and the Arkansas Times printed Terry’s lengthy account of the conversations between Hastings and the convict and subsequent articles analyzing the activities of Hastings and of the police and of the sudden mysterious death of the police informant. The Times’s office soon burned down, but the stories got the journal increased attention.

The Times became a slick monthly magazine with Terry as its first editor and a prolific writer. It would engage a few of state’s best reporters and writers: Bob Lancaster, Mike Trimble, Mara Leveritt, B. C. Hall, Dee Brown, and Mel White. Terry retired as the editor of the Times in 1983 and moved to a cabin overlooking the Kings River near Berryville (Carroll County), although he maintained the title of associate editor and occasionally contributed articles to the magazine.

Louisiana State University Press published his first novel, The Watermelon Kid, in 1984. He self-published two subsequent novels, The Husband (2003) and Scions (2008). He died of complications from lymphoma at a St. Louis, Missouri, hospital on June 23, 2009.

For additional information:
“Arkansas Times: Product of our Experience.” A history of the Arkansas Times and interviews with employees of the publication, seminar in public history project, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Fall 2013. Online at https://arstudies.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/findingaids/id/6789/rec/3 (accessed November 14, 2024).

Demirel, Evin. “Eccentric, Irascible Bill Terry: Journalist, Novelist, Speaker of Japanese.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, June 25, 2009, p. 12.

Leveritt, Alan. “A Man for the Times.” Arkansas Times, July 2, 2009.

McConnell, Jerry. “Arkansas Democrat Project, Interview with Bill Terry.” May 31, 2007. David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas. https://pryorcenter.uark.edu/project.php?thisProject=1 (accessed November 14, 2024).

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas