Charles C. Wine (1901–1974)

Charles C. Wine was a prominent Texarkana (Miller County) lawyer who held two Arkansas public offices on appointments by the governor—four months as an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1948 and two stints as chairman of the state commission that regulates public utilities. He ran for an open seat on the Supreme Court in 1950 but was defeated.

Although he spent most of his life in Texarkana, Charles Clinton Wine was born near Carthage, Missouri, on May 17, 1901, one of four children of Charles Oscar Wine, who was a farmer, and Nancy Belle Byers Wine. He spent at least part of his childhood around Carthage. He served in the U.S. Army at the end of World War I. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) and a law degree from the Cumberland School of Law, which was then in Lebanon, Tennessee. (It is now affiliated with Samford University in Homewood, Alabama.) He married Anna Grace Phillips in 1931 in Nevada, Missouri. He practiced law in Fayetteville until 1935, when he moved to Texarkana and opened a law office.

Wine’s widespread civil practice, including clients like the Southwest Arkansas Telephone Cooperative, often made the newspapers, and his cases reached the Arkansas Supreme Court. When the state consolidated the Arkansas Corporation Commission and the Arkansas Utilities Commission in 1945, Governor Ben T. Laney appointed Wine chairman of the new regulatory agency, the state Public Service Commission. Wine then moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County).

When Justice Edgar McHaney, who had been a member of the Arkansas Supreme Court for twenty-one years, died in the summer of 1948, Laney appointed Wine to the seat. George Rose Smith was elected to the position in November, so Wine was on the bench for only four months. He ran for another vacant seat in 1950 but finished fourth in the primary; Sam Robinson would be elected to that seat.

Although his term would be short, Wine was not a passive member, as indicated by his sharp dissent in Cellars v. State (214 Ark. 326), in his last week on the court. Daisey E. Cellars was convicted of murdering Ed Harris during a brawl in the honkytonk that she and her husband ran on Highway 8 between Fordyce (Dallas County) and Warren (Bradley County). Harris, a soldier who had murdered another soldier and was on parole, got into an argument with Cellars’s husband after an evening of dancing and drinking. Harris twice knocked Mr. Cellars down, and he was lying on the floor bleeding. Daisey ran to the cash register, pulled out a pistol, and shot Harris, who died quickly. She claimed it was self-defense, and it was left up to the jury to decide if she was justified in shooting Harris. It convicted her of second-degree murder.

Wine hinted that the jury was obviously influenced by the moral status of the place—alcohol, dancing, and card-playing. “I do not believe,” his dissent began, “that the law should or does require that either husband or wife must stand idly by while the other spouse is being severely assaulted by a known and convicted killer and such is my opinion even though the accused, Daisey E. Cellars, and her husband may have been engaged in an enterprise that was not a good influence in or a credit to the community in which it was conducted.”

Wine said that, while Cellars did not request it, the trial judge should have instructed the jury that she had the right to defend her husband: “If every man has the right to protect his habitation from invasion… in so protecting it he has the right to use such force… as may appear necessary to accomplish this end… and certainly it could not be seriously urged that a husband or wife would not have the same right to protect the other spouse from serious attack.”

After his Supreme Court service ended, new governor Sid McMath reappointed Wine to the chairmanship of the state Public Service Commission. He would engage in some politics, although not as a candidate, except for his unsuccessful race for the Supreme Court in 1950. An active Democrat, he was a presidential elector for Adlai Stevenson, who carried Arkansas but lost to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.

Wine died on February 9, 1974, at a hospital in Bentonville (Benton County). The article in the Fayetteville newspaper about his death stated that he lived in Bentonville but also had a home and his law office in Texarkana.

He is buried in Paradise Cemetery in Jasper, Missouri. Wine’s small headstone carries one achievement: “Farrier US Army World War I.” He shod horses, which were still important to the U.S. Army during the war, a skill that Wine no doubt had learned on his father’s nearby farm.

For additional information:
“C. C. Wine, Former Head of PSC, Dies.” Arkansas Gazette, February 10, 1974, p. 7C.

Cellars v. State 214 Ark. 326. (Vol 214), December 20, 1948.

“Charles C. Wine, Former Justice, Dies at 72.” Northwest Arkansas Times, February 10, 1974, p. 2A.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas