Richard A. Weiss (1944–)

Richard A. Weiss, a son of missionaries, grew up in the wilderness of Belgian Congo in Sub-Saharan Africa. He fled the country during the savage revolution of 1960, got a college education in America, and eventually settled in Arkansas, where he worked in the state government for forty-four years in the administrations of eight governors—most of the time as the powerful administrator of the state’s taxing and spending programs.

Richard Allen Weiss was born on January 27, 1944, at Aba, a tiny village in the northeastern corner of the Belgian Congo, the third child of Baptist missionaries Norman William Weiss and Naomi Gilbert Vandewater Weiss, who were from upstate New York. The family spent forty years in Sub-Saharan Africa in what Weiss later described as primitive conditions in a home built near a mission station by his father, who developed the basic skills necessary for surviving in a wilderness without electricity or running water: building trades, rudimentary dentistry, childbirth assistance, and farming. Their food came from growing their own crops and hunting wild animals, chiefly buffalo, guineas, and warthogs. The missionary children, including the three Weiss brothers, attended boarding school in the Congo and across the border in Kenya. Richard learned to speak several native African languages and French. The Weisses were relatively isolated from the wider world, until the Congolese civil war that broke out in 1960, in which several of their friends were killed. The Congo for a while received global attention—chiefly for the violence surrounding the Congolese leaders Joseph Kasavubu and Patrice Lumumba, who led until they were slain or removed by coup d’etat.

Weiss moved to the United States in 1962 and enrolled at La Tourneau Technical Institute (now La Tourneau University), an interdenominational Christian school at Longview, Texas. Weiss said America was a strange world in which he felt totally estranged. His English teacher and coach at La Tourneau recommended that he get an education at Baylor University in Waco south of Longview, which was affiliated with the Baptist denomination. He got a liberal arts degree in English and history at Baylor in 1968.

A friend who had moved to the Ozarks Mountains near Fayetteville (Washington County) recommended living in the beautiful mountain wilderness. Weiss and other friends bought land in the valley below Devil’s Den State Park, and he applied for and got a job at the park. “To me,” Weiss would recall in an interview fifty years later, “that was the closest thing back to Africa that there was. I could work with my hands. I knew how to make things. I know how to do things. I knew how to build roads, you know, and all that stuff, ’cause that’s what we had to do in Africa to survive.” His friends found life in the remote mountains tedious and eventually left, but he was energized by the work.

Weiss impressed state parks administrators, who moved him in 1972 to Crowley’s Ridge in Cross and St. Francis counties in eastern Arkansas to supervise the purchase of land and the development of Village Creek State Park, which was part of Governor Dale Bumpers’s grand expansion of the state parks system. After the park was developed, Weiss joined the state parks administration in Little Rock (Pulaski County), where his grasp of the state’s stern constitutional provisions for levying taxes and spending them in compliance with the revenue-stabilization reforms of 1945 made him indispensable for a sequence of governors. He served under eight governors—Winthrop Rockefeller, Dale Bumpers, David H. Pryor, Bill Clinton, Frank D. White, Jim Guy Tucker, Mike Huckabee, and Mike Beebe.

His firm control of parks sometimes caused controversy. In the summer of 1982, the parks department fired a graduate of Hendrix College who was a naturalist at Village Creek State Park because the man insisted on wearing a ponytail although the park system told him it violated the park’s dress code. An article in the Arkansas Gazette quoted Weiss explaining why the young man was fired. The man filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the state had violated his constitutional rights. However, U.S. District Judge Richard S. Arnold ruled that the parks department was within its rights in firing the worker.

Weiss joined the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration starting with the second term of Governor Clinton and became the deputy and often the stand-in for the directors of the department when the Arkansas General Assembly was in session.

When Jim Guy Tucker, the lieutenant governor, essentially became the acting governor while Clinton ran for president of the United States in 1992, he found Weiss essential because he understood the fiscal system for taxing and spending and could deal with the legislature’s powerful leaders in the daily budget hearings, where all the appropriation acts and the annual stabilization law were developed. When the finance and administration director retired, Tucker made Weiss the director in 1994, where he served in the subsequent administrations of Mike Huckabee and Mike Beebe.

Weiss married three times, to Catherine Flood in 1967, to Vicki Amber Braden in July 1976, and to Janet Louise Skyrmes in April 1982. He had a son by the first marriage, and he and Janet raised her two children from her first marriage.

He retired as director of finance and administration in January 2015, at the end of Governor Beebe’s term. Beebe said that Weiss was the one indispensable person in his eight years as governor and insisted that the director remain until his last day in office.

For additional information:
Associated Press. “State to Get 280 Acres at Cost to Use for Park.” Arkansas Gazette, November 22, 1974, p. 32A.

Fellone, Frank. “Richard Allen Weiss.” High Profile Section, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, February 9, 2014, pp. 1D, 5D.

Green, William. “Park Employee Told to Cut Hair or Be Fired; Challenge Planned.” Arkansas Gazette, July 3, 1982, pp. 1A, 5A.

Wright, Betsey. Oral History with Richard Weiss. William Jefferson Clinton Project, David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, March 30, 2012. https://pryorcenter.uark.edu/projects/Clinton-Gubernatorial-Years/WEISS-Richard-926/transcripts/WEISS-Richard-20120330-Clinton-Phase-4-Transcript-FINAL.pdf (accessed September 30, 2026).

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas