November 18, 2013

Carolyn Gray LeMaster, the leading chronicler of Jewish life in Arkansas, died at the age of eighty-five. In 1975, LeMaster enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she graduated magna cum laude with a double major in journalism and philosophy in 1977; she earned a master’s degree in journalism in 1981. She worked as a writer in the university’s news bureau before receiving a grant from the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities to research and write a history of the Jewish experience in Arkansas. In her research, she visited 127 towns in Arkansas and twelve other states, and wrote more than 1,000 letters locating individuals and soliciting their histories.