LITTLE ROCK — When Jack H. Wilson retired in 1983, the Little Rock Board of Directors urged city residents to honor him with a toast - a drink of Little Rock water.
Wilson, a 42-year employee with Little Rock Water Works (now part of Central Arkansas Water) who spent 21 years managing the utility, died Monday of complications from prostate cancer. He was 89.
"After you've worked here for a while, you start to feel likeyou are personally responsible for everybody's water," Wilson said in a March 1983 Arkansas Gazette article.
So in the 1950s, when sections of Pulaski Heights couldn't get water during peak water-use periods, Wilson carried a jug of water to a Heights resident who had called with a complaint about the situation.
"He was very outgoing and caring, but the job was always with him," said his friend Jim Harvey, former executive director of Central Arkansas Water. "No matter where he was or what he was doing, the job always came up. He always had it on his mind and was always concerned."
When attending waterworks conventions out of town, "he would take a few hours of his time and take notes on their water-treatment plants and offices, so he could integrate good ideas into the Little Rock Water Works," his daughter SusieMarsh said.
Wilson was born in Conway in 1918 and grew up in Blytheville, where his father was a logger.
As a teenager, he aspired to go to college but thought he couldn't afford tuition. With encouragement from a friend, he saved $300 - enough to get him though his first year of college - and moved to Fayetteville where he attended the University of Arkansas.
He met his future wife, Mary E. Swisher, in his freshman English class.
"He saw me sitting over there with my feet dangling because I was so short," his wife said. "He asked me for a date, and we got married [in 1939] before our senior year."
The couple had two daughters: Susie and Lynn.
Around the time Wilson was graduating with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, Little Rock Water Works was looking to hire a new engineer and contacted an engineering professor at Fayetteville for suggestions. The professor recommended Wilson, and he was hired as a draftsman in 1941.
He left the utility briefly when he was sent to Alaska as a part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II.
Wilson was promoted to engineer in 1945, upon returning from the war, then chief engineer in 1956 and manager-engineer in 1962.
He was instrumental in the building of Lake Maumelle, which provides Little Rock's and North Little Rock's drinking water, and the Pleasant Valley Water Treatment Plant, which was renamed the Jack H. Wilson Water Treatment Plant in 1989.
He also did away with "separate but equal" policies at the water utility, his wife said, making the pay for black employees equal with whites and combining two company picnics, one for whites and one for blacks, into a single picnic for all employees.
During his years at the water utility, Wilson became part of the scenery along Markham Street and could be found most mornings and afternoons, picking up trash on his way to and from his office at Robinson Auditorium, (now Robinson Center), and later at the offices on the corner of Cumberland Street and East Capitol Avenue.
"A car had stopped in front of the office and threw out a dirty diaper," Harvey said. "He was in the lobby and saw it happen, so he ran out there, picked it up and put it back in their car."
Wilson began this trek by parking about a mile away from work and found that aside from the exercise, he enjoyed the quiet, the lack of telephones and interruptions, and a chance to think. He gradually lengthened the distance to about three miles and walked to work from Kavanaugh Boulevard and Markham Street.
"It's a good way to start the day," Wilson said in a July 1982 Gazette article. "In all these years, I've only been caught in the rain once."
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 10/25/2007