With three employees, counting himself, Robert Phelps heads up what is surely one of Arkansas’ smallest state offices, and the director of the Keep Arkansas Beautiful Commission is fine with that.
Volunteers have always provided manpower for the commission’s efforts. Phelps is their chief organizer, publicist, cheerleader.
“We inspire, they perspire,” Phelps said. “That’s the essence of how we keep Arkansas beautiful.”
The commission and those volunteers just finished their busiest month of each year, May, when thousands of Arkansans tidy up the state before the annual influx of tourists. The second busiest is September, when many cleanups are held after the visitors depart.
This year, June is a big month as well. The commission marks its 25th birthday on Friday. Characteristically, Phelps has chosen to highlight the work of volunteers: 25 “lodestars” who’ve made a difference around the state.
“These are people who take the responsibility to change their communities,” he said.
Phelps’ admirers say he has tried to change the whole state.
“The guy’s a dynamo,” said Richard Davies, executive director of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism. “He doesn’t quit. It’s not just a job with him.”
Adds Randy Frazier, who spent decades as superintendent of Pinnacle Mountain State Park, “I think he’s probably our greatest unsung hero.”
The story people love to tell about Phelps is how, in the early 1990s, he and his wife, Deede, paid to have thousands of bumper stickers with the slogan “Only Trash Litters” printed and distributed around the state. Phelps concedes he was “probably obnoxious” on the topic. “I was always bugging people about it.”
Then he found a job in which he got to do it full time.
Phelps, 77, was born in Hot Springs and grew up in El Dorado, forming an early love affair with the outdoors. He fished, hunted and camped, earning an Eagle Scout badge along the way.
He worked his way through the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, trying out majors ranging from pre-medicine to art, then spent two years with the U.S. Army in Louisiana. Phelps likes to say that his unit successfully prevented Fidel Castro from invading the United States via the Gulf of Mexico during the Cuban Missile Crisis, though admittedly the White House played a part.
Phelps had done his first advertising work in college, when a professor offered him a freelance assignment to develop a logo for a new chicken product. He came up with a chicken in top hat and spats that became “Charlie the Chicken,” adorning packages of chicken and eventually a restaurant chain. Phelps said he was paid “something like $250, which was huge, considering that tuition was $60 a semester.”
After his stint in the Army, Phelps returned to Arkansas and joined a Little Rock advertising firm. After nine years working for or with others, he started a firm, Robert Phelps and Associates. He produced print, radio and outdoor ads and at least a thousand television spots.
“When I first started, TV was live,” he said. “I would go down to the studio and produce live commercials during the news, for instance. I would probably tape two days out of each week, and it was nothing for us to produce five or six commercials at one time.”
Interestingly, he never did on-camera work until he and Deede were recently recruited to portray what he calls an “affable older couple” in a commercial for Delta Dental, a role the couple seem eminently suited for.
Phelps retired in 1996, deciding he didn’t want to adapt to the prominent role the Internet and computers were increasingly playing in the advertising industry (the commission now uses social media to get momentum rolling and word out). He dabbled in the coffee business for a couple of years, importing the stuff from Guatemala with partners and selling it under private labels.
Then in 1998 he got a call from Cissy Rucker, a friend who now heads the Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs. She told him there was an opening for an executive director at the Keep Arkansas Beautiful Commission. “I said, ‘Am I looking for a job?’ And she said, ‘No, they’re looking for you.’”
By then, Phelps’ interest in cleaning up the state was known. The passion dated to a trip he and Deede had taken to Virginia several years earlier. He says they were