Robert G. Denman Jr.

He never realized his ambition to be a garbage man, but Bob Denman has been blessed to have two jobs he loved. The first was his dream job at a TV station, which he quickly left to take the second — e

“I loved KARK. That was a great job. My only regret is that I didn’t come here sooner than I did.This is a more rewarding position.” - Bob Denman
“I loved KARK. That was a great job. My only regret is that I didn’t come here sooner than I did.This is a more rewarding position.” - Bob Denman

After 25 years of working toward it, Bob Denman got his dream job — general manager of a television station — until 10 little words changed everything.

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“Bob Denman will leave very big shoes to fill. He will be very hard to replace.” — UALR Chancellor Joel E. Anderson

Denman was at a party celebrating his promotion at KARK-TV, Channel 4, when University of Arkansas at Little Rock Chancellor Chuck Hathaway asked him a question.

Hathaway wanted to know whether Denman had any interest in being vice chancellor of advancement at UALR.

“I said something along the lines of ‘Gee, I am flattered. I love UALR, but I got this new job. I worked my whole career for it and we’re right in the middle of budgets and strategic planning and I am swamped and covered up.’”

“And he looked at me and he said, ‘Yeah, but are you adding in value to anyone’s life?’

“Under my breath I just kind of said, ‘Damn you, Chuck Hathaway.’”

At home later that night, Denman’s wife, Peggy, predicted he would take the UALR job.

“I knew that night I would do it because of what he said to me,” Denman says. “All I was doing was buying jet fuel for the company plane, you know? I mean someone saying ‘Are you adding value to anyone’s life?’ That’s a pretty powerful statement.”

So six months after taking the KARK job, Denman found himself back at his alma mater.

“I loved KARK. That was a great job,” he says. “My only regret is that I didn’t come here sooner than I did. This is a more rewarding position.”

ARKANSAS NATIVE — SORTA

Denman, 64, was born in Columbia, S.C., where his father, Bob, was stationed at Fort Jackson. After his dad shipped off to Korea, the younger Denman and his mother, Mary, moved to her hometown of Hot Springs. When Bob Sr. returned from overseas, he took a job at a fan manufacturing company as an engineer/salesman and the family moved to Little Rock.

“I was born in South Carolina, but I am a native Arkansan, through and through,” Denman says.

As a child, Denman dreamed of becoming a garbage man, according to his younger brother Stan. (Stan Denman is a journalist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

“One of my earliest memories was when we lived in an apartment on Barton Street in Capitol View. Our grandparents had come for a visit and while Bobby was at school, Grandpa took me for a walk to the end of the street where there was a creek,” Stan Denman says. “A city sanitation crew was emptying trash cans along Barton. We stopped and watched them throw trash in the back of the truck and my Grandpa asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. And then he pointed at the garbage truck and said, ‘That is what your big brother wants to do. I hope you don’t want to do that.’”

Instead, Bob Denman went to UALR, graduating in 1974 with a degree in marketing and advertising. A year before, he married his high school sweetheart, Peggy. The two went on their first date in the ninth grade when Bob Sr. drove them to a church social. They have two sons, Neil and David.

TROJAN TO TELEVISION

TO TROJAN, AGAIN

After graduating from UALR, Denman worked briefly for an advertising agency before snagging a job at KARK. He started as a “sales gofer” and worked his way up the chain for 25 years before finally getting that dream job — general manager — in 2001.

Six months later, he found himself back at UALR with the task of raising money for the university.

His first week back on campus, Denman noticed that Cooper Fountain was not running.

“I thought ‘Oh man. I hope I didn’t do that’ because back when I was a student here, I put a lot of soap in that fountain. About three weeks later, the fountain was running again and I was relieved.”

When he arrived, UALR’s fundraisers had not made a phone call to potential donors in six months, and donations totaled about $4 million a year. Last year, the university raised $32.4 million.

“I knew to go out and start building relationships with people and you can’t do that sitting in the office,” he says. “You can’t do that anywhere but getting in my car and going to see somebody.”

In the early years, Denman says, he worked about 135 nights per year attending basketball games, civic events — anywhere donors lurked.

Hathaway says Denman’s background in sales and marketing made him the perfect person for the job.

“Fundraising and development had floundered at UALR for I think forever when I came there. … To be successful, the right person must have two characteristics — an association with the university and have some pride in the university and they have to understand marketing and sales,” Hathaway says.

“Bob hit all of those buttons perfectly and I’ve thought he was one of the best hires we ever made,” says Hathaway, who retired in 2002. “He did a remarkable job. I hate to see Bob go. He always seems so young.”

Denman plans to retire March 31. The main reason, he says, is because UALR is about to embark on a new initiative that will likely last seven years and “it wouldn’t be right to start it and not finish it.”

“Bob Denman will leave very big shoes to fill,” current UALR Chancellor Joel E. Anderson says. “He will be very hard to replace.”

Christian O’Neal, Denman’s associate vice chancellor, says his boss is a champion of his employees.

“Educational institutions are highly complex environments with multiple stakeholders guiding decisions,” O’Neal says. “Amid that he makes it easy for us to meet big goals because we know we have his unwavering support along the way.”

Over his 14 years at UALR, Denman says, he is most proud of the internal campus campaign. He says when he arrived, only about 6 percent of the faculty donated money to the university. The current figure is 67 percent.

As far as the most rewarding part of the job, Denman points to commencement ceremonies and the personal stories he knows about the students. He recalls the student who wrote “Hell froze over” on the top of her mortarboard.

“Somebody told her she wasn’t going to make it, but by golly, she did,” he says.

And there was boy who jumped up and shouted, “That’s my mama!” when she accepted her diploma.

“That’s a story I wish I would have known because she is probably a single parent; it probably took her more than four years to go through school and that little boy was sure proud of his mama.”

As a metropolitan university, UALR has a diverse student body. Half of the students are nontraditional — older, working full time and rearing children. But the university is evolving, and now about 1,400 traditional students live on campus. UALR has about 12,000 students and the goal is 20,000 by 2020.

“I know some of the students’ stories and what they have been through,” he says. “A lot of them have had really difficult times. So to know what some of those stories are when they walk across and get their diplomas, when value has been added to their lives because they got a college degree, that’s probably the most rewarding part of the job.”

In September 2014, Anderson tapped Denman to temporarily take over as the school’s athletic director after Chris Peterson resigned.

“He is a person of positive demeanor, good humor, enjoyable to be with, but at the same time he is well organized, does an impressive job of setting goals and pursuing those over time,” Anderson says of Denman.

In his four months as athletic director, Denman says, the most frequent question he heard was “Will UALR ever have a football team?”

“I would hope so,” Denman says. “I think football is a big part of that traditional campus life. But that’s a question the future chancellor and a future athletic director will have to answer.”

DUSTY RELICS

Denman is president of Rotary Club 99, the largest and oldest Rotary Club in Arkansas. As president, he gets to set the year’s theme. For his year, he chose “Dusty Relics of Arkansas,” telling club members tales of Arkansas’ quirkier history.

One of his favorites is the story of “Old Mike.” Mike was found dead in a park in Prescott in April 1911. No one in town knew Mike’s last name — only that he was a traveling salesman. When no one claimed Old Mike, his body was embalmed and put on public display.

“I saw him once,” Denman says. “My dad took me down there. [Old Mike] was kind of in a glass box and they had a pull string that would kind of open and close a curtain. That is the most bizarre of Arkansas’ dusty relics in my book. That’s pretty bizarre.”

Finally, on May 12, 1975 — at the request of the Arkansas attorney general’s office — Old Mike was buried in the De Ann Cemetery in Prescott.

In school, Denman hated studying history. As he got older, he became interested in knowing more about his adopted home state.

“Like the taste for beer, I acquired a taste for history,” he says.

The Rotary motto is “Service above self” — something Denman takes seriously. He says that eventually members will have a “Rotary moment” when they realize the purpose of the club.

For him, that moment comes annually when he delivers books to students at Wakefield Elementary School — the same school he attended.

“For me to see the kids light up because they get a book and we all have them write their name in the book,” he says. “For some of them, it’s the first book they got to take home. It is the only book they have at home. It is rewarding to go into a class and hear one of the kids say, ‘My sister got one a couple of years ago.’ That means they’ve still got it.”

Denman may have created a couple of his own “Dusty Relics” — like the time he took his KARK sales staff to Las Vegas for New Year’s Eve. The crew went to see a late-night Siegfried and Roy show that included a champagne toast.

Then he and a few others decided to crash the cast party.

“So we go backstage. We made it for about 30 minutes and finally they caught on to us and we had to leave. I can’t believe we were bold enough to do something as stupid as that.”

NEXT CHAPTER

Once he retires, Denman says, he plans to do some volunteering and he might take on some part-time consulting work. But primarily, he plans to spend more time with Peggy and their grandchildren, Nadia, 11, and Alex, 9.

The Denmans also plan to revisit the desert in northern Arizona and have booked a riverboat cruise down the Danube River for next year.

So, does he have any regrets about leaving his dream job for UALR?

“It was a great job. Loved it,” Denman says. “Never thought I would leave it. Got to go to wonderful parties and meet all kinds of important people. It was just like this dream job. My only regret is I didn’t leave it 10 years earlier to come do this. Doesn’t that sound crazy?”

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Nov. 25, 1951, Columbia, S.C. (Fort Jackson)

MY FAVORITE ARKANSAS DUSTY RELIC IS actually everything in Hot Springs; however if I had to pick one, it would be The Beatles’ secret visit to Walnut Ridge in 1964.

THE BEST JOB I’VE EVER HAD Would be my current job at UALR, but the KARK career was certainly a lot of fun.

THE GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY WOULD BE Bobby Jones (founder of Augusta National Golf Club), Gene Hackman (I will watch just about any movie he is in) and Alverne Gee Denman (my grandmother I never knew).

THE LAST GOOD BOOK I READ WAS Please Delete by John Diamond.

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER PEOPLE SAID I LOOKED LIKE Roger Miller. Personally, I never saw it.

ON MY BEDSIDE TABLE IS As much as I hate to admit it, a Kindle. I still love to hold a real book.

MY LAST MEAL WOULD BE Chicken enchiladas with a nice verde sauce.

MY HERO IS My dad. Brave soldier, humble, never said a bad word about anyone, deeply loyal to Mom. An exemplary member of Tom Brokaw’s ‘‘Greatest Generation.’’

A TYPICAL SATURDAY Starts with a visit on the patio with my wife, Peggy, lunch at Pleasant Valley Country Club, a round of golf with buddies and then back on the patio with Peggy for a glass of wine.

MY WEEKDAY ALARM IS SET FOR 6 a.m.

I WILL NOT EAT Boiled okra. Nasty.

THE ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP A lot of people use ‘blessed’ and I am that for sure, but ‘lucky’ probably fits me best.

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