50 years on job, education agency aide praised as gem

Dorothy Gillam of the Arkansas Department of Education is honored by Johnny Key, the state education commissioner, for her 50 years of service. She has worked for 18 state education commissioners and directors, beginning with Arch Ford.
Dorothy Gillam of the Arkansas Department of Education is honored by Johnny Key, the state education commissioner, for her 50 years of service. She has worked for 18 state education commissioners and directors, beginning with Arch Ford.

This month marks 50 years of employment for Dorothy Gillam at the Arkansas Department of Education, where she has been an administrative analyst/assistant to a long list of agency heads -- starting with Arch Ford, whose name is now on the Capitol Mall building where she works.

"You're No. 18," Gillam recently told Johnny Key, who became her new supervisor and the state's latest education commissioner in March.

She also told him she's been working longer than the 46-year-old commissioner has been alive.

Since her June 1, 1965, hire date a half century ago, Gillam has interacted not only with the who's who of state leaders but also with Arkansans who are players on a national stage: former President Bill Clinton, for one, and presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mike Huckabee.

Going back further, one of Gillam's tasks was to pick up documents at the state Capitol. She and Gov. Orval Faubus often arrived at the building at the same time and had a friendly chat on the way in.

She was the agency's liaison for the Daisy Bates Scholarship program, which called for Gillam to judge application entries and call on the civil-rights leader at her home. And Gillam used to baby-sit Minnijean Brown, one of the nine black students who integrated Little Rock Central High in 1957.

Only four people currently outrank Gillam, 81, in terms of state government tenure, and they do so by no more than a year and a half, according to records in the Office of Personnel Management in the Department of Finance and Administration.

That's out of about 30,000 state employees, but not counting Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department or college and university staff members.

Gillam told the state Board of Education, co-workers and family members at a recent celebration of her anniversary that she felt blessed to be able to work as she has.

But she also confided that her two children, Thomas and Diane, would periodically ask her why she continued to work at the department under what were sometimes challenging or frustrating conditions.

"Many, many, many years ago, I formed this habit of eating," she recalled telling them. "And in order to feed my habit -- I had to work. Then, sure enough, you two came along -- and formed the same, darn habit! And I really had to work!"

Gillam's title -- now "administrative analyst" -- has changed from time to time, but she has worked in the director/commissioner's office for nearly all of her tenure. For about 20 years, until the mid-1990s, she was the department's liaison to the state Board of Education.

"I traveled all over the state with the state board for their meetings," she recalled. "I had to take the minutes of the meeting, and you know how I took them, don't you? With a pen and a steno pad. Then I'd rush to my office real fast before I forgot some of that stuff and transcribed it on the typewriter."

These days the Education Board's two-day, monthly meetings are video-recorded and live-streamed. Minutes are typed into a laptop computer and also recorded by a court reporter.

Ray Simon, a former U.S. deputy secretary of education, recently wrote in a tribute to Gillam that he used to hand his speeches to her for a rewrite when he was the director of the state Education Department.

"For most of my adult life I labored under the impression that I could write really well. That all changed in 1997 when I met Dorothy Gillam," Simon wrote.

Brand-new at the department, he said he gave Gillam a letter to mail.

"She quickly scanned the document, shook her head, smiled politely and said she would take care of it," he said.

"Taking care of it took the form of its being returned to my desk, punctuated throughout in red ink; words and sentences lined through with new words and phrases taking their place. The overall content was reduced by a third. From that moment forward I considered anything that I wrote to be a rough draft of a good thought that I knew Dorothy would make great."

Simon said Gillam's guidance was central to whatever success the agency had during his administration.

"She was the department's conscience, public relations specialist and, given a phone and 24 hours, she could locate anyone on the planet," he said.

Ken James, Diana Julian and Tom Courtway were among the former directors and commissioners who also praised Gillam. The Arkansas House and the Senate have issued citations in her honor. Gov. Asa Hutchinson praised her loyalty in a letter, saying the department "has benefited from your proficiency and dedication to excellence these past 50 years."

Sam Ledbetter of Little Rock, chairman of the state Board of Education, told Gillam that every time he talked to her, "You always brightened my day, made me feel better -- without fail."

Gillam was born in Keo in Lonoke County and grew up in a racially segregated Little Rock, completing 12 years of school at St. Bartholomew Catholic School.

She briefly attended St. Mary's College at Notre Dame in Indiana and worked at an insurance agency, at a newspaper, a restaurant and at the former Arkansas Teachers Association before taking a clerk's job in the school food-service office at the state Education Department.

In a 2011 Arkansas Memories Project interview that is archived in The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Gillam, who is black, said there were three black employees at the department when she was hired in 1965, but they worked exclusively with schools that served black students.

She learned only after she started work-- from a newspaper reporter for the Arkansas Gazette -- that she was hired to integrate the agency and qualify it to receive federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act funding.

In the Arkansas Memories Project interview she said she intended to resign from the agency within a few months of her hiring because of the hostility of co-workers.

Ford, the Education Department's director at the time, wouldn't accept her resignation but did offer to move her to the federal programs unit housed in a west Little Rock building. In 1969, Ford moved Gillam back to the main building on the Capitol Mall to be an executive secretary in his office.

It's from that office, her former bosses said recently, that she served coffee in times of conflict, monitored who was headed from the Capitol to "take a bite out of the hide" of the director, and served as an "eloquent ambassador" for the department to those near and far.

Key, the current commissioner, presented Gillam with a diamond pin in recognition of her service, and called her "a diamond to all of us."

Gillam and her husband, John, a senior software support analyst who has worked at the Education Department for 44 years, have announced no plans for leaving the agency.

"People ask me all the time when I'm going to retire and I tell them, 'Check with Johnny Key,'" Dorothy Gillam said.

"My answer is not any time soon," Key responded.

Metro on 06/28/2015

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