If you do this job long enough, a lot of your sources are going to die.
On Thursday, I immediately recognized the name Jonnie Fuller, 95, of Conway. I spent about three hours in her living room a couple of years ago, just days before her 93rd birthday. She did not tell stories quickly, and she had a lot of them.
Debra Robinson, executive director of the Conway Senior Citizens Program, tipped me off that Ms. Jonnie, as she was often called, would make an interesting feature. She’d worked in the Pentagon and mingled with presidents, and she had competed in ballroom dances as a senior citizen and won all kinds of contests, Robinson told me.
Ms. Jonnie, who had to stretch to be 5 feet tall, was also known for her crocheting, her molasses cookies and her fried pies. I got to experience two of the three. She had a huge crocheted piece of The Lord’s Prayer on her wall, and after the interview, she gave me cookies. (My journalistic ethics told me not to take the cookies, but I didn’t want to be rude.) By the time I got back to the office, they were all gone.
One of the first things Ms. Jonnie told me was that she didn’t like the term senior citizen because the image was of “old people slobbering.” There should be a better word — she suggested “prime-timer.”
I knew pretty fast that I had a character on my hands, which makes every reporter’s pulse race.
Her first husband was in the Air Force Special Services, assigned as a crew member on planes that serviced the Pentagon and the White House, she said. He was an engineer, but he could also serve as a copilot, if needed.
Ms. Jonnie said she got to know Eisenhower “really well,” and that he called her Missy. Sometimes she’d tell me a story and say, “You can’t put that in the paper.” One story, her husband said, was how Lyndon Johnson would start drinking and get naked on the plane. I’ve heard those rumors, and now I believe them.
She worked at the Pentagon at an off-site location and had to have security clearance. She and her husband lived in Paris for 3 1/2 years, then came back to Washington, and she had an office in the Pentagon. Her first job was in “software,” she said, handling paperwork for data processing. She had to have “top-security clearance,” she told me.
Ms. Jonnie rubbed elbows with big brass and got to know Bobby Kennedy, who she said would be waiting on a bench in the Washington National Airport to pick up his brother, the president, when she was there to pick up her husband, whom she later divorced.
Her second husband was the love of her life. She and Bill Fuller married in 1984 and took ballroom-dance lessons at the Fred Astaire Studio, she said. “It was like we were born to do it,” she said. They traveled to different states to compete in, and win, competitions, and she showed me all her medals.
I told my husband that Ms. Jonnie had died, and he said, “The woman who flew around with Lyndon Johnson naked?”
Well, she wasn’t there, I told him.
I reminded him that she was the one who made those wonderful molasses cookies.
“The ones you forgot to share?” he said.
Oh, yeah. But I won’t forget her.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.