"Yeah, just sitting back, tryin' to recapture a little of the glory, yeah.
But then time slips away and leaves with you with nothin', mister, but boring stories of glory days."
--from a rock 'n' roll song written and performed by someone not familiar with Arkansas politics.
There was not a millisecond's boredom in David Pryor's hour-plus session last week at an overflowing Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock's River Market.
It came Wednesday in the "Legacies and Lunch" series, put on by the Central Arkansas Library System's Butler Center in partnership, for this special occasion, with the Clinton School of Public Service.
The mostly Democrats who attended were in a reflective mood already, coping as best they could with the passing of Pryor's best friend and colleague as governor and left-of-center member of the United States Senate, meaning Dale Bumpers.
And these Democrats were in need of a happy historical journey with the one still with us, and, at 81, pretty danged sharp.
Asked at the outset by his friend and former aide and interviewer, Skip Rutherford, to talk about Bumpers, Pryor replied that he likely would become emotional. But he said he tended to that condition generally. "Dale told me once: 'David, I think you'd tear up at a washateria dedication.'"
And we were off, and there was no way we'd finish in the allotted hour.
They don't make Arkansas politicians like those two anymore.
None of these modern-day Republicans possess humor or natural warmth or ease of self-effacement. That Tom Cotton is a card, ain't he? And John Boozman? Who so fills a room as he?
And no modern-day Democrat ... much exists.
Maybe what's happening is generational. Maybe evolution is eroding the concept of outsized personalities.
From Goldwater to Cruz, sort of, which may not be progress.
The simple fact is that the most vigorous, happy and successfully performed activity for progressive Arkansas Democrats these days is nostalgia. It's their thing.
It's their only thing.
They do it well because their fading characters are rich, so much so that their political dominance--by Bumpers, Pryor, Bill Clinton--was mostly a cult of strong personality, not a matter of policy or issues.
They do it well because those personalities are great natural storytellers. And they do it well because their era was eventful.
They reformed and modernized the state after Orval Faubus. They produced an American president. They got done in by Barack Obama.
In Pryor's case, he drawls and meanders and shrugs and says "aw, shucks" with a perfectly modulated every-man modesty. Then, all of a sudden, the long and winding and understated tale he's slowly telling leads to a payoff of great drama or history or hilarity.
Like the time as a high schooler in 1951 when he ventured from small-town Camden to the U.S. Capitol to be a page for his congressman, Oren Harris. Suddenly he got pulled down to the Senate because a senator was filibustering and had worn out all the pages and needed somebody to take a cab to his apartment and fetch his slippers, because he had no intention of stopping his filibuster.
So the senator whose Massachusetts Avenue apartment the young Pryor invaded, and whose bedroom closet he infiltrated, and whose slippers he fetched ... why, that was, Pryor found out later, Joe McCarthy.
At the end of that little internship, Pryor went to the bowels of the Capitol and hid a dime for the day he'd return as a congressman. And when he, in fact, returned as a member 16 years later, he went to the basement and found the dime, and put it back.
The coin is now permanently entombed in the Capitol subway system, most likely, Pryor figures.
So today, at 2:30 p.m., Bumpers' life will be celebrated at the First United Methodist Church in downtown Little Rock.
I asked those in the know if there would be stories. The response: David Pryor and Bill Clinton will be among the speakers. What do you think?
There's the one about Clinton and Bumpers in a little plane that skidded to a crash-landing on an icy runway while delivering them to the Gillett Coon Supper in 1988.
Betty Bumpers had told them they needed saliva tests for venturing out on such an unfit night.
Clinton kept gabbing right on through the abrupt and harsh landing. And Bumpers said, uh, Bill, I think we've kind of crashed; maybe we ought to get out of this plane.
So they ran into the cold rural darkness. As they ran, Bill shouted that crashing a plane to get to the coon supper ought to help them carry Arkansas County next time.
Which they did, of course.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansas-online.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/10/2016