HIGH PROFILE: Nancy Leggett Rorex

With motherly love, Nancy Rorex feeds the biggest musical acts who play the city’s major concert venues. As a side gig, she uses her loving touch as a chaplain for young hospice patients.

“I can’t do this crazy job forever, which it looks like I’m doing.”
“I can’t do this crazy job forever, which it looks like I’m doing.”

Mick Jagger wanted kidney. Stevie Wonder asked for nondairy pudding. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw requested chicken legs for their kids.

Nancy Rorex has fed some of the best-known entertainers in the world as a caterer for performers and crews passing through Little Rock. But there's a whole lot more to her story than that, simply starting with the fact that this music-loving octogenarian is still at it. Her latest job: catering 2,000 meals for the Guns N' Roses concert at War Memorial Stadium earlier this month (which actually took six days to stage and pack up).

"Not many 81-year-olds are still working," Rorex says. "That in a way is a message to older people: You don't have to give up. It keeps you going, keeps you alive, meaningful. 'Look folks, there's life out there.'"

Then there's her other part-time career, as a pediatric hospice chaplain, and her unpaid gig managing the Stewpot soup kitchen. It all leaves friends like Michael Marion, general manager of Verizon Arena, a little agog. Marion says one bad catering experience can hurt a show or even damage a venue's reputation in the entertainment business. But industry veterans arrive in Little Rock looking forward to a down-home meal served up by "Mom," as Rorex is known to them.

"I've seen production people come in, with 160,000 pounds of rigging for Paul McCartney, and what is our real conversation about? Catering," Marion says. "Our building would not be what it is today if Nancy hadn't been handling the catering."

Rorex goes about her various tasks matter-of-factly, a manila folder full of notes in one hand and a cellphone in the other. Susan McDougal, who went through chaplaincy training with Rorex at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, says she'd known her a couple of years before Rorex casually mentioned "this thing where I feed these people over at Verizon." Now that she knows her better, McDougal doesn't think that cooking for famous people is anywhere near the most fascinating thing about her friend.

"She's just interested in everything," McDougal says. "Nancy Rorex really is the coolest person I know."

Rorex is part old Little Rock, part rebel against the society and time she grew up in.

She was born in 1935 on the second floor of the Griffin Leggett funeral home, then located in downtown Little Rock, when both families involved in the business lived upstairs. She's a Leggett.

Rorex says her parents sent her to Sullins College in Bristol, Va. -- an all-girls school no longer in existence -- "to make a lady out of me. That didn't work."

She transferred to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, then studied to become a medical technologist at the former St. Vincent's Infirmary (now CHI St. Vincent Infirmary). She went to work at Arkansas Children's Hospital in 1956, when it held 75 beds, drawing blood from patients and testing it in the laboratory.

"Back then we even sharpened our own needles," she says. "They didn't have disposable needles."

Rorex quit in 1959 to start a family with her first husband, Dr. Hoyt Allen. Always interested in politics, she served as vice chairman of the Pulaski County Republican Party and campaigned for Winthrop Rockefeller. When he won the governorship in 1966, Rorex went to work in his early childhood development program, helping poor communities around the state organize and apply for federal funds then flowing through President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. She was also active in the League of Women Voters, pressing for expansion of voter registration opportunities.

"It was a closed system," she says. "Primarily it was poor working people and blacks that couldn't get to the courthouse" to register.

When Rockefeller left office, she "immediately switched over to the Democratic Party. Yes, I am very liberal. Absolutely." Rorex chuckles as she thinks back to the 1960s. Already in her 30s then, she says all the various causes -- civil rights, women's rights, anti-war movement -- had as profound an effect on her as any teenager or 20-something.

"All of that changed my life. I discovered it wasn't all about me. It was a big world."

'MOM'S CATERING'

In 1972, she moved to Batesville with her second husband, Jack Rorex. He was a former Army chaplain also involved in liberal politics, traveling to Washington to march for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. "He was not only my partner, but my inspiration," Rorex says.

Their blended family included five children -- Clint, Rick, Vivian, Jack and Mark -- all very close in age. While her husband directed a government-funded health program, Nancy went to work for the North Central Arkansas Community Health Center, which provided mental health services to residents of seven counties. She ended up as its director of education, advocating for a holistic approach to treatment, emphasizing nutrition, stress management and human relationship development in addition to traditional counseling and medication.

She left that job in 1980 and worked part time as a consultant, traveling the country to educate mental health providers and aging centers about programs she'd used in Arkansas. With her kids grown and some free time on her hands, she also got interested in cooking for the first time.

Her oldest son, Clint, was working for Mid South Concerts in Memphis, occasionally bringing musical acts to Barton Coliseum. Clint suggested his mother put her newfound interest to work catering for the musical groups and their crews.

"He said, 'You're not doing anything and you love the music.' I love '80s music."

So at age 45, Rorex embarked on a catering career she admits she "didn't have a clue about." Her first job was a "Battle of the Bands" at Barton. In July 1980 -- "the hottest day of the year" -- she cooked for the Doobie Brothers, Atlanta Rhythm Section and other bands involved in a concert called the "Wild Hog Boogie" at War Memorial Stadium. Since there were no real kitchen facilities at the stadium, most of the food was prepared elsewhere and hauled there by car.

"It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life," Rorex says. "I was having to order people to cook all over town. It was a nightmare." Rorex says she would have lost money on the job if friends and family hadn't pitched in. But when it was over, she concluded, "If I could do that, I could do almost anything."

Rorex went on to cater numerous shows at the coliseum, stadium and Robinson Center before its latest overhaul. She needed her station wagon pulled out of mud on one occasion, ran out of ice on another, but always got the job done. She and Jack came up with a name for her operation: "Mom's Catering."

THE VALUE OF GOOD HELP

Twenty years ago, when Rorex was 61 and Verizon (nee Altell) Arena was under construction, Marion called a friend with Mid South Concerts and asked who that company used for catering. The answer: "Nancy's all we ever use. She's the best."

Rorex helped Marion plan a kitchen and dining room on the lower level of the arena that would be a cut above the makeshift spaces used in many venues. Today the room is lined with posters of Sir Paul McCartney, Tom Petty and dozens of other performers whose shows Rorex has catered.

"The thing I love the most is they all know her," Marion says. "She's been in the market so long. They know the food is going to be good."

Rorex communicates with a band or performer's management to find out what the traveling members of the production need and also feeds local workers who help stage the shows. A typical day might involve breakfast for 50, lunch for 60 and dinner for 80, although bigger shows can require more than 100 meals at a time. When a show is in town, Rorex works 18 hours a day.

She does little of the actual cooking nowadays, instead supervising a crew of anywhere from six to a dozen people, depending on the size of the show. Most have been with her for decades.

"I believe in paying people," she says. "That has a lot to do with it."

For the most part, contract riders with demands like removing all the brown M&M's from dressing room bowls have been replaced by requests for spreads that include organic, vegetarian, vegan and nongluten foods.

Rorex's own specialty is Southern comfort food -- cornbread dressing, black-eyed peas and turnip greens -- which the traveling troupes seem to appreciate after a steady diet of fast-food and hotel fare.

"There are some groups that, if Nancy doesn't show up with some fried chicken, she's in trouble," Marion says.

DEATH AND DYING

A decade ago, at age 71, Rorex entered the four-year clinical chaplaincy program at UAMS. Clinical chaplains work with physicians, nurses and other caregivers, offering comfort to patients and families. Rorex works for Arkansas Hospice, attending to children who are not expected to live more than six months.

"That's my spiritual calling," she says. Perhaps because of her family background, Rorex says death "has never been spooky to me."

"It certainly hurts my heart to see them go through that," she says of the young hospice patients. "They're just wonderful, and their parents are going through such hard struggles. I'll cry with them, I'll laugh with them, but we get through it."

McDougal, who's with the Department of Pastoral Care and Education at UAMS, says Rorex's biggest strength is her interest in people. "She is such a great listener. People just find themselves telling her everything."

McDougal uses a case study that Rorex wrote in teaching new chaplains.

"She writes about the death of a newborn," McDougal says. "She's holding this tiny baby in her arms, standing with the family, nurse and doctors. She begins to bless this infant and talks about the love and care given in this child's life. She is drawing each person in to what they had contributed to the life of this child. It is just poetic and beautiful and loving."

For the last 20 years, Rorex has put her experience in the food business to work for the Stewpot, a soup kitchen operated by First Presbyterian Church downtown. She's in and out of the place frequently, overseeing an operation that last year served 45,000 meals. "All of the 150 volunteers are really there because they feel it's their personal mission," she says.

In rare bits of free time, Rorex might be found home in her pajamas, a good book or TV clicker in hand, bingeing on House of Cards.

AS UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE

Jack Rorex died two days before Christmas, at the age of 85, sitting up in bed waiting for Nancy to bring him something to eat. He'd been sick about six months but was not in pain.

"It knocked me to my knees," Rorex says. "When I got up, I said 'Thank you God, you took him the way he wanted to go.' I miss him and I always will."

Jack had helped out with many of Nancy's catering jobs, calling himself "chief dishwasher." The main kitchen storage room at Verizon Arena was renamed "Jack's Room" in his honor.

Of course, people want to know what Rorex knows about the famous people she has cooked for.

"I would never say who my favorite is, while I'm working," she says. "That's for a book."

She will admit that the young Jon Bon Jovi was "so cute." When she asked him to sign an album, "He put on there 'Can I have the car tonight, Mom?' Everybody calls me 'Mom.' Nobody knows what my real name is."

Michael Buble also made an impression when Rorex brought in her son and granddaughter to work his show. "He got the biggest kick out of three generations of fans." She remembers Faith Hill going around after her children wiping up the table where they'd eaten. "I went over and said you don't have to do that. She said 'Hey, I'm a mom.'"

The Guns N' Roses concert was big even by Rorex's standards -- feeding more than 100 people breakfast, lunch and dinner for six days and held at War Memorial instead of the arena. One night, dinner wasn't served until 1:30 a.m.

Self-Portrait

Nancy Leggett Rorex

Date and place of birth: Dec. 7, 1935, Little Rock

My children would say: I love my grandchildren more than them.

I won’t eat: Veal or rabbit.

Last good book I read: Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most by Marcus Borg.

Most people don’t know that caterers: Sometimes get tired of thinking about and looking at food.

My idea of a perfect day: Just hanging out with people I love doing as little as possible.

My favorite music is: Almost all ’80s music. That’s why I got into this crazy business.

Guests at fantasy dinner party: Invite all the grandchildren, order pizza and let them tell me what they think they want to do to make the world a better place.

One word to describe me: Grateful

After it was over, Rorex found herself compiling mental notes about how she could do things better next time such a huge show hit town. Then she laughed and said she'd "lost her mind" for even contemplating such a scenario.

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“I’ve seen production people come in, with 160,000 pounds of rigging for Paul McCartney, and what is our real conversation about? Catering. Our building would not be what it is today if Nancy hadn’t been handling the catering.” — Michael Marion, general manager of Verizon Arena

"I can't do this crazy job forever, which it looks like I'm doing."

High Profile on 08/20/2017

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