We had spent a fun day at the Hope Watermelon Festival, and it was time to head back to Little Rock. I was riding with Paul Austin, head of the Arkansas Humanities Council, and suggested that we not get back on Interstate 30 just yet. Instead we would make our way through the pine woods and cattle pastures of southwest Arkansas--to Washington, Ozan, Nashville and Murfreesboro--to soak up the rural atmosphere in my old neck of the woods. Our destination was Delight.
Glen Campbell, one of our most famous Arkansans, had died four days earlier and been buried the next day in a private ceremony near Delight. A perk of hailing from southwest Arkansas was being able to correct people when they claimed that Campbell came from Delight. "Well, he's actually from Billstown," you would say with a smile. "That's a suburb of Delight."
Glen Travis Campbell was born April 22, 1936, at Billstown to Carrie Dell Stone Campbell and John Wesley Campbell. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and he was one of 12 children. Billstown is about six miles from Delight. The schools there consolidated with Delight at the start of the 1948-49 school year. Since then, Billstown has mostly been a collection of homes. The Ozan Lumber Co. was the area's dominant business for much of the 20th century. The company owned 132,000 acres by 1956 and was sold to the Potlatch Corp. in the 1960s. As timber companies cleared the woodlands, farmers such as John Welsey Campbell turned to growing cotton in the "Pike County sandy loam" that son Glen later would reference in his song "Arkansas." Young Glen hadn't been a stranger to chopping cotton in the summer and picking it in the fall.
As we drove east on Arkansas 26 that Saturday afternoon, I spotted the small sign for Bills-town and asked Paul to take a right. We wound down the country road on the off chance that we might see Campbell's grave. For all we knew, it was hidden in a family cemetery well off the road. We were about to turn around when I spotted a mailbox that had "Campbell" stenciled on it. "Let's keep going a bit," I said to Paul.
Just up the road was a cemetery on our left. A wooden sign read Campbell's Cemetery, Billstown, AR. We got out of the truck and found the headstone for Carrie and John Wesley Campbell. Behind it was that freshly dug grave. At the head was a large floral arrangement from a Murfreesboro florist with a ribbon that said Brother. At the foot was a vase of roses. It was quiet on Billstown Road as the August sun baked the soil. We stood there for a minute, silently paying our respects to an Arkansas legend.
Less than 48 hours after the cemetery visit came word that we had lost another icon, former University of Arkansas head football coach Frank Broyles. Campbell was 81 when he died; Broyles was 92. Both had Alzheimer's at the end.
Broyles wasn't born and raised in Arkansas. He came from Decatur, Ga., and his rich Southern accent was never replaced by an Arkansas twang. But he was one of us. He moved to Fayetteville following one season as head coach in 1957 at the University of Missouri. National news had been dominated that fall by the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis, but Broyles always would refer to the UA coaching position as his dream job. The desegregation crisis made Arkansas the subject of derision in other parts of the country. Arkansans had both a strong pride in the place they called home and a glaring inferiority complex. Though Broyles wasn't from here, he understood us. He pledged his allegiance to Arkansas and never left.
It didn't take Broyles long to build a football powerhouse. At least among college football fans, Gov. Orval Faubus wasn't the only well-known personality in Arkansas. We had Broyles, his shirttail flapping as he paced the sidelines on those glorious fall afternoons. College Football News once ranked the top college football programs for the 1960s. The ranking was based on Associated Press polls. Alabama (coached by a native Arkansan, Paul "Bear" Bryant) was first in that decade. Arkansas and Texas were tied for second.
I was born in September 1959 and was coming of age in the late 1960s. Glen Campbell recorded "Gentle on My Mind" in 1967 and earned Grammy Awards in 1968 for Best Country Vocalist and Best Contemporary Vocalist. In 1968, he recorded "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," which won him three more Grammys. Songs such as "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston" soon followed. The man from Billstown became a regular on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and CBS asked him to host a summer replacement show in 1968. In 1969, CBS created The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and the program ran through 1971. The year 1969 also saw the release of the John Wayne movie True Grit, based on the novel of the same name by native Arkansan Charles Portis. Campbell had a role in the movie, which premiered at Little Rock's Cinema 150. In 1970, Campbell played the title role in Norwood, which also was based on a Portis novel.
While all of that was happening for Campbell in the 1960s, Arkansas was winning football games--lots of them. The Razorbacks captured several versions of the national championship in 1964. At the end of the 1968 season, as Campbell's popularity soared, the Razorback football team went to the Sugar Bowl and defeated Georgia. Texas and Arkansas were No. 1 and No. 2 in the polls throughout the 1969 season, leading to the excruciating 15-14 loss to the Longhorns in the Game of the Century. I was 10 years old and still vividly remember that gray December afternoon.
As a state, we were just more than a decade removed from the embarrassment of 1957. Arkansas also had lost the highest percentage of its population from 1940-60 of any state. There wasn't a lot to be proud of, but we had the likes of Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash on the national stage. And we had Frank Broyles' Razorbacks. I didn't fully understand at age 10 what they meant to Arkansas. I do now. They were giants in their fields, and we're fortunate we could claim them as our own.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 08/20/2017