The night before was a maelstrom of lightning and thunder, but the day dawned sunny and unusually warm for the first day of December. The long line of holly trees at the Clinton Presidential Center cared not a whit about the change in weather. They were already lustrous green with uncountable bright red berries, food for birds bound south.
Parents and small children strolled past the hollies and into the center, this being the first Saturday of December, the cusp of Christmas, and an important day. It’s the first of three Saturdays on which a large and colorful man will occupy a corner of the great hall.
How large a man? Six feet, 6 inches tall.
How colorful a man? He’s dressed in red. And white. With black boots and a big black belt.
He has a white beard. It’s his, naturally grown, to the satisfaction of all the curious children who over the years have pulled it. Just to see if it’s really, really real.
Inside that red suit is a husband, father and grandfather. Also a basketball player. And a soldier.
Inside that red suit is Carroll Dunn, formerly of Calhoun County, formerly of the U.S. Army, and for the past 40 or so years of literally Little Rock and figuratively of the North Pole.
“I’m not sure he’s not really Santa Claus because he never shows the wear and tear,” Ann Kamps, manager of volunteer and visitor services at the Clinton Presidential Center, said.
“Every child is special to him. That’s why he’s universally loved. It never seems to tax him. I wonder how many kids pull on his beard. I never see any evidence he gets tired of it.”
Dunn figures that last year he saw — talked to and put on his lap — about a thousand kids at the Clinton Center.
Rebecca Tennille, a spokesman for the center, respectfully disagreed.
“It was more like 2,000 kids last year. They’re just being humble,” she said of Dunn and his wife, Marty. “It was double that.”
Carroll Dunn is soft-spoken, gentle and genial. His path to the big red suit started in Hampton, the seat of Calhoun County in south Arkansas, where he played high school basketball. Of course he did. At 6-foot-6, he was the big guy in the middle, unlike today, he acknowledges, when a player his height would just as likely be a guard.
Dunn’s ticket out of Hampton was a basketball scholarship at the University of Arkansas, where he earned $16 a month as a scholarship stipend. Lucky him — he was also an ROTC student, and in the last two years was paid about $30 a month. Maybe it was $40. That was a long time ago.
As co-captain of the basketball team in the 1957-58 season — along with Freddie Grimm — Dunn was pouring in points and snagging rebounds at a rate of about 10 each a game, he recalled, good numbers for those days. His coach was Glen Rose.
Height obviously runs in the family. Dunn’s sons are Michael, 6-9; Andrew, 6-7; and Steve, 6-8.
ROTC turned out to be more important in the long run. Dunn chose the military police because the MPs back then were looking for big men, and “I was impressed with the MPs. Their uniforms were sharp.” The Army changed his name, more or less. He’d gone by Wayne, his middle name. The Army insisted, in its Army kind of way, that his first name was Carroll and that was that.
Army life took him to places both dangerous and different. Fort Gordon, Ga. Korea. Vietnam. Fort Bragg, N.C. New York City for five years.
“If guys got in trouble in New York,” he said, “we’d bring them back to their ship or their post.”
Along the way he served at the funerals of Presidents Harry S. Truman in Missouri and Lyndon B. Johnson in Texas.
Dunn’s license plate on his Lincoln has a Bronze Star. A certificate on the wall of his den says the medal was awarded for his service in Vietnam in 1969-70, “for meritorious achievement in ground operations against hostile forces.”
That certificate is joined by dozens of photos and other memorabilia on the walls of the den. Plus plenty of Santa figurines on the bookshelves. “If Marty sees a Santa, she buys it.”
Marty, more accurately Martha, retired in 2004 from a career as a teacher and high school guidance counselor.
It has been a busy holiday season for the Dunns, and not just because of Santa Claus. Their house is, to put it mildly, under repair. A water leak flooded much of the first floor of the home. The concrete slab isn’t especially attractive right now, but that didn’t stop the Dunns from having a Thanksgiving with 28 people. The menu was traditional, but also featured two kinds of macaroni and cheese.
Dunn retired as a lieutenant colonel. At the time, 1979, he was deputy provost marshal, 18th Airborne Corps, and chief of military police operations 16th Military Police Group at Fort Bragg. Dunn came home to Arkansas as manager of corporate security at Arkansas Power & Light, later Entergy. He retired again, from Entergy, in 1995.
WHY SHAVE?
That’s when an act of retired guy defiance changed his life.
“I was shaving one morning,” Dunn said. “And I asked myself, why am I shaving? I put down my razor and my beard came out white.”
Also long, Dunn said as he ran his fingers through that beard, sitting at his kitchen table in the house where he and Marty live in west Little Rock. His hair is white, too, but admits as he raises a ball cap that there’s not so much of it now.
“I equate him to the Coca-Cola Santa,” Marty said. “His cheeks get all rosy and the kids are attracted to him. Adults, too.”
The beard, and no doubt the sheer grandeur of the man, led to his being asked to play Santa Claus at his church, Christ the King Catholic in Little Rock. Marty said he has four Santa suits. Style is important, but so is comfort.
“You’ve got to pick the right suit for the right temperature,” Dunn said.
What makes a good Santa Claus?
“You’ve got to be interested in kids, enjoy it and know how to appease the kids.
“You ask what they want, and tell them OK, keep being good. By the time it’s over you’ve promised them everything in the world and hope their parents were listening.”
Appeasing sometimes means deflecting or deferring to the wisdom of parents. This happens in the matter of shotguns and rifles, for instance.
“I tell them, we’ll have to negotiate with Mom and Dad on that, because elves don’t make those. Elves only make toys.” Such conversations are said in the presence of Mom and Dad, so they can get the message.
Kids want computers and cellphones, PlayStations and Xboxes, animals and all sorts of modern toys. “They can come up with anything.”
Dunn once had an 83-year-old woman take a taxi to a place he was doing the Santa Claus gig. She’d never had a photo with Santa, sat on his lap, and “was happy as a bird.” His oldest supplicant was 106. Teens and adults aren’t unusual. “You’d be surprised.”
One of Dunn’s off-beat appearances was in the summer, when he showed up in Santa hat, pants and boots, and a tropical shirt at the home of a 5-year-old named Kallie. Seems Kallie had previously asked him for a little sister. She almost got her wish — Kallie would have a little brother instead.
’TWAS TWO NIGHTS BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Eleven appearances were on Dunn’s schedule this year, according to Marty. Some Santas make money; Dunn doesn’t. He has had his opportunities, “but I don’t want to tie myself down to being a professional Santa Claus.”
“He used to say I will come if you’ll make a donation for charity, and he would come to their house,” Marty said. “But we mostly have stopped that.” Dunn’s last scheduled appearance, on Dec. 15, was a private charity party. But the others are at churches and hospitals and the Clinton Center.
“I don’t know how much they make,” Dunn said of the for-profit Santas, “but it’s good money. I don’t have a problem with that. I do it for fun. I enjoy it and the kids enjoy it.”
Some kids don’t enjoy Santa Claus. They cry.
“Parents can get really tough with them, and that makes it worse,” Dunn said. “Kids have got to want it.”
One of those kids is Cameryn Brooks, 7, of Searcy. Another is her brother, Reese, 5. The family has been coming to the Clinton Center to see Santa Claus since Cameryn was 4 months old. This year they were with grandparents Kay and Mark Broyles of Little Rock.
Every year, Mark Broyles said, he and Kay take the kids for a visit and for the photos, all of which they put on their mantel. It took awhile but Mark scrolled back and back and back and found a photo on his cellphone from Cameryn’s first visit.
Said Cameryn about Santa Claus, or Carroll Dunn, or whoever that is in the big chair in the corner: “He’s nice.”
Chris Hopkinson was on hand with Teddy, 4 ½, and Alfie, 2½ , for the third time. “They’re gradually getting a little more comfortable each year,” he said. “The first year, we had to walk right past.”
Patsy Pack, a Clinton Center volunteer, has worked with Dunn for 14 years.
“He’s the best of the best,” she said. “He’s very good with the children, very compassionate. He talks to the children. He’s so good as Santa because everything is real. Like the beard.”
The reality is that Dunn has been a volunteer since March 2004, volunteer chief Kamps said, “about seven months before the library even opened.” Marty started her tenure as a volunteer in September 2004.
“When he’s not playing Santa, he’s a volunteer who has almost 3,800 hours here at the Clinton Center. He holds down the fort on the second floor, but he also does tours. Both he and Marty have been true supporters of the Clinton Center.
“His Santa at the center highlights who he is on his heart, and he’s that way every Monday morning.”
Kamps recalled something that happened one summer day.
“We had a family here and this little girl about 5, she was staring at him as he was coming down the escalator. She tugged on my sleeve and asked me, ‘How do you get Santa to work here during the summer?’
“I told her it was really cold at the North Pole and really warm here and a nice break for him.
“Kids will always stop when they see him, and they have that little thought in the back of their heads that maybe, just maybe … ”
SELF PORTRAIT
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: June 22, 1935, Hampton
BIGGEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: As a young man from a small Arkansas town to play basketball for and receive a degree from the University of Arkansas and be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Military Police Corps. Twenty years later, retiring as a lieutenant colonel and becoming manager of corporate security for Arkansas Power & Light (now Entergy), put great emphasis on that accomplishment.
I KNEW I WAS AN ADULT WHEN: I became a second lieutenant. The responsibility and decisions for the lives of men and women under your command makes you grow up in a hurry.
GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY: My dad, Jerry Truitt Dunn; Gen. Douglas MacArthur; David W. “Dub” Wells, my high school government teacher; and Glen Rose, my Razorbacks basketball coach.
MY FIRST JOB: As a high school junior in 1952 I worked for the Hampton Telephone Co. My job was climbing poles, stringing wire, digging holes and assisting in installing poles. The south Arkansas summer was extremely hot but the job was enjoyable to me. The main bonus was the weekly paycheck.
THE BEST ADVICE I EVER GOT: The summer before my senior year in high school I worked road construction on building Arkansas 4 (now U.S. 278) in Hampton. Driving road graders and such was thrilling. Three days into my senior year the school superintendent, Mr. Splawn, came to the work site and told me I had to be in school the next day or I could not graduate or, more importantly, play basketball. I immediately quit the job and returned to school. That semester, Glen Rose recruited me to play basketball.
WORST ADVICE: I can honestly say I have never received any poor advice.
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Caring