Thirty years ago Saturday, Bob Robbins’ face was shattered by an aluminum baseball bat.
It’s a moment one would rather forget, but Robbins can’t. Who could? As the KSSN 96 on-air morning personality and country music radio legend says, “It’s really stuff you want to forget instead of remember.”
“It’s a part of life that happened that you wished never did. There were families that were affected and had loved ones sent to the penitentiary, and it changed their lives forever. You wished it would have never happened because there was never any need of it happening.”
April 7, 1982, and its aftermath is a piece of Little Rock lore. It connects several individuals. Early ’80s Little Rock nightclub owners. A future congressman. Newspaper reporters. Even a former governor. Three decades later, the date and its repercussions read like something out of the Old West. But it all happened. At the center of it is Robbins. Here’s that tale.
Robbins was 37 in 1982. Robbins, whose real last name is Spears, had gotten his radio start in southern Georgia in the late ’60s before taking a job with KAAY in Little Rock. He moved to KSSN in 1979 when the station went on the air. He also worked as a DJ at a country music-themed club named Kountry Klub Kowboy Disko. First at the club’s location on Roosevelt Road and then at its new location on Patterson Avenue. Kountry Klub was owned by Robert Troutt, a former Arkansas Democrat reporter in the ’60s and a former press aide for Gov. Orval Faubus. It was the era of the urban cowboy, and the country music nightlife scene was a huge moneymaker.
By 1981, Robbins was approached by William C. McArthur, a prominent Little Rock attorney, and James Nelson, the president of an insurance company, about opening another country-themed nightclub. He agreed to become a co-owner with McArthur and Nelson. BJ’s Star-Studded Honky Tonk was its name, and it was located at the former site of Mechanics Lumber Co. on what was then the New Benton Highway. (BJ’s was sold and renamed Electric Cowboy in 2000.)
Robbins gave Troutt his notice in November 1981, and BJ’s opened in December. The new club was a success from the get go. A bigger success than Kountry Klub Kowboy Disko. That didn’t sit well with Troutt.
In early 1982, Troutt accused Robbins of the theft of a number of LPs from the Kountry Klub. About the same time, Troutt also filed suit against BJ’s, alleging copyright theft. Troutt’s $1.75 million suit alleged BJ’s was engaging in “unfair competition” and “improperly duplicating his club,” according to an Arkansas Democrat article from Jan. 9, 1982. The suit also stated BJ’s “misled [the public] into thinking the new club was Troutt’s.”
Neither charge stuck.
“I knew [Troutt] was extremely upset,” Robbins says. “But I thought we were better friends than that, and I never dreamed he would have that kind of malice.
“I guess the man panicked. I don’t really know. He continued to escalate everything that happened until it came to what happened.”
What happened was Troutt wanted revenge.
On the evening of April 7, 1982, Robbins left the KSSN studios. Back then he was an afternoon on-air personality, and the station’s studios were located at One Financial Center.
Two nights before, a tire on Robbins’ truck had been flattened. Not bad enough that it couldn’t be driven on though. He drove home to his then-Little Rock home where he lived with wife Susan Spears and their two small children. This night, around 7 p.m. when he walked out the door, a tire on his truck was completely flat.
“I stepped down off the curb and looked at the tire,” Robbins says. “There was a gentleman coming down the walkway with a bat up against his chest. I thought he was part of the crew that worked in the building and kept it clean. He got close to me and said, ‘You got a flat tire.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I had one the other night.’ When I turned around, that is when he hit me with the bat.”
The blow knocked Robbins to his knees. Bloodied up the pile of vinyl LPs he carried under his arm, including a Merle Haggard record. The man ran, hopped in a getaway car and fled. Two women saw the attack. Saw the getaway vehicle. They jotted down its license plate. Robbins walked back into One Financial Center. The blow had caught Robbins on the left side of his face. It was shattered.
Spears, Robbins’ wife of 35 years, remembers the day 30 years ago. Much like Robbins, she’d like to forget, but that’s not possible. She was at home with the couple’s two young children. Robbins usually called right before he got off and would ask what’s for dinner.
Robbins called this day and asked his usual question.
“It wasn’t long after that he called me and said, ‘I’ve been beat with a ball bat,’” Spears says. “I asked him where he was and told him to call an ambulance. He hung up and then the girl who came on [KSSN] after him called and said, ‘He’s really hurt bad.’ And I told her to call an ambulance, and she said, ‘He told me not to. He said he would just wait until you got here.’ I said, ‘Call an ambulance. I can’t come right now. I got two little kids. Just call an ambulance.’”
Spears called her parents, and while her mother watched the children, her father drove her to the radio station. But when she entered the building she was told Robbins had already been transported to Baptist Health Medical Center via ambulance. “I saw the custodian. He was cleaning up blood. It was everywhere from where he had walked in.”
When she arrived at the hospital emergency room, Robbins was already being X-rayed. Spears and her father took a seat in the waiting room. “They pushed [Robbins] through there, and I didn’t even recognize him. I was like, ‘Oh my God. Look at that poor guy.’ Then I looked underneath the thing they were rolling him on, and I saw {Robbins’] shirt and his boots. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! That’s Bob’s stuff!’”
That’s when the couple learned the severity of Robbins’ injuries. A broken left jaw in four places. A broken right jaw in three places. A broken nose. Dislodged palate. Crushed cheekbones. The wreckage meant a jaw wired shut. Reconstructive surgery. Steel plates in Robbins’ cheeks. Robbins said in an Arkansas Democrat article in June 1982 that he “wasn’t worried about how I would look; I was worried about how I would speak.”
He returned to work about eight weeks later. Not long after the jaw was unwired. He was, by his own admission, “a lot of pounds lighter.” But he was alive. And he could still talk. Robbins thanks a team of doctors and nurses, including Dr. Raymond Wende, for putting his face back together.
Within days of the April 7, 1982, assault, three men were arrested in connection with the crime: the getaway driver Jimmy Wayne Baldwin; the man who flattened Robbins’ tire, Lavonia T. Gray; and Roosevelt Nelson Jr., the man who smashed Robbins’ face. And then the 53-year-old Troutt was arrested and charged with first-degree battery.
In that same June 1982 Arkansas Democrat article, Robbins said about the attackers that he felt “sorry for the person who swung the bat, for the people who were involved in it, and their families, and those who are in jail.” He was asked about his thoughts on Troutt, too.
“If he had it done, I especially feel sorry for him.”
Before the end of 1982, Nelson pleaded guilty to first-degree battery and received a 10-year sentence with six years suspended, and Baldwin, Nelson’s uncle, also pleaded guilty to first-degree battery and received a 10-year sentence with five years suspended. Gray was found guilty of first-degree battery later in 1982 during a jury trial and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
During Troutt’s April 1983 trial, Nelson testified Troutt paid Nelson $250, Gray $200 and Baldwin $50 for their part in the beating. Troutt and his wife testified they were with Ken Curtis, the actor who played Festus in the TV series Gunsmoke, on the night of the beating. Former Gov. Faubus actually served as a defense character witness during Troutt’s trial. It didn’t work. Troutt was convicted of first-degree battery, too. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for arranging the beating.
“I said then he was innocent until proven guilty,” says Robbins now of Troutt. “He was proven guilty. He went to the pen. Lost his businesses, and things that he had worked hard for. That I’m sorry for, but it was a justified end to what he did.”
“I just ... I just couldn’t imagine someone doing that because of money,” Spears says. “You know? I just didn’t think people did that kind of thing.”
Robbins recommended parole for Nelson, who went back home to Milwaukee. Robbins hasn’t heard anything else out of Nelson.
“You forgive, but you never forget,” Robbins says. “When I brought Roosevelt into my home, and we met and talked face to face I told him that I would never forget what he did, but I did forgive him, and I told him that I prayed and hoped that he would get back on the right path.”
Troutt has since died. Others involved in the case have scattered.
Robbins remains. Still the morning on-air personality for KSSN 96. He started off spinning hits by Waylon Jennings and Don Williams. On vinyl. Now a computer loads digital hits by Dierks Bentley and Taylor Swift. Robbins sold his interest in BJ’s in the early ’90s.
The constant? Besides country hitmaker George Strait? Robbins. He’s 67 now. A grandfather. A couple of weeks ago Bell’s palsy struck him. But don’t worry. Robbins is tough. He proved that 30 years ago. He has proven it often since then.
“You pray something like that never happens,” he says. “You don’t want to see any family members suffer. You don’t want to see any children go through that because of some anger from someone. But it happens.”
Thirty years later Robbins is a community fixture. A respected and loved man. Well-known for the annual Toys for Tots Toy Hill. A man just about everyone knows with a voice most have heard. A voice many people hear first thing in the morning. Wishing happy birthday to KSSN listeners or just chatting with fellow KSSN morning on-air personality Jennifer Trafford. It’s comforting to hear his voice. It’s a reassuring presence. It’s a voice that means everything is all right in this crazy world.
Everything wasn’t all right 30 years ago. It wasn’t all right for a long time after April 7, 1982. But Robbins can look back three decades and accept it for what it was. And what it has become.
“The biggest kick I get is from listening to people talk about it,” he says. “They never have the facts right. The truth of the matter is Mr. Troutt was extremely upset I opened a business and was shutting his down, and it ended up that it got out of control and away from him and caused his family a lot of grief and I’m really sorry for that.”
And 30 years later Robbins can now laugh somewhat about that evening. Not really. It’s more gallows humor. But when asked what he learned from the experience, he says, “I learned to look and duck.”
But then he gets serious. “I never dreamed what was going to happen. But I look back on it, and I’ve learned a lot since then. Different things ... that were taught to me to be prepared. But a criminal knows what he is going to do. The victim never knows. I just have to accept that and go on and live my life, and I have. I’ve been blessed.
“It’s funny how life works.”