Last week state Rep. Fred Allen of Little Rock rose to deliver only the second speech that he'd made against a bill in his 12-year legislative career.
He prefers a low profile and eschews divisive social issues. He says he is more conservative than some of his Democratic colleagues on those, and would rather people make up their own minds.
He uses his legislative service for such initiatives as extending health-insurance coverage for prostate screenings, a personal matter for him, living as he has for 10 years with monthly treatments for prostate cancer.
But affirmative action was different. He believes he wouldn't be where he is without it. In fact, the man who hired him as a young Black man just out of college to be a pharmaceutical representative, a great beginning job in Arkansas in the late 1970s, actually told him he was doing so only because of an affirmative-action mandate.
Fred may well have had something to do with the fact that, after perfunctory and overwhelming passage of so many arch-conservative bills this session, the one essentially to end affirmation action programs in the state went down.
I sensed there would be a worthy column if I joined Allen's speech on affirmative action with what he will rise to do this week, on Friday evening.
He will accept induction into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, at which time he may or may not mention the box of "lost letters" from major colleges offering interest in his basketball services as he came out of a storied career as a jump-shot scoring machine at Little Rock Central in 1972.
The letters were lost in the sense that he never got them. He found out about them about a decade later when his high school coach, Don Nixon, then coaching at UCA, took him to lunch at Stubby's in Conway and promised Fred he'd known nothing about them at the time and had only been given them recently.
Then he handed Allen a box containing, Fred estimates, a little more than 100 letters of interest addressed to Central High but intended for him, the customary practice at the time. Fred recalls one from the University of Virginia. But there were two that caused Allen regret. One was from Jacksonville University in Florida, a powerhouse at the time. The other came from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. Allen thought he might like that kind of highly structured campus life.
He's 69 and says he's never consumed a drop of alcohol or used any recreational drug, even marijuana.
He credits his parents, each of them children of the Arkansas Delta who for years worked two jobs each and always preached strict Baptist virtue.
In college at Middle Tennessee University in Murfreesboro, Allen was a three-year basketball starter and, he says, the guy college pals called for a ride when they'd consumed too much.
What bitterness he surely holds, though, over those lost college opportunities, not to mention against the person or persons who had anything to do with his never getting those letters.
"No," he said Monday in a long and nostalgia-dominated visit in his legislative office. "Everything worked out. I had a good career at Middle Tennessee and got a degree in business administration. And you can't look back. You've got to keep going forward. That's why a windshield in a car is so much bigger than the rear-view mirror."
He worked only three years in pharmaceutical sales, tearing up the roads of north-central Arkansas, before going to work for then-U.S. Sen. David Pryor's office in Little Rock, learning politics with that legendarily Pryor-esque personal touch.
Among our reflections Monday was this one: Allen was a year behind me when I was in high school at white-flight Little Rock McClellan. I brought up a local holiday basketball doubleheader at Barton Coliseum in December 1970. Fred was a junior all-state guard averaging more than 20 points a game for Central, and I was a senior at McClellan writing about local prep sports for the Arkansas Democrat.
I told him I hated him then. "Really?" he asked, as if hurt. No, I corrected. It was only his deadly outside shot and his team's frantic full-court pressure that I hated.
Central and McClellan played a tough game that Christmas-season night at Barton. In an upset, McClellan won narrowly. A quickly broken-up eruption in player-on-player hostilities occurred at the final buzzer. Student bodies came out of the stands, mainly to come to a stop on the court to wonder what in the world they thought they had thought they were going to do when they got there.
I had to ask Fred: What was that dust-up all about?
"You know, somebody said something. But I don't remember what it was and it doesn't matter."
It was a half-century ago. Those kids are old now. Two of them sat in the state Capitol overflowing in conversation about much more meaningful things--a little public policy, a lot of personal and Little Rock history and a life and time that will be celebrated Friday night.
It's a life and time that spanned opportunities lost in letter-filled boxes but gained by affirmative action. And it's a life that has been threatened by cancer and kept ever in perspective by a man blessed by good raising.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.