by Ed Bethune
It was easy to find out more about Lana because everyone, teachers as well as students, seemed to know something about her. She was the daughter of George Douthit, a longtime reporter for the Arkansas Democrat. Her mother, Mary Lou, a beautician, worked in a shop at Stifft Station. Lana was a graduate of Little Rock Central High School and lived with her parents in a small duplex on Monroe Street. She was working her way through college with a job as a nighttime receptionist at Channel 7, the ABC affiliate in Little Rock. I also discovered that Lewis Bracy was a hundred percent right; everyone liked Lana Douthit.
No one can ever explain the magic that causes men and women to be attracted to one another, but I was definitely attracted to Lana. She was good looking, personable, had a good reputation, and she was working her way through college, just like me. I figured out her schedule of classes and “accidently” encountered her often enough that she eventually learned my name, and when she showed a little interest in me I invited her to go to lunch at Sam’s, an eatery on Fair Park Boulevard. Sam made a killer meatloaf sandwich and the place was always full of LRJC students and professors.
A couple of lunches at Sam’s and a few meetings on campus led to our first genuine date. We went to the Officers Club, a small nightclub in Little Rock. It was there that we first kissed and realized that we really cared for one another. We dated a lot after that. I would pick her up when she got off work and we would do inexpensive things. One of our favorite things was to go to a drive-in restaurant where we could order a drink and just sit and talk. There were several good ones, Granoffs at Tenth and Main, Old King Cole at Fifth and Broadway, and Peck’s Drive-In on Markham across from the State Hospital. None of them expected young people to spend a lot of money. The good thing about that kind of dating is that we had plenty of time to talk, to assess each other, and to figure out whether we were right for each other.
As time went by, I realized I not only wanted Lana’s love, I needed it. I could see that she knew how to love people, truly love people. Hers was the kind of love the Vermilye worldview could not accept. Lana grew up wanting to serve people. She had no fear of “them” and she was not looking for a “good lettin’ alone.” When she was in high school, she flirted seriously with becoming a missionary, and she would have been a good one because she is always willing to stop whatever she is doing to put the wants and needs of others first. When we were dating, I would always ask what she wanted to do and she would always say, “I’m with you, whatever you want to do is fine.” I have never heard her turn down a person who asked for help. She never says, “I can’t, I have to finish what I am doing for myself first.” When we first met, I attributed these unselfish traits to her personality, but I learned later that her willingness to love and help others comes from her strong faith.
She loves to laugh and have a good time, but her joyful nature is more than good humor. Her joy is the kind of joy you read about in the Bible. Hers is the kind of joy that does not go away when times are tough.
Most importantly, from the time of our first date, Lana has encouraged me to dream. Deep down inside I wanted to be more like her, more like my father, but I knew it would be a hard business. At the time I met Lana, my mother was aging, and as she did she began a transition back to the girl she must have been before she saw Little Gerle die of diphtheria. She was throwing off the confinements of the Vermilye worldview. I could see the change in Mother, and wanted that for myself, but I knew I had a long way to go and much to learn. It became apparent to me that Lana was the missing ingredient in my life. I intuitively knew that together we could have a wonderful life. Now that we have been married well over fifty years, I shudder to think what I might have become without her.
In May of 1957, Lana graduated from Little Rock Junior College. She was transferring to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. I did not have enough money to transfer to Fayetteville, so I stayed in Little Rock for another semester at LRJC.
Midway through the fall semester, I decided I would transfer to Fayetteville so that I could be with Lana. To get money I sold my beloved Ford and bought an old Hudson Jet. The extra cash would pay for my first few months of room and board and give me time to find part-time work in Fayetteville.
In January of 1958, I enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Lana had pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma, one of the best sororities, so I rejoined Kappa Sigma and moved into the fraternity house on 711 West Dickson Street. I rekindled many old friendships and made new ones that have lasted for a lifetime.
I worked several odd jobs, one was to sell and distribute display racks loaded with a wide variety of TV tubes. In those days, televisions and radios used vacuum tubes instead of modern transistors. If a TV failed, you tried to identify which tube had gone out. If you found the bad tube and replaced it with a good one the TV would work. Our displays contained a tube-testing device. It was a keen idea, but people who bought our replacement tubes would bring them back to the store if their TV still did not work. It was a lot of trouble for the storekeepers. They finally got so upset with the rash of complaints and demands for reimbursement that the whole thing became a big mess. The business failed and I had to find other work.
Lana and I dated for all of 1958. By then we had been going steady for almost two years. She initiated into Kappa Kappa Gamma, and I initiated into Kappa Sigma. As the year ended, we had long talks about what we wanted to do with our lives and how we could best find our place in the world. We both needed money so we decided to drop out of school, go to Little Rock, get married, get jobs, save money, and then go back to school when we were ready.
I got a job at Reynolds Metals as a filing clerk and George Douthit got Lana a starting-level job at the Arkansas Education Department at the state Capitol.
We rented an apartment on North Midland Street near the waterworks and set January 24, 1959 as our wedding date. We asked Dr. Kenneth Shamblin, pastor of Pulaski Heights Methodist Church, to marry us in the small chapel, but first he wanted to have a premarital conference. At the outset of the conference, Dr. Shamblin said he wanted to talk about loyalty. We—our hormones in full bloom—thought he was talking about sexual fidelity to each other. That was not his point. He said the “loyalty” he was talking about was greater than that. He said we should always put each other first and never engage in down talking each other to anyone. He said we should never say a negative word about each other to our parents or friends because that opens the door and gives them a chance to tell what they do not like about your chosen one. That, he said, is a formula for disaster once it gets started. As we left the preacher’s office, Lana and I looked each other in the eye and agreed that we had just heard some good advice. We pledged that we would honor each other with our loyalty. We agreed that if we had a problem we would speak about it to each other and not discuss it with others, any others.
We had a little wedding on a Saturday morning in the chapel at Pulaski Heights Methodist Church. My best man was my Kappa Sigma brother, Mike Smith. I borrowed his car for our honeymoon trip to Hot Springs. We could only stay Saturday night because we had to go to work on Monday. George Douthit arranged a room for us in the Lanai Suites at the Majestic Hotel. When we were having lunch on Sunday, Lana developed a horrible toothache and we had to check out early. We drove to her parent’s house and when George opened the door, he started laughing and kidding me, asking if I was bringing her back. It did look funny, I admit, but we had only gone by to get the telephone number of the dentist so we could call him to see if he could see Lana first thing Monday morning.
Our wedding at Pulaski Heights Methodist Church
in Little Rock, Arkansas. January 24, 1959.
Soon after we settled into our little apartment on Midland Street in Little Rock, we had our first hot argument, and that led us to make another pledge, one that has worked well for us. We fashioned a supplement to the loyalty rule that we had learned from Dr. Shamblin. We agreed that we would never go to bed mad at each other. This rule has
caused us to stay up late on a number of occasions, but it is a good rule and we have always worked out our differences before going to bed.
After only three months in Little Rock, we headed to Dallas, because I had landed a better paying job as a book salesman. Lana got a job in a Dallas bank and I started my new job with Prentiss-Hall Publishing Company. I was supposed to make cold calls and sell loose-leaf treatises about tax and labor law to businesses and law firms. We were only in Dallas for thirty days when Prentiss-Hall transferred me to Shreveport, Louisiana. Dallas was too big and too citified for me, so I eagerly took the transfer. Lana quit her job and quickly found another one with a bank in Shreveport. We rented an apartment and our Shreveport experience was fun. There were some nice young couples in our apartment complex and it helped that my sister, Delta Lew, and her husband, Bill, were also living in Shreveport. He was a traveling salesman for Walker Auto Parts.
It took a few months, but I soon established that I was, without a doubt, the world’s worst book salesman. I did not like making cold calls and it was hard to convince prospects to pay the high price that Prentiss-Hall demanded for its loose-leaf services. Nevertheless, I stuck with it for the rest of 1959. We managed to put a few dollars away, and in January 1960, we quit our jobs and returned to Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas.
Our plan was for me to enroll in the School of Business Administration, fulltime, because I, as a male in the 1960s would have the best chance to succeed in the job market. In addition, I needed more hours to graduate than Lana did, so we figured we needed to attack that part of our education problem first. I enrolled and Lana took a job as a secretary for the president of a local insurance company, Preferred Risk. Our idea was for me to graduate and get a job and then Lana would get the few hours she needed to complete her degree. About midway in the spring semester, I discovered that if I transferred to the School of Law my first year of law school would count toward my BSBA degree. If I were to go fulltime, summer and winter, we could be out of law school in two years and I would have two degrees, a bachelor of science in business administration and a juris doctorate in law. My chances of getting a good job would be better. We decided to do that.
Law school surprised me. I made good grades at Little Rock Junior College and did well after I transferred to the School of Business Administration in Fayetteville. I expected to do just as well in my study of the law, and I would have except for the fact that law school professors allowed students to type final exams. I was an excellent typist in high school and figured I would make better grades if I typed my finals. That was a bad decision. I almost typed myself out of law school in the first semester. I totally botched the final examination in the class on torts, mainly because I could not think and compose while typing; consequently, I wrote poor answers to the test questions.
There was another problem for me that first semester of law school. I discovered I had no background for the study of law. The professors assumed, logically, that all students had a basic familiarity with the sophistications of commerce in the modern world, but my immediate family had never had a checkbook, a mortgage, or any experience with such things. My mother never talked about deeds, notes, mortgages, check writing, savings, investing, or business of any sort. We had just lived from one payday to the next. So much of the study of law is about that kind of activity, events that were a mystery to me. It had not bothered me in undergraduate school, but my unfamiliarity with such matters—along with my determination to type, type, type—did hurt me in law school. Anyway, I quickly realized that I needed to ditch the typewriter and write my exams. I also spent time learning the things that had befuddled me in my first semester. I did well in the second semester. I made an A in real property, a B in criminal law, a C in contracts and a B in the second semester of torts. My confidence restored, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Over half of our freshman class dropped out of law school at the end of the first year but I was on my way to graduation.
I attended summer classes in law school but I also worked the night shift as a weighmaster for the annual grape harvest at the Welch Grape Juice plant in Springdale. The farmers, mostly Italian descendants living in and around Tontitown, brought truckloads of grapes to the plant and I weighed their trucks—first full, then empty—and gave them a receipt for what they had delivered. I made a $1.55 per hour, but I worked seven days a week, and I was able to get in twelve hours for each day of the harvest, which lasted about six weeks. It was a good supplement to Lana’s income, and we were still collecting the GI Bill, which was now paying me, as a married veteran, the princely sum of $135 per month. These were our only sources of income.
Austerity, of necessity, was our watchword all during our time in law school. We learned to eat the cheaper cuts of meat, turn the lights off, and take good care of our clothes. We took advantage of every cost-cutting technique known to man. The center-piece of our financial strategy was our car, Old Black. We had purchased Old Black, a well-worn 1950 Ford from Lana’s dad for $100 cash. The oxidized paint and the dents and rust-holes scattered from front to rear made it hard to make Old Black look good, but—aside from using a lot of oil—the old Ford ran good. The worn out accelerator kept falling over on its side, but we fixed that by taping it, repeatedly, in an upright position. That fix, amazingly, worked for us for two years. The falling accelerator became a symbol of how we could cut corners if we tried. We also learned to buy five gallons of used oil from service stations for a dollar. We carried the oil in a big jug that we kept in the trunk. We routinely stopped every fifty to seventy-five miles to “top her off.”
We had our first child, Madalyn Paige, on May 17, 1962, as I was finishing my second year of law school. She was a healthy baby, so Lana was able to get back to work in a few weeks. We found an inexpensive day care arrangement that worked for us. We had medical insurance through Lana’s employer, but in those days, we were healthy. We used the insurance to cover the birth of our daughter, and we used it to cover our new baby’s pediatric examinations. We did have one other medical incident that necessitated a call to the pediatrician. We were having dinner one night in our little one-bedroom apartment when Lana noticed a button missing from Paige’s dress. We looked everywhere and, not finding the button, concluded that Paige had swallowed it. We read Dr. Spock’s book on baby care to see what to do but found no help. We panicked and called the pediatrician. Lana carefully explained the situation to the doctor and he told us we really did not need to do anything. We insisted that we ought to be doing something and he responded, “Well, you will have to get another button.”
I was on track to graduate in a few months, in January 1963. The goal line was in sight and nothing was going to stop us. We were flat broke most of the time but we did not worry about such things in those days. We trusted that we could find a way to make it.
In October of 1962, we got another surprise that forced us to redouble our austerity effort. Lana was pregnant with our second child. Fortunately, the baby was not due until May 1963, and by then, with luck, I would have a law license and be earning money instead of spending it on books, tuition, and other school expenses.
We made it. I finished law school and we did it without having to borrow money, which would have been next to impossible because we had no collateral and there were no student loan programs back then.
It was about here in my life that I, for the first time, realized that I might actually turn out to be somebody. I had a law degree, an undergraduate degree, a healthy baby daughter, and the good fortune to be married to a wonderful Christian woman.
13
ATTORNEY AT LAW
God works wonders now and then—Behold
a lawyer, an honest man.
Benjamin Franklin
After graduation, I immediately started studying for the Arkansas Bar Examination, the prerequisite for getting a license to practice law. There were many horror stories about good students who flunked the exam. It happened every time students s
at for it. One friend of mine had to take it three times before he passed. The bar examiners scheduled two, and only two, exams each year, so my friend could not get a job as a lawyer for a year and half after he graduated from law school. I could not afford that, emotionally or financially. I studied around the clock from the time I graduated to the date of the exam.
I had a job lined up with Herbert McAdams, a well-known lawyer and banker from Jonesboro. Herbert was a friend of Bill Ritter, the man who owned and ran Preferred Risk Insurance Company, Lana’s employer. Herbert was on Ritter’s board so he came to Fayetteville often. When he came to the company he would always visit with Lana (I think he had an eye for her). One thing led to another and that is how I got the job with Herbert. He was going to pay me $400 a month but I had to pass the bar exam first.
I learned from one of the examiners that I had made the second highest grade on the examination. That was not official, he said, because the examiners only tell the rank of the student who makes the top grade. It was a joke; he was telling me something that all of us could say without fear of rebuttal. I really did not care. I passed, took the oath, and got my license to practice law in Arkansas. Lana enrolled at Arkansas State to get the last six hours she needed to graduate from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Herbert McAdams did hire me as promised but he had not told me that he was winding down his law practice and wanted me to be the trust officer at his bank. I was disappointed. I had no interest in becoming a trust officer. I wanted to practice real law, street law, people law, the kind of law you read about and see in the movies. That is what I had in mind and I immediately began to look around for a way to do what my head and heart were telling me to do.