Teller of Tales, Keeper of Truth
Rex Nelson has lived a remarkable life in the broadcast booth, on deadline, in the statehouse and on the road to the next great plate of fried chicken in Arkansas
Photo by Sarah Oden
There are few things that stump Rex Nelson for words, especially when the topic is anything and everything Arkansas. Nelson, esteemed senior editor and columnist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of the Natural State, be it football mascots, roadside attractions or, especially, where to eat.
Nelson differs from the garden-variety state savant for the meticulous detail he can apply to any question about Arkansas. While most can provide a top three in their respective category, Nelson’s vast knowledge and comprehensive attention span can answer that question scattered, smothered or covered.
Need the best barbecue? Nelson has a ready list of the classic joints, the new smokers and the flavors of the moment, often accompanied by stories of the people behind the pork.
Want to know the best slice of pie between Jonesboro and Arkadelphia, his hometown? Nelson knows so many of them so well, one wonders if he did not snatch some off a windowsill or two in his day.
Looking for the best plate lunch in the Natural State? Nelson does not fall for such a trick question, knowing there are too many to count. Instead, he asks where one is headed and then lists the best spots along the route, coordinated by time of day and speed and direction of travel.
It is the same with the subject of football — again, something so emotionally and regionally charged, Nelson knows better than to single out a specific program, aside from his beloved Arkadelphia alma mater, the Ouachita Baptist University Tigers. Of all others, he possesses a great story: the legacy of the state’s power high school program, a glory season for a plucky upstart small college and, for the also-rans, some piece of fascinating trivia.
In fact, about the only thing that gobsmacks Nelson into relative silence is when someone slips in between the history of the Buffalo River, the origins of the Fouke Monster legend and the best milkshake in the Delta that he himself is among the state’s treasures.
“That’s too kind,” he said. “You know, the [Democrat-Gazette] has been great. They’ve never told me what to write. I made the decision it’s going be all Arkansas, so that means I have to be among the most knowledgeable people on Arkansas. I digest it all because if it’s Arkansas, I need to know it.”
Nelson began life in the all-American confines of a small town where, from his earliest memory, he fell in love with the lore of his beloved state told in the lyrical manner of some of the greats of Arkansas journalism.
“I’ve got to tell you, since I was a young kid, I have been a newspaper junkie as long as I can remember,” he said. “A lot of this came from reading great storytellers who put stories in print. I can remember as a young child running out into my driveway in my pajamas to get the Arkansas Gazette. We got the Gazette every morning, got the local paper every afternoon. I just devoured it, whether it was Orville Henry writing about the Razorbacks, Jim Bailey writing about the Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference or Ernie Dumas writing about the legislature.
“At a time when we really didn’t have a lot to be proud of in this state in the ’60s, we did have a Pulitzer Prize-winning statewide newspaper, very literally, in the Arkansas Gazette. One of the things that kind of drives me now is to keep a tradition going of a great statewide newspaper because it’s the thing that really kind of hooked me on Arkansas, if you will.”
What the paper did not ignite in the young Rex, his father, a sporting goods salesman, did. The elder Nelson was a gifted storyteller — and his clientele of coaches as much or more so — which filled the workday of traveling and sales calls with local lore, especially during one particularly formative year in his son’s life.
“My father really instilled in me the love of rural Arkansas traveling around,” Nelson said. “Dad sold to high schools all over the state, and my birthday is Sept. 2, and Dad decided he didn’t want me to be the youngest one in the first grade. He wanted me to be the oldest. His joke dealing with coaches all the time, he used to tell people, ‘We redshirted him in kindergarten and gave him another year.’”
At that Nelson gave out a trademark belly laugh but, when the mirth subsided, took on a quieter tone.
“Actually — and I’ve written about this before, even though it’s very personal — when I was 4, I had a 9-year-old brother killed in an accident on Leap Day, Feb. 29, 1964. Looking back, I think it was probably therapy for my dad to have his youngest son on the road with him for an entire school year when I was held out and didn’t start first grade until the next year.
“I’ve got to tell you, I look back on that as one of the most wonderful years of my life because we’d stay in Holiday Inns when he’d often go out for two or three straight nights. If it was spring, we’d stop, and he’d let me wade in creeks. I accompanied him that entire school year and, therein, grew a great love of traveling rural Arkansas.”
By age 7, Nelson knew he wanted to be a reporter, and he has the first-grade art project to prove it.
“My mother found this and had it framed,” he said. “Everybody else was, ‘I want to be a pro football player.’ ‘I want to be an astronaut,’ whatever. Mine was, ‘I want to be a reporter.’ I drew this stick man sitting at a desk, and he’s got a microphone in front of him and, behind him in the window, ABC News, again, probably because it was easier than CBS or NBC. I knew in the first grade — I swear to God, that’s how weird a kid I was.”
Nelson began to make good on that forecast in high school, but for Arkansas, it all might have been for naught had he placed one notch higher in a scholarship competition to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. His second-place showing got him an invitation to attend the school, but without the scholarship dollars that went to the winner. Nelson, ever the pragmatist, decided to stick closer to home.
“I clearly remember asking Dean So-and-So from Vanderbilt how much money first runner-up got, and it was zero,” he said. “My parents, bless their hearts, said if you have your heart set on Vanderbilt, we’ll get you there, but I had a full academic ride at Ouachita.”
Nelson’s other motivation for staying home was the opportunity to get real-world experience at the same time he earned his degree. He worked at two radio stations in town and was sports editor for the local paper, the Daily Siftings Herald. Recalling his schedule in those days stretches his own imagination as to how he pulled it off.
“Typical small-town thing,” he said. “I would call an Arkadelphia high school game on Friday night and then, over the weekend, would call a Ouachita game, and then because we didn’t have Saturday or Sunday issues — we were like a lot of small-town dailies, Monday through Friday afternoon only — I’d spend all day Sunday pulling together my high school story, my college story, and the other high schools and colleges we would cover.”
“Then, [Ouachita graduate] Cliff Harris was in his last two years with Dallas, and I covered every home game in the press box. I had it down to a science — if Dallas had a home game, I’d have a full tank of gas, and from the Pine Street exit on Interstate 30 in Arkadelphia, I could be in my parking space right up against Texas Stadium in four hours straight up if I didn’t stop. I’d drive down, cover the game, come back, and then, lucky I was young and stupid, I’d put together all the Friday and Saturday stuff together during football season. I’d work all night to get my Monday pages ready for the paper then go straight to class Monday morning.”
The effort paid off as Nelson walked off his college graduation stage right into the sports department at the Arkansas Democrat, covering high school sports and the Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference, comprised of what are today called Division II schools. The longer he stayed, the more landed on his desk due to comings and goings, including Oaklawn horse racing in Hot Springs and tennis coverage.
After a brief return to Arkadelphia in newspaper and radio, he was back in Little Rock, where he was dispatched to Washington, D.C., for the first of two spells in the Arkansas Democrat’s Washington office. The first time he was there, he met the love of his life, future wife Melissa. The second stint, later, he got the honor of covering Arkansas’ first homegrown president, Bill Clinton.
“They created this position called political editor, and they wanted me to come supervise all of the coverage of the Clinton campaign,” he said. “I thought, ‘Man, this is Arkansas history. I can’t not do it,’ so I supervised all the campaign coverage. You know, when people ask me what’s the most significant story I ever wrote, it has to be my byline on the lead story on the ‘Clinton Wins’ edition the day after the election. You realize it was one of those papers everybody would save all over Arkansas.”
From there, Nelson joined Gov. Mike Huckabee’s team following Gov. Jim Guy Tucker’s resignation, handling communications duties. He would also spend time in President George W. Bush’s administration before finally getting out of politics for good. After a brief foray into corporate communications, he came back to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for the fourth and final time eight years ago.
Along the way, he has found other outlets for his writing about the legends and lore of Arkansas through Rex Nelson’s Southern Fried blog and podcast. He was also one of the earliest lieutenants of David Bazzel in creating the Little Rock Touchdown Club and initiated the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame. He just entered his fifth decade as the voice of Ouachita Baptist football and is enshrined in the Arkansas Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame. Incredibly, he is not yet enshrined in the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, but then, he is not planning on going anywhere either, so there is still time.
Even if that ultimately eludes him, as unconscionable as that would be, Nelson receives validation of a much more immediate variety in the way his columns — usually positive dispatches from around the Natural State with the occasional biting criticism of what he sees as detrimental to Arkansas — are received and consumed by his audience.
“I’m lucky in the sense that — and I mean this — I’ve just never considered myself personally that interesting,” he said. “I don’t like some columnists who write a lot of columns about themselves. I don’t think readers care, you know, about me fixing the washing machine, which is what you see that passes for columns these days. At my age, I would much rather write about Arkansas. It is a very unique place, and there’s just so many untold stories out there.
“People say, ‘Well, how do you come up three columns a week?’ I say, ‘It’s really not enough if you look at my list of potential columns.’ There’s stuff I’ve already researched, and I just can’t get to it. Arkansas is an interesting and can be a frustrating place, but I want to tell those stories.”
REX NELSON ON WORKING UNDER PRESSURE
“I have always had the ability to turn everything else off and totally focus on the task at hand. To this day, when I write a column, I almost always do it in one setting. I don’t like to put it off. I don’t like to save a draft and have it hanging over my head. I never look at an email during the two or three hours I’m working on the actual writing of a column. I put my phone away. If I have that focus, then I feel like I can do a better job. In fact, it’s kind of enjoyable because I don’t think of any problems I have at home or wherever. My mind’s just cleared. To do a good job, you’ve got to be totally dialed in and focused. I think that’s probably been the key.”
REX NELSON ON GOOD JOURNALISM
“To simplify, passion first. You’ve got to have a real passion for doing it, and I think that goes for anything that you do. I truly think unless lightning strikes, I’m probably in my last job, and I’m just trying to keep getting better at it. Passion first and then curiosity. I think the best writers are endlessly curious about every subject under the moon. That’s why I can never catch up on my reading because I go down rabbit holes, you know? I’ll read something about the country of Chad or whatever, and then I’ll look up Chad on Wikipedia, and then I start connecting to articles about it. The next thing you know, I’ve spent four hours reading about Chad and haven’t finished the paper. I’m curious about everything, and I think that’s something all good writers have in common.”
REX NELSON ON LOVING WHAT ONE DOES
“The people who don’t really know me will say, ‘Oh, B.S.,’ to this, but the people who really know me know I’m honest when I say I have reached this wonderful point in a life where I’ve been so lucky. I’ve sat in the press gallery right above the president for multiple State of the Union addresses. I’ve been in the Oval Office for three different presidents. I’ve covered multiple Kentucky Derbies. I’ve covered the Super Bowl. I’ve had all of these events, and I’ve reached this wonderful place in life where I’d much rather be in my car driving to go speak to the Harrison Rotary Club than getting on the airplane to go cover the Republican National Convention or the Democratic National Convention — been there, done that, and it was great, but you couldn’t pay me enough to fight those crowds and the security and all. It’s kind of a good point in life just to be traveling Arkansas. That’s what I enjoy now and what I really love being a part of.”
REX NELSON ON THE POWER OF A STATEWIDE NEWSPAPER
“I think a statewide newspaper helps unite us as a state. With east Arkansas really having suffered now for several decades economically, south Arkansas suffering, north Arkansas taking off, central Arkansas doing very well, you’ve got this gap. I wrote a column once after I got to thinking about what can really hold us together as a state. I came up with three things: One was a really great statewide newspaper. Another was a governor who really cared about every area of the state and really focused on the whole state, and third was Razorback sports. We are a small state, and I think it’s good that I can pick up a paper and see obituaries from Texarkana or Bentonville or Osceola because I think that helps hold us together. Otherwise, we split off into several different territories without much in common.”
REX NELSON ON CONNECTING WITH PEOPLE
“When I traveled with my dad and I saw him work and I think back now to what made him successful, he always used what’s now the Arkansas Activities Association, I think it was the Arkansas Athletics Association at the time. He kept an AAA directory in the car. In that, for every school, he kept coaches’ wives’ names, their kids’ names, whether they’re crappie fishermen or deer hunters, you know? He kept notes. When we’d stop at school, he’d refresh himself with those notes. Then he could come in and say, ‘Hey, how’s so-and-so?’ you know? His success as a salesman was he didn’t go in and simply say, ‘What’s your order?’ It was making the connection and storytelling.”
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