21 Jun 2016 Thornton remembered for service to 501

by Donna Lampkin Stephens

While the April death of Ray Thornton, one of the real Renaissance men in Arkansas history, reverberated across the nation and the state, the 501 lost a native son.

Thornton, a former law professor, lawyer, attorney general, United States congressman, university president and Arkansas Supreme Court justice, among other accomplishments, died April 13.

“The main thought I have about Ray is that while he had a nominal political career, very few people have been in the positions he’s been in, including president of two of our major universities,” said former long-time state Sen. Stanley Russ. “He was always a gentleman. I rank him right up there with our superstars — Bumpers, Pryor, Tucker — but he wasn’t as flamboyant.

“He was just totally, quietly effective.”

Thornton’s first tie to the 501 was his birth in Conway on July 16, 1928, in a house his father had bought for his own mother, Sally Thornton.

“He paid $600 for the little house on Ash Street in Conway because she had lost, through a separation, her husband,” Thornton told Scott Lunsford of the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in an oral history for the Arkansas Memories Project.

“She was selling pins and needles and other materials like that in a little cart she pushed around the city of Conway. Mother and Dad thought that she needed more, so they paid $600 for this house on Ash Street. I was born there.”

His father, Raymond Hoyt Thornton Sr., had grown up on Gold Creek and was the first member of the family to go to college, graduating from Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas) in the mid-1920s. He took a job as superintendent at Poyen and was, Thornton said, the first person in Grant County to have a college degree. Poyen was where Thornton Sr. met Wilma Elizabeth Stephens, who became his wife.

“I think he was very smart in marrying Mother, who was also a brilliant person who later became a schoolteacher of more than 40 years’ experience,” Thornton said in the oral history interview. “So I was fortunate in that I was a child of two schoolteachers, and they didn’t have enough members in their classes, so they spent their time teaching and indoctrinating me. And without my having any idea that it was unusual, they had me reading at the age of 3. While I was that age, I would go to Prattsville (in Grant County) and read the newspaper to my grandfather (Albert Jackson Stephens).”

Wilma Elizabeth Stephens was the daughter of Stephens and the sister of Witt and Jack Stephens, who went on to be considered 20th-century kingmakers of Arkansas. She did most of her collegiate work at ASTC during the summers, so young Ray spent a lot of time in Conway with the Thornton family.

As a child at his grandmother’s house in Conway, Thornton choked on a banana and hard-rock candy, and the mother of Silas Snow, who went on to become president of ASTC, “ran across the street and took me by the heels and shook me until the rock candy and banana came out,” he said in the oral history interview. “So my life was saved there. Dr. Snow was always pleased that he could claim credit for his mother saving my life.”

Thornton grew up mostly in Grant County, where his parents were educators. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, he attended the University of Arkansas, where he won the Navy Holloway Program Scholarship that took him to Yale University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in international relationships and engineering. He went on to study at the University of Texas Law School and the Navy School of Engineering before serving with the Pacific Fleet during the Korean War. After his service ended, he completed his law degree at the University of Arkansas School of Law in 1956.

He married the former Betty Jo Mann of Sheridan (with whom he had daughters Nancy, Mary Jo and Stephanie) and moved to Little Rock to work in the legal department at Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company (Arkla), which his uncle Witt had acquired in 1954. He also worked in some of the other Stephens family businesses until making a decision to strike out on his own.

“After all those good experiences, I found myself one day going over to Witt’s office and say(ing), ‘You know, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all that you’ve done for me since I’ve come to the firm,’” Thornton said in the oral history interview. “He looked at me and said, ‘Well, what is it?’ I said, ‘Well, I really want to become a candidate for public office, and I can’t ask for any better employment than you’ve given me. I’ve made a lot of money and I’m happy.’”

Thornton recalled that his uncle bit on his cigar and then said, “Well, let me tell you this. If you are coming for advice, I’m glad to know you are making good money, and if it were me I know what I’d do. I’d stay right where you are and make a pot full of money, and you’ll probably have more effect on politics than you’ll ever have as a candidate. But if you decide you really want to be a candidate, then I’ll support you, and all the family will support you, as long as you don’t use your politics for making money.

“Now if you want to make money, you stay right here and you’ll make a bushel basket of it. But if you go into politics, the only thing I have, or the family has, to gain is your reputation for honesty and integrity, and that isn’t the same as making a lot of money. So you think about it, and if you want to go into politics I’ll support you, and if you want to make money, stay right here.”

Thornton said the conversation made him “think hard.”

“(H)e had it right,” he said of his uncle. “He understood it — that going into politics is not the way to make yourself a fortune. It’s a way to do public service. I decided I wanted to go into politics, and I chose to go into a race for the attorney general.”

He served one term as state attorney general in the early 1970s before being elected to the United States House of Representatives from the Fourth Congressional District for three terms. There he served on the House Judiciary Committee, which in the aftermath of the June 1972 Watergate break-ins put together draft articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon.

According to Thornton’s biography in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas by Dr. Paul D. Haynie, professor of history at Harding University, “Thornton’s three articles indicted the president for abuse of power, obstruction of justice and continuing to show contempt for Congress. The substance of Thornton’s draft was approved, and the articles were immediately submitted to the full Judiciary Committee, which, after some amending, passed article one — obstruction of justice — on July 27, 1974, and the other two articles — abuse of power and contempt of Congress — by July 30. With the ‘smoking gun’ tape becoming public, as well as the upcoming vote in the House to accept the Judiciary Committee’s impeachment articles and his loss of congressional support, Nixon resigned on Aug. 9.”

Thornton left the House to run for the U.S. Senate in 1978 as a Democrat against another congressman, Jim Guy Tucker, and the sitting governor, David Pryor, in what has been called “one of the classic campaigns in the history of the state,” according to Jay Barth’s biography of Pryor in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

“That was a race of three of the political giants of their time,” Russ said. “The race seesawed back and forth among all three. Ray was ahead much of the time, and then he was second, which would’ve put him in a runoff, except that Jim Guy slipped in there and got second. It was razor-close for second.”

Pryor went on to beat Tucker in the runoff, and Thornton returned to Arkansas the next year to go into higher education. As he said later, “(H)e won the Senate and I won the presidency of Arkansas State University and the University of Arkansas.”

Thornton was executive director of the Joint Educational Consortium of Ouachita Baptist University and Henderson State University before being named president of ASU in 1980 and UA in 1984. He decided on a return to politics in 1990, when he ran for U.S. representative from the Second Congressional District.

“(T)here was some talk that I had chosen to move into the district in order to run,” Thornton said in the oral history interview. “We countered that pretty effectively by asking Mr. Kitchens, who owned the little house that I was born in, if we could open up the campaign there, and he said, ‘Certainly, if you’ll tell me you won’t do anything to cut my rights to use a gun for hunting.’ I agreed to that, and we had the campaign kickoff on the steps of the house where I was born in Conway.

“With that, the criticism of my being an outsider seeking a district to run in kind of disappeared.”

Thornton served the Second District until 1997 before being elected to an eight-year term on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Once that ended in 2005, he was the first Public Service Fellow for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law.
He still wasn’t finished. Despite his opposition to a state-run lottery, in 2009 he became the first chairman of the Arkansas Lottery Commission.

“(W)hen the people of Arkansas voted by nearly two-thirds (60 percent) to start one, I thought it was critically important to make sure that it developed the connection to scholarship and to giving deserving students an opportunity to go to higher education in Arkansas,” Thornton said during the 2011 interview. “I was told that a program properly run could develop many scholarships and would be very useful. I’ve seen in the paper recently that several students have remarked that they would not have had an opportunity to go to college except for this program.”

He said he agreed to serve as chair for a while but that he didn’t want to get stuck too long in the position.

“(I)t’s going to need a good steady hand to get it started,” he said. “Then it can be refined and developed into an ongoing program. I’m good to get it started because I have experience starting other enterprises.”

He said the decision to hire Ernie Passailaigue from South Carolina to get the nuts and bolts of the lottery going was a good one, although Passailaigue was ultimately criticized for his high salary and eventually returned to South Carolina.

“I became very convinced that Ernie could get it done and that we’d have to pay him a lot more because to get a program like that started, ordinarily you have to hire a consultant or two and pay them a half million dollars each to develop the plans,” Thornton said. “Well, all Ernie had to do was to put in place the plans he had used in South Carolina. And so it was an expensive couple of years, but it didn’t cost us as much as it would have to get one or two consultants to tell us how to do it.

“So instead of waiting for someone to tell us how, we hired a manager who knew how to make it go, and Ernie did a fine job of getting it started. We have had many scholarships funded.”

Thornton said in the 2011 interview that his life had been enriched by the quality of people who supported him as well as those who ran against him.

“I’m happy with the opportunities I’ve had in my career,” he said. “I don’t mean to say that I’ve always got it right. But I do mean to say that I’ve always gotten it right within the scope of my vision and understanding of the issues.