To a cherished Arkansan

Steve Barnes

Hoyt Purvis, whose 83 years ended in May, was honored Aug. 4 in a memorial service at the University of Arkansas that he loved with his heart and enriched with his mind. If he was unfamiliar to the general public he was celebrated in those circles wherein consequential voices are valued. Hoyt was a man of multiple passions: politics and policy (domestic and foreign), education, journalism — and baseball,

the Cardinals of the National and the Orioles of the American, and could explain in a single sentence the infield fly rule. He loved music and movies, complex people and simple sandwiches; was at home in other countries, at ease with other cultures. He savored the oral tradition but

was in thrall to the printed page; ergo his office was a legend, a tourist attraction — entire forests having been felled to create its paper pyramids. His file-by-pile system, with its teetering towers of journals and clippings and documents, was a confounding fusion of the archival and the architectural. Pisa and Giza and, here and there, pizza.

Hoyt’s eulogists included this columnist. What follows is adapted from his remarks.

About a quarter-century ago, Hoyt and I and a few hundred other people assembled here to say a final, formal farewell to his most important mentor. Not many present were aware that the Fayetteville public schools once were located on this campus, their pupils including a future global statesman. Following the service, a handful of us, in a mood to reminisce, gathered outside Old Main, the Ozarks rising in the near distance. In that moment it was easy to imagine a teenaged Bill Fulbright staring at those mountains, resolving to learn what lay beyond them.

The parallel presents itself: an adolescent Hoyt Purvis, two generations later and 200 miles to the east, in Jonesboro, considering the hills of Crowley’s Ridge, as anxious to traverse the horizon as was the man who by then was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The two of them would taste many countries; in Hoyt’s case, more than 120.

Longer than a quarter- century ago, in fact a bit longer than 50 years, our paths crossed for the first time. Hoyt had joined the Fulbright staff as it began preparations for the 1968 reelection effort, which I helped report. For Hoyt and his boss and their supporters, that campaign ended rather more pleasingly than did the one six years later. (Fulbright was defeated in the Democratic primary by then-Gov. Dale Bumpers.) If that ’74 loss closed one particular door, however, it opened others. As did Fulbright, Hoyt strode through those doors with gusto. To Austin, and a senior position with the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. Back to Washington, and staff work for the Senate Democratic conference, and for the majority leader, the legendary Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

Eventually, and to our state’s incalcuable benefit, Hoyt came home to Arkansas for good, giving some 35 years of his wonderful life to a different and equally noble form of public service: education. Along the way, he periodically forgot himself and stooped to journalism. The Lord forgave him, as Hoyt forgave me for being a Yankees fan.

He witnessed much history, in Fulbright’s office or his cavernous committee room; even, occasionally, in the chairman’s living room. Always listening intently, Hoyt, observing at close range the principal players in a tumultuous American era. Consider the names: Johnson, McNamara, Rusk. Ball, Clifford, Katzenbach. Nixon, Kissinger, Laird. Mansfield, Byrd, Kennedy. Dole, Dirksen, Goldwater. Javits, Aiken. Ellsberg. Those years shaped Hoyt as could no conventional classroom, and he brought those experiences, those lessons, to his classroom.

Hoyt embodied the best of our species in his conviction that education — to mean lifelong learning – was the non-negotiable requirement, the indispensable component, of a civilization worthy of the name. Even so, it was not civic or professional obligation but innate intellectual hunger that saw Hoyt consume newspapers for breakfast, magazines for lunch and books for dinner. In between meals he snacked on a hundred websites. Evidence of his appetite, his diet, were the literary crumbs stacked shoulder-high in the glorious gourmet restaurant that was his office. Facts, serious ideas and considered opinion were the menu.

The friends and colleagues and students Hoyt loved, and who loved him — we have our memories and will treasure them. Of course, our ache pales against the loss felt by Hoyt’s wife, Mary, and daughters Pamela and Camille, who knew him in a chamber of the heart that was properly theirs alone. In time they were joined in that splendid dimension by four adored grandchildren — four breathing symbols of what Hoyt believed should be our constant concern. He would remind us that it is more their world than ours. Not one person in a million worked harder than Hoyt Purvis to create for them a world saner and safer.