Former Arkansas State Rep.

Owens Shultz, mother of Arkansas Business founding publisher, dies

Marian Daniel Owens Ingram Shultz of Hot Springs Village died on Thursday, May 18. She was 86.

She was born in Beebe and reared in Searcy, the daughter of the White County Coroner, Circuit Clerk and funeral home part-owner William Elvis Daniel and his wife, Arlene McCulloch Daniel. As a young girl, she lived inside her family’s Daniel Funeral Home in Searcy.

As a student at Searcy High School, she wrote a school column for the Searcy newspaper, the Daily Citizen, and was a 1953 delegate to Arkansas Girls State.

She received an associate degree at Arkansas State Teachers (now UCA) in 1954. She married Wayne Owens in 1957 and moved to Warren, where they had their three children; Cynthia Blair Owens, Charles Daniel Owens and William H. Owens. Dan would later become the founding publisher of Arkansas Business in 1983.

She helped Wayne run the family business, Owens’ Shoes and Clothing, before entering real estate. In the early 1980s she took on a long-term male incumbent for a seat on the Warren City Council and became Warren’s first female city council member, serving several terms.

After her husband died, she was selected to become South Arkansas’s newest house member of the House of Representatives over two other candidates after long-time Rep. John Lipton took an appointment to the StateTransportation Board. She served three terms (1992-1998) before being term-limited. Her signature legislative act was sponsoring a ground-breaking 1995 bill requiring new teachers to undergo background checks, which drew national attention and became a template for similar laws in other states. Her legislative career is featured in “Stateswomen: A Centennial History of Arkansas Women Legislators 1922- 2022,” by Lindsley Armstrong Smith and Stephen L. Smith

She married Perry Marlin Ingram and settled in Norman, Oklahoma. After he unexpectedly died, she relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, where both of her sons currently live. She married John Shultz, Jr. in 2017 and moved with him to Hot Springs Village.

In addition to her parents and two husbands, Owens Shultz was predeceased by her sister Emma Grace Daniel and brother Robert Elvis Daniel

Survivors include her husband, daughter, two sons and daughtersin-law, and two grandchildren.

Funeral and burial was held May 26 in Beebe. A public Celebration of Life/Remembrance Service will be held Sunday, June 11 at 2 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church in Warren.