Oakley

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David.) And Meredith Oakley could be mercilessly fair. The paper got word that she died this week. At the age of-None of your business, she’d probably say.

Over the decades, how many politicians got the call at 5:30 a.m., with one of their PR types on the other end of the line: “Have you read Meredith Oakley today? You might want to right now, sir.”

But it must be said that only the politicians who had it coming would gasp at that phone call. For if you were doing your job, and doing it well, and not dipping into the public’s bank account, and being a true public servant, she could compliment a body. And in her column, she could even tell a joke on infrequent occasion.

But what really seemed to get her riled was a pol gone bad. She had them for breakfast. And readers could see the leftovers when they read her column that morning.

Governors called her “M.O.” Journalists called her ma’am. C-SPAN called her for interviews.

“I spent my youth looking ahead and much of middle age learning to appreciate the wisdom in the observation that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” she once wrote. A huge Beatles fan, as most thinking people are, she quoted John Lennon a lot. He was her favorite Beatle. By the by, she saw the group in Memphis when they came through in the 1960s, and only as Meredith Oakley could, she recalled telling all the screaming girls around her at the stadium to SHUT UP! so she could hear the concert.

“My old boss and mentor, the late John R. Starr, once chided that loyalty was both my greatest attribute and my greatest fault. He was wrong. If I am anything in great abundance, it is stubborn. I don’t give up or give in easily.”

We can vouch for that.

So can many an Arkansas politician. When the Ledge was in session in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, etc., she had what the military calls a Target Rich Environment. And she rarely missed. She called ‘em like she saw ‘em, and if a lawmaker pushed a bad bill, he found out why--and he found out when everybody else did: in the morning paper.

What really bothered her, or seemed to, was somebody fooling around with the FOI. This state’s Freedom of Information law is one of the nation’s strongest, and nobody was a bigger defender of it than Meredith. On the occasion when she was in the same room with a politician, invariably she’d turn the topic to the FOI, and whether the pol in her sights was pro-FOI ... . Or her prey.

Industry Quote

Meredith spent 35 years at this paper. She was a columnist, an associate editor, a big sister to some on this page, and a terror if you got in her way in the newsroom. Oh, there are stories. And an editorial obit isn’t a marketing assignment. Besides, she probably wouldn’t mind. She told some of the stories herself.

She was one of the many journalists who made it through the newspaper war, and celebrated when the Democrat became the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Like many good folk still in the newsroom, she was on the winning side, even having helped win. Oh, she was a fighter. Doubtless there are those in the afterlife who already know it.

She left the paper in 2011. This is from her final column, and since we can’t say it any better, we’ll give her the last word. She always seemed to get it anyway:

“It always made me smile whenever a colleague would remark that, in researching a bit of Arkansas governmental or political history, he or she had come across an old byline of mine. It makes me smile now to consider that someday others may do the same. They won’t know or care who I was, but my name will be there regardless. It’s as close to immortality as I’m ever going to come in this life, but it will suffice.”