MHEF HONOREE
JIM BODENHAMER
Extra! Extra!
It’s a fair bet that when Jim Bodenhamer was a student at Mountain Home High School, he could not have imagined what his life held in store. Oh, he might have entertained the idea of returning to his hometown at some point — maybe even thought he’d get to be a newsman along the way.
But he couldn’t have imagined a decades-long career reporting the news in print and over the airwaves, or that into his 70s he’d still be contributing to the welfare of his hometown via the city council. “Let me just tell you a personal deal here,” he said. “When I graduated from Mountain Home High School in 1965, the faculty selected 10 outstanding seniors. I was stunned when I was named one of those 10 outstanding graduates. “I know I was one with the lowest grade point average; I was involved in more extracurricular stuff, and I wasn’t very strong in academics. But that really meant something to me.” Bodenhamer’s family goes back several generations in Baxter County and the Mountain Home school system. Both his father D.J. Bodenhamer and mother, Doris Easley Bodenhamer, graduated from Mountain Home. His great uncle, Rex “Jickie” Bodenhamer,
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WINGS
served on the Mountain Home school board in the 1940s. His uncle, Hal “Bud” Bodenhamer, served on the Mountain Home school board in the 1960s and is an inductee in the MHEF Hall of Honor and the district’s Athletic Hall of Honor. Jim’s brother Joe, a retired county judge, served on the school board in the 1980s. After graduation, Bodenhamer attended Arkansas State University in Jonesboro where he majored in journalism with a minor in radio, TV and military science. With a degree in hand in 1969, he joined the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant and served a twoyear hitch. He returned home to a golden age in local journalism. “When I moved back home, I became associate editor of the Baxter Bulletin. It was a weekly newspaper then,” he said. “I’d worked there in high school as a pressman’s assistant — a printer’s devil is what they called them.
“Anyway, I was the associate editor for about five years during which time The Bulletin was recognized as one of the top weeklies in the nation by the newspaper association. That wasn’t because of me; we had a really good group of people, and that followed me all the way through my career. I was one lucky person to have such dedicated co-workers.” In 1977, Bodenhamer made the switch to radio at local station KTLO, first as assistant news director and then as news director, a job he held for more than three decades. With a tenure that long, he was hard-pressed to single out any one story that stood out from his career, nor could he easily say which he
