HONOREE JIM BODENHAMER

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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, 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.”

Jim Bodenhamer in one of the radio booths at KTLO

Photo by Jason Masters

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 enjoyed more: print or broadcast.

“I’ll tell you I enjoyed the photography aspect of a newspaper,” he said. “I don’t have a voice for radio, and I sure don’t have the face for television, you know?

“If I had to pick one over the other, I guess I’d choose newspaper. I took that newspaper in-depth and tried to marry it up with broadcasting. The station manager and owner Bob Knight used to say, ‘Hey, 60 seconds is it.’ He would just shake his head when I would come back with a four- or five-minute school board story. But he never told me to stop. He would just shake his head.”

After retiring from his news career, Bodenhamer indulged a lifelong goal of teaching, serving as a high school substitute teacher at his alma mater. He stayed in the Army National Guard until 2006, retiring with 30 years of military service and the rank of captain. And he’d also experience life on the other side of the microphone deciding to run for the Mountain Home city council and being elected in 2019.

“When I was a young reporter covering schools boards, city councils, quorum courts and politics, I had a school board member tell me, ‘One of these days, you need to get into public service. It’s not as easy as it might look to you,’ ” he said. “He was right. When I was a substitute teacher, it really opened my eyes to what these school teachers and administrators and even the lunchroom personnel and the janitors do every day. Serving on the city council is not always easy, but after covering government in the area for 40 years, I saw being a good school board member is one of the most unappreciated public service jobs there is.”

“I was one lucky person to have such dedicated co-workers.”

— JIM BODENHAMER

For a life spent keeping others informed, as well as lifelong service to school, community and country, Jim Bodenhamer was recognized as the 2021 Distinguished Alumnus by the Mountain Home Education Foundation.