| Kathryn L. Russell | Holly Williams | Vickie Lynn Flesher | Dan Gilliland | Letta Maude Gray Nichols |
A taskmaster who demanded the best from her students but who also put them at ease enough to dwell with them on the creative ideas, Katye Lou Russell influenced a couple of generations of Arkansas journalists and other professionals.
For four decades, including 27 years at North Little Rock High School, she taught journalism, English and creative writing until retiring in 1974.
Her students included Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Meredith Oakley, KARK-TV Channel 4 newsman and freelance columnist Steve Barnes, UALR journalism teacher and former Arkansas Gazette news editor Bill Rutherford, Arkansas Democrat Gazette political editor Bill Simmons, Associated Press writer Harry King and the AP's Little Rock Bureau chief Robert Shaw.
Kathryn Lucretia (Katye Lou) Russell, 86, died Nov. 28 from complications that stemmed from a stroke five years ago. She lived in Park Hill and spent her last year living with close friends John and Peggy Barnett who had been her neighbors for 34 years.
"She never got discourged," John Barnett said of Miss Russell's last years of illness. "She couldn't see, but she was sharp...She'd sit here and tell me things. She was just like a mother to me."
Peggy Barnett said she enjoyed Miss Russell's wit.
Winner of the Jon T. Griffith National Poetry Award in 1962 for her poem "Tranquilizer," Miss Russell produced a volume of verse "My Wee Muse Sings" that was published in 1939 and 1969. Her poetry also appeared in 15 national anthologies and was part of an exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair in New York.
Oakley, who writes a political column, said Miss Russell helped to cultivate her interest in writing in the late 1960s.
"She showed me that I had an ability and she showed me how to use it," Oakley said.
Other former students, too, said she galvanized their predilection for becoming writers, encouraging them to pursue "adversarial" angles-or both sides of the story-in their articles.
Moreover, she was always tough, they said.
"When you had an assignment, you were to complete it in time," Rutherford, a student in 1951, said.
She taught "a healthy skepticism," Barnes recalled from his student days in the mid-1960s. And she harped on grammar, punctuation and spelling, he noted.
"Those were the concepts that in looking back, she specialized in and that alone ought to put her in the Hall of Fame," Barnes said.
Miss Russell, who never married, was born in Fordyce, the daughter of Hugh Hassell and Ida Oakley Russell. Her father worked in the oil business that was so prevalent in south Arkansas and her mother taught school.
After graduating with honors from Fordyce High School in 1929, Miss Rusell earned a bachelor's degree Magna Cum Laude from Ouachita Baptist College (now University) in Arkadelphia in 1933. She taught at Amity, Sparkman and Fordyce before moving to North Little Rock after World War II. She also wrote freelance articles for area newspapers.
In 1950 she completed a master's degree in English from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and did additional graduate work at the University of Central Arkansas at Conway.
"She taught us more than books," Rutherford said. "She taught us to be observant of what was around us, to be interested in everything, which is necessary in our business."
He remembered her for a distinctive, straight-forward style when she called him years later at the Gazette. "Bill Rutherford, this is Katye Lou Russell. Do you remember me?" she would ask.
Simmons, who covered the State Capitol for years for the AP before signing on to head up the Democrat-Gazette's capitol coverage about a year ago, said Miss Russell was one of his neighbors while he was growing up.
"I knew her as a lady whose yard I ran through," he said. "In fact, sometimes I could catch my neck on her clothesline at night. She would chew me out."
Later in high school in the late 1950s she taught him and helped him get his first newspaper job as a copy boy atthe Gazette. Simmons said she had an arrangement with A.R. Nelson, the gazette's managing editor then, to recommend students. He called and she suggested Simmons.
"That's how I came to be in journalism." he said.
Oakley said Miss Russell taught an unforgettable lesson on the perils of misplacing the word "only" by using the song title, "I Only Have Eyes For You," insisting that as written, the popular lyrics say only the singer has eyes for the beloved, not that he has eyes only for her.
It was writing for the Hi-Comet, the North Little Rock High School newspaper, that Oakley first became a columnist.
"I wanted to be an editor," she said. "But she made me a columnist."
Miss Russell was a member of Delta Kappa gamma Sorority and the Little Rock Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She was the first editor of The Kappa State News, the state publication for the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International, and served for eight years. She was also a member of Baring Cross Baptist Church.
She was a member of the Arkansas Retired Teachers Association and former member of the Fordyce and North Little Rock Business & Professional Women's clubs. She was president of the North Little Rock Classroom Teachers Association in 1954-55.
Miss Russell wrote the lyrics for most of the songs in the Arkansas Education Association's Centennial Pageant in 1969. She was an instructor in yearbook production and director of The Scroll at UCA from 1978 to 1981.
Who's Who of American Women listed her in 1981-82. She's also listed in Who's Who in Poetry in America (1945) and in the Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Poets (1938).
Besides her special friends the Barnetts, she is survived by three cousins, Seba Darby of Hedgeville, W.V., Becky Vaughn of Minneapolis, Minn., and Albert Russell of Millsboro, Del.; and special friend Sherrie Shollmier of Little Rock.
Funeral services were held Tuesday, Dec. 2, at North Little Rock Funeral Home Chapel. Burial was in Oakland Cemetery.
The Barnetts and Miss Russell loved animals and asked that memorials be made to the Pulaski County Humane Society or Friends of Animals in North Little Rock.
The Times - 12/11/1997
Holly Williams of Sherwood loved to have fun and to have the people around her do the same.
Sam Masculli, a guidance counselor at Amboy Elementary who worked with her at Meadow Park Elementary, said Mrs. Williams tried hard to shower individual attention on all of her students and build the morale of kids and coworkers.
"She would plan get-togethers and if only a few people showed up, she would never give up," he said, "She would try again."
Cindy Melton, now a principal at Belwood who was also at Meadow Park Elementary with Mrs. Williams, said it was not uncommon to see her playing with her students on the playground.
"It wouldn't be every day, but you would see her out there with them," she said.
"And even when her health made her physically unable to teach, she still went up to the school to see her students," said Esther Crawford, the district's director of elementary education who insisted on holding Mrs. Williams's assignment to Park Hill Elementary open this year, hiring a substitute to fill in while Mrs. Williams struggled valiantly with breast cancer.
Mrs. Williams, an exuberant elementary school teacher and loving mother of a 5-year-old, lost her battle with cancer on Thursday Dec. 4. She was 38.
Her husband of 10 1/2 years, Jeff Williams, said she expected a lot of children.
"She always wanted kids to be better than they were," he said.
Still, teaching had been her second career after a stint in photography and journalism, her husband, a writer with the Arkansas Writers Project, said.
A 1977 graduate of Northeast High School, Mrs. Williams took several photography and journalism classes at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1980 after attending Arkansas College for two years.
She then worked as a photographer with Arkansas Parks & Tourism for three years before deciding to go back to school at UALR to get a degree in education.
"She was a really good photographer, but working at Parks & Tourism just wasn't getting it for her," her husband said.
For her student teaching she was assigned to Seventh Street Elementary, then in 1991 won a position on the staff of Meadow Park, where Melton and Mrs. Williams just naturally incorporated art into her teaching methods.
"She did lots of musical activities and art projects with the kids," Melton said.
And she always looked for ways to make reading interesting and pleasurable.
"She wanted to help kids find their interests in reading," Melton said.
Her drive was rooted in an innate enthusiasm for life and an ability to engage other people in the world around them. And when she became sick, her emphasis became making life as normal as possible for her family despite the thrust of abnormality on their lives.
She never slowed down, her husband said. She did Christmas shopping, laid plans for tomorrow and made lists of things to do each day until the very end.
"There wasn't a day that she laid in bed and said 'I can't do it today'," he said, "When I got up and went to work, she was right on my heels."
She even took on planning the remodeling of the kitchen in their older home on Country Club Road, color schemes and all. "She has all the plans in place, all it takes is a call to say start doing it," Jeff Williams said.
But she also insisted that the two of them be honest with daughter Emily Greer about her mother's illness.
"We said 'Mom has a serious illness and she will be in the hospital occasionally'," he said.
Then he took great pains to make sure their little girl really understood, even taking time to ask their daughter if she thought the two of them would be all right without Mrs. Williams.
"She said 'sure', but I still wasn't sure she understood," he said, until she tucked a page of Halloween stickers, which she loves to stick on everything, including mon and dad, into the casket.
"That was kind of saying you're still part of things," Jeff Williams said.
Besides her husband, Mrs. Williams is survived by her mother Carolyn Palmer Pierce of North Little Rock.
Funeral services were held at 10 a.m.Monday at Park Hill Presbyterian Church by the Rev. Floyd Whatley and the Rev. Tim High
Burial was at Rest Hills Memorial Park.
The family asks that memorials be made to the American Cancer Society, Park Hill Presbyterian Church and Pulaski County Humane Society.
The Times - 12/11/1997
The most remarkable trait of Vickie Lynn Flesher, say those who knew her best, was her innate ability to recognize when people around her needed a friend, a touch of cheer or some words to propel them out of gloom.
Over the last 25 years, this gentle preacher's wife sent more than 10,000 letters and cards of encouragement to friends and relatives, brief acquaintances and fellow church members, each penned with a note of praise and comfort that many on the receiving end say they saved for years.
"And when she was so sick, she would call and ask, 'So how did your day go?'" recalled Diane Gephardt, one of her best friends.
Mrs. Flesher, a sweet-spoken, friend-centered woman who bravely fought her own propensity for depression by showering other people with kindnesses and care, died one week ago today after a year-long battle with liver cancer. She was 48.
A native of a small town outside of Dallas, Texas, she was the oldest of four childrn of a father who owned his own gold-plating company and a mother who stayed at home and raised a brood with strong church and family ties.
Growing up, Mrs. Flesher displayed a talent for arts of all kind, including painting and crafts, said her younger sister Lois Ann Loeb of Grapevine, Texas. "She always had creative ideas, even for parties," she laughed.
But when it came time to choose a course of study, it was her interest in children that took precedence, propelling her into a major in early childhood education that she eventually finished at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock after she married Luke Flesher, now the minister of pastoral and outreach programs at Park Hill Baptist Church.
The two met when she was a teenager and he was a young seminary student working as a youth minister at her Texas church. But it was several years later on a trip to the coast with another family-who had invited Luke to tag along-that the two got to know each other, he recalled. In 1970 she dropped out of college to marry the young minister six years her senior and in 1973, they moved to North Little Rock where he had been invited to serve as youth pastor.
For a short time she ran a small business, selling sweatshirts she had stenciled with images of mallard ducks, her sister said. But mostly she would embrace her role as a pastor's wife and young mother, volunteering to be a church youth and children's department worker and, among other things, working at a mission outside of Benton, where she taught crafts and gave haircuts to women who could not afford them
"I think if she had a role model it was our dad," said her sister. "He was someone who always had hope, always believed tomorrow might be better...and who today is the sole caregiver of my mother, who is in a wheelchair."
Mrs. Flesher loved to take walks, friends and family members say, logging in five miles most days, rising early to stroll around Lake No. 6 or McCain Mall or to drive out to Pleasant Valley to walk around the golf course. And that's where they had some of their best talks, recalled her son Michael, a second-year student at Pulaski Tech, said.
"We would talk about life, talk about things that were going on. She was a good listener...and she taught me all the little things that would make life easier," he said.
Other interest included all things creative, like designing the family's favorite room, a back addition onto their house with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake and back yard that she had accented with bird feeders and beds of impatiens, her husband said.
But her favorite pastime was brightening other people's days with a little gift in the mail, an uplifting phone call, a quick visit with a little something in her hands or a happy note to tell someone she was thinking of them.
"When my mother was sick and I was home bound, she would come over and sit with me, or sit with my mother so I could go somewhere," said Doretta Allen."We never got through talking. You could talk to her about anything."
A little more than seven years ago she had overcome breast cancer, but last year the cancer returned in her liver, her husband and sister said.
"She fought it till the day she died," Diane Gephardt said. "She once said 'It is not easy and I am not happy about it, but...'"
Gephardt, a lay Baptist minister, said she kept many of the little notes Mrs. Flesher sent her over the years, and they continued to touch her heart.
But the one that epitomized her friend the most read: "Dear Heavenly Father, Please wrap your loving arms around my friend and, Father, if you need somone to help, here I am."
Besides her husband, son and sister, Mrs. Flesher is survived by her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Dorman Hinchliffe of Dallas; and brothers, Gerry Hinchliffe of North Little Rock and Dorman Hinchliffe Jr. of Grapevine, Texas.
Funeral services were held Saturday, Aug. 22, at Park Hill Baptist Church, and officiated by Dr. S. Cary Heard.
Interment was in Rest Hills Memorial Park.
The family requests that memorials be made to the Park Hill Baptist Church Building Fund.
The Time - 8/27/1998
Dan Gilliland was a man who found his special talent quite by accident and then turned it into a family business that gave him an excuse to do the three things he loved to do most - edit film, do nice things for other people and stay up all night devouring all the latest movies that came out on video tape.
Customers came to depend on him to tell them if a movie was any good or not, his wife Dottie recalls. They knew "if Dan said it was good, it was good."
Mr Gilliland, the gregarious former KATV cameraman behind Levy Home Video & Production Inc. who played an active role in St. Anne's Catholic Church despite severe health problems in recent years, died Monday, Jan. 18, of congestive heart failure. He was 54.
Born in Gassville, the oldest of three children of Anna Jean Gilliland and the late Martin J. Gilliland Jr., he moved to Little Rock at age 9 with his family when his father got a job as an instructor at the Eaton Barber College.
At age 15, still a student at Little Rock Technical Vocational High School, he lied about his age so he could get a part-time job at the Rowley United Theater in the Heights, first as a doorman-usher, and later as a projectionist.
"Half of the mover and shakers of Little Rock were probably among the rowdy teenagers he threw out on Friday nights" in the late 1950s, when the thing for teenagers to do was act up enough to get kicked out of the theater, then head for Brownings restaurant and see if they could get kicked out of there, too, his wife Dottie recalled.
She should know. She worked the concessions stand there, and they met because he was always buying candy with his own money for some little kids who were short of change.
"I just thought he was the neatest guy," she said. Still her parents would not hear of letting her date until she was 16. So he asked her out on her 16th birthday, she said, and they were married exactly one year later.
After graduation, he would parlay his experience as a projectionist into a job as a cameraman with KATV, channel 7, where he worked for the next 25 years, eventually becoming the film director responsible for editing movies and syndicated shows to fit in commercials without interrupting the continuity.
"He took the job very seriously and turned it into an art form. He was wonderful at it," his wife said.
In 1985, about the time the real boom in movies on videotape began, he and his wife decided to open Levy Home Video & Production, Inc. in Levy, a video rental store that was the first in the area to offer to put people's home movies on video tape.
It was a dream business for this movie hound and master of video production, and it was just taking off when Mr. Gilliland's health began to deteriorate and he found out he needed a liver transplant.
In May 1989, he was whisked off to Dallas for the transplant, but family members say his health was never really quite the same.
In 1995, after opening a second store on Remount Road, the couple decided the business had become too much, considering Mr. Gillilnd's diminished strength. Meanwhile, their teenage son Dan II, had also had a major health crisis and long hospital stay following a rare brain stem stroke, Dottie Gilliland said.
An outlet for Mr. Gilliland became St. Anne's Catholic Church, which he had joined in the early 1980s. There he would serve as a Pastoral Council member, Eucharistic Minister, social committee member and adult advisor for the church youth.
"He'd work on the Christmas tree sales, chaperone trips out of town to places like Disney World with the youth and help with various fund-raisers, his wife said.
"He had an enormous heart; he gave of himself all of the time," recalled Diane Mathes, a parish member. And when the church rallied to help pay what insurance companies refused to pay for his transplant, Mathes recalled: "He just felt so thankful. He loved the parish, loved working for the parish."
He just enjoyed doing things for other people, his daughter Dana Troutman said, and the lessons he taught her about customer service and empathy will stay with her forever, she added.
"He knew all of his customers," she said. "He could not always remember their name, but he knew their [video account] number..and if he knew a customer was short on cash and there was a reason, some health problem or something, he'd just let it go. He knew what difficulties like that could do to a family," she said.
"But you did not hear that man complain," Debra Mathes noted. "We all admired him so. This is a terrible loss for our whole parish family."
Besides his wife, Dottie, son Dan II; and daughter, Dana Troutman, he is survived by his son-in-law, Scott Troutman, and two grandchildren, Kylie and Christian, all of North Little Rock; mother, Jean Gilliland of Little Rock; brother, Ron Gilliland and wife Jo, of Pyatt; and sister, Ann Hunt and husband, Gary, of Visalia, Calif.
Funeral Mass was held Thursday, Jan. 21, at St. Anne's Catholic Church with the Rev. Phillip Reaves officiating. Entombment was in Rest Hills Mausoleum.
The family requests that memorials be made to St. Anne's Catholic Church or the Arkansas Children's Hospital Progressive Care Unit.
The Times - 2/4/1999
A woman of strong opinions and strong will, Leta Maude Gray Nichols was not afraid to speak up and tell those who loved her when she disagreed with them, family members say.
At her funeral, the Rev. Tom Weir, to whom she often took her complaints about goings on in her church, lovingly joked that she was probably giving God a "cauliflower ear" about all the things she wanted done differently up in heaven now.
Leta Maude Gray Nichols died in her home on Oct. 22 of heart complications. She was 90.
Born in the tiny Arkansas town of Appleton to Leta and Will Gray, she lost her mother two days after her birth, most likely of complications from childbirth and was raised, with her one true brother and six cousins by her father and his sister, Doris, and her husband.
After graduating from high school, Mrs. Nichols pursued a job in her main interest - music, though her adopted daughter, Ginger Foreman, says she's not sure how she got started in that field or where she developed her talent. In time, however, she taught music at Dover High School until after she married Barton L. Nichols, who was also a schoolteacher, in 1934.
The couple, who had met at an Arkansas Tech football game, would have a marriage of opposites that lasted 65 years, part of it lived in Dardanelle, Memphis, and finally Little Rock. After World War II, they adopted their daughter, who now lives in Sherwood and who remember how her father, outgoing and jovial, liked to spoil his quiet and "hardheaded" wife, happily washing the dishes and cleaning the house so she didn't have to.
"She had her way," Foreman said.
After quitting her job as schoolteacher, Mrs. Nichols sold cemetery lots door to door in Little Rock for a short time. Then she took a job as a clerk for the Arkansas Depart of Revenue, where she worked for 25 years coding and checking income tax returns to be sure they were accurate, jobs now lost to the age of computers. She retired in 1974.
A woman who took great pride in dressing well and in making her daughter's clothes, she found self expression in fabric and style.
"Whatever she made me, I wore," her daughter recalled of her years growing up.
And though Mrs. Nichols quit teaching piano and got rid of her piano after she could not persuade her daughter to play, she continued playing herself at church. Her favorite hymn: "How Great Thou Art."
She also loved to cook and with all the household help she got from her husband had the time to develop some favorite recipes.
Foreman says her children loved their grandmother's potato soup, which she learned to make, too, but "it'll never be as good as Mom's!" Mrs. Nichols also was a devout Methodist and devoted church member who taught Sunday school and participated in various circles and activities first of Winfield United Methodist, until it relocated, and then of Highland Valley United Methodist.
"She was a firm believer in God," her daughter said, just as much as she took an unwavering position about most things in life.
And while Foreman insists she is nothing like her mother, she recalls one battle she won by being just as persistent and unwavering as she was.
That was when Mrs. Nichols tried to dissuade Foreman from dating her future husband, Steve. She wanted her daughter to date the preacher's son.
"But I didn't like the preacher's son, " Foreman laughed.
So after five years of courtship, Mrs. Nichols finally recognized hers was a battle lost and gave up.
Mrs. Nichols was preceded in death by her husband last January. Besides her daughter, she is survived by her son-in-law Steve Foreman and two grandchildren, Michael and Greg Foreman, all of Sherwood.
A graveside service and interment were held Monday, Oct. 25, at Pine Crest Memorial Park, with the Rev. Tom Weir officiating.
The family requests that memorials be made to Sherwood Animal Services.
The Times - 10/28/1999