Myrt Bobo could have told this story better than we can. Myrt, who died in 2019, was the receptionist at The Commercial for decades. She had gone to work for the Freemans, who owned the paper, and she was one of the family’s best historians, having basically grown up with them all.
We recall one story she told of how she fell ill and was out of work for quite a number of weeks, and in all that time, she never missed a paycheck.
Such were the Freemans. Old school. Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of you.
Armistead Freeman, who handled advertising, died in 2010. And now his brother, Edmond, who ran things, has died.
When we think of Mr. Freeman, we think of someone so principled it was as if there was no other way to operate other than the right way. And it was that way until 1986, when the paper was sold to Donrey Media Group. Consequently, all that the Pine Bluff community knew about newspapers was that theirs was a dandy. No punches pulled.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
One can look at the journalistic standouts who came through the paper’s doors as evidence of the above. One was Gene Foreman, who went on to be the managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“Ed stood for high standards and ethical integrity,” Foreman told our reporter, I.C. Murrell, this week upon Freeman’s passing. “I stood for the same things. I think that’s how we got to be good friends. We had a true friendship that persisted as the years went on.”
And then, of course, there was Freeman’s hiring of Paul Greenberg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of The Commercial who recently died. Greenberg won the top journalistic prize for a series of editorials he wrote on civil rights. This newspaper has republished all of those editorials in recent months, and to say that those opinion pieces would have been unpopular in 1968, when they were written, would be an understatement. And the heat for those would have been directed at Freeman.
As Freeman’s daughter Gretchen said: Edmond took “a very principled stand” on racial integration in 1960s Pine Bluff. “My father supported the publication of editorials that strongly condemned segregation,” she said.
Freeman also cared deeply about the operation of the newsroom and was smart enough to hire good editors and get out of their way. That created a reputation for The Commercial as being a wonderful training ground for aspiring journalists. That reputation faded after the paper was sold, but in the day, young reporters came from many states away for the opportunity to learn the trade from the paper’s editors.
Freeman died at age 94 and had obviously been retired for many years. But his presence and influence will be felt for years to come, in Pine Bluff, in Arkansas, in newsrooms and in the halls of education where journalists are taught. Yes, principled, but also courageous. Rarely do they make them like him anymore.