Matthews Finds Purpose in Law

It was murder that drove David Matthews to law and politics. Not just any murder, but perhaps the most infamous slaying of the 20th century.

In 1963, Matthews was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Lowell. The assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22 of that year stunned the world and prompted Matthews to ponder his future.

“That’s when I became obsessed with the notion of A) being a lawyer and B) being in politics,” Matthews said, “because I wanted to be like Kennedy, like every boy in America. It seemed like he had a life that had a purpose, so I wanted a life that had a purpose.”

Since then, Matthews has pursued a life with meaning. He earned a law degree from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in 1975 and began practicing law in Rogers. He served as a Democrat in the state House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. Matthews represented the Rogers and Bentonville school districts in a lawsuit that resulted in more funding for public schools. Along the way, he has dropped some large corporate clients to concentrate on helping individuals, many of whom weren’t able to pay him. But that didn’t matter.

Since 1963, there’s been one overriding question in Matthews’ mind: “What can I do to make the world better?”

“There’s got to be more to life than getting up in the morning, going to work and coming home and watching TV,” he said. “I decided the way to do that was to get into politics.”

Rocky’s Revival

David Matthews was born in Springdale in 1951, the son of a Baptist minister. When Matthews was four, his family moved to Lowell, where his father served as pastor at the Lowell Baptist Church.

“I have lived in Lowell ever since,” Matthews said. “I was raised in the parsonage, in the shadow of the church, and stayed [in Lowell] ever since.”

When the family moved to Lowell, all of the town’s streets were dirt except for U.S. Highway 71.

“Lowell was fabulous,” Matthews said. “Two-hundred and seventy-seven people. Everybody knew everyone. Everyone in Lowell had just as much right to discipline me as my dad did.”

When he was 8 years old, Matthews asked George Mills Sr. if he could have credit at the town’s general store. Mills set up a charge account for Matthews but foreclosed on him when it got up to 80 cents.

“I had to get my older brother to buy me out of hock,” Matthews remembers. But it was a lesson learned.

Matthews participated in the three sports offered by Lowell schools: football, basketball and track.

“I was on the team,” Matthews said. “I was the world’s worst athlete. I was mediocre at all of them, but it was fun. It was an opportunity to make friendships.”

Matthews remembers 1963 for one other thing. America had been mourning Kennedy’s death for 45 days when the Beatles’ first U.S. single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” was released the day after Christmas. The song’s exuberant optimism helped a grieving nation awaken from its fugue and turned Matthews into a lifelong fan of the Fab Four.

Matthews’ favorite Beatles record was “The White Album.” The double record, which hit stores in 1968, contained some of the group’s more experimental music. But it was a traditional-sounding ditty that was Matthews’ favorite from the album: Rocky Raccoon.

In the song, a wounded cowboy collapses in his hotel room after being shot in a gunfight. There, he finds a Gideons Bible. In the last lines, Paul McCartney sings, “Gideon checked out, and he left it no doubt to help with good Rocky’s revival.”

Clinton Connection

In the summer of 1973, Matthews was working at Perry’s Jewelers in Fayetteville’s Northwest Arkansas Mall and getting ready to go to law school.

“One August night, this tall, curly haired guy walked in,” Matthews said, referring to Bill Clinton. “I found out he was going to start teaching at the law school, and I told him I was about to start law school. We talked for about two hours that night … He didn’t buy anything. Bill Clinton never had any money.”

Matthews and Clinton became good friends. In 1974, when Clinton ran for Congress and lost against John Paul Hammerschmidt, Matthews served as Clinton’s driver in Benton County.

“The qualification to be a driver in 1974 is you had to have your own car and a tank of gas,” Matthews said. “My car did not have air conditioning. Here he is running for Congress, and we had the ‘460 air conditioner” — roll down all four windows and drive 60 … We about wore that car out driving around the back roads of Benton County.”

If the car wasn’t bad enough, Matthews remembers trying to jump-start a small airplane at the Mena airport so they could go to the next campaign stop. With Clinton snoring in the back seat, Matthews was trying to help the pilot. Finally, the plane started, and they took off.

“I didn’t know enough about mechanics to know if the plane would fall out of the air if the battery died,” he said. Luckily for everyone on board, the battery didn’t die during that flight.

Ever since Clinton was elected president in 1992, Matthews has called his friend “Mr. President,” except for one time when a “Bill” slipped out.

Twenty years after they first met, Clinton came back to Northwest Arkansas for vacation. Matthews was one of six people who played golf with him at Pinnacle Country Club in Rogers on Aug. 18, 1993.

Matthews said that day was significant because it was the one time during Clinton’s presidency that he was almost seriously injured.

“Grant Hall hit a shank out of the sand trap and almost hit Bill Clinton in the head,” Matthews said, referring to a sports writer for The Morning News who played nine holes of golf with the group. “Grant had taken a mighty swing, and he just bladed it. It almost hit [Clinton]. It went right by his face. I think that was the closest he ever came to bodily harm.”

Race Relations

After one 1960’s assassination brought public service to Matthews’ attention, another brought the issue of race relations.

There were no black people in Rogers or Lowell when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis on April 4, 1968. But the slaying spurred riots in cities across America, and television sets throughout rural Arkansas flickered with images of fire and violence.

“I became very interested in race relations, civil rights and the idea that all people should be treated equally,” Matthews said. “The assassination of Martin Luther King is what instilled in me the notion that we have to treat all people equally.”

In 1971, Matthews served as campaign manager for Gene McKissic, the first African-American elected to be student government president at a predominately white university in the South.

“You have to understand how courageous that was on his part,” McKissic, now a Pine Bluff lawyer, said. “For David to manage my campaign and align himself with a black student … he stepped out front. He went to white constituents all over campus.”

At the time, McKissic said, there were 340 black students on the UA campus and 10,000 white students.

“He has always been willing to take a stand out front on what he thought was right,” McKissic said. “David was able to listen. He could hear what I and other black students had to say, and he could weigh it, not from an emotional standpoint, but through our eyes.”

Now, in Matthews’ office, two pictures hang side by side. One is of Martin Luther King Jr. in a crowd. The other is of the Earth from space. When Matthews starts thinking about his problems, he walks over to the photograph of King and just looks at it for a moment. The minister’s serene face seems to float above a sea of faces in the picture.

“When I start thinking that I’m someone important, I look at this picture,” Matthews said, pointing at the Earth.

“I never dreamed that race relations would become the single most important issue facing Rogers,” he said about his mindset in the 1960s.

Matthews was referring to the city’s Hispanic residents, who make up about 18 percent of the population in Rogers.

“We’ve got a crisis facing Rogers and Springdale right now,” Matthews said. “We cannot allow our two communities — we cannot permit through planning and building and school zones — an east Rogers that is Hispanic and a west Rogers that is affluent and white. We just have to take pains to make sure hatred and bigotry don’t make for segregated areas. I personally believe the Hispanic additions to our community have been a very good thing. Cultural diversity makes us better. Cultural diversity makes us more sensitive.”

Matthews said many people in Rogers pitched in to help three Hispanic families whose homes in the city were destroyed by fire in early March.

“I am proud of what we’re doing in this community to treat people fairly,” he said.

Matthews said he also has strong feeling about religious freedom and the separation of church and state.

“As much as I believe you ought to be in church every Sunday and read the Bible and study your Sunday school lesson, we need the cultural diversity to prevent us from fitting into the trap of a single-minded few,” Matthews said.

“Bill Clinton was the most church-going president we’ve ever had,” Matthews said, “but he was just like the rest of us, a flawed sinner. Some people threw rocks at him … but Clinton was true to life.”

Legislator to Lawyer

During Matthews’ stint in the state General Assembly, he helped lay the groundwork for Interstate 540, the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport and the widening of U.S. Highway 412.

“That was the one and only political position I’ve ever held,” Matthews said.

For years, many people have speculated that Matthews would make an excellent governor, but it appears he’s out of politics for good.

“I have a very wonderful life,” he said. “God has blessed me beyond anything I could have expected … Do I miss politics? Yes. If the Legislature met in Lowell instead of Little Rock, I might run again, but I have lost the allure of elected office.”

Matthews has five law partners now at his firm, Matthews Campbell Rhoads McClure Thompson & Fryauf. Craig Campbell, one of Matthews’ partners, was his best friend in the seventh grade. The two boys made a pact then to become lawyers when they grew up. Campbell is also family now. He married Matthews’ sister Deborah.

Even though he has some big-city clients like AEP SWEPCO and Arvest Bank, Matthews seems to enjoy being a small-town lawyer and helping one person at a time.

“People come to you with their problems, when they’re hurting,” he said.

Matthews has found that, in some ways, he can get more done as a lawyer than a legislator.

Summary: Rogers lawyer, David Matthews, talks about his life as a legislator and attorney.

Matthews Said School Reform Requires Vigilance

David Matthews represented the Rogers and Bentonville school districts in Arkansas’ landmark school-funding case.

The school district in Lake View, a town of 531 people in Phillips County, filed the suit in 1992 in Pulaski County Chancery Court saying the state’s funding formula violated the U.S. Constitution and Arkansas Constitution because it was inequitable, with smaller, poor school districts receiving less money.

In 1994, then-Chancery Judge Annabelle Clinton Imber found that the school-funding system didn’t violate the U.S. Constitution, but that it did violate two provisions of the Arkansas Constitution.

In 1996, the trial court certified the Lake View case as a class-action lawsuit, as requested by Lake View, with the class including all school districts in the state.

The Rogers and Bentonville school districts intervened in the case instead of becoming part of the class. Matthews, who had represented the Rogers School District since 1989, served as the attorney and argued in a cross-complaint in 2000 that, in addition to being inequitable, the school-funding formula didn’t provide enough money for any of the 310 school districts in the state.

Chancery Judge R. Collins Kilgore agreed, declaring in 2001 that the school-funding system violated the Arkansas Constitution because it was inadequate and inequitable.

Since then, the Arkansas Legislature has gone to work to find more money for public education. It plans to provide an additional $439 million for the upcoming 2004-05 school year through a new funding formula under Act 59 of the Second Extraordinary Session of 2003, which was sponsored by Sen. Dave Bisbee, R-Rogers.

The funding formula for the 2004-05 school year provides $5,400 per student. In addition to that base funding, the formula provides $480 to the schools for each student who is on free or reduced-price school lunches, and that amounts to 47 percent of the 450,000 students in Arkansas.

If more than 70 percent of the district’s students are on free or reduced-price lunches, the district gets $960 per student instead of $480. If the rate is 90 percent (which includes 10 districts, five of which will be consolidated) the amount is $1,440 instead of $480.

For each student who needs help with English, the districts will receive $195. The districts will receive $3,250 for each student who needs extra help learning in an “alternative learning environment.” Those include vocational schools, separate academic settings or for students who have been expelled.

With the new funding formula, the Bentonville School District will receive $6,056 per student next year, up 15 percent from $5,277 in the current school year. Rogers will receive $6,051 per student, up 16 percent from $5,226 this year. Fayetteville’s per student funding will jump by 18 percent from $4,976 to $5,875, and Springdale’s will increase by 16 percent from $5,341 to $6,204.

The state’s Supreme Court will review the Legislature’s work, and lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene the special session in June.

“It will require constant vigilance,” Matthews said. “Children have to spend more time with a good teacher. They can’t have a hungry belly. The key is identifying children and learning needs as early as possible and addressing those needs.

“You can’t fix education by throwing money at it, but you can’t fix education without more money.”