Stanley E. Reed: The Renaissance Farmer

Editor’s note:  This story, written by Eric Francis, appears in the latest magazine edition of Talk Business Arkansas. Reed will be inducted in the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame on Friday night.

Stanley Reed grew up on a Marianna farm, the son of a sharecropper who taught him about hard work and common sense. Reed’s father would pull him out of basketball practice in high school when there was work to be done, but he was still named best overall athlete his senior year. At the University of Arkansas, he was president of his fraternity and walked on to the football team. He met the love of his life and married her while he was still in law school at the U of A. After he received his J.D., he notched the high score on the state bar exam.

The farm boy had become an attorney-at-law, poised for a career as different from his daddy’s as could be. That sounds like a script for a movie about the American Dream. But when it came down to it, for Reed, the law couldn’t compete with the farm.

“He had opened an office, but that lure of farming just kept calling,” said his wife Charlene. “They bleed dirt, I think; my son’s kind of the same way. In the end, he was trying to do both and he finally had to close the law office.”

It wasn’t a bad choice, for Reed became one of the most respected figures in the state’s agricultural community. The Reeds were named Lee County’s Farm Family of the Year in 1984. He would eventually spend 21 years on the board of directors of the Arkansas Farm Bureau – including five as its president – and a decade on the board of trustees of the University of Arkansas, which he chaired during his final two years. And those were only the most notable of the positions held over the years by Reed, who died on July 15, 2011.

Charlene Reed said her husband felt his two degrees from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville – in agricultural engineering and law – complemented each other greatly.

“He would say the legal education is the best, well-rounded education a person can get – you study human nature,” she said. “Agriculture is also one of those professions where you have to be a mechanic and a chemist and you have to be a boss and know finances and government programs.”

Like his work ethic, Reed’s involvement in the Farm Bureau is something he grew up with.

“His father, who really didn’t do any public service, was really involved with the Farm Bureau,” said Charlene. “Also, our local Farm Bureau Insurance agent encouraged him right away to get on the [Lee County] board. One of the big things in Farm Bureau is the grass roots – you go from the bottom up, not the top down.”

Another influence was his father-in-law.

Charlene Reed’s dad, Arnold Burner, was an executive vice president with the Farm Bureau and worked there some 30 years. Reed became interested in policy development and would wind up serving on the boards of the Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Co., the Southern Farm Bureau Life Insurance Co., and the American Farm Bureau.

Reed’s appointment to the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees came from Gov. Mike Huckabee in 1998, but it wasn’t his only public service. He also sat on the Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board and the Arkansas Cotton Support Committee, and it was through that work as well as his Farm Bureau activities that Huckabee got to know him and, when he needed someone to represent the eastern part of the state on the U of A Board of Trustees, to seek him out.

“We were thrilled. It was probably one of the highlights of our life,” said Charlene. “Going to the University of Arkansas was such a changing point for him. He didn’t go to the Fayetteville campus but for one day before he entered the school. His father was very adamant about where he wanted him to go. And what an impact it had on his life.”

All three of the couple’s children attended the flagship campus in Fayetteville, as well. But the trustees oversee the entire system, she noted, and Reed was very interested in the community colleges, serving on the committee that oversaw them and visiting the campuses so he could get to know each one.

“He had a passion for education, and he felt very much that that was how we can change Arkansas and make it a better place, through education,” she said.

Tommy May, former Simmons First Bank CEO and chairman of the Simmons First Foundation, was one of Reed’s close friends and recalls him as someone who had his priorities in the right order.

“He was a committed Christian who lived his faith; a great husband, father, and grandfather; and he worked tirelessly on his farm business and for many volunteer organizations,” said May. “Stanley was a difference-maker, and he taught a lot of us not just to get involved, but to do so to make a difference.”

According to May, Reed was also “a leader of leaders,” committed to making sure things were done the right way.

“You could trust him with the most confidential information, you could trust him to always give you his best advice, and you could trust him to follow the ‘Do Right Rule,’” he said. “I asked him to join our corporate board of directors because he had a unique ability to digest a lot of information and come to a well-informed decision.”

Reed’s wife Charlene said faith was very important to him, and he served as a deacon and Sunday school teacher at First Baptist Church in Marianna. And he was such an easygoing guy, Charlene said, that he was always able to get along with folks who might have held divergent opinions.

“He and Skip Rutherford, to the day he died, were very good friends. Stanley was very conservative,” she said, and then added with admirable understatement, “Skip was probably more liberal than we are.”