Childhood in Arkansas

Random House didn’t want a book about a politician. They told Bumpers he could end the book with 1970, the year he was elected governor. The publisher wanted a book about what it was like to grow up in a small town in Arkansas during the Great Depression.

That’s what Dale Bumpers gave them — a book about his four-year-old brother Raymond dying of dysentery after eating a rotten watermelon from the garden, about people getting typhoid fever because water wells were only steps from the outhouse, about malaria, town drunks and angry men fighting with knives outside Doc’s Cafe and Pool Hall.

Bumpers writes about listening to the radio in the dark because his mother couldn’t stand the idea of two electrical devices being on at the same time (the light and the radio). He tells of families that lived on dog food, “fire-eating” evangelists who exorcised demons, a cow that mangled his big toe when it miscalculated its jump over a ditch and landed on his bare foot and about being so frail that the townsfolk wondered every year if he would make it through the winter.

Bumpers’ book is a revelation of sorts, putting a very human face on a revered public figure. As a newspaper delivery boy addicted to Eskimo Pies and Coca-Cola, Bumpers shorted his father’s bank account when he didn’t fully repay loans for papers. He guarded the Kroger store where he worked while his boss had an affair with a married woman on sacks of cow feed in the storeroom. Bumpers tested his future wife’s “devotion” every Saturday night while parking at the local cemetery.

In other words, Dale Bumpers was a pretty normal teenager. When he did stray from the path, his father was there to set him straight. His father instilled in him a sense of “honor, decency and good values,” Bumpers wrote.

Bumpers finally did get around to writing about being governor — on Page 215 of the 293-page book.