Remembering a local hero

Walter Ed Scales was the second person I shook hands with when I walked in the door of the Log Cabin Democrat to start a new job my first in journalism. Joe McGee met me and made the introduction to Scales.

Scales and I were the Log Cabin's reporters under managing editor McGee.

Within a few days of working together and in conversations, it was obvious that Scales was a young man on the rise. He was three years older and perhaps three times more experienced in life.

Scales was a local sports hero, an outstanding halfback on the Conway Wampus Cat football team and a strong player at forward on the basketball team. He played football as a freshman at Arkansas State Teachers College then transferred to the University of Missouri and to its nationally renowned journalism school. He knew where his long-range future lay.

After college and a hitch in the Navy, Scales worked as a reporter for the Hot Springs Sentinel Record, then the Log Cabin, followed by a stint with the Morrilton Democrat before he joined Arkansas Farm Bureau as a public relations official. He was with Farm Bureau 34 years.

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Scales was the only child of two well-known and popular Conway citizens. His father, Walter Scales, was the long-time manager of Conway Corp. His mother, Gussie Scales, was a Conway teacher. Her field was expression in the old days, with this renamed and expanded into speech, drama and theater later. Recently, the auditorium at Conway High-East was named for Gussie Scales, a teacher who well earned the label of "beloved."

Many adjectives can be used to describe the young, the middle-aged and the elderly Walter Ed Scales. He was a news reporter in the basic sense get the story, get it right, get it in the paper. Many neophytes don't make it in our line of work because they can't focus on those three essentials. Scales could and did.

In the mid-1950s Scales made the switch from newspapers to public relations. It was a time of change, though most of us didn't realize it. That novelty called television was gaining momentum. The world of agriculture was in transit from family farmers to corporate operations and in Arkansas, from cotton to soybeans and rice. Organization was required for farmers all over to survive and compete amid the increasing governmental controls and supports.

Arkansas Farm Bureau needed a Walter Ed Scales in 1956.

In 1951, when Scales returned to his hometown and joined the Log Cabin staff, a brand-new entity was on hand in the community, Lake Conway. He quickly became a fisherman and a capable one.

The early Lake Conway is difficult for people today to imagine. It was a watery jungle. Narrow boat trails had been cut in the flooded Palarm Bottoms that were choked with cypress and various other water-tolerant trees and bushes. The mosquitoes were so big they had ticks on them. Scales took along this writer in quests for bass a few times, with Scales handling an old-type level-wind reel effectively, and the companion spending long minutes working out tangles.

Scales wrote the first Log Cabin report of the Lake Conway Monster, an amusing serial episode that finally faded away when Log Cabin publisher Frank Robins Jr., decreed, "No more Lake Conway Monster stories unless they are accompanied by a photograph."

Walter Ed Scales died Wednesday at age 81. His funeral is today.

Mosby can be contacted by e-mail at jhmosby@cyberback.com