Biographies

BIOS

Nora Lee LawlessC. Willard McNuttGracie Mae HarrisonElla MoormanRobert E. Love


NORA LEE LAWLESS

Longtime math teacher set example of strenghth

By Nancy Dockter

For more than 30 years she taught math at North Little Rock High School, but her students, and others who knew her, learned much more than numbers from Nora Lee Lawless. From her example, they saw proof, as clear as any written on a blackboard, that life's toughest problems can be solved by determination and the resolve not to settle for excuses.

And when droves of past students came to pay their last respects to Mrs. Lawless, after her death at age 89 on Tuesday, Oct. 26, they signed the guest register not only with their names but also with the year they had been in her class, as if to say, this is when she touched my life-I have not forgotten.

They say they learned quickly that "This is too hard, I can't do it" wasn't going to elicit her sympathies, because she didn't allow that in her own life.

Hers was a series of victories large and small against a difficult physical handicap-the loss of her left arm when she was struck by a car at age 16-the she never used as a reason to give up on any dream.

"You got a bit of her philosophy along with her teaching," said former mayor Casey Laman, a longtime friend. If ever she found a student's work lacking, he said, she would say; "You can do that, use your head. What's the matter with you, are you wool gathering?"

Former co-worker and friend Mary Hess, who taught biology at the high school, said Mrs. Lawless's no-nonsense and at times unpredictable, humorous style kept students' attention and won their respect."

She kept students interested because they didn't know what she'd do next," she said. "They got a kick out of her. She'd put that little stub of an arm to good use, prop herself up on the blackboard and use the other arm to write. But if she wasn't pleased she had a nice remark to make-would kind of bring them to their senses."

Former student David Blevins agreed: "She had a way of teaching that kept everyone interested, not just a cookbook approach. She knew how to get the best out of her students."

Securing a teaching post in her hometown's high school where she eventually headed the math department, was "the accomplishment of her life," says Daisy Henderson, her daughter. A shortage of teachers during World War II gave her entree to the job and sweet victory over the discrimination she had suffered more than 10 years earlier, when she was fired from her first teaching post. Into her second year at McRae School, despite a successful work record, she had been dismissed when, "one day her principal finally noticed she had only one arm," her daughter recalled. "She'd handled herself so well it [had been] overlooked." But in those days, it was a violation of district policy to employ the handicapped-and so she was let go.

Her professional success was the fulfillment of an early goal, set by her mother who wanted her three children to get a college education.

The oldest child of traveling salesman Elisha and Nora Lee Harrod, a teacher, Mrs. Lawless was born in Wheatley but moved to Levy when she was 12. In local schools she excelled academically with plans to attend Arkansas Teachers College in Conway (now the University of Central Arkansas) after graduation. She also excelled in basketball and music, serving as a pianist at Levy Baptist Church.

But one day just weeks before her high school graduation, all of that changed. As she was walking across the street in Levy, a careless motorist hit her, mangling her left arm beyond repair.

After the accident and a year of recuperating, she went on to earn a two-year teaching degree, the requirement then, and married a young North Little Rock man, H.W. Valentine. And with the job at McRae, it seemed her dreams had come true after all, but within a couple of years, she was without work, her husband had left her, and she had a small child to take care of.

Babysitting, laundry and taking in boarders would be their only means of support for the next 10 years, until Fuller High School of the Pulaski district hired her to teach science.

Towards the close of World War II, she was introduced by mutual friends to a young soldier, Orland Lawless. They soon married, and until his death in 1976, enjoyed a happy life together.

Over the years, Mrs. Lawless, undeterred by her disability, mastered many tasks. She drove a car with a floorboard stickshift, fished, gardened and canned. She made dresses for her daughter, detailing them with fine embroidery and tiny tucks. And in her later years, she did the same for her grandchildren as well as make quilts. One, her daughter recalled, was pieced from many small equilateral triangles of slippery polyester, a feat for any seamstress.

She also returned to college, earning a bachelor's degree, with a double major of science and math.

One winter during WOrld War II, when most men were away in the military, Mrs. Lawless agreed to take on the ultimate challenge for anyone with one arm-be a coach, of both boys and girls basketball at Fuller High. And she did so with a considerable degree of athletic prowess, family members say.

"She could hit the goal from the center line," her daughter said. More inportantly, she could command the respect needed to train a winning team: That year, her girls won the state championship.

Survivors include her daughter and husband, Daisy and Morris Henderson of North Little Rock; grandson and wife, Orland and Sharon Henderson; two great-grandsons, Jason and Joshua Henderson and one great-granddaughter, Ashley Nicole Henderson, all of North Little Rock.

Mrs. Lawless was preceded in death by her husband, Orland Lawless; her sister and her brother. Funeral services were held Friday, Oct. 29, at North Little Rock Funeral Home with the Rev. Bob Inman officiating. Burial was at Little Rock National Cemetery

The Times - November 4, 1999


C. WILLARD McNUTT

Founder, former mayor of Sherwood dies

C. Willard McNutt, 83, one of the founders of the city of Sherwood and its mayor from 1953 through 1957, died Friday, Feb. 19.

A native of Little Rock who married a young woman from North Little Rock in 1942, Mr. McNutt chose to settle in Sherwood in 1946, after he returned from wartime duty as an electricians mate in the Navy Seabees, serving in Newfoundland, Philippines and Hawaii.

The couple was one of the first three families to move to the new modest homes being built on gravel roads in the undeveloped area several miles north of the city of North Little Rock at a time when North Little Rock was suffering from a severe housing shortage.

The town of Sherwood was incorporated two years later with 714 inhabitants.

There they would quickly become pillars of the community. He would help form a local Optimist's Club and the local volunteer fire department. She would organize the Home Demonstration Club and help start the first Miss Sherwood Contest that raised $500 with a penny a vote, the proceeds of which helped fund the fledgiing city's budget.

Mr. McNutt would serve as the third mayor of the young town succeeding Kenneth W. Coulter, under whom he had served as alderman. During his administration he would concentrate on improving the volunteer fire department and parks and recreation sites.

With his wife Norma he would also spend many hours working on the old Y.M.C.A. building, donated by Camp Robinson, that was also used as the first meeting place for the City Council. He also served on the board of the Y.M.C.A. and also wrote occasionally for The Sherwood News, the town's first community newspaper. He was a member of Masonic Lodge #403.

During the 54 years that he resided in Sherwood, Mr. McNutt served on numerous boards and commissions, including the Fire Commission, Sewer Commission and Electrical Board. A year ago, he served as one of the grand marshalls of a parade celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sherwood.

"It's the best city in Arkansas to live in," he said at the time of the community he had helped to create. "It's crime-free and people are neighborly. I wouldn't live anywhere else."

In his spare time, he was an avid fisherman, spending much of his free time on Lake Conway.

Survivors include his wife of 57 years, Norma Chudy McNutt; brother and sister-in-law, Floyd L. and Marry Lou McNutt; a sister, Mildred M. Orsburn, all of Houston, Texas; nephew, Bill Orsburn and wife, Bunny of Little Rock; brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Dick and Jean Chudy of Carlisle; and daughter, Lu Madru.

Funeral services were held Monday, Feb. 22, at North Little Rock Funeral Home Chapel. Burial was in Edgewood Memorial Park.

The Times - March 4, 1999


GRACIE MAE HARRISON

Energetic homemaker thrived on hard work

By Nancy Dockter

Gracie Mae Harrison learned about hard work as a child on a farm nestled in the Ozark foothills near Mt. Nebo, and she accpeted hard work as a fact of adult life along with maintaining a household and raising two sons.

Born long before federal crop insurance and food stamps, she grew up in a time when survival was solely up to a family's own efforts-and the charity of their neighbors.

Her parents had supported their brook of 10, raising cattle, hogs, and chickens and a few dairy cows. With a milk separator, they also collected cream and sold it to their neighbors.

"It was a rough life-the children plowed and worked on the farm like grown people," said Robert, Mrs. Harrison's youngest son.

"In the mornings, they slopped the hogs, gathered eggs, milked the cows, then did it all again in the evening."

Mrs. Harrison, who lived in North Little Rock for the last two decades of her life, died Thursday, Feb. 25, of complications following surgery for a dislocated shoulder. She was 88.

The second oldest child in her family, she was born near the little community of Delaware. Family members describe her as a chubby child with brown hair and blue eyes, who after her morning chores walked with her brothers and sisters to town to the two-room New Liberty School, which only offered eight grades.

In time, Winford Harrison, a young man who lived a few miles down the road, became her beau, and the couple married Dec. 5, 1928, two months after Mrs. Harrison's 18th birthday.

Their first child, Lloyd was born in 1930, and soon after they moved to the Little Rock area to sharecrop, settling east of the Little Rock Airport. There they rented a house for $3 a month and raised cotton, sorghum and corn, working the fields with horse-drawn plows. Mrs. Harrison also took a job at the Little Rock Basket factory.

When World War II broke out, the couple gave up sharecropping. Mrs. Harrison started working at the Jacksonville Ordanance Plant on an assembly line manufacturing bomb detonators, and Mr. Harrison took a job at the Little Rock Airport.

When the ordnance plant closed in 1945, Mrs. Harrison found work at the newly opened Timex plant, which was then located in downtown Little Rock at Capitol and Center streets. She worked at Timex for 30 years, as an assembly line worker and later as a watch inspector until retiring in 1976.

When her husband Winford died the following year, Mrs. Harrison moved to North Little Rock and lived with her son, Lloyd.

In her later years, family members describe Mrs. Harrison as a "homebody," who enjoyed her family, a "loving wife, mother and grandmother."

Besides her husband, Mrs. Harrison was preceded in death by four brothers and two sisters.

Survivors include her two sons, Lloyd Harrison of North Little Rock and Robert Harrison, and his wife, Vanda, of Sherwood; five grandchildren, Robbie Dillon and her husband, Rusty; Susan Murray and her husband, Marion; Jana King and her husband, Kenneth; Thomas Harrison and Tim Harrison; five great-grandchildren; a brother, Calvin Farnam of Delaware, Ark.; and three sisters, Wanda Saunders of Florida, and Marie Raney and Irene Nelson of California.

Funeral services were Saturday, Feb. 27, at Roller-Chenal Funeral Home Chapel with Rev. Dave Cypert officiating. Graveside services were at Elizabeth Cemetery in New Blaine, Ark.

The Times - March 4, 1999


ELLA MOORMAN

Wise and faith-centered, she lived 107 years

By Kitty Chism

At age 107, Ella Moorman had grown physically frail, the line of her long life chiseled appreciably into her hands and brow but her mind still keen and interested in the world around her. She was also as outspoken as ever, say those who knew her best.

So she often wondered aloud to her pastor why the Lord wanted to keep her on this earth for so long when she was so ready to take leave.

"She had prepared herself to go to the home on the mountain," said the Rev. D.L. Richardson pastor of the First Baptist Church on Percy Machin Drive where she had attended in recent years.

She had even asked that the church choir sing her favorite old gospel song "Home on the Mountain" at her funeral.

The choir obliged last Saturday when longtime neighbors and friends gathered at her church to celebrate her long and active life.

Ella Johnson Curry Moorman, a woman of enormous faith, practical wisdom and strong convictions about the rights and wrongs of the world, had died Saturday, Feb. 13.

"Sister Moorman was one of the great, old pioneers of North Little Rock," said the Rev. O.C. Jones, who had been first her Sunday School student and then her pastor for many years at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church.

But to the end, Jones said, "her mind was very alert, and she had beautiful thoughts-and concerns about the world."

The only child of farm workers who picked cotton in the fields east of England, Ark. she had lost her father when she was 12 and still attending a one-room schoolhouse down the road.

She would marry a man from North Little Rock who was as strong willed as she was, a handsome widower with three small children she had met on a streetcar ride home from her job as a cleaning lady in an office in downtown Little Rock.

They would marry in 1930, and she would raise Curtis Moorman's children as her own and follow him to Missouri and Portsmouth, Va., during the war until jobs dried up and they returned to North Little Rock.

He would retire on disability, and together they would become deeply involved in their church and community. She would join Eastern Star. He would become active in the NAACP and local politics.

They would reap a brick bungalow out of the urban renewal of Military Heights in the 1950s and on his insistence, get it built on the same site wherehe grew up-a few blocks from Old Main High School

And when he heard that the Odd Fellow's cemetery, where his parents were buried, was being dug up to make way for the Ramada Inn, he called a lawyer and raced over to the site and got the developers to agree to identify and move the bodies they were digging up with such abandon. It was never done right, she recalled with tears in her eyes during an interview a few years ago.

The Moormans would read newspapers voraciously all of their 54 years of marriage and prod each other to stay involved and connected to the world around them

They would also stand firmly behind their obligations and the commandments of God, take care of her invalid mother for five difficult years before her death.

And, wise beyond their years, many people in the community "would go to them for counsel about person and family problems," said Jones, who attributes his own decision to go into the ministry to Moorman's advice. Johnes offered Ella Moorman's eulogy last Saturday.

"I talked about standing ground. She belonged to that era when people stood by their convictions. She did not mind if people disagreed with her, but she stood her ground. She stood up for what she believed in."

And always, even when her body grew weak and her hearing began to fail, she maintained her sense of humor.

When a newspaper photographer asked to take her picture for a story when she was 105, she initialy refused.

"You don't want no picture of me," she quipped. "You put a picture of me in the paper, I never will get me another husband."

The Times - February 25, 1999


ROBERT E. LOVE

Tenacious war vet succumbs to cancer

By Kity Chism

Robert E. Love's world changed unalterably that day the Air Force doctor told him that after two vain searches for a tumor to exlain his double vision and weakening limbs, they had finally figured out what was wrong with him.

He had multiple sclerosis, the military doctor in Montgomery, Ala., told him, and at age 29 he would soon be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Married with two toddlers and in his second enlistment in the military, Mr. Love initially reacted like most people would, certain his emerging paralysis would curtail his activity and usefullness. But like the hospital buddy who showed him how to navigate the base and how to shoot pool as well as any person with legs, he would prove himself wrong-again and again.

Relegated to a full disability retirement before age 30, he looked for things he could do better than other people because he did not have to go off to work every day. And eventually he settled on elective office as the sort of pot hole politician who could make a small town like Sherwood a better place to live.

Robert E. Love, Ward 3 alderman in Sherwood for nearly 24 years and a model of how attitude can conquer disability, died Sunday, Sept. 29, of prostate cancer at age 64.

"He was not always able to participate, but he was always there, like he was in his chair at the end of the driveway when I leared to ride a bike" said his oldest of three children, Sue Love Bagwell. "And he approached everything with humor. He made light of his chair, poked fun at himself, and taught us that life was a lot of fun and we should not have a sad day."

Born in Little Rock, the fourth of seven children of a landscape architect, he attended Little Rock Tech, then enlisted in the Navy in 1951 in time to serve first in Japan and then in the Korean War. Six years later he got out, tried a variety of civilian jobs, and after 60 days decided he missed the service and joined the Air Force.

Stationed near Omaha, he met his wife when a friend invited him to her home after church one day. "And it wasn't too long after that we were married in Hiawatha, Kan.," his wife Evelyn Love said.

After the doctor's diagnosed his multiple sclerosis, he moved his family back to the Little Rock area to be near his brothers and sisters, settling in Sylvan Hills until six years later, when the Veterans Administration built a wheelchair accessible house for them at Wildwood Avenue and Longfield Street.

The house became something of a Sherwood landmark, as Mr. Love, upbeat and gregarious, often wheeled himself outside in the late afternoon and waved to passing cars and pedestrians on their way home from work.

If he loved anything as much as people, it might have been music, though not until he was an adult did he learn to play the trumpet well enough to solo in church or to write music so that he and his daughter Sue could play duets together on the trumpet and French horn. And many a Christmas season he would wheel himself out to their garage and play carols on his trumpet for all of his neighbors to hear and enjoy.

"My wheels are slow, but they can go," he touted on his re-election business cards every four years, when his wife and youngsters became his door to door legs as he drove around in his van asking residents to vote for him.

"He loved the job [of alderman], he really did, because he felt he could get things done for people," his wife said. "He really enjoyed watching Sherwood grow, and he was proud of so many things," proud of the ball fields, proud of the Kiehl Avenue pedestrian overpass and proud of Woody's Sherwood Forest Park and hospitality house.

The folks at the VA said he wore out more wheel chairs and specially equipped vans than any disabled veteran they had ever seen, Evelyn Love said. And that was because Mr. Love was always on the go, traveling or fishing or visiting schools and hospitals or tending to ground breakings and city hall matters.

"Our motto was use what you have and forget what you've lost," she said of the approach to life they had agreed to accept together-as a team.

So even when his health began to deteriorate early this year, he insisted that he would run for his City Council seat again, believing that he could serve part, if not all, of another term, his wife said.

Only in the last few months did he seem to acknowledge that the end was near, his daughter said. And then he set about to plan his own funeral at First Baptist Church, where more than 500 people gathered to say their goodbyes last week.

He insisted that "the first three letters in funeral were 'fun,'" his daughter Sue said, and that there should be no tears, only joyous music, children's voices, a chorus of hand bells and some light hearted memories-of a devoted public servant and family man who took life one day at a time.

Besides his wife and daughter, Sue, he is survived by one son, Robert S. Love of Cabot; another daughter, Shirley Love Moore of North Little Rock, and three grandchildren.

Burial was in the National Cemetery in Little Rock. The family requests that memorials be made to the Multiple Sclerosis Society, the American Cancer Society or the Jack Evans Senior Center in Sherwood.

The Times - October 10, 1996