I’ve just received word that Jack Meriweather, 79, died this morning at St. Vincent Hospice.

Knowing his death was near, Ernie Dumas, currently traveling, wrote an advance obituary on his frequent lunch companion that is a rich slice of Arkansas history — ranging from Paragould to Texarkana to Little Rock City Hall to corridors of power in Washington, to the University of Arkansas with stops at Charles Portis and the Arkansas Gazette. It is, most of all, a tribute to a friend. It begins here and will continue on the jump. Ruebel Funeral Home will be handling arrangements.

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JOHN T. JACK MERIWETHER

  • JOHN T. “JACK” MERIWETHER

John T. “Jack” Meriwether, whose public-service career brought rich dividends for two Arkansas cities and Arkansas’s public universities, died Thursday at Little Rock at the age of 79.

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Meriwether, who was born and reared in Paragould, was the city manager of Texarkana and Little Rock and later vice president of the University of Arkansas, a job he used to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the state’s system of higher education. Between those jobs, he was general manager of the Arkansas Gazette and vice president for development of the First National Bank of Paragould, on whose board he served for more than 30 years.

When Meriwether resigned as city manager in 1974 to help run the bank at Paragould, the Arkansas Democrat’s editorial cartoonist, Jon Kennedy, caricatured him embracing the Little Rock skyline under the caption “The City that Jack Built.”

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