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Meeting Harry Pearson was quite an experience. There was a live concert at the Pine Bluff High School Gym, the McFaddin Fieldhouse in 1963 or '64. Harry wrote a pretty scathing review in the newspaper which concerned Jerry Lee Lewis, "Ace" Cannon, and others. Tommy Riggs and I had attended the concert, and took great offense at the review. Tom decided to call Harry from the radio station (KPBA) and give him a piece of his mind. However, Harry invited us over to his apartment to discuss the review. I was very impressed by Pearson's intelligence and musical knowledge, and we eventually became great friends, with Harry exposing me to a lot of classical music and the fact that he had worked for the Nashville Tennessean newspaper and happened to know a lot of the music industry people I had met while I was in Nashville, plus interesting things about recordings I was familiar with already. In the next few years, many elegant and exciting parties were enjoyed at Harry's upstairs apartment which included a lot of luminaries from the world of arts... because of that, I almost wound up working for the Pine Bluff Commercial. Instead, I continued in radio for many more years. Harry was instrumental in the effort to save the Buffalo River in Arkansas through his investigative reporting of Arkansas news in the paper... Some of the people I met at Harry's include Richard Arnold, a federal judge now, Bill Simmons of the AP, Jane Stern the conservationist, among others. Our favorite drink at his apartment was the "bomb", made with Seagram's gin, orange juice, Hawaiian Punch, Wink, Sprite, plus lemon and lime juice. It was quite a summer cooler! Harry started and is still managing a prestigious magazine in New York called "The Absolute Sound". |
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