By John Brummett

Back in the blowing-going 1980s I was holding forth six days a week in a column on the left side of the front page of the metro-state section of the late, great Arkansas Gazette.

In those days a woman would call me from time to time and identify herself only as “Susan,” which she managed to stretch into four syllables.

She was a drawling and acerbic piece of work, an acid-tongued conservative, and she loved to spar from her telecommunicative anonymity.

People in the public eye amused her in an ironic fashion. “Susan” certainly could wax sarcastic.

I recall how she ridiculed Michael Dukakis both on account of his politics and his shortness. She was especially biting on the zany exploits at the time of a certain talking-tall sheriff of Pulaski County known as “TR.”

A few years later a woman named Martha Shoffner got elected to the state House of Representatives as a nominal Democrat from Newport. And it came to pass that I heard her say something one day.

This, I thought, was “Susan.”

I confronted her. Her words denied it. Her expression didn’t.

For some reason, Shoffner got elected state treasurer, still as a nominal Democrat. It made no sense. She had no credential. She had been a pointless state representative.

But, as I’ve explained, that’s what those constitutional offices housed in the state Capitol are for — pointless political hanging-on.

The treasurer provides the cash drawer for state government. It does nothing the state Finance and Administration Department couldn’t do cheaper, more easily and better.

Shoffner won big over a fiscally trained budget specialist off U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s staff. The explanation for her smashing victory evades me still.

Over the years I forgot about Shoffner, and this “Susan” before. State treasurer is a good place to be forgotten.

But then Shoffner burst on the front page last week.

First, the context, tiresome though it’s getting: The Little Rock newspaper has been writing about the state constitutional officers getting state-owed SUVs and, except for Gov. Mike Beebe and Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, using them for personal purposes without treating that as taxable income.

Beebe is different because he has a State Police security detail that moves him around in an agency vehicle. Halter is different because he kept up with his personal miles and reported them as income.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel subsequently fell over himself giving up his SUV and professing that he’d pay back the state for personal use. Other constitutional officers started scurrying around to begin treating the personal miles as income.

Except for Shoffner, that is.

She told a reporter that she deserved her tax-free Tahoe; that the IRS wasn’t likely to bother her or anyone else over such nonsense; that this was her only vehicle; that everyone else was just doing political posturing; that she’d need to be driving an 18-wheeler before she started keeping a log of her miles; and that she couldn’t fathom what the difference was with Beebe except that he had a “manservant,” meaning a State
Police officer, at his personal disposal.

As I read, I was transported.

It was the late 1980s. I was in the Arkansas Gazette newsroom. I was reared back in my chair and on the phone. I was equal parts amused and irked by the voice of my frequent caller, this woman calling herself “Susan.”

So I called over the other morning to the treasurer’s office and asked for Shoffner, who hadn’t yet arrived in her taxpayer Tahoe. I asked that the phone message seek a returned call from either Shoffner or “Susan.”

Her deputy, Wes Goodner, called back a couple of hours later to say he’d like to e-mail a statement from Shoffner apologizing for that “manservant’ crack.

I said I didn’t care about that. I asked him to tell her that I would be writing speculatively for Sunday about the striking similarity between her tone in the paper that morning and the tone I recalled in a telephone acquaintance of mine calling herself “Susan” in the late 1980s.

Goodner began laughing. He asked if this might have to do with “the days of TR.” Why, yes, I said.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.