Richard Davies, longtime executive director of ADPT, talks to a former employee about state park history, cigar boxes, and his trusty flintlock rifle.

By Matt McNair Photography bay Katie Childs

We were twenty-five minutes into our interview when Richard Davies asked what was quite obviously a rhetorical question, but I just went ahead and answered it anyway because I had anticipated him asking it and I’m helpless in the face of validation.

“And do you know how they managed camping fees in all of that,” he asked. Again, this was rhetorical, but I did indeed know how “they” (various superintendents of individual Arkansas state parks) managed “all of that” (managing and maintaining components of an overextended and underfunded department). I knew Davies was going to say it was a cigar box, because that is how those things worked in those days.

“Cigar box!” This from me, because I was excited to know the answer and wanted Davies to know that I knew it, bad enough to find even baseline journalistic decorum unsustainable. (Davies seemed unperturbed by this breach, but that’s pretty on-brand for him.) But the reason I knew the answer and was proud of the fact says quite a lot about Davies, and seems relevant. There are lots of profiles of Davies out there, rightfully so, and I’ve even seen the cigar box mentioned in a few.

But I don’t think any of the other interviewers knew about the cigar box beforehand.

I heard the story about the cigar box my first day of work at Arkansas State Parks. I worked at the central office in Little Rock and even though my section wasn’t even all that involved with the department’s actual state parks (it lived there for bookkeeping purposes as much as anything else), the orientation process was a crash course in the culture and lore of Arkansas State Parks, in which the story about the cigar box — or boxes, rather, the literal containers in which an entire fiscal year’s worth of user fees were stored in state parks all across the system — figured prominently. This was in 2013, by which time the ASP system had been considered one of —  if not the — best state park systems in the United States for quite some time; a park system of expertly managed natural areas and impeccably maintained facilities, a budget north of $100 million and revenues topping $20 million, and a policy of free admission.

That is a far cry from keeping the funds in a cigar box, was the point of all the orientation-week storytelling, and the further point was that each and every employee, regardless of post or relative importance, was responsible for keeping the cigar box and its attendant disrepair in the past. To help drive all of this home, a new hire would get walked all through the building to meet all the different people that had a hand in keeping the ship aright, including a stop at the office of Richard Davies, who since 1990 had served as Executive Director of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, but who had earlier, as the Director of Arkansas State Parks, been instrumental in turning the state park system from a ramshackle collection of pretty places, overseen by well-meaning people with wholly inadequate financial and administrative resources, into the nationally-admired institution it had become.

He was, in other words, the man who had gotten rid of the cigar box.

Old Ties, New Vision

Richard Davies might well have been the person in the state best suited to getting rid of the cigar box from the get-go, for reasons that have been covered in other profiles but that bear repeating here. For one thing, his family is famously tied to Arkansas’s state parks: His grandfather, Sam, was appointed the first Arkansas State Parks Director in 1937, based in part on his prior work designing and (along with crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC) building much of the iconic rockwork infrastructure in Petit Jean State Park, the first park in the state’s system and still one of the most loved and visited. His father, Ladd, also had a hand in the development of Petit Jean; while still working toward his engineering degree at the University of Arkansas, Ladd joined Sam and his CCC crews on top of the mountain. In one of the more impressive instances of on-the-job training one is ever likely to see, the young engineer-to-be designed and oversaw the construction of a bridge over Cedar Creek. That bridge, now known as the Davies Bridge, is on the National Register of Historic Places and perhaps the most iconic structure in a park chockablock with them.

While family ties to the park system’s origin and to state government generally — Davies’s father, whose specialty was sanitation engineering, worked for and was eventually made director of the Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology, precocious design work for the Department of State Parks notwithstanding — surely positioned Richard Davies well for the career he ultimately had, he did not achieve that career through those connections. If he had, there’s little doubt he still would have made a perfectly fine department director and steered the park system competently into the 21st century; it’s hard to imagine him running the ship aground under any circumstances. But to steer it into its present waters, it probably helped that he went looking for a different boarding pass altogether.

“That’s another good story,” says Davies (he has a lot of good stories, though many are off-record) of his eventual run as the chief executive of one of the state’s largest agencies. “What I wanted to do was get in the advertising business.”

In hindsight, the initial impulse to go into the private sector also mirrors the path his grandfather took, with the latter a private-sector civil engineer when he was tapped to direct the construction of Petit Jean State Park. Where Sam Davies was contacted by the state based on his private sector accomplishments, however, Richard Davies was still on the hunt for a job — in the private sector, not State Parks or any other state agency — when circumstance nudged him into public service.

“So anyway, I graduated and went out looking for a job,” he recalls, “and none of the ad agencies were hiring.”

Unlike his father and grandfather, both engineers, Richard Davies had graduated from college with a degree in journalism (there was no degree in advertising at the University of Arkansas; aspirant advertisers majored in either journalism or marketing and took classes in each), and so the paths they took to state government would not have been open to the youngest Davies even if he had decided to lean on family ties to get a foot in the door. Instead, he widened his net in the manner anyone does when plans A-through-who-knows-what-letter have fallen through, casting it to, among other places, Arkansas state agencies that might have need of, or allow for, a journalist.

It worked, and while the state didn’t come calling (as it had for his grandfather), it did call back; one agency that did so was the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism (ADPT), the umbrella agency formed during the reorganization of state government in 1971. While those two divisions, Parks and Tourism, appear as two sides of the same coin today, that was not the case when they were first merged, and it was the tourism side that was the more forward-facing and the larger concern; the state park system, long a minor player in the grand scheme of state government (re: funding), remained as much in the new agency.

These were still the days of the cigar box, in other words.

Dale Bumpers was the governor who oversaw the reorganization of state government that formed the ADPT, and was determined to improve the condition of the state park system, which was growing rapidly despite being chronically underfunded. He tasked the director of ADPT at the time, Bill Henderson, with squaring that circle. Henderson, who had himself majored in journalism, hired Richard Davies to write for the Department of Parks and Tourism, but specifically about Arkansas State Parks; the idea was to elevate the profile of the state park system and, in so doing, generate the public and legislative support necessary to get it adequately funded. For Davies, who of course knew a bit about parks already, this meant learning how a large government agency is administrated, how levers are pulled and sausage made.

“Henderson, to his undying credit,” says Davies, “made me sit in on every meeting he went to.”

A quick study, Davies rapidly gained the trust of his new boss and was given more and more responsibility. “Before long,” he remembers, “I’m writing legislation, and going to…the governor’s office. And it became more and more administrative, rather than just writing.”

Davies had been on the job for three years when the Arkansas State Parks director retired; when Bill Henderson began the search for a replacement, he put Davies to work evaluating candidates. Though relatively young, he had nonetheless been involved with the agency’s administration at the highest level for a very heady three years, and in a move that echoed his father’s youthful surety (Ladd Davies was 19 when he designed the bridge over Cedar Creek), Richard decided he should just run the thing himself.

“If they’re gonna apply, I can apply,” he remembers thinking, reviewing resumés that outstripped his in every way but one: administration of the park system. And so he applied.

“I think there were three of us that got sent to see Governor Pryor, and I got it,” remembers Davies. “I was 26.”

That made Davies the youngest state parks director in the country at the time, but the combination of youth and administrative experience — as well as the deep family ties to Arkansas State Parks — served him well as he set about fulfilling the governor’s mandate to make Arkansas’s state park system something of which the state could be proud, and that could withstand legislative scrutiny come funding time. Cigar boxes wouldn’t do, and Davies knew it.

The evolution of Arkansas State Parks from a collection of gorgeous, albeit a bit rickety, places began just as Richard Davies got his first job with the state, and it was realized in 1996 — Davies   was by this time Executive Director of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism — when voters approved the Conservation Sales Tax (Arkansas Amendment 75), which created a ⅛ cent sales tax to fund the state’s conservation efforts, with 45% of the revenues earmarked for Arkansas State Parks.

That’s how you turn a cigar box from a sorry state of affairs into a piece of institutional lore, and treating every new hire that comes through like they somehow had — and have — a part in it is how you get interrupted during a random interview three decades on.

Back to Basics

Today, a decade into retirement, Richard Davies remains inextricably tied to Petit Jean Mountain. Though he grew up in town, Davies was an avid outdoorsman from childhood; with Allsopp Park near their home in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Little Rock, he and his brothers spent most of their spare time roaming what they referred to as “the woods,” and extended time from school was spent on Petit Jean, where his grandfather had purchased an old homestead while designing the nearby park. While he and his wife Betsy make their home in North Little Rock, the old place on Petit Jean still serves as a getaway and hunting camp for Davies and his extended family.

Some of Davies’s hunting exploits are pretty standard fare: like many Arkansas hunters, he has a weakness for ducks, and like most duck hunters he’ll happily wax nostalgic about the perils of youthful duck hunts (carnivals of sodden indignity, littered with malfunctioning hand-me-down equipment) without expressing any real interest in recreating them (war stories are fun, know-how and operational gear more so). He is also an avid deer hunter, again like many Arkansans, but in this pursuit he bucks convention somewhat: He uses a flintlock rifle.

His interest in hunting with 19th-century technology — with all the added challenge that brings — was sparked decades ago by the introduction of black powder season in Arkansas, which gave hunters using a muzzleloader the chance to bag a deer weeks before the regular (modern gun) season opened.

“When muzzleloading first started, I just had that,” he says, referring to a kit-built muzzleloader popular in the early days of Arkansas’s black powder season. “A lot of young guys did. It was cheaper.”

Like a lot of those young muzzleloading enthusiasts, Davies enjoyed getting an early opportunity to tag a deer and kept after it year after year. Unlike a lot of those other hunters, however, Davies became enthralled with the mechanics at play, the endless tinkering one had to do to keep such a rifle in shooting condition and, ultimately, the history of black powder rifles writ large; so much so that, even as muzzleloaders evolved and became steadily more accurate and easier to use, Davies had already decided to go the other direction, purchasing an Arkansas-made flintlock rifle (a Southern Mountain by Caywood Gunmakers) and making it his go-to deer rifle, regardless of season.

The kit muzzleloaders so popular when Davies bought his are as far away from today’s muzzleloaders — breeched caps, pressed powder, blasphemous range — as those kit rigs were from the 19th century flintlocks on which the Southern Mountain that Davies shoots is modeled. And that’s to say nothing of alternative firearms season, which replaced muzzleloading in Arkansas two years ago and allows for repeating rifles so long as the cartridges are straight-walled. Davies doesn’t begrudge anybody their turn in the woods regardless of the (legal) rifle, but if he decides to forgo his flintlock for an alternative it’ll not be one of the new alternative-ready rigs so conveniently prevalent since the new season’s advent; rather, it’ll be an old gun he’s dug out of a closet, milled in a slower fashion and earlier time, that fires an odd-duck round and could probably stand some tinkering before it’s ready to go afield, if Davies is ever inclined to take it; a proposition that seems doubtful when he extols an older, slower, more thoughtful outdoorsmanship.

“I always thought it was kinda nice that you gave traditional, old stuff an opportunity,” he says. “To go out and do it. There was a whole lot to be learned…about how things worked in the old days.”

Davies still uses the Caywood Southern Mountain; he’s killed deer with it, some quite impressive, and might well kill another any time he hits the woods shouldering that old flintlock. But it’s pretty clear that the things that go with that choice — an entry point to the history of firearms and of the military, the craftsmanship of a handmade weapon regardless of age, the satisfaction of maintaining and repairing a prized possession and tool — are where fulfillment lies; and maybe a good reason, on the hunt, to decide  a shot is just too far off or a bad look, or just not the one he wants to take.

“I guess I’m maybe not as mad at deer anymore,” he says with a laugh, a sentiment that’s not uncommon among hunters who have bagged their fair share of victories, and know it, and could bag plenty more if they really wanted to, and know that, too. For Davies, those victories have come both in the field and through his four decades of public service, and while he no doubt knows it, it is highly doubtful that he’d feel the need to tell anybody about it. That’s fine, though, because it’s a good bet someone else will do the telling for him.

There’s a lot of people out there that still believe in that cigar box.