Arkansas Court of Appeals: Judge Ray Abramson
May 22-28, 2017
By Jay Edwards
The first thing you feel when you visit Judge Ray Abramson’s office in the Justice Building is a sense of family history.
Walls and bookcases are covered with keepsakes that the judge from Holly Grove cherishes, and loves talking about.
“Here is a photo of my great grandfather and his brother, and their dry goods business on the bank of the White River in Lawrenceville,” Abramson explained.
“There were lots of steamboats traversing the White River in the latter half 19th century. In those days my ancestors were peddlers, who traveled on those boats, stopping along the different river communities to sell their goods.”
Then one day, he said the brothers decided they had found paradise at Lawrenceville, in Monroe County, and built their store at that spot. “And they were right,” he says through a smile.
As the old, well-preserved black and white photo portrayed, by 1870, they had a thriving business in that spot.
The two founders, Rudolph and Dave, were both born in Poland, which was still known as Prussia at the time.
Things were not good in Eastern Europe in those days, particularly for the Jewish community; and so the brothers sailed off to America to find a better life.
But after a catastrophic event caused the White River to change course, the store changed from being on the steamboat trail to an island on an oxbow lake.
So, the adaptable brothers moved their store five miles to the north and set it on a spot in a grove of Holly trees, which they knew would be a prime location because of the new railroad line that connected Helena to Clarendon.
The creation of that railroad, the Arkansas Central, in 1872, brought prosperity to Holly Grove, even as Lawrenceville dwindled to a ghost town.
Cotton was king in those days and Abramson’s family was riding the wave. The city was incorporated in1876 and by 1890, Holly Grove had seven general stores, a drugstore, a grocery, a restaurant, a livery stable, a cotton gin, a grist mill, a machinists’ shop, a Masonic lodge, at least three churches, two physicians, and an undertaker. It also had a two-story schoolhouse. And the central building in the city was the railroad depot.
Years later, Abramson’s grandfather, would establish the First National Bank of Holly Grove.
“I still run the farming operation, R. Abramson Co., in Holly Grove, that my grandfather started,” Abramson says.
Ralph Abramson, the judge’s father, would graduate from Holly Grove High School and head off to Fishburne Military Academy in Waynesboro, Virginia. From there it was the University of Arkansas, followed by Harvard Law School.
Young Ray attended a boarding school in Atlanta and after that began undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
“After graduation I was going to Fayetteville for law school,” he says. “But my parents gave me a gift of a summer in Scotland and I took some classes at the University of Edinburgh in art, art history and architecture.”
It was there he would meet a pretty young blond from Virginia, who was also taking art classes. “Her name was Mockie and we fell in love that summer in Scotland,” Abramson says.
Mockie’s father was a Methodist minister, and after Abramson finished law school they would be married in his church in Virginia.
That summer after Scotland, Abramson left a few weeks early for Fayetteville. It was 1973.
“I went up early to find a place to live and to check out the law school,” he says. “One day I was walking through the building and I bumped into another longhaired young man. We began talking and soon found that we had both spent our college summers working in Washington DC, me for Wilbur Mills, and him for William Fulbright.”
Abramson’s new friend’s name was Bill Clinton, who had come to Fayetteville to teach, after law school at Yale.
“We just hit it off and found we had a lot in common. The next year I helped in his campaign for Congress, when he lost to Hammerschmidt.”
In 1975 Abramson was named the chairman of the Law Day committee.
“I had gone to boarding school in Atlanta. While I was there, Georgia’s governor was Jimmy Carter. His son Chip was one of my classmates. In early 1975, Carter announced he would run for president. No one, really, outside of Georgia knew who he was.”
“I invited him to be our guest speaker for Law Day, in May of 1975.”
The day before, Abramson and Mockie had a reception for Carter at Professor Cyrus Sutherland’s house, which Abramson was renting while Sutherland was out of the country.
“I invited all the law professors, other faculty, local attorneys and my friend Bill Clinton,” he remembers. “I had been criticized for inviting someone as the guest speaker for Law Day who no one had ever heard of and who wasn’t even a lawyer.”
“I told them I thought he had a good chance to be the next president, and I guess I was vindicated in November of 1976.”
“So perhaps my footnote to history will be that I was the person who introduced two future presidents to each other.”
After law school and marriage, Abramson and Mockie returned to Holly Grove where he would begin his law practice. Fast-forward 35 years to 2010.
He says he had never entertained the idea of running for a judicial seat. But, his friend Price Marshall, who held a seat on the Appellate Court, had just been elevated to a federal judgeship.
“I was sitting peacefully in my law office in Clarendon, minding my own business when the phone rang and it was Governor Beebe. He asked me how I would like to serve on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, in the vacancy left by Price Marshall. I was taken aback.”
He asked Mockie for her opinion and she thought he should do it. So he “jumped at the opportunity.”
Abramson served from August 2010 until the end of December 2012. Arkansas statue says you are not able to succeed yourself if you have been appointed.
He next decided to run for the Arkansas Supreme Court, but was defeated, and returned home to Monroe County, until he had the opportunity in 2014 to run for the seat on the Court of Appeals he currently holds.
He and Mockie live in a home in Holly Grove, which they remodeled, that was owned by his aunt. It is on the National Historic Registry. “And the best thing was, it was full of all this family history,” he says.
The judge currently serves as a member of the board of directors of the Monroe County Community Foundation, chairman of the Mid Delta Health Systems board of directors and chairman of the Smith Holly Grove Library, Inc. He is also a volunteer for the Holly Grove Food Pantry.
The Abramsons have two daughters, Emily and Anne. Anne and her husband met at Yale and are astrophysicists living in California. Emily, like her father, went to the University of Virginia and is a veterinarian technician living in Charlottesville.
Next month: Judge Bart Virden
PHOTO CAPTION:
Arkansas Court of Appeals Judge Ray Abramson and his staff (l to r) Joan Owens, Sara Beth Davis and Molly McNulty. (Photo submitted)
