What first springs up about him is that yellow plastic shopping bag. It came with AJohn every Thursday to noon meetings of the Lindsborg Kiwanis Club. It was with him at board meetings and many conventions. Long ago it must have held something he or Carol had bought, but then it was his briefcase and for years it was as attached to him as his wristwatch. The bag looked as if it had survived floods, drought, a tornado and at least one cycle in Carol’s washing machine.
It would not surprise me if that bag is with him yet at Elmwood Cemetery, where he was buried last month. Arthur John Pearson, historian, author, journalist, archivist and devoted member of Kiwanis International, had been in hospice care at a nursing home in Salina when he died July 19 after a long illness. He was 86.
Carol survives.
To friends, he was “AJohn”. He and Carol came to Lindsborg in 1970. AJohn had been PR director at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Ill., for eight years and quickly settled in at Bethany College, not long into Arvin Hahn’s 16-year tenure as the school’s 8th president. (There have been seven presidents since.) Pearson would manage publicity and communications for Bethany College for more than 34 years, stay several more years as sports information director, and serve as archivist at the College and for the Messiah Festival. He was also a longtime sports information director for the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference. He retired (sort of ) in 2012.
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Pearson was a writer and historian with an encyclopedic brain. He celebrated a community heritage, the strong ties between the Smoky Valley’s “Little Sweden” and the mother country. His many articles for the News-Record and other publications defined the history and significance of the annual Messiah Festival of the Arts ‒ the foundations of Messiah Week, the forces that inspired the Bethany Oratorio Chorus and Orchestra, their renowned performances of Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion” and Handel’s “Messiah.”
He was an informed and passionate broadcaster. Radio and television presentations of the “Messiah” were enriched with Pearson’s commentary, his cashmere baritone reassuring and reliable and rolling out nuggets of history in perfect sequence, as though he did this every day.
For years he was stadium public address announcer at Bethany College home football games. Pearson often spiced his reporting ‒ “pass complete…tackled by…” ‒ with notes of a player’s personal background, his studies, even a family history.
There were honors. Pearson won them for work as a journalist, sportscaster, historian, archivist, and Messiah radio host. In 2011 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the national College Sports Information Directors Association to a chorus of Amens from media professionals across the country.
In 2012 USA College Football established the Pearson Media and Communications Award. It recognizes an outstanding media professional for contributions to NAIA college football. It is presented annually at the USA College Football All-America Banquet on the eve of the USA Football Holiday Bowl.
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I looked inside that yellow bag once. It was like peering into a crowded wastebasket: A short legal pad, loose sheets of paper, some documents, notes on scraps, two or three ballpoint pens, a paperback book, a couple of file folders that looked important, two or three rubber bands, a paper clip here and there, and more notes floating about ‒ hints of his tangled office once in Presser Hall.
Out of the disorder came AJohn’s penchant for method. The yellow bag held his instruments of recording and recollection, files for reference, paper and pens for his notes, any loose documents or scraps of the day that might reinforce his reporting.
The bag seemed his instrument of authority. As the longtime secretary at Kiwanis, he set down what happened at our meetings, published it for the record, for our little part in the big organization that helps children and young people. AJohn was meticulous in this. He got it right and left nothing out. At times he left nothing out so much that there seemed too much of his nothing left out.
But he wanted it all down, and over the years he came to hold most of it in memory. He didn’t really need all that stuff in the bag but it must have served as a kind of reinforcement, on the off-chance that someone might challenge his recollection.
So far as I know, it never happened.