ADG: Writer Moser stayed in grip of obsessions to final days
Bill Nalty
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Tuesday, June 13, 2000
Writer Moser stayed in grip of obsessions to final days
By CHRIS OSHER
Two things pumped in the veins of Tony Moser to the bitter end:
newspapering and drinking.
The last week of his life he was doing both.
After a long hiatus from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, he was back
writing political columns.
And he was drinking -- his slurred voice forcing one longtime friend
to tell him to never bother telephoning drunk again.
Moser, 41, died Saturday night after a Chevrolet pickup plowed into
him as he walked down the middle of a busy, unlighted road in Pine
Bluff.
His sudden death was no surprise -- not to friends, not to
colleagues, not even to the police.
When the emergency call went out about a fatality along Pine Bluff's
Rhinehart Road, one officer remarked that the dead man likely was Moser,
Lt. Rick Pritzen said. The police had caught Moser wandering down the
middle of the road many times. Police are still awaiting test results to
reveal whether Moser had been drinking Saturday night.
"Tony Moser was a prodigious talent wrapped in a star-crossed life,"
said Griffin Smith, jr., executive editor of the Democrat-Gazette.
"Despite everything, he never lost faith in himself. He's finally gone
to a better place. I expect he's standing before the throne right now,
offering a suggestion or two to God Almighty. Chances are, they're good
ones."
Walter E. Hussman Jr., the newspaper's publisher, said he looked
forward to reading Moser's work.
"He was a very good writer ... at one time one of the best writers
we had," he said. "And Tony had some problems, and because we thought he
was such a valuable writer, we tried to work with his problems."
Moser told friends he grew up in an orphanage, before going on to
Hendrix College for his undergraduate degree and the University of
Missouri at Columbia for his master's.
Moser had talent, drive, confidence and ambition. He also could not
stop drinking.
Before John Robert Starr, the newspaper's former managing editor,
died earlier this year, he wrote a column rating the best and worst of
his 40 years of Arkansas newspapering. Moser was listed as the most
talented news writer.
Moser went undercover to expose an illegal horse-racing operation in
Faulkner County. He probed malfeasance at any and all levels of
government. And one night, when tornado-filled skies were so ominous no
chartered plane would fly, Starr ordered Moser to drive 100 miles to
cover when the FBI's most- wanted man shot it out to his death with law
enforcement officers.
Moser also was one of the most infuriating reporters to cross
Starr's path.
By Moser's own account, he'd been fired by the newspaper seven
times. He was sent to state prison after pleading guilty in 1984 to his
fourth driving-while-intoxicated charge, the year after the law was
strengthened.
Moser was controversial at times, once earning the distinction from
John Brummett, then a columnist for the cross-town rival Arkansas
Gazette, as one of the best public relations people for his coverage of
Sheffield Nelson's failed gubernatorial race.
Philip Martin, a Democrat-Gazette columnist, recalled that for a
while Moser worked in the newspaper's composing room. He couldn't hold
that job either.
Martin, the former executive editor of the alternative newspaper the
Spectrum, had to fire Moser, from that publication as well.
The man who could turn out a poignant tale about the death of a
reporter suffering from AIDS also was the man who North Little Rock
police arrested more than 20 times in the 1990s for charges related to
public drunkenness.
Jim Scott, the North Little Rock Police Department's public
information officer, had to make many of those arrests. He remembers
Moser as a belligerent drunk. His 6-foot, 2-inch, 275-pound frame did
not go gently to jail.
"You would get the call and see that it was him, and you'd say, 'Oh
no, here we go again,' " Scott recalled. The next day, he said, Moser
would be the most cordial person you'd ever met.
Stephen Buel, another former reporter for the Arkansas Democrat,
once told Martin that given Moser's strange combination of grief and
talent, the best Moser could hope for was to be sent to prison for good.
That way Moser would end up editor of the best prison publication in the
nation.
After a stint as a homeless person who lived at the Salvation Army
and then a spokesman for the Salvation Army, Moser came back to the
Democrat-Gazette. He'd landed a free-lance contract to write political
columns.
John Deering, a longtime friend and editorial cartoonist for the
Democrat-Gazette, talked to Moser on Friday.
Moser, who once had helped Deering win awards by suggesting
political cartoons, some so scathing that they had caused then-Gov. Bill
Clinton to complain to the managing editor, was drunk. Again. Deering
told him never to bother to call drunk again.
About 6:15 p.m. Saturday, Moser telephoned Linda Satter, the
newspaper's federal court reporter. He told her he'd been working on his
column since 6 a.m. Then, he shifted gears, quizzing Satter about
whether she was taping the conversation. When she got off the telephone,
he said he'd call again. That call never came.
Moser once wrote: "The nobility of man is not in never falling, but
rather in how -- after the fall -- he stands erect to walk yet again."
He was a person who stood again and again. In the end, he didn't so
much stand as wander aimlessly into the headlights of a truck driving
along a dark street.
This article was published on Tuesday, June 13, 2000
Copyright © 2000, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc.
la...@rightwingers.net
> And he was drinking -- his slurred voice forcing one longtime friend
>to tell him to never bother telephoning drunk again.
> Moser, 41, died Saturday night after a Chevrolet pickup plowed into
>him as he walked down the middle of a busy, unlighted road in Pine
>Bluff.
Perhaps that's what will happen to you, Naltyloon
Years of people laughing at your ignorant ass should cause you to drink and
walk in front of a large pickup