William L. “Pat” Patterson, a photojournalist and veteran of Little Rock’s legendary newspaper wars, has died. He was 88.

Patterson got into the newspaper business in 1952, while still in junior high in El Dorado, and came to work at the Arkansas Gazette in 1968, after a stint at a paper in Nebraska. He was at the Gazette until it closed in 1989, the loser in an epic battle with the Arkansas Democrat.

Anyone older than 40 who’s worked in Little Rock media has been regaled with the lore of these glory days, when Little Rock journalists from multiple outlets competed to put out the news best and first to a citizenry clamoring to be well-informed. Any Little Rock journalist older than 60 probably has some glamorous war stories of their own.

Arkansas Times editor emeritus Max Brantley worked with Patterson at the Gazette, and remembers Patterson as a consummate professional.

“He was a pro. That’s mostly what I remember,” Brantley wrote. “And an enduring piece of his general advice for shutter speed and aperture opening on the fly in the days before digital photography: ‘60 at 5.6.’”

More vintage remembrances come from historian and journalist Ernie Dumas. He and Patterson go way back, all the way to their high school days in El Dorado. Patterson and Dumas were in college together, too, and got up to some antics:

I went to Henderson State Teachers College, where I was editor of the little weekly paper, The Oracle. Pat was my photographer. He loved chemistry, in high school and college. As my photographer he had a darkroom in McElhannon Hall, the science building. He developed a formula for mixing some chemicals into a white paste, which would dry after a few hours and if it encountered friction after hardening it would explode. But the main ingredient was a chemical that was healing. Maybe iodine; I forget. Well, Pat would mix the compound in his darkroom in the science building and when there was no one around he would put little wads of the stuff in the corners around the building. Then during the night there would be loud BOOMs! heard all over the campus. It was a big mystery. Pat and I were the only ones who knew what was happening.

It was all fun and games, Dumas reported, until someone got (very mildly) hurt:

The door to my dorm room was open and in walked a kid from Murfreesboro. … He had a big bandage on his right hand. “What happened to your hand?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was in the men’s room in McElhannon and I was peeing. I looked on the pipe that ran above the urinal and there was a piece of chalk there. I picked it up and struck it on the wall to see if it left a chalk mark. And, and, and . . . IT EXPLODED!” But it seemed to be healing pretty fast, he said. When he left I told Pat not to make any more bombs. Someone could really get hurt.

Patterson and Dumas teamed up again at the Gazette, where they rode out the newspaper war together.

“He took a lot of great shots around the newsroom the day Hussman bought the Gazette and fired us all, Oct. 19, 1991,” Dumas said.

In 2001, Patterson gave an interview about his journalism career for the Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. You can read the transcription of that interview below:

Pat Patterson interview Download