Byron Thomason grew up in the Bethel Community, seven miles north of Waldo, with a brother, two sisters, a half-brother and a half-sister. “There were a bunch of kids around the table,” he said. “I was the baby. I was the one who could get away with murder. I could talk them into anything.” His father was an attorney who practiced in Magnolia and, after some other forays into the working world, Thomason followed in his father’s footsteps.
“My father was born in 1897 and he read the law on his own, passed the bar exam. It was not unheard of back then. He was well-rounded. He was known for his closing arguments. That was back before you had the entertainment of television and stuff like that. So people would pack the courtroom to hear his closing arguments,” Thomason said, drawing a parallel between his father and the character Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
“I was raised up watching him try trials. Sometimes I would go outside and play while he was in court.”
“I remember getting electricity right before I started to school,” Thomason said. “We had the fireplaces, one on each end of the house starting out, and then we put in wood heaters which were more efficient. The REA [Rural Electrification Authority], which made me a lifelong Democrat, that was one of those New Deal programs that…you know, thank God! If you lived with a kerosene lamp and you get something like that, it’s like, ‘Wow!’ Anyway, that pretty well sealed me.”
Thomason’s father had interests outside the law. “He loved to farm. Didn’t do it for money because it was a piddling operation, really. He raised a little cotton, a little corn, and made sure that I worked on the farm. I laughingly tell people, and there’s not too much of a laugh about it, we had a tractor, but my father would purchase me a mule every year. He would put me behind that mule. One of my most embarrassing moments of my young life was when I was out plowing with that mule in the field in front of the house, by the road, and the guy at Waldo High School that had one of the first cars came driving by with all my friends in it, and there I was out plowing with that mule. There’s no way you can hide in a 20-acre field with a mule,” he said, laughing. “I thought that my reputation had been compromised.”
After graduating from Waldo High School, Thomason enrolled at what was then Southern State College, where he was what he called a “roads scholar” because he stayed in the road between Waldo and SSC. “I started out in agriculture, as all kids did back then. Either you were going to be an agri teacher or you were going to be a county agent. That was all that was out there. I got a degree in history.”
The semester after graduation, Thomason said he couldn’t get a job because he was up for the draft.
Because he was about to be drafted into the Army, Thomason enlisted instead and served for two years, training at Fort Polk in Louisiana and going on to Fort Benning in Georgia, where he went into the infantry Officer Candidate School. But he did not complete that training. “My patriotism was never tested,” he said, because he was not sent to Vietnam.
Thomason returned to SSC after his military service and worked part-time at Shanhouse, where he had worked summers in years prior. He worked a summer for International Harvester as a sales rep.
“Then I got a job with Union Carbide Corp. in Dallas, and I was a sales rep. Bachelor's dream. I had the company car and the expense account, and I traveled all over Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma. Then they ended the dream. They transferred me to Fargo, N.D. Fargo and I did not cotton to each other. Well, that was kind of a shock treatment they had for young reps, because they were going to see how dedicated we were. I was not one of the dedicated ones. Of course, that was just a few short years before they wiped out Bhopal, India, with their chemical plant over there. That ended Union Carbide.”
A short, unpleasant stint as a sales rep with Proctor & Gamble in Arkansas led Thomason to believe he should take a different tack. “I went to the University of Arkansas for one year, law school. I was initially going to get a master’s in history and teach to enable me to go to school, but then I got up there and found out that they would enroll me as long as I had a degree. I took the law school admissions test after I’d been there close to a semester. Then, I loved Dallas, so I transferred back to Dallas. The GI Bill was not paying all my bills. I was working, too, but I did get the GI Bill. And I did get married between University of Arkansas and SMU. Had a child, Carrie.”
In 1970, Thomason returned to Magnolia to go into practice with his father. “I was admitted to the bar in Arkansas and Texas. One of the funniest things was, I had two bar exams outstanding at one time, not knowing if I had passed either one of them, and with people asking me when I was going to start practicing law. As luck would have it, I squeaked by.”
“He was so proud of me. He called me a ‘real lawyer’ because I graduated from SMU [Southern Methodist University]. I tell people, if he only knew how much better a lawyer he was than I was. Oh, he was a good one!’ Thomason said.
Thomason’s father had a two-room office without a secretary, as he always had. “Finally I prevailed upon him to get us a secretary. We went from there. My great love was just exactly what he did. You can’t make a whole bunch of money doing a criminal practice but that’s what I liked and that’s mainly what I did. That, with some personal injury. Back then, if you advertised, you got disbarred. If you went out and told people that they had a lawsuit, you could get disbarred. Both, practices which I agree with thoroughly,” he said. The elder Thomason was in his late 80s when he finally retired from practicing law.
“I was very fortunate because he was, of course, in good with most of the judges. People kind of took care of me. I always appreciated that.”
Two terms in the state legislature convinced Thomason that that was not his cup of tea, but he still sought ways to serve the public. “I ran for prosecuting attorney, and I lost that race, but people did me a favor there. And then I ran for mayor. I tell people who are going to run for something, don’t run for it unless you really, really want it. That’s the only way to run for it,” he said.
“I was a union rep for the International Union of Operating Engineers, local 382. It was a union out here at Alcoa. I represented the union as the attorney, so when Travis [Starr] retired, he said, ‘Byron, why don’t you take this?’ I enjoyed it,” Thomason said. “I liked representing working folks.”
“I’m presently a labor arbitrator,” he said. “I’m on the list of ‘neutrals,’ as they say, with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. When people write in, they’ve got a labor dispute, they will write the FMCS, who sends a panel of arbitrators. I don’t do much of it. I don’t like to make decisions. I like to be the one to advocate a position.”
Although he has mostly retired from law, Thomason still practices two days per week with David Beatty in Lewisville.
“David’s an excellent attorney. I served in the legislature with him. He was an excellent legislator, he was really good at it. We got to be fast friends. When I said I was quitting he told me he’d like for me to come over there, and if he had any courtroom action for me to take care of it.”
Thomason’s daughters, Carrie and Hillary, live in Fayetteville and Ruston. The grandchildren keep him entertained, he said, when they visit or he visits them.
“I have gotten to the age. I’m 74. When you reach that age, your whole life is one big habit,” he said, laughing. “Actually, if you get outside of your regular run daily, it kind of upsets you.” Thomason does have some projects he has taken on lately, mostly clearing land around what was once his office (now his home) and doing the same around the old homeplace where he grew up.
“My biggest problem I’ve always had with practicing law was I never was comfortable with how I had to charge fees. I knew some people couldn’t afford it,” but, he said, “I’ve enjoyed what I’ve done.”