He's been a spokesman for Simmons Bank and the voice of the Ouachita Baptist Tigers. He wrote the first full-length biography of Hillary Clinton and practically wrote the book on Southern barbecue. He reported on political campaigns and ran them, infuriated politicians and worked for them, and covered everything from White House summits to Little League baseball games.
Rex Nelson once even edited the publication you're reading now.
He has played enough roles in Arkansas journalism, broadcasting, business and politics to become all but a household name. And at age 57, Nelson is "home again," doing what he likes best.
"That's traveling around and writing about Arkansas," Nelson said as he gave up his well-paying post as a senior vice president at Simmons First National Corp. a couple of weeks ago. Now he'll be patrolling the state in a Chevy Equinox and writing three columns a week for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. His title is senior editor, and he'll be a public face of the newspaper, speaking to civic groups around the state and flexing his expertise on Arkansas history and culture.
So will the paper pay him on the same scale as Simmons did?
"I'm doing this because it's what I want to do," he told Arkansas Business. "Let's just put it that way."
Nelson was already writing once a week for the Democrat-Gazette's op-ed page, as well as working for Simmons and tending to his blog, Rex Nelson's Southern Fried. The multitasking comes naturally. Nelson worked full time as sports editor of the Daily Siftings Herald in Arkadelphia while studying at Ouachita Baptist University and serving as the sports director at two radio stations. Except for a few years when he was in Washington, he has announced OBU football games on radio since his student days, a total of 35 years.
"The newspaper world has intrigued me since childhood, and it calls again."
When I met Nelson, I was a 19-year-old sportswriter and he was a role model: a keen observer and writer chafing against the kind of reverential coverage the Arkansas Razorbacks got from Arkansas Gazette sports editor Orville Henry. Henry was beloved for covering the Hogs thoroughly since World War II, but rah-rah sports writing was waning by the early 1980s.
Nelson joked about Henry's thousands of words, largely chronological, on every Hog football game. "Here's the lead of an Orville Henry game story," he jibed: "The wind was out of the west at 10 miles per hour and the Razorbacks won the toss."
A play-by-play of Nelson's career would take too long, but here are highlights: Nelson was an assistant sports editor at the Democrat, then left the editorship of Arkansas Business to be the Democrat's political editor during Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and first term. He wrote "The Hillary Factor," published in 1993, as the first full-length biography of the future secretary of state.
From 1996 to 2009 Nelson worked for former Gov. Mike Huckabee in policy and communication and was a George W. Bush appointee to the Delta Regional Authority. More recently, he led Arkansas' Independent Colleges & Universities and was a government relations chief for The Communications Group.
"It all prepared me for this," said Nelson, who said the job evolved over several talks with Democrat-Gazette Publisher Walter Hussman Jr., who sees the move as good for a paper that has reluctantly pruned its staff in a lean era for the publishing industry.
Hussman told Arkansas Business that a good local columnist is a treasure, "and Rex is excellent. It is good to have unique content that no one else has, and [Nelson's column] offers more value for our subscribers." The column runs Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Nelson is following in the tradition of the old Arkansas Traveler column, though he didn't revive the name. Established by the late Ernie Deane in the Gazette in the 1950s, the travelogue was a reader favorite. Charles Allbright, the last to write it, died in 2015. In between, two of the best newspaper writers the state ever produced, Mike Trimble and Bob Lancaster, roamed the state looking for stories.
Nelson's column is his own, and its logo is simply his name and picture.
"My approach will be to try to turn out three pieces a week that most readers will be interested in," Nelson said. "I will have the freedom to write about what I want, whether it's politics, people, history or culture. I hope to tell stories about Arkansas."