'I stunk,' retired Democrat-Gazette reporter Jake Sandlin said in a story that made him the talk of Arkansas for a day.
Mr. Sandlin, well-known and well-regarded as an Arkansas Gazette sports writer and an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette news reporter, had never written a story quite like this one. And never has since.
By Jay C. Grelen, Moniteur de l’Arkansas
Dozens of Jake Sandlin’s stories appeared on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette during his 30-year career as a reporter, but on April 14, 1996, Jake himself was front-page news.
Jake was newsworthy because of the odor that had attached itself to him, his wife, and their three children. Since Jake knew the facts intimately, no one else could tell the tale better, so he wrote a front-page story that courageously revealed his malodorous family’s nightmare for all the world to read.
He stink was so stout, he wrote, that the editors voted to give him the day off with pay if he would leave the newsroom. His editor, Lisa Thompson, kept her distance when she delivered the “suggestion” that he vacate the premises.
“What could I say?” he said. “I stunk.”
Jake Sandlin is well-known and well-respected for his sports writing as well as his reporting of real news about city government in North Little Rock and Maumelle, among many things. He is a central Arkansas boy who went off to Texas to study journalism at East Texas State University in Commerce. He had the good fortune to chase stories back home in his childhood stomping grounds. He covered sports for the Arkansas Gazette, and after the Arkansas Democrat won the newspaper war and combined the papers, Jake was a copy editor and then a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
As a sportswriter, Jake covered a lot of Razorback football. In locker rooms, he joined the gaggle of writers to interview Michael Jordan at a Chicago Bulls game; quarterback Troy Aikman after he led the UCLA Bruins in a convincing victory over Arkansas in the Cotton Bowl; and John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors at a tennis tournament in Memphis.
He interviewed Bobby Riggs at the Senior National Clay Court championships at Country Club of Little Rock; Joe Ferguson, quarterback for the Arkansas Razorbacks and the Buffalo Bills; Batesville, Arkansas, native and NASCAR driver Mark Martin; Johnny Unitas at a an appearance in Little Rock; and tennis champ John Newcombe.
“My most memorable sporting events [were when] the Gazette sent me to cover the men's Final Four in Seattle [in 1989] where Michigan won the title [against Seton Hall] in overtime,” Jake says. “That and covering UALR upsetting Notre Dame in the NCAA tournament. And when Arkansas State played Arkansas in an NIT match-up in Fayetteville, the first time those two had played, and the Hogs won in overtime.”
Jake and his wife, Terry, a registered nurse, moved to Maumelle in 1981 when fewer than 6,000 people lived in the community, which was next door to nowhere. Before Maumelle City Hall was city hall it was a strip shopping center that included the only grocery store in town, Bob’s Thriftway, and was anchored by the real estate company that was selling property in Maumelle. (Maumelle wasn’t incorporated as a first-class city until June 20, 1985.)
Those were the days, Jake says, when neighborhoods put together volleyball teams for friendly competitions.
Jake, who retired from the newspaper racket in 2019, and Terry lived in two houses during their nearly 30 years in Maumelle. Their second house, where they raised their three children, was the setting for the Sandlins’ Malodorous Adventure.
On a Thursday night in March 1996, Jake and his sons, Adam, 14, and Luke, 5, were settled in downstairs awaiting the tip-off of the Razorback’s March Madness game when odorant molecules assaulted their olfactory receptor neurons through their orthonasal pathway,
Or as Jake quaintly wrote: An “onion-like stench” knocked them out of their chairs.
“‘We scurried about the house and garage, looking for the source.’”
The Sandlins spent Thursday evening attempting to air out the house. Rachel slept upstairs, two bandannas covering her face.
Upon awakening Friday morning, the air inside their home was rank but tolerable. The worst, however, lay in their future. First, as Jake wrote, Adam called from school. “‘Dad, come get me,’ he said in a quiet, but urgent voice. ‘I'm stinking up the school.’”
Adam wasn’t exaggerating. When Jake entered the school hallway, the Sandlin fragrance hung in the air. Even Adam’s sack lunch, which he had left in his locker, was stinking up the place.
Back home, Jake took a second shower and reported to work at the Dem-Gaz. Within 20 minutes, the editors voted him off the island.
The Sandlins correctly deduced this odor was the work of a skunk, the contacted Maumelle Animal Services, which referred them to a skunk-busting company.
What the Sandlins didn’t deduce right away was that the skunk had waddled beneath their home, soaked the place with the thiols and thioacetates that produce that rotten-egg smell. All this permeated the flooring and insulation.
Then, to add insult to the olfactory attack, the skunk died.
The Skunk Buster in Chief arrived in due time, followed the scent to the corpse, emerged from beneath the house, his eyes watering, and said: “Worst I’ve ever seen.”
When the insurance agent showed up, he stood in the driveway and imperiously informed the Sandlins the house was habitable, and that the company wouldn’t think of paying for a hotel. Jake offered to take him inside. “As he moved closer to the front door,” Jake says, “he backed off and changed his mind.”
So the Sandlins reserved a hotel room.
Before they checked into the hotel after midnight Friday, the Sandlins had aired out suitcases and washed enough clothing for two days, all to no avail. When they arrived at the hotel, they discovered that the stench had followed them. Everything reeked: clothes, suitcases, shoes, Jake’s shaving kit, Terry’s makeup.
Saturday evening, after Luke’s soccer game and Rachel’s basketball game, they bagged up their smelly clothes in the hotel room bathroom, and bathed with tomato juice.
Terry, referring to the piles of towels soaked in tomato juice, joked to Jake: "‘They're going to think you've killed us and are hiding the bodies.’"
(If Wikipedia had been around in 1996, the Sandlins would known that a bath in tomato products was a waste of time and tomato juice, which only disguise the odor. Beer and oatmeal, also the standby of Old Wives Who Tell Tales, don’t eliminate the stink either.)
At midnight, Jake went to a laundry-mat and washed all their belongings in detergent and baking soda.
Sunday, they changed hotels, and bought two days' worth of school clothes, socks and shoes included, for each of the children.
Monday afternoon, they learned the insurance policy would cover the house but not their belongings. The adjuster, whose olfactory experience persuaded him to change his mind about covering their living expenses, called in a disaster restoration specialist.
About the middle of their week as refugees, they were stink-free and felt like celebrating. So they went out for Italian food, which is heavy, of course, with tomato sauces, which, Jake says, provided a moment of levity that required a decision: “Eat the food or wash our hair in it.”
That’s me in that photo below, Jay Grelen of Moniteur de l'Arkansas, shaking hands with former Alabama Governor George Wallace when I was a columnist at the Mobile Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama. In September 1994, I spent a day in Montgomery, Alabama, with Governor Wallace, who, by the time I met him, had forsworn the racism of his early political career. He also was totally deaf; I still have the yellow legal pad on which I wrote my questions for him.
I’m a refugee of the daily newspaper business, clutching at my manual Royal typewriter and trying to stay afloat. For now, the U.S.S. Moniteur de l'Arkansas is my life jacket.
I worked in the daily newspaper racket for 35 years, including stints at the Denver Post, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, and the Mobile Register. My last stop was a 10-year stay at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In 2017, Governor Asa Hutchinson hired me as his senior writer. After nearly six years with Governor Hutchinson, I hired on as chief of staff to Hizzoner Caleb Norris, mayor of Maumelle. Hizzoner promoted me to Chief of Staff Emeritus in August 2023, so now I have time to write stories and rake muck as I surf the crest of the wave of the much-balleyhooed rebirth of local journalism.
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— Jay C. Grelen, Moniteur de l'Arkansas
