James Lee Sheets (born March 29, 1931), known as Jim Sheets , is a retired entrepreneur from Bella Vista, Arkansas who is a former Republican member of the Arkansas House of Representatives. From 1967 to 1968, Sheets represented Benton County for a period in the lower legislative space.
Sheet was the first member of her party in the 20th century to be sent to the legislature of Benton County in the northwestern part of the state. In due course, Benton County became the county banner of GOP in Arkansas. Sheets are not looking for re-election because the time required is far from her job as her Christian affiliated John Brown University director in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. At that time, evangelicals were not yet politically the prime mover of the Republican voter base; many of which are still active Democrats.
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Sheet was born in Arkansas City in Cowley County in southeastern Kansas, until June P. Sheets (1903-1982), originally from Fargo in Ellis County in northwestern Oklahoma, and former Mae Robinson (1904-2002), native of Pierce City. in Lawrence County in southwest Missouri. June Sheets was employed in Arkansas City as an agent for Frisco Railroad, but in 1943, he was transferred as an operator to Enid in northern Oklahoma. Therefore, Jim Sheet graduated in 1949 from Enid Secondary School.
After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible and English in 1953, Sheets soon joined the JBU staff as a campus radio station manager. While attending JBU, he meets his future wife, former Martha Hamlin, who is from Disney in Mayes County in northeastern Oklahoma. The couple married in 1954 and adopted four children.
From 1955 to 1958, Sheets served in the United States Army, partly under the secret permission of the earlier Atomic Energy Commission at the Oakland Naval Supply Station in Oakland, California. After his military service, Sheets returned to John Brown University 1958 as director of public relations and student recruitment, a position he held until 1969. The JBU registration in 1958 was only 250 students, but before Sheets left the position, the number was close to 800.
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Political activity
Relationship with Rockefeller
Sheets met Winthrop Rockefeller for the first time when the two were looking for an office in 1966, it was for the State House and Rockefeller as the first of the post-Faubus and Republican first governors in a position since the Reconstruction era. Nevertheless, Spets recalls having a very good personal relationship with Rockefeller, like George E. Nowotny's colleague from Fort Smith, he disagreed with Rockefeller on certain issues. In the legislative session of 1967, Sheets introduced a revised draft law, but Rockefeller opposed the death penalty, a position contrary to most of the Arkan community on both sides. According to Sheets, Rockefeller told him that their disapproval about the death penalty would not affect their personal and political relationships. Sheets said that she was contacted at that time by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who presented the "subject matter", an undisclosed term, that the death penalty is a barrier to killing because it causes some criminals to think twice about taking life if they know that their own existence will be threatened.
Unlike Nowotny, who considers drinking Rockefeller has become serious in his later years, Sheets says that it seems to him that excessive liquor reports may be exaggerated. In 1973, Sheets was among the mourners at the Winthrop Rockefeller cemetery at Petit Jean Mountain, where he met Nelson Rockefeller, who next year would start a brief term as Vice-President of the United States.
Challenging Kelly Bryant
After leaving John Brown University in 1969, Sheets took the position of full-time executive director of the Siloam Springs Chamber of Commerce, but the following year he returned in politics as Republican candidate against Democratic State Minister Kelly Bryant of Hope in Hempstead County south of Arkansas , also known as the hometown of Governors then Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee. The first sheet defeated John Thompson of Morrilton in the Republican for the state secretary, 35,954 (68 percent) to 16,881 (32 percent). In the campaign, Spreadsheets are invited to board the Rockefeller helicopter. In the end, he won a majority in his own Benton County and in Searcy County. The sheets are lost by one vote in Washington County, where many of the local Democrats are also political reformers hostile to Bryant. Official results show Bryant with 360,209 (62.3 percent) to Sheet 216,752 (37.7 percent).
Spreadsheets cautioned that the last pre-election polls he saw showed a competitive race, but the situation changed rapidly when US Sen. J. William Fulbright lent Bryant the use of his political team. Spreadsheet said that he never expected to win the race even though he finished in a vote about twenty thousand votes in front of Rockefeller.
In launching a campaign against Kelly Bryant, Sheets recalled that he hoped to make a regional name identification for a possible congressional race in 1972. Then US Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt of the 3rd congressional district of Arkansas, a businessman Harrison Republican and Medal of Honor winner was first elected in 1966, along with Rockefeller and Maurice L. Britt at the top of the ticket, had told Sheets that he believed, wrong as Apparently, US Senator John Little McClellan would retire in 1972. If the scenario developed, the Hammerschmidt, for its fast and effective constituency services, plans to run for Senate and will authorize Sheets as their preferred successor.
Manage Ford campaigns
In the mid-1970s, Sheets left the trading room and engaged in real estate at Siloam Springs. He was an alternate envoy to the 1976 Republican National Convention meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, to nominate Ford-Dole tickets, well liked by delegates over rivals Ronald W. Reagan and Richard S. Schweiker. Dole took second place with Ford as Nelson Rockefeller was previously withdrawn from the showdown. Sheets organize the Arkansas state campaign for Ford-Dole, with colleagues for Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale has Bill Clinton, who ran without resistance that year to Attorney General Arkansas. Although Sheets visited most of the counties in the campaign, Ford only surveyed 35 percent of the vote in Arkansas, with larger Republican votes confined to his traditional fortress in northwestern Arkansas.
Kiwanis International
In 1953, Sheets joined Kiwanis International; in 1965, he served a year as governor of the Missouri-Arkansas District during the organization's golden anniversary. After he made Kiwan's presentation to Democratic Governor Orval Faubus, Sheets met Faubus on several occasions while Faubus sold a copy of his personal memoir, Descending from the Hills: I have no problem with Faubus. He is kind. Much of what he did was what the Arkansas wanted then. "
In 1982, Sheets left Siloam Springs to become executive director of Kiwanis International Foundation, based in Indianapolis, a position he retained until his retirement in 1998. In this role he traveled to nearly fifty countries, including Australia and New Zealand, to establish a Kiwanis club. He spurred a $ 100 million increase to finance, along with UNICEF, a campaign to eradicate iodine deficiency in the Third World. "We got iodine in almost every country in the world," writes Sheet.
Retirement in Benton County
After that, Sheets and his wife returned to Benton County and settled on Bella Vista. The couple attended Baptist Valley Church, Southern Baptist congregation in Bella Vista.
Reflecting on his life, Sheet states: "I love everything I have done I connect it with God's blessings and he leads me through my life."
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia