For more than 60 years, Melvin Pickens walked the streets of Little Rock’s Heights area where he sold brooms slung over his shoulders, sipped coffee with barbers and worked even after he had to rely on a walker and a caregiver for help.
On Monday, friends and relatives of the legally blind man were mourning his death Sunday night at age 84 at a nursing home.
Pickens made headlines for selling what he called “cheap brooms” — those with slight defects such as scratches on the handles — that he bought from Little Rock Broom Works and then resold. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette carried a feature on him in 2013. CBS Evening News also televised a feature on him that year.
Even after the ever-cheerful Pickens suffered a stroke, he sold brooms with the help of a caregiver and a walker. For years, though, he walked from one business to another — Shipley Donuts on Cantrell Road, Ozark Country Restaurant and Jerry’s Barber Shop among them — armed with the red-handled, corn-fibered merchandise.
Even with his thick glasses, Pickens could see only shapes, not details.
Everette Hatcher, president and owner of the broom business, recalled sitting in Shipley Donuts with his future wife in 1983 when he looked out and saw Pickens walking across a busy Cantrell Road with no regard for traffic.
“I mean he just went,” recalled Hatcher, who had started working at the factory that same year. “I thought the Lord was protecting him because all these cars were stopping [for him].”
Pickens entered the doughnut shop selling his brooms, and even tried to sell Hatcher one for $6.
“I said, ‘I’m the one that sold it to you for a dollar fifty,’” Hatcher said with a laugh. “And he was like, ‘Keep it down!’”
Hatcher said Pickens would show up at the factory each afternoon at 2, then take the brooms to the Heights to sell. Business owners would invite him inside where he’d hawk his merchandise and chat about the likes of the Arkansas Razorbacks or the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Codey Cameron, a barber at Jerry’s Barber Shop on Kavanaugh Boulevard, recalled how Pickens would come by the shop every day at the same time for years. And, of course, Pickens was always “trying to sell brooms.”
“We’d always have a full house, and he’d sit down and have coffee with us, and we’d always buy three or four [brooms] from him,” Cameron said. “Sometimes, we would buy like the ones he had left … so he could end his day. … We ran through the brooms pretty well up here.”
Cameron said Pickens “was always the sweetest person. When he came in, he would always talk good about the Razorbacks, no matter if they were doing bad or good.”
Cameron knew that Pickens had moved into a nursing home but didn’t know until Monday that he had died.
“We’ve been wondering about him,” Cameron said. “There’s a few people who come up here and we make them part of the family.” Pickens was among them.
Pickens’ son, John, said his mother, Dorothy, preceded her husband in death by several years.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete Monday, but the younger Pickens said he hopes to have the service at New Hope Baptist Church, where his father had been a deacon.
The couple had four boys and a girl. Two of the sons preceded their father in death, John Pickens said.
He fondly remembers his father making sure that his children kept their home swept clean.
“We didn’t have the best … but we had a broom,” he said. “We had to sweep.”
When John was a child, he thought his father “was the worst in the world. But I found out when I had kids, he … was the greatest man in the world.”
Information for this article was contributed by Gavin Lesnick of Arkansas Online.
NW News on 06/20/2017