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Heart of the Matter: Arkansas’s First Heart Transplant Recipient
People regularly reach out to the Roberts Library to ask their most pressing questions about Arkansas history.
Sometimes we get a question from someone who needs help locating an Arkansas-based historical journal, or a phone call from someone who is interested in an Arkansas author whose volumes are held in our closed stacks. We might receive an email from a patron who is looking for an article about an 1890 tornado or to see if we know how one might retrieve a transcript from a defunct Arkansas college. If a patron’s request has a simple answer, it can be resolved in a matter of minutes, but it often takes time to thoroughly research and respond to their question. Once an answer or reference is provided, I move on to the next inquiry (and there is always a next one!). But some reference topics lodge in my brain long after I’ve answered the patron’s request.
When I answered the phone in the research room a few months ago, I heard this: “Can you find some information for me about my friend? Her name was Carmel Walker. Her family called her Rockie. She had a heart transplant; it was a big deal.”
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Carmel Walker was born on February 12, 1966, to Rev. George Walker and Hildred Walker. Her family were longtime Little Rock residents.
On Christmas Eve in 1983, Walker experienced shortness of breath and was treated at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock. It was determined that she had a form of congestive heart failure called congestive cardiomyopathy and that she would not survive more than a few months without a new heart.
The family appealed to the Little Rock community through the local newspaper to help find Walker a new heart and raise the funds for the surgery. Less than five months after her diagnosis, she received a heart transplant at the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham on May 2, 1984. The eighteen-year-old was the first Arkansan to undergo a heart transplant.
Employees of the Danny Thomas Company, where her father was employed at the time, organized a fundraising campaign to help with the estimated $150,000 cost of the surgery and associated medical expenses. Her mother’s place of work, Westside Tennis Club, also began raising money to help the family pay for the procedure.
Before she fell ill, Walker had been a part-time employee at a local McDonald’s restaurant, and the Central Arkansas McDonald Restaurants’ owner-operator group donated $10,000 toward the cause at a public ceremony that took place on May 7, 1984, at the Arkansas State Capitol. Less than a week after the surgery, nearly $50,000 had been raised to help with her medical expenses.
Newspaper coverage of Walker’s recovery and ongoing fundraising efforts continued well after the surgery was complete.
The Arkansas Gazette reported about a month and a half after the transplant that Walker was “doing fine” and recovering in Birmingham to be close to her medical team. According to a 1986 article from the same newspaper, the then twenty-year-old Walker struggled to find a sense of independence as she navigated life with her new but fragile heart. It reported that she prioritized being active, had “an enviable sense of humor,” and hoped she could one day work “a challenging job.”
Walker died at age twenty-four on September 5, 1990, six years after the transplant. In an Arkansas Gazette article published two days after her death, her father was quoted as saying that she had been dealing with a virus and dehydration, and that her body had ultimately rejected the heart.
Carmel “Rockie” Walker’s story was documented widely in the local newspapers, and I found all these details in the archives of the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette, as well as on Ancestry.com.
All these years later, those newspapers are what allowed me to share the details with the inquiring patron.
During a time that feels especially tumultuous, it is encouraging to think back to how the Little Rock community rallied around this young woman and supported the Walker family during a time of crisis.
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Do you have a question for us? Our staff at the CALS Roberts Library Research Room is equipped to help you. Contact and visiting information is here.
We can also assist with your own newspaper research. You can access the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and other newspapers online here with an active CALS library card, or by visiting a CALS location. Ancestry.com is available to patrons visiting CALS locations in person.
By a genealogy and local history specialist staff member at the CALS Roberts Library/Butler Center for Arkansas Studies
