Osro Cobb

Osro Cobb (May 28, 1904 – January 18, 1996) was a Republican lawyer who worked to establish a two-party system in the US state of Arkansas. In 1926, he was elected to the Arkansas House of Representatives from Montgomery County and served as the only Republican member in the chamber for two two-year terms. He was the United States attorney for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas during the Little Rock Crisis of 1957–1958. He served a year on the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1966 as a temporary appointee of Democratic Governor Orval Faubus. Background Cobb was born near Hatton in Polk County, Arkansas, to the lumberman Philander Cobb (born 1869), who in 1916 was an active supporter of the Republican nominee, Charles Evans Hughes, who narrowly lost the election to US President Woodrow Wilson. Cobb's mother was the former Ida Sublette, a songwriter, playwright, poet, and the author of four books. In his memoirs, Cobb recalls that his mother "always made me feel that I was destined to do great things and make a meaningful contribution to my state and country of which she would be proud. She instilled in me the belief that by doing my very best, almost any objective I might seek would be within my grasp. She was right." Reared mostly in Caddo Gap in Montgomery County, Arkansas, Cobb as a child often accompanied his father to work and hence developed an interest in the family business and later in the law. College years Because Cobb graduated from high school at the age of sixteen, he enrolled in 1920 at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, formerly known as Arkadelphia Methodist College or as Henderson Brown College. Cobb refers to Henderson as "a small Methodist college ideally suited to my needs. It took only a short time for me to establish my identity and to make numerous friends among my fellow students and with faculty members." He lettered in baseball and was a member of the debate team and reports that he was falsely accused of plagiarism by an English professor regarding an article he wrote about moonshiners in Montgomery County.