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.

[1] 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.

"[2] 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.

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.

[4] At Henderson, Cobb became an advocate of two-party competition as a potential solution to Arkansas' lagging national standing both politically and economically.

The Republican Party had to be convinced that it must really work in Arkansas and across the South to help establish a viable, competitive two-party system.

"[7] Cobb applied for a Rhodes scholarship, but the 1925 appointment went to J. William Fulbright, a student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, who later became the UA president and a long-term US senator.

Several senior partners in the law firm where he was employed, Campbell, Mallory, and Throgmorton in the capital city of Little Rock, were Republicans.

Coolidge also pocket-vetoed the national park bill, which had the support of Democratic US Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, his party's 1928 vice-presidential candidate on the Al Smith ticket.

This reinforced my conviction that it was absolutely necessary for the rights of the minority party to be protected in elections through the appointment of precinct judges and clerks.

In 1948, with the assistance of Sid McMath, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Cobb helped to pass Initiated Act 3, which guarantees that a member of the minority party be in place at each precinct in Arkansas.

Invited to meet with Eisenhower after the nomination, Cobb advised him not to concede a single southern state to the Democratic nominee, later Governor Adlai Stevenson II of Illinois.

"[14] In 1954, Eisenhower appointed Cobb as US attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, a highly-visible position during the desegregation of Central High School.

In the fall of 1957, Cobb was in communication with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Department of Justice, and the White House regarding late developments.

With United States Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., Cobb represented in federal court the US government's case against Governor Faubus, who attempted without success to thwart desegregation.

Cobb reached the conclusion that Faubus had exaggerated the likelihood that segregationists would engage in violence in a vain bid to block desegregation.

In 1964, Cobb refused to support Republican Winthrop Rockefeller for governor and instead endorsed Faubus who won his sixth and final two-year term.

The evidence simply is unanswerable that Mr. Rockefeller is working for his own personal interest to the exclusion of all other considerations, which leaves the Republican Party in Arkansas hanging precariously at the whims of one individual.

Her father, Sydney Albert Umsted, had in 1924 drilled the Discovery oil well in the Smackover field but was subsequently fatally injured in a train accident in Mississippi and had died in a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

[19] Shortly before the second marriage, two armed robbers wearing masks broke into Martha Jane's home and locked her, Cobb, and her housekeeper in a closet.