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Earlier today I was at the intersection of Braker Lane and Lamar Boulevard in north Austin. It’s your standard suburban Austin scene: CVS pharmacy on one corner, Goodyear Tire Center on another, Penske truck rental place, Thai restaurant. But that particular intersection is anything but typical for me, filled as it is with echoes of youthful innocence and ghosts of long ago. It all slides indelibly into the past, into a Texas of myth and pure, sweet memory...
 
1979. The summer between my junior and senior years in high school. I was 17 years old, skinny as a rail and recently liberated, having acquired my first car.

I headed to Austin with my friend Eric to spend a week with his older brother, Jerry, who was a senior at UT. Jerry had a roommate named Darcy, a beautiful, blond graduate student with a great smile, crackling wit, and knowing eyes. She was worldly and radiant and she’d go braless in the apartment and I’m pretty sure that I started sweating whenever she was around. And I was dumbstruck by the idea that Jerry was living with this woman in a purely platonic fashion and that it was treated so matter-of-factly, as were it a simple matter of course, the most natural thing in the world. I was smitten with Darcy, who was way out of my league but kind enough to pretend not to notice. And I fell in love with Austin, a magical place where such creatures abounded in a time of free love and so many other flavors of goodness.
 
Jerry was in summer school and one night he went to the library while Eric and Darcy and I stayed at the apartment and drank beer. After awhile, Darcy said, “Let’s go to the Stallion and get some chicken fried steak.” So we drove over to North Lamar and pigged out and drank some beer there, too. Mind you, the drinking age was 18 at the time and I was only 17 and I was just SURE the waiter was going to ask for some ID but this was Austin and it was that summer, that mystical summer when everything was safe and there were no terrorists and nothing was scary and we wore flip-flops everywhere and slept in late whenever we wanted to and crickets piled up at night beneath gas station lights.
 
When we were done eating, Darcy said, “I want to show you guys something.” So we climbed into her little VW Super Beetle and headed north on Lamar. It began to get kind of rural-looking by and by, especially after we got north of 183. Darcy said, “you know that this street, Lamar, used to be called the Dallas Highway? It’s true. Before they built I-35, Lamar was the highway that you had to take to get to Dallas.” A couple of minutes later she whipped into a dusty parking lot on the west side of the road —- exactly where that CVS pharmacy on the northwest corner of Braker and Lamar is, where I was earlier today.
 
We got out. There was a full moon and I could see a long, whitewashed, wood frame building in front of us. Darcy started getting mystical, launching into doe-eyed Stevie Nicks mode. “Listen,” she said, “Can you hear it? Can you feel it?”
 
“Feel what?” I asked.
 
“Shhh …. listen close,” she said. “Can you feel the vibrations?”
 
We’d been listening to John Prine’s “Illegal Smile” on the 8 track in her VW as we’d been driving along and I was beginning to wonder if Darcy had secretly partaken of some things that Eric and I had been unaware of. Because Darcy was all about the partaking.
 
“Darcy,” Eric asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”
 
That’s when she pounded Eric in the chest with the palms of her hands. “What am I talking about? I’m talking about Elvis, man! I’m talking about Hank Williams! I’m talking about Johnny Cash and Johnny Horton and ….”
 
“Johnny Horton?” I asked.

“You know, Johnny Horton,” she said, “he sang that song about the Battle of New Orleans.”

Then she broke into the chorus:

“We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they commenced to runnin’
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico”
 
I remembered the song because my dad practically wore it out on our record player when I was a kid.

“Okay, so what about Johnny Horton?” I asked.

“Guys,” she said, “you are standing in front of the world-famous Skyline club. They closed it down a year or two ago. The Uranium Savages played there on the last night of operations and then they shut her down. Anyway, this is the place where Elvis sang and where Johnny Cash sang and where all of the greats used to sing when they came to Austin.”
 
I stood and looked at the building in the moonlight. Maybe it was the beer, but I WAS beginning to hear, or feel, something.
 
Then Darcy ---- preaching to the breeze now ---- said, “But this is the strangest thing about this building. It is the place where both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton performed their last concerts before dying. Hank played here at the end of 1952 and died in the backseat of a car less than two weeks later. And Johnny Horton played his last gig here, climbed into his car afterward, and was killed in an accident. So both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton played their very last shows right here, in this building. You should both kneel down and pay your respects on account of you’re in the presence of greatness!”

I admitted that it was a pretty strange coincidence that both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton had played their last shows in this building.
 
“But it gets even weirder than that,” Darcy said. “Hank Williams was married to a woman named Billie Jean when he died. After he died, Billie Jean remarried ----- to Johnny Horton. She and Johnny were married at the time Johnny was hit by a drunk driver and killed in Milano, Texas. So not only did both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton play their last gigs in this building, but they were both married to the same woman when they died.”

I shuddered, beginning to feel kind of uncomfortable with the whole thing. I thought maybe she was making it all up. But I found out later that it was all true. Legends had played at that place and a few of them left it and never played again.
 
Hank Williams performed his last show at the Skyline Club on December 19th, 1952. Witnesses say that, in spite of his terrible health and drinking and drugging, he tore it up that night, playing for three hours. Less than two weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, he died while en route to a show in Canton, Ohio.
 
The first photo shows an advertisement for Hank's last show at the Skyline. The second photo is of the Skyline. The third photo shows Johnny Horton playing on the Louisiana Hayride, a traveling show. It was not taken at the Skyline. 

The last photo is a sketch of the Skyline Club.





 
 

skyline advertisement 1.jpg

Skyline-Courtesy-Bonnie-Stark.jpg

Johnny Horton on the Louisiana Hayride show.jpg

Skyline Club sketch.jpg

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I saw many shows there when it became the new home of Soap Creek Saloon. Albert Collins was the most memorable, doing his signature parking lot walk. He sat on several motorcycles belonging to some rough looking bikers, but they were grooving with everyone else. 

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I went to school in a small Texas town. It was so small that, if we needed to, we could swing by the superintendent's house to get the keys to the school on weekends. We were viewed as trustworthy I guess.

One Sunday my friend Bob and I had to go to the school for some reason, though I can't remember why. And we weren't hoodlums or malicious vandals or anything, but this was an opportunity to run around the school unfettered. We could look in lockers, run down the hallways .. do whatever we wanted.  I was in one part of the building and came back to find Bob trying to break into the library by jimmying the lock on the door with his comb. He was bent over the lock, trying like hell to get into the library. I went into the band practice room and noticed a pair of cymbals.  It was absolutely 100% dead quiet. I grabbed that pair of cymbals, sneaked up silently behind him as he was doing this "illegal" thing that he should not have been doing, and crashed those cymbals together as loudly as I could. I don't believe I've ever seen anybody jump so high, not even Michael Jordan. He threw that comb straight up in the air and looked like he'd been shot.  He denied it but I swear I saw a bit of urine soaking through his jeans. Even as I write these words I'm laughing about it and even today he still calls me something that rhymes with "bass hole" when I bring it up.  I'm lucky he didn't have a heart attack. 

Oh, the stupid stuff we used to do for fun in that small town. I think back on it now, 45 years later, and it all seems so innocent.

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When I was growing up, my father’s Uncle Joe Stewart, my great Uncle Joe,  had a ranch west of Kyle, where Mountain City is now. He ran Hereford cattle and mohair goats. He used to tell me about the painters that would go after his goats and cattle. I asked him one day why people who painted went after his stock and he laughed and said in his Texas drawl that he meant the big black cats. I realized he was talking about panthers. As I got older, I discovered those black panthers, which roamed all over central Texas, were melanistic jaguars. 
In 1968, I went to a weekend camp out at a ranch near Kerrville. Five friends and I went for an early morning walk through dense woods. We climbed through a bobwire fence into a pasture where a cow was making a terrible noise. I looked to my left, and crouched about 10 feet away from me was a huge black panther. We all just froze. It was probably less than a minute, but it seemed like forever that I stood there eye to eye with that cat. I could see the impressions of rosettes in its black fur like watermarks on velvet. The cow broke the trance by turning and running and the panther leapt off across the pasture away from us. We just looked at each and asked “did that just happen?” It was not to be my only encounter with a jaguar, but that’s another story.

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Wow! What a great story! My 15 year old son and I once joined some of my old college friends to see if we could see Jenny’s ghost which is supposed to haunt a creek bed in a very rural part of Erath County. We got permission from the land owner to go, so we went late one night. My son and I got separated from the group at one point with only one flashlight…and it was dim. Trying to get back to the group, we were climbing over barbed wire fences, old fallen trees, and other such obstacles when we heard a panther scream. We both started running, hoping we were headed to the dirt road where my truck was parked. Luckily, we came to the road pretty quickly, but the fence was hard for me to crawl over or between strands for some reason. My son picked me up and almost threw me across, but I survived. The others showed up as soon as I was across the fence, but we decided we really didn’t want to see that ghost that badly…not and battle “painters” at the same time. That was 26 years ago, and we still laugh about that today.

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I was born and raised in Southern California.  In 1995, I was pregnant with my only child.  His father was Asian, I am white.  We were not married, but I desperately wanted a child.  Before I was born, my own father had been stationed in the southeast Asian nation where my child's father was born and raised.  I had left the military myself, I was scared, confused and longed to move to a more stable, kinder, easier state to live in and raise a child.  I did, and along the way while my son was growing up, I began to earnest look at moving to East Texas, to a town that I happened to notice one day on a map, a place called Tyler.  Soon I was sending away for information about this mysterious place called Tyler.  At the time, Tyler had a great outreach project going on that really encouraged people to relocate there.  I had never lived anywhere that seemed so welcoming.   I decided to call  independent Tyler business owners at random, to ask them how they enjoyed living in Tyler.  I was pleasantly surprised by the responses I received.  I decided that I would move to Tyler.  My financial prospects had improved over the years, my son had just finished 6th grade when we finally arrived.  Unfortunately, my son was not as enthusiastic about moving to Texas as I was.  I personally found it to be somewhat quaint back then, and absolutely magical.  I had always lived in western states, this edge of the south was completely new to us.  We were very fortunate to find a safe place to live, my son thrived in school.  The greatest surprise came when my son was selected to apply for a Terry scholarship to college.  Terry scholarships are a uniquely Texas institution, they only cover Texas state universities.  My son's father and I had brought our son to visit Austin some years back, when we had first moved here.  We toured the state capital, having no idea that our son would one day attend UT Austin.  My son loved UT Austin, he thrived and best of all, many of his friends from Tyler had also moved to Austin, so he was always with friends.  One day,, my son decided to try out an online dating app.  He soon found a match.  This led to her phone number.  He took one look, and saw it had a (903) area code.  He contemplated not calling her, he was not sure he wanted to meet someone from Tyler.  Fortunately, he called.  Soon they were falling in love, and he was graduating college.  His father and I attended our son's graduation ceremony, we were thrilled to meet and spend time with this lovely person our son was feeling serious about.  She was born in Southern California, her parents grew up in a nearby town in the same area I grew up in.  Her mother, like my son, is half Asian.  Her parents had decided to relocate their young family to a small town outside of Tyler.  She grew up, graduated from high school, and received a scholarship to attend UT Austin.  The magical coincidence of it all is not lost on me.  I do consider Texas to be my home sweet home.  

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I used to walk my dog past a neighbor's house a few years ago.  She was disabled, so I gave her my phone number and told her to call if she ever needed help.  I soon heard from her, and spent a few months helping her after her spouse died suddenly.  She was born and raised in the San Angelo/Alpine areas of Texas, back in the 1950's.  She had two older siblings who still lived in that area, I was intrigued because she mentioned that her parents, native Texans themselves, had lived to celebrate their 63rd wedding anniversary.  I listened intently whenever she shared stories and memories of their marriage.  

She said that her mother was quite beautiful, tall, graceful with model worthy looks.  Her mother was born in 1918 Erath County, to a mother who passed away shortly after the birth.  I don't know how they met, but her father, born in Bluegrove, Clay county Texas in 1915, wrote multiple love letters to her while he was away blasting and digging out what would become the Texas interstate highway system.  They married in 1937.  My neighbor's father managed a lumber yard, her mother stayed at home, raising 3 kids and nurtured an incredible garden.  My neighbor grew up in relative bliss, her mother did not drive but her parents shopped for groceries together once a week.  One day, her mother completely shocked my neighbor by confiding in her that, "She would never forgive the Mason's for ruining our sex life".  Apparently, her father was wounded in an intimate area of his anatomy during a Mason hazing ritual, sometime after 1954, the year my neighbor was born.  

My neighbor enjoyed growing up in the coziness of her parent's home.  The refrigerator was jam packed at all times with three different kinds of prepared meat.  Desserts were prepared from scratch.  Her mother dutifully and expertly sewed almost all of their clothing.  Because she did not drive, her mother was the epitome of the mid century stay at home housewife.  One day, when my neighbor was outside playing at a nearby park, she noticed her father's car parked in front of a house.  She did some investigating, and found out her father's secretary lived there.  Livid, and extremely concerned, she privately confronted her father with the information.  Initially, he tried to deny it, but ultimately resigned to admit he had been there.  Several years later, after he passed away, my neighbor found a photo album in his belongings.  Looking at it, she realized her father had lived with this secretary whenever he was not home, for a span of over 30 years.  I asked for the secretary's name, looked her up and found that she was still alive and in her 90's.  My neighbor kept a framed photograph on her wall of her parents, they were quite elderly in the picture and all the kids had a copy.  She told me about their final anniversary, their 63rd, before her father passed away.  The now extended family that included six grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren sat gathered around an enormous long table outside to help celebrate.  One of their great grandchildren said out loud, "Hey great grandpa, kiss great grandma!".  My neighbor's mom looked at my neighbor's dad, and scowled, "Don't you dare".  

 

 

Edited by Calvinsmom
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Wow, what a story. So ....  married for 63 years and had a mistress for more than 30 of them?  Did his wife ever find out?

I'm thinking about things are so often not as they seem on the surface, how people's real, inner lives are so much deeper than we ever know.

You read about men like H.L. Hunt who had three families simultaneously or whatever and you think "dang, I have a hard time dealing with just one!" AHAHAHA!

Thanks for sharing.

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1 hour ago, Calvinsmom said:

 One day,, my son decided to try out an online dating app.  He soon found a match.  This led to her phone number.  He took one look, and saw it had a (903) area code.  He contemplated not calling her, he was not sure he wanted to meet someone from Tyler.  Fortunately, he called.  Soon they were falling in love, and he was graduating college.  His father and I attended our son's graduation ceremony, we were thrilled to meet and spend time with this lovely person our son was feeling serious about.  She was born in Southern California, her parents grew up in a nearby town in the same area I grew up in.  Her mother, like my son, is half Asian.  Her parents had decided to relocate their young family to a small town outside of Tyler.  She grew up, graduated from high school, and received a scholarship to attend UT Austin.  The magical coincidence of it all is not lost on me.


That is pretty dang coincidental. Sometimes, it does seem like deeper forces are at play, doesn't it?

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One extremely hot day, I sat in the shade outside a concert venue in Houston.  I had drove my teenage son there from Tyler, and now I had to sit and wait while my son stood in the crowd of people waiting for the concert to start.  I noticed a man sitting nearby, something about him was very intriguing to me.  I decided to muster up some courage and engaged him with some small talk.  He had brought his kids there, they were waiting in line with my son to see the concert.  Eventually the crowd was let in, and he disappeared as he left me to join them.  I wandered into the arena, and was happy to see him sitting alone again as the concert was starting.  We sat together, got cozy and exchanged phone numbers before the night finally ended.  He lived far from me, in Austin.  His name was Wally, he was born in Austin in 1948.  

I got to know Wally very well these years since.  Wally told me a lot about Texas.  One day, driving around Austin, Wally pointed out an old building and told me it used to be a fire station.  He told me about going there with his parents when he was only 5 yrs. old.  A fireman convinced a very frightened Wally to allow him to take a spin down the fire pole.  Wally was terrified, he screamed and cried, but begged to go back up and do it again when they touched down.  Wally's mother was from Chicago, Wally's dad's side of the family was all Austin.  Wally had traced that side of the family in Austin before statehood.  That lineage included many judges, and Wally's paternal grandfather had graduated from UT Austin in the late 1800's.  

Growing up in the 1950's, Wally's mother would sometimes worry about and seclude Wally whenever a certain psychotic relative of theirs was said to have escaped from the psychiatric institution where he was held.  Wally never understood why his mother was so frightened, he was very young at the time and he remembered his mother would almost go into hiding with him at those times.  I did some research and found out why.  It turns out that this relative was who Wally's mother was so frightened of was the grown son of the late William Pierson, Associate Justice of the Texas Supreme Court.  In April of 1935, William Pierson and his wife Lena were murdered by their son, Howard.  Howard Pierson's shocking case and subsequent trials are famous in legal circles for the actions taken by the defendant, the subsequent filings and his numerous escapes.  Wally himself, intrigued by the memories, had not received much information from his parents, so he had researched some.  Wally told me that he stumbled on old newspaper articles on microfiche about the breaking stories of the murders that were written by a then rookie cub reporter named Walter Cronkite.  

Just goes to show you that you never know who you'll meet, when you decide to strike up a conversation with a stranger outside on a hot summer day in Texas.  

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This story was told to me by cousins of my mother's generation. I don't know if it is true, but I suspect it is. At any rate, the story teller and I found it very humorous. It probably happened in the 1950's.

My Granddad and the undertaker in the community were very close friends. One day my Granddad was visiting the undertaker and the undertaker said lets make a trip to Ft. Worth and look around. My Granddad told him he had left his teeth (false teeth) at the Ranch and didn't want to travel that far without them. The Undertaker opened a drawer and said, "see if you can find a pair that might fit!" When I asked, the story teller, he didn't know if they went to Ft. Worth or not but he knew my Grandfather well and said 'They might have"

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This is a tale told to me a long time ago, by a uncle (on my daddy's side of course). There is no mention of this in any research, and I have in vain tried to locate such. Also, the tale was spoken to me with a glint in the eye of the storyteller and that leads me to believe it has no merit, although I see some similarity to the logic.  Back when settlers were moving in the area was ranchland. Aspermont was a general store, and a saloon which with gals as 'hostesses'. Being a cowboy only resulted in pay once a month, which the cowboys readily spent  on various resources offered at the saloon. So the hands would venture to town once a month. It was told to me that, the original spelling was three words. Somewhere down the line a 'S' was dropped so there is no "double S" and a 'H' was removed from the end word. Then the letters were scrunched together! Happy trails.

 

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First trip to Caddo Lake was in my '82 Plymouth Arrow pick up, in 1994, I was as 18. All loaded up with beer, fishing gear and my jam box riding shotgun for music. My first stop leaving Wichita Falls was  Dallas/Highland Park to pick up my girlfriend. Her grandaddy started Southland Corp./7-11. Felt a little funny pulling up in that truck in front of the front door at the huge mansion. We headed out and got stuck on 635, my first time driving on that monster. Pulled over to use the pay phone to tell the owners of the fish camp I would be late. They told me the cabin # and the light would be on and the cabin would be unlocked, sure enough was. Rented a small boat from them the next day and got lost in the cypress boat lanes. By the grace of God we made it back in the dark. 

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My Grandmother lived one farm near Bonham, Texas. As a child born in 1898, the family had to drive a wagon with poly horses to buy supplies but no city large enough was within a days journey.

They had to camp out overnight on the way to Dallas so the whole family loaded up their camping gear to go shopping & it was an adventure for her. Not only the camping but the risk of Indians, wolves & outlaws!

One of the only stories she shared about growing up in the horse & buggy era. 

Of course she lived into the 1980s, saw men step on the moon,  so a horse & buggy story didn't seem that exciting to her anymore. 

 

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On 1/24/2023 at 5:02 PM, Baby Head said:

Doug Sahm performed with Hank Williams at the Slyline when he was eleven years old!


Absolutely right. I really wish Doug would have lived into the Traces of Texas era because I would have loved to ask him about that.  Plus, of course, there's all that great music we're missing. He died WAAAY too young!
 

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In 1983 I was drinking a few beers with friends at Scholz Beer Garden in Austin, the famous beer pavilion that has been in operation since 1866.  Scholz Garten had a scratchy old .45 RPM on their jukebox of Ernest Tubb singing "Waltz Across Texas" and I swear you'd hear it 15-20 times in an evening.  Ernest released that song in 1965 and I'm pretty sure that Scholz Garten got the record then and never replaced it. You can imagine what it sounded like. But that was part of its charm and whenever it came on everybody would stop and sing along. Anyway, I went to the bathroom there at Scholz' and, as I was exiting, that song came cascading down from the rafters, accompanied by the usual drunken chorus of singers.  At that very moment the great Doug Sahm stumbled into me.  Doug grabbed hold of my shirt, looked up at me with shiny eyes, and yelled in his sloshed Texas accent  "I wish to hell he'd get through waltzin!' He's been waltzin' for the last 20 years!"  I just said "Keep on truckin', amigo, keep on truckin'!"  Doug said "Thanks! I'll do that!"  and wandered on into the restroom. Good times.

Any of y'all ever meet a famous Texan? I'd love to hear to hear the story.

Schown hier: Scholz Garten in 1983

Scholz Beer Garten.jpg

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My mother was one of seven children who lived what she called “a poor farm”. She had an uncle who had a “better farm”. 
Her uncle and aunt would ask her drive to the city at times. She told me about having a pack of five sticks of gum. She delighted I’m chewing half of a stick at a time. She offered her aunt some gum. Her aunt took the entire pack. This story made me so sad but not as sad as my mother. Their way of life was different. She loved Juicyfruit gum all her life. 

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1974. I was a junior at Texas Tech. One weekend my roommate Nancy and  friend Teresa decided we would take a road-trip to Galveston.  We left Lubbock on Friday morning, planning to return on Sunday. Now, the distance between Lubbock and Galveston is about 567 miles. But we figured a day at the beach was worth the drive. We were in Teresa’s 1969 Mustang with a standard transmission only she knew how to drive. Well, we headed out in high spirits, eagerly anticipating the adventure before us. We got to Conroe on Friday night and stayed with friends. Saturday morning we headed for Galveston and a day at the beach. We had booked a room at The Surfside Motel, which was just within our college student budget. Not fancy, but relatively clean if you didn’t look too close. We had a great time sunning and enjoying the waves. Dinner was hotdogs roasted over an open fire on the beach. We were on a budget, after all. The next morning we packed up and started the long drive back to Lubbock. I did mention that Teresa had to do all the driving, right? Well, after a long day at the beach and a night of very little sleep, she was pretty tired. A bit cranky, too. But we made the best of it because we got to spend a day at the beach. By the time we got to Big Spring, Teresa was exhausted and barely holding up. But we had to get back to Lubbock because she had to work and we had classes! So Nancy and I took turns keeping Teresa awake by putting ice on her neck. The last couple of hours were pretty hairy, but we got back to Lubbock Sunday night as scheduled. We definitely saw miles and miles of Texas that weekend! 

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I recall reading this when it occurred  This was published in the Chicago Tribune

CLARENDON, Texas -- A man believed to have been the oldest working cowboy in Texas died the way he wanted, stretched out in the prairie grass with his boots on, friends said.

Thomas Everett Blasingame, 91, was found lying on his back Wednesday by fellow cowhands at the JA Cattle Co. ranch near Clarendon in the Texas Panhandle. His saddled horse was standing nearby.

'If he had written it down on paper, he wouldn't have changed a word,' said Buster McLaury, the cattle foreman on the ranch.

About 400 people attended graveside services Saturday at the JA Cattle Co. cemetery near Clarendon. The last burial in the cemetery had been in 1899.

Johnny Farrar, the ranch's business manager, said Blasingame was riding a young horse he was training just before his death.

'He must have known he was in trouble, dismounted and just laid down and died,' Farrar said. 'There were no bruises or scratches, so he wasn't bucked off.'

Blasingame's son, Thomas E. Blasingame Jr. of Hereford, said the cowboy was laid to rest during a traditional 'cowboy funeral,' with the hearse accompanied to the graveyard by Blasingame's riderless horse and cowboys on horseback.

 

There were lots of people there,' the younger Blasingame said. 'It was a pretty pleasant day. Things went real well.'

Blasingame was born in Waxahachie on Feb. 2, 1898, and was a cowboy all his life.

He came to the JA Cattle Co. in 1918, then left two years later to go to Southern California, New Mexico and Arizona. He returned in 1934 and remained at the ranch until his death.

'(He) had chosen to be a cowboy when he was a little kid,' said Thomas Blasingame Jr. 'The reason he lived so long was because he did what he did for his entire life.'

Farrar said Blasingame's job was to look after the cattle and horses, the ranch's fence and windmill. He said Blasingame displayed outstanding qualities for a cowboy of any age.

'It was exceptional for him at age 91, because he performed the job just as all other cowboys do,' Farrar said.

Blasingame married his wife, Eleanor, when he was 35. He lived during the week at the Campbell Creek Camp in Palo Duro Canyon, 9 miles south of ranch headquarters. The camp had no electricity or telephone, and his wife lived in nearby Claude.

 

'He was a good, kind man to everyone,' Eleanor Blasingame said. 'When he died, it was the first time I've ever seen a bunch of cowboys just crying. They were all devastated by his death.'

Edited by Zack Miller
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It's 1946 and my family from from the center of Elgin to our new home on the edge of town.  There were only two homes on our gravel road and an undeveloped city park was behind our house.  I'm six years old and looking forward to making friends with the kids in the neighborhood, exploring, and playing in the park area.

Sometime in June a carnival was set up in the park and we went every night to eat, drink sodas, and enjoy the many rides.

About a week later, I had pain in my stomach and my parents took me to the local hospital.  The doctor said it was my appendix and I needed surgery to remove them.  It was a major surgery back in 1946 and I spent a week to ten days in the hospital before I was allowed to go home under my mother's care. 

She had to change the dressing each day until the stiches could be removed.  Everything was normal until the fifth day.  Mom was changing the dressing and discovered the stiches had broken and something green was protruding from my stomach.  They rushed me to the hospital and found they'd left a sterile cloth inside me and I had gangrene.

I underwent a second surgery and then they inserted a tube in my side and a tube down my nose to drain the toxic fluids.  This was pure hell for a six-year old boy.  Penicillin was the new wonder drug and I was getting a shot every four hours for the fever and infection, but I wasn't getting any better.  As a last resort, the doctor went to Camp Swift, the Army base ten miles from Elgin to obtain a new drug, streptomycin, which was still being tested on the troops before being approved by the government for public use.  It was the miracle drug that saved my life, yet the never told my parents what he'd done.

Some thirty years later my mother was in the local beauty shop and listening to several retired nurses talking about their experiences.  One lady mentioned the time a very sick little boy's life was saved in the 1940's because the doctor had gotten a new drug from the Army.  My mother knew I was the child and never understood why the doctor never told them the truth. 

I don't have many memories about my ordeal other than fighting to keep them from putting cone with chloroform on my face and getting shots every four hours.  One of my childhood friends said he remembers visiting me in the hospital and seeing all in tubes in my body.

I've often wondered if I was the first non-military person to have received streptomycin.   

 

 

 

   

 

 

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ROAD TRIP! 

I knew some girls from France when I was going to school at St. Edwards in Austin.  They rented a car and went to Florida on Spring Break. Don't ask me why they didn't go down to Padre. I think they wanted to see Disney World and Miami.  They got all the way to Key West.  When the got ready to leave Key West, one was driving, one was in the back seat mostly sleeping and the other was in the passenger seat reading etc ...  The plan was for the girl who was sleeping to take over when the girl who was driving got tired. The girl who was driving drove about 10 hours, all the way to Tallahassee. They stopped at a convenience store for about half an hour or so. The girl who was driving climbed into the back seat and fell asleep. The girl who was in the passenger seat either didn't have a driver's license or didn't want to drive or something and she had dozed off by the time the former backseat passenger had filled up the tank and got on the road. Somehow the driver managed to turn the car around.  By the time the other two girls woke up around daylight and realized what had happened they were seeing signs for Miami. Mind you this was many years ago, long before the internet.  Kids, all we had was maps back then.  It's about 8 hours from Tallahassee to Miami.  So they had driven for about 18 hours and were about two hours from where they had started. The two girls who hadn't been driving wanted to kill Marion, the driver, but Marion started crying and they felt so bad for her that they started crying, too.  But what could they do? They drove another 8 hours and were back in Tallahassee when they could have been back in Austin. 

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