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Former San Antonio musician Larry Patton is having a rough time of it with fourth stage metastatic melanoma, a deadly form of cancer which is in his stomach, pancreas, lymph nodes, liver and pelvic area.

Patton will be recalled by San Antonio music fans for his 1970s work with Claude Morgan and the Buckboard Boogie Boys.

A bass guitarist and vocalist, Patton, who now lives in Chestmound, Tennessee, was the Flying Burrito Brothers front man for a number of years, and he has worked with such notables over the years as Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, Ronnie Milsap, Johnny Bush, Barbara Fairchild, and countless others.

Patton was the bus driver for both Ricky Skaggs and Delbert McClinton for a number of years, and he was partially responsible for getting Mike Kennedy’s audition with Skaggs.

Oldtimers on the San Antonio music scene will recall when Larry Patton, Larry Roberson, and Ron Knuth hit town in the 1970s. They had all been members of Hank Williams Jr.’s band, and all of them found themselves out of work when Williams fell off a bluff while hunting in Montana.

Landing in San Antonio, bassist (Big) Larry Patton, drummer (Little) Larry Roberson, and fiddler Ron Knuth soon fell in with Claude Morgan to become The Buckboard Boogie Boys.

Patton married Pamela Roberts, daughter of San Antonio fiddler and band leader Slim Roberts, and the rest is music history.

With his singing daughters, Pamela and Deborah, and drummer son Will, Slim formed the popular club  band he called The Generation Gap.

Will Roberts was the contact for this article on Patton.

“Larry is my brother-in-law,” Will said. “He is also the caring and kindly spirit who took me into his home and saved my life when my addiction to drugs and alcohol was killing me. I have been clean and sober since October of 1989, and I owe a big part of it to Larry. I don’t have the words to adequately explain what a wonderful man he is.”

Will says Patton knows his days are limited, although doctors have supplied him with no time frame.

Roberts said a GoFundMe account has been set up to help the family pay expenses. Please help if you can.

When I was a cub reporter with the San Angelo Standard-Times in West Texas I learned a basic truth about people that set the tone for my life as a professional writer.

Not all readers demand a conventional winner, and the Norman Rockwell myth has never applied to the vast majority of us.

Tom Steph was the San Angelo city editor who launched me into a world of characters who have included the hustlers and the hustled.

Steph came to the San Angelo newspaper from the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, and I never forgot what he taught me.

“Be different,” Steph said. “Write your articles about the losers and the off-color characters of this world. Steinbeck did it, Erskine Caldwell did it. People get sick of hearing about the winners. There is a little loser in all of us, and we can all identify. So many of us are a little odd, a little off-whack, a little removed from the beaten path.”

A year after that, I had transferred to the San Antonio Express-News where I started as a general assignments reporter. My first opportunity to put Tom Steph’s visionary advice into newspaper print was soon to be forthcoming.

The San Antonio Livestock Show and Rodeo was in full swing, and the city editor had suggested that I try to interview world all-around champion cowboy Jim Shoulders for a feature article.

Before heading for the rodeo grounds, I stopped off at the Melody Room Lounge, a drinking dump on Third Street directly across from the newspaper building. There were a couple of cheap hotels in the immediate area, and this is where I met Robert (Coyote) Perry, a little-known Choctaw Indian rodeo performer and stock pen manure scooper who followed the rodeo tour, entering both bull riding and saddle bronc riding events.

We were shooting 9-ball pool when a cowboy friend of Perry’s introduced him.

“This is Coyote Perry,” said the cowboy. “He is the losingest cowboy on the rodeo circuit. Some call him Wolf Perry, but to most of us he is Coyote Perry. He gets his name from the coyote yips and howls that come out of his mouth every time he is thrown by a bronc or a bull. When Coyote Perry hits the arena ground they can hear his howling all the way to Tulsa.”

Jim Shoulders was forgotten. Coyote Perry had captured my imagination.

Coyote Perry was built like a human fireplug, a swarthy competitor who did his best.

I soon learned that Perry’s rodeo winnings were from scant to non-existent, and he earned most of the money used to get him from rodeo to rodeo by shoveling shit out of the arenas and stock barns. Sometimes he slept in the barns, sometimes in cheap hotels like the one near the Express and News.

When asked about his situation, Perry said, “Heck, who says I’m the losingest? I won eighth place in bull riding at Cheyenne one time, and I placed fifth in saddle bronc at Pendleton. I guess it was a year or so back.”

I asked Perry why he fought it with the professional rodeo circuit.

“I rodeo because I have a bad back,” he said without blinking. “I think I have one of them slipped disc doohickeys or something like that. Rodeoing beats hell out of riding a Farmall tractor on the reservation from daylight til dark. It was killing my back.”

I asked Perry if being thrown and maybe stomped on by a brahman bull wouldn’t be equally or more painful than the tractor. He had a simple answer: “Being thrown and stomped on only hurts for a little while. Riding that tractor hurt from daylight til dark.”

I left Robert Perry in the Melody Room to return to the newspaper city room where I wrote about Coyote Perry, the losingest cowboy on the professional rodeo tour.

The wire services picked up on the article, and, within hours, Coyote Perry was featured in newspapers all over the United States, as well as the front cover of the London Times.

That West Texas editor, Tom Steph, was right. The losers have a place, too. And many of the off-plumb winners might look like losers through the lens of proper society. I had found my way with that segment of humanity which has produced many of my friends and subjects of my writing. People are continually asking me about the rapport I have enjoyed with many of the subjects.

I guess it came natural for me, and I answer most questions as candidly as possible.

How in the hell did I talk world renown pool hustler Minnesota Fats into wearing a Santa Claus suit for a picture shoot?

Simple. I asked him and he jumped into the suit.

My entire life as a writer has included subjects who Hank Williams might have described as fractured stars from “Life’s Mighty Gallery of Pictures.” Some famous and some infamous, the characters who have made my world go around. From Rudolph Wonderone Jr. (aka Minnesota Fats) they have included the likes of David Alan Coe, Big John Hamilton, Hondo Crouch, Honest Charlie Potter, Willie Nelson, world renown tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, Leon Russell, Johnny Rodriguez, and Bourbon Street Chaplain Rev. Bob Harrington.

The names and the memories will never leave me. The list goes on into what seems like infinity–motorcycle daredevils Even Steven and Igo Mendoza, golf legend Lee (The Flea) Trevino, San Antonio and Las Vegas sports handicapper Tony Salinas, George Strait, Wild Man Ray Liberto, madam Theresa Brown, Johnny Bush, Darrell McCall, Alex Harvey, wild piano pounder Blind George McClain, Augie Meyers, Gary Stewart, Texas Ranger legend A.Y. Allee, boxer Tony Ayala, Red Adair with Boots and Coots, pool shark and billiard parlor owner Bananas Rodriguez, gambler and bookmaker Jack Hanratty, San Antonio Bandidos chapter founder Royce Showalter, Dub Robinson, saddle bronc champion Case Tibbs, Randy Toman.

The criminal defense lawyers such as Alan Brown and A.L. Hernden are both personal and professional associates. Others include Ray Wylie Hubbard, police figure shotgun-toting Arthur (Bunny) Eckert, and Bobby (Kid Death) Thomas, boxer and scam artist who was by far the craziest bastard I ever knew. And many many more. I guess I loved Bobby, and, at some level, I know he loved me. And I guess the same might be said about a bunch of them.

“Sambo!” Bobby always called me, with heavy emphasis on the “bo!”

Nobody but Bobby (Kid Death) Thomas could peddle laundered and blow-dried sheep skins for baby polar bear hides and get away with it. Bobby showed me how he did it. All lanolin was removed through the laundromat washing and drying process, and the fluffy, snow white sheep hides resembled what all of us thought an infant polar bear skin would surely look like.

I was greatly impressed by the blinding white sheep fur.

I was told that Thomas got $50 each for the skins. He sold a few but I never knew how many.

I realize that I would never have fit well in polite society, so I chose that other fork in the road which included booze, drugs, hustlers, felony charges and jail, pitfalls and pratfalls, and some of the most interesting and talented people this world has ever known.

Alex Harvey wrote hits like “Delta Dawn” and “Ruben James,” and he offered me this bit of encouragement as I entered my mid-80s and started on this book.

“It ain’t the number of years you have that is important,” he said, “it’s still all about how high you can jump.”

In the early 1970s I was drinking hard but enjoying some measure of success. The Express and News had published my first book, a paperback titled The Best of Sam Kindrick–Secret Life and Hard Times of a Cedar Chopper. It was basically a compilation of short articles and columns I had written for the newspaper. Nothing like the size or scope of this project. The paper paid for 20,000 copies of the book, and the deal called for the paper recouping all printing expenses before I was to share in the profits.

Sales of the book were going at a brisk clip, one of the big reasons being television promotions by U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez. Henry liked me. His 20th Congressional District covered a large area of San Antonio and Bexar County, and I know that some of those books sold simply because Henry strongly suggested that people should buy it. During this era both the Express and News and KENS 5 TV were owned by Harte Hanks, so I had unlimited newspaper and television exposure for the book.

My early friendship with Willie Nelson was starting to grow. Nelson was playing John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes

on a regular basis, and my understanding at the time was that Willie needed these regular gigs to pay off his gambling debts. I do know that Nelson liked to play poker for money, and he also loved to play golf. It was the game of golf that first tied Willie to San Antonio golf hustler and caddy Larry Trader.

Larry Trader had carried the golf bags for pro golfer Tommy (Thunder) Bolt, and he was a friend of Lee Trevino, the El Paso hustler who became the greatest Hispanic golfer of all times. Larry’s brother Bobby Trader was another scratch golfer who had played on the University of Houston golf team. At that time, Nelson was letting Larry handle some of his bookings at John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes. Old man John T. had taken a liking to me, and I had the run of Flores when Willie was playing the big outdoor patio during spring and summer months.

I first played golf with Nelson and Trader when Willie was hanging out at an abandoned country club in Bandera. He had an eye to buy the Bandera club, but scrapped that idea and moved to Austin when the redneck culture around Bandera started rubbing his fur the wrong way.

Nelson and I were inconsistent duffers during those early golf outings, shooting in the 90s on many days.

“The safest place to be on the course with Willie and Sam is directly in front of them,” Larry Trader was fond of saying. “They will drive a golf ball in every direction, but seldom straight down the fairway. Flying buzzards and ground squirrels are in constant danger.”

In subsequent years, Nelson got much better at the game. I gave it up in disgust when it became obvious that I would never be the next Arnold Palmer.

When I started giving Nelson ink in my Express and News column, he seemed grateful. This was long before the world found out about the amazing talent from Abbott, Texas.

I recall asking Willie if there were other newspaper writers around the country who recognized his talent and were writing about him.

“There are,” he said. “They are in pockets around the country. Like you, these guys are willing to go out on a limb for me.”

This was a time when Nelson had become disillusioned and disgruntled with the county music recording industry based in Nashville. This was also a time when marijuana possession was still a felony, and Willie was making little attempt to hide his almost open use of the evil weed.

“I have decided to record my music in Texas,” Willie told me. “I guess people wanting to buy the records will just have to come to Texas to get them.”

Those were heady years for us all. Nelson’s Saturday night gigs in Helotes ended at midnight, giving us plenty of time for impromptu visits to San Antonio live music venues that stayed open until 2 a.m. On many of those nights I would pile into Willie’s Mercedes with him, Larry Trader, road hand Billy Cooper, and some member of his crew who drove. Two clubs we always hit were the eclectic Bijou and Scotty Young’s Scotchman’s Club, both on San Pedro Avenue. Sam Noin and Romy Vela owned and operated the Bijou. And after these came the Longneck Club off Blanco Road where Augie Meyers and other top local talent was showcased. Ronnie Branham was the Longneck operator.

The Bijou was one of those rare and ratty little joints that appealed to musicians. It was a musician’s bar with a soul of its own. I recall one night with Willie when we entered the Bijou to find blind Blind George McClain pounding the piano. Blind George was out of Austin. He had about 10 percent of his eyesight but no more. His aggressive piano style was combined with his loud foot stomping on plywood stage flooring as he rocked the house. When we entered the Bijou that night, Willie quietly slid in next to George at the piano. He whispered something to Blind George and McClain lit up like a brush fire. He instantly knew who was with him on the piano bench. The duet that followed was epic–Blind George and Nelson ripping the house down with Willie’s “Bloody Mary Morning.”

On another note, I have always wished I had a video clip of Blind George and his equally blind brother-in-law fist-fighting one night out behind the Bijou. They finally punched themselves out and I don’t think either of them landed  a single solid blow.

When we visited the Scotchman’s Club, Victor Lopez and Los Blues were the house band, a hot group including Jimmy Casas and Bobby Rey.

“I look back now and can hardly believe it,” Lopez told me

shortly before his death in 2017. “When you all came into the club I would invite Willie up to sing a number. He usually just sang one song or maybe two and got down, always polite and the gentleman. I would thank him and got back to playing. What a dunce I was. Here was one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and I was letting him off my stage with a mere ‘thank you.’ I should have encouraged him to play all night.”

Nelson truly enjoyed club hopping in those earlier times, and so did I. Late one night we stopped at my house on Harriett drive to pick up some money and that was when Willie stepped on the dog bone. In those days, we were still feeding the dogs bones and table scraps.

The bone went through Willie’s tennis shoe. There was blood everywhere. His howl of pain awakened my wife Vicky, who walked in to find Nelson holding his injured foot and hopping across the living room on the other one.

I recall my then wife telling one of her girlfriends: “Yes, I woke up to this horrible noise and could hardly believe my eyes when I walked into my living room to find Willie Nelson hopping on one foot and holding the other one.”

Nelson and I were pretty tight in 1973 when I hatched a plan for a world championship menudo cookoff. I had attended the much-ballyhooed first international chili cookoff at the Big Bend ghost town of Terlingua, which featured chili cooks H. Allen Smith and Wick Fowler. By then I was hobnobbing with Luckenbach imagineer Hondo Crouch and future movie star Guich Koock, and I had an idea that we could pump up a pretty good crowd with the right kind of promotion.

Menudo is the Mexican and South Texas soup made from tripe, hominy, chopped onion, serranos, and various other spices. Tripe is the rubbery and powerfully pungent lining of a beef stomach. The legends of Mexico have always touted menudo as a hangover cure.

I stole the name for our cookoff product from a Wheaties cereal box. Our cookoff would feature the true “Breakfast of Champions.” It might not be a medically proven hangover cure, I conceded, but a lot of drunks ate menudo and flour tortillas after a hard night on the alcohol sauce. “The Breakfast of Champions” cookoff captured the heart and imagination of San Antonio and South Texas. I started pumping it in my newspaper column, and the results were amazing.

Entrants for the cookoff numbered almost a hundred, some of them being cooking teams who came from distant towns like Corpus Christi, Brownsville, Harlingen, and Victoria.

On that morning of the big day, it was April and hot. Cars were jamming the access road leading from IH 10 to Raymond Russell Park. I will never forget the DPS cop who called me out of Raymond Russell Park and demanded by what authority was I causing a gigantic traffic backup which was endangering human life.

I told the cop we were fixing to host the greatest menudo cookoff ever held, and that he would need to talk with my co-sponsor for the event for any questions he might want answered.

“Who might your co-sponsor be?” the cop bawled at me.

“Congressman Henry Gonzalez,” I answered.

“The United States congressman?” the cop was about to cry.

“One and the same,” I told the policeman.

I hadn’t bothered to tell Henry that he was co-sponsoring a menudo cookoff, but I felt confident that he would back me up.

The poor cop headed back to his cruiser while cars and trucks passed him as they turned into the park.

I recall cringing when I looked up to see a Winnebago full of prostitutes and a big banner proclaiming “Hot Pants Menudo.” It was my friend madam Theresa Brown and some of her working girls, and I recall the little sinking sensation I felt in my belly while trying to figure out what I would do with Theresa.

“Damn it, Theresa,” I told her. “What the hell are you trying to do to me? I don’t need the heat.”

T-Brown was unfazed, and her smile promised nothing but mischief when she gave me her answer:

“Fuck you, Sammy, I know more about menudo than you do.”

We would have the Willie Nelson band and others who might want to join in. Before it was over we had Johnny Bush and the Bandoleros, plus more than 20 other groups and a mid-afternoon boxing match that would feature homicide detective Roy Aguilar and criminal attorney Alan Brown.

This captured the fancy of both lawyers and cops, who talked it up for weeks prior to the event in both the courthouse and the police headquarters.

Brown was the nephew of bookmaker Jack Hanratty, and Hanratty told me in advance to bet as much money as I could get down on Brown, a former Golden Gloves champion from Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley.

To the unpracticed eye of most of the spectators, this fistic match between detective and lawyer looked like a mismatch that might result in serious injury to the attorney.

Homicide detective Roy Aguilar was a former street fighter and police academy athlete who was built like a steel oil drum with muscled arms and legs. Brown was a couple of shades paler than Aguillar with a snock of hair hanging over one eye and nothing to suggest arm or leg power that could hurt anything much bigger than a long-legged yard toad.

Minutes before the fight was to start, I heard Hanratty holler out: “Two-to-one.” Then only seconds before the opening bell I heard him yell “Five-to-one.”

I was standing next to the old bookie when he upped the odds yet again: “Ten-to-one.”

I looked at Jack and he said, “You will not lose if you bet on Alan. He has whipped every fighter in the Rio Grande Valley at least once.”

It was late spring and blazing hot that day. Jimmy Parks was refereeing the fight.

Aguilar was the aggressor from the opening bell.

He charged Brown hard, punching and missing and sweating.

“Twenty-to-one” Hanratty yelled.

There were no takers.

Second round ended with no punch from Brown, just bobbing, weaving, ducking, and dodging.

Roy was dripping sweat when the third and final round started.

And then it was over. Alan hit Roy with a crashing right cross that glazed his eyes and turned his legs to spaghetti. And even as Aguillar was plunging to the canvas, Jack could be heard in the distance: “Forty-to-one.”

I recall saying a little prayer at the time–Oh, Lord, don’t let Roy be dead.

The great cookoff ended sometime before dawn. Crowd estimates unofficially topped 20,000, but we had no official count since no tickets were sold. We did sell rivers of beer with my associates getting away with most of the profits. A few gravestones were upended by vandals in next door Mission Park Cemetery, but nobody got killed that I ever heard about. I did have a deputy sheriff escort a radio station executive off the grounds when he and his wife engaged in a hollering cuss fight that could be heard all over Raymond Russell Park. Hal Davis was general manager of the Doubleday radio stations KITE AM and KEXL FM at the time. I had no information on Mr. and Mrs. Davis, just that they were raising holy hell with each other. Ironically, Davis would play a large part in my future, but I will talk about this when we get there. One of our county commissioners told me later in private that I shouldn’t try any more promotions in county parks for a long while.

At this stage, I was hungover, dog tired, and in dire need of rest. But my rest and recovery would be short-lived and fraught with stunning and traumatic upheaval.

A few short weeks after my menudo cookoff, I awakened to learn that Australian newspaper billionaire Rupert Murdoch had purchased the Express and News from Harte-Hanks for $17-million. I had an uneasy sensation in my gut upon learning this news. Houston Harte Sr. had hand-raised me in the newspaper business like an orphaned goat, putting up with my kid shenanigans at the San Angelo Standard-Times, and following my progress in San Antonio when he bought the Express-News. Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza couldn’t have had it any better. As I mentioned earlier, the elderly newspaper titan loved to walk into the Express city room and plant his rear on a corner of my desk to talk.

Harte Senior installed Conway Craig as the Express and News general manager, but Houston Harte Jr. was directly in line to take over when the elderly Craig retired, and I always sensed that my invisible cloak of protection had been passed down from father to son. Houstie liked me as well as his father and I knew it.

Charles O. (Charlie) Kilpatrick, our scrotumless sycophant and social climber of an executive editor, was more than half scared of me because of the rapport I had always enjoyed with the Hartes. Kilpatrick’s expertise at posterior oscillation was a fact to be acknowledged, and, by God, his good standing membership in the self-imagined royalty of the Texas Cavaliers was a sad prize to define one’s blue blood worth as a human being. At some level I was aware of this although I had never really thought much about it.

It was the morning after sale of the Express and News that I got the call. I was to report to the office of executive editor Kilpatrick.

I was about to be fired from my column writing job with the Express and News. I knew it but had trouble believing it. From hurricanes to uprisings in the onion fields, I had covered it all, putting my heart and soul into the San Antonio newspaper job. I had never made much money, but with childlike faith I had always looked with optimism for some sort of future with the Express and News.

When I walked into Kilpatrick’s office I knew. Charlie was looking at the wall somewhere behind me when he spoke.

He had wanted to do this for a long time. I could tell. The Harte’s were gone and I was standing there like a naked fighting rooster with no spurs.

“You are the best writer I have ever been associated with,” Kilpatrick said, “but I have to let you go.”

I asked for a reason, nothing more.

“You associate with criminals and other undesirable people,” he said.

He named a couple of my San Antonio friends before dropping Willie Nelson’s name.

“This musician you just had out at Raymond Russell park is a known dope addict,” Kilpatrick said.

Then he dropped the name that confirmed what I had suspected.

“Paul English,” Kilpatrick said. “The Nelson drummer is a pimp. I know for a fact that English is a pimp, and these are the people you have been associating with.”

I knew then that Kilpatrick was getting his information from within the Nelson camp. Or very close to the camp. It is true that Paul was a Fort Worth gangster and pimp before he joined the Nelson band, but Charlie Kilpatrick had no way of knowing this. Someone close to Willie fired the torpedo that sank my canoe. I was dumbfounded when it happened. I am pretty sure now who the Judas was. The slimeball sneak is dead now, but my resentment is still very much alive.

My hands were shaking when Kilpatrick ended my newspaper career. I recall the surreal feeling I had of being skinned alive and refitted with another person’s skin. I looked down at my hands and saw shriveled folds of skin that didn’t belong to me as workers from the Express press room rolled stacks of boxes filled with copies of my book down the hallway next to Kilpatrick’s office.

“I have decided to give you your remaining books as severance pay,” Kilpatrick said. “The press room workers will help you load them in your truck.”

There were many boxes, containing the unsold books. The newspaper had recouped all printing costs, and I was to get my pay through future book sales. I had no way to market these books. Thousands of them. I had no money. I had school age kids at home.

I can recall the tangle of emotions that hit me. I felt for a minute like crying; I felt for another minute like going back to Junction and being that carefree little boy running the beautiful South Llano River bottoms of my childhood. Then the anger hit me like a runaway freight. I felt like cutting off Charlie Kilpatrick’s balls and them tamping them down his throat with a 10-pound maul. I felt like getting drunk and I did.

Then I picked up the pieces and went on. I had to quit drinking and I did. I started doing dope as a substitute, recalling now the words of my musician and songwriting friend Ray Wyie Hubbard.

“We figured cocaine was the answer to our drinking problem,” Hubbard was heard to say.

It wasn’t. It was the gateway to another little stretch of hell on earth. I stuck with my mantra–Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. And the insanity got its second wind.

Legend has a young lovesick Indian couple leaping to their deaths from a rugged limestone bluff near my hometown of Junction. Their parents had refused their dream of marriage, so they went hand-in-hand together over the edge and into the Great Beyond.

The craggy cliff is known to this day as Lover’s Leap, and the legend of those despairing young Indians has long been part of the magic of my home. An unknown scribe from long ago had this to say: “Knowing their love can never be, the young couple stare at the swirling river far below. One last kiss, and then, holding hands, they leap off the cliff, united forever in death – and legend.”

That river below had to be the South Llano which joins the North Llano by the town of Junction, forming the Main Llano which winds on toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Lover’s Leap overlooks the annual Junction Easter pageant which is held in the Lover’s Leap Amphitheater, a cleared area beneath the rocky bluff and close to the spot where legend had the young Indians meeting their death.

There are Lover’s Leap cliffs with similar legends in three other Texas locales, but the one at Junction has always been the one which inspired a writer by the name of J. E. Grinstead to wax poetic in his 1916 magazine called Grinstead’s Graphic.

Wrote Grinstead:

Thus they stood a single moment,
On that rocky, towering heap;
Then, they named the place forever –
As they made the Lover’s Leap.

I believe the legend. It was part of my boyhood.

I fished the swirling waters of that river below, and I hunted the juniper covered hills of Kimble County which surround the town of Junction, truly the land of living waters.

To this day, when I take Exit 456 off of IH–10, and start the sloping road descent north beside the high craig which is Lover’s Leap, I look down with mist of eye and nostalgic chill upon the prettiest little river valley town in the entire State of Texas.

Junction will always be my home.

Spring and then summer were the seasons I loved as a kid growing up in Junction. When the mesquites showed their first traces of green, off came the boots and shoes. The pecan trees in our yard were towering. Their leaves followed the mesquites.The sweet scent of blooming agarita bushes belongs to Junction and Kimble County. I loved going barefoot during the grade school years. My feet grew callouses that were tough as a pig snout, enabling me to run with impunity through grass burr and goathead thorn patches that would seriously cripple a city kid.

My father, Grady Kindrick, had died before I was a year old. I lived with my mother, Bernice, in the little stucco house my father hand built. It had a standing-seam metal roof, and a fireplace built by master rock mason Oliver Lynn Verlin. There were two bedrooms, a small living and dining room combination with a hardwood floor, and a small kitchen with linoleum flooring. It was a mansion in my eyes, the most beautiful home in the entire world. The flat standing-seam metal roof was drained by square metal pipes. The noise they made put me to sleep on many a rainy night, and when Junction got its occasional snow, I could hear the drains making a strange ticking sound. When I heard that sound at night I bounded out of bed the next morning to play in the mysterious white stuff. I knew the snow would be covering the ground.

Our house also had an adjoining one-bedroom garage apartment, but I couldn’t recall any of the tenants. They were mostly working women, none of them staying for any significant length of time.

In the summer months before I was to enter the eighth grade in school, I prowled the South Llano River banks with a fishing rod and a dog. I don’t think my mother worried a lot. I had learned to swim at age 6. My mother was there, too. I took my first swimming strokes at Flat Rock Crossing, a natural swimming hole at the time on the South Llano River about a mile from our house in Junction. At that exact spot, my mother had me baptised by a Baptist preacher. I took to the water much quicker than I took to the preacher. My mother was a natural athlete and a dark-haired country beauty, starring on the Junction High School girls basketball team, and swimming like a Llano River bank beaver when she was a young girl.

She led me out to the deeper water and held me belly-down, supporting me with her hands on my midsection. I had seen her swim and I knew what to do. I started stroking with my arms and kicking my feet. She stepped back and I was swimming free. I crossed the Flat Rock Crossing deep hole with little effort, and after that day nobody could have kept me out of the river.

With cane poles and later a cheap Montgomery Ward rod-and-reel, I stalked the fishes of the Llanos, landing an array of perch and catfish that included sun perch and black Rio Grande perch, silvery channel catfish and blue cats when I was still very young. The heavyweight yellow cats and alligator gar would come later when I was older and strong enough to handle the deep water throw lines and trotlines which required a boat.

I can close my eyes and conjure up a South Llano River morning as if a 75-year gap in time did not exist. My spotted terrier mix pup Tippy is sniffing the river bottom humus, checking for grey squirrel scent and maybe some coon sign left over from the night before. The sparkling clear water is gurgling and burbling as it spils over a gravel bar into a pool below, lined by sycamore and water elms.The sun is just beginning to rise on a Kimble County morning, beautiful and inviting as steam slowly rises from the pristine water and lily pads of the South Llano.

Then splat! The cork on my fishing line disappears under the river surface. My breath was like pure oxygen. I had the long-shanked hook baited with earthworms. I had raised and nurtured those worms with liberal helpings of coffee grounds from our kitchen.. The cane pole tipped and then bent as a flash of orange appeared just beneath the river surface. It was a sun perch, a big one, maybe a quarter pound or more. My mother deep-fried these fish, cooking them crisp so bones and meat could be consumed safely together. Much like potato chips.

I would have a full stringer of perch, plus a channel cat or two if I was lucky, and the sun would be setting on a happy country boy as Tippy and I made our way home. I wore nothing but cutoff jeans and a shapeless farm boy straw hat that didn’t cost more than a couple of dollars. A cacophony of frog and cricket sounds would follow me as I left the river bottom.The call of a wild gobbler was not uncommon. Harmless Texas water snakes would leave their v wakes as they glided across the river. And we would see the occasional poisonous copperheads and cottonmouths that bothered no one if they were not messed with.

My back and feet were not tanned by the sun.They were burnished the color of a burnt stump but nobody cared. I will forever remember the sounds of the river at night. They were the familiar hoot of a great horned owl, the crazy gabble of a screech owl, the mournful cry of the whippoorwill, the warning pop of a beaver’s tail hitting the surface, and the sharp bark of a hunting fox. I loved all of the sounds, even the spooky ones nobody could identify. I have always believed they might have been made by ghost people killed by the Comanche–Indians who left their arrow points and kitchen middens on the Llano watersheds for some of us to find.

Animals, both wild and domestic, were a huge part of my childhood. Dogs, cats, burros, pigeons, hamsters, white rats, raccoons, possums, squirrels, feather-legged bantam chickens, bats, snakes, and one beaver were all part of the menagerie which my poor mother managed to tolerate. My mother allowed a small metal shed out behind our house where I raised pigeons and bantam cickens. The beaver’s name was Sawdust, and Sawdust had to go when he chewed the leg off a dining room chair. One of two donkeys I kept in the fenced area behind the house was a tough little critter I rode into town from Johnson Fork Creek some 10 miles distance. I called him Samson. The wildest pet who enjoyed the most longevity in our house was Possie the pet possum, a nocturnal little creature with a perpetual grin who liked to suck eggs and eat cat food. Possie lived undetected in the house for the better part of six months, emerging at night to dine on the cat’s food. My mother finally caught him just before daylight one morning when she got out of bed for some unknown reason. She opened an outside door and the possum was happy to go.

Nobody around Junction had ever heard of a golden hampster. I found a hamster ad in a Fur, Fish, and Game magazine, and my mother let me order a pair of the little animals. I don’t recall what happened to my hamster business.

Those pre-pubescent years were the happiest I was to enjoy with my mom. She was still trying to accept the death of my father, and the stark reality of our situation was that she didn’t know what to do with me. When two large Texas water moccasins escaped from an aquarium tank I had in the garage, my terrified mother wouldn’t go near the garage for a month. I guess the snakes high-tailed it for the river. They never came back. But my mother never cracked down on my propensity for collecting wild critters. She basically allowed me to do as I pleased.

My closest childhood friend remained in my life through high school, college, and into adulthood. As I entered my pre-teens and early teens I spent a lot of time on the Coke Stevenson Ranch on the headwaters of the South Llano with Rex Thompson Sherry, a powerfully-built kid whose father Rex Sherry was Coke Stevenson’s ranch foreman. Rex Thompson was known only as Tommy Sherry in those days, and his younger brother Roger was Bubba.

My maternal grandparents leased ranched on the Stevenson property several miles from the Stevenson home and ranch worker lodgings. I often found myself hanging out with the Sherry brothers. When we weren’t hunting or fishing, we hatched other activities to blunt the boredom, usually in the hottest months of late summer.

One unique game we played was called High Pissing. I’m not sure who originated this one, but I do know it became fairly popular with us and some of our associates.

The object was simple. We competed to see who could urinate on a dead run and hit the highest mark on the side of a building with our piss stream. We pissed high on the side of a Stevenson ranch stock barn, and we also competed with town friends on the back side of our garage apartment when my mother was away.

Tommy Sherry and I excelled at the High Pissing competition, along with his little brother Bubba and town kids who included Kenneth Stapp and Bob Wallace. We practiced and we perfected our various techniques.

In the competition, we drank all the water we could hold, then waited 20 or 30 minutes before gathering at the designated starting line. We performed individually. When the water was on the verge of bursting our bladders, we unbuttoned our britches, pinched the ends of our peckers tightly with one hand, and then broke into a dead run directly at the barn wall. It was like a cavalry charge with no horse. We knew exactly when to go airborne and when to relax the grip on our tallywhackers. If this was all completed with precision at the apex of our leap, the resulting blast of urine would hit high on the wall, sometimes head high or even higher. Crashing headlong into the wall was no grounds for disqualification. High pissing was not for pussies. The highest piss mark on the wall determined the winner, no matter what happened to the contestant.

While we were largely responsible for invention of the pissing game, the great mountain lion hoax just seemed to naturally fall our way. I don’t know who stole the stuffed cougar, a frightening mount that had somehow disappeared from a hunting lodge on one of the South Llano dude ranches, either Lynside or The Flying L. I never was sure which ranch it came from. Nor was I ever positive who stole the fearsome-looking feline, a silently snarling menace that seemed ready to pounce on anyone who ventured too close. I know I didn’t steal the stuffed cat, but I was quick to join in the fun with the Sherry brothers when we learned what startling effect the big lion had on night traveling motorists.

Placed on the side of any number of Junction-area highways and ranch roads, and positioned so that it woud be directly facing oncoming vehicles, our stuffed mountin lion proved to be a sensational hoax that would exceed even our wildest dreams. Big cats are rare in Kimble County, but they have aways been there. So we had a plausible scare stunt. When the lion appeared in car or truck headlights, the vehicle usually pulled on past before stopping. There were no cell phones in those days, and a nighttime motorist confronted by a snarling mountain lion was more than rattled. Most of them were scared shitless. After a quick stop, it was a fast dash into town and a telephone where either the town marshal or the sheriff was called.

It didn’t take us long to perfect and streamline the hoax. I put small strips of red relective tape on the mount’s glass eyes and the result was mind-blowing. Never mind that no real mountain lion’s eyes would shine red in the night, the reflective tape was the crowning touch.

When one country motorist backed up his pickup and fired what we guessed was a 30-30 rifle bullet at our cat, we quickly took safety measures. From that point on Tommy Sherry and I took turns driving and positioning the mount.

We had a long piece of cotton rope tied to the cat. One of us drove and let the other one out with the cat. When a motorist saw the cougar and started slowing down, the one hiding in the bushes immediately dragged the mount off the road and into the brush.

The driver in our team would return to pick the other one and our cat up after the excitement was over.

We waited for days and sometimes weeks between our cougar episodes. Mountain lion reports were flying around Junction for months. We continued the tomfoolery until our poor old mountain lion was a tattered mess of raggedy hide that would no longer frighten anyone. Dragging him through the rocks and brush had taken a toll.

Nobody ever exposed us in official fashion, but Sheriff Rip Martin did tell me near the end that we had best pull up with the lion foolishness. I think he must have figured it out. Real mountain lions don’t have eyeballs that glow like red marbles in a fish bowl.

The cougar pranks and pissing matches were diversions from boredom. I killed deer and wild turkey, but varmint hunting with dogs was my true love.

Tommy Sherry’s father Rex owned two Treeing Walker bobcat hounds he called Streak and Saddler. They were big, rangy, black-and-white spotted animals with broad muzzles and medium-long ears that were notched and scarred from fighting bobcats. Ranch people all over that area were acquainted with Rex Sherry and his dogs. Bobcats are the most voracious of all predators in Texas sheep and goat country. Streak and Saddler were always welcome on most any of the South Llano River ranches.

I was intrigued by the excitement.

Some ranch person would spot a bobcat crossing the road, usually at night as they drove home from town. Rex Sherry would get a call on one of those ancient party line phones with ringer, crank, and hand-held receiver. Sometimes Tommy and I would go along as Rex loaded the dogs into the back of his rusty old pickup truck and headed out. This was not kid play. This was serious business. We were going out with two celebrated cat hounds, the best in our part of Texas. If there was moisture on the ground, the dogs would quickly pick up the bobcat’s trail. The chases would sometimes be short, sometime longer and taking several hours before the dogs had the cat in a tree. If the cat left the tree, the fight would be epic– a snarling, roaring, and screeching donnybrook with the cat’s demise happening under the night sky. Usually, though, if the quarry remained in the tree, Rex Sherry would dispatch the cat with a 22 caliber rifle bullet and we would all be headed for the house.

Inspired by the Rex Sherry hounds, I bought my two Walker hounds, Rock and Ruby. Rock died early and I kept Ruby until I went off to college, leaving her with a dog man friend who kept her until her death.

We hunted coon, fox, an occasional bobcat, and mostly ringtails. The ringtail cat is a beautiful buff-colored animal with distinctive black and white rings on its long tail. In Mexico and some western states it is technically known as a “cacomistle.” It is a relative of the fox.

When we were growing up, ringtail pelts were being used as imitation mink for coats and other garments. At one time, Leonard Sutton, the Kimble County fur and pecan buyer in Junction was paying up to $10 each for prime ringtail pelts.

With dogs and headlights, kids like us could sometimes bag as many as a half dozen ringtails in a single night. A $60 fortune for us.

We varmint hunted at night and on horseback, always in the dead of winter when varmint fur was prime. Junction and Kimble County record some of the coldest winter temperatures in Central Texas. We rode the Stevenson ranch horses bareback for their body warmth. They were a gelding named Star and a mare called Flaxie. The geldingwas a sorrel with a white star between his eyes. The marewas a dun the color of broom straw. Flax colored. I usually rode the mare. Both horses had been broken by my cowboy hero Red Smith, and both of them were as gentle as house kittens. Standard bridle bits were not needed with these horses. They were easily steered with rope hackamores, bridles that required only light pressure on the mount’s nose. We had gaps in fences which encircled both the Paint Creek Ranch and the Seven Hundred Springs Ranch, enabling us to hunt on both of these Texas paradises without detection. We crossed onto them from the Stevenson property when the mood struck. There was a spring-fed ditch near the Sherry cow pens. Sometimes we hunted all night, returning to the house in the pre-dawn hours. The irrigation ditch was only a couple of feet wide, but Flaxie had an aversion to getting her feet wet. Instead of wading the ditch, she would stop dead still and then jump the little waterway. By that time of the morning I would be half asleep on the mare’s back. When she made her little crow hop I invariable toppled from her back and into the icy water.

Flaxie would turn and patiently wait for me, the hackamore bridle trailing in the water. Flaxie’s eyes said it all: “Come on, dumb shit, let’s get on into the barn.”

When I night hunted with a dog it was always with Ruby, a petite hound with black and tan spots on a white body with a sprinkling of blue freckles around her face and muzzle. The people who sold her to me said she had some of the Tennessee July foxhound blood in her along with some Treeeing Walker.

Ruby had the sweetest disposition of any dog I ever owned, and a hunting instinct that was a constant threat to her health. She would run over the rocky terrain of the Texas Hill Country until her paws were leaving bloody prints, and then she would run some more. Her big flaw in our part of the country was her disdain for fighting or sitting under a tree. If the quarry–whether it be coon, fox, or cat–went underground or into a tree, Ruby soon lost interest and went on to chase another critter that would run.

Hound dog men in my neck of the woods were into tree dogs that would fight the quarry. I always heard that true fox hunters in other southern areas were satisfied to sit by a campfire and listen to their dogs. I think Ruby had more July foxhound blood in her that anyone suspected. I always enjoyed her high-pitched excitement when she was running a trail. It always reminded me of the old foxhound story The Voice of Bugle Ann which was an early-day motion picture.

Ruby didn’t have a conventional bay when on a varmint trail. She had a soprano song like no other. Red Smith said she sounded like a squeaky bed spring.

There was no calling Ruby off a trail. She ran until she could run no more. If we were hunting anywhere near Junction, Ruby would find her way home. I once took her on a hunt many miles away near the Kimble/Edwards county line. She had run completely out of hearing, and we had returned the 25-mile distance to Junction before the sun came up.

No Ruby, but I knew what to do. Later that day, around noon it was, I returned to the ranch we had hunted the night before. There had been a campfire, and I had left my Levi jacket by the fire ashes when we left for home.

Ruby was there sleeping on my coat as I had known she woud be.

One of the hardest decisions of my life was to leave Ruby behind with others when I went off to college at Sul Ross in Alpine. I truly loved the crazy little girl.

Famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair sashayed into the Express and News city room like she owned the place. It was summer time and I will swear that I could smell her body odor.

I had been assigned the job of interviewing the most hated woman in America, who a few years earlier had filed the suit in a Baltimore federal court that resulted in prayer being banned from American public schools.

To this day, I cannot recall much about the gist of that interview. What always stuck in my memory was Madalyn’s foul mouth and her hairy armpits. She was wearing some sort of flip-flop sandals and one of those frowsy house dresses of a gauzy material that was almost semi-transparent. It was transparent enough to make you look in another direction to avoid Madalyn’s folds of flab.

That was in the late 1960s and most of us were getting accustomed to the Austin-area snuff queens who were expressing their independence by refusing to shave their legs and armpits. Madalyn, however, was an extreme example of the female liberation movement.

When she reached up to scratch her head, I was repulsed by a mass of armpit hair that reminded me of a black wasp nest, one of those big nasty masses of crawling insects that I used to see on the clay bluffs of the Main Llano River in Kimble County. I shied back as if recoiling from a coiled rattlesnake.

We were in the Express-News city room, a large area dotted with desks and open to other departments. My desk was in the wide open, and I recall Madalyn’s presence drawing a small gathering of onlookers. I believe that sports editor Dan Cook was looking on as was company artist Bob Dale and there were a few others. None of us were shy or sensitive to salty talk, and I was prone to use more cuss words than my mother would have sanctioned, but Madalyn Murray O’Hair delighted in the shock effect produced by her toilet mouth.

When I asked about her new husband, Richard O’Hair, who was not present for the interview, Madalyn rocked us back on our heels when she described Richard. “He’s an ex-Marine with a hot pair of balls and a prick that stays harder than a fireplace poker,” Madalyn said with a leer. “My kind of man. Always ready for action.”

I will be damned but I believe that Dan Cook and I both blushed red. We were not prepared for anything like the world famous atheist. She delighted in shocking and embarrassing the shrinking violets and square Johns of this world, and she knew how to do it.

I was never to see O’Hair after that meeting, but I followed her exploits on print, radio, and TV, and this included some of the 38 television debates in 38 cities she had with Rev. Bob Harrington, the flamboyant preacher from New Orleans who was then known all over the country as the Bourbon Street Chaplain.

Never did I dream at the time that Harrington would work his way into San Antonio and the St. Mary’s Street strip joint where we would meet for the first time, or that we would forge a friendship that would last until Harrington’s death on July 4, 2017 in Stigler Oklahoma where he had been living with daughter Mitzi. Bob died at age 89.

Harrington and O’Hair were polar opposites, but they formed an unlikely duo as they debated the existence of God on the Phil Donahue show. Madalyn was as sharp as she was profane, and the big boisterous preacher was the showman’s showman–200 pounds and then some with a curly mane of graying locks and sequined suits with Bourbon Street lamp poles on the coats. He was a handsome speciman with a glib tongue and an eye for the spectacular.

I recall one episode where O’Hair asked Harrington: “Do you mean to tell us that you actually believe all of the dead people are going to come up out of the ground on some kind of judgement day and walk around stinking up the whole country? We’ve already got a population explosion. What are we going to do with them all?”

Harrington had a comeback for anything O’Hair tossed at him. When she asked him why he believed inGod, Harrington said, “I believe in God because I want to.”

Of O’Hair, he said: “Madalyn O’Hair knows the Bible. She has studied it page by page, and I will concede that she knows the scriptures better than I ever have or ever will. But there is one great difference–I know the author.”

By the late 1960s, I was drinking nightly in downtown after-hours clubs, the Commanders Room on Main Avenue and the Navy Club on Pecan Street. Phil Sfair owned and operated the Navy Club, while his younger brothers, Mike and George Sfair, held forth in the Commanders Room. Both clubs managed to stay open after the legal closing deadlines, strictly because of the political connections enjoyed by the owners. Police officials and members of the judiciary who frequented both drinkeries ranged from police lieutenants to federal judges. I was to become a close personal friend of Mike Sfair.

Another downtown club operator who seemed to enjoy a measure of immunity from the law was Guy Linton, who with wife Evelyn owned and operated the first real strip joint on the San Antonio scene. When she was younger, Evelyn taught the girls how to dance. This club was known all over the state as The Green Gate, a burlesque club or cabaret. The Green Gate dancers showed everything but vaginas and nipples, the coverings being pasties and skimpy G-srings. That was tantamount to buck naked in 1968. A sizeable number of us who drank regularly in the Sfair clubs paid occasional visits to the Green Gate, a fact that was known by the Lintons.

Never in a million years would I have dreamed of meeting a New Orleans preacher on the Green Gate stage, but that is where I met the Bourbon Street Chaplain. The year was 1968. Guy and Evelyn Linton publicly announced that they were closing the Green Gate forever, and Bob delivered a hell fire and brimstone sermon that traumatized the lead dancer, a busty little blonde who danced under the pseudonym Candy Cane. As Reverend Bob’s voice thundered on the failings of the flesh, I will swear that poor little Candy was trying to cover her tits with a bar towel.

A small part of San Antonio history was made that night, and the entire show was set up from start to finish.

I was writing a daily column for the San Antonio Express when Evelyn Linton called me to announce that she and Guy had found Jesus Christ through a New Orleans preacher by the name of Bob Harrington. They were turning their lives over to the Lord, and the official announcement would be made directly after a Bob Harrington sermon that would follow the final dance show at the Green Gate.

History verified that the Lintons were serious about their conversion to Christianity, but Guy and Evelyn were lifetime show people, and with the flashiest preacher on the planet, they wanted San Antonio and the world to know that they were officially going out of the skin and sin trade.

The Lintons met Bob Harrington when he preached a revival sermon at the Castle Hills Baptist Church. Castle Hills is an independent municipality completely surrounded by the City of San Antonio. The Lintons said that Harrington led them to the Lord, and Evelyn said they all wanted me to write an article about their conversion to Christianity and their decision to shut down the Green Gate forever.

I meant it when I told her that I would not cover Harrington’s sermon without a beer. She and Guy really wanted the publicity.

“Okay,” she said with reluctance, “but your beer will be the last one we will ever serve at the Green Gate. And it will be free.”

She was true to her word. I drank the last beer ever consumed at the Green Gate. It was a Lone Star. And let the record reflect that Guy and Evelyn Linton remained loyal Christians and faithful members of the Castle Hills Baptist Church until their deaths. When they closed the Green Gate, the Lintons left a sign on the door which read: “Closed Forever, See You In Church.”

Unfortunately, my world renown minister friend had a major slip on life’s slippery and temptation fraught highway in later years, but he had found his way back to the Lord before his death in Oklahoma.

To my knowledge, Bob had no contact with Madalyn Murray O’Hair after their ballyhooed series of television debates. Madalyn, who founded American Atheists, was murdered in Austin along with one of her two sons, Jon Garth Murray, and granddaughter Robin Murray O’Hair, by ex-con David Waters, a former employee of American Atheists.

After his arrest, conviction, and confession, Waters led authorities to the shallow grave in Real County where he had stacked the dismembered and partially-burned bodies like cord wood. He told authorities he chopped up the bodies with an electric circular hand saw.

O’Hair’s elder son, William J. Murray, disavowed his mother as evil, and became a Baptist preacher.

Larry Flynt, founder and publisher of Hustler Magazine, was at one time a big contributor to O’Hair’s organization American Atheists. And I can recall Bob Harrington telling me at one point in time that he was working to convert Flynt to Christianity. “I’ve got him just about ready to take the leap,” Harrington said. “He is almost ready to turn his life over to Jesus Christ. You will really have a big story to write when this happens.”

But that is all I could recall on the subject of Flynt. Harrington never mentioned him to me again.

In later years after I had left the Express and News and established Action Magazine, and after a World Championship Menudo Cookoff I promoted with Willie Nelson and some 30 other bands, I had Harrington preach what we called Sam Kindrick’s Outdoor Revival and Music Extravaganza.

Bob and I had become friends after the Green Gate closing, and he jumped at my suggestion for the preaching and music show which was held on the San Antonio River south of San Antonio on private ranch land.

Gary P. Nunn and the Lost Gonzo Band headlined this one with stellar performances by Dub Robinson and the Drug Store Cowboys, including Randy Toman and Robert (Cotton) Payne. Jerry Jeff Walker was supposed to play with Nunn and the Lost Gonzos, but he failed to show.

“I can recall that we had some electrical problems with the equipment,” Robinson said. “But we wound up having a hell of a show. I will never forget the great time we had.”

Harrington became a well-known evangelist during the 1960s and 1970s following his conversion to Christianity at age 30 in his hometown of Sweet Water, Alabama. He was a popular guest on national television shows including Phil Donahue, Merv Griffin and The Tonight Show due to his one-liners and unconventional religious wit. Bob met Madalyn Murray O’Hair in the early 1970s. He also had a picture of himself with famed evangelist Billy Graham.

In 1960, after only a few years of preaching throughout the South on flatbed trailers and in tents, Harrington moved to New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary with his wife Joyce, and daughters, Rhonda and Mitzi.

During his time in seminary, Harrington served as assistant pastor of First Baptist Church of New Orleans with J.D. Grey and continued his ministry as an itinerant evangelist. In a chapel service, NOBTS President Leo Edleman said, “Wherever there is a pocket of sin, there is a mission field, and the nearest Christian to it is a missionary.” According to Harrington, “the nearest pocket of sin was Bourbon Street.”

Harrington immediately began a street ministry armed with a microphone and a Bible. Several months later deacons at First Baptist New Orleans loaned him enough money for a few months’ rent to open a chapel on Bourbon Street in the heart of the French Quarter. Harrington began witnessing and preaching to whores, bums, and pimps in the bars and strip clubs of Bourbon Street. In 1962, New Orleans Mayor Victor Schiro proclaimed him “The Chaplain of Bourbon Street.”

Harrington’s street ministry message was bold and simple. “God loves you just as you are. He knows you are a sinner and wants to save you. Don’t figure it out. Faith it out!” Before long his unorthodox story reached Doubleday Printing. “The Chaplain of Bourbon Street,” written by Harrington with Walter Wagner, was published in 1969. Harrington went on to publish seven more books and released more than 30 record albums.

The sermon album “Laughter, Truth and Music” was released in 1965 and Harrington was presented with a gold album for more than $1 million in sales worldwide. Later he received a second gold album for “Chaplain of Bourbon Street,” a recording of his first television show.

Prior to our outdoor revival and music extravaganza, Bob told me he was planning a new album titled “Bob Harrington Goes Country.” I never knew what happened to this project.

I had heard that Harrington had gone back to his old wicked ways. I called him at his daughter’s home in Oklahoma shortly before his death and he told me the same thing he had told a writer for SBC Life, official publication for the Southern Baptist Convention.

“The devil threw me a pass and I caught it and ran for defeat,” Bob said. “All of my fame and glory caught up with me.”

In the 2000 November issue of SBC LIFE, Harrington shared about his past struggles in the article entitled, “Chastened Chaplain: A forthright account of failure and renewal.” In the article, he referred to the “pass” that Satan threw the evangelist during the height of his success as “pride, arrogance, self-centeredness and stubbornness.”

His first marriage ended as well as his ministry on Bourbon Street in 1977. He married again and moved to Florida, but later divorced. During the 1980s and 1990s, Harrington was a popular motivational speaker primarily with car dealerships and real estate companies.

One evening in 1995 in his hotel room, he was robbed and nearly beaten to death. Harrington had said it was during that time “the phone rang and it was Rex Humbard (long-time pastor of the Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron, Ohio, where Harrington had preached many times), my old friend. He said it was time for me to come back to the Lord and I did.”

After divorce and bankruptcy, Harrington recalled being at the bottom, which he said “is right where God can use you!” Harrington began a restoration period and moved back to New Orleans.

In 1998, Bob married Rebecca Harris Birdwell and moved to Mansfield, Texas, where he continued preaching. Rebecca died of a heart attack in 2010. That same year, Bob moved to be near his younger daughter, Mitzi Woodson, and her husband Steve in Stigler, Okla. He faithfully attended the First Baptist Church in Stigler. When I called him at his daughter Mitzi’s home in Stigler, Harrington pretty much reiterated what he had told the Baptist press about his ignominious fall from grace:

“Three things got me: fame, finance, and frolic. I was going strong with my little radio program there. Then after the mayor named me Chaplain of Bourbon Street the Governor of Louisiana named me Ambassador of Goodwill to America.” Bob said “the kingdom of thingdom” started to replace the Kingdon of God.”

His national TV debates with Madalyn Murray O’Hair started his climb to “thingdom.” The money started rolling in, Harrington said, and following the fame and finance came the frolic.

“All those things — fame, finance, and frolic — led me to catch a pass that Satan threw at the peak of my success,” Harrington said. “ And that pass — I caught that sucker, and ran for defeat. When you break that pass down, P. A. S. S., it’s pride, arrogance, self-centeredness, and stubbornness. That stole my first love away from me, and that’s when I fell.”

The frolic, Harrington said, finally finished him off.

“After a while you get those Bathshebas, Delilahs, and Jezebels out there in the church world, not the Bourbon Street world,” Harrington said. “Those in the Bourbon Street world didn’t bother me. I knew about this kind of temptation. It was those sweet little ol’ church members that got to me. They start telling you how nice and neat and handsome you are, how big and strong you are. Your wife isn’t telling you that anymore because she knows what you are turning into.”

When I called him, daughter Mitzi answered the phone. Bob must have mentioned my old drinking problem to her because she asked me about it. She yelled out at Bob: “It’s Sam Kindrick from Texas, Daddy, he has quit drinking.”

I heard Bob call out in the background: “Praise the Lord, it sure is fun being saved!”

Harrington had told his daughters exactly how he wanted his tombstone to read. They followed through upon his death.

The red granite grave marker in Sweet Water Alabama is more than impressive. It featurers a full-length likeness of Bob with Bible in Hand and standing under a Bourbon Street lamp pole.

It reads exactly as he directed: Robert Leonard Harrington Bob Harrington The Chaplain of Bourbon Street Born: September 2, 1927 Born again: August 1, 1958 Died: He Didn’t Transferred to Heaven: July 4, 2017

This is about my part in Sugarland Express and the zany world of movie folks like Steven Spielberg and Goldie Hawn. Goldie did not like Luckenbach. This and other material may be viewed on the Sam Kindrick blog. The link is actionmagsa.com

When I met Steven Spielberg my head was falling off my shoulders and rolling around my feet.

It was spring of 1974 in Floresville. I was hungover bad and wishing I had never heard of Spielberg or casting director Shari Rhodes.

The filming of Sugarland Express with Goldie Hawn and Ben Johnson had begun. I have a speaking part in the movie.

This was Spielberg’s first gig as a director. He had somehow persuaded co-producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown to foot the production bill.

I was still with the Express and News during those times, and my drinking was starting to escalate. I had the shakes that morning in Floresville. I was hurting so bad that my hair hurt.

I am the Texas newspaperman in the film who tries to inverview a howling baby Langston. I will get into the story line and other details later.

There are tidbits here of human interest, like Goldie getting her drivers so stoned on weed they never got her to the movie set on time, or the fit she pitched when some of us hauled her to Luckenbach.

`Suffice it to say that Goldie Hawn did not care for Luckenbach, but more on all of this later.

What I remember most about Steven Spielberg and the Sugarland Express filming was my miserable hungover condition and Spielberg’s torturous obsession for detail. He achieved it through mind-rattling repetition, bolstered by a fetching ability to reach the hearts and souls of veteran film stars.

It all started for me in the Gunter Hotel coffee shop where I met casting director Shari Rhodes. I’m not sure how this meeting came about, but I think it may have been arranged by my friend Big John Hamilton, owner of Big John’s Steak House and a movie actor himself who appeared in seveal John Wayne movies.

Guich Koock may have been with me that morning. He did wind up with a part in the movie. Koock had partnered with Hondo Crouch to buy the town of Luckenbach, and the two of them were popping up all over the burgeoning San Antonio and South Texas entertainment map.In Sugarland, Guich played a Louisiana highway patrolman.

Shari Rhodes was a delight. Even with the hangover I took to her immediately.

“How would you like to play a part in our film?” Shari Rhodes laughed. “You look like a movie star in the making.”

I didn’t have any idea what Sugarland Express was all about, but I agreed to give it a try. Shari had me sign a bunch of papers, and two mornings later I met her and other people from Universal Pictures back at the Gunter Hotel. It was 5 o’clock in the morning and we were loaded in a van and headed for filming in Florersville.

Shari was with us. I had no idea of her stature in the film industry. She was laughing and cutting up with me like we had been friends for ages.

Who would have suspected that she would work in films like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and many other films? I think she may have directed a few movies herself. Years later I was to learn that Shari Rhodes died from breast cancer in 2009.

In addition to me, Shari, the van driver, and maybe a couple more, there was Louise Latham, a veteran Hollywood character actress
who I recognized immediately but had no inkling as to her name. The supporting actors and actresses like Louise Latham are the true talents who keep the Hollywood star ship afloat. You see them in a film and there is immediate recognition, but their names are but a meaningless string of letters among the film credits.

Like Shari Rhodes, Louise Latham proved to be an affable, down-to-earth, and engaging lady of grace with a ready sense of humor.

I had been drinking most of the night and early morning in San Antonio’s downtown Commanders Room, an after-hours nightclub that sometimes stayed open until daylight. Louise must have sensed that I wasn’t quite right in the head and nervous system.

“Are you feeling all right?”

I didn’t want to tell her I was experiencing a monumental hangover.

“It’s early for me,” I said.

Latham seemed to understand.

“This is just the way for us people who work in films,” she said. “The public has no idea. The reason we are up at these ungodly hours is all about time and money. When we are on location away from the Hollywood studios it costs a tremendous amount of money to pay everyone involved and cover the huge production expense.
We are up at dawn because we utilize every minute of real daylight we have available. Daylight is like pure gold in the film industry. When on location, we go from first light until dark.”

The setting in Floresville where my scene was filmed was one of those old country-style houses with a wide front porch, wide concrete steps, and a long concrete sidewalk which led from the street to the porch.

I recall laying down in the shade of a tree, waiting for instructions. Finally I was up and facing the director. I had donned a new dark red and black sport coat that was almost new. I owned only two sport coats. I was ready for my debut on the silver screen when Spielberg called out to Shari Rhodes.

“Take this guy to the wardrobe trailer and have them outfit him in a gold coat,” Spielberg told Shari.

Turning to me, the director explained:

“Nothing against your red coat, but gold fits your dark coloring. We want you to look your best for this scene. I know you will do fine.”

Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest and most liked directors in Hollywood.

We saw the Spielberg genius early with Sugarland. The world saw it one short year after Sugarland when he broke the record bank with Jaws.

Spielberg was a fuzzy-cheeked 28 years of age when Sugarland was filmed, yet he held some sort of hypnotic magic over his veteran actors and actresses, grizzled pro Ben Johnson being a prime example.

Over and over and over again, in one scene, Spielberg coaxed Johnson into jumping out of the same pickup truck.

Slamming on the brakes, Ben jumped from the vehicle.

Spielberg the kid director was congratulating Johnson when his feet hit the street.

“Great job, Ben,” Spielberg gushed. “An incredible scene. Let’s do it once more, please sir.”

Johnson jumped out of the truck again.

“Fantastic, Ben,” Spielberg bubbled. “What an actor you are. I would like to see this at one more angle. Please do it for me again. Ben.”

Johnson jumped out of the truck yet again.

“Incredible, Ben. I don’t believe I have ever seen anything better,” Spielberg was relentless.

I don’t know how many times Ben Johnson jumped out of the truck with Spielberg rooting him on. Nobody was keeping count. And I can’t say how many times the director had me and and other faux newspaper reporters and TV cameramen walk up the sidewalk to the front porch of that old house in Floresville.

Sugarland Express was also written by Spielberg, the story based on a true Texas tale of comedic madness which started when Lou Jean Poplin talks husband Clovis Michael Poplin into breaking out of a low-security prison to go after their 2-year-old son Langston who is in foster care. Adding to the obsurdity of it all was the fact that Clovis was only four months short of release from the pre-release prison farm when Lou Jean talked him into the jail break.

The slow-motion and ever-growing chase that ensued, with over 200 cop cars, rubberneck spectators, gun nuts, and self-annointed honky-tonk heroes, was a carnival on wheels with a light show the likes of which Hollywood had never known before.

Clovis and Lou Jean were crossing South Texas to retrieve their 2-year-old son from foster parents in what was actually Floresville. They had a kidnapped highway patrolman in tow. Adding to the insanity of it all was a Boy Scout troop Spielberg had out directing traffic.

Goldie Hawn played Lou Jean Poplin. Her husband Michael was played by William Atherton. The zany plot has Lou Jean and Michael kidnapping Highway Patrolman Maxwell Slide, who is portrayed by Michael Sacks.

The baby Langston was portrayed by producer Zanuck’s 2-year-old son Harrison Zanuck. Louise Latham played Mrs. Looby, the foster mother. The foster father was played by Merrill Connally, Governor John Connally’s brother. Ben Johnson plays DPS Captain Harlin Tanner, and it was Captain Tanner who led the procession of lawmen and weirdos.

The news crew arrived first at the Floresville house where baby Langston was being fostered by Mrs. Looby and the governor’s brother, Merrill Connally.

The script called for us news people to march down the sidewalk, up the flight of steps, and onto the porch where we are met by Mrs. Looby and Merrill Connally, who is holding Baby Langston.

While this may sound simple, it was not. I think there were five of us in the entourage of news people. I know that country singer Dale Jackson was holding a giant TV sound camera. The others may have been holding notebooks. I was the only one of the bunch with a speaking part.

Here was the rub. After we completed our advance down the sidewalk and upon the porch, Spielberg insisted that we all land in the exact same spot. He also insisted that none of us look down at our feet as we advanced on the house and stopped on the porch. Here is where the operation got maddeningly tricky. Spielberg got down on his knees and placed chalk X marks on the exact spots where he wanted us to land. We had to repeat that advance maneuver over and over and over again, counting the exact number of steps from the street to our exact designated landing spots on the porch. Not until all of us were able to count our steps and land squarely on our designated porch positions in complete unison did the filming proceed.

It was late afternoon before we got to the grand climax, an irate foster mother meeting the encroachment of a bunch of news yoyos trespassing on her porch.

By this time everyone was irritable, restless, and discontent. Especially Harrison Zanuck, the Baby Langston who was the object of it all. He was holding soda crackers slathered in grape jelly because his father said that was the only goodie he would respond to. And producer Zanuck was there overseeing his baby.

I was leading the news people onslaught, so it was me who the infuriated foster mother lit into.

“I know why you people are here,” hissed Mrs. Looby. “You are not welcome here and I will have to ask you to leave.”

Here is where I saw the great actress in action, eyes narrowed in slits of hate. Louise Latham was earning her pay.

She was scary. She was living the life of a foster mother in danger of losing her baby. Mrs. Looby did not resemble in any way the Louise Latham I rode to Floresville with.

I had my lines down.

“But, ma’am, we just want to talk to the little child.”

Then I hollered the kickers:

“Langston, do you know who your real mother is? Could you wave bye bye to your real father?”

At this point, someone hollered “Cut.”

Baby Langston had smeared his grape jelly cracker across his foster father’s shirt and coat front.

When my lines were repeated the next time, Harrison Zanuck broke into an ear-splitting scream, flinging one of his crackers at me.

“You are scaring the child with your voice,” a bystander said.

Daddy Zanuck broke in at this point.

“This is exactly how we want him to react, like a frightened 2-yeaar-old.”

Earlier movie reviews failed to give Goldie Hawn her just due because they didn’t know Goldie.

The Hollywood Reporter said of Spielberg’s Sugarland Express: The fledgling filmmaker often fails to keep a tight enough rein on Hawn. Too often she breaks into her Laugh-in giggle and bubble-headed blonde routine, destroying the image of a distraught driven mother.

When Sugarland was filmed, Goldie was only a few months removed from a go-go dancer job in a cheap saloon. When members of the Sugarland cast took her for a visit to Lucenbach, Goldie turned up her nose and started bitching and complaining about “the nasty place” until Ben Johnson told her to shut up.

“If you don’t like it here,” Johnson told Goldie, “you can hitchhike back to San Antonio.”

And that was it. Johnson knew how to handle the petulant kid, and Spielberg knew what he was doing when he signed her on.

Goldie fit the Lou Jean Poplin part to a T.

Sugarland Express concluded my movie careeer, although I did have a significant part in an independent production that never made it off the cutting room floor. This one was The Adventures of Jody Shannon, and again I was recommended for the part by John Hamilton. It was filmed in Brackettville.

In this one I played a hypocritical dice shooting circuit-riding Preacher Sam with a whiskey flask protruding from a hip pocket. I rode a white mule and preached hell fire and damnation to a bunch of saloon girls in the main scene. Playing piano in the saloon was Wild Man Ray Liberto, former brother-in-law of Johnny Cash.

This ill-fated production was financed by a group of San Antonio dentists. It was produced as a children’s film, but funding was withdrawn when the dentists decreed that it was unfit for kid consumption.

The Preacher Sam saloon sermon, and a fight among a bunch of buffalo hunters were the two scenes deemed too rough for kids. And these were the two scenes the kids went wild over when showed some raw rushes of the film.