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Lover’s Leap

Lover’s Leap

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.

Filed Under: Columns

The Chaplain of Bourbon Street

Madalyn Murray O’Hair

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.

Rev. Bob Harrington

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

Filed Under: Columns

Sugarland Express

Goldie Hawn

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.

Steven Spielberg

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.

Filed Under: Columns

Hurricane Beulah

My transition from San Angelo to the San Antonio Express-News was seamless, partially because I was already familiar with the Harte-Hanks way of gathering and printing the news, and partially because I wasn’t terrified of Houston Harte Sr.

Strange as it may seem, old man Houston Harte took a shine to me after I pitched the big muddy sign on the hood of his Cadillac.

Executive editor Charlie Kilpatrick hired me after a short telephone conversation and a brief meeting. I was soon to learn that Kilpatrick was a frightened executive who bent and turned with the winds of company politics.

Kilpatrick knew I was coming in from the Harte-Hanks home base of San Angelo, and he was taking no chances.

I hadn’t been on the job a month when Harte Senior walked into the Express and News city room and yelled, “Where is the kid who worked for us in San Angelo?”

My desk was in the back of the city room next to the sports department. When I said “Here,” the old man hustled right back and took a seat on the side of my desk.

“Well,” he said. “How do you like it here?”

When I said I liked the new job, the millionaire publisher asked, “What do you think we need to do to make the paper better?”

“Stop running shinplasters,” I told him.

“Shinplaster?”

“Yes, sir, Shinplasters.”

I explained the shinplaster, a derogatory term I had picked up in the paper’s editorial department. Advertising copy that is disguised as news, I told Mr. Harte. He frowned and had me repeat the bit about shinplasters.

“I didn’t know we were doing that,” Houston Harte said. “We will stop it today.”

And stop it he did.

This had a profound effect on the entire editorial staff, all of them older and more experienced than me.

It is hard to believe that the executive editor of a daily newspaper in a metropolitan market would fear a cub reporter. But I honestly believed that Kilpatrick was afraid of me from that day forward and so long as the Harte’s owned the Express and News.

Dan Cook was the Evening News sports editor and columnist when I arrived. Cook was a great writing talent and the most popular sports writer in the city. Of Charlie Kilpatrick’s unctuous propensity to please his superiors, I heard Cook say: “If a chicken farmer bought the newspaper, Charlie would show up for work wearing a feather suit.”

Cook and I became friends and drinking companions, as did company artist Bob Dale. Front page columnist Paul Thompson, a recovered alcoholic, became my friend and mentor of sorts. I also worked with legendary photographer Bill Goodspeed. Goodspeed was nearing the end of his career when I arrived on the scene, but I had heard about his pigeon loft on the top floor of the newspaper building.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Goodspeed used homing pigeons to fly his football game film back to their newspaper home. The rival San Antonio Light and other Texas newspapers could not compete. Goodspeed would have film flown home, processed and ready for print before any other newspaper could even hit the streets.

I sold an article on Goodspeed to Editor and Publisher Magazine, a national trades publication.

I was the Express and News top general assignments reporter early in my career. a time when my third child and daughter Gena Gay Kindrick was born. She was delivered without complication in San Antonio’s downtown Baptist Hospital on October 20, 1963.

Most of the major story assignments were falling my way as I worked with three photographers, Goodspeed, Johnny Tarsikes, and Jose Barrera.

Tarsikes burned up a company Chevrolet as we raced to Austin. Infamous University of Texas Tower sniper Charles Joseph Whitman was picking pedestrians off like fish in a barrel.

Then came the disaster of nature that nobody could ever forget.

I had just returned home from a night of fishing on Canyon Lake when I got the call. The day was Tuesday, September, 19, 1967.

It was Ken Kennamer, city editor of the San Antonio Express and my immediate superior in the newspaper’s chain of command.

Unusual, I thought, to get a morning call from Kennamer. We both worked night shifts on the morning Express.

“Pack enough clothes to last several days,” Kennamer said. “Bring rain gear. Rubber boots if you have them. The storm is bearing down on Brownsville and that’s where you are going. You will be riding with Joe. Expense money will be waiting when you get to the office.”

Joe was Jose Barrera, one of the Express and News young photographers.The storm Kennamer referred to was Hurricane Beulah, one of the biggest and most deadly hurricanes to ever hit the Texas Gulf Coast.

I was a greenhorn reporter who had never heard of a category 5 hurricane. Photographer Joe Barrera was equally inexperienced. I met him at the Express and News city room and we were off to cover the hurricane which would pack 160 mile-per-hour winds, dump rain bombs that would total 25 inches, and kill a total of 58 people, 15 of them Texans.

I covered three major hurricanes while working at the Express and News–Carla, Celia, and Beulah. Big bad Beulah was the first and the most destructive. Weather experts, law enforcement officials, and first responders all agreed that Beulah probably packed more than a few tornadoes close to the huricane’s eye.

Joe Barrera and I started out in high spirits. Like a couple of kids embarking on some sort of Boy Scout adventure. We had never experienced wind that can turn your mouth wrongside out, or broken power lines spewing high voltage death in the dark. Who would ever believe that hurricane-force winds and heavy rain can somehow bring 6-foot rattlesnakes up out of their dens and onto city streets, writhing and buzzing their deadly song? And only those who have suffered a shotgun charge of buckshot could imagine the searing pain of rooftop pea gravel driven by the ungodly winds of a major hurricane.

Joe Barrera and I were babies heading for our baptism of fire in the Rio Grande Valley. Joe drove. I noticed the stream of cars coming our way. We seemed to be the only ones heading down into the Valley.

We reached Brownsville at dusk. It took us longer than we had anticipated to cover the 250 miles. We were told the Fort Brown Motel was the place to stay, but we found a no-vacancy sign on the entrance. Everything else in town was taken. Media people had filled the Fort Brown, including a reporter/photographer team from the Dallas Morning News, and award-winning San Antonio Light photographer Gilbert Barrera (no relation to our Joe Barrera).

Joe and I had about despaired of finding shelter when help appeared behind a badge. It was a Cameron County deputy sheriff who told us to head for the courthouse. There were no beds available, but the sandstone courthouse, which was built in 1912, was open for us and some others fortunate enough to run into the helpful deputy.

“There ain’t any building stronger or safer than a Texas courthouse,” said the deputy. “They will be standing when nothing else is.”

The deputy knew of which he spoke. Most of the Fort Brown Motel was wrecked by the storm, and there was little else left standing in the town. Only the majestic Cameron County Courthouse took the big wind hit with no damage done.

I will never forget the early morning hours of September 20, 1967. We knew Beulah was coming. The Coast Guard had radioed ahead. The air had a waxy feel and there was an eerie yellow hue to the sky. The Devil had to sit this one out. This morning belonged to the big bad bitch called Beulah. She roared across Boca Chica Pass with unrelenting fury. She screamed like a runaway freight train with no engineer. Power lines were snapping in the darkness, showering Brownsville with deadly white and blue ribbons of electricity. Great sheets of roofing metal were windmilling through the air like airborne guillotines, any one of them capable of removing a human head. This was hell on the Texas coast, and it would get worse long before the people of Brownsville would recover from Hurricane Beulah.

It was raining bathtubs when the photographer and I ventured out to view and photograph the aftermath. One big rattlesnake buzzed at our approach, and we saw several smaller ones as we made our way around live power lines that were snapping and popping. I learned later that intense rain water flooding their underground dens drove the snakes above ground and often onto downtown streets.

Our Express-News staff car was a white Chevy II, and we were preparing to drive out and survey the damage when San Antonio Light photographer Gil Barrera flagged us down. I knew Gil Barrera to be an award-winning photographer whose work had graced the cover of Life Magazine. Gil was the younger brother of ace criminal defense attorney and District Judge Roy Barrera. The younger Barrera had been staying in the Fort Brown Motel when a two-by-four timber was driven through the windshield of his San Antonio Light staff vehicle. He came down to Brownsville with a Light reporter, but the two of them had been separated in the storm. He asked if he could ride with us that morning and I said “hop in.”

In those days, the San Antonio Express and the San Antonio Light employees were spirited competitors and often bitter enemies. But my relationship with Gil Barrera had always been one of professional respect and admiration. With other editorial employees from both newspapers, we often drank beer together at the Melody Room Lounge on Avenue E, about a half block distance from both papers. And, privately we had lamented in the past that we did not work together for the same publication.

Our Express-News photographer Joe Barrera was quiet when Gil Barrera crawled into the backseat. I knew Joe was intimidated by the presence of the older and more accomplished photographer, but Gil’s naturally humble demeanor belied his genius with a camera. He wore horn-rimmed glasses that were seemingly always broken and patched together with scotch tape.

“I’ll just ride along and snap a few pictures when I’m not getting in anybody’s way,” he said. I knew that was bullshit. I was already feelig nervous.

Gil Barrera was carrying what we considered to be a little-bitty new-fangled 35 millimeter camera. He also had a ragged rain poncho he held wadded up in one hand. Joe shot a number of photographs as we worked our way through the wind wreckage which was Brownsville. He shot an upended car, downed power poles, wrecked store fronts, and other damage. Street signs were twisted like pretzels, further indication that tornadoes were probably in the mix.

Gil Barrera sat quietly in the back seat while we worked our way through Brownsville and out onto the highway leading to Port Lavaca. He had not said a word or taken a photograph. The rain was a solid sheet.

Then Gil Barrera spoker to Joe Barrera.

“Hey, Joe, would you mind letting me out here for a minute or two?”

Gil had the old poncho over his head when he crawled out of the car. He headed straight to a highway sign that had been bent down by the wind, almost level with the ground. I think it read Port Lavaca 20 Miles. Nothing different from many other similar signs in the same condition. We had been passing them all morning. They were barely visible through the curtain of water.

I suspected something might be happening that foretold nothing good for the Express and News.

Gil Barrera was my friend and competitor, but to be scooped by the San Antonio Light was a horrible fate to contemplate.

At this point, I was driving the car. Joe Barrera was shooting the Express News photos.

“Find out what Gil is doing out there by that sign,” I hollered at Joe. The rain was pouring.

“He’s shooting the sign,” Joe said.

“We have been passing signs like that all morning,” I yelled at Joe.”You better get over there.”

Gil reappeared.

He seemed relaxed. Jovial.

Deep in my bowels I knew that the greatest news photographer in the country wasn’t taking pictures of a Port Lavaca road sign.

“Thanks,” Gil Barrera said. “I really appreciate you guys letting me ride along.”

Oh, shit. I thought it but said no more.

We found couriers to deliver storm film to the Express city room. Gil Barrera did also. We found out the next morning when issues of both papers hit the streets.

Joe Barrera had a hellacious photo of hurricane wreckage which appeared on the front page of the Express and News. I don’t even know what it was. But I will never forget the photograph that Gil Barrera killed us with.

Gil Barrera had one simple photo that said it all.

The photograph was six columns wide, engulfing the entire cover page of the San Antonio Light.

The photograph pictured a tiny chihuahua dog and a large rat. They were wet and bedraggled as they snuggled together, cheek-to-cheek and paw to foot, shivering and exchanging body warmth with all four eyes tightly shut.

I think the headline said Strange Bedfellows in the Eye of a Storm

I didn’t say anything about it to Joe Barrera. He was hurting enough. And I was part of it, too. Maybe I should have tackled Gil Barrera in the rain. It didn’t feel good. That’s for sure. But I later told Joe we had nothing to be ashamed of.

We got beat by the best in the business.

Filed Under: Columns

The Red Rooster and Elmer Kelton

Elmer Kelton

I was working with Elmer Kelton on the San Angelo Standard-Times when Buffalo Wagons, his first best-seller western novel was published. Kelton was my friend and one of my early influences in the writing game. He told me to always hang onto my day job if I ever tried writing books.

Elmer Kelton was voted the greatest western novelist of all time by the Western Writers of America association. And he was as humble as St. Frances of Assisi.

The following copy details my rough start in the newspaper business.

The English professor’s name was Elton Miles. He was a member of the Sul Ross State College faculty in 1955.

Miles kept me after class one afternoon to deliver this message: “I know you have been writing theme papers for other students and charging them in the neighborhood of $10. The papers are obviously the work of one writer, and many of them are quite good. But this business is going to stop.”

Then Miles asked me what I was majoring in. I told him I had no major. I was taking general courses and drinking a lot of beer. He was a skinny little fellow with a crooked grin and a limp shock of brown hair that kept falling down over one of his eyes. I knew he was plenty smart. I sensed that he sort of liked me. Even when he was dressing me down. He was doing it with his lopsided grin.

“You are accomplishing nothing,” Miles said. “You need to transfer out of Sul Ross to a school with a journalism department.” He was telling more than suggesting. “Southwest Texas State in San Marcos has a journalism department. Joe Vogel is head of the department and he is my friend. I am going to recommend you to Joe. This is something you really need to do.”

The rest is history. I didn’t know what journalism really was at the time, but I became a journalist in spite of myself. Vogel was a one-man journalism department with one parttime professor by the name of Box. I never took a course from Box. All of my J school courses were from Vogel. I hit it big with Vogel, my very first article for the College Star was an interview I did with a half-naked female student with hair scorched in a student housing fire just off the main campus.

The reporter for the weekly San Marcos Record concentrated on the fire, the damage done, and the number of fire-fighters it took to control the blaze. I wrote about nothing but the half-naked girl with the burnt hair, and Joe Vogel loved my story.

I married my first wife, Vicky Miller, shortly before leaving Sul Ross and Alpine for San Marcos. Vicky had just graduated from Alpine High School. She and Ann Bounds were the two prettiest girls in Alpine High. I pegged Vicky as the most comely. After graduating from Southwest Texas State, my first newspaper job was editor of the Bay City News, a small Bay City weekly owned by shrimp boat owner and captain Steve Parsuit. Steve didn’t have a printing press. We got the Bay City News printed just a few miles up the road in El Campo at State Sen. Culp Krueger’s El Campo Leader-News and Svoboda (Svoboda was the Czech language part of the paper). El Campo was and still is rice farming country with roots going back to the Czech Republic. Before this, the country was known as Czechoslovakia and the language was Czechoslovakian. A number of the oldtimers still spoke the language back in the 1950s. I heard it in some stores around Bay City and El Campo.

I would write copy and headlines for our paper, then Parsuit’s business flunky Chuck Arthur and I would drive it to El Campo for printing.

I fished and drank a lot of beer the three months I was in Bay City, the big event of my Bay City newspaper tenure being the birth of my first child, Grady Michael Kindrick. Grady was born premature on June 26, 1957, in Matagorda Regional Medical Center. He weighed three pounds at birth. Within two months, his weight had climbed to that of a normal child of that age. I was making $65 a week in Bay City, and when it began looking like the Bay City News might have been on shaky ground, I headed for Kerrville to write for Rankin Starkey’s Kerrville Daily News. The pay at Kerrville was $70 a week.

We rented a little duplex not far from the Junction Highway that ran through Kerrville. Vicky was spoon feeding baby Grady. We couldn’t afford to go anywhere, and our only entertainment in those days was a little black-and-white TV with rabbit ears. We could see snowy forms on the little screen, and the audio was just as bad. Sometimes we tried to watch boxing and wrestling.

The Kerrville job lasted a month. I started on the wrong foot in Kerrville. Carroll Abbott was Starkey’s editor, and I was all ears as Abbott explained that, in order to become successful in the Kerrville newspaper business, a young newsman like me should join the Kerrville Junior Chamber of Commerce. Abbott was a big wheel with the Jaycees. He insisted that this was the only way for a young fellow with any kind of ambition to go.

I didn’t know what the hell a junior chamber of commerce was all about, but I wanted to do good so I told Abbott to sign me up. Abbott then directed me to the city park. The Miss Texas pageant had just been held in the Kerrville City Park and the Jaycees had been tasked with dismantling the stage and catwalk that had supported the beauty contestants.

The Jaycee who seemed to be in charge handed me a clawhammer.

“What do I do with this,” I asked.

“Start pulling nails out of that catwalk,” he said.

“What’s the pay?”

“Nothing, of course” he said. “The Junior Chamber of Commerce is a civic organization. We do work like this because we are proud of our city.”

I handed him back the hammer and quit the Kerrville Junior Chamber of Commerce on the spot. I never joined anything again.

But my days in Kerrville were already in short number. When Rankin Starkey ordered me to wear a coat and tie to work, I told him I would if he would pay the cleaning bill. He refused and I was headed to San Angelo the next day for a reporting job with the San Angelo Standard Times, the daily newspaper I grew up reading in my hometown of Junction.

I got the San Angelo job by telephone. I called and asked for the editor. Managing editor Ed Hunter came on the line. I told him I was from Junction, that I had graduated from Southwest Texas State, that I wasn’t making enough money in Kerrville, and that I needed to make more than

$75 a week. Hunter said he could start me at $85 a week, and I was rich. I herded Vicky and Grady into our peach-colored 1951 Ford sedan and we were loaded and rolling into the sand dunes and tumbleweeds of West Texas. I had the world by the tail with a down-hill pull. I would make money and history in the metropolis of San Angelo where the Harte-Hanks red rooster was emblazoned on the door of every Standard-Times staff car.

I did know that Houston Harte and Bernard Hanks came out of the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. They founded the San Angelo Standard-Times and branched out with a chain of mid-sized daily newspapers that included the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the Greenville Hearld, Abilene Reporter-News, and three others that were not Texas papers. Bernard Hanks died during the early going, and Houston Harte kept the Hanks name in respect for Bernard Hanks’ widow.

It would be euphemistic to say that Houston Harte Sr. was eccentric. He was that and then some, a compact-sized executive with the stern and craggy features of a pitbull. He had red rooster images on most everything he owned.

I never knew the story behind Harte’s affinity for the barnyard cocks; I learned quickly, though, that the image of a crowing rooster in red ink was overlaid on the front page of every San Angelo newspaper when it rained an inch or more over three or more counties in the West Texas newspaper’s circulation area.

The red rooster was emblazoned on the door of every Standard-Times staff car. The foyer tile in Harte’s San Angelo mansion was red, white, and black, in the giant image of a crowing red rooster. Harte’s cufflinks were red roosters, and the newspaper icon was adapted by at least one independently-owned drinking joint, The Red Rooster on Concho Street. Harte-Hanks had no interest in the saloon, but most of the Standard-Times staff frequented the place.

The one staffer who did not drink in the Red Rooster or anywhere else was farm and ranch editor Elmer Kelton, a serious writer who was raised as a cowboy near Horse Camp on the Five Wells Ranch near Andrews in West Texas.

Kelton, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, is now recognized by many as the top writer of western fiction in America. His story lines were fiction, but Kelton’s work was as honest and unfailingly accurate as most pieces of library history.

Elmer had published his first western best-seller, Buffalo Wagons, when I met him. I was impressed with his humility. He wrote his fiction at night, his newspaper farm and ranch news by day.

“It’s fine to write western fiction at night,” Kelton once told me, “but be sure and hang on to your day job. There ain’t a lot of money in it.”

He then went on to win every western writers award available. He was voted the best western author in the counry by the Western Writers of America.

I liked Kelton because of his affable nature. He treated everyone the same and we all loved him. But he always declined when I invited him out drinking. I don’t think he even drank alcohol.

Publisher Houston Harte’s office was behind one-way glass. He could sit in his office and view everything going on in the newspaper city room. The outside of the glass was reflective, and new employees were known to fix their hair or squeeze pimples without knowing that the company’s chief executive was looking straight out at them.

I had been with the newspaper for about a year, long enough to rate a staff car with a red rooster on the door when I committed what I thought then was my worst gaffe in San Angelo. I was a general assignments reporter then, covering everything from car wrecks to an occasional murder away from San Angelo and Tom Green County. Each reporter had a designated parking spot in the Standard-Times lot. Mine was occupied by a cream-colored Cadillac when I pulled in from an assignment one rainy afternoon. A wooden sign that read Staff Only had somehow toppled over. It had a couple of rusty nails protruding from the sign board and it was caked with West Texas mud.

I picked the sign up and pitched it onto the hood of the Cadillac, mud and nails included. Then I found another parking place for the staff car and went into the newspaper building. I was in the newspaper snack bar when I heard old man Harte screech at Ed Hunter, the managing editor.

“Goddamn it Ed, find out right now who put that muddy sign with nails on my Cadillac.”

Hunter came to San Angelo from the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. He was a likeable professional, but he hadn’t been on the job long enough to know that the old newspaper pioneer had a soft spot in his heart for drunks and intemperant kid reporters.

Hunter was a little rattled. He seemed to know who to zero in on.

“Okay, Sam Kindrick, what about this?”

I had to confess.

“I thought Mr. Harte had a black Cadillac,” I told Hunter. “This one was cream-colored. I put the sign on it because it was in my parking space.”

Hunter was as collected as he could possibly be.

“Mr. Harte has five Cadillacs,” Hunter said. “One is black, one is white, one is blue, one is red, and this one is cream-colored. In the future, I think you had best not damage another Cadillac in the Standard-Times lot.”

Hunter didn’t know it at the time that old man Harte had never fired an employee for drinking or booze related mischief. George Kunkel would go on knee-walking, commode-hugging benders, only to return to his copy desk job withlittle or no repercussion. I never heard of Houston Harte drinking alcohol or being drunk, but his tolerance for booze-blitzed employees such as Kunkel and sports writer Blondie Cross was a topic of much discussion in high places and some not so high.

Blondie Cross covered high school football for the San Angelo Standard-Times, and anyone who knows anything about West Texas knows that high school football is king. Blondie Cross was a big, puffy albino-looking man with red skin and cloudy eyes. He wrote a Standard-Times sports column for years, and half of West Texas believed Cross had supernatural powers when it came to football game predictions. If Blondie predicted a team would win, that team almost always won, and the Standard-Time hierarchy ignored or tolerated Cross’s penchant for whisky.

First one and then another young reporter would be dispatched across West Texas to fetch Blondie and bring him home. The bosses all knew the score. My first Blondie Cross assignment found me driving to Eldorado where Blondie had supposedly had weather-related car trouble.
I found Cross’s car in a dry wash with water up to what we called the running boards in those days. The car had stalled but Cross was doing well.

He was sitting on top of the car as boiled as an owl.

My second child, Steven Howard Kindrick, was born August 27, 1958 in San Angelo’s Shannon Hospital. It was shortly after Steve’s birth that the word got out. Harte-Hanks was buying the San Antonio Express-News.

This, to me, was the bigtime. Houston Harte, we all knew, had long yearned for a flagship daily newspaper in a metropolitan setting.This was it and I was determined to go with them. I had little trouble making the transition. Ed Hunter recommended me, and I was subsequently hired by Express and News executive editor Charles O. Kilpatrick.

My salary: $100 a week in 1960. I had arrived.

Filed Under: Columns

Moonshine Revival

Lacy McAndrew Brinson

This is about Lacy McAndrew Brinson, my favorite female singer/songwriter who with husband Mike has written a hot new song about my late circuit-riding preacher friend George W. Cooper.

The song, which will be produced in a Nashville recording project by Dean Miller, son of country music legend Roger Miller, is titled Moonshine Revival.

Lacy is carrying me as a co-writer of the song because she says the tune was inspired by my story of Rev. George Cooper which appeared in my book The Best of Sam Kindrick–Secret Life and Hard Times of a Cedar Chopper.

“Your story inspired me to write the song,” says Lacy, who works as a federal attorney when not performing and writing songs. “I have loved your writing since we met, and the story of George Cooper was my inspiration for a song. My grandfather was a circuit-riding preacher in the South.”

I have always leaned toward the writers. That’s what first attracted me to Willie, his lyrics. Lacy is a special young lady who writes and performs with her own material. There are too many human jukeboxes around, those performers who scream into a skull orchard microphone with the material of others.

Here is Lacy’s intro for the project: Moonshine Revival -Lacy Brinson McAndrew, Mike McAndrew (©2019) *based on a true story about Rev. George W. Cooper *adapted from “Rowdy Reverend” by Sam Kindrick (The best of Sam Kindrick, 1973)

In addition to the chapter on George Cooper in my book, I wrote a short booklet for George which he hawked on his clear channel radio programs which emanated from the Texa-Mexico border.

George was the father of Billy Cooper, my longtime friend and a member of Willie Nelsons road crew for years. George came out of High Point, North Carolina and Lacy’s voice has a High Point ring to it.

Jim Chesnut introduced me to Lacy Brinson in 2017, and it was Chesnut, a former Nashville recording artist, who wrote the first Action Magazine cover story on Lacy. And after this, we had Lacy on the last Sam Kindrick music promotion at Texas Pride Barbecue.


The record project with Dean Miller producing will include Moonshine Revival and two other Lacy Brinson songs.

“I am excited about it, Lacy said. “We will see how things turn out.”
They should turn out good. Lacy has an honest country music delivery with a voice that sparkles like spring water running through a moonshine still.

Moonshine Revival has hit written all over it.

Filed Under: Columns

A.Y. Allee

A.Y. Allee

When I left Sul Ross at Alpine for my final two years of college at Southwest Texas State College in San Marcos (now Texas State University), there followed jumps to newspaper jobs in Bay City, Kerrville, and San Angelo before I landed a general assignments reporter job at the San Antonio Express and News in 1960.

I covered three major hurricanes for the Express and News, along with many other assignments, and I also wrote a daily column, but before I recount those early newspaper jobs and experiences I will recall the defining time in my career as a big city newspaper reporter.

I was in Crystal City, Texas, a small South Texas town that residents still proclaim to be “The Spinach Capital of the World.” It was circa 1970, and the statue of Popeye on the town square belied the explosive atmosphere which was beyond my sense of comprehension at the time.

La Raza Unida had been formed by Chicano activists Jose Angel Guiterrez and Mario Campean, both Mexican-American firebrands whose party translated to National United People’s Party.

I was in the midst of a political racial takeover as La Raza, with help from the Teamsters Union, fielded their own candidates and trucked South Texas migrant farm workers to the polls in an unheard-of takeover of all municipal offices. None of the candidates, including newly elected Mayor Juan Cornejo, had better than a fifth-grade education. La Raza had made a statement.

La Raza candidates won every municipal office in Crystal City that spring as tensions hummed like a fiddle string fixing to break. Anglo townspeople were boarding up their houses and leaving town as the governor sent famed and feared Texas Ranger Captain A.Y. Allee in to keep the peace.

The Express and News articles I wrote during and after the Crystal City political phenomena resulted in me being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Ironically, the man on the Pulitzer committee who nominated me, Express and News executive editor Charlie Kilpatrick, was to fire me from the newspaper in years to come. Times were crazy in those days.

As the polls closed and final votes were tabulated, I heard shouts on the streets which made it plain and clear that gringos such as myself were not welcome in Crystal City. I heard a couple of bottles shatter on the street asphalt. They were tossed from moving cars, but I saw no faces. There was fear in the air. It was almost palpable. I had rented a motel room from friendly Anglos who had moved to Crystal City from New York State. They had customers and friends with white faces and brown faces. They did not know what was happening. They didn’t understand what the racial divide was all about.

For many years the Texas Rangers had been a feared and hated force in the beet fields and the barrios of South Texas. The Mexican-American people have charged ranger brutality for years, and while there has no doubt been some justification for the racial prejudice charges, the rangers have proven themselves through the years as the unstoppable crime fighting machine of Texas.

Joaquin Jackson was the last Texas Ranger to be appointed by a ranger captain, Alfred Young Allee. Now the rangers come up through the Texas Department of Public Safety ranks like regular patrolmen. In his book One Ranger, Jackson devoted an entire chapter to Captain Allee.

In his prime, Captain Allee weighed about 200 pounds and stood about 6 feet tall. But Ranger Joaquin Jackson told me there was not a man on the planet who could stand up to Captain Allee.

Joaquin Jackson was my friend. I put him on the cover of my magazine once, and I also wrote about his wife Shirley, a country music vocalist with a lot of talent. So I believed every one of Jackson’s words when he described the ranger captain who gave him his job.

“Cap Allee is the most formidable man I have ever met,” Jackson said. “I believe him to be totally fearless. You meet him you know. It is in his eyes. There is no fear. It’s the A.Y. Allee presence. Nobody can stand up to it.”

I was to meet Allee and understand that presence on my first day in Crystal City. He was getting up in the years then. Allee called me “newspaper man” but I could sense he meant  “newspaper boy.” We became friends over the ensuing months. and I believe the tough old ranger captain developed a genuine liking for me. He chewed cigars, but I never saw him spit. He grunted on occasion, and I came to learn that some of his grunts were to emphasize his wishes or meanings.

The streets of Crystal City were almost deserted on election night. There was an eerie quiet when Captain Allee said, “Come on, newspaper man. You can go with me to the election party if you like.” Then Allee started walking and I fell in behind him. It seemed like the safest place to be at the time.

The election victory party was being held in a ratty, run-down, whisky bar known as The Veteran’s Club. It resembled an ancient army barracks that had long since said goodbye to its orignal and then peeling paint job.

The La Raza celebrants had a snoot full when we arrived. They were hooting, hollering, and filling the air with Spanish language invective which suggested raw danger.

Captain Allee’s cowboy boots thumped loudly as we crossed the Veteran’s Club flooring toward the bar. It sounded like a drum beat of doom. When Allee grunted it was like a combination of grunt and clearing of the throat. Grrruuump.

The Veteran’s Club was crammed with some sinister-looking characters, the shine of alcohol hatred and menace in their eyes.

“Grrruuump.” He did it before he spoke. Utter quiet. You could have heard a matchstick hit the floor.

“I need your attention,” Allee said. Not loudly but evenly. “Some of you know who I am. For those who don’t, I am Alfred Alee, captain of Texas Rangers. I have been appointed by the governor to see that the law is upheld in Crystal City. I will now take a minute to congratulate you on your election victory tonight. You won fair and square and I would be the last one to deny you.” Another pause. Another grrruuump before Allee finished his speech.

“You won this election,” he said. “But if any one of you tries to take the law into your hands, I will kill you.”

He grunted again and headed for the door. I fell in behind. No graveyard was ever quieter than the Crystal City Veteran’s Club that night. I was waiting for the bullet to crash into my back as I followed Allee across the floor and out the door.

The next day, I visited the captain at a small temporary office he maintained on Crystal City’s main street. I asked him about his stunning promise to the party celebrants and he told me something I will remember for the rest of my life:

“You will always be okay newspaper man if you say what you mean, mean what you say, and cover the ground that you stand on. Not one of those drunks last night doubted for a minute that I would kill the first one who broke the law and violated the peace.”

Allee was over 70 then and not far from retirement. He epitomized the legendary saying: You got one riot, you need only one ranger. His era was coming to an end and I think he might have sensed it. After the Crystal City showdown, Allee’s antagonists were relentless.

Crystal City Mayor Juan Cornejo, a diminutive fellow who might have stood 5-foot-4 at the most, flew from Crystal City to San Antonio where he filed federal assault charges against the ranger captain.

If I asked Captain Allee what was going on his answer never wavered. “”You are the newspaper man. You tell me.”

He answered a specific question with a straight answer.

“Mayor Cornejo has filed a federal assault complaint against you in San Antonio,” I told Allee. “What do you say to that?”

That warranted an Allee grrruuump and a typical Allee answer.

“If I had assaulted the mayor,” Allee said with a laconic grin, “he wouldn’t have been able to crawl on an airplane and fly to San Antonio to file any complaint. He would have been in a hospital. I didn’t assault him. I just picked him up and shook him a little.”

Captain Allee died in 1987 at age 82. The legend of the Texas Rangers has had a good run. Ranger Manuel (Lone Wolf) Gonzaullas tamed the oil boom towns of Texas; Captain Gully Cowsert of Junction wrecked every carnival that came near him; and Ranger Captain Frank Hamer ended the lives and bloody crime spree of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

A.Y. Allee was the last of the breed. He averted a race riot in Crystal City.

His tormentors danced around him near the end, filing lawsuits and complaints like a bunch of kids poking sticks at a proud but crippled wolf.

I was proud to call him friend who was true to his word. He said what he meant, he meant what he said, and he always covered the ground that he stood on.

Filed Under: Columns

When I met Elvis, Scotty, and Bill

Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley, and Bill Black

When I graduated from Junction High School in 1953, I had little to show. I lettered in football, basketball, and track and field, no big accomplishment in a small Class A school. From Junction I went to Alpine where I enrolled in what was then Sul Ross State College. It became Sul Ross University in 1969.

During the two years I spent at Sul Ross I was to meet Elvis Presley, Norman Cash, and Dan Blocker. None of these names meant much of anything to the world back in 1955. Little did any of us suspect that Presley would become the king of rock, that Cash would become an American League batting champion, or that Blocker would emerge as the hulking superstar Hoss Cartwright on the TV series Bonanza.

I met Presley at an off-campus cafe the day before he was to make his West Texas debut at the Alpine High School Auditorium. I don’t recall name of the restaurant, but it was directly across from the Sul Ross campus on Alpine’s main drag. Presley was with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, his lead guitarist and upright bass player respectively. The three of them had been out tacking up flyers promoting the upcoming show. Presley’s early recordings on the Sun Records label were just starting to get air play. He was also coming off a successful run on the Louisiana Hayride radio show.

I was in the cafe with Glen Llewallen, a Sul Ross basketball player. I don’t remember which one it was, but Elvis, Scotty, or Bill invited us to attend the upcoming show.

Colonel Parker had yet to enter the Elvis Presley picture. Alpine KVLF Radio Dj John Nelson and Memphis promoter Bob Neal booked the show for $250. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had to make that stretch three ways. The show was to benefit the Alpine Future Farmers of America. The high school furnished the PA.

Llewallen and I did attend the show with Vicky Miller, a senior in Alpine High School who was to become my first wife and the mother of my children.

My interest in that first Elvis show started with an attraction I had to guitarist Scotty Moore’s quirky rockabilly style. At that time I had been fooling around with an electric guitar, a misguided folly I soon abandoned when it became more than obvious that I would never become the next Merle Travis or Tommy Emmanuel.

Scotty did not disappoint on that distant night in the Alpine school auditorium, but the main attraction came as an unexpected jolt.

Elvis was not decked out in the regal, high-necked gold lame´finery which was to become a part of his bigger-than-life image. He hit that school auditorium stage au naturel Presley, wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and blue sneakers. It was Memphis magic with The Blue Moon of Kentucky shining somewhere out there with the Marfa Ghost Lights.

It was 1955 and West Texas college girls were all but coming out of their undies in a high school auditorium. Who in hell told them they could shuck their britches? I had never witnessed anything like it. Presley was doing his pelvic palpitations that no modern day dick dancer has ever been able to emulate. Moore had the guitar calling from Rockabilly Heaven, and as Kinky Friedman might observe, Bill Black was snortin’ and fartin’ on the Tennessee upright walking bass.

Petticoats were popular with many young females in those days, voluminous body draperies which were flying like kites as Presley somehow wound up with a marking pen in his hand. With some of the girls yanking petticoats all the way over their heads, Elvis couldn’t miss. He signed everythig but bare bottoms, and he might have autographed a couple of those in the melee.

Just one year after that incredible night, Presley packed San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium with screaming damsels. By this time he owned three Cadillacs and was on his way to unheard of world super-stardom.

Glen Llewallen and I had asked Evis, Scotty, and Bill after the Alpine show to join us for drinks at a popular college skull orchard known as The Bull Beer Parlor. They accepted at first but later declined. They had a show booked for the following night in El Paso, and there was some concern that the old Cadillac they were driving might overheat if they didn’t get an early start.

They pulled out at daybreak and I never again laid eyes on the king of rock-and-roll.

Elvis died August 16, 1977; Bill Black died October 21, 1965; Scotty Moore died June 28, 2016.

Norman Cash and I had two things in common. We were both born on November 10, 1934, and both of us liked to play 9-ball pool for money.

Baseball and baseball players were foreign to me. We didn’t have the sport in the Junction school system, so when I met Norman Cash in the Sul Ross Student Union Building, we were competing with each other on a pool table for a dollar a game. Cash was as country as pig tracks, an easy guy to like and be friends with. He hailed from Justiceburg, Texas, a greasy spot in the road which was just down a fence line or two from the West Texas town of Post, population 5,000 plus a few more.

We all called Cash “The Justiceburg Flash.” I don’t think he minded the nickname.

I knew Cash was a Sul Ross baseball and football player. He was an All Lonestar Conference running back. What I didn’t know was that he was a world class athlete who would be drafted as a football running back by the Chicago Bears, and as a baseball player by the Chicago White Sox. He declined a pro football career to sign with the White Sox and after a series of trades he wound up with Detroit.

Also known by friends and fans as “Stormin’ Norman,” Cash was the American League batting champion in 1961. He was a lefty. At Sul Ross I started watching baseball only because of my friendship with Cash. He drove homeruns over the right field fence in Kokernot Field with regularity.

An outstanding power hitter, his 377 career home runs were the fourth most by an American League left-handed hitter when he retired, behind Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Lou Gehrig; his 373 home runs with the Tigers rank second in franchise history behind teammate Al Kaline (399). He also led the AL in assists three times and fielding percentage twice; he ranked among the all-time leaders in assists (4th with 1,317) and double plays (10th with 1,347) upon his retirement, and was fifth in AL history in games at first base (1,943).

Cash never seemed to take himself seriously. He was the first Detroit Tiger to hit a home run ball out of Tiger Stadium. He was to repeat the feat three more times before his retirement. And he may have been the first major league baseball player to bring a table leg instead of a standard baseball bat to home plate during a game.

Nolan Ryan was in the midst of his second no-hitter when Cash walked up with the table leg. The umpire said, “You can’t bat with that.”

Cash said, “Why not. I can’t hit him anyway.”

That was the Norman Cash I knew.

Cash drowned near Beaver Island in Lake MIchigan in October of 1986. Authorities ruled that he slipped on a wet dock and struck his head, causing him to slide into the water and drown.

There were those, though, who believed Cash was murdered. One of the doubters was Detroit Lions football player Alex Karas, a friend and drinking buddy of Cash.

Karas was quoted by one of their friends. He said: “They killed him, you know. They hung him over the boat, filled his cowboy boots with water, and let him sink. Gambling debt. He owed the wrong kind of people more than he could pay back. So they killed him.”

I hate to think that Stormin’ Norman went that way.

Toxicology tests showed that Cash was not drunk when he died. He was a powerfully built man, only 51, and with reflexes like a cat. I tend to believe Alex Karas might have had something.

Norman never returned to Justiceburg that I know. I know that he had a wife when he died and that he was buried in Michigan.

But you can never get all of the Texas out of a real Texan.

Norman Cash was wearing his cowboy boots when he died.

Dan Blocker

Dan Blocker had finished his Sul Ross football career and was back working on his masters in the dramatic arts when we met. I was working summers at the Sul Ross swimming pool, parttime life guarding and parttime pool maintenance man. Dan Blocker was a friendly giant who told me he had been teaching drama at Sonora High School.

A native of De Kalb in Bowie County, and weighing 14 pounds at birth, Blocker was the biggest baby ever born in Bowie County. When I met him he must have weighed 350 or more, and with hair on his back like a West Texas peccary.

I had already heard the Tobe Gober story before I met Blocker. Sul Ross was a rodeo school when I was there, and some of the cowboys on scholarship were enough to scare the shit out of the average student of the finer arts.

One of the scariest was a big bulldogger named Tobe Gober, who wrote with bold black marker in the Sul Ross Student Union men’s room: All Band and Drama Majors are Queer. He signed it Tobe Gober.

I heard the Blocker/Gober confrontation was brutal, but I could never say for sure since I wasn’t present. But there were more than a few witnesses who would testify that Blocker dragged a huge bulldogger into the student union building mens room by his hair, then stood over the battered cowboy while Tobe scrubbed the wall clean with soap and water.

Such went the stories in the summer of 1955, a heady and exciting time for students at that West Texas college. Elvis Presley played the Alpine high school auditorium that year, and such stars as Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Huson, and James Dean were filming the epic movie Giant at nearby Marfa.

Many of the stars, including Taylor and Dean, were driving the 30 miles over to Alpine where they swam in the college pool as townsfolk and students alike gawked.

Dan Blocker was in his element. The movie stars were enthralled. Despite his gigantic size and 50-gallon oil drum physique, he was a stunningly graceful diver. With Liz Taylor and her swimming pool hand maidens in waiting, Big Dan did his thing on the 3-meter diving board. His massive 350-pound bulk would bend the high board almost to the water before catapulting Blocker skyward. He did graceful flips with twists that never failed to amaze the audience.

Little did any of them dream that they were watching the big star of another generation and new age medium. It was 1955. They were watching big Hoss Cartright before the prize-winning TV serial Bonanza was even a germ in some producer’s mind.

The Dan Blocker I remember was the playful giant who would enliven his own awards ceremony with humor not for the faint of stomach.

I don’t recall exactly what the honor for Blocker was all about, but the ceremony was in the Alpine Holland Hotel banquet room.

In the 1950s, many news photographers were still using the Speed Graphic Camera with flash bulbs that were cloudy blobs when spent. Blocker somehow picked up one of these discarded bulbs and stuck it in his nose. It did resemble a giant booger when big Dan faced his audience.

“Anybody have a handkerchief,” he hollered.

And the solemnity of the occasion was no more.

My most vivid memory of Dan Blocker goes back to one late-summer day when I returned to my job at the swimming pool after visiting my hometown of Junction for more than a week. That pool was without a roof and my swim suit had been hanging in the bath house. I slipped it on and when I made it out to the pool, Dan Blocker was sunning himself on the pool apron.

My suit was stiff from disuse, and I was vaguely aware of some sort of movement on my back when Blocker yelled at me.

“Hey, Sam,” he said. “You need to be real still. And don’t make any sudden moves. There are three big scorpions on your back and you need to dive into the pool before they get you.”

That did it. My back muscles spasmed and three giant scorpions stung me in unison as I leaped into the pool.

I can still hear Dan Blocker’s guffaws. Those damn scorpions almost killed me, and Blocker loved every minute of it. But he liked me. His belly laughter told me so.

Dan died May 13, 1972, in a Los Angeles hospital. Cause of death was a pulmonary embolism following gall bladder surgery.

It was supposed to be a simple operation, but someone used a dirty knife. I felt like crying when I heard the news.

Filed Under: Columns

Red

Red Smith

I never knew for sure what first inspired me to write. Looking back now, I know Fred Gipson was a major influence. Gipson was the Mason County writer who penned books like Hound Dog Man and the nationally acclaimed best seller Old Yeller, which became a major motion picture. I grew up on neighboring ranchland in Kimble County. Hound Dog Man was the first book I ever checked out of the Junction school library. It was classified a children’s book.

J.D. Salinger also caught my eye when I was still a kid. I read Catcher in the Rye three times. That best-selling author Salinger fell in the moron category on early day IQ testing gave me further hope. Salinger was an early-day outlaw as was Blackie Scantlin, the rapscallion hero of Gipson’s first book.

I will always count San Antonio Evening News front page columnist Paul Thompson as a significant influence. He was a word mechanic with few peers, a literary hatchet man with a fascinating command of the written word. Paul Thompson became a mentor of sorts. I was intrigued by his ability to kill, gill, and gut political panjandrums with his writing while skating successfully along the fine line of libel. Paul Thompson probably wielded more political power than any single individual on the San Antonio, Texas scene. He epitomized the term “Poison Pen.” He was damn sure the most feared writer in this part of Texas.

And I read gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (no relation) with the weird feeling that I might have known him in an earlier life. I had to read Hunter Thompson. Perhaps because his weird behavior and scatter-shot writing style offered proof that you don’t have to be sane in order to make it. Whatever make it is. I never was sure about this. Hunter S. killed himself at the very end of his zany career.

As mentioned earlier, when I was a kid growing up in Junction, Texas and surrounding Kimble County ranch land, my first interest in any kind of literature was focused on Mason County writer Fred Gipson. Gipson’s interests centered on dogs and kids. He wrote several books, gaining national acclaim with the bestseller Old Yeller, a touching dog yarn which became a major motion picture. But it was Gipson’s earlier novel that caught my fancy and fired my imagination, a story of a boy and the loveable but fiddle-footed rake the boy idolized.

Title of the book is “Hound Dog Man.” The setting is Mason County in West-Central Texas. The main actor is a raccoon hunter who never managed to completely grow up. Blackie Scantling is his name. He was never referred to as a raccoon hunter. He was a coon hunter, the greatest in the world, and his coon hounds were called Rock and Drum. People from that neck of the woods still refer to raccoons as coons. I do so myself.

Hound Dog Man is told from the perspective of 12-year-old Cotton Kinney, a country boy who yearned for a dog of his own. After dropping by the Kinney home for a visit, Blackie Scantling was to captivate young Cotton with antics and trail hound stories alike. The two even went on a magical adventure which saw the hound dog man get down on all fours and back down a bewildered bull. And as was his custom, author Gipson eventually returned the boy to reality and his responsible, hard-working father and the qualities that such men instill in their sons. There was always a moral to a Fred Gipson story.

I had two treeing walker coon hounds while growing up in Kimble County, of which Junction is the county seat. And wouldn’t you know I called my dogs Rock and Ruby. I also had a tough little terrier mix I called Tippy.

My childhood hero, however, was no coon hunter, although his lifestyle was as free spirited as was the fictitious Blackie Scantling’s in Gipson’s novel. Red Smith was my childhood hero. He was the toughest cowboy in the world and the greatest horse trainer who ever lived.

I was always taken with Fred Gipson’s knack for describing our part of Texas– there is nothing prettier than hoar frost sparkling on a cow chip in the moonlight.

Of Red Smith, I once wrote: He was a hell-raising whiskey-drinking cowboy with no teeth and a face like a rock slide. Red was the clean smell of juniper cedar on a bright morning. He was squeaky saddle leather on a muscled blue pony.

Red Smith was my Blackie Scantling.

My father, Grady Kindrick, died before I was three months old. I never got to know him. He died on an operating table in San Antonio’s old Nix Hospital after being rushed by car from Junction, more than a hundred miles distance. The year was 1934. My mother, Bernice, always told us that Grady died of locked bowels. His younger brother, my uncle Bennett Kindrick, told his son, my cousin Dr. Roy Kindrick, that my father’s death could probably be attributed to a ruptured appendix accompanied by pneumonia.

My mother was a beautiful, brilliant school teacher and published poet who retired with a masters degree after teaching in Comstock, Comfort, Junction, and the Fort Sam Houston Independent School District in San Antonio. She taught me in fifth grade. It was my hardest school year, as my mother wanted no hint of favoritism. Her last Job was at Cole Middle School at Fort Sam Houston.

When I was in school at Junction she married an Edwards County ranchman by the name of Temple Deats. The relationship was brief and abusive, Deats being the polar opposite of everything my mother believed in. One of my mother’s younger sisters accurately described Deats as “scum.” This marriage was annuled by a county judge. She later married Horton Layfette Howard, a retired chief in the U.S. Navy and a really good guy who treated me with kindness. They stayed together until Howard’s death.

When Bernice was 18 months of age she was voted the prettiest baby in Junction. My Aunt Mary Helen (Polly) Majirus, one of my mother’s younger sisters, remembered a picture of the event, my mom holding a little silver cup she was awarded and crying.

Always active in church and civic organizations, she published two books of poetry after retiring from school teaching for 45 years. Among many other organizations, she was a member of the National League of American Pen Women and the Stella Woodall Poetry Society International.

I know she was brilliant, and at some level I believe she loved the little boy Sammy she raised, but we were never what one might call close as Sammy grew up to become Sam the daily newspaper columnist and later the publisher of Action Magazine. My mother’s taciturn disapproval was always there. She never mentioned anything I wrote, and the words Action Magazine never escaped her lips. Alcohol consumption was anathema to her. The first issue of Action Magazine in 1975 had a back cover advertising Lone Star Beer. I’m sure my mother never looked at another issue. And I had my part. My own drinking problem and the drug arrests which followed did nothing for the relationship with my rigidly religious mother.

But there was another side to Bernice my mother. After I was divorced from my first wife Vicky, and before I was to marry my forever wife Sharon, my mother washed every stitch of clothing I owned, and she lovingly hand mended my shirts, pants, and even the bed sheets I took her to be washed. She always loved little Sammy, and the love for that little boy endured until her death.

I can also recall those times so long ago when I really wanted a father. One instance has been lodged in my memory like a river bottom rock.

I must have been in grade school. Red Smith was working with my cowboy grandfather.

A larger and older bully was tormenting me when school turned out for the day. My mother was a teacher in the Junction school and this may have exacerbated my situation. The bully was shoving me down, then daring me to get up and fight him. His name was Hamp Wallace. I guess I was ashamed to alert my grandfather. I finally told Red what was going on.

He told me what to do.

“You get you a strong cedar stick,” Red said. “Then you go up side his head the next time he messes with you.”

“Up side his head?” I remember asking.

I never forgot Red’s reply:

“Up side his head means you knock the shit out of him anywhere you can hit him. And you stay with it. If you don’t do this, it will only get worse for you. This kid pushing you around ain’t got good sense. Sometimes people like this have to have sense knocked into their heads.”

I was prepared to take Red’s advice, but when I showed up outside school with the cedar stick my adversary backed off. There was fear-fueled fury in my eyes and I was probably foaming at the mouth like a rabid fox as well. It was enough to stop the bully. He reported me to the school principal for threatening him with a club. But he never again tried to shove me around.

For as long as I can remember, Red Smith was intertwined with both sides of my family. He was a close friend of my father, Grady Exa Kindrick, and he worked for years alongside my cowboy maternal grandfather, Clarence Frank Chenault, a lease rancher who survived for years in the rugged Central Texas cedar brakes after a mortgage foreclosure cost him his own ranch on Kimble County’s Cedar Creek, just a few miles south of the town of Junction. He bought the Cedar Creek ranch from his grandmother, Susan Abigail Wood Harmon Kelly. He later lost the ranch in the mortgage foreclosure, due to heavy rains which kept him from reaching the bank in time to make his mortgate payment. Ironically, it was Weaver Baker, law partner of my grandfather’s friend Coke Stevenson, who signed the foreclosure. I don’t believe my grandfather held a resentment. He told me once that it was “just business,” and that Baker was only doing his job.

People who loved and admired my grandpa affectionately referred to him late in his life as Old Shinney. Although he was nearly stone deaf, Clarence Chenault was no mute. Shinney could cuss like a China marine on a blue streak. He lost almost all of his hearing as a young man. He always blamed his hearing loss on an old Model-T Ford freight-hauling truck that he drove with no muffler. Our family always maintained that my grandfather was a distant cousin of General Claire Chenault, commander of the famed Flying Tigers of World War II.

I loved my grandfather Chenault. He could read my lips fairly well, but his hearing impairment probably kept us from being any closer than we became. He taught me to boil cowboy coffee in an open pan; he taught me to shoot pool in the Junction Pool Hall. But it was Red Smith who taught me to shoot a rifle and gut a deer, and it was Red who got drunk with me repeatedly in later years when I was a reporter with the San Antonio Express and News.

My grandfather was poor for most of his life. All but dirt poor. The lease rancher in the Texas Hill Country was akin to the poor sharecroppers of the south. They worked hard just to stay on the land and provide for their families.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the hated screwworm was threatening to obliterate the livestock industry in many parts of Texas. The screwworm hatched and thrived on living animal flesh, eating away until the animal was dead or too far gone to survive. This was before experiments at Texas A&M University produced a sterile screwworm fly that, in effect, sterialized other flies, eventually bringing the hated scourage to an end in Texas. This happened in about 1957 in Kimble County, about four years after I graduated from high school.

I have vivid recollection of livestock literally crawling with screwworms. I once saw a doe deer with worms literally working in her face. The worms had eaten out her eyes and she was stumbling blindly until Red Smith ended her suffering with a single shot from a 30-30 Winchester rifle. The doe had wandered into the long-since-abandoned Evergreen School House on the South Llano River, one of numerous elementary schools in Kimble County before students were bused into town for the advanced grades and high school. Members of my family had attended the Evergreen School.

The powerful stench of Smear 62, the foul black goop which seemed to be the only answer of that day for screwworms attached to living livestock, will remain in my nostrils until I die. The worst of the screwworm epidemic in Kimble County was experienced by my family when my grandfather Chenault was lease ranching on one of the Coke Stevenson ranches, this one on the North Llano River.

I was just a boy in those days, but they had me out doctoring the worm-infected sheep, goats, and even cattle. My aunt Rayola Chenault, my mother’s baby sister, was a cowgirl who rode like a man with my grandfather Chenault and Red Smith, both driving and carrying infected livestock from the ranch pastures to a fenced area near the ranch house which was called a “worm trap.” We doctored the wormies in the trap area daily, turning them back into the open pastures only after they healed, making room for new wormies in a seemingly never-ending battle with the screwworm fly. Any small wound, even a tiny scratch, would invite the hated flies and the “blow,” eggs which would quickly hatch into flesh-eating larvae.

I can remember Red, Aunt Ray, and my grandpa carrying new wormies across the pommels of their saddles to the ever-populated worm trap. And there was a constant influx of babies– lambs and goats that were orphaned by the flesh-eating worms. My grandmother called them “sanchos,” and to this day I don’t know where she found the word. The sanchos were fed daily with dilluted cow’s milk in Coke bottles equpped with rubber nipples my grandmother fashioned from discarded car innertubes.

My mother’s side of our family was headed by my cowboy grandfather Clarence Frank Chenault. He graduated from Peacock Military Academy in San Antonio, and when a young man, he and Texas governor-to-be Coke Stevenson hauled freight by mule and horse team between Junction and Brady, the nearest railhead to our part of the state. They also hauled goods in and out of Menard, another railhead, often camping together on the trail. The two of them were lifelong friends. And through the years as I grew up around my grandpa Chenault and Red Smith, much of that time was spent on ranchland that my grandfather leased from Coke Stevenson.

Both sides of my family, the Kindricks and the Chenaults, were enexorably enmeshed with the Stevenson attorney brothers, Coke and Bascomb. As Coke was elected governor of Texas (serving from 1941 until 1947), with my Chenault grandparents living and working on Stevenson property my grandfather leased from his longtime friend, Bascomb Stevenson continued on with the Stevenson law firm in Junction when he became engaged to marry my father’s oldest sister, Kimble County beauty Anga Lillian Kindrick.

I was always told that Bascomb was a heavy drinker and probably an alcoholic. He and my aunt Lillian had announced their plans to marry when Lililan died in a one-car rollover near Junction. Bascomb Stevenson had been at the wheel and he was unhurt in the wreck that killed my beautiful aunt. Everyone said Bascomb was probably drunk.

My father’s brother Bennett Kindrick said Bascomb killed his sister. He swore on Lillian’s grave that, from that day forward, he would never drink a drop of alcohol. And he was true to his vow. He stayed sober until his death at age 98.

Coke Stevenson organized the First National Bank in Junction. He served as a county attorney, a county judge, and a state representative before he was elected lieutenant governor and then governor. The only political race he ever lost was the one that made headlines all over the nation, his fall by 87 votes to Lyndon Johnson in the infamous “Box 13” race for the U.S. Senate. Everyone in Junction always said that Lyndon Johnson stole the election from Coke Stevenson by virtue of the dubious Box 13 in Jim Wells County which was delvered by vote broker George Parr. Names for some of those who allegedly voted in Box 13 had been copied from tombstones.

My grandmother Chenault was named Lulu Burt Hodges Chenault, including nicknames Oudie, Toodle, and Evie. We all called her Mama. My aunt Rayola, her youngest, said Mama used the name Lulu the most. Her death was a tragedy that my old cowboy grandpa never got over.

I was in junior high school when my mother pulled me out of class. I will never forget that awful morning. My grandmother Chenault had been killed by a train. The circumstances were devastating.

My grandfather’s last attempt at lease ranching was on Kendall County property located a few miles out of Boerne on the Sisterdale Road. The owner of that property lived in San Antonio and he hired my granparents to act as caretakers on the ranch. My grandparents lived on that ranch for about a year before they made the decision to move into a Junction house my mother had found for them. They were leaving the Boerne ranch when a freight train hit their 1938 4-door Plymouth sedan on the northern outskirts of Boerne, killing Mama Chenault and seriously injuring our Papa.

The circumstances, later recounted by my heartbroken grandfather, were hard for any of us to take. All but impossible for our Papa. He finally recovered from his physical injuries. But his tormented mind never healed.

The car had stalled on the railroad track. Mama was desperately trying to get my hearing-impaired grandfather to get out of the vehicle with her while there was still time. The train engineer was blowing the whistle full blast. Clarence couldn’t hear it. Lulu was desperately trying to push Clarence out of the car. She would not leave him. He couldn’t understand her frantic words. She loved him. We all knew it. She stayed with him in the cab of that old car until her death.

My aunt Rayola Chenault Proffer has been my greatest helper in piecing together much of my family history. She told me the following: “Papa never talked to me about what all happened – at a later time, the only thing he ever told me was that Mama was tugging on his shirt sleeve with tears in her eyes and was pointing to the train. I still do not know if they were thrown out of the car or not. Someone told me that right after it all happened and this person got there, they saw Papa and Mama on the ground with Papa holding her head. Mama was taken to the mortuary in Boerne and an ambulance took Papa to a Fredericksburg hospital. To this day I do not know if Papa had any serious injuries or not. I don’t think he had anything broken. And I don’t know how long he was in the hospital. This all happened close to noon on a Wednesday, May 12, 1948. The funeral for Mama was at 4:00 p.m. Friday, May 14th.”

Aunt Ray said a coroner who investigated my grandmother’s death said she may have died of a heart attack when the train hit. There was little blood, he said.

“This would have been a blessing if it were true,” Ray said, going on to note that she saw traces of awful bruising on Mama’s face as she lay in her casket. “The undertaker had tried to cover it up but we could see the damage.”

I was just a youngster at the time, but my grandmother’s violent death and my old cowboy grandfather’s anguished grief, gave me an early look at what true love really looks like.

Old Shinney Chenault was done cowboying after my grandmother’s death. My mother had another room built for him on our little white stucco house in Junction. He spent most of his time shooting pool in the Junction pool hall. I never heard my grandfather say much of anything about the horror on a Boerne railroad track.

But I heard enough to know.

My room in the Junction house was next to the add-on room which was Papa’s until his death a number of years later.

I heard. Late at night. Every night. Not loud. The soft sobbing of an old cowboy mourning a lost love, the only love he had ever known, the mother of his seven children and the one he might have saved if not for the damnable hearing loss which denied a train whistle. The whistle tried its mechanical best to warn them, but the human frailty was the rapacious creditor, not to be denied. She would not leave him. She never did. And he never stopped loving her.

Aunt Ray sent me a copy of the letter of condolences former Governor Coke Stevenson sent his longtime friend after my grandmother’s death. The letterhead proclaimed: Stevenson Ranch. Cattle, sheep, goats. Junction, Texas. It read:

“Dear Clarence:

“I have wanted to come and see you and try to express my friendship for you in your time of tragedy and loneliness. You know, of course, of my friendshp, and have known of it for many years. There isn’t much that a friend can say in a time like yours except to let you know that you are remembered often and in the spirit of a fellow man who would be helpful if he could

“The temptation is strong, Clarence, to men in your situation, to give up and let go. But don’t do it. All of us have a purpose to serve in this world, and while you and I can never understand why we have been called upon to suffer tragedy in our lives, yet there must be some reason for it and it is our duty to accept it and make the best use of our situations for our families, our friends, and our communities. We can still do some good in the world. It may not be much but every little bit makes life worth living for someone. I am satisfied that you feel a great deal like I do and that you have the determination to carry on. I hope so.

“With kindest regards, I am, sincerely your friend.”

The letter was signed: “Coke R. Stevenson”

My mother Bernice was the oldest of the Chenault children. After her there was, in order, Nunelee Harman, John Blake, James Allen (Jimmy), Mary Helen (Polly), Joyce, and my aunt Rayola.

Jimmy was the child prodigy who applied for college entrance and passed with flying colors when he was in his third year of high school. He then joined the Army with parental consent when he was 17, only to die in a Denver hospital of tuberculosis. My mother traveled to Denver to be with him during his final days. His entire army career was spent in Denver’s Fitzsimmons General hospital where he was to die.

My father’s side of the family was always more of a mystery to me than my mom’s side, largely because my father, Exa Grady Kindrick, my maternal grandfather, Samuel Bennett Kindrick, and my aunt Anga Lillian Kindrick all died before I got to know any of them.

I was born November 10, 1934, and named Clarence Samuel Kindrick after my grandfathers. My birth took place in the old Nix Hospital in San Antonio, the same hospital where my father died.

My paternal grandmother was Iva Lou Miller Kindrick, known to her grandchildren as Nanny. She lived in the family home in Junction until her death when I was still an adolescent. My maternal grandfather was a postmaster in Junction and also at the Telegraph Post Office and Store on the South Llano River, but he died before I was born. My father’s brothers were Ur Dee (Turk), the oldest in the family and a Junction postmaster himself, and Miller Bennett, the youngest. My aunt Lillian was second of the Kindrick kids and my father Grady was number three. Of all the Kindricks I was closest to my Uncle Ben and his two sons, Freddy and Roy. Fred passed of natural causes, and my cousin Dr. Roy Kindrick, an oral surgeon, was retired from his medical practice in Denton at this writing.

Once again, it was the influence of former Gov. Coke Stevenson that would help a member of our Junction family, this time my father’s younger brother Bennett, who was named at Coke’s behest the business manager of the Gatesville State Scnool for Boys in Gatesville.

My uncle Ben worked himself up from the state school business office to eventually be named superintendent of the Gatesville State School for Boys. A humanitarian who loved the boys under his supervision, Bennett Kindrick did away with such harsh punishment practices as the dreaded “busting block,” a greasy, filth-encrusted mattress where boys were stripped of their pants, laid face-down, and whipped with a thick razor strop until their buttocks were striped with blood and torn flesh.

These facilities have been converted into a state womens prison, but I can recall our summer visits to my uncle Ben and aunt Eleanor Kindrick when my cousins Fred and Roy were romping and playing baseball with the reform school inmates.

Bennett Kindrick was slight of build, but he had an amazing way of handling even the roughest of the reform school inmates, some of them 18 or 19 and built like adults. They respected him, and many of them loved him. He even adopted and helped educate a few of them.

Uncle Ben always said that most of the reformatory inmates were not bad boys, just neglected boys who needed a loving home.

When I was a baby, my grandfather S.B. Kindrick owned and operated the Kimble County Telegraph Store and Post office on the pristine headwaters of the South Llano River. He was the postmaster and grocer-owner of the general store, which sat on ranchland that bordered the Coke Stevenson Ranch which bordered both sides of the river.

During the1927 F5 tornado which destroyed the little neighboring town of Rocksprings in Edwards County, my grandfather Kindrick was said to have given away groceries and drinks to the tornado victims.

The store and beautiful river front rancland, known as the Telegraph Ranch, were passed from S.B. Kindrick to his son Grady Kindrick, and my father kept the property until his death. During that time, my father allowed my maternal grandparents, Clarence and Lulu Chenault, to live in quarters attached to the store, and for a time my grandfather Chenault was the Telegraph postmaster.

“I feel sure,” said Rayola Chenault Proffer, “that Grady and Bernice allowed Papa and Mama to live rent free in the Telegraph store quarters as long as they wanted.”

My Chenault grandparents moved frequently,barely managing to keep the wolf from the door. From the Cedar Creek Ranch, they moved to Hays County, and then back to Telegraph and Coke Stevenson property on the South Llano River. From there they moved to ranchland on the North Llano owned by Stevenson, and they stayed there until Coke sold that ranch to J.M. Livingston. I think they then moved back to Stevenson property on the South Llano before they were to move on Kendall County ranch property near Boerne.

After my father’s death, my mother sold Telegraph to Ernest Boyette, an Austin lobbyist. Ernest’s younger brother Pat Boyette was a TV weather pioneer in San Antonio. I think he was on Channel 5. When Bernice sold Telegraph she was frightened and grief-stricken, a young school teacher with a baby son and no comprehension of ranch real estate value. She let Telegrah go for a pittance, and she grieved over the loss for the rest of her life.

The ranch, store, and crystal-clear South Llano River front property would have been mine had my mother held on to property which is worth multiple millions today. I never faulted her. At the mere mention of Telegraph, tears would spring into her eyes, and my heart would mourn with her. I was spiritually connected to that piece of heaven on earth, and my soul roams those river banks to this day. I fished there, I hunted coons and ringtail cats there, and I swam in the prettiest and cleanest waters on earth. So who, I have often wondered, really owns Telegraph? It couldn’t matter who holds a paper deed. Who really owns Telegraph? Ask the Dalai Lama and he might tell you Sam Kindrick.

The South Llano and the North Llano Rivers of Kimble County merge just below Junction, hence the name of what I believe to be the prettiest little town in Texas. After confluence of the north and south streams, what we always called the Main Llano, meanders on through Mason County to join the Colorado River near the town of Llano.

The South Llano, where I spent most of my boyhood, is the gem of spring-fed Texas rivers, and the great flood of 1935 was the water event most discussed througout my early years. I was a year old when the flood hit.

My mother told me she stood on the front steps of Junction’s First Baptist Church to watch both North Llano and South Llano rivers raging on either side of the town. And 16 miles up toward the headwaters of the South Llano, my father’s Telegraph Ranch and Store weathered the storm, but not before a beautiful river-front pecan orchard was leveled by the mighty rush of water. leaving one gigantic and majestic pecan giant still standing.

Red Smith was staying with my family at that time. He recalled my father Grady Kindrick’s reaction.

“Grady had a double-bit cedar axe in his hand,” Red told me. “He told me to grab an axe and help him. Grady said, ‘I can’t bear to look at that one tree. Let’s take it down and start all over again.’ So that’s what we did.”

Red Smith and my fatrher Grady Kindrick worked the better part of a day in waist-deep river bottom mud before that last pecan sentry was to fall.

I think I know now where my once-explosive temper and defiant attitude might have come from. Grady was a Christian church man who might have let his self will run riot on occasion. God took almost all of his beautiful pecan orchard, so he and Red finished the job. Was this tree cuttng an act of defiance? Anger? Grief? I always wondered if Grady felt remorse over destruction of that tree.

Everyone I have ever talked with who knew my father would attest to his sharp business acumen.

“He could fix a broken-down bicycle and sell it for three times what he paid for it,” my uncle Ben told me. “There is no way of knowing how far in the business world Grady might have gone had he lived. He was the master of the deal.”

By the time he reached the age of 30 he owned two large produce trucks, a grocery store, the Telegraph Ranch and Post Office, and our white stucco Junction home which he built himself. Oliver Lynn Verlin was the rock mason who built our fireplace.

My mother was a devout Christian and member of the Junction First Baptist Church. She and others said my father was a staunch church member who also sang in the choir with a strong tenor voice.

I never knew for sure if my father was a gambler, but many of the oldtimers who knew him said he was known to wager at golf, the sport he loved and reportedly excelled at. While Grady’s truck was being loaded with produce and other goods in preparation for his return to Junction and other towns along the way, he was known to frequent the Brackenridge Park Golf Course where he was a known winner. An oldtimer in the produce business by the name of Guggenheim recalled my father’s skill with the golf clubs. I think Guiggenheim had a company in Boerne.

I don’t recall Mr. Guiggenheim’s given name, but I recall his words when defining my father’s prowess with the golf sticks: “Grady could hit out of a sand trap like few others. Sometimes he deliberately hit his ball into a trap. When he blasted out of the sand, his ball would almost always land near the hole. His opponents called it luck. But it was not luck. Your father could hit out of sand like the pros. I watched him win this way time and time again.”

When I was young, I had my father’s full set of golf club, all with hickory shafts. I lost many of them through the years, and the only two I have left are a driving iron and a 1920s era niblick, which is shaped much like the modern day 8 or 9 iron.

While talking with friend and fellow writer and musician Hector Saldana about writing a possible autobiography, I mused: “Hell, Hec, what to write and how to start?”

Hector came right back.

“Hold those old golf clubs of your dad’s and write what comes into your head.”

I did it. I held the clubs and closed my eyes. Stories and events from my past began to form. But the two most notable sensations were sorrow and curiosity.

I felt an almost palpable sorrow that I never got to know my father; and a profound and almost overwhelming sense of curiosity about what might have been.

I have always wondered what Grady Kindrick might have taught me had he lived into old age.

The Chenault family horses and my cowgirl aunt Rayola’s keen observations and heartfelt rememberances speak volumes about who we are. She was 92 at this writing. The horse members of our family included Pinto, Brown Jug, Leatherbritches, Dunny, Redbird, and Buckskin.

Pinto was my grandfather’s pride and joy, a high-strung paint cow pony that had been broken to the saddle by Red Smith. The first time Aunt Ray laid eyes on the two-year-old paint colt, Red had Pinto jump the hood of a car parked in front of the Telegraph Store. That did it for Papa. He bought Pinto on the spot.

Only Aunt Ray can give first-hand and beautifully descriptive information on the Chenault family horses and the hard times my grandparents survived. The great depression of the 1930s was ending, but it was still tough for hard-scrabble lease rancher Clarence Chenault and his brood as the World War II years materialized.

Of my grandfather’s favorite horse, Aunt Rayola said: “Pinto was a paint or pinto horse. His coat was white and spotted with bay mane and tail. Red Smith broke Pinto. Red was working for Debs Boone at the time and he rode Pinto to Telelgraph one day (from the Boone ranch). Pinto was just two years old then. That is the earliest age for a horse to be broken. There was a convertible parked actoss the road from the store. Red was so proud of the way Pinto handled. He showed off a little by having Pinto jump the hood of the convertible. Shortly after that Papa bought Pinto (from Debs Boone).

“Pinto was the most high spirited of all our horses. Not temperamental, just hyper. His energy was limitless. When you were riding him if you didn’t pay attention he would throw his head back and hit you right between the eyes. Any morning that Papa saddled Pinto they seemed to go throgh the same routine. Papa would start to put his foot in the stirrup and Pinto would know exactly when to side-step. So they would literally go around and around, Pinto making noises by blowing through his nose while Papa’s leggings were flying. Pinto would get his bits jerked and a few whacks from Papa’s old floppy hat across his withers and a whole bunch of ‘dad blame its’ as ‘dad blame it’ was Paps’s favorite cuss word with the threat of ‘I’ll wrop my rope across your withers.’ Papa always pronounced wrap with an o as in hop. With all of this out of the way, Papa would mount up and off they would go, Pinto stepping lively and both of them sniffing the wind.”

Papa could never afford ranch help. Red worked with him for enough money to get drunk on the weekends. Mama did all of Red’s laundry and kept him supplied with the buttermilk he loved. Aunt Rayola workd stock with my grandfather from the time she was big enough to mount a horse.

“Papa always tried to run a thousand head of sheep and a thousand head of goats,” Rayola said. “When it was time for the roundup Mama would have breakfast made and get us up at 4.”

Rayola said it took them almost a week to complete the roundup. They pulled out before daylight in the mornings, Ray on the big brown saddlehorse she called Brown Jug, and Papa on Pinto.

Aunt Rayola has hoarded her most treasured memories like some women stockpile diamonds.

“Papa would never let us kids race the horses,” she said. “ But sometimes as we started out early in the morning, Papa would pull his hat low over his forehead and say to me ‘I don’t believe old Crow Bait (my horse Jug) can beat Pinto.’ Then he dug in the spurs and the race was on, me on Jug and him on Pinto, neck-and-neck and full speed for about a quarter of a mile. Then it was down to business for the rest of the day.”

She said Pinto was nosey and always wanted attention.

“When we lived on the North Llano there was no fence around the house,” Ray said. “Pinto would come up to the screen door in front of the house, snort a little and twiddle the door with his upper lip. One day we gave him a slice of lightbread, or ‘wasp nest’ as Papa called any bread that was not homemade. Pinto caught on quick how to get his treat.

“Pinto had a bad habit of biting or kicking the other horses. He didn’t do it to us, just the horses. We had to watch him when they were all fed. He would gobble up his oats and grain and then run the other horses away from their feed boxes.”

After a long days ride, Rayola said, from 5 in the morning until 9 at night, Pinto would still be going strong.

“After the other horses were all turned out in the horse pasture for the night–when they should have been grazing or resting–you could hear Pinto at any hour running the other horses,” Rayola said. “From the sounds they were all making you knew he was biting and kicking. The next morning he would be full of vinegar and ready to ride. I’m sure if we had inspected the other horses they would have had bloodshot eyes. Papa tried hobbling Pinto at night but hobbles would never hold him. I suspect he chewed them loose. Papa next tried a big chain about 6 foot long with with a heavy leather strap on one end which was buckled to a foreleg. Pinto mastered that. At night you could hear him sling that chain with a certain rhythm–clank of chain, then hooves, as he ran the other horsess. I suppose Papa gave up after that.”

Rayola can still produce the wonderful little memories that might have slipped through the cracks for less attentive people.

“We were out in the pasture…stopped for a shady rest. The horses hot and sweaty. They liked their heads rubbed where the bridle fit. Pinto would go up to Papa’s back, rub his head up and down really hard. Almost push him over. Then he did it. Papa was on hands and knees, drinking from a spring. Pinto ducked his head, shoving Papa’s backside until he went head first into the creek.”

When Papa left Boerne and after my grandmother’s death, he knew he had to find Pinto a proper home. He found it on the Coke Stevenson ranch.

Coke took Pinto in, and my grandfather’s great paint cow pony and longtime friend was allowed to live out his remaining days on the Stevenson ranch near Telegraph where he started it all by jumping over a car hood.

Rayola’s horse was Brown Jug, a powerfully-built animal we all called Jug.

“He was part Morgan,” Rayola told me. “Had a dark reddish brown coat with black mane and tail. Before Papa bought him he was used in rodeos as a roping horse. During that time he got his foot caught in a fence, leaving a bad cut on his foot and leg. The wound didn’t leave him a cripple, but he could no longer be used in rodeos.

“Jug stood out from the other animals–always with a look of elegance. Neck had a graceful arch. Pretty rounded forehead and ears always pointed alertly foreward. He was larger than most saddle horses but was sure-footed and could stop, start, and turn just as quickly as any quarterhorse. He had a gait that made riding him as comfortable as sitting in a rocking chair. He was usually good natured and gentle but you couldn’t always count on it. He wasn’t too good to bite you and of all the horses we had, you couldn’t trust him not to kick if you walked behind him. Especially when he was eating. He got me only once, leaving a horseshoe print on my backside which I wore for a while. I had fed the other horses and was walking behind Jug, still carrying the feed bucket, when he got me. Jug kicked me and the bucket into an agarita bush.”

Rayola recalled Jug using the old breath-holding trick that many horses have known to pull when the saddle girth is being cinched up.

“Only Jug probably did it a lot more than most horses,” Ray said. “He would puff up like a blowfish when I was cinching the girth, then let his breath out when we were on our way. Of course the girth cinch would be so loose the saddle would almost fall off. It made me so mad I felt like murdering Jug. But he loved me, and contrary as he could get, I loved him.”

Red Smith was my grandfather’s most loyal stock wrangler, but a drifter by the name of Doc Curtis was there for some of the roundups. And Rayola recalls that Doc was helping them roundup sheep when Jug threw her for the first and last time.

“We were rounding up the sheep and it was hot,” Rayola said. “That was when we lived in the rock house on the Stevenson ranch. We had stopped to rest and loosened the saddle girths on the horses. When it was time to go, I tightened the saddle girth and Jug nipped me. This was one of his contrary days. I suppose horses have days they don’t feel good just like people. I got my foot in the stirrup and before I got my other leg over the cantel he pitched just enough to throw me right on over and across his back. Papa and Doc Curtis were both saddled up and watching the show. They were trying hard not to smile. I remember Papa telling me, ‘If he does that again take your rope and wrop it good across his withers.’”

The rock house they lived in on the South Llano Stevenson ranch had a rock water tank with a hose Rayola used to cool Jug down. “He was one of the few horses we had who loved to be bathed.” Aunt Ray said. “Jug would stand and savor every drop from head to tail for as long as I dared to waste the water.”

My Aunt Rayola Chenault was a superior horsewoman who did it all. She roped, branded, helped shoe the horses and did all of the chores most male ranch people perform.

“A lot of times,” she said, “Papa had me ride by myself. Check a fence, doctor wormies. See if the windmill in the back pasture was pumping. Took me a half a day or more and, often times, your dog Tippy would follow. When he got tired I would put him behind the saddle and let him ride. Jug never objected.”

Tippy was a tough little terrier mix that an old Junction doctor gave me as a puppy. I didn’t want to keep him penned at our Junction house while I was at school, so his home became the ranch my grandparents were living on. Tippy would also ride on the front fender of my grandmother’s old car when she drove down to the Telegraph Store for groceries and household supplies. He never lost his footing.

There were many rattlesnakes on the Coke Stevenson Ranch during those days, and Tippy developed into a protective rattler hunter and killer. He was always between us and the snake, and our efforts to discourage his rattlesnake killing were to no avail. He found the snake, barking and circling, and waiting for the inevitable strike. When the snake struck and missed, extending its body from the coil, the little terrier mix was on him like jugged lightning. He grabbed the snakes behind their heads and shook them until there was no life left. We never knew how many he killed. It was many until he finally missed. The big rattler got him around his head. The swelling was awful as my grandmother doctored him with potash and whatever country remedy she had at her disposal. There was no vet around Telegraph and the Stevenson ranch in those days. I remember us all crying. Tippy hung on for a day and the better part of another night before his little frame finally succumed to the venom. I never forgot Tippy.

I still have visions of Tippy riding behind Aunt Ray on Brown Jug.

Redbird was a reddish brown bay, temperamental mare always referred to as my uncle Jimmy’s horse. Rayola said the mare was not mean but stubborn. Aunt Ray recalled Mama hitching Redbird to the family’s Model-T Ford when the car stalled in the creek crossing..

“Redbird did not want to pull,” Rayola said. “Mama got in front and tugged on the harness–even laid a few thumps on her rear. Redbird either balked or went backward. So Mama unhitched her, turned her around facing the Model-T, rehitched her and it worked. I do not recall what happened to Redbird.”

Aunt Ray remembers Buckskin as her childhood horse. He was light gray with black mane and tail. “He was so gentle. He would sit on his haunches and let me and my sister Joyce slide down his back.”

Leatherbritches was a 2-year-old stallion with a chestnut coat and a sorrel colored mane. When Papa brought him home, Aunt Rayola recalled, he was unbroken. She said he was a mixed breed draft horse, part percheron, and larger than other horses they had at that time.

“When I crawled on him bareback, Papa got really nervous,” Rayola said. “He said ‘Watch him.’ I remember Papa getting Red Smith to break him. He turned out to be gentle and good-natured. Two things Leatherbritches ever put up a fight over–getting his first set of horseshoes and the castration process that would leave him a gelding.

Rayola said: “The first time he was shod it was a real man’s job. He didn’t want his hooves rasped and his frogs picked. (The frog on a horse is the tender inner part of the hooves, and it is important to pick the frog clean when applying new horseshoes). He snorted and kicked and Papa and Red first hobbled him and then tied one leg to a tree and he wound up laying broadside on the ground. How undignified. When he got up he was wearing four new horseshoes.

“When Papa and Red made a gelding out of Leatherbritches that was a feat in itself. I wasn’t supposed to watch but I did anyway…from a distance. That was another man’s job–throwing a big animal like that to the ground and then tying his feet.”

Of all the family horses, it was Pinto, Jug, and Dunny that have always remained in my memory. Especially Dunny, the sweetest and most loveable of all the horses in the world as far as I am concerned. Dunny was the first horse I ever crawled on, and long before I was large enough to saddle a horse, I constantly pestered Aunt Ray to “saddle old Dunny.” Mama Chenault loved the story and she delighted in retelling of the time that Rayola lost her cool.

“Would you saddle old Dunny,” I whined for what may have been the umpteenth time and counting, causing Ray to shriek in frustration… ‘No, I will not daddle old Sonny.’ My grandmother never tired of telling the story.

Of Dunny, Rayola said, “He was old when Papa bought him. And Papa wouldn’t use him to work stock if another horse was available. Dunny babysat all kids. If any of the grandchildren ever said they knew how to ride a horse it was because they sat on Dunny first. When all of the horses were in the horse trap (a 40-acre pasture used to hold the horses before the work day started) it was my job to bring them out at daylight. One always wore a bell. Most of them were hard to catch. I would hide the bridle behind my back and tempt them in with an ear of corn. But not Dunny. I remember how easy Dunny was to catch. I could walk up to him, put on the bridle, and then lead him to a stump or fork in a tree where I could climb on bareback and drive the rest of the horses in,

“Dunny was patient and tolerant as an old brood hen. One time we were heading home at a pretty good clip. I was probably daydreaming and Dunny was probaby thinking of the bucket of oats he would get when we reached the barn. He made a quick turn around a fence corner and I wound up underneath him. The minute I left his back he came to a dead stop. He had his head turned as he watched to see what I would do next. He didn’t move an inch until I had crawled back on his back.

“Dunny was a good horse to teach you horse things. I learned how to prepare a horse’s feet for shoeing by working on his feet. He would patiently let me hold his feet and pull the nails out to remove the shoes that needed replacing. I would dig all of the gunk out from under his hooves and use the pincers and rasp to trim them.Then Papa would form the horseshoes to his feet using anvil and forge.

“Papa and I were rounding up sheep one day, and Dunny and I were heading off a sheep through a liveoak thicket when a limb raked me out of the saddle, knocking a wasp nest down my collar. There was a swarm, and as I fought to get them out of my shirt, some of them must have gotten under the saddle blanket. It was the only time I ever saw docile old Dunny kick up his heels, pitch, and break wind like a real cavorter.”

Dunny’s ending was the saddest story I ever heard my Aunt Rayola tell.

“The day came,” she said, “when Papa had to make the decision to sell Dunny. I know it wasn’t pleasant for Papa. He just couldn’t afford to keep horses that could no longer pay for their oats. I can still see Dunny turning his great head and looking wistfully toward us from the backend of the horse truck until it was out of sight.

“I never asked but I know all the horses on that truck were being sold to a glue factory or for dog food. After some 40 years I can still see Dunny’s face. I never blamed Papa. He did what he had to do.”

William Chester (Red) Smith died December 20, 1985 at age 80 from natural causes. I was in San Antonio and nobody bothered to call me until Red was already buried on the South Llano River Wooten Cemetery. I wasn’t as closely connected with Junction historian and newspaper columnist Frederica Burt Wyatt as I am now, so I got word of Red’s passing by word of mouth happenstance. The following is part of a tribute to Red I published in Action Magazine:

The Junction town marshal might have worn out at least two pistol barrels on Red’s head.

He had his own personal cell in the Kimble County Jail where he spent the tail end of most weekends.

The week days were spent breaking horses and no Comanche Indian ever lived who could talk horse language better than Red Smith.

I had a personal interest in Red. My father died when I was a baby and Smith was around to offhandedly contribute to my upbringing.

Some of the upstanding townsfolk looked down their noses at Red. They called him a no-good saddle tramp without a direction in life. But I knew better.

Chester (Red) Smith was a flat-belly with hide tougher than corrugated sheet iron. He liked the wind at his back so he had a new direction every time it shifted. His 150-pound frame remained lithe and muscular even as he advanced into his 70s. When young, he had bright red hair. And the kids would all gather on Saturdays to watch Smith spur a snot-slinging colt down Junction’s main street, knowing full well that he was on a collision course with Marshal Joe Baker.

His home was a saddle. The ground was his bed. He would spit in the devil’s eye and charge hell with a bucket of water when he believed he was right.

Red went to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and later received a full governor’s pardon. But he stayed in Huntsville long enough to ride the hair off everything he mounted in the big prison rodeo.

A bronc raked him off on a tree limb once. Red landed in one of those giant prickly pear mottes.

I recall his laughter as he shaved off thousands of pear thorns protruding from his leathery hide. It was a dry shave with a straight razor. We were at my grandpa’s place on the North Llano River at the time.

“Can’t pick ‘em all out,” Red said. “I’ll shave ‘em down and the rest will rot out in a few days.”

Red died at age 80 but he never got old. When he was about 75 he was leading a parade through Junction with a broken bone sticking all the way out of his leg. Someone decreed that Smith, the living legend of hard-to-curry cowboys, should serve as grand marshal of the annual horse race and fair parade.

In typical fashion, he showed up on a green half-broken colt which was spooked by the noisy crowd. The horse rolled its eyes, chewed at the bit, and jitterbugged nervously on the asphalt. As it attempted to bolt, Red hauled back on the bridle and swatted the two-year-old with his hat.

The horse slipped and fell on Red, shattering his leg just above the ankle.

A veterinarian was among the crowd which quickly gathered.

“Don’t cut that boot off,” Smith said. “I have been jailed a thousand times for riding a horse down this street and I ain’t about to miss a chance to do it legal.”

And with the busted bone poking over his boot top. Smith triumphantly led the annual parade on that same slobbering colt that fell with him. Red was part horse. He could jump car hoods, and I personally watched him coax his bow pony Blue into the open bed of a pickup truck.

So the thought of Red Smith dying had never occurred to me.

The deep draws and high bluffs overlooking the South Llano River don’t die. Rocks don’t die. The creaking, clanging windmill doesn’t die. So what the hell right did Red Smith have dying?

When I heard that Red Smith was gone my first reaction was anger.

Red was the clean smell of juniper cedar on a bright morning. He was squeaky leather on a muscled blue pony.

It just wasn’t fair that he should go. I felt cheated for myself. And I felt cheated for the millions of people who never had the privilege of knowing Red Smith.

I cussed as tears flooded my eyes. As was his way, Red didn’t let anyone know he was going to die. He just did it. And in accordance with his last minute instructions they took him to the obscure little Wooten Cemetery on the South Llano Rver and buried hin in a simple pine box.

When I was a kid, Red helped my grandfather stay alive on a dought-stricken range which sustained more screw worm flies than anything else. At that time, Old Shinny, my grandfather, was lease ranching on the half-dry North Llano River. A lease rancher is the equivalent of a share cropper, and no row ever hoed could be any harder than a summer of screw worms killing the livestock, followed a record cold winter that killed what the worms missed.

They hunted for their food that winter. I was just a sprout but I can remember it was the same winter that Red had the rest of his teeth pulled. The first batch of teeth went when a horse stepped on Red’s face. I remember that toothless grin as Red rode out of the snowy half-darkness with a buck deer tied behind his saddle. When not hunting for table meat, he had been searching for freezing livestock and there were actually icicles hanging from the brim of his hat.d.

Red worked all over, twice riding a horse to California and back and if he had a family he felt close to it was my mother’s. He came and went, sometimes staying a year or so at a time and working for no more than his board and some Saturday night drinking money.

When I was attending Sul Ross State College in Alpine I awoke one snowy winter morning to find Red’s dappled gray pony he called Blue hobbled beside my car.

Red was in the back seat sleeping.

The movie Giant with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean was being filmed in nearby Marfa. Red had ridden Blue from Junction to Alpine, hoping to land a horse wrangling job on the movie set. He got the job.

When I was working at the Express and News in San Antonio, Red rode his horse to my house on Harriett Street. He rode Blue to my mom’s house in Terrell Heights a number of times, and I believe he visited by horseback my Uncle Nunelee Chenault who lived off of Flores Steet on San Antonio’s South Side. They were friends since childhood. I was starting to drink heavily in those days, and I had no trouble getting Red to join me in San Antonio skull orchards such as the Burnt Orange, SWC Club, and the San Jacinto. My wife at the time, Vicky, was kind enough to put Red up, but after we boozed it up for more than a week, she was happy to see the cowboy ride away.

Red Smith taught me to shoot a rifle. He helped steady the gun when I shot my first deer, an illegal spike on ranchland where we had no permission. Red broke off one of the spikes with his boot. “If a game warden stops us, we will just say the broken antler was shot off and that it had three points.” Red did not believe we were morally wrong. He taught me how to bridle a horse. He taught me to never hit a woman. He showed me how to dress a deer without breaking the fine membrane which covers the carcass. He taught me how to sharpen an axe. And he taught me to stand for what I believed to be right. I learned how to get drunk all by myself. Although Red and I got hammered a few times together in later life, Red had nothing to do with me getting my head in the jug.

When Red Smith sat a horse he looked like a part of the animal. His spurs were equipped with little slick rowels which would do little or no damage to a mount. Red literally slept in his spurs.

Except for the prison rodeo, Red stuck to horse training.

“I’m a horse breaker,” he was oft to say. “Not a bronc stomper.’

The people who looked down their noses at Red never saw him work with a horse. My grandfather called Red a good honest man. The horses knew, too. Red loved children, and I experienced his affection at an early age. When there was money left after one of his weekend sprees, the old cowboy would spend it all on candy which he would pass out to kids who were waiting for it.

In his younger days, Red hired on to help move some heavy ranch and farm equipment which he didn’t know was being stolen. He was arrested and sentenced to prison along with the others and he remained at Huntsville for almost a year before one of the real thieves made a statement which exonerated Smith.

With his pardon from the governor came a pocketful of cash and a new suit of clothes as compensation for his false imprisonment. I know Red held on to the suit for I saw him in it at my grandfather’s funeral. He used the cash to throw a drunk which lasted more than a year. He loved Shinny.

When my grandfather Chenault was near death at my mother’s home in San Antonio, Red was there. I have a distinct memory of Red bathing my grandfather’s face with a damp cloth. There was a bond between the old cowboys that I cannot explain.

My grandmother was smashing up Smith’s food after his remaining teeth were pulled. He never even considered wearing dentures and in short order he was able to gum his way through anything, including corn-on-the-cob and rock candy. The toothless look seemed to match up with Red’s other facial architecture. His face suggested he may have looked 45 when he was born.

Although records show he had only one brief marriage to Dorothy Bohissen of Houston, Red liked the ladies, and there was sometimes a twinkle of contentment in his eye after one of his visits to the dude ranches that dotted the South Llano River.

I recall one of my grandmother’s comments when Red came dragging in after a night of tomcatting at Heny Bossman’s Flying L guest ranch.

“My, my,” said Mama. “Those city women do have a taste for roughness.”

Red did a stint in the Merchant Marine Corp. My Aunt Rayola remembers him showing my grandmother a marine pants creasing technique he liked.

Junction Eagle columnist and Kimble County historian Frederica Wyatt filled me in on some Red Smith history as I was preparing to write about Red.

He came from a hard luck family. His mother Fannie died when he was 15. His fater Monroe was killed by poison which was placed in his food by a ranch wife named Nethery who was trying to kill her husband. Monroe was working with the husband and he was an accidental victim. Red’s brother John D. was shot to death in a Rocksprings cafe, and a younger brother, James Monroe Smith, was knifed to death on Junction’s main street.

I know Red had little in the way of material possessions. He was wealthy in the ways that count. I was thankful to God when Frederica assured me that Red had no pauper’s funeral.

“Red had a nice funeral” Frederica assured me. “No tent, just the overhead sky as the canopy. It was a beautiful morning and we all felt a little bit closer to Heaven. I sat there and wondered if anyone had notified you as I know you would have been there had you known.”

The late Ramsey Randolph was Red’s lifelong friend and Frederica relayed Randolph’s words to me: “Red and I had been friends since we were teenagers. As I walked away from that open grave where Red’s body had been placed I thought unless his friends mark his grave no one will know a hundred years from now whose body rests in that spot. So my concern led to 35 of Red’s friends joining together to erect a Georgia granite monument at his grave. It cost us $525.”

Graveside services were held in the Wooten Cemetery on Cajac Creek 11 miles southeast of Junction. It was Red’s request that he be buried in the valley of the South Llano River in the ranch country he loved.

The Reverend Sam Coffey eulogized his friend. Members of the group sang Amazing Grace as the grave was filled.

Bennett Boone was later buried beside Red at his own request. Bennett was named after my uncle Bennett Kindrick.

I later took my wife Sharon to visit Red’s grave. As I looked down toward the river, I recognized the very spot where my dogs once treed a coon.

As it always did, the gentle spring breeze was reminding me how much I loved my homeland.

Filed Under: Columns Tagged With: Cowboy Red Smith, early family history

It was rough and rocky traveling

Sam Kindrick
Sam Kindrick

Yesterday was my 30-year sobriety birthday. I didn’t post it until today because lightning had knocked out my computer.

I haven’t had a drink of alcohol or an illegal drug since October 16, 1989. It was rough and rocky traveling through those hard years of 1988 and 1989. I was busted four times and charged with aggravated possession of methamphetamine after each arrest.

It is by God’s grace, help from a big bunch of anonymous sober drunks, and a front of nightclub advertisers who stuck with me through the worst of it all, that Action Magazine was to survive while I somehow escaped hard time in the state penitentiary.

After almost 44 years of monthly publicatiion without a miss, I retired Action Magazine this past January. The most memorable of my drug busts came at the hands of former Bexar County Sheriff Harlon Copeland, and by the Alamo Area Drug Task Force, headed back then by Sumner Bowen.

Sheriff Copeland personally conducted the wild circus-like drug bust of my Action Magazine offices on Wurzbach Road where I was led into the parking lot only after Copeland’s deputies had alerted every TV and radio station in town.

I recall a Channel 4 reporter poking a microphone in my face and announcing with much drama: “You are live on WOAI-TV. What do you have to say?”

I was completely out of control at the time. I distinctly recall answering the TV reporter with “Fuck Harlon Copeland.” I don’t recall much more about that awful day. I can testify with accuracy that no more microphones were shoved in my face.

I had already been convicted and placed on 10 years probation when I was busted again, this time by task force leader Sumner Bowen who raided magazine offices I had on the main drag in Castle Hills.
Bowen offered me an informant deal which I rejected.

“Give me the lab,” Bowen said, “and we can all have a cup of coffee at Maggies and go on home.”

I chose the trip to jail, not because of any misguided loyalty notions or drug world hero status. At that point in time, I had been around the criminal element long enough to know what happens to snitches, and I had no intention of spending the rest of my life looking back over my shoulder.

My arrests wound up on the front page of the San Antonio Light and on a section front in the Express/News, both without me losing one single advertiser in Action Magazine that I was aware of.

Major North Side club operators like Ronnie Branham, Alex Habeeb, Jack Mikulenka, and Danny Levinson, plus South Side club stalwarts like Frank Mueller and Frank Mumme, closed around me like shepherds protecting a stricken lamb.

They seemingly did not give one shit about my arrest problems, and when I hit the front page of th Light, Tiffany Billiards owner Danny Levinson called up to double the size of his Action Magazine ad.

Details of my jail time, courtroom miracles, and association with both petty criminals and headliner bad boys like Arthur Harry (Bunny) Eckert, will all be included in an autobiography I have started writing. So stay tuned.

Filed Under: Columns

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