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

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

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

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

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

Wrote Grinstead:

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

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

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

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

Junction will always be my home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was intrigued by the excitement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The frolic, Harrington said, finally finished him off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you feeling all right?”

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

“It’s early for me,” I said.

Latham seemed to understand.

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

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

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

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

Turning to me, the director explained:

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

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

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

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

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

Slamming on the brakes, Ben jumped from the vehicle.

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

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

Johnson jumped out of the truck again.

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

Johnson jumped out of the truck yet again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had my lines down.

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

Then I hollered the kickers:

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

At this point, someone hollered “Cut.”

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

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

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

Daddy Zanuck broke in at this point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldie fit the Lou Jean Poplin part to a T.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.