According to the most recent figures, about 178,500 Texas residents die each year. That’s about 0.07 percent of our entire population, a little more than 1-in-140 people. So there’s a chance a Texan you knew passed this year. Suddenly gone. Poof. How incomprehensible and foreign that concept truly is. Those former not-dead people used to be here—or there—and likely within reach. But now they’re somewhere . . . no . . . something else entirely. Perhaps they are celestial beings. Perhaps they are nothing. But they are beyond us in every way. They are not even a “they” any more.
That’s the physical reality. But not, of course, the metaphysical one. Those who are gone master all the cliches. They’ve “passed on. “They’ve “touched lives.” They remain, for a little while longer, “with us” or “in our hearts.” They’re memorialized in public obituaries, dirges, folk songs, the honorary renaming of some place or building, and, as is common practice now, memorials on their Facebook wall, a hashtagged #RIP.
We considered probably close to fifty Texans for inclusion in this year’s selection of People We’ll Miss, a hefty roster of talented and unique (read: quirky) characters. But researching the lives of these people was often bittersweet; their efforts and accomplishments were given some proper public due only after they had gone—but at least they had been celebrated at all.
We had some big names leave us this year, giants of Texas like Red Duke and Jim Wright, people that received extensive appreciations and posthumous (and humorous) profiles. (We also experienced great grief just days before this list was finished, including the loss of the “Greatest Lawyer Who Ever Lived.”) But we also made an effort this year to give attention to some of the lesser-known creators of the Texas Mythology. Like Texas itself, they are eclectic in their descriptors. There’s the Texas housewife who made bundt cake a national staple. There’s the Texas professor who coined a word that’s now so ubiquitous it seems elemental to our vernacular. There are Texas football players, and nationally-renowned cartoonists, and a rebellious poet-priest who roamed the terrain of Big Bend.
We hope that by featuring those characters, they will live on just a little longer, deep in the hearts of Texans. And, as cliches go, their passing will remind the living that Texas is and will always be full of characters, fellow Texans worth befriending, of understanding, of becoming family with. Preferably before it’s too late.
Ella Rita Helfrich
The woman who popularized the bundt cake
Father Mel
The poet-priest of Big Bend
Richard Evans
The professor who coined the term “workaholic”
Red Duke
The pioneering trauma surgeon
Mack McCormick
The great music historian
Sam Spritzer
The premier furrier of Texas
Earlene Moore
The bra expert of Austin
Gene Elston
The Astros play-by-play man
Milo Hamilton
The voice of the Astros
John David Crow
The first Heisman winner of Aggieland
Jethro Pugh
The heralded Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle
Tom Moore
The Archie comics illustrator
Brad Anderson
The creator of Marmaduke
Sheri S. Petmecky
The patroness of the Palomino Patrol
Daron Norwood
The unrequited country music icon
Charles Joyner
The unofficial greeter of Fort Worth
Dusty Rhodes
“The American Dream”
Gilberto O. Garcia
The conjunto king
Ebby Halliday
The real estate maven of Dallas
Bob Armstrong
The creator of Big Bend State Park
Jim Wright
The Speaker of the House
Monty Oum
The lead animator for Rooster Teeth
Ornette Coleman
The jazz genius
TerryDorsey
The radio man of Dallas
Rex Holt
The pageant king
Lawrence Herkimer
The grandfather of cheerleading
Bill Waugh
The founder of Taco Bueno
Sam Tasby
The man who desegregated DISD
And Tommy “F— that Alligator” Woodward
Ella Rita Helfrich
December 1, 1916–July 21, 2015
Before there was an entire television channel dedicated to cooking shows; before the late-night infomercials shilling the latest kitchen gadgets; before the organic movement, the buy-local movement, Lunchables and Hot Pockets. Before all that, there was a Houston homemaker named Ella Rita Helfrich.
At the same time Julia Child was just beginning to show America that extravagant French cuisine was possible in the home, there was Helfrich, demonstrating pragmatic treats for the everywoman. Her greatest creation, the Tunnel of Fudge, would become a national phenomenon, one of the high-points in an era mostly unrecognizable to the gluten-free generation.
Some kitchen prep for those who’ve grown up with Whole Foods and Chopped. By the sixties, the Greatest Generation was well settled into their suburban lives, working on maintaining the kind of Leave It To Beaver existence that proceeded relative post-war stability. It was that “traditional” time when father, in his gray flannel suit, went to his job, and mother stayed home—only about 25 percent of women were in the workforce. Product companies and advertisers were in their groove, directing their pitches and consumables, an entire lifestyle, to the modern homemaker. It was the beginning of the era of convenience products: quick and sturdy dishes great for taking to a church supper or when hosting a large martini party, or just to allow one more time to do more housework with other great products.
Tupperware was invented in 1945; by the fifties, Tupperware Parties were de rigeur. Another grand event to emerge during this time? The Pillsbury Bake-Off, held annually from 1949 until 1976 (before switching to a biannual affair).
The Pillsbury Bake-Off was the pinnacle celebration of convenience cooking. It was televised live on CBS and emceed by stars and celebrities like singer Pat Boone. Thousands submitted recipes, and about one hundred were invited to the annual competition itself. Houstonian Ella Rita Helfrich, mother of five, wife of a railroad mechanic, possessor of a stunning, oh-so-popular blonde bouffant that was almost as big as she, had been submitting various recipes since the competition’s second year. She was the ultimate home-maker.
“She always had an experiment going. She would come up with an idea and she would cook it four different ways, three different pans, two different temperatures, and etcetera,” said Helfrich’s granddaughter Jacqueline Pontello, who has served as the keeper of the legacy. It took years of experimenting and competition submissions, but in 1966, Helfrich became a finalist at the Bake-Off with her grand contribution to the culinary world, an invention of necessity and playfulness, “She wanted to make a dessert [for the Louisiana relatives] and she didn’t have cake mix, so she tried this frosting mix,” explained Pontello “She didn’t know how long to bake it, but she wasn’t supposed to bake frosting mix. And so it was sort of lava-y.” Helfrich had used a bundt cake pan because the shape and ridges looked fun.
And thus was born the Tunnel of Fudge. Shaped like a doughnut from another dimension, the outside was all fudgy goodness, while the inside, that decedent tunnel of butter and sugar and chocolate and pecans, remained contained until bursting forth. Lava-y. The 1965 Pillsbury Bake-Off was the year of the Tunnel of Love. Helfrich won $5,000; a full set of kitchen appliances, and a tractor (“Don’t ask me why; must’ve been a corporate sponsorship,” said Pontello).
It’s impossible to truly document the impact Helfrich’s dessert had. To say it became a staple of the American recipe book is an understatement. After Helfrich’s Bake-Off appearance, more than 300,000 people sent letters to Pillsbury asking about the recipe (Helfrich received notes from people like Albert Thomas, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Ladybird Johnson). She toured around with her creation, signing autographs and making appearances on behalf of Pillsbury.
The bundt cake pan had been an obscure item designed by a Minnesota company for a few of its Jewish customers who wanted to recreate a dish from their German fatherland. The company had sold about five hundred of them the year before Helfrich’s recipe and were considering limiting their availability, said Pontello. Afterwards, demand for the pan was so high the company set up two factories on a 24-7 production schedule. The reason you probably have a bundt cake pan in your kitchen right now is due to Helfrich. The recipe is now in an untold number of cookbooks. Ever had a molten lava cake at a fancy restaurant? That’s a direct rip-off of the Tunnel of Fudge.
Ironically, Helfrich only earned second-place in the Pillsbury competition. But there have been some just efforts to redeem one of the poorest culinary judgments ever made: Herlich’s recipe is the most requested in the history of Pillsbury, which inducted her into its Hall of Fame, and she and the pan were featured in the Smithsonian’s first exhibit on American food.
Herlich never rested on her sweet laurels though. She continued submitting recipes to the Pillsbury Bake-Off until 2000. She achieved greatness—and $10,000—one other time with a Triscuit-inspired praline dish, a glorious homage to Texas made with pecans and chocolate.
Helfrich died at the age of 98. As her granddaughter likes to say, Helfrich’s four major food groups were butter, sugar, chocolate, and pecans. Appropriately enough, the last thing she ate before passing was chocolate mousse pudding, a fitting last meal for one the state and country’s great culinary artists—a Houston homemaker with a sweet tooth.
(If you’d like to make the Tunnel of Fudge, the recipe is here.)
Father Melvin Walker La Follette
September 7, 1930–July 4, 2015
Invariably, the shepherd seems to always mirror his flock. Or is it the other way around? Regardless, far from the cities with their mega churches, more than five hundred miles from Joel Osteen in Houston, or T.D. Jakes in Dallas, there was Melvin Walker La Follette of Big Bend.
The first thing to know is that everyone called him Father Mel. The second thing to know is that all those everyones would comment on his eyes. A deep, piercing blue, they nestled in a full and rugged, crevice-lined face, itself adorned with a bushy, white mustache. Father Mel looked as tough and bracing as the land around him. And just as his flock around the area is full of characters (¡Viva Terlingua!), so too was Father Mel, the Episcopal priest-poet.
Father Mel arrived in the area in 1984 with the most distinguished sounding of titles: Reverend Canon of the Trans Pecos. With communities sparse and far apart, Father Mel attended to numerous people in numerous—Van Horn, Fort Stockton, Alpine, Marfa, Terlingua Ranch, Lajitas—whether they were Episcopalian or not. It was, as his son put it, the “riding circuit of the Rio Grande.” Father Mel had learned Spanish late in life to better serve the Latino communities (that they might not have understood that he wasn’t Catholic, was a minor concern), and he reached them as best he could. When the border was still open, when it was still possible for two very different communities to interact, Father Mel would take a rowboat across the river, where he would then ride a donkey to visit parishes in Mexico.
In Lajitas, he held services every other Sunday, which a handful of patrons would atend. And at times that meant literally a grouping that could be counted on a single hand—they were lucky if six people were in attendance, including a group of “church ladies,” as they half-jokingly called themselves. Yet despite the far-flung post, despite the meager flock, Father Mel gave the sermons his all. He wore the full vestments. He delivered his homilies. He went through all the pomp and circumstance. Once, during a Communion procession, Father Mel had his four church ladies walk forth while he recited liturgical lines. Had there been more members, he might have finished on time. Instead, Father Mel had the women rush back to the end of the line to begin their procession again, several times, so that he could complete the formalities.
It was sanctuary by improvisation, which is the only way to do it in a part of Texas where one can find strange art installations or a town that is willing to elects a goat as its mayor. Father Mel fit right in. Upon finishing his service, moments after taking off his vestments, Father Mel would light his cigarette. He’d put on his favorite hat, the one advertising cock fights (he appreciated all kinds of culture), and sell fresh eggs from the trunk of his car. The product came from the chickens he kept on his tiny plot of land in Redford, a coop beside the garden he tended. There, he lived in a simple trailer filled with the pages of the historical tome he was working on until his death and packed with the lives he lived before his time in Big Bend.
There were artifacts from the summers after high school that he spent on fire crews with the U.S. Forestry Service during the infamous Mann Gulch Montana Fire of 1949 that killed thirteen fighters. There was a diploma from graduate school at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, where he studied poetry under the esteemed John Berryman. There was material from his teaching jobs, one at the University of British Columbia where he was sought out by none other than Dylan Thomas, for whom he served as a guide through the Columbian Rockies. There were mementos of his life during the fifties and 1960s, when he continued to write and skip from college to college—he became friends with Allen Ginsberg in California, yet another chance encounter with one of the greats. There was his published work, which appeared in publications like Poetry Magazine, the Beloit Poetry Review, and the New Yorker.
By the late sixties, Mel had felt the call of God, finally becoming Father Mel in 1967, another period of life on the road as he served one congregation after another around the country and the world. In his forties, Father Mel became a merchant marine for the mind—or more accurately, he became a professor for the U.S. Navy, teaching sailors who traveled through the Pacific and Indian oceans. It was, in many ways, the beatnik poet life of his more famous peers. But while the others squandered their talents with vices, with declarations of Nihilism, with a life uninhibited by God, Father Mel had kept his devotion to righteousness. A poet-priest-warrior.
Father Mel had spent most of his life fighting against injustice—joining the Civil Rights and anti-war causes when they were at their height. It was a passion he maintained and that followed him to Big Bend. It was Father Mel who supported the family of Esequiel Hernández, Jr., who helped them seek legal recourse after the killing of the eighteen-year-old by U.S. Marines near the border. It was Father Mel who established a co-op for the area to assist the poor. And it was Father Mel’s 2012 Christmas Eve service that had people talking for years. For once, the church was “packed to the gills,” as one of the Church Ladies recalls. “And, Father Mel busts out with not Mary and Joseph, not the Baby in the Manger, not the Nativity, none of that. It is full scale [attack on the gun culture that had killed so many].” By all accounts, it was a heck of a sermon, and not simply because he was preaching to a gun-toting choir (his “street cred” had been his own collection of guns). As Father Mel would explain it later in a very un-priestly manner, the shock-and-awe sermon had been a calling, something from necessity. “It was just time. We’ve pussy-footed too much [on the issue of gun violence and gun control].”
As the Church Ladies would recall, Father Mel had that twinkle in his deep, blue eyes when he gave that Christmas sermon. Though there are few like him, he fit perfectly among the odd flock of Big Bend, idiosyncratic and restless. The poet-priest-warrior who never ceased to wonder, to create, to inspire. Let him, then give the final blessing, a small stanza from his book of poems, The Clever Body:
We loved him; loved, but not because
He was blue and blue horses are rare—
He taught us to love; the tamed us, too—
Our wild minds learned new meanings for care.
Richard Evans
August 29, 1922—April 20, 2015
Aware of it or not, there is likely at least one area of your life that has been affected by Richard Evans. Taught your kids how to say no to drugs? Thank Evans. Love the inflated conjurings of Malcolm Gladwell and his polished books on pop social science? Thank Evans. What about being able to call out peers (or yourself), as “workaholics”? Thank. Evans.
A Professor Emeritus at the University of Houston, Evans was one of the county’s pioneers of social psychology, not only bringing it to the masses but creating the program from scratch for the school itself. One of Evans’s first contribution to our national psychology was the development of social “inoculation.” Scaring kids (“fear arousal,” academics call it) into avoiding unhealthy behaviors—like not brushing your teeth, or, more to the immediate concern of his studies, teen smoking—is not nearly enough. Evans’s research in the seventies, and eventual report to the U.S. Surgeons General, stressed the need to educate kids not only on the harm of drugs, but how to react in social situations involving things like peers and pressure. If that all sounds familiar, it’s because the work would later be whittled down to a perfect and simple political phrase for Nancy Reagan: “Just Say No.”
Evans’s other contribution to our modern thinking came by mostly by accident, during a consulting job in the sixties. As Evans himself recalled years later, he was describing employees who overworked to the point of becoming inefficient or unproductive. “I explained that it was a phenomenon similar to other addictions of excess, such as alcoholism, and basically made an off-the-cuff comment that perhaps we should refer to those employees as ‘workaholics.’” The word, obviously, stuck. Newspaper columnists began using it. Merriam-Webster put in the dictionary. The curious can click on a hundred different online tests to see if he or she is in fact one. It’s even the title of a Comedy Central show that’s about to begin its sixth season.
Catchphrases are nice, but Evans also wanted to bring psychology to the masses. As the Houston Chronicle noted, Evans aired his daily social psychology class on local television, making him “an early pioneer of distance learning, an idea that has gained momentum recently via massive open online courses and other web-based classes.” Nationally, Evans conducted interviews with some of the area’s top scholars (B.F. Skinner, and the only filmed interview with Carl Jung), not to mention discussions about psychology with entertainers and artists like Arthur Miller and Joan Rivers. Curiously enough, it was Evans’ Jung interview and subsequent book, that caught the attention of Johnny Carson, who had the Professor on the Tonight Show several times.
With all his contributions, academic or otherwise, Evans was about as popular as a social psychology professor can get. The fame and renown, however, didn’t seem to affect him. “He could have traded up to a different city or university, but he loved Houston,” his son told the Chronicle. “He liked the idea of growing the University of Houston. He was very loyal to Houston.”
Red Duke
November 16, 1928–August 26, 2015
By Jan Reid
While I’m glad I knew James “Red” Duke, the folkloric trauma surgeon who died August 26, 2015, I wish we had met under different circumstances. The path that led me to his care in Houston started, oddly enough, in Mexico City. In April 1998, I traveled there with three friends—who are all now senior editors at Texas Monthly—to watch a boxing match featuring a fighter from Austin that I respected and admired. On the last night of our trip, we got into one of Mexico City’s notorious green cabs, a fateful decision. The taxi driver acting as courier delivered us to two malevolent characters with guns, who entered the cab with us and, for the next 45 minutes or so, terrorized us and pistol-whipped us. When we finally stopped, one of the robbers shot me with a .38 revolver. The slug shattered my wrist, set off a flood of internal bleeding, and ricocheted off vertebrae to the base of my spine.
An off-work paramedic who lived in the barrio where the thieves left me to die sent the ambulance that picked me up to the most acclaimed hospital in the city. I received superb care from a vascular surgeon and a team of neurosurgeons. When my wife, Dorothy Browne, and stepdaughter, Lila Wilson, arrived, the neurosurgeons told them I was out of danger, but their tests indicated I would be paralyzed from the waist down. The vascular surgeon, Roberto Castañeda, took Dorothy and Lila into his care with great compassion, and told them he thought had seen me move my toes voluntarily. When I was coming out from anesthesia, a routine test for sensation hurt me, and I kicked my foot.
I might walk again, if physical therapy began very soon, they were told. So Texas Monthly colleagues secured a Life Flight jet—an emergency service Red Duke pioneered in 1976 for Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston—and I just needed to get on it. Dr. Castañeda and a doctor friend in Austin had cleared me to travel, but Dorothy and Lila wondered if moving me so soon was reckless. Could I survive a turbulent flight? Though well equipped and staffed, it was not a mobile emergency room. Finally Dorothy said, “Let’s go.”
When the jet landed at Hobby airport in Houston, the nurse in charge told Dorothy and Lila that my eyes were open but I wasn’t breathing. Hustled off the plane with Lila, Dorothy blamed herself and screamed for a helicopter. The chopper carried me off, with a van or EMS unit racing my family through the empty pre-dawn streets. When they arrived at Memorial Hermann, they expected a neurosurgeon would receive them; instead, a tall, bony old fellow in greens and with a rust-colored mustache awaited them. “I’m Dr. Red Duke,” he said. “I’m gonna be your doctor, and I’m gonna be your mother.”
He continued, “I’m not supposed to do this, but I’m gonna take you back in there and let you see Jan Reid breathing.” Once Dorothy and Lila were assured I was out of danger, he said, “Now I’ve got to do something about you two.” He called a hotel and barked at a receptionist, “Yes, a room! Do you think I’m asking you for a date?” Then he told my family, “They’ve got a van, but if they won’t send it, I’ll drive you over there in my pickup.”
A long friendship had begun.
My parents lived in northeast Texas, and an area television station carried the nationally syndicated Dr. Red Duke’s Health Reports on the afternoon news. I had been charmed by Red’s drawl, his down-home bearing, and his sign-off: “For your health!” But I suspected he might be just a TV doctor with a gift for performing in front of a camera.
How wrong I was.
Born November 16, 1928, Red grew up in Ennis, Texas, acquainted with youthful Willie Nelson and Bob Bullock. Red had been an Eagle Scout and proud yell leader at Texas A&M. He served as an army tank commander for two years before taking a divinity degree at a Baptist seminary. A book by Albert Schweitzer—the famed theologian, humanitarian, and doctor—had a profound effect on him and inspired him to go to medical school. He enrolled in the University of Texas Medical School in Dallas, and it was during his time there as a resident in general surgery at Parkland hospital that he made his own imprint on the world: he was the first doctor to receive President John F. Kennedy after the shots were fired in November 1963. And the lung surgery he performed that day on Governor John Connally likely saved the man’s life.
Red later took graduate courses in chemical engineering and biochemistry on a fellowship at Columbia and then spent two years as a professor of surgery in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Following his return to Texas in 1972, he directed Memorial Hermann’s trauma and emergency services and held a distinguished professor’s chair at the University of Texas Medical School.
During his tenure, he received numerous accolades—Surgeon of the Year, consideration to be the Surgeon General of the United States—but he never let his rising star take him too far from his truest calling: being a damn fine doctor.
The doctors, nurses, and technicians stabilized and prepared me for my transfer to TIRR Memorial Hermann, an esteemed rehab hospital nearby. Red came to see me every day I was lucid. He talked about hunting and his conservation efforts on behalf of Texas Bighorn sheep. His favorite Texas novel was Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained. One day he performed a hilarious dramatic reading from a novel by a fellow surgeon Ferrol Sams in which a farmer paid back a flatulent mule by lighting a match under its tail.
Red oversaw a couple of Aggie residents who looked like football players and made sure I followed the doctor’s orders. But he never kid me about my injuries. “That slug came close to your business interests”—a punctured aorta would have killed me—“and it whanged your spine around pretty good.” Yet not quite two years later I walked with a cane and danced with Lila at her wedding. I wanted to write a full-blown profile of Red, but he declined, saying, “I’m really pretty shy.”
Instead, I wrote a book about the Mexico City brutality and its aftermath, and when asked to talk about it, I learned to just talk about Red. A supporter of Austin’s library foundation came up after one of the readings during my book tour, and she told me her own Red Duke story. “I was in the hospital down there, in bad need of a surgery scheduled the next day. But I was terribly frightened and Red knew I was on the verge of bolting and going home. He told me to get dressed up nice, and he took me dancing. A couple of margaritas, and the next day the surgery went off fine.”
The last time I saw Red I was following a Memorial Hermann publicist through corridors when doors swung open and I cried, “It’s my favorite doctor!” Red pulled back, startled, and I reminded him who I was. “By god, you are!” he cried. His greens were spotted with blood from the prior night’s emergency surgery. He was eighty years old.
Mack McCormick
August 3, 1930–November 18, 2015
By Michael Hall
Mack McCormick loved to tell stories—even if they were sometimes took a circuitous path. He might start off talking about the time he took a group of Texas ex-cons to the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 before segueing into some historic minutiae about Lead Belly, who had also spent time in the state prison system, a fact Mack knew due to his extensive research into the musician. Before you knew it Mack would be talking about his work for the Census Department in the early sixties, how he knocked on doors in Houston’s Fourth Ward and, when he was finished asking the government’s questions, he would ask about barrelhouse piano players. Then he’d tell about his early love for trumpet player Harry James, who grew up in Beaumont, a factoid that would somehow lead to a memory about how Floyd Tillman said he ran into Robert Johnson at the Huntsville Prison Rodeo in 1938. Or was it 1939? Either way, some year after Johnson was supposed to be dead. And maybe that death would remind him of Billy Gibbons’s birth and how Billy’s father gave Mack a blue cigar the day he son was born. That snippet might unlock another memory, like a short anecdote about the life of Joe Patterson, an Alabama panpipe player. Or it could lead to a beautiful soliloquy about Mack’s adoration of Willie Nelson. “I love him deeply,” he once said, “and regard him as a major musician. He’s important to the country.”
This fluid storytelling was a natural response to his work as a historian, folklorist, collector, musicologist, producer, songwriter, record label owner, journalist, and playwright. Mack recorded and preserved the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, and Robert Shaw. He researched and re-imagined the lives of Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas and Blind Lemon Jefferson. He tracked down the first known photos of Robert Johnson. And he spent decades of his life researching and collecting the life and work of countless other unknown Americans, spending much of his life on the road, chasing down stories but also songs, games, recipes, and photographs. “I am an anthropologist,” he once wrote, “I am involved in a study of mankind and his ability to cope and the style he brings to the job.” For Mack, it was all about connections—the ones between ideas, between artists, between barrelhouse piano players, between us all as human beings. “All I learned,” he said in 2002, “was what others found staying home with the neighbors. Each of us is connected by an infinite number of threads.”
Mack was born on August 30, 1930, in Pittsburgh. His parents divorced and Mack grew up with his mother as she moved around the country, finally winding up in Texas. He was living in Houston in 1949 and writing plays when he became the jazz correspondent for Down Beat magazine, interviewing everyone from Frank Sinatra to Duke Ellington. He worked various jobs over the next decade—barge electrician, cook, carny. Driving a taxi around Houston he was struck by all the different kinds of music he heard—and he began seeking out strangers to record, ultimately working with many, including Hopkins, Lipscomb, and Shaw.
This quest for knowledge led to his greatest passion: field research. Or simply the act of knocking on doors and asking questions. Stopping in a strange town and going up to groups of strangers and starting a conversation. He’d hear songs, get recipes, learn local legends—in short, make connections. Later he’d type up his notes and file them away for future use. He wrote stories for various newspapers and magazines, booked shows, and occasionally actually made money being a folklorist. In 1968 he was hired by the Smithsonian as a “cultural historian” when Texas had an exhibit at the summer Festival of American Folklife in Washington D.C. Mack gathered everything he could to show off his state, from quilts and recipes to dolls and handmade chairs. He also asked President Lyndon Baines Johnson to do a workshop and tell tall tales. The President came and told stories for fifteen minutes.
Mack was obsessed with the search. Most famously, Mack spent many years on the trail of bluesman Robert Johnson, driving down the back roads of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, talking to hundreds of people. This singular focus on Johnson took over Mack’s life, and he finally located the musician’s two half-sisters near Baltimore in 1972 and got the first photos of Johnson. He sat down to write what would be the definitive book about the bluesman, tentatively titled Biography of a Phantom, though he often thought of it as a detective story: Who Killed Robert Johnson?
The book never came, though, even as Johnson became an American icon. It wasn’t the only project Mack abandoned—The Texas Blues, a mammoth project he had collaborated on with English scholar Paul Oliver, was also left incomplete after he and Oliver had a falling out. Mack was a noted perfectionist, one who also suffered from manic depression, which became, he said, a “destructive block.” A creature of enthusiasms, Mack would set aside one project and pick up another. “I’m the king of unfinished manuscripts,” he said. He was also physically ill–and paranoid, though not without reason. Over the years people stole artifacts and information from him.
In the years before his death on November 18, 2015, due to complications from esophageal cancer, he mostly worked in solitude, withdrawing inside his northwest Houston home and severing a lot of his closest connections. Mack continued to work on various projects, puttered around the house, and fielded calls from enthusiastic strangers—whether students and journalists or rock stars like Jack White, who wanted to talk to the man who had done so much to find and preserve American music. He also spent much of his time working on plays–including one on his favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, called Zero at the Bone. “She’s so inspiring,” he said in 2002. “All I have to do is go to one of her poems for hope. ‘This is my letter to the world’ is the most heartbreaking poem and the closest to my own lonely feeling sometimes”:
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me–
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!
Sam Spritzer & Earlene Moore
July 16, 1920—April 12, 2015
December 20, 1922—April 24, 2015
We love the people who dress us. Maybe it’s something programmed from birth and childhood starting with the parents and adults who literally put on our clothes— the protection, the armor—we needed to make it through the day. The people who prevented the shoelace disasters, who layered coats upon coats to stop the cold, who, even later, offered sage opinions on the perfect outfit for those once-in-a-lifetime occasions.
Perhaps that’s why we hold somewhat aloft such positions as the tailor, the seamstress, and the personal shopping assistant. They provide support and assistance, some reassurance in those choices that affect our mood, comfort, and confidence. Texas lost two such couture icons this year. And while their departments would’ve have been located on different floors, their ability to affect those around them is certainly going to last longer than any fashion trend.
For more than fifty years, Earlene Moore was the bra expert of Austin. She worked for several area retailers between the thirties and sixties. Then, in 1970, she opened up her own high-end lingerie shop, “where the elite ladies of Austin shopped,” as well as couples. “Even the transvestites found their way there.” By age 94 (she was still working a few weeks before her death), Moore had not only fitted several generations of women, but they would flock from far and wide for her divination-like abilities—she didn’t use or need a tape measure.
Perhaps you’re the other fifty percent of the population that doesn’t understand just how necessary a proper fitting is, or how rare it is for someone like Moore to be so good at it. A multitude of factors go into finding the right bra: there’s the obvious cup size, but there’s also lift, the right amount of padding, the right material, concerns over chaffing, back rolls, and how it cuts into the shoulder just to name some concerns. Even those with daily experience have difficulties. Anywhere between 60 to 80 percent of women wear the wrong bra size.
In other words, being the best isn’t a one-size-fits all compliment. Though Moore guided woman in the subtle and hidden art of a good bra, there was nothing secret, Victoria’s or otherwise, about how Moore was able to be so successful. She was charismatically up-front about what makes a good bra: “Everyone thinks they are a 34B,” she told the Statesman in 2010. “In their dreams.”
Moore, known for her pristine appearance, was all but a superhero for countless number of women, previously trapped by the just-not-quite right. There are far too many bothersome problems pestering men, restricted movement—to not have the most intimate things be treated with care. Moore made this her goal, like a zen craftswoman striving for perfection. “The harder they are to fit, the harder I work. Because there is an answer; I just have to find it. I don’t give up,” she once said. “Every single customer is different. She is a worthy person and deserves attention. There is an art to it.”
While Moore’s gifts to the community often remained hidden, Sam Spritzer wore his more on his sleeve. He was, after all, Houston’s premier furrier for sixty years. As one might expect, he covered Houston’s finest, becoming well-known in the social circles in the city and beyond. “Glamorous parties, trips to New York and Paris and photo shoots all were part of his job description,” wrote the Houston Chronicle, “and he met Warner Roberts when he was looking for glamorous young women to model his furs.” He became, in the words of another Houston furrier, “an institution.”
Spritzer’s success seems almost preordained—the fur business was a tradition passed through the family. Except there was nothing certain about his family’s legacy, or his own life. The fancy furs, the warm coats, the exalted position in the community—it was the antithesis of Spritzer’s early years. Born in Poland, much of his family had been trampled by Hitler’s march for control. At seventeen, he fled from the Nazi guards who’d rounded up all the men in his village. Later, he was drafted for the war and returned to fight the Soviets. There were bitter battles, those against the elements being some of the toughest.
He returned to his Polish village after the war, to confirm the horror heard: his entire family, the entire Jewish population of his town, had been eliminated. Following a few years in France, Spritzer moved to Houston in 1955 and began what would become a thriving business. But it wouldn’t be his entire legacy. He spent much of his time alighting both the past and future. Throughout his years, he shared his and his family’s story numerous times, a warning against the evils we allow. But, as a Rabbi explained during one such meeting, “the message, was not a morbid one. It was about perseverance, rebuilding for the future.”
In no way was this more evident than the work Spritzer did with the community. His status, as had always been the case, had less to do with those precious garments adorning the shoulders then what was in his heart. The list of charities he participated in and gave generously could fill a closet. He helped develop Houston’s Holocaust Museum and pushed for Texas’s “Stop the Darfur Genocide Act,” encouraging divestment from the oppressive Sudanese government.
Spritzer knew it wasn’t the clothes that make the man. Just as Earlene Moore knew each one of her customers deserved, and needed, individual care and attention. Texas without these two feels a little more exposed.
Milo Hamilton & Gene Elston
September 2, 1927–September 17, 2015
March 26, 1922–September 5, 2015
“It’s plain and simple: baseball is a radio game,” someone once declared. Sure, that someone was Milo Hamilton and it was the opening line of his memoir chronicling fifty years as one of the sport’s most recognized playcallers. That doesn’t mean he’s not absolutely right. That calm, methodical play-by-play punctured by exuberant moments of triumph and failures is as essential to the game as bats and gloves. The announcers are part and parcel to the experience and are just as much tied to the teams as anything else. It’s true across the country, whether it’s Los Angeles’s Vin Scully, Chicago’s Harry Carey, or “Mr. Baseball” himself, Bob Uecker.
Texas, and Houston, lost two of those famous voices this year with the signing off of Hamilton himself, along with the Astro’s other long-time announcer, Gene Elston.
Hamilton’s fame preceded his arrival to Texas in 1985. It was his voice that people remember when the Atlanta Braves’ Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career 714 home run record in 1974. Even Aaron associates ones of his greatest accomplishments with the man who joyfully shared the news with the entire country. “Your voice goes with me all over the world,” Aaron told Hamilton in 2012. “Everywhere I go when people start talking about that home run, your voice comes back, and I want to say how much I appreciate that.”
That’s likely the sentiment of every Houston Astros fan who remembers hearing Hamilton’s favorite catchphrases like “Holey Toledo” and “put a blue star on that play!” He worked several ball clubs before finally settling in Houston, and as a man who believed passionately in the purity of the America’s greatest pastime, it’s no wonder he liked it here. “In coming to Texas, he found a home and a region that liked him to an extraordinary degree,” explained an historian of baseball’s voices. “He hearkened back to an era where for many people there was only one sport, and that sport was baseball. He called other sports and called them well, but to Milo, there was really only one game, and that was baseball.”
Hamilton put everything into his announcing. It was, in many ways, a performance meant to call the game with vigor and the most colorful language possible. “For me, Milo was part poet and part P.T. Barnum. He was a great ringmaster, and he loved painting the prose of baseball,” former Astros player Phil Garner said in September.
If Hamilton was the ebullient one, Gene Elston was the consummate professional. “I wanted to be a reporter, to let my listeners know what was going on,” Elston once explained. “I was never a homer. I was a fan of the Houston Astros and I wanted them to win, but my job was to report the game.” To many Houstonians, Elston is and was the voice the team. He’s certainly known as the original voice of the Astros, coming up with them as they went from being the Colt .45s expansion team to the pro club they are today.
Elston worked the press box from 1962 through 1986, and his signature style was that of “reserved eloquence,” as the Chronicle put it in its obituary. The Houston Press’ John Judge had long been a supporter of the Elston style, and has lamented more than once the fact that the Astros look over the subtle power and precision of Elston. “He wasn’t fancy. He didn’t shout. He wasn’t a homer. He was the eyes for the people who couldn’t be at the game, and it was his job to accurately describe what was happening on the field,” wrote Judge. Others who enjoy the art of the call, recognize Elston as an announcer’s announcer. The “most underrated play-by-play man I’ve ever listened to,” said one broadcaster. “He never treated the game like it was a four-alarm fire and that you’ve got to come down to watch things burn,” said that same voice historian. “He treated the listener with respect, and he assumed a certain body of knowledge by the viewer or listener.”
In an era when the focus shifted from radio to television, Elston was one of the few to first recognize that the words and images could work together, rather than piling on top of one another. The moment after Nolan Ryan’s record-breaking fifth no-hitter, Elston simply said “there it is,” and let the audience see for itself the excitement of the stadium.
Both Hamilton and Elston went silent in September, two weeks apart from one another. With their passing, we might prepare to mourn, too, the passing of America’s pastime, at least as we know it. The skilled and universally recognized radioman, though an integral part of baseball, is not what it used to be. It’s little more than an echo of the very different talent each man possessed. Houston still has plenty of people who chatter, but no more with such voices.
Jethro Pugh & John David Crow
July 4, 1944–January 7, 2015
July 8, 1937–June 17, 2015
We like to think of our sports figures—especially our football players—as gods, immortal and limitless in their strength. They are, of course, mere mortals, like the rest of us (well, must more than mere). The problem with Texas producing so many football greats is that we must also watch so many of them walk off this grand field.
John David Crow wasn’t simply among the greats. He was a legend. Long before there was Johnny Manziel, there was Crow. He is, as Manziel himself said, “Mr. Aggie Football at Texas A&M.” As if it weren’t enough that Crow would become the first Aggie (just one of two, with Manziel) to win the Heisman Trophy, in 1957, the running back tore up fields and broke lines under the direction of Coach Bear Bryant. Even under such punishment, Crow was unstoppable. “People talk about coach Bryant being a bear—a tough man—but shoot, he wasn’t any tougher than my dad,” Crow once recounted. “Coach Bryant could have kicked me in the butt a lot of times, and he wouldn’t have caught up to my dad.” It was no doubt that toughness that led Bryant to famously declare that “If John David Crow doesn’t win the Heisman Trophy, they ought to stop giving it.” There was more. “Don’t count the yards. Count the people he’s run over.” Crow did indeed win following a year of rushing 562 yards, scoring six touchdowns, throwing five, and making five interceptions. When the Heisman committee told first told Crow about the award, he reportedly hadn’t even heard of it before.
It would be enough if Crow had stopped with his college career. But the prototypical bruiser originally from Louisiana—“Ol Crow” as he was nicknamed, was six-foot-two-inch and 215 pounds—continued pushing forward, playing eleven seasons with the Chicago Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers and the St. Louis Cardinals. He’d later serve as an assistant coach to his old mentor in Alabama, then become athletic director and coach at Northeast Louisiana, before returning like a prodigal son to College Station as assistant athletic director, before taking over the big gig himself. “I tell everybody that A&M is my true love,” he once told an interviewer (though he did admit Alabama was a close second). It should come as no surprise that he’ll be remembered forever in AggieLand. Fittingly, the Core Values statue was rededicated to Crow the first day in the newly redeveloped Kyle Stadium.
While Crow cemented his legacy through life-long efforts, the game, bless its heart, allows others a single game, a single moment, to be etched into history. It’s not always an appreciated invitation. The Dallas Cowboys’ Jethro Pugh, who died in January, earn his status thanks to one gridiron battle that’s impossible to forget. It was December 21, 1967, the National Championship game, against the Green Bay Packers, mercilessly held at Lambeau Field in Green Bay. With the temperature hovering around -15 and -20 degrees fahrenheit —the coldest game in NFL history—the game sort of had to be known as the Ice Bowl. So cold was it, that the referee’s lips stuck to his whistle. Green Bay got the first good lead, at 14-0, but before the half, the Cowboys closed the gap by four. While the temperature kept dropping the Cowboys’ score kept climbing, eventually putting them ahead 17-14 in the fourth. With the Packers in possession at the one yard line, Bart Starr went for a quarterback sneak with two linemen knocking back Pugh, a defensive tackle. And with that Green Bay won, 21-17.
As teammates remember, they were literally playing on ice, so there was little Pugh could do to stop the play. But that was just one play, and Pugh had a tremendous career, all of it with Dallas, replete with examples of his commitment. He was part of the Cowboy’s Doomsday Defense that would help get the team to four Super Bowl. He even once played through the end of season while taking penicillin to hold back appendicitis. He finished his career with 95.5 sacks and led the team in that statistic for five consecutive seasons (’68-72) before it became an official category, writes ESPN. Working with the best of the best, however, had consequences—Pugh never made the Pro Bowl. He was “overlooked” his teammates have said, calling Pugh “a terribly unsung person among that bunch of great players.”
Pugh himself had a brighter view. After the end of that season, he “decided to look to the future.” Though there are no statues of him as there are of others like Crow, Pugh contributed just as much to the game and to future players. He showed all of Texas just what giving 110 percent actually looks like. In their unique ways, both Pugh and Crow showed that with clear eyes and full hearts, is really is impossible to lose.
Tom Moore & Brad Anderson
May 16, 1928–July 20, 2015
May 14, 1924–August 30, 2015
Back in the ol’ days, there were things called newspapers—like iPads but bigger, heavier, flammable. And these items, kids, were comprised of things called pages. These pages were filled with some of the same sections, stories, and pictures you might see now on the Huffington Post, MorningNews.com and any local homepage. The problem with these pages is that you had to share them. Not “share” them with “friends.” But actually, physically, share them with actual, physical people. It was a nightmare! At least in my house. The parents read the news and opinion section in tandem, trading sections at roughly the same time. Apart from that, no one in the family cared a lick for sports, the stock-market page was some sort of newfangled crossword, and the classifieds were only glanced at to ensure the newly available rental property advertisement been spelled correctly. So that left one section for which everyone battled for, clawed at, would hide like contraband if given the chance: the comics page.
It was a glorious thing, kids. A page that seemed to jump out at you with all manner of fantasy—aliens, talking animals, grotesquely depicted humans, everything. The ones that tended to really stand alone were the ones that went against the grain, the vertically inclined big boxes as opposed to the strips. If you were lucky, one of those big boxes belonged to the loveable if forever-pestering Great Dane known as Marmaduke. Some people were still lucky until this year. The 91-year-old creator Brad Anderson was still sketching away from his home in The Woodlands when he died this year, 62 years after the comic debuted. At its height, Marmaduke was syndicated in 600 newspapers and available in 20 countries. The single-panel work earned Anderson prominent accolades in the comic world, including a lifetime achievement award. So beloved by those who followed Marmaduke’s innocent antics that more than one paper faced a “reader revolt” when it threatened to drop it. There was perhaps a deceptively simple reason for this. “People who’ve had a pet in their lives, or wish they had, will identify with the antics of this loving dog,” Paul Anderson, Brad’s son and late-career assistant once explained. “He doesn’t lecture or get political. He’s good-natured and kind, lives a dog’s life, gets into mischief and takes care of his family, generating smiles along the way.”
It was, in a word, relatable. It didn’t concern itself or need to hammer readers over the head with angsty emotions, convoluted plots, or the latest trend of dark, anti-heroes.
Like Marmaduke, Archie was a comic for the regular types. And like Marmaduke, it was created by a man who kept at the art with a workmanlike consistency. You may not recognize his name (in the early days, hustling several illustration gigs, he sometimes wasn’t credited), but you most surely know the name of the most wholesome, American cartoon ever: Archie.
It was native Texan and long-time El Pasoan Tom Moore that shepherded the long-running comic book on and off from the early fifties to the eighties during the height of its popularity. Like his Marmaduke counterpart, Moore got his first taste of drawing success during his Vietnam service. Famously, he sketched a caricature of his captain and was soon summoned by his superiors. Rather than any kind of punishment, he was reassigned as the staff cartoonist. Back in civilian life, he first trained under pioneering Tarzan creator Burne Hogarth, and after more than a decade working in New York, decided to move back home, “having felt that his heart belonged at the foot of the Franklin Mountains,” his son told the Associated Press.
Homegrown gems flourish everywhere, but it’s almost hard to imagine that the artist behind Archie, not to mention his work with another popular strip, “Snuffy Smith,” would be continuously creating iconic and universally known work in the city that even parts of Texas tend to forget. But Moore flourished, doing freelance projects for other comics like “Underdog” and “Mighty Mouse,” not to mention other ambitious efforts. By the time he retired (at least from doing Archie work), he become one of those hidden, unassuming legends of the comic world. Not that he didn’t have admirers in town, least of all the El Paso Museum of art, which hosted his work in 1996, well before all the big, hip cities and art galleries began their major efforts to reclaim comics as art.
“If he’d been in New York, or in Dallas, or the big cities, he could’ve came out and went to these [comic] book conventions and went to shows and people would’ve come to see what he was doing and what he had done,”