Literary El Paso

Tom Lea

2 Widely acclaimed artist, muralist, illustrator, and novelist Tom Lea (1907-2001) was born and raised in El Paso. Tom Lea Sr., his father, was the mayor of El Paso during the Mexican Revolution. At the age of seventeen, Lea studied under the muralist John Norton at the Chicago Art Institute and became his apprentice. He worked as a mural painter and commercial artist in Chicago until 1933 when he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There Lea worked for the Laboratory of Anthropology, illustrated for Santa Fe Magazine, and briefly worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Lea returned home to El Paso in 1936, then painted murals for the Texas Centennial celebration at the Hall of State at the Dallas State Fairgrounds and for the Branigan Library in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He won competitions sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department, Section of Fine Arts, that resulted in the murals located in the Benjamin Franklin Post Office, Washington, D.C., painted in 1935, and “Pass of the North” located in the Federal Building in El Paso, among others. His lifelong friendship with book designer and publisher Carl Hertzog and writer J. Frank Dobie led to a career in writing and book illustration, in addition to his painting. Lea illustrated Dobie’s Apache Gold, Yaqui Silver and The Longhorns. He won a Rosenwald Fellowship, but declined the honor when Life magazine asked him to become their accredited war correspondent. His writings and paintings were featured in Life from 1942-1945. From 1941-1946, Lea traveled over 100,000 miles to the North Atlantic, on board the Hornet in the South Pacific, to China and the landing on Peleliu. He wrote about, as well as illustrated, his experiences in Peleliu Landing. During his time at war, he painted the portraits of Jimmy Doolittle, Claire Chennault, Berndt Balchen, and Madame and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. However, his favorite painting remained Sarah in Summertime, a portrait of his wife Sarah Dighton Lea. His art has hung in the Oval Office of the White House and the Pentagon, and collections of his work can be seen at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and in the Tom Lea Gallery at the El Paso Museum of Art. In 1981, he was awarded the Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award by the Texas Institute of Letters. Among the many books he wrote and illustrated are: Tom Lea 3 Randado; A Grizzly from the Coral Sea; Calendar of Twelve Travelers through the Pass of the North; The Primal Yoke; The Hands of Cantú; and A Picture Gallery. Two of his novels, The Brave Bulls and The Wonderful Country, were both made into major motion pictures. He appears in a small role in The Wonderful Country as Peebles the barber. Lea also wrote and illustrated the two-volume King Ranch, a five-year collaboration with Carl Hertzog that was published in two editions, including a limited edition with a facsimile saddle blanket as a cover. Tom Lea: An Oral History, published in 1995, is his autobiography, based on six months of interviews by Adair Margo. His books remain highly sought after by collectors. Books about Tom Lea include The Art of Tom Lea and The Two Thousand Yard Stare. He continued his career as a studio painter until 1998 when his eyesight failed. Tom Lea, a Texas legend, died at his home due to complications from a fall. From The Wonderful Country Chapter One An hour before daylight the wind came up and swept along the floor of the desert, moving the sand, changing the shapes of the hummocks under the dark mesquite. It blew across the bare mesas, over the summit stones of the mountains, down to a desert river flowing south through a pass where hills pitched steep to the edges of the narrowed water. Below the pass, the wind followed the stream into a valley where it found the houses of a lonely town sleeping by trees and plowed fields. Hidden and small, four separate companies of travelers rode that morning before sunrise toward the lonely town. Unknown to each other, discovered only by the wind, they rode converging from the four compass points of the wide circling dark. North, the wind struck a blow at the backs of three men hunched on the seats of an open buckboard headed south along the trees by the river. The wind bit at the hands of the driver holding...