Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

Foreword

x ✥ Foreword In far west texas, where Lonn Taylor lives, there’s a saying that if you ask someone a question, they’ll tell you a story. And out there, no one tells stories quite like Lonn. That’s no brag, just fact. It’s taken me some years and considerable miles to reach that conclusion. I knew Lonn was a fellow traveler from my hometown of Fort Worth long ago. I didn’t know that his family was actually from McKinney and that he’d spent much of his youth in the Philippines, where his father built roads. His twenty-year career as curator and historian at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, attests to his vast reservoir of knowledge and love of history. Less well known is his insightful understanding of the kind of Texas history that textbooks and museums tend to overlook. That belated discovery began with his innocent question, asked in a rich, distinctive voice inflected with a slight drawl that makes clear he could come from nowhere else but Texas: “Do you know Pepi Plowman?” She’s my friend, my wife and I told him excitedly, a renaissance artist who happened to be Janis Joplin’s roommate in the ghetto apartments near the University of Texas, the same scene that produced underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton and musician Powell St. John and ultimately germinated into Austin’s global reputation as the creative city it is today. Lonn already knew all that because he was there, it turns out, and saw it all. Lonn is especially well versed in all things Texas. “He can stand anywhere in Texas and tell you the history of each parcel of land on either side of the road and the role it played in the development of Texas, going all the way back to the days of the ✥ xi Republic,” marveled Eddie Wilson, the trail boss of the Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin’s most storied music venue. Wilson recalled running into Lonn at a Fort Worth pizza parlor and at a bar in Austin during the mid sixties. Both times, Lonn was with a group of gentlemen wearing tweed who were hanging on to every word Lonn spoke. Turns out they were neither academics nor the historian types Lonn runs with; they were a rock and roll band called the Sir Douglas Quintet, a Texas group that had embraced British couture, as had Lonn, who fancied a bowler hat. This was about the same time that Lonn was scouting for period furniture to furnish the interiors of the University of Texas’s Winedale Historical Center, a historic site between LaGrange and Brenham. Then again, he was working on a book about early Texas furniture, collaborating with no less than Miss Ima Hogg, a Texas icon if there ever was one, so he knew what to look for. He was also the director and curator of Winedale. In other words, he wore many hats, not just bowlers. There have been other stops along the way, including Dallas and Santa Fe. But it wasn’t until 2002, after he retired from the Smithsonian, and his lovely wife Edith (Dedie) retired as a senior editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the couple relocated to Fort Davis, Texas’s mountain village in the western end of the state, that Lonn Taylor really found his voice. The Rambling Boy started appearing in the Desert-Mountain Times in 2003 until that publication folded, and has run ever since in the Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa. Every week, his stories about the people and places of Texas are featured in the finest weekly newspaper in the state, and he then reads them aloud in his sonorous drawl on Marfa’s public radio station, KRTS. After tramping all over God’s green and brown earth, he’s more at home than ever, and more in love with Texas than anyone I know. Lonn writes it, talks it, walks it, sings it, lives it, and breathes it. Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb—eat your hearts out. xii ✥ In a recent Rambling Boy column, ninety-three-year-old Hope Wilson told Lonn all about the rise and fall of the Pecos cantaloupe , the sweetest, creamiest melon ever grown. She prefaced her remarks by telling him, “You may write down anything I say. I did not go to the school of lies and promises.” Neither did Lonn, who has...