The Man Who Dreamed up Luckenbach
Hondo Crouch took a tiny town with a funny name and created a magical place where folks could forget who they really were. The trouble was, Hondo forgot too.
Within my lifetime, two famous people have come out of the Hill Country. One was a president of the United States, and the other was a mayor of Luckenbach. It has always seemed baffling that either Lyndon Johnson or Hondo Crouch had anything to do with Gillespie County. I grew up there in the fifties, and few places could have been more obscure, less likely to produce famous men. There was no source of power, no money, no industry, no oil or big ranches. It was nothing like the Texas we heard about or saw on television and in movies. That Texas was someplace else, a long way off on winding Hill Country roads that made Austin and San Antonio more distant than they are today. The distance was magnified by the German culture and language that isolated the people in Gillespie County from their neighbors in Llano, Mason, and Johnson City, and a difference in dialect estranged them from other German-speaking Texans in Comal and Kendall counties. Gillespie County just wasn’t the sort of place where you expected to find famous Americans.
Of the two careers, Lyndon Johnson’s was much easier to understand. He went away as a young man and became powerful. Fame followed him home. Whatever you might think of Lyndon Johnson’s accomplishments, you have to admit that he changed the course of history.
Hondo Crouch’s fame was much more ephemeral and much harder to explain. He didn’t leave the Hill Country but rather appeared to turn his back on the world by settling twelve miles west of the LBJ Ranch — in Luckenbach, a town with one general store and a population of eight. Luckenbach had been there since 1849, but Hondo created it, much as Thoreau invented Walden Pond. Hondo declared that everybody was somebody in Luckenbach, and by celebrating what was small and simple, he made fun on a world that had become too large and complex. Hondo was Johnson’s polar opposite. It seemed coincidental that the two men existed in the same county, but the connection was fairly direct. Lyndon Johnson brought media attention to Gillespie County, establishing an atmosphere in which Hondo Crouch could flourish; the war in Viet Nam created a national climate that made the simple virtues of Luckenbach appealing. To a lot of people, particularly the songwriters and musicians who were in the process of reinventing the myth of rural Texas, Hondo Crouch was the real thing. Briefly, he was a hero.
I knew Hondo while I was growing up — or I knew him as much as a child knows an adult. His two oldest children, Becky and Juan, would come to town to stay with my sister and me, and we would go to the Crouches’ ranch for overnights and weekends. When I was six, Hondo taught me to swim at the Fredericksburg municipal pool, and one of my indelible summer memories is of standing, crouched for a racing dive, with sunlight shimmering on the aquamarine water, the smell of chlorine, and the sound of Hondo’s voice calling, “On your mark…”
My first appreciation of physical grace came when I saw Hondo swim. Standing on the back with the rest of his “team,” I would watch as he moved through the water. The smooth, effortless strokes, the quiet, syncopated splash of water, the deep, even breaths of air. Like a series of Muybridge photographs with sound, it was such a pretty thing to watch that twenty fairly wild little boys would stand in silent awe. We knew that Hondo was special, that he was all-American. Hondo had a way with children. He had a warm voice, and there was always something in his dark brown eyes, a glimmer of amusement, that made you think he could see you better than you could see yourself. There was something sly about Hondo, as if he were keeping a secret. Sometimes it was one you shared, and sometimes it was his alone.
As I grew up, I realized that if no one else in Fredericksburg seemed to live in the mythic Texas we saw on TV, the Crouches did. They had a large ranch south of town with a big rock house and old rock barns. They rode horses to round up the livestock, hunted deer, and trapped animals for their pelts. In the winter there were wood fires in the house, and in the spring orphan goats roamed the kitchen. Unlike families in town, the Crouches didn’t watch television at night; they didn’t even own a set until long after everyone else did. Instead, they were always making something with their hands. Hondo carved , and Shatzie, his wife, spun wool and wove.
To other children, it seemed that the Crouch children — Becky, Juan, Kerry, and Cris — came from a special place and were their own special breed. All of them attractive, they tended to be stronger, faster, and braver than their peers in town. They were at once more rustic and much more sophisticated than anyone else. While we in town watched cartoons on Saturday mornings, they went to San Antonio for lessons at museums and at the YMCA. They had their own brand of humor and their own way of speaking — a slightly nasal drawl that, combined with a certain reticence, gave the impression that they weren’t entirely comfortable with speech. As far as I know, no Crouch ever pronounced a final g, so that “talking” would come out sounding like “tawkin.” Nonetheless, they were articulate and were given to naming things. A row of cottonwood trees down by the creek was Big Ears. The hill behind their house was Old Smokey. A boy at school with well-shaped legs was Hollywood Legs. A girl who bruised easily was Banana Legs. But their humor was more often visual. Once, while we were sitting at the dinner table, Cris, the youngest, waited until I happened to look at her, then pulled a long red pimiento out of her nose and popped it into her mouth.
The Crouches weren’t concerned with appearances in the same way as families in town who were trying to nail down their places in the middle class. They wore old clothes and drove old cars. When I thought back on them in the late sixties, I realized that they were ahead of their time. They weren’t materialistic — at least not on a level I understood. They appreciated what was old and handmade and what came from the land. After I graduated from college and left Texas, I thought about the Crouches a lot, and from time to time I dreamed about their house. Nothing happened in the dream except that I wandered through empty rooms, then woke with a feeling of loss.
When I came back to Texas in 1971, I heard that Hondo, Shatzie, and a young man named Guich Koock had made news by buying a town. Luckenbach wasn’t much of a town, and its chief virtue was that it looked old. When you turned off RM Road 1376 onto the even smaller road next to Snail Creek, you had the feeling that you were entering a time warp. On the right was an old rock house; on the left, past the line of cypress trees that grew along the creek, were the ruins of a rusted-out cotton gin. Straight ahead, beyond a slight curve in the road, was the little weather-beaten store, looking like a Norman Rockwell illustration. Benno Eagle, who lived in the rock house and whose family has owned Luckenbach since they started it in 1849, had made few changes on the property. The outside of the store was covered with old signs, and the inside was a random collection of merchandise that looked as if it belonged in an antique shop. Not much of note has happened there since 1865, when a local inventor, Jacob Brodbeck, flew the first airplane fifty feet high for a distance of sixty feet. The plane, powered by a large spring, had no practical value and was long forgotten by the time the Wright brothers made their maiden voyage. Luckenbach was just another country store where German farmers and ranchers stopped in to pick up their mail, drink a beer, and play a game of dominoes. The dance hall across the street from the store was where families had reunions and gave wedding parties.
The Crouches and Guich originally planned to keep Luckenbach just as it was — a sort of “living museum” that would continue to serve the community, as well as cater to the tourists who had started to explore the Hill Country. The first kink in that plan came when the new owners discovered that Benno Engle had failed to tell them that the U.S. Post Office was closing down the Luckenbach station. Without the money that the post office brought in, the store would have a harder time breaking even. They quickly learned, however that Luckenbach, with its funny name and minute size, had instant media appeal. Frank X. Tolbert devoted a column in the Dallas Morning News to the purchase of Luckenbach, and other papers around the state picked up the story. Hondo and Guich capitalized on that appeal by writing humorous press releases about the theft of Luckenbach’s one parking meter (someone thought it was a slot machine) and about their attempt to get air mail by putting a mailbox on top of a flagpole. Newspaper readers in Texas cities were amused and intrigued, and Luckenbach, blessed with both obscurity and growing fame, became a destination for weekend drives. Shatzie, who had been most committed to preservation, dropped out of the venture when she saw how things were going, leaving Hondo and Guich to run Luckenbach as a beer joint. They put on dances some weekends, but people came mainly to drink beer out under the trees in warm weather or around the pot-bellied stove when it was cold.
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