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.
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To draw more people to Luckenbach, Hondo, Guich, and their new partner Kathy Morgan, who had recently moved to the Hill Country, established a schedule of annual events. They hosted an all-women chili cookoff in the fall, and in the winter they had a hug-in for Valentine’s Day. Then, in the spring they celebrated the mud daubers’ return to Luckenbach. In 1972, in the spirit of parody, they put on the First Annual Luckenbach World’s Fair. Twenty thousand people came. According to Kathy it was “unreal” and she was “petrified.” The crowd managed to go through nine thousand cases of beer, and Kathy remembers running around with brown paper bags stuffed with money. Cannons were fired, and a cannonball almost killed Benno Engle. Willie Nelson came, as advertised, but he and Hondo never met. On quieter days Hondo and Guich would hand around a guitar and sing, and occasionally Jerry Jeff Walker would drop in. Born and raised in New York, Walker had embraced Hondo as a father figure when they’d met several years earlier. And it didn’t hurt Luckenbach’s reputation to have a bona fide celebrity on the premises either. In 1973 Walker brought cult status to Luckenbach when he recorded his album ¡Viva Terlingua! in the dance hall and used photographs of Hondo and Luckenbach on the album cover.
Luckenbach attracted all sort of people — hippies, hopeful musicians, and members of the middle class who, living in cities, felt alienated from the “real” Texas. Jack Harmon, a public relations man in San Antonio, started writing press releases on a volunteer basis, and newspaper columnists around the state, fed with releases, covered Luckenbach so faithfully that for a while you couldn’t help but read about it. Slowly Hondo and Guich were becoming media figures. Hondo appeared on Gunsmoke, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, To Tell the Truth, and the Today show. Guich got a small part in The Sugarland Express, a movie that starred Goldie Hawn. He went on to Hollywood, won second place in a singing-cowboy contest, and eventually landed a role as a dimwit on Carter Country, a short-lived sitcom about a small town. Harmon, however, scored the biggest media coup when he dreamed up Luckenbach’s Non-Buy-Centennial, which got national coverage by protesting the commercialization of the patriotic celebration. To many people who were naïve about the media, Hondo and Guich appeared to have realized a common fantasy of becoming stars simply by being themselves. In Luckenbach it really seemed that everybody was somebody.
I dropped in at Luckenbach now and again, but with one or two exceptions I avoided the big celebrations. If I was going to go home for something like that, I wanted to go to the county fair or the races in Fredericksburg, where I could see — in addition to tourists and new summer residents from Houston and Dallas — the people I had known while I was growing up. In those days, when the influx of tourists had just begun, there was some resentment in Fredericksburg that the Luckenbach celebrations were for out-of-towners and competed with the traditional civic events. A lot of people thought that Luckenbach misrepresented the good, solid values of life at Gillespie County.
During the late sixties and early seventies the Crouch family has suffered most of the stresses and conflicts occurring in the country. Juan has been in a helicopter that was shot down in Viet Nam. He survived the crash, but he was back on the ranch, alienated and angry, faced with the problem of what to do with his life. Kerry, a son two years younger than Juan, was a casualty of the Austin drug culture and floated in and out of mental institutions. Becky and her husband become born-again Christians while looking for help for Kerry. Cris, the younger daughter, married well. Shatzie, dismayed by Luckenbach, divorced Hondo.
Knowing all this, I had a hard time connecting with Hondo in the present, in as public a place as Luckenbach. Later I was sorry that I didn’t try harder, that I didn’t pay closer attention to what would ultimately seem a transformation of character. In the fall of 1976, at the age of 59, Hondo died suddenly of a heart attack. The song “Luckenbach, Texas,” recorded by Wabylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, came out in 1977, and according to newspaper and television reports, hordes of tourists had descended on Luckenbach and were about to carry it away. Then, in 1979, Becky Crouch Patterson published a biography called Hondo, My Father. Yet, even aided by all of this documentation, I didn’t understand what had happened in Luckenbach or what had happened to Hondo Crouch. As when anything private becomes public, I felt a sense of personal loss.
Hondo, My Father is a remarkable biography when you consider that Becky, who is a visual artist, had never written before nor did she intend to write again. She didn’t try to spare Hondo or to make a hero of him, as you might expect a daughter to do. Ensconced in the charmed life of the ranch, Hondo comes across in her book as a strange, unhappy man, unable to express himself in even the most basic ways.
He was born John Russell Crouch on December 4, 1916. His parents, Ione and Harry Crouch, had come to Texas from Illinois with the Southern Pacific Railroad with the encouragement of Harry’s twin brother, Holly, who worked for the railroad in San Antonio. Harry, Ione, and their five-year-old daughter, Mary, were stationed first in Spofford, a lonely place where the tracks came to an end out in the South Texas brush country. The Crouches were eventually bumped up the line to Hondo, where Ione gave birth to their son. The baby boy became the center of the family. Both mother and sister doted on him, keeping him well groomed and well mannered. Mary, eight years older than her brother, played with him as if he were a doll, pushing him in a baby buggy almost until he was in the first grade.
The Crouch family had been homesick for Illinois in Spofford, but in Hondo they settled down to stay. Harry worked as the telegraph operator at the train station. He was a quiet, passive man with large brown eyes, and he cried easily. There was never much question that Onie, as he called his wife, was the stronger partner in the marriage. Short and stocky, she ran the family. If she resented having a passive husband, she vented her anger in practical jokes and loud, unpredictable behavior. One morning when she was sick in bed, she hid Hondo beneath the cover with her, then called Mary (who was supposed to be taking care of him) and asked where he was. She sustained the joke until her daughter, sick with fear, had looked all over town. On another occasion, when a modest adolescent girl came to one of Mary’s slumber parties, Onie sewed up the girl’s pajama legs so that when she went behind a door to change, she had to come hopping back into public view. Later Hondo would follow in his mother’s footsteps, handing on frustration to his children like a family birthright by pouring molasses on Becky’s hands and then giving her a feather to play with, and by making an “idiot’s hat” for Juan that dangled a carrot just out of reach so that the two-year-old would entertain himself for hours and keep the adults in the house laughing uproariously.
When Hondo was seven years old, his parents bought the Armstrong Hotel, where once a month they gave a Saturday night dance. The man who was to become Mary’s husband had an orchestra, and for the benefit of the crowd — however small — Hondo would dance when it played. Outfitted by Onie in a Charleston suit (white shirt, white bell-bottoms, black shoes with wide toes, and a black bow tie), he could draw the crowd around him with his showmanship. When he finished, he would scramble for the coins people tossed.
Hondo was a nice-looking boy, though small for his age. He liked sports, and he liked to make intricate model airplanes, carving the parts out of the soft wood of orange crates. According to Becky, Hondo took after both parents. Like his father, who drank beer steadily and was often treated in a Houston hospital for respiratory ailments, Hondo never showed much affection. For Harry, who was oversensitive, Onie’s jokes must have been unbearable. It is small wonder that he developed a deep rapport with animals and spent most of his time “with hunting dog and gun, chasing birds. He took Hondo hunting and to King’s Water Hole, where Hondo learned to swim after practicing at home on a piano bench. When Becky describes Hondo, lying facedown on the bench, kicking his legs and moving his arms while he looked at an instruction book, it’s easy to imagine him trying to fly away, to escape into another atmosphere.
As it turned out, swimming became not only Hondo’s escape from home but also the way he made a name for himself. The summer after he graduated from high school, he went to live with his sister and brother-in-law in Corpus Christi, where he worked as an office boy in a chemical plant to save money for college. He entered a swim meet and won three gold medals, then went on to the state meet in Austin, where he won a first, a second, and a third. He caught the eye of Tex Robertson, the swimming coach at UT, as well as that of sportswriters, who gave him his nickname — Hondo the Swimming Cowboy.
In the mid-thirties, swimming was a minor sport at the University of Texas. Robertson, an Olympic swimmer of 1932 and an all-American at the University of Michigan, coached the team for two years without compensation. He wasn’t much older than Hondo, but with four years he managed to put together a nationally ranked team. To raise money and draw attention to the sport, Roberston, a natural showman, put on swimming exhibitions jazzed up with comedy stunts. Hondo had found his environment. He not only set records in the fifty-meter and hundred-meter freestyles but he also became the darling of sportswriters. He wore jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat, playing up his role as the Swimming Cowboy. But even as Hondo became known to the public, he remained an enigma to his peers. Teammate Bob Tarlton, who was often Hondo’s roommate on the road and a lifelong acquaintance, said that he never knew Hondo very well. He remembered that at UT Hondo dressed “kinda cowboy” and that he carried around a “coon prick” in his pocket and would pull it out and show it to people. Hondo rarely attended school dances, and he kept to himself unless he could be with an old friend from home, Burr Noonan.
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