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.
(Page 3 of 5)
Hondo was a junior at UT when his father committed suicide. Harry had received a phone call from a hospital in San Antonio saying that his dear friend and boss Mr. Jungman had died. Brokenhearted, Harry went to work, only to learn that he no longer had a job. He went back home and put a rifle bullet through his heart. “He must have really wanted to die,” Mary reported later. “The first shot missed and blew up a chair. He had to reload and try again, pulling the trigger with his toe.”
Without telling anyone in Austin what had happened, Hondo borrowed the team car from Tex Robertson and drove home for the funeral. He pinned a prized swimming medal to his father’s lapel, but his only comment while riding in the back of the hearse was to wonder aloud if his father’s toenails were clean.
In 1939, Hondo was named an all-American and was elected captain of the swimming team. He had his eye on the 1940 Olympics in Finland when someone jumped on his back during a game of water polo, separating his shoulder and bringing his swimming career to an end. At the age of 23 he was a has-been.
Hondo was so impassive that it is difficult to judge the immediate effect of these blows. In a diary he kept, he didn’t mention either of them. Instead, he created self-conscious pictures of himself setting out to “batch up a trappin’ party,” and he wrote about trips home for football games with rich friends from Dallas and Fort Worth and the impression he made as the naïve cowboy come to the city. He didn’t seem particularly concerned about what he would do with his life except to mention at one point the possibility of a job at San Jacinto High in Houston and to say in another place that he would like to be a rancher.
Hondo stayed at UT until 1941, when he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physical education. He had worked summers at Rio Vista, a camp on the Guadalupe River near Kerrville that catered to boys from some of the richest, most prominent families in Texas. The camp made a practice of hiring varsity athletes from Southwest Conference schools to teach sports, serve as counselors, and entertain their charges with campfire skits. (Swan Lake, with the counselors in pink tutus, is remembered as a favorite at Rio Vista.) Hondo liked camp so well that in the fall of 1941, rather than go home, where he was afraid a draft notice was waiting for him, he moved to River Oaks in Houston to start a boys’ club. A wealthy family he had met through Rio Vista offered him the use of their garage apartment and telephoned River Oaks mothers who feared their sons weren’t getting sufficient attention from their busy fathers. Hondo would pick the boys up after school in an old woody station wagon and take them down to the bayou near River Oaks to hunt and trap. They built campfires, and when it was warm enough, they swam in the bayou.
It is strange to think of Hondo at this point, poor and handsome, floating on the edges of River Oaks, but if he was worried about his future, war and romance took care of the problem. That summer, he had met Helen Ruth Stieler. Called Shatzie — sweetheart — by her family, she was the prize of the Texas Hill Country. With her blond hair, sky-blue eyes, sweet voice, and strong, open face, she was, as Becky described her, a personification of earthly elegance. She and her brother were raised on their father’s ranch between Comfort and Fredericksburg. The Home Ranch was five thousand acres of rugged Hill Country that included land in three counties — Gillespie, Kerr, and Kendall. Stieler Hill, on Texas Highway 87, which cut through the ranch, was the biggest hill in that part of the country. Shatzie’s father, Adolph Stieler — dubbed the Goat King of the World by Life magazine in 1954) — ran as many as 60,000 Angora goats on ranches in Texas, Arkansas, and New Mexico. His largest ranch covered ninety sections of Sierra Blanca Mountains in West Texas. Stieler was a large, imposing man with a pink face, blue eyes, and white hair. That he had lost one arm — he hit a downed power line while checking on livestock in an ice storm — merely emphasized his stature. He was a generous man, well respected throughout the state. He gave to the Republican party, attended five national conventions, and was a personal friend of President Eisenhower’s. If there was anything approaching a German aristocracy in the Hill Country, Shatzie was part of it.
When Shatzie was thirteen, her mother was killed in a car crash and Shatzie was sent to board at St. Mary’s Hall in San Antonio. From there she went to the University of Texas, where she was a Pi Phi and a member of a prestigious English riding club. She was a popular, unpretentious girl who had clothes, a car, and money. She liked the arts, and she liked the outdoors. She offered Hondo everything he thought he might want. When they were married — Hondo in his newly acquired Air Force uniform and Shatzie in a white satin wedding dress — Adolph Stieler threw the biggest party the Hill Country had ever seen. The gardens at the Home Ranch were lighted with Japanese lanterns. Outside, tables covered with red-and-white gingham cloths were heaped with barbecue, German potato salad, tamales, and beer. Inside, there was champagne, finger sandwiches, and fancy cakes. Shatzie’s trousseau — furs, monogrammed silks, and designer dresses — came from Neiman-Marcus in Dallas.
Shatzie and Hondo lived at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Then, after the war, they returned to the Home Ranch with their firstborn daughters, and Hondo went to work for his father-in-law. Becky alludes to the trouble between the two men without spelling it out; the main problem was work.
Stieler was a self-made man who judged other men by their willingness to work. Hondo appreciated the romance of ranch life, but he never approached his duties on the various ranches or his office job at the wool and mohair business in Comfort with enough moneymaking fervor to please his father-in-law.
Instead, Hondo made a stab at writing folk humor. He sent material to J. Frank Dobie at the University of Texas and to Austinite John Henry Faulk, a folk humorist and national radio commentator. Faulk said the problem with Hondo’s writing was that Hondo didn’t know who he was. For folk humor to work, the writer has to be on the side of the people. According to Faulk, Hondo’s sympathies were essentially reactionary and he tended to be a racist. When Faulk visited the ranch, he noticed the tension between Hondo and his father-in-law. Hondo wanted and needed attention, but whenever he tried to tell his jokes and stories, Stieler was visibly and painfully irked.
In a fundamental way Hondo had replicated his parent’s marriage. He was in a weak position, married to a strong woman. But life was fast and easy. Juan was born in a Buick on the way to the hospital in Fredericksburg, and two years later, Kerry was born in his parents’ bed at the ranch. Hondo and Shatzie seemed to have everything. They shared a deep aesthetic appreciation for life in the Hill Country, while their contemporaries — recovering from the Depression and the war — wanted what was new and convenient. They bought a two-thousand-acre ranch on Highway 87 near Fredericksburg and commissioned architect Albert Keidel, Shatzie’s cousin, to restore the 150-year-old two-story rock house on the property.
Hondo continued to work at the wool and mohair business in Comfort, and with the help of foreman and wetbacks, he ran the Fredericksburg ranch and the Block creek ranch, which was near Sisterdale and belonged to Shatzie, but he wasn’t happy. Friends in Fredericksburg remembered how Shatzie worried about Hondo when he wouldn’t eat. He would roam the Hill Country in his pickup, stopping at beer joints and entertaining the other patrons with stories and jokes. As a boy staying on the ranch, I was the most aware of Hondo during the exciting times when sheep and goats were sheared and calves castrated, but I also remember periods of lassitude in the winter, when Hondo would lie motionless by the fire, and in the summer, when, on hot afternoons filled with the oppressive smell of cedar, he would lie on a bed out on the screened porch and have Juan or Kerry massage his injured shoulder.
As an outlet for his talents, Hondo taught swimming lessons in Fredericksburg and performed with the little theater in Comfort that eventually became pretty much his show. When Cris was old enough, the entire family started spending summers at Camp Longhorn (founded and owned by Tex Robertson), where Hondo taught swimming and was impresario of the campfire, while Shatzie taught crafts and served as camp mom.
From the outside it looked like the ideal life, but, of course, it wasn’t. When the children started going off to boarding schools and college, ready cash became a problem. Shatzie sold off pieces of her own property and took a job selling paint at Stein Lumber Yard in Fredericksburg, but Hondo was unable to make a decisive move. He stayed on at the wool and mohair business and, under the pen name of Peter Cedarstacker, wrote a column for the Comfort News called Cedar Clippings, in which he poked fun at small-town life and crabbed about big government.
I don’t think anyone in Fredericksburg understood or approved of what Hondo was doing, but he had started to fashion a role for himself to play in society. Dressed like a saddle tramp, chewing on a wad of tobacco and whittling on a piece of wood, he would appear in a crowd as the old hayseed, the naïve outsider who could see what was really happening and make the devastating remark or gesture. Essentially, it was the role of jester. To play it, Hondo went where there were crowds and publicity — UT football games, chili cookoffs, rodeos, and public institutions. As the fool, he didn’t have to be particularly brilliant to score; coming from such an unlikely guise, his wit had the same effect as a risqué joke told by a nun, and for those who knew him, it was even better.
My Library
