Dry Times & Hot Days Thursday Open Comments

I only missed it by seven weeks but I could not let pass the 50th anniversary of the publication of Elmer Kelton’s landmark historical novel, The Time It Never Rained.  The current drought and heat wave in Texas is almost like a hellish tribute to his memory.

Born in 1952, some of my earliest memories are of adults talking about the drought of the 1950s.  I have vague recollections of grim, dusty newsreels on television of starving cattle and everyone worrying about Aunt Faye and Uncle Earl on the ranch out at San Angelo.

At some point around 1957 at the peak of the devastation, President Eisenhower came down to San Angelo to tour the baked and burnt West Texas lands. The local ranchers elected our Uncle Earl Byrd to represent the livestock industry in talks with the President.  The ranchers got together and picked out the finest local mohair and had it loomed into fabric and tailored into a beautiful sports coat as a gift for Ike.  After the initial meeting, the following day Uncle Earl hosts, at his ranch, President Eisenhower who arrives wearing the sports coat.  Walking around the place they decide to climb over a barbed wire fence and the President rips a big hole in his new mohair coat.  It was a bad moment, at least for the local ranchers who had tried so hard to create a special gift.  Folks wondered if it was a bad omen.

In one of the Texas Monthly anniversary issues, the 25th or 30th, Elmer Kelton, as an eyewitness, memorialized the story about Ike, Uncle Earl and the torn coat in a far better fashion and style than I could muster.  Kelton’s reputation as a writer and preservationist of West Texas history and life knows no equal.

Texas writer W.F. Strong:

Like me, many Texas literary critics consider it one of the top ten best novels ever written by a Texan about Texas. It was also Kelton’s favorite book, and what he called his signature work – which is saying something considering he wrote 50. He received both the Spur Award and the Western Heritage Award for “The Time It Never Rained.”

We must all be grateful that Kelton was a poor cowboy. When he was a young man he said his inability to rope and ride well pushed him toward reading, and then writing. Had he been a better cowboy, he told a New York Times reporter back in 1984, “I’d still be working out on some ranch on the Pecos River.”

Kelton’s father was a great cowboy and a fine man made of unyielding standards. He was the man who inspired the character of Charlie Flagg, the admirable protagonist in “The Time It Never Rained.” Kelton said that, to his father, “work was something you did on horseback, or with a shovel.’”

The book is not your run-of-the-mill Western novel. There are no shootouts. No one dies.

Two other Elmer Kelton books I love and need to mention are The Good Old Boys, made into a movie with Tommy Lee Jones and Sissy Spacek, and The Wolf and the Buffalo, a fascinating novel about the black cavalry soldiers who fought in the Indian wars in Texas and the American West.

You never regret buying and reading these books.  There are no more Elmer Keltons to tell these stories of Texas heritage.