Four days after receiving the Medal of Freedom from fellow Texan and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, J. Frank Dobie lay down for his afternoon siesta on Sep. 18, 1964 and never woke up.
The future folklorist was born in 1888 on the family ranch south of San Antonio. The closest community was six miles away, the Live Oak County village of Dinero.
To some the Brush Country of his birth and upbringing was a bleak wasteland but not to James Frank Dobie. For him it was love at first sight, a passionate bond that caused his mother to remark, “Why, son, you think more of the ranch than of your own people.”
Daddy Dobie, a strict fundamentalist, read to his six children from the Bible, while their mother nurtured them on a long list of classics that included “Ivanhoe,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Robinson Crusoe” and “David Copperfield.”
Despite their differences, both parents emphasized education. They hired a governess to teach Dobie and his nearest sibling until a schoolhouse was built on the ranch. Then at age 16 he was sent to Alice to live with his grandparents and attend high school.
Two years later, Dobie enrolled at Southwestern University in Georgetown. He held his own in class, but the size of the place -- 600 students! -- overwhelmed him.
By his junior year, the shy youth had come out of his shell. He was on the staff of the student newspaper, a cheerleader for the baseball team and a regular contributor to the literary magazine. He also found his first cause, an anti-elitist crusade against fraternities and sororities. Always the champion of the underdog, he admitted years later, “I cannot remember when I was not on the side of rebels.”
After graduation in the spring of 1910, Dobie got his first teaching job at faraway Alpine. He returned to Southwestern the following year, where he taught until going to New York City in 1913 for post-graduate study at Columbia.
His master’s degree landed Dobie a faculty position at the University of Texas in 1914. He was not altogether happy with his colleagues complaining to his mother that he preferred the company of down-to-earth cattlemen over pretentious professors. “Law me!” she snorted in disbelief. “Some of them don’t have brains enough to fry an egg in!” After a six-year courtship conducted almost exclusively by mail, Dobie married Bertha McKee, whom he had met at Southwestern. Eight months later, he left his sickly bride to fight “the war to end all wars.” He was discharged in time for the fall 1919 semester at UT but resigned before the spring term to lend his favorite uncle a hand. Dobie’s year on the Rancho de Los Olmos proved to be the turning point of his life. He returned to Austin in 1921 with a calling -- to collect the stories Texans passed down by word-of-mouth and to transform the tales into literature. Meanwhile, Dobie’s rocky relationship with the UT establishment went from bad to worse. The vast majority of faculty members, born and educated out of state, looked down their noses at Texas. For example, when the token Texan proposed a course on Southwestern literature, they informed him there was no such thing. After Dobie was told he could not expect to advance up the academic ladder without a Ph.D., the situation came to a head.
Refusing on principle to satisfy the requirement, he bolted to Oklahoma State and did not come back until friends negotiated a modest raise and a face-saving promotion.The publication of A Vaquero of the Brush Country in 1931 established the maverick “as a spokesman of Texas southwestern culture.” But the spectacular success two years later of Coronado’s Children forever changed Dobie’s life and earned the grudging respect of his snobbish peers. In 1933 he was promoted to full professor -- a first for a native Texan and an instructor without the obligatory Ph.D.
The 1930’s were a prolific decade for Dobie. He published On the Open Range, Tales of the Mustang, The Flavor of Texas and Apache Gold and Yanqui Silver in addition to starting a weekly newspaper column that continued for 25 years.
Dobie’s dogged defense of embattled UT president Homer P. Rainey along with his outspoken advocacy of unions’ right to strike during World War II and full voting rights for blacks resulted in his dismissal by the board of regents. Finally freed to write full-time, he produced The Voice of the Coyotes (1949), The Ben Lilly Legend (1950), The Mustangs (1952), Tales of Old Time Texas (1955), Up the Trail From Texas (1955) and I’ll Tell You a Tale (1960). But after a bad bout with pneumonia in 1957, “Mr. Texas” was never his same energetic self. Five years later, he was seriously injured in a car wreck near his Austin home, and only an emergency tracheotomy kept him above ground. The week before his seventy-sixth birthday in 1964, Dobie received the first copy of Cow People in the morning mail. Later that day, he died in his sleep during a nap. “The important thing in life is to see clearly,” J. Frank Dobie once advised a young admirer. “See all you can. And above all, live by what you, yourself, see.” and I would go retrieve him, but he never quit wandering. He finally disappeared and we never found him or heard of his whereabouts. Hopefully he recovered enough to fly and returned to his past habitat. I have looked for another one but to no avail. I should be satisfied with my 3 dogs, 10 head of bovine, 1 horse, plenty of wild birds we feed, 10 or 12 deer we feed every evening and a couple parakeets in a cage in the breakfast nook....... I sure need a crow....!!!
I will just stick to painting them........... The painting above is headed to the “Trappings of Texas” 24x30 oil on canvas , framed and ready to hang.. $10,800