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My daughter’s first column for the Livestock Weekly was published today. Her grandfather, Monte Noelke, wrote a weekly column for the paper from 1961 until 2012 when he passed.
Grace has been coming to Irion County and Mertzon since she was a baby. She will no doubt be writing about these parts, but her columns will be varied, as were her grandfather’s.
Here’s a portion of her first column: “I write about West Texas not as its authority, nor as the rancher's daughter who worked the day to day. I'm the shadow that extends as the sun lowers into the western horizon, the first generation with one degree of separation from the cowboy. And yet, despite the generational gap, I am ill with the disease filled love affair. I too have succumbed to her dusty seduction.”
I’m not going to be re-posting her columns here, of course. I’d like you to go out and subscribe. The digital subscription is not expensive.
To start things off, as an intermediary of sorts between these generations, I think it’s appropriate for me begin where my father left off. Below is his last column for the Livestock Weekly, published by the paper the week he passed in 2012. His message is for us all, even today. He is buried in the Mertzon cemetery, a few yards from his great grandfather who landed in Texas at Indianola in 1848. He wrote this article specifically to be published after his death.
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In all the times I rode across the Bank Hill sitting upright before I became a prospect for the spot of honor, there never was a chance for the deceased on his one-way ticket in the hearse to make one more dance in Angelo, or take one more ride at the ranch.
When we buried Jake Childress way back there, rains flooded the whole country. The pallbearers were halfway up under the funeral home’s awning. Looked like the sides of the grave were going to cave in before the coffin could be lowered. About the time it seemed like the preacher wasn’t going to be able to think of another word, he came over to each of the pallbearers, glared in our faces, pointed to the open grave and said, “That is the real thing, brother.”
Well, the funeral was the real thing for me, too. Old Jake rode into a horse I hung to at the gate going out of the Clay Water Hole pasture in the Monument trap after a rain about as hard as the one falling at his funeral. We’d crossed a draw deep enough to swim our horses. As I started to dismount, my left foot slipped in the stirrup and a tie rope hung the right leg of my chaps. Jake rode in and grabbed the right rein and the headstall and gave me time to kick loose.
So burying Jake was double the real thing for me. He’s the cowboy I wrote about who pulled an old kid out of another horse wreck, but that’s what a final deadline means. It means it’s time to bury those old stories, too.
Sitting in the office at the ranch, I think better of how to write this final column. Most of my books are shelved there. The pictures of the steady hands at the old ranch, one photograph of the Big Boss standing by his friend Cecil Smith, mounted on a polo pony, are up on the very top shelf. Notebooks filled with letters from old friends are stacked in a row. A gal leg spur of my maternal grandfather’s and a rusty OK spur I found up on the big bluff overlooking the Monument Ranch are in a pile of papers on top of the desk.
The oak desk where I wrote my columns cost 25 bucks and came from Harris Luckett Hardware in San Angelo, when the fixtures of the old store sold in 1962. The roll-top on the other wall came from a barn on a leased ranch. I paid 30 dollars for it. I spent $600 restoring the desk.
Unless you have eight roll-top desks and that many more chairs for the daughters-in-law and son-in-law to sit on, they are hard to divide in a large family like mine of seven sons and one daughter. I thought about leaving a note if Tom Parr, the wood worker over in Angelo who restored the desk, is still around; Tom might be induced to make my casket out of the desk and solve two problems at once.
Big drawback is going to be convincing Tom the work needs to be turned out in a hurry. Might be possible to anticipate the day of death and start him to work on the project ahead of time like the son did in William Faulkner’s story.I just want to be sure the casket isn’t a rushed-up job without the gold fittings and bronze handles needed to send me away in high style. (One thing different about my bequeaths or last wishes — the usual precaution in protecting the testator by his attorney from claims of unsound mind at probate at the slightest departure from the hithertos and henceforths of legalese, do not apply to a writer who has been in print since 1961. The and/ors can be omitted in my behalf.)
I worry more what is going to happen to my books than the other stuff I’ve accumulated. Books are shelved and stacked all over the ranch house and overflow to the Mertzon place. All one section at the ranch covers the early New Yorker Magazine era, so important an influence over my education. I thought about selling the collection, then visited the final days of the closing of a big book store in California to face the same editions strewn on the floor rejected at 50 cents a copy. There are a few first editions, a few copies signed by writers I knew or wrote letters to.
Pretty ironic that this will actually be my last deadline. I sure don’t have to worry about the next week.
Every time I came back across the hill from the Mertzon cemetery from a funeral, I planned on writing this column to leave in my bank box to be submitted for the real deadline. Doesn’t matter where the funeral is; my lot over on the north side of the windmill is visible. The boundary of the lot is less than a windmill rod length (20 feet) from the bottom of the tower legs. I have already instructed two windmill men, Possum Martin and Ray Beam, that after I am buried I don’t want rods and pipe stacked over or on my grave. Windmills have been enough of a burden without placing rusty pipes and broken rods on my grave site.
The plots all around the windmill belong to the families I knew in my childhood. Quite a number of the men once traded at the barbershop where I shined shoes in the 1930s. Far as I know they never told on me and I never wrote anything to hurt them. Shine boys hear and see the word from shoelace and boot heel level. I knew, for example, how much dividend the bank and the wool house paid way before the editor of the weekly newspaper, The Mertzon Star.
In those formative years, I got a well-rounded education. The barber’s wife taught me how to smoke cigarettes back in a tin shed where clothes were dry cleaned. The soda jerk at the drug store gave lessons to all of us working downtown how to play half-rack nine-ball at the pool hall for a big cut in the shoeshine revenue and the wages at the grocery store and the filling station.
Things were plenty exciting on Saturdays. One of the most vigorous characters was a trapper, who in advanced stages of intoxication, got down on his hands and knees out in the middle of the highway coming through town to paw and bellow like a bull at the approaching traffic. He’s the fellow I might have written about who leaped from the chair during a shave and shine to chase a pedestrian he wanted to whip, until he ran out of breath from his dissipation. Three days later, he brought back the barber’s apron, paid me for the shine, and gave the barber 50 cents to even up his bead. He may have been the wildest one of all our customers. A few years later, he died a horrible death in a runaway wild horse wreck pulling farm equipment.
Also, we street kids never missed a chance to watch the fist fights around the garage where men shot dice and played cards on a square cushion. (I was never to see a poker game again played on pillow or cushion from an old couch.Worked real well as a portable table.) Election years were exciting times around the barbershop, as feelings ran high, especially for the local races.
Doctor Deal had an office in the back of the drug store building that he leased to his son. Whatever boy swept out the drug store knew exactly how many stitches the doctor took to sew up old so-and-so’s eye from smarting off too loud in front of old such and such’s choice for commissioner.
Doctor Deal was a very strict church worker. The times offered few refinements for a doctor to have a painless practice, but he had no mercy for drunk cowboys.
The main lesson I learned from my customers, however, came much later in life. One Christmas when I visited my mother and stepdad’s graves, I read all the names along the way and remembered them coming in the barbershop or parking over at the post office. Over and over I’d heard my grandfather and grandmother say that if you lost or sold your land, you’d be buried in an unmarked grave. But on those visits I made later in life, I realized the abstracts and the stock certificates along with the bonds and bank accounts didn’t make much difference once you were dead.
Takes a lot of nerve to denounce a penny earned is a penny saved, or however the old axiom saws away at the conscience. But try someday to convince yourself out at the cemetery or on a visit to a nursing home that an estate plan is better than a living plan. While you are at either place, take a test and see what is better, the money you gave away alive, or the money you leave your heirs to divide.
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Copyright 2025 G Noelke