The small red volume beckoned from the bottom shelf of a used bookshop in Rockport. The dust jacket revealed a black cowboy boot rendered in a rough woodcut style.
Oh dear. What is this? A digest of cornpone sayings reported in cringe-worthy dialect? A stale series of tall tales about how Texas is superior to smaller, meeker states?
Look again. The black-and-white portrait on the back of the 1961 first-edition, offered for $10, shows a man in a modern suit and tie. A lit cigarette projects from one hand that rests lightly on a handsomely cleft jaw.
His eyes are focused on the middle distance. One might guess that our subject is a dreamer if it weren’t for the heavy crease in his forehead that suggests habitual skepticism.
The author? Paul Crume. The name meant nothing to me.
Yet if you lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area from the 1930s through the 1970s, it turns out, you probably read Crume’s byline in the Dallas Morning News. For most of those years, he wrote a prominently placed daily column, a custom that lives on among newspaper columnists who also blog every day.
Page 1 of “A Texan at Bay” pours out a steady stream of warmth and modest wit.
“I was born in a log cabin in the Ozarks,” Crume writes. “Despite this promising start, it is as near as I ever came to the presidency. My first pet, the most amiable one I ever had, was a black-snake who lived under the cabin. He died in a flood of scalding water because my mother was jealous of his attentions to me.”
Crume’s career mirrors that of Herb Caen, who wrote about San Francisco on a daily basis for more than 50 years. Closer to home, Crume wrote alongside John Rosenfield, the legendary Dallas theater critic who did as much as anyone else to promote high standards on the Texas stage from the 1920s through the 1960s.
Daily columnists like these did — and do — reflect their times and places. They give context to the life experiences of their readers.
Crume’s Dallas was full of Texans who had, like himself, grown up in rural areas, enjoyed the advantages of public education — Crume studied at the University of Texas, that great civilizer — then lived in cities that eventually and in certain ways rivaled the coasts for liveliness and urbanity.
Crume’s Monday “Big D” columns, reprinted here, considered Texans reflectively. He often wrote about his childhood in the West Texas towns of Farwell and Lariat in Parmer County near the New Mexico border.
He doesn’t over-romanticize these memories and, gratefully, succumbs to dialect very rarely in 212 mellow, forgiving pages.
“Thirty years ago, Lariat was a grain elevator on the Santa Fe tracks, a cotton gin, a combination filling station-store-post office and a small white church, with a half a dozen nearby farmhouses for a residential section,” he recalls. “On late autumn afternoons, the shadows of the buildings lay eastward across the vacant, flat land for half a mile like marks of blue powder on the gold of the grasslands and the kafir fields.”
Where did he learn such economy of style, such verbal rectitude? One clue can be found in his profile of a UT Latin teacher, Miss Roberta Lavender, “a Virginia gentlewoman who looked every inch her name.”
“Most of us who studied under her sensed 25 years ago that Miss Lavender’s world was dying,” he writes. “It was a world in which learning was the beginning of wisdom, not the means for turning out supermechanics.”
A chunk of “A Texan at Bay” is devoted to the inevitable rivalries among cities, counties and states. His targets were often Californians or Oklahomans. (Some things don’t change.)
He also took aim at Alaska, newly the country’s 50th state. He seems glad that Alaska relieved Texas of its obligations as the biggest and brashest of the brood.
It goes without saying that Crume did not produce such glowing prose every day.
Like Caen, Rosenfield and today’s columnists, he was forced by deadlines to improvise around scant material or fall back on formulas. One of our own editors, who worked at the Morning News back then, recalls that the paper reprinted Crume’s Christmas column every year without emendation.
Born in 1912, Crume died in 1975. His wife put together another volume entitled “The World of Paul Crume.” I’ll keep a stray eye out for it. Scandalously, one seller on Amazon is offering a used copy for 8 cents.
I think Crume would be amused.