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A Gifted
Writer
by Bob Bowman |
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| At
lunch a few days ago in Tyler,
the subject turned to unusual writers in East
Texas. I immediately thought about Landon Bradshaw Even in East
Texas, where he lived all of his life, few people knew Landon,
a self-educated writer who had a remarkable gift for telling stories
in a down-to-earth fashion. |
He
wrote only one book, “These People Actually Lived in East Texas,”
a collection of newspaper columns he produced for the Beaumont Enterprise
and Jasper News Boy some four decades ago.
People who have copies cherish it with an affection reserved only
for their wives and rich uncles. |
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When
he wrote about “The Great San Augustine Hanging Bee,” Landon said:
“When Ben Lane of San Augustine County killed his lover, Sidney Ann
Dikes, in 1883, and threw her down a well, he committed two unforgivable
sins. He destroyed a beautiful woman and ruined a good well of water.”
In the end, Ben Lane was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.
“There was at least one person present who was dead set against the
proceedings. Ben Lane didn’t believe in hanging and said so. But Burl
Smith pulled the trip anyway.
“If the punishment was supposed to teach the guilty man a lesson,
the whole affair was a flop. During the hanging, Ben Lang suffered
injuries that resulted in death.”
Landon also raised watermelons and once appeared on the television
show, “I’ve Got A Secret,” as the only man who had raised a watermelon
bigger than he was. Landon’s melon tipped the scales at 136 pounds,
considerable more than his 115.
Coming
home to Jasper, he wrote about “The Traveling Tick.”
In New York, as he took a bath before his TV debut, he discovered
an East Texas tick clinging to his body. But instead of mashing him
betwen his fingers, Landon turned the tick loose in the hotel.
“That tick might be lucky and catch up with someone going overseas.
He could tour Europe, become a world traveler and be the best educated
tick in histrory. If he played his cards right, he could make the
trip with a movie queen.”
He finished with: “I don’t know what happened to that tick. The last
time I saw him, he had a promising future.”
In
a column about the way East Texans
talk, he wrote of visiting a lady near the Weeks’ Chapel chapel community
in Newton County.
Talking about her ancestors, she told Landon: “My four fathers came
to East Texas from Misery
in 1820, signed the decoration of independence and fought in the evolution.
My granddaddy was wounded in the Battle of Sandy Center and had to
have his leg hypenated. He drew a constipation check for the rest
of his life.”
Landon
died in Jasper in 1975, the victim of respiratory illnesses that had
plagued him from his World
War II days in Germany.
But to the people who knew him and loved his East Texas humor, he
hasn’t been forgotten.
As a friend once said: “It just didn’t make sense for an ol’ boy off
a watermelon farm in Brookeland to be reading books, and writing better
than the authors he read.” |
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