Bigger Than Life, Death on the Gritty Frontier

West Texas farm boy Doyle Brunson was a state champion miler at Sweetwater and a star basketball player at Hardin-Simmons until a broken leg ended his athletic career.

He was selling business machines in Fort Worth when he stumbled onto a poker game in a customer’s office. Bingo! After quickly winning a month’s salary, he quit his job and set about becoming a professional gambler.

Known now as Texas Dolly, Brunson lives in Las Vegas, owns two World Series of Poker trophies and is recognized by colleagues as probably the greatest no-limit poker player of all time.

Says he: “The only time money means anything to me is when I run out of it.”

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West Texans often are bigger than life. And death.

When Canadian rancher Malouf “Oofie” Abraham Sr. died at age 78, his grandsons buried him with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a wooden nickel Oofie used as a campaign token during his champagne days in the Texas Legislature, and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

But first they asked the hearse driver to cruise through the rodeo grounds en route to the cemetery. Explained Oofie’s son: “They knew their granddaddy would want to make the drag one last time.”

--Amarillo Globe-News

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The role model of a West Texas cattleman was Watkins “Watt” Reynolds Matthews, who lived on his Lambshead Ranch outside Albany until his death last year at 98. His only extended absence was when he attended Princeton University.

At his death, his obit was headlined: “Die? This epitome of the Texas rancher? How could he?”

Mused his old pal Dub Bizzell: “He was as good a cowman as they come. . . . He could look a cow in the butt and read its mind.”

--Fort Worth Star-Telegram

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The low-income neighborhood of Ysleta fronts Alameda Avenue in El Paso, home to the amazing class of 1992 at Ysleta High School. In all, five seniors were accepted at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The MIT Five “gave a lot of momentum to the school and the community,” counselor Irma Sanchez said. “These kids were all motivated.”

Albert Martinez parlayed his software engineering degree into a job with Intel, and David Villarreal brought his industrial engineering diploma back home to work for Johnson & Johnson. Alicia Ayala opted for the University of Texas-El Paso instead.

Ayala went on obtain a master’s degree at UTEP and conduct research for NASA.

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For years, the knowns and unknowns grazed on C.W. Stubblefield’s barbecue and entertained in his east Lubbock restaurant--Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Ely, even Tom T. Hall from Nashville.

Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, they all knew him.

Stubb died in 1995, but jars of sauces and pickled jalapenos still bear his nickname, as does the Lubbock cafe and another in Austin.

“People are good all over, least ways more of them good than bad,” he once observed.

-- Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

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West Texas never suffered a shortage of assertive newspaper publishers, but few were quite so colorful as Ben Ezell, who spent 45 years at the helm of the weekly Canadian Record.

Friends and colleagues insisted that his honesty and fairness were exceeded only by his courage. He opposed John Birchers, an incompetent county sheriff and a politician who wanted to bomb North Vietnam into a pile of sand.

“I’ve been here 43 years, and I’ve only been worked over once,” he told a reporter in 1991.

The “work-over” happened in 1955, when Ezell was on the losing end of a fistfight with a mayoral candidate unhappy with an editorial. In 1971, someone, presumably another irate reader, blew 19 holes in the office door with a pellet gun.

“Someone was expressing an editorial opinion,” Ezell quipped. “These things must be expected in this business.”

--Amarillo Globe-News