Leon Hale’s March 16, 2014 column announced his retirement from writing columns after almost 65 years on the job, in aggregate, for the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle. He deemed it time to retire, 30 years past the time most people quit the rat race. We “customers” of Leon Hale thought this day would never come – because he and his observations are timeless.
Hale was born May 30, 1921, in Stephenville, Texas. He wrote a column for the Houston Post for 32 years, then moved to the Houston Chronicle from which he retired in 1985. But he never stopped writing. He wrote a personal commentary for years until his retirement in 2014. In retirement, he worked on a “retirement journal” (which became his last book, “See You On Down The Road”) until his death March 27,2021 just a couple of months shy of his 100th birthday.
In addition to the columns Hale wrote, he is the author of eleven books. He received the lifetime achievement award from the Texas Institute of Letters (also awards for fiction and non-fiction from that group), United Press international, the Associated Press, the Headliners Foundation – among others. He fought in World War II as an aerial gunner on 50 combat missions.
Reading “See You On Down the Road” made me think about this customer’s (he called his readers customers) time spent wrapped up in his stories. When I was a child, my family followed Hale’s column religiously. Once we followed his directions to find a ghost road in East Texas – and we thought we had found the ghost until it turned into a reflection on a car’s windshield. No one elevated the common man better than Hale, and who can forget his trips south each year to find the spring?
And Leon Hale loved East Texas. I found the following quote in one of his columns from the Houston Chronicle:
“I’m struck with an almost painful hankering to get back on the road. Go east first, on U.S. 90, through Dayton and Liberty and through the rice fields, and then cut up into the Big Thicket. To Sour Lake, Kountze, Silsbee. Spend a day or two listening to the birds along the Neches River.
“I haven’t spent any time in the East Texas Piney Woods in years, and I need to go. I used to think it was a sin to miss East Texas in November, when the hardwood foliage put on its color show. Or in spring, when the dogwood bloomed.
“Go on north to Woodville, Jasper, San Augustine. And Sam Rayburn Reservoir. I once burned a good deal of gas running around on what’s now the bottom of Rayburn, and Lake Livingston as well. Those lakes flooded a lot of timberland. (I wonder what he would have thought of this year’s floods?)
“I’d want to run on up to Caddo Lake, just to get the feeling of that spooky place one more time. I still like to believe the ivory-bill woodpecker, supposed to be extinct, is alive somewhere back in the woods of Caddo.
“Then come back down to Nacogdoches and Lufkin. I spent so much time in those two towns, I had plans to retire in or near one or the other of them. And if I’d ever found the right little patch of woods up there to build a cabin on, I’d be writing this stuff from East Texas instead of Washington County.
“I’d love to roam a while through Davy Crockett National Forest. And see if anyone in Livingston or Crockett remembers me. I was the skinny dude walking around with a pencil and notebook, trying to get somebody to tell me a story.
“Then Huntsville. I hung around that town so much, I ought to have paid taxes. While drinking coffee in the Texan Cafe there, I heard every lie ever told in Walker County, and that’s a mighty lot of them.”
Personally, I learned a lot from Leon Hale. When I was working on my English/journalism degree at Sam Houston State University, this young, would-be journalist was fortunate enough to take Feature Writing I and II from Mr. Hale the only two semesters he tried to make a living teaching. In those days, he typed his columns on a manual typewriter using the hunt and peck method. He was an unusual college professor to say the least. You never knew what he would bring to class – a wooden clothes pin today, a corn cob tomorrow – a full-fledged story, or just an observation. (His description of what you did with an old corn cob in an outhouse still lingers in the recesses of my brain today.) What I learned in his classes has served this writer to this day. I learned to observe – everything. I learned everything and everyone has a story, you just need to look for it. How good a story depends on the storyteller and the relationship to his/her “customer,” so get to know your source. I took his lessons to heart.
When I published my first story for Image magazine, I called Mr. Hale to thank him. Now many years later, I’m still harvesting wonderful stories from people around me, and I am still grateful for Leon Hale’s teachings. I sometimes wonder how my writing would have changed if he never brought a corn cob to class.
The attached picture is of Leon Hale and his family’s late Lab, Charlotte Bronte. The picture was taken by Babette Hale and we should credit her with the picture. n
