Throughout February 1999 my wife Mary and I were “winter Texans.” We visited sons and grandsons.  Mainly we attended two elderhostels. Elderhostels are centrally directed from Boston as a private, non-profit globally organized network of adult education opportunities for people 55  and older. 

The first February event was in Granbury, 30 minutes west-southwest of Fort Worth and an hour’s drive from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). When you leave I-40 west at U.S.377 and head south, you approach Granbury along its main link with Forth Worth. This was once the eastern edge of the legendary waist-high prairie grasses, long since done to death by sod busting and the relentless intrusions of water devouring cedar and juniper trees.

The themes of the Granbury Elderhostel were “COWBOYS, COMANCHES AND CULTURE.” The event is offered only once per year, with attendance limited to 40. This is because most of the lunches and dinners and a good percentage of the programs took place in three rooms of a solid but small restored historic structure, the Riley Aiken House, oldest residence in Hood County. Altogether we elderhostlers were only 34. The Riley Aiken House is on the grounds of the comfortable, warmly welcoming Plantation Inn on Lake Granbury, where we were all lodged. 

The elderhostel began Sunday evening February 7 [1999] and ended after breakfast Saturday February 13th. Cost per participant was $410. For most of our stay the weather was so warm that many chose to eat outdoors. After the initial wine and cheese ice-breaker and the first of a series of delicious catered meals, we received our first inkling of how high was the pedestal on which the leaders of Granbury put elderhostelers. We were greeted in succession by the Mayor, President of the Chamber of Commerce and Chairman of the Visitors Bureau, to name the most prominent. We were urged to display our elderhostel ID cards on our strolls through shops in downtown Granbury. Good things (including discounts) would happen to those of us who obeyed. This level and warmth of official welcoming was absolutely unprecedented in my several years of teaching in and being a student in elderhostels in eight states.

[NOTE: 2 1/2 years and five elderhostels later, Granbury remains uniquely welcoming. TPK 06/25/2001.]

The room between dining room and lecture room was circled by tables piled high with books on cattle trails, Comanche history and Central and West Texas. All were for sale on the spot at steep discounts by owner Dee Gormley and staff of Books on the Square. The volumes remained there and available to us for three days. A second Elderhostel first! 

During a later visit to downtown Books on the Square, I bought  some old maps of the Republic of Texas, when its northern border stretched into present day Wyoming. 

On our first full day, we enjoyed two packed, lengthy lectures by  73 year old prolific novelist and chronicler of the trail drives, Elmer Kelton. He had driven over from San Angelo to speak to us gratis about legendary cattlemen like Jesse Chisholm, Charles Goodnight and John Chisum, the trails they broke, the cattle they drove north and the ranches they created in the Texas Panhandle and Colorado. In 1994 Tommy Lee Jones directed and starred in the film for TV, “THE GOOD OLD BOYS,” from Kelton’s 1978 novel. With fifty books to his credit, Elmer Kelton’s advice to young writers remains, “Don’t quit your day job.” He had been an agricultural journalist in San Angelo. Kelton  provided us elderhostlers an introductory bibliography to books about West Texas and the cattle drives. He also sketched the history of horsemanship from Muslim North Africa through Spain and into the New World.

We spent the morning of our last full day a few miles outside Granbury on the  Iron Eagle Ranch of a sculptor, Mr Covelle Jones. Covelle (as he prefers to be called) lives in two weathered wooden buildings brought together from elsewhere and now fitted  snugly together. They made me think I was back in the 1890s and walking up to  a Texas saloon and grocery store. I counted over a dozen handguns, rifles and shotguns in both his living and working area. He warned us that all were loaded and at any minute he might have to grab one to go after a pesky cougar recently prowling the neighborhood. 

Covelle  had just completed a commissioned, exquisitely detailed two foot high wax model of a Texas Ranger. Numbered bronzes will soon flow from molds, with proceeds used to benefit a charity dear to these legendary State policemen. Depicted, at the insistence of the Rangers, was Chuck Norris, star of  “WALKER, TEXAS RANGER,” a TV series produced in nearby Irving where our two sons live. “WALKER” and Chuck Norris fans might not be pleased to learn that real Texas Rangers are uniformly clean-shaven, do not use non-standard shotguns, do not draw their pistols cross handed or put spurs on the wrong foot. Covelle was a gracious, winning host,  generous with his time. . A visit to his small herd of Longhorn cattle was followed by lunch  on his lawn: a Texas barbecue culminating in “dessert tamales.”

That final evening we went to the restored 19th Century Granbury Opera House, now in its 25th year of new life. This theater includes a year-round professional company which performs 46 weeks. In the summer, college interns room in a dorm near the theater. The Opera House took its modern form in 1975 under Managing Director Jo Ann Miller who held her position for 21 seasons and is  held in awe by present staff. We elderhostlers had enjoyed an on-site lecture and tour of the Opera House two days earlier. On Friday we watched current Managing Director, Ms.. Marty Van Kleeck and her co-star, Pam Dougherty, a favorite in theaters in Dallas and Fort Worth, acting in “A COUPLA WHITE CHICKS SITTING AROUND TALKING,” by John Ford Noonan.

Next week’s column will tell more about the small gem which is Granbury, Texas.

-OOO-

for Asheville TRIBUNE