Remembering an icon
Over 65 years, beloved newspaper columnist made ordinary folks bloom
In 1984, I had the good luck to interview Leon Hale, a writer I had been admiring since the 1950s when I was attending Golfcrest Elementary School in the East End. My father, like Hale and about the same age, had grown up in a small town in North Texas, flew airplanes during World War II and moved to Houston to start a business and a family. He was a reader who always had a paperback novel in the hip pocket of his khakis and he admired Hale’s columns. If he had been a writer, he would have tried to write like Hale.
When my third grade teacher gave me my first ballpoint pen in 1953, I put it in my shirt pocket and vowed that I was going to write. When I looked around Houston for a model, Hale seemed to be the only one available. His familiar voice seemed to belong to a member of my family. So when he died on March 27 at 99 and after 65 years of column writing, I grieved as I would over family.
Hale made writing a newspaper column about country folks and personal memories look easy, although of course, it’s not. He wrote with simplicity and sincerity about the pleasures of life, about what it means to He once wrote about how beautiful it was to watch foaming gasoline gush into the glass cylinders of an old-timey pump, or how good it felt to play baseball or to smell wood smoke or have a certain old woman smile at him. He would almost always guide you indirectly to his overriding and wise theme of the preciousness of small moments and the value of lives that do not play in the great dramas of politics and power. As a journalist I feel I should keep up with the news, but in this time of upheaval and division I long for writers who are not taking sides and pounding the table. I want to read someone who is not trying to prove a thesis.
He was the embodiment of all the people who came from rural places and filled up Houston after World War II. Most came to make their fortunes in oil, industry and commerce. Hale came to make a living, as he liked to say, by writing sen
tences. We watched him wander around the state looking for storytellers and dogs and oldtimers who represented the Texas that was rapidly disappearing. We watched his children grow up and heard the tales of his childhood during the Depression in West Texas. We learned about his father, an irrepressible traveling salesman, and glimpsed briefly the sadness of his two divorces. If there is any truth to Alexander Pope’s dictum, “Style is the man,” then Leon Hale fit it.
He was 64 when I interviewed him for a long defunct magazine. He was recovering from a divorce and living in a two-room apartment near San Felipe, just inside the Loop. The walls were lined with books.
“I like the way they look,” he said. “It just makes me feel good to have them around me.”
That was his theme: feeling good. And yet so much was going on behind that statement. On an old chest that served as a coffee table were a brand new history of the town of Trinity and a worn-out paperback copy of the autobiography of Mark Twain (his favorite book). But there was also Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” a book about social and religious upheaval in which the heroine kills herself, and another one that looked like heavy going: “The Christian Agnostic.”
Hale never complained in his columns about what didn’t feel good, but that didn’t mean he didn’t think about it.
If you looked out from the balcony, you saw the thick trunk of a hackberry tree. In the mild autumn weather, it lost its leaves late, and Hale wrote about that.
Most surprising was what was just beyond the hackberry tree: a blank, high concrete wall that completely filled up the view.
“I’ve come to be fond of that wall there,” he said, “because the way the light changes is something else. Look at it happening.”
In the golden afternoon light, the shadow of the few leaves and branches of the hackberry tree were making a shimmering hieroglyph on the wall.
“I can look out there and I can produce almost anything on that screen that I want,” he said. “I can make it an ocean, I can make it a mountain range.”
He was talking, I think, about how he fought dread with his imagination and his writing, and never mentioned it to his readers, which was why readers loved him. He didn’t lecture. He didn’t write about the news that troubled him and his readers, who covered the spectrum of political and religious beliefs. He kept doctrine out of his writing, which might explain why he never was syndicated. He wrote for all of us, not a few.
Attached to the bulletin board over his desk a Latin motto was carved in a wooden placque: Ad Quid Venisti? That means, some monks in Schulenburg told him, Why are you come?, and is supposed to be what Judas said to Jesus in the garden on the night of the Last Supper. The words are hung on the walls of far-flung monasteries, Hale said, to remind monks of the reason they endure their deprivations and discipline. It was Hale’s favorite question and came to mean for him, “What is the value of living? What are we doing here?”
One thing that makes life worth living is stories. Long before he ever knew he wanted to be a writer, Hale loved to listen to stories. He would hide under the porch of one of the many West Texas houses he lived in and listen to the old folks. He said “they help preserve some of the fun of being a Texan.” And he lamented the passing of what he regarded as authentic, self-deprecating Texas humor and vulgarization by the professional Texan who is “the worst of all things, a phony.”
He hated the image of the bragging Texan, the ones who wear a cowboy hat to run for office, the loud ones who are often on camera and, these days, on social media. These were not the people he talked to for his columns, the caricatures who hog the spotlight but were not what Texas was about in his mind.
In his early columns, Hale seemed too busy collecting other people’s stories. He was a little bit like a reporter, gathering the tales of country storekeepers and beach bums and tavern owners and farmers and fishermen and rural bus drivers and the like.
In his collection, “A Smile from Katie Hattan & Other Natural Wonders,” he hit his stride. The smile from Katie Hattan is a wonder, a lesson to people who feel sorry for themselves from a 104-year-old daughter of enslaved people. “Easy Going,” his third collection, continues the theme, about a woman in a housecoat who gave him a gardenia, and how he, an “old guy,” is driving to the store to get some cream for his coffee and it’s a beautiful day and a young woman in an open Jeep stops at the traffic light next to him. She’s about the age of his own daughter.
“Before I knew I was doing it, I had my head stuck out the window and was telling her hello, and I asked her what she thought about the day.
“She took that greeting just exactly right. She tossed her head back a little and sang me an answer. She said she thought it was a beautiful day, just perfect. So I tossed her my flower.
“The range was short and I made a good pitch. The flower landed on the seat beside her. She picked it up and smelled it and tucked the stem inside her scarf so that the bloom was close to her ear.
“As the light changed, she turned my direction and switched on a smile that must have fogged film in the drugstore across the street. A smile so brilliant it’s a lucky thing it wasn’t released at night, else every electric light within half a mile would have shut off in shame.”
He then turns and addresses the reader with a confidence and joy that no writer since
Walt Whitman has matched. When you finish that essay, you feel good. You feel you have been loved.
That is the primary pleasure of a good Hale column. There are others, of course. One is his utter sincerity. He believes in what he writes. Nor is he so in love with himself or his country people that he loses all perspective. A lot of what country people have to say is not worth listening to, he wrote in one book. His attention shifted increasingly to city people, as he found he was not interested just in country people, but in thinking about people in general.
In a column Hale asked his readers — his customers, as he called them — to interpret a recurring dream he had had for years. It’s of a big, one-story frame house in the country with a wide porch all around it.
“I have sat, in dreams, on that porch many times,” he wrote. “I look out over rolling terrain that has no trees. But it has wildflowers in great profusion. There are bluebonnets and pink primroses and Indian paintbrushes and half a dozen kinds of yellow-blooming flowers, and they’re so thick the colors blend and make a kind of master color that hasn’t any name that I know. When the wind comes, it makes waves of color that roll up and over the slopes and it’s beautiful.
“But the house is lonely. It has nothing to accompany it. No shrub. No barn. No fence. No clothesline pole. No toolshed.”
The house is Hale himself, of course. Those wildflowers blending their colors are his writing, each small flower, each column, a striving toward beauty. And even if the flowers are not towering and long-lived, like a tree, they have a special beauty all their own. The loneliness is the loneliness of mortality.
It’s a beautiful and sad dream, the dream of an artist, and I think he knew what it was about, but he wanted to share it with the customers so they might think about their own anxieties.
The dream was answered by his partner of the 40 years, Babette Fraser Hale. They spent a lot of time in a house they bought in the town of Winedale from a customer who said, “I know a field where there’s 12 acres of violets in bloom.”
It’s hard to imagine another Leon Hale coming along.
Journalism has become specialized. Political parties have their own television stations. Social media gives everyone a place to bark and curse one another. Social life takes place in a silo, not on a front porch. Would there be a job description for a newspaper writer like Hale, who wanted to write from the heart about why we are here? Who wanted to stir his readers to ask the same questions of themselves?
Probably not. Leon Hale did not have a job. He had a calling.