Country newspaperman mused wisdom under pen names
CIRCLEVILLE — Let’s say you’re a traveling salesman in the late 1940s, and your territory covers much of Texas. Maybe you’re a manufacturer’s rep for lines of hardware, maybe pharmaceuticals or piece goods. Coming into one of the little towns you call on, you make a habit of glancing at the local newspaper over coffee; you’re looking for conversation starters. (“How ‘bout them Panthers Friday night?”) Thumbing through the paper, you might chuckle over the wise and witty columns of Pecos Willie in the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Stovall Creek Philosopher in Diboll’s weekly paper or the Jollyville Road Philosopher in the Round Rock Free Press.
What you might not have guessed in your wide newspaper reading was that the various newspaper “philosophers” across the state were the same man — a country editor, columnist and novelist named Henry B. Fox. A resident of this unincorporated hamlet near Taylor for much of his life, Fox wrote his weekly “philosopher” columns for nearly 55 years.
Longview resident Gary Borders, publisher of a succession of small-town newspapers, never met Fox, despite paying $7.50 a month for years to run his columns. He recalls opening Monday’s mail one morning nearly three decades ago, when he was publisher of the Fort Stockton Pioneer in far West Texas, and reading a preface to Fox’s latest — and last — offering: “If you have wondered who Pecos Willie was, we can now tell you. He was not a local man, as we pretended. He was H.B. Fox, who lived on a ranch in Texas. He has written his last column. He died on Jan. 31, 1989.” (Borders found out later that his daughter, Carol Fox, had penciled in the date.)
Borders, who writes a weekly column of his own for Red River Radio, the East Texas NPR network, describes Fox as “a genuine journalist” and “a very unique guy.” He was so intrigued by the quintessential small-town newspaperman that he’s written a biography of Fox,