The Winsett Springs Murder

Brutal Winsett Springs Murder

Chills History of Tranquil Place

By Jeff Clark

            Travis Winsett has gone missing.

            The backroads of Eastland County look like fields of fireflies tonight. Folks drive up and down, spotlights shining inside bar ditches. Flashlights sweep across empty pastures, peer inside silent barns looking for 52-year-old Travis Winsett.

            It isn’t like him to take off like this.

            Winsett Springs is located just east of Ranger on Hwy 571. Horse drawn wagons stopped here, the spring’s pipe ending so close to the trail one could almost catch water in cups, never leaving their buckboard seat.

Winsett water was cold and pure. Fill your containers. Let your horses drink. John “Milton” Winsett came to Ranger in 1900, planning to continue to Arizona. He ran into Sam Philipps in Ranger, who offered him a job and a room at his Colony Creek spread. Milton later married Philipps’ daughter Lucy, having two kids Veda and Travis during the marriage.

Milton was an outdoorsman, learning about a spring Indians once camped around. He found its waters seeping weakly from the ground, as the Indians had “spoiled it,” driving large timbers into its mouth. Winsett bought this land around 1902 and through hard work released the spring waters once again.

Winsett Springs helped save Ranger during the 1912 typhoid epidemic and the 1917 oil boom. Stagnant cisterns invited typhoid – treated by lots of water and not eating. Men made livings hauling water from Winsett Springs in wood barrels by mule-drawn wagons during the oil boom. It sold for $1 a barrel.

Some thought Texas Rangers might have used the springs as a camp. Caddo and Comanche may have called this place home.

Ranger’s 1935 Cooper School kids hiked here, spending the day roasting wieners and marshmallows on a camp fire. Alameda schoolmates visited during their 1940 senior trip.

Activity at Winsett Springs had tapered off by 1970, however.

            Travis Winsett has always been an enigma to locals. He’s described differently, depending on who you ask. Published accounts say he was well-respected. Anecdotal words paint the picture of a loner, a nice man who tipped his hat to school kids driving his mom to town.

Travis was arrested by the FBI for draft evasion during WWII. Some said he traveled with pacifists, giving speeches downtown on a portable loud speaker. Strange, as Travis might’ve been exempt from the draft being a farmer. His best friend was a WWII airplane gunner.

“His distance came about because he kept to himself,” niece Lucie Olson told me. “He didn’t want to cause any trouble or bother anybody. He was a very quiet, introspective artist/engineer type. Not anti-social at all, but he didn’t go out looking for things to do either. He had plenty with the gardening, farming and animal tending he did on a daily basis.”

By 1970, his parents had passed away. Townspeople noted the bachelor rarely spent money. Perhaps, some thought, it was hoarded up in that old Winsett house somewhere.

“To me he was a kind, gentle person,” Lucie remembered. “He took flies outside, without killing them. The only thing I ever saw him kill was rattlesnakes. It would have been much easier for him to go along with the draft, but killing violated everything he was about.”

Travis had a mechanical mind, once building a device to scare deer away tailored from a windmill and disk hammer. “Eccentric, but smart,” neighbors said. A nice man.

“Travis meant no harm to anyone. He was not un-American. He was a pacifist and if he had been a Quaker or Seventh Day Adventist, he would have been left alone,” Lucie said. “My grandmother had a stroke in 1968, and Travis and my mother cared for her at home until the very last. His patience and care was amazing to me.”

Lucie’s mom Veda, Mrs. Hubert Capps always thought of Travis as “her other child”, a touchstone connection that continued into adulthood. She was 11 years his elder. She had written him two letters that June, receiving no answer back. That wasn’t like Travis.

            Mrs. Capps arrived at the frame Winsett Springs farm house Saturday, June 27, 1970 to see what was up with her brother.

The front door was unlocked. His car was in the garage but he was nowhere around. She found the letter she’d written him the previous Sunday, still inside his mailbox.

The locals hadn’t missed him, until his sister raised the alarm.

The police were called. Sheriff Lefty Sublett, Ranger Police Chief J.W. Vinson, Deputy Sheriff Loy Williams, Ranger Constable Ralph Veal, Eastland Constable Bill Hunter, Game Warden Kenneth Payne, Ranger Justice of the Peace M.D. Underwood, Eastland Justice of the Peace L.W. Dalton and later District Attorney Emory Walton converged on the house.

            Walking inside, they sensed something wasn’t right. Moving Travis’ recliner chair near the front wall aside, they found dried blood on the hardwood floor. A small round hole was found in the front screen door. A rifle cartridge was located on the ground outside the front fence, below the left gate post some 50 feet away.

Mrs. Capps noticed a “Long Tom” shotgun absent from Travis’ bedroom. His arrowhead collection, valuable coins, and other items were also gone.

What the group didn’t find was Travis Winsett.

            Dozens of officers and volunteers spread out across the Winsett Farm. More hopped in their cars and pickups, searching high and low around the area. Neighbors said they hadn’t seen Travis since the previous Monday evening, right before supper time.

            Buzzy Rutledge was a high school senior in 1970. That previous Monday, he and his girlfriend noticed a house burning south of town at the Hathcock Farm. He drove to Ranger, hopped in a volunteer fire department truck and rushed to put out the blaze. There was no gas or electricity connected at the homeplace, making the fire’s cause a mystery. The house was totaled, its debris fallen all the way to its foundation.

After the Winsett manhunt got under way, that Monday’s mystery fire hit radar screens quickly. When searchers returned to the Hathcock Farm, they were greeted by a horrible smell. An old cistern under the back porch was covered by fallen debris. Flashlights shined down the dark cistern. Floating face up in the black water 22 feet below was the bloated corpse of Travis Winsett.

The search for Milton and Lucy’s only son was called off.

A killer was on the loose.

The fire department arrived, the body hoisted to the surface. One shot to the temple was visible. Justice of the Peace Underwood pronounced Travis dead, his body taken to Ranger’s funeral home. The cistern was searched with a magnet for a weapon and later drained. No clues were found.

            Constable Veal said, “I can think of a half dozen fellows around here we should talk with to find out where they were last Monday night.” One of the people interviewed remembered seeing someone in town with a new box of old arrowheads.

James Henry Bishop was a collector of old artifacts and antiques. Prior to Travis’ body being found, 32-year-old Bishop was investigated for burglary by Palo Pinto County Deputy Bill Harris. The deputy interviewed Bishop about a home burglary in the town of Palo Pinto. He remembered seeing a rifle in Bishop’s home, but it wasn’t connected with the crime he had been investigating.

Bishop was still in the Palo Pinto County Jail concerning that burglary. Eastland County lawmen were in luck. Meanwhile Travis’ body was sent to Abilene’s Hendricks Hospital for autopsy.

            The suspect appeared before a Palo Pinto County Justice of the Pace and was advised of his rights. Sheriff Sublett and District Attorney Walton then started asking questions.

            The rifle Harris had seen was bought at Weatherford’s First Monday Trade Days, Bishop told them. He couldn’t remember the seller’s name. Travis Winsett’s murder was news to him, Bishop maintained. The Long Tom, a .22 rifle, arrowheads, several silver half dollars, and other items of interest were found in Bishop’s home. A spent .22 cartridge similar to that found outside Winsett’s gate was found in Bishop’s vehicle.

            Sublett and Walton questioned Bishop a second time. His story didn’t waiver, other than admitting being near the Winsett place, finding one of the stolen items in a ditch. He acted like he wanted to help, lawmen said.

            The Hendricks autopsy found that a single shot had entered Travis WInsett’s right temple and remained in his skull. The slug was virtually destroyed. Local ballistics tests wouldn’t be able to tell if the bullet had been shot from the rifle taken from Bishop. Travis’ sister identified some of the items taken from Bishop as being her brother’s.

            Texas Ranger H.R. Block took possession of the spent slug. It joined the seized .22 rifle, two cartridges and dust samples from the Winsett and Bishop homes at the Dept. of Public Safety lab in Austin.

            Two days later on July 8, James Henry Bishop was charged with Travis Winsett’s murder. Bail was denied. Bishop was moved to the Eastland County Jail.

            The Austin lab later concluded that the two cartridges were fired from the gun taken from Bishop’s house. An Eastland County grand jury indicted Bishop July 20, 1970. Bail was set at $10,000 by District Judge Earl Conner, though Bishop remained incarcerated. Trial began in 91^st District Court, with 12 witnesses called.

The defendant admitted he’d shot Winsett, but that it was an accident. A “little voice told him to do it,” reports said he testified. He said he was hunting near the Winsett home that evening. He had pursued a rabbit near the Winsett barn, but didn’t want to shoot that close to the house. Bishop is said to have testified that he didn’t see Travis in the house, but aimed at a window and pulled the trigger in a “childish gesture”.

Bishop took off, he said, thinking Travis might come after him. When no one did, he returned to the Winsett place, he said. He found Travis in his chair, like he’d fallen asleep. It became clear to Bishop what had happened, he said. Travis Winsett was dead.

Bishop panicked, he said, placing the body inside a blanket, hiding it in a closet. He stole several things to make it look like a burglary, he said. Bishop testified that he came back later, taking the body to the abandoned Hathcock farmhouse. Travis being placed in the cistern was an accident, he said, but he admitted setting the fire.

            The jury found Bishop guilty, assessing a 55 year prison term.

            Prosecutors had not asked for the death penalty.

            Travis Winsett is buried on a quiet slope beside his parents and grandparents at the Merriman Cemetery outside town. The man convicted in his killing is alive, and out.

Many actors in this tragedy have passed away. I still don’t feel like I know Travis Winsett. I didn’t catch a sense of the man, walking around his family’s old farmhouse. Maybe I felt a little of his sadness near the cistern out south of town. I’m not sure what his legacy is, beyond that of victim. Beyond that of a life not fully realized. But that too, doesn’t feel quite correct.

Tranquil Winsett Springs continues to run, cold and pure.

.

Special thanks to Will Barrett, Kenneth & Salata Brown, Dorothy Elrod, Ken Falls, Lucie Capps Olson, A. J. Ratliff, Buddy Rogers, Buzzy Rutledge, Buddy Vinson, Roy Weekes (deceased) and the “Case of the Human Target,” by Bill McNeill, Startling Detective magazine, circa October 1, 1970.

The Will Jacobs Story

Will Jacobs’ Fiery Piano Life

Stokes Danger into a Musical Inferno

By Jeff Clark

        Something’s gone horribly wrong.

Piano player Will Jacobs fought a pitched 40-year battle with his demons inside ragged honky tonks stretching from Austin to Oklahoma City. Today he plays rest homes, when they’ll let him.

For free.

Will’s just been approached by a national agent wanting to set up a tour, he says. He won’t open for another artist, he tells me. We sit inside his two room rented house.

Will can play nine hours and never repeat a song. But nobody’s calling. “That’s got to get inside you a little bit,” he tells me. “Someone sees you with a beer bottle or you cuss out an audience and it haunts you the rest of your life.” Today he wanders the streets of Weatherford, when he’s not laying brick or stone.

            I visited Will’s place a week ago. We talk a while, then he picks up his dead brother’s blue guitar to play. The musician’s 59-year-old stare is captivating.

He doesn’t look away.

            When Will strums the acoustic guitar, he digs deeply into lyrics from his life’s front row anguish. Will considers himself a Throw Away. His words. He tends to bond with other Throw Aways of society, he confides. “We can be happy, you know.”

This man’s been married three times, but confesses another lover always came first. “When I saw that big black man unload that piano when I was a kid, when I saw those black and white piano keys rolling down the ramp into my house, I knew the piano would be the love of my life.”

Will’s lifelong musical tryst has brought him insanity, he volunteers. “I’ve lost my mind over music, then music’s brought me back. Music has been more a part of my life than the women were.” The Rules Don’t Apply Here nightclub life seemed ready made for this man to exercise some demons.

            You can see Will Jacobs walking two or three miles a day around Weatherford, if you know where to look. He’s survived 10 years without a car. “The only thing I like as much as playing the piano is walking. Sometimes it’s meeting someone. It gets tough about the time the bills come due, but I’m living life the way I want to.”

            He’s not about Things, he wants me to know.

The man leans his body into and out of our conversation, much as he does at the keyboard. He’s good in his own skin, the heck with what anybody else thinks.

Jacobs has seen everything while looking across the top of nightclub pianos – old couples dancing, still in love, wicked bar room fights, anguished tears, rowdy laughter hiding sticky stinging beer-stroked pain.

Playing to a honky-tonk crowd can be like snake charming. The greats did this, he tells me – Hank Williams, Sr., as one example. “He’d look into the eyes of his audience – his music could make that audience do whatever he wanted.”

“When I was a kid, people thought the honky tonk music I played was of the devil.” Jacobs disagrees. “God isn’t so strict he has to only hear Jesus songs. When you hear Hank Williams sing “I’m so lonesome I could cry” that’s a human experience –that’s holy.”

Jacobs wakes up each morning and asks, “Okay Lord, what are we going to do today?” His walks are spiritual releases of stress, a way to exercise. “I meet 100 people a year walking. What if one of them becomes a friend?”

            Personal struggles drive his art. “I’m on the other side of hurt now. I’ve struggled with alcohol all my life. But, now I’m trying to keep my mistakes down to a minimum. We have to be real with ourselves. Who we are.”

Bill Jacobs taught his son Will the Missouri Waltz and the Boogie Woogie when he was six, growing up in Weatherford. Bill played the accordion, the guitar, the piano and was song leader at York Avenue Baptist for a time.

Three other men impacted Jacobs’ musical education. “Floyd Cramer taught me technique and simplicity. Ray Charles, that I can arrange my own songs. And Jerry Lee Lewis showed me when I was 11 – you can play the same song 100 different ways.”

You can play the same song 100 different ways.

Jacobs has played Toulouse in Austin, the Diamond Horseshoe in Puerto Rico, The Stumble Inn in Oakhill, the Cedar Chopper’s Lounge in Cedar Park, Leon’s Country Store in Rockne, Weatherford’s Peach Festival and Christmas on the Square, Kickers Palace in Poteet and Austin’s fabled Broken Spoke. He’s performed with David Wills (“I Need a Drink, Here’s $20”), Johnny Lyons at the Flores Country Store outside San Antonio and Kenny Dale, among others.

“I played about 70 nightclubs. Some of them I played once and a lot of them I played many times.”

Will hasn’t had a paying gig since August 2010.

Truly creative people can be misunderstood, he tells me. We talk of John Lennon and Edgar Allen Poe. “People that run the world are clever, but not wise. They’ve got their own little boxes they never get out of.” I can tell looking around Jacobs’ living room he can’t even see his box in the rearview mirror anymore. Will’s house is a working museum filled with achingly honest vinyl records and Polaroids from his attempts up music’s high summit.

A compliment, I assure you.

“A lot of times when you’re not born rich, you have low self-esteem, a chip on your shoulder. You normally don’t ever get over it. There’s such thing as having self respect, however. It’s not ego. You look people in the eye. How are you going to correct them, if you don’t assert yourself? The problem in America is that everyone’s hiding behind this politically-correct stuff. It’s like fake wrestling. The more I keep my ego in check, the better I do.”

His eyes never leave mine, main lining his uncensored thoughts into words the rest of us are then able to hear.

Musicians are struggling these days, he confesses. “There’s a quarter of the world who want to hear blues, gospel and what I do. But they’re not going out anymore. They’re jaded. The rest of the world likes garbage.”

Jacobs has starred in bar fights, been spit on, thrown out, and had a front row seat to 357 Magnum gunfire. The stink of spilled Lone Star and the sour perfume of too-many-dance partners slink along the underbelly of his venues.

Will sometimes lays brick or stone to pay the bills. “My daddy made about $125 a week, so I guess we were poor. He was a genius in electronics.”

The day I visited, we ran up the street to Weatherford’s Keeneland Rest Home. They have a piano. They have an audience. Jacobs might’ve said hello as we burst through the front door, but if he did, I missed it. I do remember that he stepped around wheelchairs and gossip and strode to the piano standing against the wall like he was cornering a long lost lover. He began playing its keys fast and hard, throwing each song to the ground.

No questions.

Just sing.

“The reason I play at rest homes is important,” he tells me. “They’re dying in there. They deserve better.”

Women in wheelchairs rolled up as Jacobs pushed through the first 1950s blue-suede hit. A former stuntman from Gunsmoke walked up, introduced himself. One of Jacobs’ walking-around-Weatherford discoveries.

People start swaying, patting their hands in time, his loud playing fingers dancing up and down the keyboard. Will plays songs his audience remembers, doesn’t start out with gospel music, not caring if they think he knows God or not.

He does.

Jacobs makes intense eye contact with his audience – a hint of danger or purity, I can’t decide which.

Is too much purity the root of danger itself?

His finger-fueled riffs make it hard to look away. I was impressed with his talent, as his textured voice hot-boxed lyrics out into the audience. The Artist Will Jacobs came alive to the touch of his lifelong love, the piano, singing for him beneath his electrified fingertips.

His lover likes it rough.

“One night I sang this song I wrote. I was sitting at the Cameron Road Inn in Austin. Doing songs, having a good time. There’s this guy trying to pick a fight with me because his wife’s over there swinging her hips for my benefit, so I play this song. I was drinking beer and Weller’s Whiskey. I was cocky. The audience froze because the song was so honest:

I looked for an answer, my whole life through,

just thinking that someone would appear in the room,

after 89 questions and 3,000 lies,

I woke up one morning and I opened my eyes.

They’re too scared to live, and they’re too scared to die.

And they shake their fists up, and they cuss at the sky.

They’ll drive to their churches, and they’ll drive to their bars,

because they’re running from the truth, in prestigious cars.

Don’t trust books, because they’re usually lies.

Just learn what you see, with your storybook eyes…

I want to like Will Jacobs. I respect his danger, admire his courage. But no one’s calling him for gigs. Spring turns into summer. His musical life could still go either way.

He knows it.

Will seems at peace with that uncertainty, for reasons I can’t quite understand. “I know there’s a God. If you help people out, that keeps it under control.”

Will’s house sits on the road I take to visit my parents. It’s Saturday night. His lights are on. I have to believe he’s home. I have to believe, for a long list of logical reasons, tonight’s honky-tonks are missing out. Or maybe just taking a break, awaiting Will’s second act.

“I need to connect to an audience pretty soon,” he tells me.

Is too much purity the root of danger itself?

Nelda's Pecan Pie Recipe

It turned out that Nelda Sullivan was a writer. I learned that at her funeral, a collection of friends and family who got up and told stories I'd never heard before. I love that.

What a life.

Old Weatherford was there, "Holland's Lake" dinners on the ground, instead of the new not-from-there and wrong "Holland Lake". People who remember Weatherford, before. Who remembered Weatherford College. Who built lustrous lives in that town. You had to be there.

Thank God I was.

Nelda and Charlie touched a lot of lives.

Nelda was asked once, in this book she wrote about her life inside, "If you could leave behind one gift to the world, what would it be?"

Her answer, "My pecan pie recipe."

The above recipe card is in her handwriting, her engagement photo from 1943 to the infamous Charlie Sullivan below it. It reads:

"Pecan Pie: 1 deep 9" crust. 1 cup white syrup - 1 cup sugar. 3 eggs - 1/4 C. butter (soft). 1 C pecans. 1 tsp vanilla. Beat ingredients well and pour into uncooked crust. Bake 10 min. at 425 degrees;Turn oven down to 350 degrees and bake until the center is firm, about 30 - 40 min. Enjoy! Granddaddy's favorite."
+

Nelda Myrle Sullivan

August 7, 1925 - April 4, 2014.

Gypsy Woman in Gorman

A Gypsy Woman’s 1932 Cure

Offers Hope in Downtown Gorman

By Jeff Clark

            It’s two in the morning, November 12, 1932. Eastland County’s had one of its toughest years ever – jobs scarce, crops uncertain, oil wells going dry. You and your spouse would like to sleep, but can’t. Down the hall, your two-year-old daughter coughs, the dry hacking sound stabs fear into your tense, silent farm’s box house. The little girl struggles to breathe. Tomorrow, she’ll look up at you with her deep brown eyes and be unable to speak, having lost her sweet voice completely. Her sickness started as bronchitis two weeks ago, so the doctor said. God only knows where it will end.

            Gypsies traveled from town to town in this part of the state back then. Saturdays seemed to be when they hit Gorman. Mule-drawn gypsy wagons circled up to camp around Bass Lake, southwest of Gorman, its waters much larger then than now. Friday night campfires heard gypsy tambourines and guitars lift Old Country dialects high into the silent air in celebration. With the morning sun, these families would move into Gorman for a fruitful day of enterprise.

Wanda Hull’s parents, Bruno and Anna Duske greeted that same sunrise with desperation. Father and mother bundled two-year-old Wanda Jean up and drove hurriedly into town. They were looking for an old gypsy woman, who we’ll call Zora.

            The old gypsy woman looked into Anna’s eyes. “Do you believe in Fogeyism” the wrinkled stranger asked Mrs. Duske. “I believe in anything that will make my daughter better,” the mother replied without hesitation. The gypsy woman instructed, “Take your daughter out to a tall, mature oak tree on your place.” Zora’s weathered fingers stroked Wanda’s long blond hair with obvious concern. “Have her stand with her back against its trunk and mark her height with a straight nail.”

            Mom and Dad listened in rapt attention. The gypsy continued, “Drill a hole where the nail mark is, as deep into the trunk as the drill bit will go.” Bruno Duske used a braced bit drill, turning and forcing the sharpened steel bit deep into the solid oak’s trunk.

            “Cut a small piece of hair from little Wanda Jean’s hair and place it inside the hole in the tree. Then, plug it up tight as you can. When Miss Wanda grows past that plug in height, she will be cured.”

            The Duskes rushed back to their place at Golly Horn Farm, west of Bass Lake. They found a suitable tree and got to work. The cure or spell or whatever transpired on their farm that day apparently worked. Wanda Hull and the tall-standing oak tree are both doing great (80 years later), both still thriving in Eastland County. Gorman’s Dr. Stubblefield was told of the miraculous cure not long after that. “Well, if that’s what you think cured her, I’m glad it appeared to work,” he’s said to have replied.

            Wanda’s life merits eighty more stories, all colorful and mostly true. The day we visited, I could tell she wasn’t finished. She asked if I’d ever heard of asfidity. Never heard of it, I replied, getting my pen back out. Little black clumps of asfidity were placed inside small drawstring bags, these then tied to the neck strings of kids’ feed-sacks-made-into-school-clothes. This was around Gorman and the Grandview Community. Asfidity was thought to ward off disease.

            Researching this claim, I learned that asfidity smells, is bitter, nasty, not pleasant to the nose. Asfidity appears to have started in the Georgia or Arkansas backcountry as a folk medicinal used to ward off colds and flu. “Asfidity” derives from the Latin “odiferous asafetida”, meaning “stinks” (I’m not making this up). One theory suggests moms knew that smelly kids wouldn’t mingle, preventing grimy little hands from spreading runny nose infections child to child

            I haven’t found any Eastland County gypsies (I haven’t looked too hard, truth be told). It might be interesting to listen to their medicinal ideas. Listening, disagreeing perhaps, one might leave hoping that the unexplained (by whatever label one describes it) is still powerfully at work healing children. Upon that faith, I hope we can all agree.

            Special thanks to Wanda Hull. If anyone has photos of the Grandview Community north of Gorman, I’d sure appreciate hearing from you. 

Penetekah Comanche Marker Trees Close By

Thurber Hill, Ranger Hill

Bankhead Highway’s Thurber Hill

Begins and Ends Many Lives

By Jeff Clark

Roads have memories, just like people.

Last week I retraced the abandoned Bankhead Highway as it climbed steep Thurber Hill, just west of Highway 16 in Eastland County. I used to call this uprising “Ranger Hill”, but that occurs farther west, where Loop 254 leaves Interstate 20. I’m parallel and north of Interstate 20, its big hill still hassling heavily-laden trucks as they head toward West Texas. Migrating west, 1930’s travelers received their first heaping spoonful of the bitter medicine up ahead.

Thurber Hill rises 200 feet in a little over a mile. Model T’s attempted this incline backwards, sucking every available ounce of horsepower from their feeble engines. Folks were often driving rattle trap old vehicles that were one strand of bailing wire away from disaster. Gas tanks were rarely full. You didn’t stop until (not unless) you ran out of gas, broke down, or Nature called.

Thurber Hill remains miserly with her secrets. Elders remember the roar of the Thurber-bricked roadway beneath thin tires, before Highway 80 asphalt replaced it. Like so much that’s happened here, this high-pitched ascent seems so unnecessary. I wonder what possessed planners to carve their road here and not along the more gently ascending Gone-to-California wagon road a mile to our south.

During Ranger’s too-brief oil boom, twenty horsepower Tin Lizzies had two speeds – low and high. Gravity-fed gas tanks lurked beneath their driver’s seat in early models. Facing an uphill climb with a half-empty tank, fuel couldn’t reach the engine. That sputtering noise under your hood told riders that life was about to get exciting. The early Fords had three pedals (low, reverse and brake). When the high speed clutch band became worn, the reverse pedal was used to back up the hill.

Today, the road narrows quickly from the bottom, the ground falling away to a deep gorge on the right. Tall hillside, then boulders soar above one’s sightline to the left. High grass and trees reach out to reclaim this black and white striped road. You can go forward. You can roll backward. There ain’t no turning back.

Given the tightness of this road, 12 feet wide in places, and the dramatic stay-away-from-the-edge curves, surely Pacific-bound Tin Lizzies loaded with their family’s worldly belongings were followed on foot by their kin. Today, mesquites and cedar line the ledge once punctuated by guard rails (more for show, if hit very hard). Trucks that couldn’t make the climb backed down. If you blew a hydraulic brake line coming down, you’d need to go home and replace your shorts.

This first climb is the steepest. When a heavy truck had to stop under strain of its load or a wobbly car broke down, there were no shoulders. No place to turn around. There’s no changing direction – unless you can fly. Coming down you’d have to stand on friction brakes, your Model T a little too anxious to achieve supersonic speed. This 1920s path struggles to peel itself away from the edge.

The road whispers sadly, “it happened here, back in 1941.”

A stopped-in-the-road truck loaded down with lumber blocked its lane, its broken axle not an easy fix. A nice car stopped to help, pulling up beside. This is a blind corner, until the next car coming along is almost upon you. Up at the top of Thurber Hill we see a second truck begin its descent, full to the sideboards with happy workers heading to East Texas cotton fields.

When the lumber truck and the Good Samaritan car come shockingly into sight, the farm workers’ truck driver knows he has to stop. Pushing steel pedal hard to the floorboard, the doomed truck’s brakes fail, its speed faster and faster falling down the runaway road toward the star-crossed car and lumber truck. The careening truck’s driver aims heroically for the space between the two vehicles, to avoid taking his passengers through the rails and into mid-air.

Whatever horror this poor truck driver imagines pales beside what happens next.

The big truck crashes full speed into both lumber truck and car. Many were injured. Many needed help.

The Ervins stop to help, to take the injured to Ranger’s hospital. The lumber truck driver lights flares to warn off further catastrophe. People busy themselves helping the wounded. The call goes in to Ranger – send help. Send everything you’ve got…

The Ranger Fire Department had a siren mounted on top of their building that could be heard all over town. Its wail announced fires, tornado warnings, world war black outs and other emergencies. “Most of the young people who had access to cars would follow the fire trucks to the scene,” Dorothy Elrod told me. Fire trucks, ambulances, and “all of Ranger” left the little town, racing toward destiny.

They say the fire probably started in the lumber, maybe a spark from the flares beneath its wheels. It might have smoldered unnoticed in all the chaos. Two loaded Greyhound buses stopped behind the accident. Their passengers piled off to get a better look. Cars from the surrounding countryside pulled to a stop, blocking more of the road. Some say four hundred souls watched as that lumber truck burst into flames.

The fire quickly spread, igniting a saddle gas tank under the truck. A monstrous explosion erupted across the panicked hillside, spewing burning gasoline across hundreds of onlookers like high tide slamming into a seawall. James L. Ervin was blown off the cliff by the blast. Faceless shapes ran in every direction across the hellish scene ablaze. The few who’d remained in their cars were uninjured, reports later confirmed.

Whatever happened next, panic has erased from the record. There wouldn’t have been enough firemen to go around. There’s no water at the site. Time must have stopped, as shocked minds struggled to take in the end-of-the-world tableau. The injured, the dead and dying were taken to Ranger’s West Texas Hospital, whose rooms filled, whose hallway floors were quickly littered with occupied mattresses. Others were taken to the City-County Hospital in town, and a few to Eastland. Then as now, burn injuries are grotesque, among the most agonizing to ever be inflicted upon a suffering victim.

Seven died that night. Thirty to forty more are said to have perished later from burns or other injuries. Several more were maimed for life. No one left unchanged.

“It was a very sad time since some of our classmates were injured in the blast,” remembers Dorothy Elrod. Today the road is eerily silent. “Nothing to see here,” this stretch seems to have learned the hard way. A quick prayer, then back in the truck. I need to escape this place.

Ironically, the paved road widens to seventy feet not too much farther up the path, a place designed for ascending cars and trucks to pull off and add water to overheating radiators, to let descending car brakes cool. To marshal one’s courage for another attempt at the summit.

Just up the hill on the north side of the road, a long northern curve to the right is lined with two WPA-looking brown stone gateways, marking the entrances to Scenic Point, a roadside park. People could’ve walked here from the wide place in the road. There are at least three barbeque pits built out of the same stone hiding in the brush. A rusted set of bedsprings pulled up to one fire for warmth.

Once you enter the gateways, the pavement stops. Vintage photos show this to be a scenic hillside for picnics. There’s still a beautiful thigh-high rock wall lining the curving Bankhead out front.

            Easter sunrise services were held here. “I remember we were on high ground,” Dorothy told me. “The scene looking east was breathtaking, especially when the sun started rising. We had a sermon and sang gospel songs.”

            Back in the truck, the road finally reaches the crest of Thurber Hill. What takes a few minutes on Interstate 20, takes much longer here. But this road’s not through talking. As the pavement flattens, you notice concrete and brick ruins to the south. This was the original hilltop gas station, before the complex moved west to Ranger Hill when Highway 80 blew through. There’s a flat concrete slab observation deck hanging off the hillside, from which you can see Thurber’s Italian Hill many miles to the east.

Rejoining the interstate’s service road up ahead, a cinder block building marks the location of Offield’s Truck Stop and Café. Not too much farther and the real Ranger Hill awaits. Like so much along this old highway, “what used to be” holds center stage.

Today I don’t much care what came next – Highway 80 then I-20. Too much has been uncovered, too many wounds unsealed. The gray asphalt reaches west finally toward Ranger, cutting a slightly wider path through the cedar. Tens of thousands passed by this spot heading toward, or away from something as our young nation reached adolescence. A few souls never made it.

            Interstate 20 caused the death of many Bankhead Highway towns, I’m often told. But after today, I think that’s a symptom, not a life sentence. I invite those folks to travel Route 66, much less historically-important than the Bankhead brick and asphalt remnants still snaking through their towns. Route 66 is raking in the cash.

Shorty Fox tells about when he and Mutt Lee were traveling to Ranger in 1939. They’d been to Fort Worth to pick up lumber for a National Youth Camp cabin or three, across from where the Ranger Library now sits. They were driving a packed-full Chevy truck. It popped a spark plug, hitting the inside of the hood like a snub nose bullet. The two men stopped, climbed out, scotched the wheels with rocks, and made their repair (most of Shorty’s stories involve duct tape or chewing gum, seems like). They got the truck running and started up the hill.

I asked him about what he saw, as they rode that old truck up the too-steep road. “Listen,” he told me, as serious as he ever gets. “We’d just repaired a truck, we were loaded down with lumber, and we were struggling straight up this big hill in first gear – a huge drop off to the right. We were just happy to get to the top.”

I’ve always heard about the “big hill” east of Ranger. Now I’ve driven it. I’ve listened to it speak. Thousands of long-ago echoes can be heard, if this hillside road’s memory is to be believed. I look back along the narrow road, its words softly speaking one last time. “I was just happy to get to the top.”

Some of this story occurs on private property, entered with permission. A full recounting of the 1941 tragedy and its heroic aftermath may be read at www.angelfire.com/tx/rangerexes/1939a.htm (used with permission). Special thanks to Barry Franklin, Ken Falls, Shanon Hunt, Tommy Parks, Dorothy Elrod, Leo Bielinski, Rae Wooten, Shorty Fox, Mac Jacoby, Jack Blackwell, Mike Herrington, and Harlon Perrin.

Discovery Well from the Ranger Oil Boom