Welcome to the San Antonio files.

I'm Sanford Nowlan, editor in chief of the San Antonio Current.

In 1970, a tiny town in the Texas Hill Country was listed for sale.

It consisted of a post office, general store, and some chickens.

The ad for the town, advertised in the nearby Fredericksburg newspaper, said the egg route provided by the chickens would cover the mortgage.

Three people got together and bought the town of Luckenbach Texas for around $30,000.

The most notable of the three was John Hondo Crouch, a local writer whose creativity and eccentricity turned the town into a legendary spot for musicians, bikers and tourists.

50 years later, it's still going strong.

It's a pleasure to welcome to San Antonio Files Honda's daughter, Becky Crouch Patterson, who has just released her third book, Luckenbach Texas The Center of the universe.

Welcome, Becky.

Thank you.

I try to prove why it's called the center of the universe.

Because people laugh when they hear that.

Well, everybody is somebody and Luckenbach, right?

And it's got a deep history.

The culture your father and his compatriots created around looking back is that of a free thinking place, a place where people can join together in song and good times.

A place where everybody is welcome.

And we're not expected to be too serious given the present state of our country.

Do we need looking back now more than ever?

Oh, yeah.

Hondo was always humorous, and you can go there and just be yourself.

Back in the day, they had the hippies sitting next to the rednecks and it kind of melded everyone together.

I call it now The Altar of Texas Music because it created the, you know, still most famous Texas songwriters.

Your book interestingly traces looking back all the way back to its very beginnings.

It was a Comanche area that eventually welcomed German settlers, and the two traded and created a peace treaty.

Is it fair to say that even from its infancy, Luckenbach was a place where different cultures came together?

Yes.

And Texas had the largest group of German immigrants ever.

One of the immigrants, Jacob, looking for.

He came here in 1835 to fight in the Texas Revolution, and for that he got awarded land.

So then he came back in the 40s with his friend Auguste Engel, who was a preacher, and they started that little community.

The German history there is fascinating because you point out in your book that this wave of German immigrants that settled around Luckenbach and some of those other towns was a group of intellectuals known as the free thinkers, who were persecuted not just in Germany, but once they got here.

How did that thread fit in with your father and his friends and what Luckenbach became?

Well, I don't think people know how sophisticated Luckenbach and Sister Dale were.

They were called the free thinker.

Towns comfort, Boerne Castell, sister sister Dale and Luckenbach.

And they were intellectuals who taught and invented things.

And they weren't welcomed in Germany because they had too many new ideas.

And in Germany, the thing was, Germany, love it or leave it, well, they all wanted to leave it, but they came down here at the worst time during the Civil War.

And they were unionists.

They were opposed to slavery.

Yes, they were abolitionists.

So I think that everybody, somebody in Luckenbach means that we still need to think of those young kids.

They were 18 and in their 20s from Luckenbach that were all murdered and killed.

That's why those little towns didn't grow for years.

All their heirs were killed too soon.

Because they were abolitionists, because they were perceived.

As and they were inventors.

And sister Dale was ahead of its time.

Law Olmsted, who was architect for the city Park in New York.

Frederick Law Olmsted lived there.

Paul West, Van Halen, all his intellectuals lived there.

Doctor cop had a spa there.

They were way ahead of their time.

And there was even in an inventor there who.

Oh.

Who was out ahead of the Wright brothers in terms of creating the fire flying machine.

And he also was a music man and directed a band.

He invented the first airplane.

Maybe it only went 100ft up.

Launched off the top of a barn.

And the trouble was, it was a spring that didn't wind back up.

It wound down.

But he also invented an ice machine, and he invented a self-winding clock over in Germany that the king only gave him a cow for a reward.

So he got mad and came to Texas.

There's just a lot of characters that were there who need to be known about.

Talk to me a little bit about the free thinkers rules.

Okay.

If you looked on a map, they took up almost the whole middle of Texas for their democratic utopian society.

And they had rules.

They they had mandatory education for women, Mexicans and blacks.

That was unusual.

If you were a lawyer, you couldn't live in the town because they attracted trouble.

You had to go live in New Braunfels.

They didn't want a church there because in Germany they always had to pay taxes to churches.

If you wanted a church, you had to go to New Braunfels.

No one knew the Lord's Prayer at the funerals, and they all pitched in money to have their funerals.

Comfort did that for a long time, but finally, a train wouldn't stop in a town without a church.

So 40 years later, they got a church.

It seems to be almost the antithesis of what we think about in in terms of small town Texas.

We don't tend to think of small town Texas being very progressive, but it sounds like this was an area.

That was at their time.

They were way ahead of their time, especially in sister Dale.

That thread continues to run through the history of Luckenbach, and I'm wondering if that's why you think your father had such kinship with the outlaw country musicians, because even though they were playing so-called redneck music in their own way, they were the dreamers, the poets, the thinkers of their time.

Well, both both were the outlaws.

The 1850 outlaw people were the abolitionists.

During the Civil War, the 1970 outlaws were looking back on how, when and where you record an album which Jerry Jeffs came there and recorded it in a crummy little dance hall with a big long plug to a truck that provided electricity, hay bales to keep the chickens crowing from coming in.

It's all about you don't have to wear the rhinestone suits.

It's all about songs longer than three minutes poetic songs, and maybe write them on the spot and maybe don't practice them.

All those songwriters that are on that album, which is iconic still.

The album.

Viva Terlingua!

Right.

I mean, it's a milestone.

Yeah.

And we still sing those songs a day because they were fun.

But I consider the 1850s and 1970s both outlaw attitudes that still keep it what it is.

So when your father bought the town, was he aware of that outlaw history, or was this all sheer serendipity?

No.

You know, he wrote a column for 12 years for the comfort newspaper satire column called Cedar Creek Clippings.

His pen name was Peter Cedar Stacker, and it was put right next to the real social events.

And he kind of made fun of those and had his different characters.

And so Luckenbach became that place of those characters.

It was called an imaginary.

He even had his calling card, say Imagineer authorized distributor.

He was so creative that he loved that as his new playground with his characters.

Let's let's talk about what kind of father Hondo was.

Well, Hondo was known as a prankster, and we four kids were his first guinea pigs.

I remember one time he took his hunting and we all jumped in the back of his truck, but he grabbed a BB gun as he went out and he stopped the truck and we think, oh, he must have seen a deer.

And he shoots ping into the woods and we go up and lo and behold, there's a dead deer there.

And my brother one says, gosh, Hondo, you must have shot him in the eye.

And he had already gone out and planted the deer there, you know.

And if we'd get a new truck, he wouldn't show us the truck.

He'd hand us a ball of string that took us out the pasture, into another pasture, up a hill, and on and on and on.

And there was the truck attached to that string.

But I remember Jerry Jeff one time asked him, Hondo, do you want to be reincarnated, and what would you want to come back as?

And Honda said, oh, I'd want to be a little poodle carried on a pillow and being brushed and combed and petted.

And he said, no, Hondo, wouldn't you want to be a sheepdog?

And Honda said, no, I was already that in this life we were ranchers and had sheep, goats and cattle.

And your book, you mentioned that a writer from Ohio likened your dad to is an Elizabethan court jester, somebody who was not just there to entertain, but to be a guard of honor, putting down smugness, deflating the arrogant, and lifting up the little guy.

Why was that important to him?

Okay.

He didn't have to have a stage to do his pranks and jokes.

I remember he met John Connally at the football game one time.

John Connally said, hi, Honda, what are you doing?

He said, oh, I'm still herding sheep up in the hill country.

What are you doing now?

So that's what I'm saying.

You like to put down big people and lift up little people.

But you also pointed out that your dad was a complex character.

Beyond the jokes, right?

The name Hondo means deep in Spanish.

And there was there was sort of a deeper meaning behind a lot of this.

And he also overcame some serious tragedies in his life.

Was humor the principal way he dealt with adversity.

While he was a swimmer at UT, his father committed suicide.

And then he had a son that became a schizophrenic.

And I think it's like the Pagliacci clown who laughs on the outside but cries on the inside.

He was a very sensitive man, and he used humor to live.

And that humor, though, was I think it lifted up other people.

Right.

I mean, you talked about Jerry Jeff looking to him as almost a father figure.

Yeah.

One time it must have been at a Terlingua big chili cookoff or something.

But everyone thought, oh, Jerry, Jeff is in that.

R-V and people gathered around hoping to get a glimpse of, well, Hondo comes up to him.

Very humbling hat in hand.

Oh, and talked to this guy.

He said, oh, I'm so glad to meet you, Jerry.

Jeff, thank you for giving me your time.

And when Honda left, a whole bunch of people gathered around him and they said, who was that guy?

He said, oh, that's Hondo.

He's Jerry, Jeff's best friend.

He knew how to play people.

Yeah.

Willie Nelson also held five 4th of July picnics there, starting in 1995.

Talk a little bit about the outside forces that ended that tradition and forced Willie to to look elsewhere.

For you couldn't have a gathering of over 11,000 people and I think 20,000 people would come.

You couldn't even cram a car in there.

Everyone had to be bused in.

And in 2009, this is after your dad's passing, nearly 1900 volunteers showed up in Lucan back to break a Guinness World Record for the largest recorded guitar ensemble.

From what you said in the book, that was a very special moment for you.

Why does that stand out so much?

Unbelievable.

And it was to support the head trauma wounded warriors, but to have almost 2000 people all across the creek, all wearing white t shirts, to hear them sing that song for five solid minutes?

Yeah, they broke a world record.

And that song was.

Let's Go to Looking Bob, Texas.

What else?

It's really called back to the basics in the way that song got written was we were friends with Guy Clark way back before he was a songwriter.

So when Honda died, he went to Nashville in 76.

And as a chip moments and Buddy Emmons, hey, you've got to write this song about Hondo and looking back and they said, Will you write it?

And he said, no, y'all right?

No, you write it.

Well, they ended up writing it, and within it became the number one crossover song in the United States.

And that really put looking back on the map.

Thank you, Guy Clark.

Was that a shocker that that song became as big as it did and resonated with so many people?

Yes.

And it talks about having feuds which were still having.

But no, it's just a real classic.

You know, the book is so full of colorful characters, it almost seems like it could be fiction, but it was real life.

Life was like, right?

But one of the characters you especially hold dear is Sheriff Marge.

Oh, tell me about the special place.

Sheriff Marge.

Was actually a student in that little school that closed down in the 70s.

Hondo called her sheriff because she would always yell and put down people who were getting out of line.

And I remember she got frostbite on her hands, digging out so much beer for one of the occasions.

She was a bartender.

Right?

They had bartender.

She was just hilarious.

She had those long braids and rattlesnake earrings and she endeared everyone to her.

She had to have had a special character to be able to control the bikers in the hippies and the rednecks all getting there and all wanting the beer.

And you weren't supposed to bring beer in and she'd knock them down on that.

You weren't supposed to bring your own drinks in there.

I remember someone says, Marge, do you have on a thong?

And she said, I wear my thongs on my feet.

Her ashes are in the bar up in the corner next to the stoplight.

Wow.

Your dad was fond of giving people titles.

They were honorary titles, I suppose, in Luke and Bach, but he seemed to bestow a lot of titles on people.

What was that all about?

He went to camp champions and started.

He started camp champions with Darrell Royal, and he worked as a counselor to camp's people.

Kids just loved him.

But that started there.

There'd be the Royal Order of the channel, swimmers at camp champions, where they'd swim across the lake and back.

But the initials are rock, so you could swim like a rock.

Some of his writings had initials, like Pappa.

That was the planned parent association or something.

I remember the brat.

It was the boy, ranger and tomahawk slingers which stood for brats, you know.

So his initials were real important to define these groups.

These days, Luke and Bach is still in family hands, although you're not directly involved.

The town's less than an hour from San Antonio.

It's also not far from Austin.

Do you worry that development is changing the area and that it may change Luke and Bob?

Yes, I sold my half to my son, Kit Patterson, and he's partners with my sister Chris Graham.

All around looking are developments.

They're scraping the ground.

They're scraping the plants away to put up RV places.

Our event centers all around it.

One of the things that put Lucan back on the map, so to speak, put it on the national attention was the World's Fair that happened there.

And and your dad's friend and partner in owning Luke and Bach, geek cook went on tonight's show to talk about the World's Fair and prove that this Luke was, in fact, the center of the universe.

Tell me how that went down.

So he took a globe with him and put a star where looking back was, and put a string around it and where the string went.

He met, he said.

See, it's the center of the universe.

But he said that was a science project for the looking box, seventh grade.

And that's what they came up with.

So how did how did he get invited on Johnny Carson?

Well, he was responsible for the PR and so he went up there to promote the fair.

And the fair itself drew, what, 20,000 people?

Yeah, they carried the signs away.

They carried the antique fire truck away.

The next couple of times they had it still at looking back, but the third time they had it at the fairgrounds in Fredericksburg because it was getting so big.

But that really put looking back on the map as well as the song.

What is it.

That you think captured the national imagination about Luke and Bach?

Was it the it was a ghost town, essentially.

Was it that it was so small?

Was it the fact that it sort of represented a bygone era.

The simplicity of it, and the fact that hippies could sit next to rednecks, all, all walks of life had to sit on the same bench under the trees, which was our main building.

It was not commercial, and one of the reasons Jerry Jeff chose Hondo and then therefore looking back was because he said Hondo, like looking back, was uncommercial.

And he liked that.

And it wasn't just Viva Terlingua that was recorded there.

He recorded two other albums, and.

Then was Carry On when Honda died 20 years later, another Viva Terlingua!

Was the electricity situation any better the second and third time.

Around enough money to improve the electricity.

But one time Gary Nunn was playing there and all the lights went out on the dance floor.

Someone said, oh, just wait a minute, I'm going to run to town to find a fuze.

And someone ran and stole a fuze from some other place, and people still stayed there until the fuze got back.

The the dance hall itself is, if I understand it correctly, that wasn't even originally a dance all.

It was originally sort of the fellowship hall for the.

For the community.

They would have school closings there and all that.

And Ray Wylie Hubbard wrote that up against the wall, redneck mother.

I think he wrote the second or third verse while they were recording it.

Gary Nunn sang that song that was used as the theme song for London Homesick Blues.

Oh yeah.

Absolutely.

When you look back on that era, did you have any idea that the music they were creating then would be so influential and that people are still listening to it today?

No.

Those songs are so classic and it takes us back to When We Were young.

Your personal connection to that area goes back quite some time.

There are two pretty prominent families that that you have connections to.

People came from Germany to comfort in the 1850s, before it was even a town.

And then Doctor Keitel, another family member, came to Fredericksburg in the 1840s, and he helped with the Mexican-American War and all the doctor Keitel since him.

But the three families, Shriners, Steelers and reals intermarried.

They came with nothing.

And they they had huge ranching empires.

And they they developed a young Texas with their warehouses and railroad railroads.

They named counties they named they made roads.

They had wool and mohair warehouses.

I think Charles Schreiner invented a bank in became Frost Bank in Kerrville.

My great great grandmother was Amelia Schreiner, the only sister to Captain Schreiner, who became my great grandmother, and Casper Real, who married the Amelia Schreiner, brought the first batch of fine wool sheep to Kerrville, and therefore the wool and mohair thing started.

And my grandfather in 42 was known as the Angora Goat King of the world.

He had more in Gaura goats than anyone in.

That was a very cashmere fiber.

And the name Shriner all over Kerrville.

Still to these.

He's the father of Kerrville.

He's called.

But it was those three families Steeler, Schreiner, and rial.

Not only are you an author who has three books out, you're you're a visual artist of renown as well.

Talk a little bit about about your visual art and.

What you did.

Art all my life.

But for 40 years I was a little artist who designed stained glass windows, nailers, altar hangings.

I've probably made 800 tapestries on the machine.

And these would appear in churches.

Oh yeah.

All over the country.

The largest was five by 15ft in the Schreiner University Library.

The largest window is in Kerrville at the Kroc Center.

They invented McDonald's, the crocks.

And it's probably 20 by nine feet out of Tiffany glass.

So my way of dealing with my personal tragedies is to make beauty out of pain.

So I became an artist in illustrated almost the whole Bible in my tapestries.

But now I'm a painter.

I'm the first woman who had a one woman show at the Kerrville Western Art Museum a couple of years.

Ago.

And your paintings appear in your second book as well?

Yes.

Trinity University asked me to write that book.

Trinity University Press Naomi and I brought Barbara to my house and saw paintings.

And they she said, if you will write the book to go with these paintings, we will do it.

Wow.

I was a new author.

I mean, what an offer.

That was.

In that book was called.

The Ranch.

That was us.

And Willie Nelson wrote the foreword.

How did that feel to have a poet on the level of Willie Nelson and want to write the intro for it?

Well, yeah, I mean, I had to give them an eagle feather and a red bandana.

Final question.

So did that egg route that was advertised when your dad bought Lucan.

Did that actually end up covering the $30,000 mortgage?

No way.

No.

The things that we had invented, you know, guides put on the World's Fair and the women's only chili cookoff, when looking back, had to invent these crazy celebrations.

We always started with a parade.

I don't know what celebration it was, but Tom Noel, his chili team, built a cannon that was made out of 250 gallon drums and had it somehow rigged up with wires.

Honda collected chicken feathers to put in it for like, ammunition, and so Hondo had people stand up to be shot at by this cannon.

With chicken feathers.

Yeah.

And whoever fell down the best got awarded the Purple Heart, and he passed out flags to everyone and said, don't let your flag touch the ground.

So thank you so much for talking to us today.

It was a real pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for joining us for the San Antonio Files.

I'm Sanford Nowlan.

Happy trails.