By Michael Berryhill
Slightly updated from March 1985
Remembering Leon Hale,
RIP, March 27, 2021
In the fall of 1984, the New York Times Book Review published an article about the personal essay. Its author, New Yorker and University of Houston professor Philip Lopate, mentioned in passing that the best personal essayists writing for newspapers were Russell Baker, Ellen Goodman and Leon Hale.
In the fall of 1984, the New York Times Book Review published an article about the personal essay. Its author, New Yorker and University of Houston professor Philip Lopate, mentioned in passing that the best personal essayists writing for newspapers were Russell Baker, Ellen Goodman and Leon Hale.
Leon who? the readers of the Times must have asked. Baker was a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist at the Times. Goodman, a relative newcomer at the Boston Globe, was syndicated nationally. Leon Hale wasn’t a satirist like Russell Baker. He never offered political insight like Ellen Goodman. He was never syndicated, although he deserved to be. Hale, then sixty-four when I interviewed him, had been quietly practicing his art for nearly thirty years, comparatively unnoticed except by readers of the Houston Post. When Hale joined the Houston Chronicle in the spring of 1984, the Post lost a rare artist.
Rare because he made writing a newspaper column about country folks and personal memories look so easy, although of course, it’s not. Rare because he wrote with simplicity and sincerity about the pleasures of life, about what it means to feel. He will write about how beautiful it was to watch foaming gasoline gush into the glass cylinders of an old-timey pump, or how good it feels to play baseball or to smell wood smoke or have a certain old woman smile at him. In his writing he will make you feel the pleasure of that sensation, and he will 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.
Perhaps because Hale has been such a fixture in the newspaper during the last sixty years, Houston took him for granted. He was the embodiment of all the people who came from rural places and filled up this city 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, writing sentences. He wrote a lot of them, enough to fill twenty-one volumes at 100,000 words apiece, he once calculated. His columns were collected in three volumes and he found time to write two novels. We watched him wander around the state looking for storytellers and dogs and old-timers who represented the Texas that was rapidly disappearing. We watched his children grow up and heard the talks 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 fits it.
He was a tall old dude when I interviewed him in 1984. At sixty-four he’d finally filled out his skinny frame. He looked good in a fresh pair of blue jeans, gray shirt, and soft black loafers. He had thick, gray, curly hair and a high wide, and bony forehead. His eyes were spaced far apart and the right one was pulled down, giving him a lopsided look. It was the result of abnormal bone growth, a condition called fibrous dysplasia, which affected him since he was a child. It doesn’t kill anybody and nobody knows the cause or cure, Hale said.
His unusual looks made him shy, a considerable disability for a man whose job was to drive around the state interviewing people. He came to accept it. Besides, he said with a chuckle, if he had been one of these good-looking writers, he might have been unbearable.
Hales lived then in a two-room apartment nears 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’s his theme: feeling good.
On an old chest that served as a coffee table were a brand-new history of the town of Trinity, a worn-out paperback copy of the autobiography of Mark Twain (his favorite book), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and one that looked like heavy going, The Christian Agnostic.
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. After Hale got his second divorce and moved here about 1980, he was a little fearful about what might happen to him, he says, and that wall made him feel safe. And it became a source of inspiration.
“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.”
Above his long, paper-strewn desk was a bulletin board. Pinned squarely in the center were wall calendars for the last four years. They served as his record of the places he had visited and written about. He had been keeping those calendars since 1956. There was a picture of a good-looking brunette, his daughter Becky, thirty-two, who was in the real estate management business in Austin. He dedicated his last collections of columns, Easy Going, to “Becky my girl-child, whose laughter has been music to me.”
A picture of a handsome blond young man in a St. Louis Cardinals uniform also stood out. That was Hale’s son Mark, then thirty-four. He was a left-handed first baseman and outfielder who played three years with the St. Louis farm clubs before going on to other things. His daddy said he makes a comfortable living in Montgomery, Alabama, betting on greyhound races. Mark is the father of that cute four-year-old boy at the top of the bulletin board, Hale’s only grandchild, Daniel. When a four-year-old popped up in Hale’s column, as one did a few months ago, it’s probably Daniel.
Mark and Becky were children of Hale’s marriage to Helen Vick, the daughter of a Navasota River bottom cattleman. The marriage broke up after twenty-five years, and that divorce was one of the great sadnesses of Leon Hale’s life. He won’t talk about it much.
At the upper right-hand corner of that bulletin board were some words by Ellen Goodman, neatly printed on an envelope: “Writing a daily column is like being married to a nymphomaniac. Just when you think you’re finished, you have to start all over….”
Above the whole bulletin board, like an overarching question was a Latin motto carved in wood: 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 says, 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? That’s what he tried to write about. But of course, it would be too bold, too dreary, and maybe impossible to ask directly.
One thing that makes life worth living is stories. Long before he ever knew he wanted to be a writer, Leon 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 tell stories. His first selection of columns, published in 1965, Turn South at the Second Bridge,paid homage to the storytellers he sought out during his first ten years as a full-time columnist. He says in that book that his purpose in writing about the storytellers is that “they help preserve some of the fun of being a Texan.” He also laments the passing of what he regards as authentic, self-deprecating Texas humor and vulgarization by the professional Texas who is “the worst of all things, a phony.”
In that first collection of columns, Hale’s familiar, easy style is all there, with his simple descriptions and strong rhythms. Once in a while, he laments, he let slip a fancy word, like sobriquet. But what is missing from the early Hale is a sense of his own worth as a story-teller. He is too busy collecting other people’s stories. He is 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 this second collection, A Smile from Katie Hattan & Other Natural Wonders, he hits his stride. The smile from Katie Hattan is not a story, it is a wonder. She is the 104-year-old daughter of slaves. What matters in the writing is not her story but the value Hale places on in it. He has found his theme. Easy Going, his third collection, continues the theme. The final essays is a natural wonder itself, 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 coffee cream and it’s a beautiful day and 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 sag 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 fell like 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 believe in what he writes. A former student of his tells of handing in a story assignment about what he most wanted to do in the world. The student wrote that he would like to drive a truck. Hale’s terse comment at the end of the paper was “What are you doing taking journalism classes, then?” 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 writes in one book. The last few years his attention has shifted increasingly to city people, as he has found his subject is not country people, but Leon Hale thinking about people, any people.
Another pleasure of Hale’s columns is his use of colloquial language. He never overdoes it, but it’s hard to forget the story about the awkward boy who didn’t have the “coordination of a bale of hay,” or the woman who wore her cat “loose as liver” around her neck, or a dog whose “unshirted enthusiasm” for digging holes was contagious. Sometimes he will write a column about exotic words he loves from browsing in the dictionary. You’d think he’d found money.
He’s also a master of description. Almost every Hale piece has at least one good passage of description. It’s his way of preserving things against change and making you see and feel things you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. For example, a hitchhiker asks him for a ride:
“Then he took half a step backward and stood a few seconds to let me inspect him. He looked all right. Orange hair and pink skin and pale blue eyes behind thick glasses. Almost six feet tall and about as big around as a post oak sapling.
“I figured he was maybe seventeen. He had on tight faded jeans and white sneakers and a red shirt that clashed with his hair. He carried a small canvas zipper bag.
“He had a pair of cowboy boots. I liked the way he carried them. Their loops were tied together with a piece of sash cord and slung over his shoulder and they rode there, saddlebag style.”
The pace is so deliberate that he makes you slow down and think about everything he describes. He builds up to the things he likes most, the things that make him feel good about the boy, the way he carried those cowboy boots. He makes it look so easy. Just try it.
The wonder is that Hale ever became a writer at all. He grew up poor, as many of his columns attest. The Depression was for Hale and many other Texans a traumatic and soul-making experience. He was born in 1921, the third child of Fred and Leona Hale. His mother was a stanch Methodist woman who saw to it that her children went to church, even if it was only a brief prayer on a country road when they were moving to one of the nine West Texas towns he grew up in. His rhythmic writing style comes in part from the King James Bible his mother made him read. He was named for his mother, to his lasting regret, because Texans are forever mispronouncing his name Lee-on, with the accent on the first syllable.
“Leon is not the worst thing they did to me,” he said. “The worst thing they did to me was give me my first name, which is Carol.” It seems a Sunday school teacher persuaded his mother that without an e on the end, Carol was a masculine name.
Because his father spent most of the time on the road, Hale was raised by his mother and older sisters, Maifred and Ima Ruth. He didn’t feel deprived.
“What more does a guy need than three women?” Hale recalled. “I feel like women are wonderful.”
Ima Ruth was musical and Maifred wrote poetry, published a couple of books with a vanity press.
“But the talent came out of the father,” Hale said. “He was the musician and storyteller, and I always though he was a wonderful dude. I always wanted to be like him more than anything.
“He was not the greatest provider in the world. He was a terrifically hard worker but he just didn’t know how to make money and didn’t know how to hold onto it after he got it. But he was always doing neat things, like going out and coming back with a milk goat in the back seat of the car.”
The laughter and music of his childhood clearly have meant a lot to Hale. It’s a subject to which he returns again and again. What does it mean to be happy and satisfied? The security and love of his family made it possible for him to go out into the world and write about such questions.
Sometimes Hale would travel with his father from town to town, a forecast of his travels as a columnist. But he was not ambitious.
“I remember a picture that one of my friends took of me in front of the bank in Eastland. I had my suit on. Mama loved that picture. That’s what she wanted me to be, was somebody like that, a banker. Or a doctor, a preacher.”
When he became a newspaper columnist who wrote about how much he hates to wear neckties, her support was almost embarrassing. She would clip out everything I did and make scrapbooks.”
His earliest memory of writing is an essay contest in the sixth grade.
“I won third place I my class. I was amazed that I had won. I had thought up till then that writing was nothing but a chore. Then there was a great blank until I was a senior in high school and I had a teacher then who is still alive, by golly, and her name is Verna Johnson. She talked to me about writing and encouraged me and tried to teach me that it wasn’t the terrible drudgery that I imagined it was and that it could be rewarding and fun. That was the first inkling I got that it would be kind of neat to write sentences. But it never occurred to me that anybody would ever pay me for writing one. I went through two years of college and it never occurred to me. When I was a junior out there at Texas Tech and I saw my byline in that boldfaced type…it kind of hits you right here,” he said, pointing to his chest, “and some of us never recover from it. I never have.”
The Hales moved to Lubbock so Leon could live at home and attend Texas Tech. (His sister Maifred contributed money throughout most of his college career.) He wasn’t so much interested in school as amazed that he was on a university campus, he recalled. After two years of general study, a dean called him in and told him he would have to declare a major. Consulting the aptitude tests Hale had taken during freshman orientation, the dean suggested he choose journalism. Besides, he told him, sizing up Hale’s academic record, “It’s an easy major.”
“In five minutes in that dean’s office,” Hale said, “the course of my life was set.”
Hales said he learned little about journalism at Tech but he did learn that he wanted to write a column when he got a chance to do one for the school newspaper. A semester before graduation, he took off to fight World War II. His dysplasia made it hard to get in the service, but he was finally accepted for pilot training by the Army Air Corps. He washed out, though, because he had an incurable habit of using the wrong rudder pedal in moments of stress.
After the war he finished his last semester at tech and took a job writing for the agricultural extension service at Texas A&M. His familiar, easy style had not yet developed.
“Nobody at Texas Tech told me to write simply,” he said, “not even the journalism school. So I made it as complicated as I possibly could.”
His bosses at A&M pointed out that the average reading level of the rural population of Texas then was the sixth grade. They shipped him to Auburn University in Alabama for a two-week course in simplified writing.
“I think those two weeks did more to affect my writing style than all the previous four years had. It appealed to me. I didn’t have to be on of these people who use big words and complex sentence structure. I could do it straightforward and simple. That meant quite a lot to me.”
In 1947 The Houston Post decided it needed a farm editor and its editors liked the looks of Hale’s press releases. By that time, Hale had married Helen Vick, who was a secretary at the same office in Bryan. The Post raised him from $200 to $300 a month.
“The reason I went to the Post is that they told me I could write the column. But in those days a column was something you did with one hand behind your back after you were finished with your regular day’s work. I covered country fairs, I interviewed cotton farmers and Brahman breeders, and when I filled up the Sunday page, then I got the reward of sitting down and doing my column.”
After a few years of writing as a farm editor and slipping in occasional columns about storytellers, Hale couldn’t persuade his editors to let him write the column full time. So he left for a public relations job with Humble Oil.
“I decided if I had to so something I didn’t really want to do, I might as well make some money at it. I thought I would work up to being a hotshot oil company PR man or something, walk among people and spend money as they used to say.”
He stayed at Humble, he said, “two years, ten months, three weeks and four days.” In the fall of 1955, Arthur Laro, then managing editor of the Post, called him back and gave him everything he wanted except money. He could live where he wanted, within reason, write about what he wanted, travel, do freelancing and teach. He moved to Brazoria County, where he raised his children and took a cut in pay from $600 to $500 a month.
During the early seventies he managed to write two novels, Bonney’s Place and Addison. Both have been optioned for movies, but neither has been made.
“It’s great fun to write fiction,” Hale said, “because I don’t have to worry about all those journalists’ restraints, mainly the libel suits. But then you have the laws of good taste that your publisher puts on you.”
The novels offered something else, too. I think they offered him a chance to deal with some of the pain hee has felt about the breakup of his first marriage. In Bonney’s Place, the narrator is a middle-aged man like Hale was when he wrote it. His wife has died and he feels the pain acutely. The narrator become enmeshed in this struggle the confront he numbness he feels at his wife’s death.
Bonney’s Place deals more emphatically with drinking that Hale can do in a column. Addison deals more forthrightly with sex. Addison is a man in his late twenties stranded in a remote Texas army base, away from his pregnant wife in Chicago. Hale knew such a man wwhen he was going through gunnery school in Yman, Arizona, during the war.
“It was my first exposure to a guy being really in love, and I was really impressed by it.” Each character has an essential quality of Hale’s and that is loneliness. Maybe that is why he puts such an emphasis on friendship and family. Loneliness is a condition of poets, not novelists. In a column Hale asked his readers — his customers as he calls them — to interpret a recurring dream he has had for years. It’s of a big, one-story frame house in the countrywith a wide porch all around it.
“I have sat, in dreams, on that porch many times,” he writes. “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 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 can see why he couldn’t interpret it, but wanted to share it with the customers.
Hale took me driving in his station wagon one day, and we visited some East Texas towns where he has written stories. We visited Borski’s tavern near New Waverly, where he used to drink beer and shoot pool with his students from Sam Houston State. A man recognized him immediately and wanted to shake his hand. “I sho’ like your writing,” he said. “I sho’ like your writing.”
We stopped at a store in Evergreen. When the clerk learned that Hale was from the Chronicle, she hoped he would do something about the vending box that had disappeared from the front porch. He said he would mention it to Circulation.
We visited Coldspring, where in 1947 they had a county fair with the animals tied up to trees in the town square and the poultry exhibited in the basement of courthouse. Grown up and changed now. People from Houston were crowding in, bringing cutesy strip shopping center and trailer houses. Hale was thinking of a woman who lives so far out in the country that she once visited Crockett, didn’t like it and never again visited a town, let alone a city. We drove over to the shore of Lake Livingston, where Hale and some friends used to watch the dam being built. The construction of lakes changed East Texas forever.
We spent the night at a little house on a ranch near Winedale that Hale eventually bought. It was owned by a customer who phoned him up one January and said, “I know a field where there’s twelve acres of violets in bloom.” They’ve been friends ever since. The house had a nice front porch where Hale would tap out his column the next day on a portable computer. It would be the about the enthusiasm of the black Lab that was with us. We sat by a big log fire and he talked about the past, about the Sunday school teacher who changed him forever by telling him he wasn’t going to hell. Hadn’t he committed al the sins? Hadn’t be been up the skirts of all those women in his imagination? Hadn’t he stolen O.E. Owens’ cap pistol that time and buried it in the backyard? It was a great relief to be unburdened by the prospect of hell.
Midnight and Hale had gone out into the night. The moon was three-quarters bright and lighting up the frost on his white station wagon. His friend’s longhorn bull bellowed from the meadow. I stepped onto the porch. Hale was out there with the dog at the edge of the woods. A hoot owl called, followed by a long silence. Then I heard Hale calling, calling him back.
