Live Oak County Texas Biographies

Live Oak County, Texas
Biographies

DOBIE, JAMES MADISON (1856-1929).
James Madison Dobie, rancher, son of Robert S. and Amanda (Hill) Dobie, was born on January 18, 1856, near Houston, Texas. He became a freighter before he moved to Live Oak County, where he ranched and raised horses to send to Dodge City, Kansas. After several years in Live Oak County, he moved to Indian Territory but returned to the area in 1895 almost broke. However, in San Antonio he managed to gather a herd of 25,000 cattle by year's end. He took this herd to Live Oak County and soon had one of the largest ranches in the area, with 30,000 acres in parts of Live Oak, McMullen, Webb, and La Salle counties. In 1905 he married Ida Mae Taylor.

According to his nephew, J. Frank Dobie,qv he claimed that one man was enough to handle the worst stampede of cattle and usually took control himself in such cases. Dobie not only had business interests in cattle, horses, and ranchland, but also owned real estate in San Antonio and at one time owned the Princess Theatre. He was active in shaping policies of the old Texas Cattle Raisers' Association and later the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.qv After establishing a permanent home with his wife in San Antonio in 1924, Dobie died there on May 21, 1929.

[Source: Emory A. Bailey, "Who's Who in Texas" (Dallas: John B. McCraw Press, 1931). San Antonio Express, May 22, 1929 - Submitted by Janice Rice]

DOBIE, DUDLEY RICHARD, SR. (1904-1982).
Dudley Richard Dobie, Sr., antiquarian bookseller, was born on August 6, 1904, at old Lagarto in southern Live Oak County, Texas, to William Neville and Mary E. (Mills) Dobie, prominent South Texas ranchers. Family pioneers had first settled in Harris County in 1828. Dudley's branch moved to Live Oak County in the late 1860s. Dudley's first cousin, J. Frank Dobie,qv grew up on a nearby ranch, but their sixteen-year age difference inhibited the development of close friendship until Dudley reached maturity. He received his childhood education in the Lagarto school and graduated as valedictorian from Mathis High School in 1923. After a year of unsuccessful job seeking, he entered Southwest Texas State Teachers College, and from that time he considered San Marcos his home. He received his degree in history in May 1927 and that fall was named principal of Westover School on the west side of San Marcos. Two months later he married Deborah Galbreath, who became the mother of his three children. He later looked back on the winter of 1927-28 as the time he began to get serious about book collecting. In the summer of 1928 he embarked upon a graduate degree in history at the University of Texas, where he returned each summer for the next four years. Walter Prescott Webbqv supervised his thesis, A History of Hays County, Texas. In 1933 Dudley left teaching to become an educational advisor for the Civilian Conservation Corps.qv He had already begun free-lancing newspaper and magazine articles about historic persons, places, and events for sundry Texas publications.

He became a bookseller in 1935 and further supplemented his uncertain income by scouting artifacts for the Hall of State,qv which opened in Dallas the following year. Throughout the 1930s he systematically expanded his knowledge of books and his acquaintance among book people. He attended annual meetings of the Texas State Historical Association,qv the Old Trail Drivers Association, and on occasion the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.qv He also kept membership in the Texas Folklore Society,qv where his cousin J. Frank was the secretary-editor. In all of these groups, Dobie quickly identified the authors and collectors. During the winter of 1940-41 he helped the Texas State Historical Association organize its first book auction, now a traditional feature of its annual meeting. Following his debut as a bookseller, and while working for the Texas Centennialqv Commission, he was also running a mail-order book business out of his home. He would periodically load his car with books and head for San Antonio, Austin, or elsewhere, and collar potential customers in their homes or businesses. In 1941 he began a ten-year career at Southwest Texas State Teachers College as a nontenured, part-time history instructor and part-time museum director. His status was such that he was able to continue his bookselling and, in 1947, issue his first printed catalogue, Spirited Southwest: Roundup No. 1. From 1949 to 1951 he served as a San Marcos city alderman.

Dobie's connection with the college ended in 1951. A year later he opened a bookstore in Austin on the site of what is now Dobie Center, near the University of Texas campus. Not achieving the hoped-for success, he closed his Austin store and later made an unsuccessful race for school superintendent in Hays County. In 1955 he opened a bookshop and gift store in San Marcos, but again the time and place weren't right. At this time he unexpectedly received the opportunity to teach history and direct the Big Bend Memorial Museum (later the Museum of the Big Bendqv) at Sul Ross State Teachers College in Alpine. Except for the 1958-59 academic year, Dobie remained at Sul Ross until his retirement and return to San Marcos in 1966. For most of that time, however, he was affiliated with the library. From 1966 until his death, he sold books by mail order from his San Marcos home. He served a term as county Democratic chairman and was for ten years a member of the county historical commission. He made notes for the memoirs he always intended to write, but never did. He also regaled many a novice reporter with tales of frontier life that he knew not only from a wealth of reading, but from personal and family experience. Aside from various newspaper and magazine features, his publications include A History of San Marcos and Hays County (1948) and Adventures in the Canyons, Mountains and Desert Country of the Big Bend of Texas and Mexico (1952), both privately printed. He died of colon cancer on April 17, 1982.
Source: Al Lowman, "Remembering Dudley Dobie: The First Bookseller to Enrich My Life (and Empty My Pockets)" (Austin, Boerne, San Marcos, Texas: Lagarto Press, 1992). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin. Submitted by Janice Rice]

J. Frank Dobie, (1888-1964) folklorist, was born on a ranch in Live Oak County, Texas, on September 26, 1888, the eldest of six children of Richard J. and Ella (Byler) Dobie. His ranching heritage became an early influence on his character and personality. His fundamentalist father read the Bible to Frank and the other five children, and his mother read them "Ivanhoe" and introduced them to "The Scottish Chiefs", "Pilgrim's Progress", and "Swiss Family Robinson". He left the ranch when he was sixteen and moved to Alice, where he lived with his grandparents and finished high school. In 1906 he enrolled in Southwestern University in Georgetown, where he met Bertha McKee, whom he married in 1916, and Professor Albert Shipp Pegues, his English teacher, who introduced him to English poetry, particularly the Romantics, and encouraged him as a writer. Dobie's education as a teacher and writer continued after graduation in 1910. He worked two summers as a reporter, first for the "San Antonio Express" and then the "Galveston Tribune". He got his first teaching job in 1910 in Alpine, where he was also the principal, play director, and editor of the school paper. He returned to Georgetown in 1911 and taught in the Southwestern University preparatory school until 1913, when he went to Columbia to work on his master's degree. With his new M.A. he joined the University of Texas faculty in 1914. At this time he also joined the Texas Folklore Society. Dobie left the university in 1917 and served for two years in the field artillery in World War I. His outfit was sent overseas right at the war's end, and he returned to be discharged in 1919. In 1919 he published his first articles. He resigned his position at the university in 1920 to manage his uncle Jim Dobie's ranch. During this year on the Rancho de Los Olmos with the vaqueros and the stock and the land that had been part of his formation, Dobie discovered his calling - to transmute all the richness of this life and land and culture into literature. The Texas Folklore Society was the main avenue for his new mission, and the University of Texas library with all its Texas resources was his vehicle.

Dobie returned to Austin and the university in 1921. The Texas Folklore Society had been formed in 1909 by Leonidas W. Payneqv and others, but had recessed during the war years. On April 1, 1922, Dobie became secretary of the society. He immediately began a publication program. "Legends of Texas" (1924) carried the seeds of many of his later publications. Dobie served as the society's secretary-editor for twenty-one years and built the society into a permanent professional organization. When the university would not promote him without a Ph.D., Dobie accepted the chairmanship of the English department at Oklahoma A&M, where he stayed from 1923 to 1925. During these two years he began writing for the "Country Gentleman". With considerable help from his friends on the UT campus, he was able to return in 1925 with a token promotion. He began writing articles on Texas history, culture, and folklore for magazines and periodicals and soon started to work on his first book, "A Vaquero of the Brush Country". Dobie's purpose in life from the time of his return to the university in 1921 was to show the people of Texas and the Southwest the richness of their culture and their traditions, particularly in their legends. John A. Lomax, another founder of the Texas Folklore Society, had done this with his collecting and publishing cowboy songs; Dobie intended to do this with the tales of old-time Texas and through the publications of the society and his own writing.

His "Vaquero of the Brush Country", published in 1929, established him as a spokesman of Texas and southwestern culture. It was based on John Young the Vaquero's autobiographical notes and articulated the struggle of the individual against social forces, in this case the battle of the open-range vaquero against barbed wire. Two years later Dobie published "Coronado's Children" (1931), the tales of those free spirits who abandoned society in the search for gold, lost mines, and various other grails. It won the Literary Guild Award for 1931 and, combined with his continuing success as a popular writer in "Country Gentleman", made Dobie a nationally known literary figure. He was also promoted in 1933 to the rank of full professor, the first Texan non-Ph.D. to be so honored at the university. In 1942 he published the "Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest", an annotated reading list. It was published again in 1952. As head of the Texas Folklore Society and author of "On the Open Range" (1931), "Tales of the Mustang" (1936), "The Flavor of Texas" (1936), "Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver" (1939), and "Tongues of the Monte" (1947), Dobie was the state's leading spokesman and literary and cultural figure during the Texas Centennial decade, the 1930s. His first period of writing ended with the publication of "The Longhorns" in 1941.

He spent World War II teaching American literature in Cambridge. After the war he returned to Europe to teach in England, Germany, and Austria. He said of his Cambridge experience in "A Texan in England" that it gave him a broader perspective, that it was his beginning of his acceptance of civilization, an enlightened civilization free of social and political rigidities and with full respect for individuality. In Texas the University of Texas regents, critical of the university's liberal professors, had fired President Homer P. Rainey in November 1944. Dobie, a liberal Democrat, was outraged and vociferous, and Governor Coke Stevensonqv said that he was a troublemaker and should be summarily dismissed. Dobie's request for a continuation of his leave of absence after his European tour in 1947 was denied by the regents, and he was dismissed from the UT faculty under what became known as the "Dobie rule," which restricted faculty leaves of absence to two years except in emergencies.

After this separation Dobie devoted all of his time to writing and anthologizing. The next decade saw the publication of "The Voice of the Coyote" (1949), "The Ben Lilly Legend" (1950), "The Mustangs" (1952), "Tales of Old Time Texas" (1955), "Up the Trail From Texas" (1955), and "I'll Tell You a Tale" (1960). Before he died he published "Cow People" (1964) and almost finished the manuscript for "Rattlesnakes", which Bertha McKee Dobie later edited and published in 1965. Dobie began writing for the "Southwest Review" in 1919, when it was the "Texas Review", and continued the association throughout his life. The Southwest Review published his "John C. Duval: First Texas Man of Letters" in 1939. Dobie wrote a Sunday newspaper column from 1939 until his death, and as an outspoken critic of the Texas scene he was a popular subject of newspaper stories. His most celebrated targets were professional educationists ("unctuous elaborators of the obvious"); state politicians ("When I get ready to explain homemade fascism in America, I can take my example from the state capitol of Texas"); Pompeo Coppini's Alamo monument ("From a distance it looks like a grain elevator or one of those swimming pool slides"); and inappropriate architecture (a friend reports his saying that the University Tower,into which he refused to move, "looked like a toothpick in a pie, ought to be laid on its side and have galleries put around it"). His war against bragging Texans, political, social, and religious restraints on individual liberty, and the mechanized world's erosion of the human spirit was continual.

Dobie died on September 18, 1964. He had been feted by the Southwestern Writers and the Texas Folklore Society. Special editions of the Texas Observer and the Austin American-Statesmanq had been devoted to his praise by his many admirers, and President Lyndon B. Johnsonqv awarded him the nation's highest civil award, the Medal of Freedom, on September 14, 1964. His funeral was held in Hogg Auditorium on the UT campus, and he was buried in the State Cemetery.
[Source: "DOBIE, JAMES FRANK." The Handbook of Texas Online. - Submitted by Janice Rice]