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Beloved Houston Chronicle columnist Leon Hale dies at 99

By , Staff writerUpdated
Leon Hale, longtime columnist with the Houston Chronicle, photographed on the infamous front porch, which was immortalized in numerous columns, in Winedale, Texas, Monday September 25, 2006. (Karen Warren/ Houston Chronicle)

Leon Hale, longtime columnist with the Houston Chronicle, photographed on the infamous front porch, which was immortalized in numerous columns, in Winedale, Texas, Monday September 25, 2006. (Karen Warren/ Houston Chronicle)

Karen Warren, STAFF / Houston Chronicle

Ira Glass, the host of the radio program “This American Life,” once said “great stories happen to those who can tell them.”

In a career that spanned decades, Leon Hale proved that to be true. He dedicated his life to telling stories, spending 65 years as a columnist for the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Post. A writer capable of braiding together wit and insight in a conversational style that also conveyed a philosophical depth, Hale died Saturday, said his wife, Babette Fraser Hale. He was 99.

Poet and essayist Phillip Lopate said Hale “mastered the column form in many ways. And he knew his audience. He could speak to them. He was both a populist and an intellectual. He had a feeling for community. He was one of those people like William Goyen and John Graves who bridged the regional to a larger literary world. I respected him as a fellow craftsman.”

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Though he retired at age 93, Hale’s narratives didn’t stop there. This spring, at age 99, he offered a new book, “See You on Down the Road: A Retirement Journal.”

“I need to be working,” he told the Chronicle this month. “I need to be working.”

One didn’t need to know a single one of the hundreds — maybe thousands — of proper names that peppered Hale’s work. By the time he told a story, the minute and intricate details he’d curated filled in entire lives and spaces. Hale stopped in the towns the rest of us might skip, and he’d talk to the people we might not acknowledge at a filling station. He came away from these explorations and interactions with a richly calibrated take on life in Texas throughout the 20th century and beyond.

He could make heroes of people just doing their daily work, such as Otto Raab, who in six decades of blacksmithing had shod only one horse because he was allergic to horses. He told of visiting Melba McConnell in Omen, who sold him a dozen eggs even though she had only 10. So Hale waited another 20 minutes for two eggs and in doing so heard a life story that included five marriages from a woman who admitted, “I’m a little psychic.”

Hale left behind a body of work that created an adoring following for its humor as well as a master’s sense of detail and deep connection to the people with whom he’d come into contact. Through it all, Hale presented himself as a flawed player in his own narrative.

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His introduction to the perfectly titled “Easy Going” — a 1983 book anthologizing some of his Houston Post work — found Hale referencing a temptation to edit or rewrite some of the columns. He chose not to.

“Somewhere I said that a chicken snake is harmless,” he wrote. “Since then I’ve been taught by Richard Wharton, who lives at Joaquin and knows plenty about snakes and chickens both, that the chicken snake can inflict a painful bite. So it shouldn’t be called harmless just because it doesn’t inject venom. I can see that’s true. Moral: Don’t mess around with chicken snakes.”

The late John Graves, storied author of “Goodbye to a River,” once said Hale’s “voice as a writer is the voice of the man himself. Colloquial, wise, caring and wryly and powerfully humorous.”

Paper hero

When Hale decided to retire in 2014, he wrote about a day in April 1984. “I was sitting in the newsroom of the Houston Post, arguing with myself about whether I ought to quit my job and move on.”

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Then 63, Hale received a call from Jack Loftis at the Houston Chronicle offering him a job that offered pay, travel expenses and a car. Thirty additional years of regular columns would follow, with Hale always resisting the perks of the business that he considered trappings. He didn’t want to judge barbecue competitions, and he didn’t want to cut ribbons at ceremonies. His life, much like his work, was about observation, reflection and then sharing his thoughts. The process was always entrancing. It could feel like a trip to the ophthalmologist. Shapes and figures were presented out of focus. Slowly they found a revelatory crispness.

Lopate said Hale “demonstrated another way of doing essays. … He was a fellow essayist posing as a columnist.”

Hale’s own life was threaded throughout his work, though he wrote about it most directly and most extensively in “Paper Hero,” a memoir in story form published in 1986.

Even at the outset, Hale lived up to Glass’ words about storytelling. He recalled a theme he’d written in grade school about his family.

“The winter of 1927, when I was 6 years old, I became a hero for the first time,” he wrote. “I saved the lives of my entire family, with the exception of my father.”

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Hale recounted the rescue of his sisters and his mother and their Persian cat during a house fire. And then he shared the fact that his sisters remember the event entirely differently. That Hale made up the story whole cloth, right down to the nightshirt he was wearing, something he’d seen in a Sears-Roebuck catalog.

“In the pages to follow I intend to record many other events that shaped our lives in those curious years when we were all under the same roof,” he wrote. “We don’t always agree on the details of those events. But that doesn’t mean I am telling things wrong. I am telling everything just the way it needs to be told.”

Country folks

Hale was born May 30, 1921, in Stephenville. Best to let him tell it:

“Near the back door of the First Methodist Church in Stephenville there was once a little frame house. I was born in that house on May 30, 1921. I believe my mother felt privileged to have a baby in the shade of a church, especially since it was Methodist.”

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He was named for his mother, Leona, and often expressed a closeness to her that exceeded his feelings for his father, who was often gone. The family moved quite a bit, due in part to his father’s work as a traveling salesman offering a machine that sealed packages to be mailed. Hale was 7 when the family moved to Fort Worth: “I had heard of the place,” he wrote, “in the same way I had heard of New York and Chicago.”

The city “is where I first began to understand that the Hales were country folks.”

Both city and country provided a better setting than an unsettled period during the Great Depression when Hale’s father stored all the family’s belongings and dragged them around on a lengthy sales trip. When they finally returned, they owned nothing.

Hale’s family then moved to Lubbock. He describes a fairly awkward childhood as “a funny looking kid,” his face misshapen due to a bone disease that wouldn’t be diagnosed until years later as polyostotic fibrous dysplasia.

Naturally, Hale remembered his teachers well, particularly Verna Johnson, a high school English teacher who told him writing needn’t be a tormented process. “Therefore sometimes I would write sentences when I didn’t even have to be doing it,” Hale wrote.

At Texas Tech University, he was tutored by Alan Stroud, who praised Hale’s compositions yet gave him D’s for his poor spelling. While attending Tech, Hale began writing for the school paper, the Toreador, though he had no interest in being a reporter. Essays and columns, opinion pieces and other feature writing took hold.

First, though, came the war.

After the war

Hale tried to enlist with the Navy (he was a fan of the Horatio Hornblower novels) and then the Marines but was turned away because of unusual positioning of his eye and high blood pressure. He found his way into the Army and in 1941 was sent to Nebraska for training, the first time he’d ever stepped foot outside of Texas. With the United States Army Air Corps, Hale flew 50 combat missions “without once firing a shot at an enemy plane or getting as much as a skinned finger in the way of sounds. ... My entire military career was of no consequence whatsoever.”

He amended that account in “See You on Down the Road.” In his new book, he described witnessing a bomber that was downed by German anti-aircraft fire. Days later, his own plane had a close call, taking a shell to the wing that failed to explode, leaving behind a sizable hole.

“I asked him why in the world he hadn’t worked that into a column,” Babette said. Hale felt a close call didn’t require mention until many years later.

Upon his discharge in 1945, Hale returned to Texas Tech and received a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He was offered a job at the Lubbock Avalanche Journal for $20 a week.

“I had picked up expensive tastes in the Army,” he wrote. “I had already learned how to spend $20 in one night in a bar in Los Angeles.” So he turned the job down.

Though in his writings Hale expressed a deeper connection to his mother, he credits his father with pushing the young aspiring writer out of Abilene, where his parents had settled and where Hale was finding odd jobs.

Hale’s father told him, “You stay here, you might get stuck,” and encouraged the young man to leave.

“I believe that was the best advice I ever received,” Hale wrote.

Busy retirement

Hale’s father also loaned him the family’s car for a year. So the son drove away and found a job at the Houston Post in 1952. The father walked to work, except for those days when weather forced him to take a bus or seek a ride.

The work suited Hale. He wrote introductory paragraphs with admirable efficiency. The words sang and offered enough intrigue to tempt a reader to continue. He always knew what to leave in, and he always knew what to leave out.

Take just this one example that opens “Uncommon Folks”:

“Back in early August I saw Buckshot Lane down at Rockport, where he has a beach house. He said if I’d come by his home in Wharton sometime, he’d tell me how he burned the Kendleton Bridge on U.S. 59.”

Hale’s colleagues describe a writer who needed little editing. Former Chronicle editor Roberta MacInnis said, “What you read in the paper was what he had turned in. I remember maybe finding two comma faults in all that time. Even those might have been arguable.”

So it went for years and years and years. Hale filed multiple times each week. He was never a reporter covering any industry or crime or metro news. But he possessed a keen skill for reporting nevertheless, always finding the right person, the right detail, the right quote.

After more than 30 years at the Post, he took that job at the Chronicle.

“I’m pretty sure I said yes, I’d take the job, even before I’d heard what the salary was,” he wrote in his final print column for the Chronicle. “How’s that for cunning negotiation?”

Despite his standing as Texas treasure, he described his status entering the 1980s as tenuous: “I’d just had my plow cleaned in a divorce. I was driving a smooth-mouthed station wagon that was about half paid for. I was living in a two-room apartment with a second-hand sofa for a bed.”

He and Babette met in 1981 and spent the next 40 years together at their home in Winedale, just west of Brenham. Hale’s decision to skip retirement in the ’80s only deepened his connection to readers in Houston, as he continued writing regularly between 1984 and 2014, when he decided, “I’ve stayed at the party long enough. Maybe even a little too long.”

His dedicated readers would disagree. Hale’s audience was fervent and revered his work. Some Chronicle subscribers held on solely for his columns.

Chronicle Opinion Editor Lisa Falkenberg, who won the newspaper’s first Pulitzer Prize as a columnist, recalled a post Hale made on Facebook about a coffeemaker that drew hundreds of comments.

“That made me wonder, what was it about this columnist that made people care so much about that person as an individual?” she said. “It wasn’t just about telling stories, it was about connecting to readers. He made them feel like they knew him. Sadly, I think that’s something missing from newspapers today.”

“Home to the Country” stands as a brilliant Hale piece that exemplifies his gift for words and phrasing and pacing and detail. Its components are so skillfully constructed that even excerpted they look like the inside of a watch. Hale in the piece recounted his desire to record some sounds he wanted to get on tape “before it’s too late.”

He then inventories those sounds, including these:

“A steel tired wagon going over a rough road, and the sounds of the harness and the trace chains.

“An old hen, clucking to 14 baby chicks.

“A woman churning, with a crock churn and a wooden dasher that makes that steady, down-in-a-well sound pattern. Clonk, she-clunk, she-clunk, she-clunk.

“A norther moaning around the corner of the house in January.”

Hale is survived by his wife, Babette Fraser Hale; two children; three grandchildren; a stepson; and two step-grandchildren.

andrew.dansby@chron.com

twitter.com/andrewdansby

|Updated

Andrew Dansby covers culture and entertainment, both local and national, for the Houston Chronicle. He came to the Chronicle in 2004 from Rolling Stone, where he spent five years writing about music. He’d previously spent five years in book publishing, working with George R.R. Martin’s editor on the first two books in the series that would become TV’s "Game of Thrones. He misspent a year in the film industry, involved in three "major" motion pictures you've never seen. He’s written for Rolling Stone, American Songwriter, Texas Music, Playboy and other publications.

Andrew dislikes monkeys, dolphins and the outdoors.