The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989 Page: 68
682 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
was not forthcoming, the plates were to be scrapped and melted down
"because sales of the book did not merit their preservation." Dr. Webb
was killed midway in a letter-by-letter tug-of-war with the publishers
over "the principle of the thing," and the publishers then gave the
plates to his widow. The second edition of The Great Frontzer was pub-
lished by the University of Texas Press, using those original plates.
Arnold Toynbee, in his introduction to the book, wrote that "Walter
Prescott Webb was a scholar whose mind went on growing all through
his life" (p. vii).
The little photograph there on his desk? That is Terrell, the bride to
whom he came very late in life-Terrell Maverick Webb, to whom he is
slave, heavy date, coworker, companion, provider, lover. When he talks
about her he grins like an adolescent boyfriend. He marvels at her wit,
and her piano jazz, and the comfortable, gracious home she has made
for him. ("Poor Walter, poor dahling, he has never had any house
slippers!")
The excitement of things they will do together-the trips they will
take (like the one on "the last railroad that will ever be built, any-
where"-the Chihuahua-Pacifico, which runs from Presidio and Oji-
naga to Los Mochis on the western Mexican coast), the new life they are
contemplating away from his beloved University of Texas-at another
university that is urging him to accept the endowed chair with which
the University he has served so well for so long does not see fit to honor
him, a refusal that has become another rock that he must plow around.
Terrell, who twinkles, and giggles, and cusses like a sergeant-
Terrell, who is gay and flirts with him and flatters him and comforts
him. Terrell, who at the Christmastime funeral for little birdlike Bertha
Dobie in the State Cemetery in Austin, where Bertha's Frank and Fred
Gipson and Harry Crozier lay near Dr. Webb, said when I asked her if I
should ask people standing on Dr. Webb's grave to please get off, "No,
dahling, he'd like the company." And so he would, all his old "boys"
there to honor little Bertha Dobie-Hart, Ransom, Frantz, Wardlaw,
Winfrey, and Kielman.
I'm glad you want to talk to him about the Hinds-Webb Memorial
Fund. You'll find him eager to discuss every aspect of what he hopes
will be his ongoing memorial and that of the unmet benefactor about
whom he wrote in "The Search for William E. Hinds," which was pub-
lished in Harper's Magazine and Reader's Digest.
3Walter Prescott Webb, "The Search for William E. Hinds," Harper's Magazzne, July 8, 1961,
pp. 6i-68; Walter Prescott Webb, "My Search for William E Hinds," Reader's Dgest, Aug.,
g1961, pp. 35-40.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989, periodical, 1989; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101212/m1/95/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.