The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989 Page: 69
682 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb
It was really Hinds, the man to whom he owed his education and his
ultimate success, who brought me to Dr. Webb in the first place. The
inspiration for that powerhouse writing in "The Search" was a bache-
lor, an importer in an eastern state when Dr. Webb was a boy in the
brushland of West Texas. With correspondence and money, he had en-
couraged the very young Webb to read, read, read.
William E. Hinds had responded to the young Webb's first published
writing-an appeal in the "Gossip" column of a magazine, The Sunny
South, in which he wrote of his need for an education in order that he
might one day become a writer. Hinds later saw Dr. Webb through to
his first degree with loans that were always repaid before going on to
the next phase of the academic ladder. It was Hinds who provided the
encouragement, in Webb's youth, to keep going, to keep reading, to
look ahead, and it was Hinds for whom he was searching and trying to
thank when he lay stretched out on the highway south of Austin, a
check for seventy-eight dollars in his wallet, a check made out to the
Hinds-Webb Memorial Fund from the San Antonio Retired Teachers
Association.
When I came to see Dr. Webb about the "little job" he had, there
were bulging grocery cartons full of unopened mail piled against the
bookcase wall in his office, all generated by the publication of the Hinds
story. My exciting chore was to get all of that mess out of o102 in Gar-
rison Hall, to open, organize, and answer all that mail. That's when we
two trudged up to the seventeenth floor of the University of Texas
Tower, where, unknown to almost everyone except his great friend,
Mrs. Frances Hudspeth, Chancellor Ransom's assistant, he had a hide-
away office with a huge window looking out over the western hills rim-
ming Austin. In his childhood he had dreamed of one day having just
such a room, one filled with books on all four walls, from floor to ceil-
ing.4 There were books on everything, from the earliest records of
American Indians to years of U.S. Hydrographic Office surveys, joke
books, English novels, and just trash, and I was to work there blissfully
alone, reading those heartfelt letters from everywhere, having an emo-
tional binge as I realized the extent of the great surge of empathy Dr.
Webb had aroused in so many different kinds of people.
As the opening and classifying of all that mail proceeded, it became
apparent that no one was going to be able to lead Dr. Webb to Hinds, or
to his heirs, or even to where he had lived. The trail had grown too
cold. Still, shortly before Dr. Webb was killed one letter did arrive that
seemed to have hit "pay dirt" and he was looking forward to following
its exciting lead to perhaps an equally exciting conclusion. Professor
"The Confessions of a Texas Bookmaker," 3 (copy in possession of the author).
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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/m1/96/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.