Right. So, last time, I was holding forth on Judge Roy Bean, and being kinda confused about why it was that the town of Ozona, Texas, claims a connection to him when, in point of fact, he was mostly in Langtry, Texas, which is a hundred miles away. Well, today, I’m finally going get around to explaining all that.
We had been driving for quite a while before we got to Ozona. We had stopped and gotten sandwiches, and then found a place to eat them in a little park. We realized that the park was just in front of a building that housed the town’s Chamber of Commerce and Tourist Info Center. So, after we finished up our ham-and-cheese and Italian BMT respectively, we figured what-the-heck? and trotted on into the Info Center.
There we found a very nicely laid out place with lots of pamphlets and other information on local attractions. There was also a very pleasant woman behind the counter who was full of information and willing to chat.(1)
I asked her some questions about the town. She told me about some of the economic developments and how the town was reacting to changing circumstances. (Note: check out the town’s airport. According to its webpage, Ozona has an “all-weather hot mix asphalt runway [that is] 6,000 feet in length, 75 feet wide, and will accommodate any aircraft weighing up to 70,000 lbs.”[2] It sounds like a great place for light, private aircraft, and the town is actively looking for businesses that might be able to use the place. So if you’ve got an airframe or engine modification enterprise inside your soul just busting to get out, you might consider Ozona.)
About the photos: Three today. First, the exterior of Ozona Vistor’s Center. Well worth a visit. Second, the road just outside Ozona. You can see why I say that Far Western Texas looks an awful like New Mexico. And, finally, just because I like the shot, Martha and me at Baris, one of our fav Italian restaurants in Texas. Specifically, it is in Pflugerville. See it here: https://barispastaandpizza.com/
Then I got around to asking her about the Judge Roy Bean connection. I said I might have been misinformed or I’d misunderstood because it sure looked to me like the good Judge never got anywhere near Ozona, much less lived there.
She smiled. “Oh,” she said. “That’s a story.”
Here’s what she said. You’ll recall that Judge Bean had a family. He was married and had four children with his wife. According to some sources, he also adopted another child somewhere along the way.(3)
The children came to live with Roy in Langtry. And when they were grown, they, too, had families and made lives for themselves in the town. But, then the town began to wither on the vine. The railroad tracks had been laid. They had to be maintained, of course, but that could be done with relatively small crews. The rail companies didn’t have to keep large armies of Irish, Chinese, and other immigrant laborers in the field any more. Thus, Langtry no longer had an economic raison d’etre.
So what were the children and grandchildren of Judge Bean going to do? Answer, they moved someplace else...someplace that was still thriving. And, for at least some of them, that place was Ozona. “We’ve got several Beans here,” she noted, cheerfully. They were, she said, among the town’s “old families,” people who had been in Ozona forever and ever.
Besides the Beans, were there any other Old Families? I asked.
“Oh, absolutely. There certainly are. We’ve got families of the original settlers, and Native American families, who were here way before anyone else.”
And so the mystery was solved. It wasn’t that Bean had been here (or if he had, he hadn’t been often), but his children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so on, had been. They had carried on his living legacy here, in Ozona, and the town had as good a claim to the man who was Law West of the Pecos as any. This is, of course, the reality of history. It is fixed, but also strangely mobile. The major characters may not leave their graves, but their memory and their legacy are entirely portable. We cannot hold them prisoner in either space or time.
Anyway...
We finished our conversation and then, saying goodby, Martha and I went our way. We still had a long ways to go to get to Marfa--just about 200 miles, in fact. And we still needed to find a grocery store so we could bring some supplies to the AirBandB where we’d be staying with the kids.
Thanks to our map apps, we already knew where there was a Walmart near-by. We figured that would fine.
And it was...we just didn’t count on my bleeding all over the dairy case.
But that’s for next time.
More to come.
Footnotes:
1. Maddeningly, I never got her name. But, if you’re out there reading this, whoever you are, thank you so much for the background.
3. See, for example, this article in American Cowboy, https://americancowboy.com/people/langry-texas-roy-bean-jersey-lilly-saloon/
Copyright©2024 Michael Jay Tucker
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