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While John was
out doing field work, Tom and I were playing. We woke up in the morning
ready to play and after breakfast (brakrust then) wrote out the script for
the day. The conversation would go something along the lines of, “Plike like
(play like) you’re Gene Autry, Tom, and I’m Roy Rogers and we’re fightin’
the Indians and plike like...and so on till we had a whole morning of
playing laid out. Growing up on a farm where there was still lots of dirt to
play in was great. The dirt around the shop where Pa and Grandpa worked was
littered with nails and metal pieces of all kinds, spark plugs, some from
when Pa was a kid and all sorts of space craft-like things. With metal rods,
spark plugs and other high tech ‘space ship gauges’, we were able to blast
off from the soil of Texas and right out into space. Tom and I were constant
companions. Nothing was any fun if my little brother wasn’t along. It upset
me when kids my age wanted me to come play and leave my little brother
behind. Eventually, as teenagehood goes, Tom began to be his own man. In
1960, country music wasn’t cool. And though we lived with cowboys all around
us, ‘Ivy league’ was in. Ban Lon shirts were the rage, not western snap
long-sleeves. Tom didn’t care. He was going to be a real cowboy and he was
gonna dress like one and listen to cowboy music. Tom was a genuine ‘stomp”
and took every opportunity to work on the local ranches.
“Stomps” Tom Taylor and James Williams,
When he graduated
high school, I tried to get him to come to my art school. Tom could draw as
good as I could, but by age 13 he left off the art for the real thing. He
wanted to live it, not paint it. And live it he did. Tom’s creativity didn’t
go into paint on a canvas. It built a better fence, better gates and made
wherever he worked, work better. Instead of art school, Tom enrolled in
animal husbandry at
That’s snow! “Aw, it ain’t that cold.” Tom on a cowboy Corvette,
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