$60 to buy him a calf. He went to Whitney to fetch it and brought it home to the pen where the milk cow was. It wasn’t two minutes before the calf found an opening in the pen and ran off, never to be seen again.
He helped publish the high school annual. He and Bobbie were consistently voted class favorites, Duke and Duchess, King and Queen, and the main entertainment on Friday assemblies in the cafetorium. And he excelled in the role of Uncle Billy Babcock, the Hated Old Bachelor Next Door, in the senior class production of
Oh, Aunt Jerusha,
performed in the Abbott gym on Thursday, March 30, 1950, then held over a second night by popular demand.
Acting onstage was no big deal. Mamma Nelson had brought up Willie not to be afraid to look a man or a lady in the eye when he talked to them. “There is, I think, a power there that you lose when you don’t do that,” he said.
Confidence came naturally to him. “I always instinctively felt like I was sort of in control with what was going on,” he said. He realized that when he stared at trains and got the engineer to look over his way. “I started thinking along the line that if you put your mind to something, you could do those things. When you think positive about those things, you have a better chance of getting them done. If you think you can’t do it, you won’t do it. If you want something to happen, pretend it has already happened.”
W EARING the western suit purchased by the five girls in the Willie Nelson Fan Club, he joined twenty-one other students from the Abbott High class of ’50 in graduation exercises in the gymnasium and a baccalaureate service at the Methodist church. The graduates were all exceptions to the rule, Willie especially, considering the hand he was dealt growing up. Only 11 percent of the adults in Hill County could claim a high school degree. Willie Hugh was one of them. So were Mary Ann Kolar, Danny Ozyomy, Adolph Janecka, Jean Carroll, Bobby Watson, Donald Reed, Ermalee Ellis, Lawrence Hlavaty, Helen Pettitt, Gayle Gregory, Joseph Jenecka, Mattie Row Payne, Jackie Clements, Ramona Stafford, Billy Harsler, Helen Urbanovsky, Donald Pendegrass, and Ralph McIlroy.
The year Willie completed high school, country music was redefining itself as Red Foley racked up jukebox spins with his version of “Birmingham Bounce,” a song initially popularized by an Alabama cowboy known as Hardrock Gunter, while another ’Bama boy, Hank Williams, was moaning the blues with “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.”
A FTER graduating, Willie started running around with Zeke Varnon, a buddy of Bud Fletcher’s whose main mission in life seemed to be the pursuit of a good time.
“I met him at the Nite Owl,” Willie said. “I was playing music. He’d just gotten out of the army. We started hanging out together.” Zeke endeared himself to Willie by dancing with all the girls in the Willie Nelson Fan Club seated at the table by the front of the bandstand and by clowning and carrying on. Zeke and Barbara Jean McDearmon, who was Willie’s sweetie when she was killed, were old friends from Hillsboro.
When Willie wasn’t playing, he and Zeke liked to “drink, run around and chase the girls,” Willie said. “He had done it all his life. I never knew what he was gonna do. He never knew what he was gonna do, and when he’d get drunk he was like everybody else—there was no telling what he was going to do.”
Some nights, Zeke and Willie would drink to the point of passing out and wake up the next morning and start drinking again. They attempted to enter the bootlegging trade, pooling their earnings and buying nineteen half-pints over the McLennan County line and driving the haul back to Hillsboro, where half-pints went for twice the price. “We sold two bottles,” Willie said, and drank or gave away the rest. “We were great bootleggers.”
Zeke had a wild streak wilder than Willie’s and was a natural-born con, always trying to work a scam, shave an
He helped publish the high school annual. He and Bobbie were consistently voted class favorites, Duke and Duchess, King and Queen, and the main entertainment on Friday assemblies in the cafetorium. And he excelled in the role of Uncle Billy Babcock, the Hated Old Bachelor Next Door, in the senior class production of
Oh, Aunt Jerusha,
performed in the Abbott gym on Thursday, March 30, 1950, then held over a second night by popular demand.
Acting onstage was no big deal. Mamma Nelson had brought up Willie not to be afraid to look a man or a lady in the eye when he talked to them. “There is, I think, a power there that you lose when you don’t do that,” he said.
Confidence came naturally to him. “I always instinctively felt like I was sort of in control with what was going on,” he said. He realized that when he stared at trains and got the engineer to look over his way. “I started thinking along the line that if you put your mind to something, you could do those things. When you think positive about those things, you have a better chance of getting them done. If you think you can’t do it, you won’t do it. If you want something to happen, pretend it has already happened.”
W EARING the western suit purchased by the five girls in the Willie Nelson Fan Club, he joined twenty-one other students from the Abbott High class of ’50 in graduation exercises in the gymnasium and a baccalaureate service at the Methodist church. The graduates were all exceptions to the rule, Willie especially, considering the hand he was dealt growing up. Only 11 percent of the adults in Hill County could claim a high school degree. Willie Hugh was one of them. So were Mary Ann Kolar, Danny Ozyomy, Adolph Janecka, Jean Carroll, Bobby Watson, Donald Reed, Ermalee Ellis, Lawrence Hlavaty, Helen Pettitt, Gayle Gregory, Joseph Jenecka, Mattie Row Payne, Jackie Clements, Ramona Stafford, Billy Harsler, Helen Urbanovsky, Donald Pendegrass, and Ralph McIlroy.
The year Willie completed high school, country music was redefining itself as Red Foley racked up jukebox spins with his version of “Birmingham Bounce,” a song initially popularized by an Alabama cowboy known as Hardrock Gunter, while another ’Bama boy, Hank Williams, was moaning the blues with “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.”
A FTER graduating, Willie started running around with Zeke Varnon, a buddy of Bud Fletcher’s whose main mission in life seemed to be the pursuit of a good time.
“I met him at the Nite Owl,” Willie said. “I was playing music. He’d just gotten out of the army. We started hanging out together.” Zeke endeared himself to Willie by dancing with all the girls in the Willie Nelson Fan Club seated at the table by the front of the bandstand and by clowning and carrying on. Zeke and Barbara Jean McDearmon, who was Willie’s sweetie when she was killed, were old friends from Hillsboro.
When Willie wasn’t playing, he and Zeke liked to “drink, run around and chase the girls,” Willie said. “He had done it all his life. I never knew what he was gonna do. He never knew what he was gonna do, and when he’d get drunk he was like everybody else—there was no telling what he was going to do.”
Some nights, Zeke and Willie would drink to the point of passing out and wake up the next morning and start drinking again. They attempted to enter the bootlegging trade, pooling their earnings and buying nineteen half-pints over the McLennan County line and driving the haul back to Hillsboro, where half-pints went for twice the price. “We sold two bottles,” Willie said, and drank or gave away the rest. “We were great bootleggers.”
Zeke had a wild streak wilder than Willie’s and was a natural-born con, always trying to work a scam, shave an
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