A Deeper Blue (3 page)

K.M. Van Zandt helped organize one of the many regiments that sprang up almost overnight throughout the South, Company D

of the Seventh Texas Infantry, where he was made captain. He fought with his regiment in Mississippi and Tennessee and was taken prisoner during the capture of Fort Donelson. Exchanged in 1862, he was given a certificate of disability and discharged, with the rank of major, in 1864.

Major Van Zandt, his wife Minerva (the first of his three wives, including his second, Minerva’s sister Mattie), and their growing family (fourteen children eventually lived to adult-hood) moved west in 1865 and settled in Fort Worth, then a frontier town with a population of fewer than 250 and lacking even a proper saloon, as K.M. himself pointed out. There, seeing no market for a law firm, he opened a dry-goods store and was soon successful.

This was only the beginning of the Major’s success in business and civic affairs. He served a term in the State Legislature in 1873–74—his only venture into politics—then in 1874 he founded the company that would become the Fort Worth National Bank. In 1875 he formed the construction company that built the Texas and Pacific Railroad roadbed between Fort Worth and Dallas. Van Zandt served as president of these companies for more than fifty years, and was also president of the K.M. Van Zandt Land Company, director of the Fort Worth Life Insurance Many a River: The Van Zandts of Texas

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Company, and director of the Fort Worth and Denver Railway and the Fort Worth Street Railway Company.

The Major also co-founded the Fort Worth
Democrat,
one of the town’s first newspapers, served for two decades on the local school board, and was instrumental in bringing the Texas and Pacific; the Santa Fe; and the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas rail-roads to Fort Worth, laying the foundations for the area’s future as a transportation center. He helped organize the United Confederate Veterans, serving as that organization’s commander in chief from 1918 to 1921. He dictated his autobiography to his daughter, then died shortly thereafter, in March 1930, in Fort Worth, at the age of ninety-three.

K.M.’s brother Isaac Lycurgus, known as I.L., received his medical degree from Tulane University in 1866 and moved with his growing family to Fort Worth in 1868, where he opened a practice and is said to have brought the first microscope to the city.

He and his wife Sara Ellen (Henderson) had seven children.4 The fourth was a son, William Lipscomb Van Zandt (1875−1948), who married Bell Williams (1882−1965) and fathered three children: two daughters, Mildred and Martha Ann, then a son, Harris Williams Van Zandt, who was born in 1913.5

Harris and his sisters grew up on the family farm in Dido, in the rolling, scrub-covered pasturelands northwest of Fort Worth.

When the handsome, athletic young man started high school, the family moved into Fort Worth proper. Harris played football in high school and lettered in it at the University of Texas while studying law. The summer before entering UT, he had worked in the oil fields of West Texas, an exercise he believed would build his character. During the next summer, between semesters, Van Zandt worked at the prominent law firm Vinson and Elkins in Houston, where the father of a good friend of his from UT also worked. Harris’ friend was Dorothy Townes, and Dorothy’s father was John Charles Townes, Jr.6

Born in 1886, John Charles Townes, Jr., was a nationally known oil company litigator, himself the son of a founder of the University of Texas Law School in Austin. John Townes, Sr.,
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
served as Dean of the Law School for thirty years, and his son took his place when he died, serving until his own death in 1948.

John Jr.’s brother, Edgar, born in 1878, was also a prominent Texas lawyer. In 1917, in Houston, he wrote the original charter for the Humble Oil and Refining Company, which later became Exxon. Edgar was also a founder of the South Texas Junior College, later to become part of the University of Houston.7

After graduating from law school Harris married Dorothy Townes in 1940 at the River Oaks Baptist Church in Houston.

Van Zandt began practicing corporate law with Vinson and Elkins, where he was hired full time after he passed the bar. He was soon assigned to represent a prominent client, the Pure Oil Company of Illinois. Harris and Dorothy’s first child, Donna, was born in Houston in 1941, and six weeks later the family moved to Fort Worth. As World War II raged and the oil business boomed, the Van Zandts managed to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, and the family grew.

On March 7, 1944, John Townes Van Zandt was born to Dorothy Townes and Harris Williams Van Zandt, in Fort Worth, Texas, the city that the newborn’s great-grandfather had helped settle. Raised to follow the family path into a professional career in law or perhaps even politics, John Townes Van Zandt ultimately pursued neither, instead following his own muse into a very different world, where he added his own to the historical legacy of his ancestors.

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No Lonesome Tune

J
OHNTOWNES VAN ZANDTGREWup between the end of World War II and the coming of Elvis Presley, a great cusp of the old and the new in America. It was on this cusp that the boy, who went by his middle name, formed his first impressions of the world, gathered his first memories, and began to try to make sense of his life.

Harris and Dorothy Van Zandt provided a solid family-centered environment, strongly rooted in the extended Van Zandt and Townes families in Fort Worth and Houston. While there were branches of both sides of the family that were considered wealthy, Harris and Dorothy lived relatively modestly. “We were the Dido Van Zandts,” says their second son, William Lipscomb Van Zandt. Bill was born in 1949, namesake of the grandfather who had originally moved his branch of the family out to the small farming community of Dido. There always “seemed to be enough” money for the family to be comfortable, but “there was never a bunch” of money, sister Donna recalls. “I remember my dad telling stories about how the Depression had absolutely no effect on his family, except all of a sudden their neighbors were
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
as poor as they were.” She remembers her father telling the family how he had never had ice cream until he was in college, then adding, “you don’t miss it if you’ve never had it.”1

Harris was a strongly built man with a set gaze and a well-cropped crew cut. He was a tough businessman, a straight arrow, and by all accounts a compassionate father and a Texas gentleman. Dorothy Townes Van Zandt, tall and slim, with dark hair and dark eyes, had grown up in the upper-middle-class environment of a prominent professional family, living in Houston and also on a ranch near Conroe, north of the city. “The family raised Great Danes,” Donna remembers, “and they raised some cattle. In every picture of my grandmother, they are surrounded by Great Danes.” Dorothy’s sister, Anne, was married to Brownie Rice, Sr., of the prominent Houston family that included the founder of Rice University—“old bluebloods,” according to a relative2—and they lived in one of the mansions that graced the Montrose area of the city. Mr. Rice also owned a ranch west of Houston, where the young Van Zandt family spent a lot of time.

Other members of the Rice clan were among the first developers of the prestigious River Oaks neighborhood, which became the home of a number of Dorothy’s relations. “The Townes family had their wealth a lot longer,” explains a relative. “The Van Zandts were famous in their own right, but they were always country people and farmers.”3

The oil business was booming in Texas and throughout the West after the war, as new markets opened and production soared to all-time highs. Harris Van Zandt was doing very well as a corporate lawyer, and the family prospered. The family was also quite mobile. Donna recalls, “We moved a lot in Fort Worth. They never bought a house, just rented. When we would outgrow one they would have to rent one a little bit bigger, as the kids grew up.” The family maid, Frances, who started working for the Van Zandts shortly before Townes was born, recalls the household scene vividly, and her memories provide a fascinating window into Townes’ childhood.4 “I remember his first birthday,” she says. The family was living at 2130 Stanley Av-No Lonesome Tune

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enue, in Fort Worth. “Mrs. Van was out of town. I thought if she was home we might have a party.” She asked Mr. Van Zandt to invite his mother and sister over for dinner, and Frances baked a cake. “Mrs. Van had some real silver glasses for drinking water. These were used,” she recalls. She remembers Townes as a fast-moving child who loved to play outside with a little dog named Sandy and who would climb the fence and generally roughhouse with a boundless energy.

Mr. and Mrs. Van Zandt—known to friends and family as Van and Dotsie—had an active social life, mostly revolving around the extended family. During football season, Dorothy’s two sisters and their husbands and children would often visit, going to a game then coming back to the house for dinner. She recalls a time toward the end of the war, when there were still shortages of soap and she was making her own using bacon grease, young Townes climbed up in a chair, took the wooden spoon from the simmering pot of grease, and burned blisters on his mouth from licking the spoon. Another time, Townes was discovered sitting on the bathroom floor playing with a can of strong bathroom cleanser; “Thank the Lord he hadn’t eaten any,” Frances says.

The Van Zandts were generous with Frances’ family, each Christmas helping them out with food and extra funds, and also helping Frances’ sister attend college. At one point the Van Zandts took in a foster child, a small boy named Jimmie, who looked up to Townes, enjoyed playing with his toy guns, and treasured the hand-me-down cowboy shirts Townes would give him.

“Townes was a pistol. I used to say this so much,” Frances remembers. “He was so lively, and always busy.” She recalls a time when Townes sneaked into his sister’s room while she had her twin girlfriends over for the night. He hid under the covers of the bed, and refused to be driven out, laughing and forcing the crying girls to turn to Frances for help. She ended up dragging him from the room, and “he was so tickled.” As Frances remembers, Donna said to her, “Frances, I want to get married, or be an actress, and change my name … I know Townes is going to be a gangster.”

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
From Stanley Avenue, the family moved across town to Water Street, then soon after to Washington Street. Townes had a group of playmates in the neighborhood and enjoyed playing baseball and running around with his little dog, Nemo. As Townes got older, he became fond of cowboy stories, and he had a collection of books from which Frances would read to him. Townes and Bill and Jimmie especially liked to play cowboys and would spend hours shooting their toy guns and practicing dramatic death scenes. “At night [Townes] would go to sleep sometimes downstairs,” Frances says. “Donna and I could not wake him up, so we would carry him upstairs. She would carry one end and me the other. We would take off his boots and jeans, and he would still be asleep.”

The family also liked to spend time at Uncle Brownie Rice’s ranch outside of Houston and Townes thrived on the time they spent outdoors at the ranch. One summer, Townes had a bad brush with poison ivy there. A family member recalls, “One year they burned the area trying to get rid of some scrub, and he breathed it, and he spent two weeks in bed with gloves and strapped down; he had it in his lungs … it was horrible. But Townes would go to the ranch a lot, and that’s where I think his love of horses came from. The ranch was beautiful. There was an old rambling farmhouse, and a big bath-house and a swim-ming pool.”5

The oil business took the Van Zandts (along with Frances and Jimmie) from Fort Worth to Midland, Texas, in 1952. Harris left Vinson and Elkins and went to work for a small oil company in Midland, but after about six months there he accepted an upper management position with Pure Oil, the company he had represented and with which he was quite familiar. “That’s when we moved to Billings, Montana,” Donna recalls.

The summer before Townes started fourth grade, Harris took his family to their new home in Montana, over a thousand miles from their roots in Texas. With all the moves, Donna says,

“there were times when our family was kind of the only friends we had. I think we were probably closer than some families No Lonesome Tune

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because we needed one another more at times.” However, she remembers their parents always marveling at Townes’ ability to go out into a new neighborhood and quickly make friends.

“While they were unloading the truck, Townes would go out and come back with a friend for him and a friend for me and a friend for Bill.”

Townes was by all accounts a fairly normal, well-adjusted child. He was very intelligent, and he liked school. There were always a lot of books around the Van Zandt house, and Townes was an avid reader from an early age. “The family had a whole set of Harvard Classics and history books and old west novels and stuff that [Townes’] daddy loved,” recalls a relative.6

“He was just real bright,” Donna says. “School was always easy for him.” He was also strong and naturally athletic, and he became involved in sports, playing second base on the local Little League baseball team in Billings, and later playing football and wrestling on his school team. His sister remembers a Little League game where Townes hit a long line drive that went in the window of a car a woman was driving down the street. “She stopped and came over and was just yelling,” Donna says. “My dad was nice to her, but he said Townes couldn’t have possibly done it on purpose; he couldn’t do it again on a bet!”

While Donna and Bill were “straight arrows,” Donna describes the young Townes as “the free spirit.” Both Donna and Bill recall that Townes always loved practical jokes. Bill recalls a stranger approaching Townes once and asking for directions to someplace. “Instead of admitting he didn’t know, he answered in Spanish and said he didn’t speak English. He’d do that kind of thing.” A family tradition, going back to Dorothy’s family when she was a child, was to spend the summer months in the mountains around Boulder, Colorado, at the Chautauqua community. The Chautauqua Institution, founded in the 1870s, sponsored large camp-like communities—billed as cultural and educational retreats—often featuring a symphony, theatre, lectures, and other cultural and recreational activities, all in an idyllic, rural setting. The Boulder Chautauqua site is a
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