Webb found farm life on the family homestead in the Cross Timbers area near Ranger harsh and unappealing. In desperation he wrote a letter to the editor of a literary magazine, the Sunny South, asking how a farm boy could get an education and become a writer. William E. Hinds, a toy manufacturer from New York, responded to the boy's query and encouraged him to "keep his sights on lofty goals." Webb finished at Ranger High School in Eastland County and earned a teaching certificate. He taught at various small Texas schools and, with the assistance of his benefactor, William Hinds, eventually attended the University of Texas, where he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1915 at the age of twenty-seven. Webb interrupted his teaching career to work as a bookkeeper for Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos and to serve as an optometrist's assistant in San Antonio. He was teaching at Main High School in 1918, when he was invited to join the history faculty of the University of Texas. Webb wrote his master's thesis on the Texas Rangers in 1920 and was encouraged to pursue the Ph.D.

His year of "educational outbreeding" (as he referred to it) at the University of Chicago was unsuccessful, and he returned to Texas determined to write history as he saw it. The result was the publication in 1931 of The Great Plains, acclaimed as "a new interpretation of the American West," acknowledged by the Social Science Research Council in 1939 as the outstanding contribution to American history since World War I, and winner of Columbia University's Loubat prize. On the basis of this book Webb received the Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 1932. In 1939, after a year as Harkness Lecturer at the University of London, Webb became director of the Texas State Historical Association. During his tenure (to 1946), he expanded the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and launched a project to compile an encyclopedia of Texas, published in 1952 as the Handbook of Texas. With the assistance of H. Bailey Carroll, he established a student branch of the association, the Junior Historians of Texas, in 1940 to encourage secondary school teachers and students to investigate local and regional history.

Respected as a teacher both at home and abroad, Webb returned to Europe in 1942 as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford. At the University of Texas he became famous for his books and seminars, especially those on the Great Plains and the Great Frontier, in which he developed two major historical concepts. He proposed in the Great Plains thesis that the westward settlement of the United States had been momentarily stalled at the ninety-eighth meridian, an institutional fault line separating the wooded environment to the east from the arid environment of the west. The pioneers were forced to pause in their westward trek while technological innovation in the form of the six-shooter, barbed wire, and the windmill allowed them to proceed. The Great Frontier thesis became the crux of a book of the same title, published in 1952, that Webb declared to be his most intellectual and thought-provoking.

The Great Frontier proposed a "boom hypothesis": the new lands discovered by Columbus and other explorers in the late fifteenth century precipitated the rise of great wealth and new institutions such as democracy and capitalism. By 1900, however, the new lands disappeared, the frontier closed, and institutions were under stress, resulting in the ecological and economic problems that have plagued the twentieth century. Although not universally well-received at the time, the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico examined the Great Frontier thesis as its sole topic during its 1958 meeting, and the concept was again an object of discussion at an international symposium in 1972.

In all, Webb wrote or edited more than twenty books. In 1935 he published The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, the definitive study of this frontier law enforcement agency, but regarded by Webb as being filled with "deadening facts." Divided We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy (1937) analyzed the practices of modern corporations, which Webb contended promoted economic sectionalism to the disadvantage of the South. More Water for Texas: The Problem and the Plan (1954) reflected Webb's interest in the conservation of natural resources. A collection of his essays, An Honest Preface and Other Essays, appeared in 1959, and at the time of his death he was working on a television series on American civilization under a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Webb was one of the charter members and later a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters. He was also a member of the Philosophical Society of Texas and president of both the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (1954-55) and the American Historical Association (1958). He received honorary degrees from the University of Chicago, Southern Methodist University, and Oxford University in England. He held two Guggenheim fellowships, acted as special advisor to Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson on water needs of the South and West, and received a $10,000 award from the American Council of Learned Societies for distinguished service to scholarship. The United States Bureau of Reclamation also gave him an award for distinguished service to conservation.

Webb was married on September 16, 1916, to Jane Elizabeth Oliphant, who died on June 28, 1960. They had one daughter. On December 14, 1961, he married Terrell (Dobbs) Maverick, the widow of F. Maury Maverick of San Antonio. Webb was killed in an automobile accident near Austin on March 8, 1963, and was buried in the State Cemetery by proclamation of Governor John B. Connally. A statue of Webb and his old friends J. Frank Dobie and Roy Bedichek stands in Zilker Park in Austin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Joe B. Frantz, "Remembering Walter Prescott Webb," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 92 (July 1988). Necah Stewart Furman, Walter Prescott Webb: His Life and Impact (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976).

(Courtesy of The Handbook of Texas)

Ritter attended the University of Texas from 1922 to 1927, spending one year in the law school there, 1925-26; as a student he was influenced by J. Frank Dobie, Oscar J. Fox, and John A. Lomax -who encouraged his study of authentic cowboy songs. Ritter, more interested in music, did not take a degree; for a time he was president of the Men's Glee Club at the university. He also attended Northwestern University for one year in 1929 before he began singing western and mountain songs on Radio Station KPRC in Houston in 1929.

Ritter was a major star in 30's and 40's as western cowboy for PRC and Monogram. Tex was known as America's Most Beloved Cowboy. He went on to star at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, TN. Tex's son, John Ritter, became an actor and appeared in the long running sitcom "Three's Company". John died suddenly in 2003, while on the set of a fairly new television series.

Ritter starred on Broadway and worked as a radio star on shows such as The Lone Ranger, Tex Ritter's Campfire, and Death Valley Days. Later he starred in movies for three motion picture industries. He also Tex Ritter's comic career began when Fawcett published Tex Ritter #1, dated October 1950. The last Fawcett issue was #20, dated January 1954. As with many other Fawcett titles, Tex's comic was continued by Charlton Comics beginning with issue #21, dated March 1954. It lasted through issue #46, dated May 1959.

Ten years before his death in 1974, Tex Ritter was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn. Tex Ritter died of a heart attack on 01 Jan 1974 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was buried in the Ritter family plot in Oak Bluff Memorial Park in Port Neches. About fifty feet away from his grave stands the Texas State Historical Marker, honoring Tex Ritter, the cowboy movie star.

The Tex Ritter Museum, located on the second floor of the historical Hawthorne-Clabaugh - Patterson House, which also serves as the Chamber of Commerce, is located two blocks from downtown Carthage on W. Panola St. The museum is dedicated to the life and times of Tex Ritter and entertains thousands of visitors each year.

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Soon after he married Mary White and worked as a disc jockey at a country music radio station KGRI in Henderson Texas. In 1952 he went to work at KWKH radio in Shreveport, Louisiana where he was hired as a radio announcer on the Louisiana Hayride. He filled in for Hank Williams one evening and was discovered and signed by Abbott Records. He later signed with RCA in 1955 and in 1955 he became a member of The Grand Ole Opry. During his career he had sixty-nine "Top 40" hits on the country charts.

He was famous for his velvet voice, died in a plane crash during a heavy rainstorm near Nashville, Tennessee on 31 July 1964. A life-sized sculpture of the famous singer marks his grave in Jim Reeves' Memorial Park near Carthage, Panola County, Texas, on a one-acre, tree-covered plot of ground three miles east of Carthage on U.S. Highway 79. Jim's "beloved dog", Cheyenne, is also buried there. Thousands of visitors from every state and many foreign countries have visited the site.

In 1967, "Cheyenne", his favorite dog, was buried inside the concrete circle surrounding the grave of his former master just a few feet to one side and to the rear, in just about the same position Cheyenne would have assumed in following his master.

Jim Reeves, his wife Mary, & Tom Perryman standing in front of radio station KSIJ, Gladewater, Texas. abt 1950

DeBerry, Class of 1936

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