My Story …

A Jay Hawker by birth, in 1948 my family moved to Texas from Arkansas City, Kansas. My dad started college at Abilene Christian University as a 35-year-old freshman bible major. We lived there for five years then moved back to Kansas. We then made an unexpected move to Oklahoma when I fell out of a 1950 Mercury, with suicide doors at 65 mph on US 77 between Norman and Oklahoma City. I opened the door to throw out an ice cream cone and rolled out the rear passenger door onto a grass shoulder and survived with only a lot of road rash and complete fracture of my left thigh bone. I had to have emergency surgery to save my leg. The little hospital rounded up the only surgeon, Dr. Willard the OU football team doctor that could do the surgery. Went he first saw me, he showed me the x-ray of my break and said “you ok kid?”. I said “yeah I feel fine”. He said “damn kid you are one tough little Comanche, I’m going to call you Quanah”. That’s how I came to be known as Quanah.

We had to stay in Oklahoma, after the accident because I was in traction for two months, and in a body cast for four months. Because I was in the hospital for so long, we moved to Norman, where we ended up living for nine years. I enrolled in school as Quanah Parker and changed it formally after I came home from the Army.

When I was about 10 years old, my dad bought an advertising business called Star Time Serenade in which he sold ads to drive-in movie theaters in towns all over Oklahoma. He recorded commercials on reel-to-reel tapes in between popular songs at the time, and the drive-in owners would play the tapes on their speaker systems before each show and in between double features. My brother, Quay, who was about 15 at the time, was chief counselor to my dad when it came to what 45s to buy and use for his reels. Almost every Saturday, we would go to a music and record store at the Campus Corner across from OU and buy five or six records at a dollar a piece to add to my dad’s library of music.

A couple of years later, Quay started a band called the Sultans, and I sometimes played rhythm guitar with him — mostly in the key of ‘E’ because most Johnny Cash and Everly Brothers songs were in ‘E.’ I would sing melody and Quay would harmonize. Quay was a good guitar picker, and we also had a bass player and a drummer. When I was a freshman and Quay was a senior at Norman High School, we were playing fraternity parties. I learned a lot for a Church of Christ boy that year, including the evils of drink! Being two red heads gave us a little “pop,” and our mom made us all powder-blue sport coats that we wore with white shirts and matching blue ties. We sang a lot of Elvis and Johnny Mathis, and did a mean version of Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” We also covered Buddy Holly and ConwayTwitty, and everybody loved George Jones’ “White Lightning,” which kind of became our theme song.

I was halfway through high school when we left Norman and moved back to Abilene, so my brother could go to Abilene Christian (and as my mom Lynna Jewel said, get him away from those Philistine women at OU). I started my junior year at Abilene High, then went to Abilene Christian myself for four years. Originally, we both wanted to go to dental school, but that didn’t stick. I was a freshman in high school when I decided I wanted to go to dental school, so I had already taken all the pre-requisites by the time I got to college, but my second semester I got a B in chemistry from a professor who gave mostly A’s, so that kind of knocked that idea down a notch for me. Around the same time, Quay — who also struggled in organic chemistry and hadn’t really done any dental pre-requisites in high school at all — decided to just get a government degree and a job because he had a wife and baby to take care of.

About 1963, I went to see a movie at the Paramount Theatre in Abilene: To Kill a Mockingbird. I was impressed by Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. I noticed that he was home every night and even came home for lunch with his family, and I thought about how my dad had been gone Monday through Friday when he was on the road as a salesman. I thought law would be a nice alternative to dentistry, because I could still be home every night to be with the kids, be their baseball coach and do other things. I was also impressed by somebody that represented the underdog, the crippled, and the downtrodden, and I wanted to do the same. So, I went to my counselor and changed my major to business, because law school didn’t care what your major was — you just had to have a degree. Then I went to law school at UT Austin for three years, and Quay ended up going to law school the next year in Lubbock (He was a district judge in Albany for 20 years and became a senior judge or visiting judge for 15 years after that until he passed in 2018. I still miss him a lot).

In order to put ourselves through college and law school, we both sold bibles for the Southwestern Company. The company was started by a Nashville publisher in 1866 to offer bibles on credit to be sold by returning Civil War vets trying to go back to college. They worked straight commission, and it’s still going 140 years later. I started when I was 16, rooming with my brother. Our crew leader was Bennie Ward Lane from Coleman, now a surgeon in Dallas. He had gone the year before and done really well and recruited us and about 10 other guys to sell on the Cap Rock area around Lubbock. We went to Nashville to the World War Memorial Auditorium with 3,500 other students for a week of memorizing sales talks and listening to inspirational speakers, most of them former bible salesmen. Two by two, like the apostles, we were assigned a county to sell in.

Our first summer in 1963, Quay and I were assigned to Dawson County, Texas. The biggest town there was Lamesa, with about 10,000 souls at the time. My goal that summer was to replace my 1955 Oldsmobile with dents in both sides. Every morning we ate at a little café on the county court house square, and then we’d go across the street to the Chevy dealership where they had a 1963 anniversary gold Impala with black bucket seats. In the show room we would stick our heads in the window of that sweet ride and get a whiff of that new-car smell for inspiration and then go knock on doors. That fall, Quay and I both bought new Impalas from Jimmy Maples Chevrolet in Antlers, Oklahoma and paid for our tuition at ACU. We were hooked on selling bibles until we both finished law school. Three years later, I bought a red Corvette (a great selling tool).

I sold bibles for nine summers in Texas, Kansas, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Both of my sons sold bibles for three summers, too. It’s almost like being in the Marine Corps without guns. Years later, I was complaining to a counselor about poor, pitiful me: “I’ve never had a summer to just relax, date girls, go to the lake, eat homemade ice cream, and have holidays off”. I worked 80 hours a week 1,500 miles from home, starting the day after school closed and stopping the day before school started. “I had to”, I whined, “just to pay all my expenses and tuition!” The counselor stroked his beard and said, “Well, Quanah, you didn’t have to drive a red Corvette through law school.” He was right, and after that I quit feeling sorry for myself.

I drove that red Corvette until I sold it to buy a wedding ring for my first wife and future mother of my children. Then I got “recruited” into the army. I went to OCS at Ft. Benning, Georgia and got a commission from the University of Texas ROTC, while in Law School. I went in as a 2nd lieutenant (MP platoon leader), and finished as a captain. I got my Bar Exam results and law license in the mail while I was stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia, butdidn’t get sworn in as a lawyer until I came home from the Army the next year. After that, I practiced law in Fort Worth for five years before coming back to Abilene in 1977. Then I worked for an oil company for a while, was an assistant district attorney for two years, and finally went into private practice in 1983.

I primarily do family law, criminal law, probate, and personal injury work. One time I had a client who had been treated for mental illness on several occasions. But he had a bad habit of exposing himself. We had to have a trial just to see if he was competent to stand trial; the prosecutor knew he was as mad as a hatter, but we needed a jury to say so in order to send him to Big Springs for treatment. While the DA was making his final argument, my client stood up and drank all of the water in a glass in front of him, pulled down his pants, and peed in his glass until it over flowed — then drank it until the bailiff, who had been asleep, woke up and tackled him. The jury came back and said there was nothing wrong with him and he was able to stand trial. I guess it’s hard to be crazy in West Texas! I also had a client who wanted to sue the Beatles for getting him on LSD with the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and Steppenwolf for getting him on pot with the song “Don’t Step on the Grass, Sam.” I told him to bring me $2,500 and we would file a lawsuit, but I never saw him after that.

I started writing songs to keep myself awake while driving my boys to and from Richardson, Texas for visitation. It’s kind of like my version of “Highway 20 Ride” by the Zac Brown Band (I tear up every time I hear that song). For two years, I went back and forth until my baby boy came to live with me. Writing my own songs helped keep me focused up and down the highway. I would talk and sing into a hand-held recorder, and it just progressed from there. A lot of songs came out of those trips — and on my trips driving back and forth to courthouses from El Paso to Tyler, Amarillo to Houston to San Antonio and pretty much every county in between on the super slabs of Texas. As they say, “You have to live the blues to sing the blues,” and I’ve done some living”.

I still practice law some but have slowed down by work load quite a bit. This leaves me with more time to visit my kids and grandkids, which I try not to abuse. My Oldest, Padgett is now a Physician’s Assistant at a cancer center in Corpus Christi after going back to school at age 38. I am so proud of her for that. Both of my boys work for Beltone selling hearing aids. My Oldest Pride and his wife Allison, a speech pathologist, live in the Woodlands with their three daughters, Presley-13, Raleigh-11, and Holliday-5. My youngest Paden and his wife Susan, who works at the UT Health Science Center, live in Houston with their two children Stella-4 and Jonah-1.