DTM_Summer'26_Flattened - Flipbook - Page 17
Elmer Kelton mural, located at 118 S. Chadbourne.
Source: goodfellow.af.mil
Elmer did hear, some years after his father’s death, that
Buck had told a friend that he was “well pleased with
what I had done with my life. I wish I could have heard
it from Dad himself . . . pride seems hard to articulate.”
Buck Kelton’s silence on his accomplishments was
probably the ache Elmer felt most keenly, aside from
the familiar, but real, regret of not spending more time
focused on family. Like Elmer, Steve and Gary have
passed away; at the time of this writing, Anne still lives
in their home, cared for by their daughter Kathy.
Elmer Kelton died in 2009, he and Anne having spent
some sixty years in San Angelo. Though our city
became his home and he traveled widely, there was
still something that called Elmer back to the memories
of wind-blown sandhills around Crane and the
cowboys he grew up knowing. It was, he said, the
place of his heart, his querencia. Elmer would turn to
those memories time and time again and, while those
cowboys have long been gone, they live on through the
medium of story which, like land, also lasts far beyond
the people who populate it.
Elmer Kelton in his Office, 1986.
Source: ElmerKelton.net
This article relied heavily on Elmer Kelton’s
autobiography, Sandhills Boy, The Winding Trail of a
Texas Writer, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 2007,
and his estate’s website, elmerkelton.net. Kelton’s
The Time it Never Rained was also a valuable
resource. My thanks to Bobby Frank of Livestock
Weekly for sharing his memories. Any errors are
the author’s.
