According to J. Frank Dobie, the writer Roy Bedichek "liked to cook outdoors, eat outdoors, sleep outdoors, look and listen outdoors, and be at one . . . with the first bob-whiting at dawn."
Bedichek was born in 1878 and raised on a farm south of Waco, where he absorbed the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the blackland prairie.
He spent the majority of his professional career as director of the state's University Interscholastic League, which promotes academic and athletic competition in Texas public schools.
But Bedichek is best remembered for the books he wrote late in life. In 1946, at the age of sixty-eight, he spent nearly a year in seclusion at Friday Mountain Ranch, writing Adventures with a Texas Naturalist.A classic of American nature writing, Bedichek's book—like Thoreau's Walden—mixes natural history with moral and philosophical speculation. The prose is crisp, unpretentious, and engaging. Bedichek views the world and the cosmos from his particular vantage point on the Edwards Plateau. In 1947, Dobie described the book as perhaps "the wisest and most civilized book that Texas has yet produced."
A bronze statue of Bedichek, Dobie, and the historian Walter Prescott Webb now stands at Austin's Barton Springs Pool, where the three friends spent many a hot summer afternoon. The statue is an especially fitting monument to Bedichek, who helped so many recognize the beauty and value of the state's natural treasures.
Historian Walter Prescott Webb was born in rural Panola County, Texas. Later, he moved with his family to a farm near Ranger, Texas. The young Webb showed an early interest in writing and appealed to magazine editor William Ellery Hinds for help. Hinds encouraged Webb, who graduated from Ranger High School and began teaching at a variety of small Texas schools. With Hinds' assistance, Webb enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1915 and married Jane Elizabeth Oliphant in 1916. He was asked to join the History Department faculty at the University of Texas in 1918, concurrently writing his master's thesis on the Texas Rangers and earning a master's degree in 1920.
After an unsuccessful attempt at doctoral work at the University of Chicago, Webb returned to Austin and wrote the seminal work The Great Plains in 1931. The book gained widespread acclaim as a new interpretation of the American West and was largely the basis for the University of Texas awarding Webb a Ph.D. in 1932. From 1939 to 1946 Webb also served as director of the Texas State Historical Association, where he expanded the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and began compiling an encyclopedia of Texas which was eventually published as the Handbook of Texas.
As a professor at the University of Texas, Webb was well-known for his books and engaging lectures. Webb published The Texas Rangers in 1935, Divide We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy in 1927, More Water for Texas in 1954, and a collection of essays titled An Honest Preface and Other Essays in 1959. His wife Jane passed away in 1960 and in 1961 Webb married Terrell (Dobbs) Maverick (widow of F. Maury Maverick). Webb's life ended abruptly in an automobile accident near Austin on March 8, 1963, and he is buried at the State Cemetery in Austin.