Means of Ascent (79 page)

And then, in 1951, there was a new county clerk in the Courthouse. As a girl growing up on a Kimble County ranch, Marguerite King had been noted for her intelligence (“She was one of the brilliant ones,” a friend recalls), and for her ability as a rider and a rifle shot (“I learned to shoot before I could hold the stock steady against my shoulder; I’d lean it on a rock or something,” she says), but she had been nicknamed
“Teeney” because she was barely five feet tall. Since then, she had left the Hill Country as one of the few young women from that isolated area
to attend Baylor University, had married, been widowed when her husband, a pilot, had been shot down over Europe; and now, thirty-three years old, she had returned to Junction with her young son. But she was still petite and her nickname had stuck. “Teeney” was very quiet and serious, usually
staying home reading (“biography, history—anything; I tried to read a hundred books a year”), but beneath the quietness was determination; in 1951, when the office of Kimble County Clerk became vacant, she ran for the job and was elected, becoming the first woman in the county’s history to hold elective office.

The new county clerk was strikingly attractive: slender and shapely, with keen blue eyes, what friends called a “whipped cream complexion” and glowing, tightly curled, golden hair. Her friends kept suggesting the names of eligible young men to her, but they weren’t interesting, she said; they didn’t have anything to talk about. They didn’t read.

She was still new to the job when, one day, Coke Stevenson came into her office to file a case, and she was unfamiliar with the procedures involved. She would never forget the quiet, calm,
“kind”
way he explained them to her. Then they began to chat. Recalling that day many years later, she says simply: “We found we had many things in common to talk about.” Stevenson was in the Courthouse frequently, of course, and they had more
talks. “He loved his ranch and his land,” she recalls, “and he asked me if I’d like to come riding and see it. I would do that, and we would picnic on the river. That was how it all started, I guess.”

He invited her to go deer-hunting, and that proved a little embarrassing: famous hunter though Coke was, Teeney turned out to be the better shot. He was very good with her son, Dennis, then nine years old; years later, Marguerite would recall that Coke was a “
gifted speaker, whether to an audience of hundreds concerning the serious affairs of the State or Nation, or to one little boy begging for the fiftieth time: Tell me about the time you
shot the bear.’ ” She saw that Coke “doted on all children” and thought it was sad that Coke, Jr., now chairman of the State Liquor Control Board and a big man in Austin, didn’t visit the ranch more frequently so that Coke could see his two granddaughters. One day, when Bob Murphey came for a visit, instead of his uncle being alone, there was a beautiful woman with him. She seemed tiny beside Coke’s height and big shoulders, and was
much younger. But Murphey realized that that didn’t matter. “I’ll never forget the way she looked at him, and the way he looked at her. Uncle Coke was in love, and Teeney was in love with him.” On January 16, 1954, without telling anyone—for Teeney hated “fuss” as much as Coke did—they slipped into a little church and asked the minister to marry them. (When the
Junction Eagle
learned of the wedding, the lead on its
article told something of the near-reverence
in which the groom was held: “Saturday, for the second time, Coke R. Stevenson, lawyer-ranchman and former Governor,
took a bride from among.his own people.”)

After they were married, when Coke rode out over his ranch, Teeney rode beside him; she was a good enough rider so that when he was working with cattle, she could work with him, although she couldn’t handle his big brown “cutting horse,” Nellie, and Coke found her a black named Elgin with a very smooth gait. When he was doing work with which she couldn’t help, such as clearing cedar or driving fenceposts, she would pack a lunch and bring it
to him, and sit by him as he worked (worked, in his sixties now, hour after hour, swinging the huge sledgehammer as he had when he was young). Teeney seemed to want to spend every minute with Coke. Late in the afternoons they would swim in that beautiful river, with the herons and the cranes standing nearby, and the deer coming down to drink.

And as for Coke, he was a different man—or, rather, he was the man he had been when he was young, and had driven his car down the middle of the river on a bet. “I’m going to say a word about Mr. Stevenson now that you wouldn’t believe,” Bob Murphey says. “Bubbly. Uncle Coke was just
bubbling
. He just worshipped her.” Murphey had a wife himself now, and she says, “He never walked in the kitchen that he
didn’t grab her and squeeze her and give her a big kiss. They were just so
happy
with each other!” Other friends, visiting the ranch, would watch Teeney and Coke reading together and talking. “They had the same kind of humor, the same way of looking at things,”
Ernest Boyett says. “That dry way of observing people. They could sit and talk for hours. If that wasn’t happiness, I don’t know what
was.”

And when, on January 16, 1956, the second anniversary of their marriage, they had a daughter, Jane, Coke Stevenson’s love for the little girl became, for the people of the Hill Country, a part of the story that had become, during his own lifetime, a legend to the people of Texas.

He gave her a precious possession that he had obtained for himself during countless mornings with his books. He gave her history.

As soon as the little girl was old enough to understand (and she was old enough very young; at three and a half she was not only reading adult books but could speak fluent Spanish), Stevenson began telling her stories—wonderful stories—about the history of the United States, and of Texas—and of Greece and Rome. After she started school, on days when snow or ice made the roads impassable and she couldn’t get to school, he and Teeney would take
over her education themselves, reading to her. And when Jane was nine, Coke and Teeney started showing Jane history for herself. They had read her the accounts of the Alamo, of course, and of the battles of San Jacinto and Goliad and Sabine Pass, and they took
her to all those sites, but they also ranged farther afield. They took her to see the Oregon Trail, reading Parkman’s
The Oregon Trail
as they drove; the three of them followed the trails of
Lewis and Clark. “And many of the other Western trails, too, trails we never hear of,” Teeney recalls. “Coke knew all the trails.” There was the Revolution and the Founding Fathers, and there were trips to Mount Vernon and Monticello, and there was the Civil War, and all the battlefields that made up part of the history that Coke Stevenson loved. By the time Jane was a teenager, she had been taken by her mother and father to every one of the forty-eight
states, and to several provinces of Canada, also. And there was a trip to a place nearer home. Coming home from school one evening when she was eleven, Jane told her father and mother that her class had begun studying how the state government worked. Coke took her to Austin so she could see it work for herself; once again, there was the whisper in the halls of the Capitol, “Coke Stevenson’s here,” and people came out of their offices into the halls to see a tall,
erect old man holding by the hand a skinny little girl in pigtails.

And she appreciated the gift. “Jane was a good student, and a good historian,” Teeney says. “Those trips were
good.”
She loved history, and she and her father were very close. A reporter who spent several days with Coke when Jane was twelve was struck by the slim, pretty girl, and by her relationship with her father. “Stevenson is gentle-voiced with her, calls her ‘baby,’ ” the reporter wrote.
“And
you sense her love for the man who is big in her history books.” And when she became a teenager, Coke Stevenson made for Jane what was, for him, the ultimate sacrifice. Newspapers across Texas chronicled it in amazement: “A telephone has been installed on the Coke Stevenson Ranch.” “Well,” Stevenson drawled, “you know how teenagers are.”

“H
E IDOLIZED THAT GIRL
. He told me many times that he hoped he would live to see her grown,” Bob Murphey says. He lived to see her nineteen years old and married to a young rancher, and not only did Coke live to a great age, respected throughout the Hill Country, a prophet with honor in his own country, but only in the last three or four years of his life did his health begin to fail; a reporter who went to see him wrote in 1959
that “
at 71, the [former] Governor of Texas does hard manual labor six days a week.” All through the 1960s, as he neared eighty, he seemed never to be ill, and he still ranged from Wyoming to Montana to hunt the big elk. And he still worked on his ranch. He had decided to build at least rough roads connecting its fifteen thousand acres, and he did—ninety miles of them—and he took pride in every mile. He never lost his desire to learn new
methods; deciding in about 1963, when he was seventy-five,
that he wanted to build a large garage for his tractors and other ranch machinery, he decided also that he wanted to build it without supporting columns, so that maneuvering the vehicles would be simpler. Sending away for architectural textbooks, he taught himself the science of cantilevered construction, studying these books as eagerly as, fifty years before, he had studied books to teach himself
accounting, and law, and highway construction. He never lost his
self-reliance, and his happiness and pride when he did something on his own. And as for the law, “Well,” Teeney says, “Coke just
loved
the practice of law. And he had just the pick of cases now, from all over the state, and when he got a new case which was difficult,” where the legalities were complicated, he was as enthusiastic and as eager about studying up on
the law involved as he had been when he had first started reading law books. His love of his land, the land he had saved so long to buy, and his pride in the improvements he had made on it were so deep that visitors constantly commented on it. Taken on a tour, a guest remarked on the clarity of the water in a large “tank” or pond. “I built that,” the host said. He had built it twenty years before, he said. The water was so clear because he had lined the
pond with caliche, which he had lugged from another section of the ranch; sure, he said in response to the guest’s question, “It was a
lot
of work.” But, Coke Stevenson asked, surveying the results of his labor, “wasn’t it
worth
it?” If there was a single aspect of the ranch that was dearest to him—with the exception of the falls of the South Llano (“How he loved that river!” Teeney would
recall)—it was the springs which kept the ranch green and his cattle watered even during droughts that turned the rest of the Hill Country brown. Every time he discovered a new spring his enthusiasm over the discovery would be as full and pure as the excitement of a young boy.

The love between Coke and Teeney was striking, too, as was the contentment they brought to each other. They were to have twenty-one years together, and they seemed to fall only more and more in love. When he rode his ranch, by horse or car, inspecting it or cutting out cattle, Teeney still rode with him; when he was doing work in which she couldn’t participate, she would still come, carrying lunch, and sit near him for hours as he worked. She began doing some of
the research for his legal cases, so she was part of his life in the law, too. Says a friend: “It seemed like they couldn’t bear to be apart for a minute.” Says Murphey: “Uncle Coke told me many times how much joy she had brought him, and how he had never thought he would ever be this happy again.”

Teeney made sure that the Stevenson ranch was no longer isolated. Her husband had friends—from his days as a young legislator, in fact from his days as a young cowman—all over Texas, and now Teeney invited them for visits. “It was sort of an Open House,” one of these friends says.
“There were a lot of bedrooms in that house, and sometimes it seemed like they were all filled.” In the evenings, Stevenson and
his guests would sit around a mesquite campfire by the river drinking Ten High whiskey and swapping stories, while Coke got a good scorch on the steaks as big as saddle blankets.

C
OKE
S
TEVENSON
and Lyndon Johnson never saw each other again. Stevenson’s hatred and contempt for Johnson never faded, and occasionally it would surface. Asked once, during Johnson’s 1964 campaign for the presidency, to evaluate him, he said, after a long pause: “
Well, of course, he is a very, how should I say, skillful politician,” and dropped the subject except to say
that he himself would vote for Goldwater. “I’ve been waiting a long time to see a turn toward
conservatism.” Those who knew him well knew there were still scars from the 1948 campaign.

But the scars were smoothed over by happiness. From the day Teeney agreed to marry him, Stevenson never again thought seriously about running in the 1954 campaign against Johnson—or in any other campaign. He simply had no interest in public office. His dream, after all, the dream he had conceived during those nights so long ago on the Brady-Junction trail when six horses had been all he owned, had not been to be Governor, or Senator. His dream had been to be a
rancher. And now he could enjoy the realization of that dream. “He would have made a great Senator,” Teeney says. “But he loved his ranch, and the life out here, and he
loved
practicing law. His life out here was more meaningful for him than it would have been any other way. And he knew that. He understood himself.”

A columnist for the
Dallas News
,
Frank X. Tolbert, came to visit the former Governor. Observing Stevenson’s joy in the ranch, in the boyhood dream that he had turned into reality, witnessing the enthusiasm with which he still planned and built each new improvement, seeing the serenity of the quiet evenings by the river he loved, the affection between him and his wife, the love and respect in which he was held by
wife, daughter, friends—by everyone around him—Tolbert wrote: “
After spending some time with Coke Robert Stevenson … here by the green, rushing river, I’m wondering if he wasn’t lucky to lose that Senate race by 87 votes.”