By Bruce R. Partain
President/CEO
Nacogdoches County Chamber of Commerce
Trying
to categorize Ab Abernethy’s life is nearly impossible. Is he a
scuba-diving folklorist, or a string bass-playing spelunker? Was
that Ab scooping up salmon in Alaska, or is he that Texas cowboy
smiling in the old black-and-white photo? Is he the sailor surveying
the South Pacific, or the one on a leaky wooden raft, heading down
the Neches River in hopes of floating from Diboll to Beaumont?
If he’s
a distinguished regents professor emeritus, is he an expert on
Elizabethan sonnets or the go-to guy on poisonous snakes? Maybe he
is that rough-hewn man hacking through the brush and pounding out a
footpath along Lanana Creek.
Of
course, Francis Edward Abernethy is all of these—and more.
To
Texas academics, he’s the prolific editor and executive secretary of
the Texas Folklore Society. Around Nacogdoches, he may be best known
as the man who built the trail—that’s the Lanana Creek Trail. He is
quick to credit the dozens of people who served alongside him,
including Archie McDonald, Carroll Schoenewolf and John Anderson.
These men volunteered in 1986 to follow Ab into the woods and to
begin to separate the privet hedge, laurel, hackberry and assorted
vines from the trail that surely lay beneath.
“In
Some places the privet was so thick we worked on our hands and
knees,” Abernethy said, “cutting the first trail by pushing a chain
saw ahead of us.” Most of the work was completed in those first
years following the Texas Sesquicentennial, but Ab has never really
stopped working on the trail. Just this year, he added monument
signs, benches and a water fountain to the area he designated
“Father Margil Park.”
For his
outstanding 20-plus years of community work in improving the creek
and the trail, Abernethy has been chosen as the Nacogdoches County
Chamber of Commerce 2008 Citizen of the Year.
For Ab,
hard work is just part of enjoying an adventure. Born in 1925, in
Altus, Okla., he grew up in the Texas Panhandle and in East Texas.
Ab’s family was hard-hit by the Great
Depression, and he shuttled from his grandfather’s ranch on the
Washita River in dusty Hemphill County, to his mother’s family in
Dallas and Palestine. Fate would eventually lead him to Nacogdoches,
but it took patience and time to find his place here.
The
ranch in West Texas was “high and lonesome,” but it suited Ab’s
curiosity about life, as he roamed the breaks with friends and his
dogs, and learned old-timey music like that of Gid Tanner and The
Skillet Likkers from records on his granddad’s Victrola.
He
lived in Palestine from 1934 to 1942. For Ab, these years combined
one part Tom Sawyer with one part Thomas Edison. He crafted skate
scooters, sling-shots and kites, but also soaked up knowledge about
paramecia, photography, arc lights and making gun powder. That last
experiment explains how Ab burned down his parents’ garage. Ab
became an expert hunter and collector, shooting squirrels and
archiving cat skulls, snake skins and hawk claws. During his 15th
summer, he toiled as a cowhand and fence builder on his uncle’s
ranch in Hamilton.
Ab
moved from Palestine to Nacogdoches in 1942, but not willingly. As
he puts it, “I had to leave the sophisticated good life in Palestine
and move to the out-back rurality of Nacogdoches, where I became the
new kid on the block.”
Ab met
Hazel Shelton that year. She was a sophomore, and he was the cool,
good-looking new senior boy. “By the end of the year we were going
together,” Hazel recalled.
But the
world was at war, and Ab and Hazel knew he’d be joining the Navy and
leaving right after graduation. Ab’s biggest concern was that the
war might end before his chance to jump into it. He signed up for
the officer’s training program, but got anxious, and purposely
flunked out to go immediately to boot camp and become a sailor. He
went through gunnery school and finally to sea in the U.S.S.
Harkness, a wooden-hulled minesweeper converted to a survey
ship. The crew’s assignment was to map the waters off Japan. Ab took
part in the occupation of Japan and was released from service in
1946.
He
returned, expecting Hazel to welcome her war hero back. Instead, she
was enrolled at SFA, enjoying her new college life and friends,
acting in plays and attending classes. She had moved on.
Ab
brooded for a while, then hit the road. Nacogdoches was really no
longer home, as his parents had moved to Baton Rouge. In his words,
he “bummed around” the country for four months, wandering to New
Orleans, Tampa, New York, Chicago, Winnipeg, Indiana, Kansas, and
back across Texas.
“I
slept behind sign boards, in fire stations, flop houses and
Salvation Armies,” he said. “I washed dishes for a week in D.C.,
milked cows for two weeks in Indiana and worked the wheat harvest
until it ran out in Kansas. I met a host of wandering hobo vets on
the road. I guess we were all looking for something—a place, maybe,
or something of our old selves.”
While in Tampa, he
was mugged, but the assailant found only a dollar in Ab's wallet.
The robber let him keep it.
Ab returned
briefly to Nacogdoches, but showing up in dirty, ragged clothes at
First Methodist Church did nothing to enamor him to Hazel. He made
his way to work on a shrimp boat in Morgan City, La. While snapping
shrimp heads, it occurred to him that perhaps a better course for
his life might be to enroll at SFA, using the GI Bill. His rite of
passage--which included 5,500 miles of hitchhiking--was over. He now
had confidence that he could do anything.
Housing was scarce in Nacogdoches, but
Ab conspired with several friends to rent a four-room house on Starr
Avenue. It soon became known as the Buzzard’s Roost. Dean of Men Bob
Shelton forbade women from entering. That included his daughter
Hazel.
In the summer of 1947, Ab hitchhiked
over 2,000 miles to Vancouver, hoping to get to the salmon boats in
Prince William Sound. This passed Ab’s quality test of adventure,
which is to ask “Where would you be if you could be anywhere in this
world?” If the answer is “Right here!” then the trip is worth it.
Seining for 6-pound sockeye salmon was the plan. The politics of
fishing intervened, and Ab found himself on a pirate’s mission,
freeing salmon from longline nets owned by corporate canneries, then
selling the fish right back to the cannery.
It took a while for Hazel and Ab to
reunite, but they did, and after five years of tumultuous courtship,
they were married in 1948.
After a year in Switzerland and a
spell at Louisiana State University for a master’s degree, Ab was
sorely in need of a paying job. He and Hazel were parents now, as
daughter Luanna was born in Baton Rouge.
The Abernethys arrived dead broke in
Woodville in 1951. Ab taught English at Kirby High and drove a
school bus route. He began work on his Ph.D. in Austin then
transferred in 1953 to LSU in Baton Rouge.
He finished his doctorate in 1956,
after summer jobs working as a biologist’s aide for Louisiana
Wildlife and Fisheries, and a brief stint as a lineman for Gulf
States Utilities. That job allowed Ab enough practice with
pole-climbing hooks that he used the technique to climb trees to
hunt deer until he was in his 70s.
At Lamar State College of Technology
in Beaumont, Ab taught English and folklore for nine years. One of
his students was Janis Joplin. After she left Lamar, Joplin would
return to visit Ab, play his guitar and show him what she had
recently learned.
Ab met biologist Bob Mitchell, and
began a lifelong interest in exploring (spelunking) in caves.
In 1965, Ab, Hazel and family moved to
Nacogdoches into an 1888 two-story home in the historic district,
just south of Pilar Street on Lanana Street. Ab and Hazel still
abide there, a few hundred yards from Lanana Creek.
The big home accommodated the growing
Abernethy clan—which now included Robert, Sarah Elizabeth, Maggie
and Ben.
Ab formed an old-timey string band
with three other SFA professors. The East Texas String Ensemble was
anything but classic, but they secured gigs across Texas, including
the Texas Folklife Festival. At SFA, Ab taught English and folklore
as well as running the Texas Folklore Society. He’s a prolific
writer and has been honored for his academic achievements.
The wanderlust has continued for Ab.
In 1992 he visited Indonesia, where he delighted in getting up close
and personal with orangutans. In 2007 he toured China with Jeff Abt,
and in 2006 he was calling on the Dalai Lama’s apartment in Tibet.
With all these far-flung adventures,
one would think Ab Abernethy would find it a bit mundane to be still
cutting through the briars on the Lanana Creek Trail.
But the man with many interests has
found his one obsession. And Nacogdoches has been the beneficiary of
the man who built the trail. |
