inspire Big Bend National Park by galva-
nizing the Texas Legislature to preserve
the vanishing wilderness. He also was
instrumental in the movement to save
animals from extinction by railing
against the widespread use of chemical
poisons such as DDT.
Believing that “Texas needs brains,”
Dobie constantly fought for the promo-
tion of the intellect. He waged the battle
against censoring school textbooks. He
was the first public figure in Texas to
stand up against McCarthyism. J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI investigated him, Lyndon
Johnson’s White House celebrated him,
and ultimately, he was presented with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom just four
days before he died.
I was amazed. Who knew that Dobie
was such a renaissance man?
But hardly anybody was aware of this
stuff. The last biography had been done
30 years earlier and was sorely out of
date. I knew I could do something fresh
if I avoided the literary analysis and
focused on Dobie the person. So, I delib-
erately concentrated only on his writ-
ings that revealed useful biographical
data. In 2009, I published J. Frank Dobie:
A Liberated Mind, which tells the story of
how Dobie grew up in a prejudiced time
but transformed himself into one of the
state’s leading champions of civil rights
and intellectual freedom.
A couple of years later, I got invited
to that South Texas ghost town, where I
found Dobie’s voice coming alive at my
first Dobie Dichos in a way I had never
heard before. My work with him was
apparently not done.T
HE VILLAGE OF OAKVILLE SITS
along a cluster of hills crowned with
live oaks on the north side of the Nueces16 texashighways.com
River. Located halfway between San
Antonio and Corpus Christi, this had been
the bustling seat of Live Oak County in
1888, when Dobie was born, but then the
railroad veered 10 miles south to George
West. Soon, the courthouse followed, and
Oakville sank into oblivion.
In recent years, Oakville’s old town
square has been lovingly restored,
making this an attractive stop for visitors
traveling along Interstate 37. The plaza is
anchored by the stone jail, an impressive
Italianate-style structure built in 1887 of
rough-hewn sandstone blocks. Today, the
renovated jail is a picturesque B&B. Other
vintage buildings in the area have been
saved, from the post office to the mercan-
tile store, and moved to the tree-shaded
plaza. This has recreated an atmo-
sphere Oakville hasn’t seen in nearly a
hundred years, making it a destination
for weddings and family reunions.OPEN ROAD (^) | ESSAY