A gifted writer
By Bob Bowman

At lunch a few days ago in Tyler, the subject turned to unusual writers in East Texas. I immediately thought about Landon Bradshaw.

Even in East Texas, where he lived all of his life, few people knew Landon, a self-educated writer who had a remarkable gift for telling stories in a downto earth fashion.

He wrote only one book, "These People Actually Lived in East Texas," a collection of newspaper columns he produced for the Beaumont Enterprise and Jasper News Boy some four decades ago.

People who have copies cherish it with an affection reserved only for their wives and rich uncles.

When he wrote about "The Great San Augustine Hanging Bee," Landon said: "When Ben Lane of San Augustine County killed his lover, Sidney Ann Dikes, in 1883 and threw her down a well, he committed two unforgivable sins. He destroyed a beautiful woman and ruined a good well of water."

In the end, Ben Lane was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. "There was at least one person present who was dead set against the proceedings. Ben Lane didn't believe in hanging and said so. But Burl Smith pulled the trip anyway.

"If the punishment was supposed to teach the guilty man a lesson, the whole affair was a flop. During the hanging, Ben Lane suffered injuries that resulted in death."

Landon also raised watermelons and once appeared on the television show, "I've Got a Secret, " as the only man who had raised a watermelon bigger than he was. Landon's melon tipped the scales at 136 pounds, considerable more than his 115.

Coming home to Jasper, he wrote about "The Traveling Tick."

In New York, as he took a bath before his TV debut, he discovered an East Texas tick clinging to his body. But instead of mashing him between his fingers, Landon turned the tick loose in the hotel.

That tick might be lucky and catch up with someone going overseas. He could tour Europe, become a world traveler and be the best educated tick in history. If he played his cards right, he could make the trip with a movie queen."

He finished with: "I don't know what happened to that tick. The last time I saw him, he had a promising future."

In a column about the way East Texans talk, he wrote of visiting a lady near the Weeks' Chapel community in Newton County.

Talking about her ancestors, she told Landon: "My four fathers came to East Texas from Misery in 1820, signed the decoration of independence and fought in the evolution. My granddaddy was wounded in the Battle of Sandy Center and had to have his leg hypenated. He drew a constipation check for the rest of his life."

Landon died in Jasper in 1975, the victim of respiratory illnesses that had plagued him from his World War II days in Germany.

But to the people who knew him and loved his East Texas humor, he hasn't been forgotten.

As a friend once said: "It just didn't make sense for an ol' boy off a watermelon farm in Brookeland to be reading books, and writing better than the authors he read."

(Distributed by the East Texas Historical Association. Bob Bowman of Lufkin is a past president of the association and the author of more than 35 books about East Texas.)