Back when there were still newsstands that carried Sunday newspapers from across the country, I spent too much money buying papers. Being a newspaper junkie can be an expensive habit.

One of the publications I often bought was the Houston Chronicle. My father-in-law in Kingsville, Texas, subscribed to both the Chronicle and Houston Post when Houston was still a two-newspaper city. Whenever I bought a Chronicle or visited south Texas and read it at my father-in-law's home, I turned to Leon Hale's column because he gave me such a sense of Texas.

Hale, who was born in May 1921 at Stephenville, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps for three years before earning a degree in journalism from Texas Tech in 1945. He wrote thousands of columns for the Post and later the Chronicle, and was the author of 11 books.

Hale died in March 2021 at age 99. After retiring from the Chronicle in 2014 (he worked until he was in his 90s), Hale lived out his final years near the Fayette-Washington County line in Winedale, Texas.

When he died, the Fayette County Record noted: "His stories were often about country folks, or out-of-the-way places, or fishing trips--scenes that brought to the big-city audience of Houston a simpler life than the ones most of them were experiencing. He wrote an annual column about going to south Texas to greet the arrival of spring, and he wrote another annual column about driving around the 610 Loop in Houston, marveling at the changes of each new year."

Hale's columns first appeared in the Post in 1954. He moved to the Chronicle following the Post's demise in the 1990s. He would travel in search of spring with someone he described as Old Friend Morgan.

"Greetings from south Texas," Hale wrote in 2002. "I'm parked by the side of U.S. 281, under a mesquite tree in almost full leaf. I can crank down the window of the pickup and hear half a dozen mockingbirds trilling out there in the brush. If Old Friend Morgan were with me, which he is not, I believe he'd agree that I've found the leading edge of spring, as shown by the leafing out of mesquites.

"I've stopped just south of the little Brooks County towns of Encino and Rachal. About 50 more miles down 281 would put me on the Mexican........

© Arkansas Online