THE DAY I found out that Lonesome Dove had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, I happened to be lecturing at a small college in Uvalde, Texas. I think I may have been the first writer to speak in Uvalde, home of John Nance Garner, Roosevelt’s outspoken vice president (for a while) who remarked famously that the vice presidency “wasn’t worth a bootfull of warm spit.” (There are variant versions, of course.)
Because they had never had a speaker before, the college in Uvalde wanted to be sure and get its money’s worth, and they did. It was during my half-hour lunch break that I learned about the Pulitzer, a prize about which the writer William H. Gass has some pithy things to say.
James was living in San Antonio at the time—Uvalde was not far so he came over to help me celebrate, a doomed effort since I was dead tired from all day lecturing and had to drive to Austin, which was pretty far, to appear on a panel at the LBJ Library in the morning—a confab at which the then mayor of San Antonio, Henry Cisneros, brusquely insulted me.
As I was preparing to leave Uvalde I noticed the marquee of the Holiday Inn where I had been staying. When I arrived it read “Welcome to Larry McMurtry, Author of Terms of Endearment .” By the next afternoon, despite a bunch of reporters showing up to interview me, the marquee had already been changed. Now it read: Catfish Special, $3.99.
Sic Transit Gloria DeHaven, as the fine Texas writer Edwin “Bud” Shrake once observed.