BEND: Hornsbys wend back to Austin's early history

BYLINE: Brad Buchholz, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF   
DATE: August 24, 2003
PUBLICATION: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
SECTION: Lifestyle

My grandfather wrote me a letter, and the letter led me to a river. The river flows straight for miles, then makes a swooping horseshoe curve on the eastern edge of town. It winds past the whispers of history. It skirts a family cemetery. Sometimes, it seems to me as if the river yearns to bend into itself, to flow into its own past. A letter led me to the river, then to the little cemetery on the river. It leads me now to consider forces of nature -- the pull of the water, the echo of our ancestors, the longing in a human heart. The river riffles its way into a story. It touches something true.

I'd never heard of the big, bold curve in the Colorado River -- a place called Hornsby's Bend -- until my grandfather wrote to me in the spring of 1978. I was 21 years old then, a University of Texas senior, enthralled by the beauty and spirit of Austin, certain I'd live here forever. My grandfather, who was living in Los Angeles, had never seen this city. But he was coming, in May, to attend my graduation.

In his letter, my grandfather explained he'd be flying into Austin a day early, before anyone else in the family. He had in mind a pilgrimage. Grandpa, you see, had learned that Rogers Hornsby -- a legendary baseball player, a superstar of the 1920s who played for the St. Louis Cardinals -- happened to be buried in Austin. Clearly, it was my job to find the grave site. It was my job to take him there.

From the beginning, my grandfather's request struck me as eccentric, out-of-the blue, a little bit spooky. Sure, my father's side of the family loves baseball; our affection for the game is a river that winds through generations. But until receiving his letter, I could not remember my grandfather ever once mentioning the name of Rogers Hornsby. And now we were supposed to stand together at his grave?

As a baseball fan, I knew all about Hornsby -- or at least I thought I did. The man was a hard-as-nails second baseman with a blazing bat, "the greatest right-handed hitter of the 20th century." In an age when Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb were the dominant figures in the American League, "Rajah" was the premier player in the National League. Hornsby won six straight batting titles in the 1920s. He hit .400 three times. But to me, a child of the Kennedy era, Rogers Hornsby seemed lost in time, as vital and contemporary as a barbershop quartet.

I had no idea Rogers Hornsby had any connection to Austin. Certainly, I thought, he couldn't be buried here. Yet all I heard was my grandfather's voice within the lines of a letter, so eager and enthusiastic, as if he were yearning to come home to a place he'd never been.

In the name of family, I sought out the resting place of Rogers Hornsby. In the name of love, I found a curve in the river called Hornsby's Bend.

Austin originals

After pleading for help at the Austin History Center, I learned that my grandfather was on the mark. Rogers Hornsby died in Chicago, of heart disease, in January 1963 at the age of 66. And sure enough, the baseball hero was buried in the Hornsby family cemetery, nine miles east of Austin, near the banks of the Colorado where the river bends wide like a giant horseshoe.

The Hornsbys, it turns out, were a seminal Austin family. Reuben Hornsby -- the great-grandfather of Rogers Hornsby -- is frequently identified as the first Anglo settler in Travis County. Reuben and his wife, Sarah, along with their seven children, made their home here before anyone had even named Travis County or drawn it on a map. They were here before Austin, before Waterloo. . . .

Reuben Hornsby built a cabin at Hornsby's Bend in the fall of 1832, on 4,600 acres of land granted him by Stephen F. Austin on behalf of the Republic of Mexico. The Hornsbys harvested wheat and corn, raised sheep, built a grist mill. They opened a riverside quarry at Blue Bluffs. The first men buried in Hornsby Cemetery, in 1836, had been killed by Comanches. One of Reuben's own sons was killed by Indian arrows in the waters of the Colorado River at Hornsby Bend in 1845.

The Hornsby descendants became teachers and lawmen, ranchers and public servants. Two of Reuben's sons were present at the Battle of San Jacinto. One Hornsby was killed during the Civil War, and another was imprisoned in a Union camp at Ohio. The most popular member of the clan may have been John Hornsby, who served four terms in the Texas legislature in the first half of the 20th century and was once described as Austin's "all-time ambassador of goodwill."

The baseball star Rogers Hornsby was born in Winters, near San Angelo, and not at Hornsby's Bend -- though he lived at the bend for several years as a child after the death of his father, Ed Hornsby, in 1898. According to family legend, young Rogers played baseball with older Hornsby children in the bottomland near the Colorado River.

Hornsby was raised by his mother and named for his mother, Mary Rogers Hornsby, who had grown up next to Hornsby's Bend in the settlement of Rogers Hill. Mary loved her youngest son and indulged his affection for baseball to the point that she hand-stitched his boyhood uniforms.

"I can't remember anything that happened before I had a baseball in my hand," Rogers Hornsby once said, and he was a man of extraordinary focus. It was written that Hornsby did not smoke or drink, didn't go out on the town with his teammates, didn't read books. He wouldn't go to movies during baseball season, fearing the experience would strain his batting eye.

In the ledgers of record books, Rogers Hornsby is forever a baseball legend. He twice won the Most Valuable Player award, twice won the Triple Crown (best in home runs, batting average and RBIs). His .424 batting average in 1924 hasn't been matched in 79 years. Yet Hornsby's no-nonsense approach to the game -- "colorless, quiet and methodical" -- did not make him a romantic figure like Babe Ruth. By most accounts, he was a hard and difficult guy.

Hornsby was "an exceptionally plain-spoken, uncompromising, pull-no-punches type of man with ultimate confidence in his own opinions," wrote his most recent biographer, Charles C. Alexander. He had piercing blue eyes and a penchant for bluntness. First as a player, later as a manager, he sounded off against the men who were his bosses -- calling them cheap or hypocritical -- and it seemed that the timing of his remarks, not so much the substance, was what got him into the most trouble. The title of his autobiography, "My War with Baseball," alludes to the spirit of confrontation that defined him.

Sportswriter Red Smith once wrote that Hornsby made hitting look easy -- and everything else seem hard. He was fired a half-dozen times as a major-league manager. The legendary broadcaster Vin Scully recalls he was no soft touch as a boss. As manager for the Cincinnati Reds in the 1950s, Hornsby would never leave the dugout when changing pitchers -- preferring to whistle toward the mound and shout, "You're outta there!"

Hornsby married three times. The horse track was his one great vice. He once remarked that Roger Maris -- the man who broke Ruth's single-season home run record -- couldn't carry his bat. Late in life, he made derogatory comments about Jews that appeared in a national magazine article. He worked for the city of Chicago for years, teaching children how to play baseball.

"He was a stranger, even to those who knew him best," Smith wrote after Hornsby died. "He was a hard and lonely man who loved kids, hated phonies, and worshiped the truth."

I'd read none of this about Rogers Hornsby in the spring of 1978. I understood only that the man was a great player, tough as nails -- and that my grandfather wanted to see his grave. The best part was I now knew how to take him there, to the cemetery at Hornsby's Bend.

Of poetry and pain

At any time, I suppose, I could have said something. I could have asked my grandfather what he so admired about Rogers Hornsby -- and why it was so darned important for us to drive east in the direction of Webberville to this little family cemetery on a pleasant country road that just a few minutes ago was Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the middle of Austin.

But I didn't. My grandfather was 78 years old, born out of a time I didn't understand -- so I assumed that his passions were things I wouldn't understand, either. Instead, we just drove, feeling the spring air blow through the open windows of my car, watching for that sign on the highway that would say "Hornsby Cemetery."

My grandfather was a true character, imposingly stern and stubborn on the outside but with a gentle, poetic streak in his soul. He was born on a farm near Chicago in 1899, the youngest son in a large family, one generation removed from Germany. Though his Chicago roots ran deep, he spent most of his adult life in the West -- working as a bookkeeper in a mining camp above Telluride, Colo., living above the main street movie house in Dalhart and finally settling his family in south central Los Angeles at the end of the Depression.

His name was Syl -- but he was known as "Bill" at work, and no one outside the family knew his real name. My grandfather was the kind of guy, during the 1960s, who would step onto an elevator next to a man with shoulder-length hair and say, "So. You like that, looking like a girl?" He was tall and lean and absent-minded, like me. Each year, I look more and more like him.

Grandpa was quick to opinion, quick to judge. He loved coffee and cats and hated FDR. He was also an ardent reader. It was the great gift he passed on to me -- an enthusiasm for reading, an enthusiasm for language.

My grandfather read three or four newspapers a day and clipped from them vigorously with scissors the size of small yard tools. His house was full of books. The living room bookcase was lined with the classics and history, Homer and Tolstoy and Kipling. His great passion, however, was poetry. And when I was a boy, he'd read aloud to me as I sat beside that bookcase.

Grandpa recited this poetry with a delicacy and a dignity that made him seem a new and different man. I wish I could remember more of the poetry he pulled out for me -- Philip Freneau's "On a Honeybee"? Robert Burns? Robert Frost? But it was my grandfather's affection for texture and meter, the attention he lavished upon specific words, that caught my attention. What was this world? . . .

He wrote the most cheerful letters -- rich with reflection, political rumination, baseball news, stanzas from German nursery rhymes of his childhood. It was correspondence that I wasn't smart enough to treasure. Dozens of those letters are in landfills now, so carelessly thrown aside in those certain, urgent moments of my youth.

I let him down, a lot -- for I was the prospective writer who rarely answered his letters or kept stride with his larger passion for substantial discussion. When he saw my apartment in Austin, his first reaction was, "Where are your books?" There were lots of records, a big stereo. But not a single volume of Tennyson.

My grandfather cared for me deeply. Yet an event had scarred us: The Argument. Grandpa was a very conservative man, you see: John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater, all of that. Somehow, during one of my summer visits to L.A. in the early 1970s, it came out in conversation that he believed black men were not equal to white men. To be precise: my grandfather wouldn't consider inviting a black man into his home.

I was astonished. For the only time in my life, I challenged one of his core convictions at length. After all, I'd grown up in the age of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. Civil rights were discussed all the time in our social studies classrooms in Texas. How could my grandfather -- a city employee, involved in social services, no less -- close his house to a black man?

Our argument was intense. How dare I tell him what to do in his own home. My grandmother cried, and her tears were born of shock, not sorrow. I retreated to a bedroom, my body feeling what the teenage mind could not articulate: "How could this poetic man carry such backward feelings about race? And how could it be that we were of the same family, the same river?"

We patched things up, of course, and never spoke of the incident again. Yet those feelings never really went away. I felt them riding with us in the car that spring day in 1978, the wind blowing through the open windows, on the road to Hornsby's Bend.

Among the headstones

My grandfather wrote me a letter, and the letter led us to a family cemetery near the banks of the Colorado River. From the highway, we saw the sign. We pulled off the blacktop. The dirt road to the cemetery was blocked by a gate -- so my grandfather approached a stately house next to the road and asked permission to enter.

The morning air was warm, but the broad trees at the house cast cool shadows. From the car, I heard the slap of a screen door and friendly laughter. Clearly, my grandfather was being given some cordial, homespun directions. As he ambled back to the car, I had the sensation that this didn't feel like Austin anymore; it felt like something out of the Old South.

"Watch out for rattlesnakes!" a voice from the house called out to us as we passed through the gate.

As we bounced along the gravel road, my grandfather informed me that I was to drive past the first graveyard -- a Mexican cemetery -- and veer right to the "real," Hornsby cemetery. We found it easily. The river bends enticingly close here, but we did not see it.

The cemetery was filled with dozens of grand old monuments -- some as tall as my grandfather -- and we walked about tentatively, not knowing where to go. It was hot and quiet; the ground had been burned by the sun. My grandfather was thinking about snakes. Me? I was stuck on the irony of standing in a whites-only Texas graveyard in the company of my grandfather.

As a prospective sportswriter, I assumed that a star such as Rogers Hornsby would be buried beneath the tallest of headstones. And so it was that I was repeatedly surprised upon approaching impressive markers only to say, "No, no. This isn't the one." Nature has a way of evening things out in a cemetery.

My grandfather finally found the headstone -- a simple, flat slab. "Rogers Hornsby: April 27, 1896 - January 5, 1963." A pair of crossed baseball bats, delicately etched into the stone. Nothing more.

We stood together in the Texas sun, considering the resting place of the greatest right-handed hitter of the 20th century. I felt the sweat on my back. I expected my grandfather to say something -- a summing statement, a story with meaning. But no. . . .

Instead, he pulled out a pocket camera. My grandfather carried this camera a lot, and carried it to cemeteries a lot. Most of Grandpa's brothers and sisters -- I think he had 10 of them -- were long dead. No longer able to visit them, he'd travel the country and take pictures of the grave sites. As the survivor, he was the family chronicler, a caretaker, the keeper of the record. The cemetery photos were a part of all that.

As he framed his photo, I stepped away -- to stay out of the picture. But he gave me that look, as if I'd done wrong.

"Here," he said, holding out the camera to me. "You take it."

Nervously, I accepted the camera -- though it was clear he didn't want to be in the frame. I took a picture of the headstone. My grandfather let me know that it wasn't enough, so I took one or two more. Then we left, leaving the silence of the morning behind us.

We spent the rest of our day driving around Austin. We dashed up Mount Bonnell, marveled at the glories of the city. Even at 78, my grandfather was in great shape, bolting up the steps, charmed by Austin's beauty. During the next several weeks, he mentioned our town sweetly in his letters. The city and the cemetery were now a part of our bond.

I never saw him again. My grandfather died a little more than four months later, of a heart attack, at his late mother-in-law's home in Wellington, Ill. -- a simple country house of another era, one I had never known to have indoor plumbing. He was last seen chopping wood. They found him sitting in a living room chair. It was World Series time; I imagine he was getting ready to watch the big game, the Dodgers and the Yankees.

And so it was that I found myself in a cemetery with my grandfather once again, this time in Illinois. I walked uneasily among the headstones. I retraced familiar steps. I stood beside my grieving father -- who before too long would find in my grandfather's possessions some odd photographs taken at an Austin cemetery. And in that futile, human way, I tried to say goodbye.

The pull of the river

Not so long ago, I telephoned an expert at the Lower Colorado River Authority, asking about the river at Hornsby Bend. I said, "A river really doesn't want to bend into itself, right? Certainly I'm wrong to assign a human condition -- a kind of yearning -- to something in nature. Right?"

The man laughed. He said, in fact, that the river truly does want to arch back into itself, to push forward into itself, at Hornsby's Bend. It's the river's natural tendency to straighten the line; just look what happens when it floods. Someday, he said, an oxbow lake will form at Hornsby's Bend. The river's past and its present are destined to unite, to flow together as one.

Who is to argue against the larger forces of nature? A few weeks ago, I felt the pull again -- and for the first time in 25 years, I drove east on that old road and visited the cemetery at Hornsby's Bend.

I set out before twilight. The air was cool and breezy after an afternoon rain. Salt-and-pepper clouds rested low on the horizon, furrowed brows against a hopeful blue sky.

In the delicate evening light, the cemetery seemed larger, less forbidding, more serene than I had remembered it -- despite the occasional burst of 737s taking off from the airport across the river. "Amazing," I said to myself. "I guess that goes to show what 25 years and different light can do." The ground was damp. I noticed trees -- the crape myrtles were in full bloom -- and sure enough, I found Rogers Hornsby's grave within five minutes.

In front of the headstone, there was a baseball glove -- an infielder's mitt, the lacing at the thumb torn away, the leather wet from the rain. Beside it: five battered baseballs, most with the covers torn away. A silver ring rested on the stone, inscribed simply with the word "love."

I noticed this time, also, that Rogers Hornsby is buried near his parents, at the very foot of his mother's grave. I knew to look for it, having learned that this hard, imperfect man saved the softest spot in his heart for his mother, that he'd known the cemetery at Hornsby's Bend well as a grieving son.

Why was it that my grandfather wanted to come here so many years ago? Had he seen Hornsby play in Chicago or St. Louis in those years he came of age in the Midwest? Did he see something poetic in his swing? Or was it a matter of demeanor? Was there something in Hornsby's bold disregard for authority that touched something in him?

Could it be that Hornsby was merely a symbol of a time that was lost to my grandfather? Or was Grandpa's motive purely instructional -- that he wanted to teach me something about baseball, the times of men like Rogers Hornsby, and inevitable passage of things that bring meaning to our lives?

I'll never know. In the shadows of the Hornsby cemetery, I was left with the awareness that it simply mattered to him -- and in the spirit of love for the man, I was once again standing at the grave of a stranger. And those old frustrations, the nagging incongruities? Over the span of these last 25 years, I've learned from my own failings that we're ill advised to condemn baseball stars or grandfathers for their very human imperfections, even if they do break our hearts.

Standing before the headstone, I found myself thinking of so many sad, unwanted visits I've made to other cemeteries over the past few years -- and felt that larger force that pulls within us all, the desire to bend back against the rock of time and toward reconciliation, to touch the waters of our own past. "We should all be so lucky to rest in a place as peaceful as this," I whispered to the twilight. It is only fitting, in the greater nature of things.

bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967

(from box)

Learn more about the Hornsbys

The Hornsby family Web site, www.hornsbybend .com, is rich with history and information about Hornsby's Bend. Included is the legendary tale of Josiah Wilbarger, Reuben Hornsby's neighbor, who was scalped by Indians in the 1830s and left for dead. He was eventually rescued, however, thanks in large part to Reuben's wife, Sarah.

The Hornsby Cemetery, nine miles east of Austin on FM 969, is designated as a Texas Historic Cemetery. It's also a private cemetery, posted with "no trespassing" signs. To obtain permission to visit the cemetery, e-mail cemetery@hornsbybend.com.