I love Texas

I live in Missouri but for some odd reason I have a strong relationship to Texas auctioneers. I would have never thought that would be the case. I was born in Lockport, New York but I moved to Texas when I was 3 months old. We lived in El Paso. Most of my Texas friends didn’t even know that until now.

My father was a Warrant Officer in the US Army and worked with Nike Hercules Air Defense missiles which happened to be located on the edges of the country in places like El Paso.

I don’t remember living in El Paso, we moved to Fairbanks, Alaska when I was 3 years old. Like I said we lived on the edges.

My next exposure to Texas was in Indiana the the Certified Auctioneer Institute hosted by the Keller School of Business. I met several Texas auctioneers there including Rick Stroud, BS, CAI, BAS and Cindy Stroud, BA, CAI, BAS , Luther Davis, and Si Harbottle, CAI.  Over the 3 years we were together in the Spring at CAI we came to respect each other and we became great  friends.

My next exposure to Texas was life changing. I was invited to Texas to teach a class at the Texas Auction Association’s convention. The Texas auctioneers took my wife and I to Gruene, San Antonio, Boerne, and then one of the coolest places I have every, ever gone, Luckenbach Texas.

What makes Texas so great is the Texans, and Texas. Let’s face it Gruene is a wonderful place because  it is pretty, but then Texans made a very cool mill there and then they turned that mill into a way cool restaurant. Now Luckenbach, is a town of 3, but it has a bike rack that they use for guitar cases, there were 12 cases on the rack the day we went there (I counted). They have a general store, that is also a post office, a bar and a dance hall. As I sat under the spreading moss covered trees full of roosters and hens and listened to the excellent musicians play I was reminded of a line from Field of Dreams (with a slight modification)
“Is this heaven? No it’s Texas”. I thought the musicians must have been from all over the US to be that good, I was shocked to learn that they were mostly from just a few miles away.

One song in particular struck a cord with me. A young man named Jake Martian (I just figured out his name today almost a year and a half later) who sang a hunting song about the last living live oak tree. Live oak trees grow down South, they are often as wide as they are tall. The live oak trees stay green all year (thus their name) but they are dying off and nobody knows exactly why.

I would have never found Gruene, or Boerne, or Luckenbach. I would have never seen a Luckenbach pickers circle. I wold have been much poorer, you can’t buy a day like this. Thank you Texas, this was one of the best days of my entire life, and I owe it all to Texas Auctioneers. Here is the video I took that day of the picker’s circle singing this song.