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The Roy Bedichek Family Letters Selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek |
Roy Bedichek, author of Adventures with a Texas Naturalist and close friend of J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb, loved both reading and writing letters. His often expressed wish that more letters and journals would be published has been brought to bear on his own work by his daughter-in-law, Jane Gracy Bedichek, who offers a selection of the Bedichek family correspondence.
The collection shows once again what talent Bedichek had for describing the world around him, and for expressing his opinion of that world, but they also reveal his interest and involvement in his children's lives and his sense of humor in dealing with them, with his pets, and with the wildlife he became famous for observing. Always the letters are rare vintage Bedichek.
"Evidence accumulates against the blue jay. This morning . . . I saw a jay deviling a young martin sitting on a telephone wire. . . . One killed a baby inca; I suspect one of the death of one of my screech owls; one stole the rag-strips I had prepared with great pains to tie up my tomato-vines with; and this morning I found almost half of a large green tomato eaten away and can think of no other bird which would commit such an atrocity. And yet he is a proud, gay, gorgeously colored creature whose arrogance becomes him. But I have a temper: he'd better not let me catch him killing a baby inca."—letter to Lillian Bedichek, June 18, 1949
"There is a desert plant in New Mexico called the Sotol. It is a very strange thing . . . neither weed nor bush nor tree. . . . a very slow growth and . . . a very shabby, prickly, rough, uncouth looking affair. But after years spent in attaining six or seven feet, behold a slender, white, tender shoot starts out of the top of the plant. . . . When [it] has shot up straight twenty feet into the air, the end of it bursts into a spray of . . . sometimes as many as 100 individual blossoms. They . . . are so defiant of the desert—the white banner of blossoms is flaunted so exultantly—it is a veritable 'hurrah—at last' of vegetation. . . . This sotol reminds me of our acquaintanceship—it has grown in the desert—it has had little chance—it was but a scrubby, sunburnt affair, until lo! . . . it suddenly throws up into the golden sunshine that banner of blossoms which we call love."—letter to Lillian Greer, June 17, 1910
"[We] saw five magnificent white pelicans, scooping with their enormous bills and throwing their heads up now and then, exhibiting their pale yellow pouches. Immediately behind them walking in solemn procession, like Egyptian priests performing some ancient rite, were seven (mystic number) wood ibises, with their bills plunged into the water up to their eyes, treading along without raising their bills for five minutes at a time. Flanking this procession on either side were several . . . roseate spoonbills, in full mating plumage . . . . this procession went forward in the glow of the rising sun, and it is hard for me to believe that it wasn't some kind of solemn religious pageant."—letter to daughter Sarah Bedichek, July 8, 1937
JANE GRACY BEDICHEK, a graduate of Wellesley College and Columbia School of Social Work, currently serves on the board of Scarsdale Audubon and Weinberg Nature Center and is active in the Archaeological Institute of America. She lives in Scarsdale, New York.
The Roy Bedichek Family Letters
1-57441-032-6
$32.50s
6x9. 352 pp. 50 b&w photos. App. Index.
Natural History. Texas History. Literary Nonfiction.
Publication Date: January 1998.
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