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During the recent TSHA annual meeting in El Paso, the Association recognized the impending retirement of longtime assistant
director George B. Ward and honored his many contributions as managing editor of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and director of publications over the past two decades.
At the presidential banquet on Friday evening, past TSHA president Jerry Thompson thanked George for all of his good work
on behalf of the Association and requested that George take a cell phone with him to those duck blinds on the Chesapeake and
fishing rivers in Canada so we can stay in touch. TSHA president Shirley Caldwell then presented George with a handsome Lalique
crystal eagle with the thanks of the Association.
At the business meeting earlier that day, Steve Hardin read a resolution formally acknowledging George's twenty years of
service to the Association.
The following is a farewell letter from George to his many TSHA friends:
Love of history often begins with love of family and love of place. In my two decades with the TSHA I don't know how many
people have told me that their fascination with history began while reading a grandfather's letter from the Civil War pulled
out of an old trunk, or after finding a perfect arrowhead on a Hill Country bluff over a dry creek bed. My own love affair
with history has several such moments, including a hot August afternoon in the late 1950s on the family farm in Missouri when
Aunt Minnie--then well into her nineties--pulled me close to her one good eye and told me about being carried off into the
woods at the approach of Union soldiers who were responding to the Centralia Massacre, one of the Civil War's most notorious
guerrilla actions, which took place a short distance from the farmhouse where we sat. I shivered in the heat, physically touched
by the fragile but direct line that Aunt Minnie made between my life and the Civil War on the Missouri frontier.
That family-inspired connection to history took a distinctly Texas turn thirty years ago when I began my career as a graduate
student at the University of Texas, where I studied Western history with Bill Goetzmann and Joe Frantz, among other inspiring
teachers. While my courses and research brought me in touch with Texas, my great love for this place--the land, the people,
the music, the history--was strengthened just as much by my wanderings all over the state while hunting and fishing. I had
an informal policy that for every hour spent up in the stacks of the old Main Library I had to spend another doing "field
research" (i.e., quail hunting) or visiting one of Central Texas's many honky tonks listening to people like Kenneth Threadgill
yodel the country blues. I was inspired by it all. After getting my doctorate I briefly left for a teaching job at a university
in Ohio, but came running back to Texas joyously after only a few years when I was offered my current job. For the last twenty
years some of my fondest memories have to do with colleagues and friends I have met through the TSHA. I simply can't imagine
a job in the world of Texas history that would have allowed me to get to know such a vast array of wonderful people--scholars,
ranchers, governors, slackers, novelists, oilmen, cowboys, lawyers, liars, and all the rest. But after twenty years here it
is time for me to get back to two things which I have not been able to do as much as I would like: teach and write. (And,
I must admit, hunting and fishing in the middle of the week is also part of the game plan.) I guess it's called retiring,
although I will continue to live here in Austin and will be busy teaching a course or two at UT every semester. I don't plan
on becoming a hermit so please feel free to get in touch.
Since I can't personally say "Adios" to all the people I have come to know during my two decades as managing editor of the
Quarterly and director of TSHA publications, I am using this opportunity to say thank you and goodbye. When I sit in my office and
look west, I see the UT campus and the Texas Hll Country in the distance--both of which have been great sources of inspiration.
Looking the other way, across the piles of manuscripts and author correspondence that fill my office, I see several shelves
full of twenty years of Quarterlies and TSHA books--a fair number of them award-winners--and I feel a real sense of accomplishment and pride. But none of this
would have happened without the generous support of my family and my many colleagues and friends both inside and outside the
TSHA. To my good friends on the TSHA staff and among TSHA members, thank you for your camaraderie, hard work, advice, and
dedication to history. Most important, thank you for your friendship.
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