No one person could completely embody the Texas Hill Country experience. But of the thousands living here today, it’s hard to imagine one who comes closer to that ideal than Bob Ramsey, who lives on a beautiful ranch near the boundary of Kerr and Real counties. In his ninety years, he has been personally involved with much of the Hill Country’s history. He knows the land well, and he knows the people, the plants and the animals who give the land its unique character. Fortunately for all of us coming along behind him, he has written two wonderful books that give a unique glimpse into the soul of the Texas Hill Country: As Texas as it Gets (1999), and More Texas Tales (2002).
Bob Ramsey was born in 1918 to Reynolds Allen Ramsey, a former San Antonio boy employed as a typewriter salesman in Waycross, Georgia, and June Burdett Ramsey, the college-educated daughter of a doctor from Lenoir City, Tennessee. The couple had exchanged their “civilized” life for a ranch in Real County just a few years before, and Bob’s childhood home was a small 1850s-era Ranger’s cabin built from logs and rough lumber.
Bob’s dad had displayed an adventurous streak when he was very young; he and some friends snuck close to the fenced compound at Fort Sam Houston where the famous Apache chief, Geronimo, was held prisoner. Geronimo spotted the boys, and asked them to get him some tobacco. Bob’s dad rode his bicycle six miles to town, used his savings to buy some, then came back alone and threw the tobacco over the fence to the legendary Indian.
When Bob was just four, his father went in partnership with a businessman from Dallas to buy 10,000 acres along the West Frio River, and it was there that many of Bob’s earliest adventures occurred. They, like many other Hill Country ranchers, raised sheep, Angora goats and Hereford cattle in the rocky wilderness.
One day in 1925, while Bob was at school in San Antonio, two men came to the West Frio Ranch with their wives and a letter of recommendation from an old Ramsey family friend. They introduced themselves as the Baker brothers, oil men who wanted a little time in the country, and asked if they could vacation for a couple of weeks at the ranch. The “oil men” behaved a little strangely, but were genial and demonstrated great skill at riding and shooting. They also slept with loaded pistols under their pillows.
A few months later, U.S. marshals showed up with pictures of the “Bakers.” They were actually Willis and Joe Newton, ringleaders of the notorious Newton Gang and future subjects of the 1998 movie, Newton Boys. They had been hiding out on the Ramsey’s ranch after robbing a New Braunfels bank, and Bob wondered for years if they had hidden some of their loot somewhere on the ranch.
Bob owned a gun from the time he was six years old, and when he was 14, he began experimenting with the technique of “rattling” deer – banging antlers together and kicking rocks and brush to simulate a fight between bucks during mating season. During the next 70 years, he would document the “rattling” of more than 2,000 bucks. The most famous occasion would be a photo op on the 75,000-acre Y.O. Ranch for San Antonio Express-News outdoor editor Dan Klepper in 1965, when Bob was able to “rattle up” 38 bucks in just five hours! Klepper wrote about that episode many times, including a column for Field and Stream magazine that October.
Another lifelong pursuit was Indian artifacts. Bob started collecting arrowheads when he was just six years old, and had accumulated thousands of artifacts before he was married in 1942. He had also accumulated thousands of hours as a hunter and a fisherman in the rugged country along the Frio River.
After high school (he played football for Uvalde High, where his pet coyote was used as the team mascot), Bob earned a degree in wildlife and fisheries sciences at Texas A&M University. After graduation in 1941, he was hired for $70 a month (plus expenses) to trap gray foxes in the Hill Country and preserve their digestive systems so A&M scientists could study their eating habits. This field work would provide credit toward a master’s degree (which he never quite finished) in game management.
It was on that job that he met his future wife, Willielee; after a five-month courtship, they were married in September of 1942. By that time, America was at war, and Bob entered the military in February of 1943. He was serving in the Army (at Paine Field in Everett, Washington) when their daughter was born on December 6, 1944.
When the war was over, the Ramsey’s came home to the Hill Country. Bob worked at several different jobs over the next twelve years, teaching vocational school, chasing poachers as a game warden on the legendary Y.O. Ranch and instituting the state’s first antlerless-deer hunt for the Texas Game and Fish Commission (now Texas Parks and Wildlife). He had adventures wherever he went. In 1956, he took over operations on his wife’s family ranch; the adventures continued.
Bob Ramsey’s books detail dozens of those adventures, including hunts in Texas and all over North America (Mexico to Alaska), meetings with celebrities from Will Rogers, Ace Reid and John Nance Garner to the brother of Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi. When James Michener was writing his famous novel, Texas, he came to the Ramsey ranch to talk to Bob. Among Ramsey’s treasures are an autographed copy of the book and a letter of thanks from the famous author.
Ramsey’s books also tell of pranks like releasing an armadillo in a crowded theater and close calls in the wild (he has the skin of a monstrous 8-foot, 4-inch rattlesnake hanging on his living room wall. It nearly got him first.) Through reading his adventures, readers will understand a little of the Hill Country’s transformation from an unforgiving wilderness to a vacation paradise. This beautiful corner of God’s creation is even better because of tough, ingenious and big-hearted people like Bob Ramsey.
Read more articles from the Summer 2008 issue.