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• Austin Chronicle - https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/arts/2017-03-02/in-memoriam-gary-cartwright/

  That Wild Man
  Gary Cartwright: The mad, mad, mad life of a Texas wordsmith
  By Joe O'Connell, Fri., June 26, 2015
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  Gary Cartwright
  Gary Cartwright (Photo by Devaki Knowles)

  How to write about the memoir of an iconic Texas scribe whose life has been way more interesting/wild/chaotic than yours? Use his words.

  "On the road home to Brownwood in her green '74 Cadillac with the custom upholstery and the CB radio, clutching a pawn ticket, for her $3,000 mink, Candy Barr thought about biscuits. Biscuits made her think of fried chicken, which in turn suggested potato salad and corn. For as long as she could remember, in times of crisis and stress, Candy Barr always thought of groceries. It was a miracle she didn't look like a platinum pumpkin, but she didn't: even at 41, she still looked like a movie star."

  Thus begins Gary Cartwright's 1976 Texas Monthly profile of the state's most notorious stripper, a story that in many ways cemented a style of inserting himself into the narrative. It's a technique that served him well in writing the memoir The Best I Recall (University of Texas Press, 272 pp., $27.95) When UT Press asked him to pen the book, he realized details of events from party days of yore were often hazy.

  "Even though I wasn't the topic I was writing about, I wrote in first person a lot," Cartwright, now 80, said recently from his Central Austin home. "So I could go back and re-read stories from Texas Monthly and other magazines and get a timeline of what I'd done and when I'd done it. I put it together by going to school on myself."

  Cartwright had a longstanding desire to meet Candy Barr going back to his Army discharge when a buddy and he showed up in Dallas at Abe Weinstein's Colony Club with a bottle of whiskey in the days pre-liquor-by-the-drink. They weren't (yet) drunk, but an overzealous cop threw them in jail anyway. Candy Barr had to wait.

  Barr had quashed previous attempts to interview her, including one by the famed writer Gay Talese, but Cartwright knew a stripper named Chastity who knew Candy. "She was beautiful, she was famous, she was mysterious, and nobody had written about her," he says. "I would follow her around the house and try to interview her. It was going nowhere. A couple of times I thought, 'Screw this. I'll just leave.' But I didn't. So I wrote about experiencing Candy Barr. That's one thing I learned. You have an idea of what the story will be, but it doesn't work out that way. There's still a story there. It's another story, and it's probably as interesting or more interesting than what you've conceptualized."

  Cartwright's life swirls in the interesting. The memoir cuts it into four distinct chapters: the early Mad Men-esque years in the Metroplex newspaper game, the drug-hazy Seventies, the Texas Monthly years, and the final truths/sadnesses of growing older. Underlying themes run through it: an ability to be in the right place at the right time surrounded by the right people, a rage against the humdrum life he saw others leading, and a churning battle with the belief that he somehow didn't deserve it all.

  "That's probably a reflection of my character that seeps out," he says. "You don't know what you're doing, but you know that if you keep doing it, it'll work. There always comes a time in a story, whether it's a magazine story or a book, where you realize you're on to something. Most writers I know had a plan, but I never had enough foresight to have a plan."

  Credit the original spark to Emma Ousley, a journalism and English teacher at Arlington High School who made her students free-write to start every class. "People said, 'Write what?' She said, 'I don't care. Just write.' I wrote. I thought, 'This is great.' I would write a sentence, then I'd write another sentence. It was great fun." One day Ousley pulled him aside and pointed out his writing talent. "It floored me," Cartwright says. "Nobody had ever felt I had a talent for anything."

  As a Fort Worth Press paperboy, Cartwright became a fan of Blackie Sherrod, a newspaper columnist and sportswriter. After a stint as a Fort Worth Star-Telegram cops reporter and an ill-advised stretch in advertising, Cartwright landed under Sherrod's guidance as part of what would become an all-star sportswriting team. Sitting across from him were Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins.

  Sherrod "took us under his wing and taught us how to be newspapermen, not sportswriters," Cartwright says. "Sportswriters tended to be what we called homers. They think of the home team as being we, part of our family. If you're a newspaper guy, you think objectively. That attitude changed over the years partly because of writers like me, Jenkins, Shrake, and particularly Blackie."

  The sports team also embraced a hard-partying lifestyle with lots of booze and lots of women. "That's how everybody I knew lived," he says. "Everybody I knew was divorced, so when I got married for the first time, I think I figured in seven years I'd be divorced, and I was."

  He ended up sharing an apartment with Shrake just north of downtown Dallas where, when the bars closed, late-night parties percolated. A regular houseguest was a flame-haired stripper named Jada who worked in one of Jack Ruby's clubs. "She was a wild woman," Cartwright says. "She had long, long fingernails. She was a cat woman. She wasn't much of a dancer, but she was fairly sensational. She'd hump on a tiger skin rug." Ruby would show up at the apartment looking for her, usually armed. "Ruby loved Jada, but he hated that act. She'd tell him to go screw himself."

  Later, Cartwright, now remarried, joined Shrake in waving to President Kennedy's motorcade moments before JFK was assassinated. The sportswriters were in Cleveland for a football game that the Dallas Cowboys inexplicably agreed to play the following Sunday, the day Ruby shot suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

  "I've never been through a time like that," Cartwright says. "That's why it was so stunning that the Cowboys played a game that Sunday. Nobody wanted to play a game. Nobody wanted to watch a game. Everybody just went through the motions."

  Cartwright's second wife, Jo, had purchased a convertible in Ohio, and the two drove back to Dallas via Nashville. "We were in no hurry to get anywhere," he says. "The world had just stopped. Everybody felt like something else was about to happen. This was the start of a revolution – something. An unnamed thing that couldn't be good. Life continued, but it would never be the same."

  Shrake triggered a change in Cartwright's career path. He and Jenkins both headed to New York City to write for Sports Illustrated, and Cartwright followed as a freelancer. Jenkins, whom Cartwright considered the best pure sportswriter he'd ever met, had branched into fiction with Semi-Tough, a rollicking comic novel about pro football starring Billy Clyde Puckett, a character he'd created for column fodder back in their newspaper days. Shrake was even more serious about writing fiction.

  "Everybody admired Bud," Cartwright says. "He was a big guy – 6'6" – and very dynamic. He was a natural liar. He always knew he was going to be a novelist. I just sort of followed his lead."

  Shrake advised him to just write one sentence at a time, so Cartwright sat down and did just that. The result was 1968's The Hundred-Yard War. "I thought it was going to be about pro football because that's what I knew," Cartwright says. "I'd covered the Dallas Texans (now the Kansas City Chiefs) and later the Dallas Cowboys. So I wrote a sentence. Then I wrote another sentence. A story developed." His main character was modeled after charismatic Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith. The coach was originally a take on Cowboys coach Tom Landry, but Cartwright found Landry too enigmatic to grasp and went instead with a Vince Lombardi-esque coach whose explosive, egotistical personality was more fun to put down on paper.
  That Wild Man

  "It taught me I could write a book," Cartwright says. "Later, there were a lot of things I'd wished I'd known beforehand. I would have restructured the book or dwelled more on certain characters and less on others. But there's no way to write than to sit down and do it."

  An editor talked him into penning a second novel, Thin Ice, set in the world of hockey, a sport the Texan knew little about. "They offered pretty good money at a time when I needed money, so I said, 'Sure,'" Cartwright recalls. "To solve the problem of not knowing anything about the game, I made my lead character a goalie, thinking that at least he'd stay in one place. I also decided he'd be going blind."

  Shrake and Cartwright were dreamers and provocateurs prone to dressing up in capes as the Flying Punzars, a supposed foreign circus act. During a road trip, they only half-jokingly talked of producing their own movies and publishing their own books, and thus created Mad Dog, an actual corporation whose motto was "doing indefinable service to mankind." Cartwright calls it the "world's longest practical joke."

  When a Western screenplay of Shrake's called Dime Box was being shot in Durango, Mexico (as Kid Blue), Mad Dog showed up with a Winnebago and a smaller van festooned with Mad Dog Productions banners. Dennis Hopper starred as an outlaw trying to go straight. "He was totally crazy at the time," Cartwright says. "He had just come off Easy Rider, which was a huge success. He was a movie star in a day when movie stars had just about ceased to exist. He played the role. He was a pain in the ass, but refreshing." Hopper was soon inducted into the membership of Mad Dog.

  As part of their corporate activity, Shrake and Cartwright filmed a fake movie-within-a-movie titled The Congressman's Carrot, a joke that involved Cartwright pulling back his jacket to reveal a carrot in his vest pocket. The craziness hit its crescendo at the New Year's Mad Dog Masked Ball where a crowd including writer Peter Gent (North Dallas Forty), actor Warren Oates, and Don Meredith mingled and partygoers sampled vanilla-flavored LSD and, as concocted by Cartwright and his wife Jo, marijuana cookies that packed a 12-hour punch. Meredith and his girlfriend, unaware of the secret ingredient, were wolfing them down.

  "Life was really boring back then," Cartwright says of Mad Dog. "Nobody was taking chances. Nobody was pushing the envelope. I wanted to make things happen. One way was to be as outrageous as we could and see where the chips fell."

  Cartwright said his life's third act was a "lapse into journalism."

  "Fact and fiction come together," he says. "There's a narrow line. My first two books were fiction, so I taught myself to write while writing fiction. Texas Monthly came along, and I got into long-form journalism. I really liked that and understood it because I'd written long-form fiction. I'd learned to trust my instincts. You learn by doing. You learn by failing. You learn by trying."

  Crime quickly became Cartwright's forte. His tale of Dallas businessman Cullen Davis' trials for murder grew into two Texas Monthly pieces and the 1979 book Blood Will Tell, which was then made into the TV movie Texas Justice. Convicted cop killer Randall Dale Adams wrote to Cartwright from death row. Cartwright's Texas Monthly piece and Errol Morris' 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line led to a reversal of the conviction. "The cops had stacked the deck against him," Cartwright says. "They had an unsolved cop killing, and he fell into their hands. I didn't particularly like Randall Dale Adams. He didn't have a personality. He's not the guy you'd like to have a beer with, but I thought he'd gotten screwed over."

  Cartwright knows that some folks think of him as "that wild man, that crazy man," but the frivolity has been tinged with its share of sadness. He reconnected with his son Mark when the boy came to study at UT. They became more like friends than father and son. Mark called his father Jap, a nickname from his Fort Worth Press days. Then in 1996, Mark was diagnosed with leukemia. "He was so tough and resilient," Cartwright says. "I thought he'd come through it, but he didn't."

  By his side through it all was Phyllis, the wife who stuck. Cartwright's first two marriages were short and fiery – he admits in the book to hitting each of his first two wives in the jaw – but Phyllis was the one. They had plans to celebrate their 30th anniversary in France when she was diagnosed with cancer and died in a few months. Cartwright later remarried, but his wife Tam also died of cancer.

  "You go on living," he says. "You do the best you can. I've always had an upbeat attitude. I don't dwell on what I can't change."

• Statesman - http://www.statesman.com/news/local-obituaries/1934-2017-texas-monthly-writer-gary-cartwright-dies-age/Rq20OPk4QpaW7b4apgvqPJ/

  1934-2017: Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright dies at age 82

  Michael Barnes American-Statesman Staff

  8:22 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017 Local News
  13
  Local
  Taylor Johnson/AA-S photo 11/18/99 file# 87995 photo of Gary Cartwright reading one of his books, Galveston, at his home in Austin. photo for millennium profiles.

  Lively, hard-living magazine writer, Gary Cartwright, 82, died at Seton Medical Center Austin about 6 a.m. Wednesday.

  Cartwright spent most of his career at Texas Monthly magazine, where he was among its first writers hired in the 1970s. He remained among its most durable contributors until his retirement as senior editor in 2010.

  “Gary was a master storyteller,” said former Texas Monthly publisher Mike Levy, who considered Cartwright a mighty catch in the early 1970s. “Great writers do three things: get the stories — in other words, get people to talk, and Gary could get anybody to talk — then put all the pieces together and have the wisdom to figure out what it meant.”

  He specialized in true crime stories, such as spectacular case of Fort Worth millionaire Cullen Davis, charged with shooting his estranged wife, Priscilla, and murdering her lover, Stan Farr, and her teenage daughter, Andrea. Cartwright turned the lurid drama into the book “Blood Will Tell,” which was adapted into a TV miniseries.

  In addition to Texas Monthly, Cartwright wrote for Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Stone and Life magazines. He produced books such as “Dirty Dealing,” “Texas Justice,” “Galveston: A History of the Island,” “HeartWiseGuy,” “Confessions of a Washed-Up Sportswriter,” and “Turn Out the Lights: Chronicles of Texas during the ’80s and ’90s,” a collection of his Texas Monthly articles.

  Born in Texas, Cartwright attended Arlington High School. He attended the University of Texas for three semesters and then graduated from Texas Christian University. He cut his journalistic teeth at Dallas-Fort Worth newspapers.

  Cartwright married four times. He described his sometimes erratic, sometimes violent behavior in a predictably well-written memoir, “The Best I Recall.”

  Cartwright also co-wrote and co-produced movies and television shows. He was associated closely with other celebrated Texas writers, such as Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins, who worked with him under legendary sportswriter William ‘Blackie” Sherrod at the Fort Worth Press. In a key book, they were grouped together by Steven L. Davis, curator of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, with the likes of Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer and Peter Gent as a generation of “Texas literary outlaws.”

  “For all of his books and wonderful magazine pieces, he’ll always be remembered best for his lede on a Dallas Cowboys game, which went something like: ‘The Four Horsemen rode again yesterday. You know them: Pestilence, Famine, Death and Meredith,’” Jenkins said.

  “For better or worse, I think we honed our craft on each other in those days. Sadly, another true original has called a cab.”

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/business/media/gary-cartwright-dead-texas-writer.html?_r=0

  Gary Cartwright, Acclaimed Texas Writer, Dies at 82

  By MANNY FERNANDEZFEB. 23, 2017
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  Gary Cartwright in 1997. “He was definitely our version of Hunter Thompson as much as anybody,” said Evan Smith, the chief executive of The Texas Tribune and a former editor of Texas Monthly. Credit Wyatt McSpadden

  Gary Cartwright, a longtime Texas journalist whose sharp writing, fearless reporting and fast living established him as one of the state’s greatest nonfiction writers and a kind of Lone Star cousin to Hunter S. Thompson, died on Wednesday in Austin, Tex. He was 82.

  His death, in a hospital hospice unit, was confirmed by the author Jan Reid, a friend.

  Friends said Mr. Cartwright had fallen recently inside his home in Austin, where he lived alone, and was unable to reach a phone. He remained there for days before he was discovered and taken to the hospital, they said.

  Mr. Cartwright was the dean of a loose-knit class of Texas journalists who pushed the bounds of long-form journalism and helped bring national acclaim to the regional magazine some of them wrote for, Texas Monthly. His career with the magazine began with the first issue, in 1973, and continued to his retirement in 2010.

  He practiced the brand of irreverent, participatory storytelling that Mr. Thompson had made famous as “gonzo journalism.”
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  “He was definitely our version of Hunter Thompson as much as anybody,” said Evan Smith, the chief executive of The Texas Tribune and a former editor in chief of Texas Monthly.

  Mr. Cartwright wrote a 1998 memoir about his life-changing heart attack (“HeartWiseGuy”), mused in print about the con man who was the best man at his wedding (his second of four) and described his sex life as an elderly man in the pages of Texas Monthly.

  “One of the best stories ever that Cartwright wrote, or that the magazine published, was one of Cartwright’s first stories,” Mr. Smith said. “It was about Jay J. Armes, a private detective in El Paso who literally had hooks for arms. You cannot make this up.”

  In the weeks leading up to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Dallas apartment that Mr. Cartwright shared with his friend and fellow reporter, Bud Shrake, was a popular late-night hangout for, among others, Jack Ruby and one of Ruby’s favorite strippers, Jada.

  Mr. Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, was a recurring figure in Mr. Cartwright’s journalism. As Mr. Cartwright wrote in “Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter” (1983), “On the morning of the assassination, Ruby called our apartment and asked if we’d seen Jada.”

  In the 1960s and ’70s Mr. Cartwright belonged to a group of writers — including Mr. Shrake, Dan Jenkins, Billy Lee Brammer and Larry L. King, one of the writers of the hit Broadway musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” — whose hard, boozy living and freewheeling prose captured and exemplified the era.
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  Mr. Cartwright published a second memoir, “The Best I Recall,” in 2015. Credit University of Texas Press

  “It seemed like they were living lives of joy and engagement and with a sense of recklessness that was beyond the reach of most of us,” Joe Holley, a columnist and editorial writer for The Houston Chronicle, said in an interview. “They lived hard. They wrote well, and they seemed to be intensely alive.

  “What we didn’t realize until later, when the heart attacks began and when they started writing confessional memoirs, was that hard living exacted a price.”

  Mr. Cartwright published another memoir, “The Best I Recall,” in 2015. He also wrote screenplays and novels.
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  He was born in Dallas in 1934 and grew up in the tiny West Texas oil town of Royalty in the late 1930s. With defense plants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area hiring after the start of World War II, the family moved to Arlington, the Dallas suburb, where his mother worked in a dress shop. His father worked at a defense plant in Fort Worth.

  After high school Mr. Cartwright attended Arlington State College and the University of Texas, enlisted in the Army for a two-year stateside stint and earned his bachelor’s degree afterward at Texas Christian University.

  He got his start in journalism in the mid-1950s, covering the police and sports for newspapers in Fort Worth and Dallas. He became the anchor of Texas Monthly and mentored a generation of young journalists, including Nicholas Lemann, the author and former dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

  “Gary was a Texas news guy to the core — somebody who grew up in old-school, smoke-filled, blue-collar newsrooms and went on to become one of the first Texas journalists to make a national reputation in long-form journalism,” Mr. Lemann said.

  Mr. Cartwright is survived by a son, Shea; a sister, Lea Hickman; five grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren, Mr. Reid said. Another son, Mark, died of leukemia in 1997.

  Mr. Cartwright’s work appeared alongside that of Larry McMurtry, J. Frank Dobie, Molly Ivins, Katherine Anne Porter and other Texas writers in the 2003 anthology “Lone Star Literature.” The book included this Cartwright passage:

  “If there is a tear left, shed it for Jack Ruby. He didn’t make history; he only stepped in front of it. When he emerged from obscurity into that inextricable freeze-frame that joins all of our minds to Dallas, Jack Ruby, a baldheaded little man who wanted above all else to make it big, had his back to the camera.”

  Even more famous was his 1976 Texas Monthly cover article about one of Ruby’s stripper friends, a Texas folk hero named Candy Barr.

  “They say she once sat waiting in a rocking chair talking to sweet Jesus,” Mr. Cartwright wrote, “and when her ex-husband kicked down the door, she threw down on him with a pistol that was resting conveniently in her lap. She shot him in the stomach, but she was aiming for the groin.”

• Austin American-Statesman - http://www.mystatesman.com/entertainment/books--literature/legendary-texas-writer-details-his-work-and-his-failings/tQDL8GuZLDGfVhsmdYdQ5M/

  A legendary Texas writer details his work — and his failings
  insight-and-books

  By Charles Ealy - American-Statesman Staff
  0

  Posted: 11:00 p.m. Friday, June 19, 2015

  Gary Cartwright takes a traditional, chronological approach to writing his memoir, “The Best I Recall,” starting with his early life in West Texas and his teen years in Arlington, then discussing his military service, his education and his rise through journalism — during which he crafted some of the most interesting stories to ever come from the state.

  The memoir also includes a sizable amount of rather frank information about his rough-and-tumble private life.

  But most of the book focuses on his exploits while at Texas Monthly, starting in the 1970s, when he wrote about the Fort Worth case of millionaire oilman Cullen Davis, who was charged with shooting his estranged wife, Priscilla, and murdering her lover, Stan Farr, and her teenage daughter, Andrea. Cartwright’s coverage eventually evolved into a book, “Blood Will Tell,” and a four-part TV movie.

  He also discusses another murder — of “flamboyant El Paso attorney Lee Chagra, which was the foundation of a far more complicated case that involved the murder-for-hire of federal judge John Wood.” As Cartwright notes, the story evolved into another book, “Dirty Dealing,” and later a movie.

  He writes about his efforts to free a Texas Death Row inmate, Randall Dale Adams, who was framed for a murder he didn’t commit and was the subject of the Errol Morris documentary “The Thin Blue Line.”

  And he has some sterling prose reserved for Candy Barr, the stripper who scandalized Dallas in the 1950s and did prison time.

  “I already knew that Candy could blow without warning: try to imagine a hurricane in a Dixie Cup,” he writes. “The laughing green eyes would begin to boil. The innocence that had made that perfect teardrop face a landmark in the sexual liberation of a generation of milquetoasts would twist into the wrath of Zeus.”

  But appreciation for such fine turns of phrase can’t help but be tempered by some of Cartwright’s revelations.

  For instance, during his Army service shortly after the Korean War, he had what he describes as “my first up-close encounter with black people.” And while he found most of them “friendly and good-natured,” he was bothered by a man named Prather, “who wore a permanent scowl and shouted out vile oaths as we marched in formation.” One day, during a foxhole-digging assignment, Cartwright was alone with Prather, who started “making occasional threats against me and against the world in general.” Cartwright writes that he “actually feared for” his life, and “I waited until Prather was looking away and then I hit him against the side of the head with the shovel. … He dropped to his knees, then collapsed facedown. For a moment I thought he was dead. Then I heard him moan.” Cartwright goes on to say that Prather got back on his feet, but that “he disappeared from our company later that day, and we never heard from him again. Far as I know, he recovered.”

  Cartwright also details his marriage troubles. While at his first newspaper job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, he married Barbara Austin. The two were together for seven years, but they divorced after she “caught me in bed with a woman whose name I have long forgotten.” Unfortunately, their two children were with Barbara when she made the discovery. “In the ensuing scuffle, me trying to get her and the kids out of the room, she screaming insults and sobbing her heart out, I took a swing at her. It was just a glancing blow, or so I thought, but somehow I managed to break her jaw.”

  Cartwright goes on to praise his first wife, saying “she deserved far better than me, but, sad to say, that’s who I was — who I am — careless, self-centered, impulsive, and egotistical beyond all telling.” He then adds that “during a similar argument with my second wife, Jo, I hit her and broke her jaw.” His self-reflection — and regrets — are dealt with in the simple sentence: “I will surely burn in hell for such wanton carelessness and disregard for others.”

  During much of his time at Texas Monthly, Cartwright was married to Phyllis Sickles, “the love of my life.” She was there for him when he had bypass surgery — after years of drinking and smoking heavily — and they traveled and had a great relationship from the 1980s onward. But around their 30th anniversary, they learned that Phyllis had cancer. She died in 2006, and Cartwright’s description of the long illness is heartbreaking.

  Cartwright married for a fourth time in 2009, to Tam Rogers. A survivor of breast cancer, Tam feared that it would return, and in the fall of 2012, she “began experiencing sharp pains in her chest and side, much as Phyllis had.” Cartwright says it was a particularly difficult time for them, and that one day they began to argue. “As I recall, she cursed me, at which point I shoved her. She fell backward and hit her head against a chair back, then against the floor,” he writes. Tam’s children from a previous marriage urged her to leave Cartwright. She died in 2013.

  Many people will say Cartwright is to be commended for being honest about his failings. But I’m not sure Cartwright has been completely candid. In 1982, he wrote a Texas Monthly article titled “Back Home,” about his experiences while living in Taos, N.M. In the article, he said, “A lot of things happened here, some of them bad — our prize Airedale, Dashiell, was killed, then Phyllis broke her jaw, then we ran out of money.” That detail about Phyllis’ jaw isn’t in the new memoir. And I still wonder about something that the book doesn’t answer: What caused Cartwright’s violent streak — something that cropped up again and again throughout his life? Maybe that’s another book. A little more self-analysis would have helped this one.

• Kirkus Reviews - https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/gary-cartwright/

  Gary Cartwright
  Author of THE BEST I RECALL
  Interviewed by Joe M. O'Connell on June 15, 2015

  Gary Cartwright figured out the secret to writing: sit down. Spit out one sentence. Add another. Find your way forward.

  It's a technique that has served him well in a 50-year career that has included sportswriting, fiction, and narrative journalism. His memoir The Best I Recall is a wild romp that opens in the Mad Men-ish '60s world of Dallas/Fort Worth journalism, stretches to '70s free-wheeling Austin where the hippies meet the rednecks and a lot of illicit drugs are consumed, detours to a long career writing long-form creative nonfiction for Texas Monthly, and stops with the stinging losses of later life.

  “I invented myself,” says Cartwright, now 80. “I became a bigger-than-life character.”

  It began in earnest in Fort Worth where Cartwright wore a snap-brimmed hat and a trenchcoat to simulate the police detective look while he actually worked the streets as police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. After a misstep into advertising in Los Angeles he returned to Texas and stumbled into a sportswriting job alongside “hip-to-the-times wise guys” Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins. Along with their mentor Blackie Sherrod, the dream team would raise the bar for sportswriting nationally. All the while they played the part of hard-partying, womanizing wild men for whom divorces were almost a given.

  Continue reading >

  “Life was boring back then and nobody was taking chances,” Cartwright says. “Our goal was to be as outrageous as possible.”

  At one point, Shrake was sharing a house with Jada, a stripper from one of Jack Ruby's Dallas nightclubs, with “hair the color of Tabasco sauce and with the temperament of Tabasco sauce.” Ruby, who always carried a gun but seemed harmless, was a frequent visitor to the apartment when late-night parties raged.

  On Nov. 22, 1963, Shrake and Cartrwright watched from an intersection as President Kennedy's motorcade traveled through downtown Dallas. Cartwright swears the president waved and looked directly at him as he passed. Moments later Kennedy was assassinated, and soon Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested as the suspected gunman. That weekend, the Dallas Cowboys inexplicably played an out-of-town game that many felt should have been canceled. Shrake ran up to Cartwright at the stadium and asked him to guess who just shot Oswald in Dallas. Cartwright flippantly replied “Jack Ruby” as Shrake stared in stunned silence.

  Sherrod, whom Cartwright had idolized since childhood as a Fort Worth Press paperboy, was a “good, smart writer in the days when sports was not good writing generally,” Cartwright says. “It had been the garbage of newspapers. He taught us to think like newspapermen.”

  Cartwright recalls in the book, “He gave us freedom to write in whatever style suited us, and we took full advantage of it. We made it fun. Any self-respecting writer knows that there is a thin line between fact and fiction and senses the duty to stay as near the edge as possible.”

  Jenkins meanwhile, was the “best pure sportswriter ever,” Cartwright says. “He loved sports. He understood sports.”

  But Shrake, who made his mark as a novelist, was the real deal as a writer and as a friend, Cartwright says. “He taught me to take it as you find it and trust in yourself. I learned I could do it. If a writer as talented as him thought I could, it must be true. I learned from Shrake to write one sentence at a time.”Cartwright cover

  That encouragement led Cartwright to pen the sports-related novels The Hundred Year War and Thin Ice, which taught him lessons that he would use while tackling later nonfiction books including Blood Will Tell, his saga of Dallas oil man T. Cullen Davis' trials for murder that grew out of two pieces Cartwright penned for Texas Monthly.

  His many years with Texas Monthly were highlighted by tales of true crime including pieces that helped get two wrongly accused men off of death row: Randall Dale Adams, whose case was also featured in Errol Morris' documentary film The Thin Blue Line, and accused cop killer Greg Ott.

  “Writing fiction taught me how to structure,” he says. “The biggest difference is you have to tell the truth or decide what the truth is.”

  The memoir's final section deals with the hard truths of Cartwright's later years—the leukemia that claimed his 40-year-old son Mark who had reconnected with father and become his best friend, and the cancer that killed Phyllis, his third wife of almost 30 years, and also his fourth wife Tam. “When you've lived life to the max, dying seems especially slow and clumsy and mean,” Cartwright writes in the memoir.

  But he didn't get to 80 without some sense of optimism.

  “You go on living,” he says. “You go on the best you can. I've always had an upbeat attitude. I don't dwell on what I can't change.”

  Joe M. O’Connell, author of Evacuation Plan: A Novel from the Hospice, is based in Austin, Texas.

• Dallas News - https://www.dallasnews.com/obituaries/obituaries/2017/02/22/one-kind-texas-writer-gary-cartwright-dies-career-spanned-dallas-cowboys-hollywood

  'One of a kind' writer Gary Cartwright, whose career spanned from the Cowboys to Hollywood, dies at 82
  Filed under Obituaries at Feb 22
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  Gary Cartwright, a colorful Texas journalist who began his career on the talent-laden sports staff of the Fort Worth Press in the 1950s, died Wednesday morning after suffering a recent fall at his Austin home. He was 82.

  Cartwright went on to become an award-winning sportswriter for the Dallas Times Herald and The Dallas Morning News. He left The News in 1967 to advance a career that included writing the 1968 novel The Hundred Yard War, inspired by his coverage of the Dallas Cowboys.

  But his most prominent years as a journalist came during his time with Texas Monthly. He worked for the Austin-based magazine from 1973, when he profiled controversial Cowboys running back Duane Thomas for its debut issue, to 2010, when he retired.

  His credentials include multiple works of nonfiction, most based on stories for the Monthly, and credits on four Hollywood screenplays.

  Katelyn Cartwright, the writer's granddaughter, and journalist Jan Reid, one of his closest friends, confirmed Cartwright's death Wednesday morning.
  Sportswriters Gary Cartwright (left) and Bud Shrake in 1961. Cartwright and Shrake covered the Cowboys for The Dallas Morning News in 1963. (DMN file)
  Sportswriters Gary Cartwright (left) and Bud Shrake in 1961. Cartwright and Shrake covered the Cowboys for The Dallas Morning News in 1963. (DMN file)

  "He was certainly one of a kind," acclaimed Texas author Dan Jenkins, 88, said of Cartwright, with whom he worked at the Press and the Times Herald. "He was a wild card, but he was awfully talented. We had a million laughs."

  Cartwright, Jenkins and mutual friend Edwin "Bud" Shrake collaborated on what may have been the most audacious, literary-minded sports staff ever assembled. All three worked at the Press and Times Herald, where their boss was an equally vivid character, the late Blackie Sherrod, who later became a columnist for The News.

  Cartwright was well-read, Jenkins said, "and he was a fan of the trade, as we all were. It just came natural to him. We were all kind of natural, for some strange reason. It was just one of those things. We all fell together. Blackie had an awful lot to do with making us work hard.

  "We laughed a lot, we joked a lot, and we kind of wrote for each other and tried to outwrite each other. It was fun, and we were all friends."

  Jenkins, who now lives in his native Fort Worth, said: "I figured it up one day. Blackie and Bud and Gary and I, the four of us, combined to have 57 books published. For a little sports staff, that may be a world record."

  Cartwright came of age as a journalist in the 1960s, which coincided with a memorable era in Dallas sports. The decade began with not one but two professional football teams playing in the Cotton Bowl.

  It was a time of raw turbulence in the country but especially in Dallas, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, when Cartwright was the Cowboys beat writer for The News and Shrake was its lead sports columnist. The two covered the Cowboys game in Cleveland two days after the assassination, a Sunday in which a man they knew — strip-club owner Jack Ruby — gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.

  In 2011, Cartwright gave an oral history of his memories of Dallas, circa 1963, to The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

  "Dallas was ... Someone called it a 'city of hate' after the assassination, and that was a good description of it," Cartwright says in the oral history. "It brimmed over with hatred and mistrust and with anti-government rhetoric. Everyone assumed that the government was Communist, and Dallas politics were far right-wing politics. There was a small group of people — I knew most of "em [chuckling] — who voted Democratic, and everybody else was Republican."

  By the time of the oral history, Cartwright was known widely as a consummate profile writer. His subjects included such Texas characters as nude dancer Candy Barr and Ruby.

  "In those days, Gary and Bud were very much a part of that more colorful side of Dallas, associating with folks like Jack Ruby and his dancers ... That all became the stuff of local legend," said Stephen Fagin, the museum's curator, who interviewed Cartwright for the oral history.

  Ruby, Cartwright told Fagin, "liked sportswriters. He liked all the newspapermen, but he particularly liked sportswriters."

  Bud Shrake (right) and Gary Cartwright, dressed as "Flying Punzars," wake Ann Richards early one Sunday morning.  (Courtesy Doatsy Shrake)

  Bud Shrake (right) and Gary Cartwright, dressed as "Flying Punzars," wake Ann Richards early one Sunday morning. (Courtesy Doatsy Shrake)

  He gave them free tickets to his club, Cartwright said, and introduced them to strippers. That led to Shrake dating Janet Conforto, better known as Jada, the star dancer in Ruby's club. Shrake died in 2009, but when former Texas Gov. Ann Richards died in 2006, she had been his companion for years.

  In the oral history, Cartwright calls Ruby "a thug. He was a gangster. He carried a gun and let everybody know he carried a gun. Kind of a little guy, stocky, always wore a dark suit and a snap-brim hat. Always was feisty."
  The Best I Recall, by Gary Cartwright
  The Best I Recall, by Gary Cartwright

  Cartwright reminisces further about 1963 Dallas in his 2015 memoir, The Best I Recall, a not entirely happy account in which he confesses, candidly, to more than one instance of domestic abuse. He was married four times but lived alone at the time of his death.

  Katelyn Cartwright, 29, says her grandfather fell in his home on Valentine's Day and remained on the floor for four days before a neighbor found him and rushed him to the hospital, where he died in the hospice unit at 6 a.m. Wednesday. Cartwright had three children, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

  "He lived alone with his little mutt dog, Zack, whom he loved," Katelyn says, adding, "From a young age, I knew he was a legend, someone important."

  He also had a nickname, a politically incorrect moniker given to him by colleagues who felt he resembled the Japanese warriors in World War II movies. His closest friends and family members called him by the nickname.

  Katelyn called him "Pappy," followed by the nickname. "At the time, I didn't know that that was derogatory," she says, "because that was just my granddaddy. But he was a legend, and I am forever learning about all his adventures. But there's not a thing that would surprise me."

  By the time he retired from the Monthly six years ago, Cartwright had carved out a pre-eminent reputation for expertly crafting long-form narratives about dozens of subjects, most dealing with grisly crimes. He covered the shocking Fort Worth case of millionaire oilman Cullen Davis, who was charged with shooting his estranged wife, Priscilla, and murdering her ex-lover, Stan Farr, and her teenage daughter, Andrea.

  That led to the book, Blood Will Tell, which became a four-part television movie.

  Reid, who began writing for Texas Monthly in May 1973, said that Cartwright, his longtime friend, always remained "the leader of the pack."

  "Even though a number of us came in with a lot of ego and ambition, you could look around the room, and we were all 26 and 27, and we didn't know what we were doing," Reid said. "He was like 10 years older, and he had already established himself. From the very first issue of the magazine, he was the leader of the pack. As the years wore on, even as others moved on — Stephen Harrigan, Al Reinart, William Broyles, the first editor who became a great screenwriter, etc., etc. — Gary remained the foundation of the magazine until he left.

  "What an incredible influence he was — and a friend. He was never distant. Egotistical and ambitious, the rest of us thought we knew what we were doing, but the guy we looked to was Cartwright, because he did know what he was doing."
  Gary Cartwright as a sophomore at Arlington High, 1948. From"The Best I Recall, 2015 by Gary Cartwright, published by the University of Texas Press
  Gary Cartwright as a sophomore at Arlington High, 1948. From"The Best I Recall, 2015 by Gary Cartwright, published by the University of Texas Press

  In his often painful-to-read memoir — which a critic for the Austin American-Statesman said "includes a sizable amount of rather frank information about his rough-and-tumble private life" — Cartwright chronicles his early life in West Texas, his teen years in Arlington and his Army years after the Korean War.

  His memoir fleshes out one of his most compelling stories, involving the murder of "flamboyant El Paso attorney Lee Chagra," which became, in his words, "the foundation of a far more complicated case that involved the murder-for-hire of federal judge John Wood."

  That story led to the book Dirty Dealing. It, too, inspired a movie.

  Cartwright recently won mention on the national radio show, Snap Judgment, which aired on many National Public Radio affiliates, including KERA-FM (90.1), for his profile on private detective Jay J. Armes that began as a story for the Monthly.

  He also covered the case of Texas death row inmate Randall Dale Adams, who was framed for a Dallas murder he didn't commit and who inspired the 1988 Errol Morris documentary, The Thin Blue Line.

  But one of the most talked-about moments in Cartwright's career came after a bitter Cowboys defeat. The lead to his game story published in The News remains a staple of sportswriting folklore.
  Don Meredith (left) and Gary Cartwright: "Though they became good friends, Gary sometimes wrote caustic reviews of his performance mostly." From The Best I Recall, 2015 by Gary Cartwright, published by the University of Texas Press.(Dallas Morning News)
  Don Meredith (left) and Gary Cartwright: "Though they became good friends, Gary sometimes wrote caustic reviews of his performance mostly." From The Best I Recall, 2015 by Gary Cartwright, published by the University of Texas Press.
  (Dallas Morning News)

  On Nov. 21, 1965, the Cowboys were playing the defending champs of the National Football League, the Cleveland Browns, led by Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown. In their sixth year of existence, the woeful Cowboys had yet to experience a winning season. But on Thanksgiving Day 1965, they teetered on the threshold of a turning point.

  Don Meredith, the team's often-embattled quarterback, had marched the Cowboys to the Browns' 1-yard-line, with 4 minutes 34 seconds remaining and the Browns ahead, 24-17. The cacophonous crowd of 76,251 was, at the time, the largest in Cotton Bowl history.

  But, sadly, the comeback unraveled.

  Rather than have the Cowboys run the ball, Meredith hurled a wobbly first-down pass, which caromed into the arms of a Cleveland defender.

  Hunched in the press box on deadline, Cartwright crafted a lead that serves as a lasting parody of turn-of-the-20th century sportswriting legend Grantland Rice:

  "Outlined against a gray November sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. You know them: Pestilence, Death, Famine and Meredith."

  That, Dan Jenkins said, "was one of the greatest leads ever."

  Sam Blair, a retired sports columnist for The News, once wrote a piece in which he quoted Cartwright, his longtime friend, expressing regret about something else he wrote of Meredith: "In a column I said Meredith was a loser. That was stupid. Meredith wasn't a loser. I was."

  Born in West Texas, Cartwright grew up in Arlington and graduated from Arlington High School and Texas Christian University. He began his career as a police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram before defecting to the rival Press, where he and Shrake began to leave a lasting impression.

  "They were the real gonzo journalists," said Austin-based musician John Inmon, who met Cartwright, Shrake and one of their high-profile running buddies, Dallas Cowboy-turned-novelist Pete Gent (North Dallas Forty), when Inmon was the lead guitarist for Jerry Jeff Walker in his backing ensemble, the Lost Gonzo Band.

  Cartwright and Shrake "lived that lifestyle," Inmon said. "They were real journalists in the old-fashioned newspaper sense of it." Some call it New Journalism, an approach they shared, Inmon said, with the king of Gonzo, the late Hunter S. Thompson, who also began as a sportswriter.

  However unconventional or circuitous the path, Cartwright landed the prestigious Dobie-Paisano fellowship, given by the University of Texas. He won the Texas Institute of Letters Stanley Walker Award for journalism and the Carr P. Collins Award for nonfiction. He won the 1989 Press Club of Dallas Katie Award for Best Magazine News Story. He won the 2005 Headliner Club of Austin award for best magazine story. In addition to Blood Will Tell, Dirty Dealing and The Hundred Yard War, Cartwright's books include Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, Heart Wiseguy: How to Live the Good Life After a Heart Attack and Galveston: A History of the Island.

  He co-wrote the movie scripts J. W. Coop (Columbia, 1972); A Pair of Aces (CBS-TV, 1990), which he also co-produced; and Pancho, Billy and Esmerelda, which he co-produced for his own production company in 1994. In addition, he co-produced Another Pair of Aces for CBS.

  Funeral arrangements are pending.

  CORRECTION, 2 p.m., Feb. 22, 2016: An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Katelyn Cartwright's name on second reference.

  CORRECTION, 4:05 p.m., Feb. 22, 2016: An earlier version of this story cited an incorrect publication date for Cartwright's novel, The Hundred Yard War. It was published in 1968.

Heart Wiseguy: How to Live the Good Life After a Heat Attack
245.17 (Apr. 27, 1998): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Gary Cartwright, foreword by Ann W Richards. St. Martin's, $22.95 (272p) ISBN 0-312-18591-X

Beginning with thc candid admission, "Considering my raucous lifestyle and unrestricted appetites, nobody deserved a heart attack more than me," Cartwright takes readers back to his days as a young newspaper reporter in Texas, where the habits that nearly killed him were formed. For decades, Cartwright worked as a journalist, screenwriter and novelist, founding with writer Bud Shrake the "Mad Dogs," which recruited the likes of actors Howard Hesseman and Dennis Hopper and the woman who would be the governor of Texas, Ann Richards (who contributes a foreword here). After two divorces, Cartwright was still not deterred from his steady diet of alcohol, tobacco, drugs or spicy, fat-laden foods, while "one by one, as he recalls, "my old pals were hitting the wall." While several of Cartwright's friends suffered and died from emphysema, throat cancer, diabetes and liver damage, Richards and Hopper went into rehab and sobered up. Finally in 1988, a heart attack and bypass surgery filled Cartwright with a genuine resolve to live and to take responsibility for his health. Cartwright brings his firsthand experiences and insights to life, but he also lends impressive journalistic skill to the issues of heart and kidney disease, hypertension, diet, exercise and aging. This is a first-rate mix of rollicking entertainment and sound health advice. Author tour. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Heart Wiseguy: How to Live the Good Life After a Heat Attack." Publishers Weekly, 27 Apr. 1998, p. 55+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20539720&it=r&asid=e4622ad620f2d31f1bbe3c7222b956f3. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A20539720

• Impressions in Ink
  https://impressionsinink.blogspot.com/2017/02/review-galveston-history-of-island-by.html
  Word count: 563

  (Review) Galveston: A History of The Island by Gary Cartwright
  February 12, 2017
  Publication Date: 1991
  Publisher: Atheneum, Macmillan Publishing Company
  Genre: Nonfiction, History of Galveston, Texas
  Edition: Hardcover
  Pages: 344
  Source: Library
  Rating: Very good

  Amazon

  I was born and raised in Houston. I've only been to Galveston Island a few times. On one of those visits I remember touring the historic Moody Mansion. My dad was not interested in any beach, worry over his freckled skin kept him away. At one time my mother loved it, and during her youth she spent many days sunbathing on the beach. However, on September 1, 1957, my mother's first husband went wade fishing at San Luis Pass early in the morning. While fishing he stepped off into a sink hole and drowned. After this horrible event, my mother was not as interested in Galveston.
  My husband's family has roots in Galveston. My father-in-law was born in Galveston. My husband's paternal grandmother grew up there. Her father was an engineer. He helped build the seawall. He also helped build the Panama Canal. My father-in-law has a large architectural drawing of the Panama Canal.
  My husband's aunt Lily, and her late husband Lloyd, have lived at West Bay, on the Island, since the late 50s or early 60s. They were Galveston Island fishing guides. She was the first woman fishing guide in the state of Texas. Lloyd Pepper built custom fishing rods. Uncle Lloyd passed away last December.
  The following links are on this well-known couple of Galveston:
  West Bay Guides Have Seen Changes
  Gulf Coast Closeup

  Gary Cartwright begins the account of the history of Galveston with a grand tour of the Island. This tour is from what the Island looked like in the early 90s. I don't know what has changed since Hurricane Ike in 2008. This chapter is interesting, he gave a personalized tour, from one side of the Island to the other.
  Further chapters are on the earliest known history of the Island, the Karankawas, Cabeza de Vaca, Spanish pirates, Jean Lafitte, African slaves, Sam Houston, the war of Texas Independence, the Civil War, the Great Hurricane of 1900, the building of the seawall, a new city government, gambling, prostitution, the revitalization of Galveston in the 1970s; and the main families who were the wealthy influencers of the Island. These families were the Moodys, Sealys, and Kempners.

  A few things I learned.

  The people who live on Galveston Island simply call the place the Island.
  Bolivar Roads is where the ships pass through. However, I wonder if the name has changed since the writing of this book.
  Galveston survived the Great Depression without problems.
  Details of the Great Hurricane of 1900 and its aftermath I'd not known. This includes a 2 story pile of debris that was as wide as 6-8 city blocks. This debris was caused by the enormous push of the water on the Island. When the water retreated, the debris was left.

  A few places in the book Cartwright shares gossipy information about the three main families, and the prostitution and gambling rackets. For me, this was interesting, because people are interesting. This information whether it is nice or not is apart of the history of the Island.

• Lone Star Literary Life
  http://www.lonestarliterary.com/cartwright%2c-the-best-i-recall%2c-062115.html
  Word count: 612

  Texas: Memoir

  Gary Cartwright

  The Best I Recall: A Memoir

  Austin: University of Texas Press

  978-0-292-74907-8, hardcover, $27.95

  272 pages; with photos

  June 1, 2015

  The Best I Recall, the latest release in the Charles N. Prothro Texana Series from the University of Texas Press, is the much-anticipated memoir by Texan, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and chameleon Gary Cartwright. During his fifty-year-career, beginning with the police beat for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1956, Cartwright has written about everything from crime and politics to sports and travel (to name a very few), for the Dallas Morning News, Sports Illustrated, Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and National Geographic Traveler, among many, many other publications. He is the winner of a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and numerous awards, including an Edgar and the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters.

  ​

  The Best I Recall is an earnest and painfully honest (“…that’s who I was – who I am – careless, self-centered, impulsive, and egotistical beyond all telling.”) but rather ordinary account of an extraordinary life. It’s the story of the evolution of an innocent. “We were a generation in which sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll had replaced sock hops, Juicy Fruit, and Patti Page.” The often sobriety-challenged Cartwright’s list of friends and acquaintances includes famous and/or infamous names every Texan recognizes: Blackie Sherrod, Dan Jenkins, Jack Ruby, Lamar and Bunker Hunt, Billy Lee Brammer, Don Meredith, Larry L. King, Warren Burnett, Ann Richards, Willie Nelson and, of course, his soul mate, Bud Shrake. Cartwright knows which closets the skeletons can be found in.

  ​

  Above: Bud Shrake and Gary Cartwright wake the future governor as the Flying Punzars.

  The book flows intuitively with each part signifying the beginning of a new era in his career. Cartwright spends adequate space on his favorite stories over the years. Two of his investigations helped free inmates from prison and he says that “…nothing in my career as a writer-journalist has given me greater satisfaction.” Cartwright glories in exposing with sardonic wit the absurdities so abundant in hoary Texas tropes. For instance, he writes of Dallas in 1963: “Right-wing nutcases had captured Dallas, which was ripe for the taking. Today, Dallas is one of my favorite cities, but back then it had the heart of a weasel.”

  Right: The original staff of Texas Monthly, 1974. Editor William Broyles is on the front row in a sweater. Cartwright is on the back row behind Gregory Curtis, who would follow Broyles as editor.

  Cartwright is most eloquent when writing about health and mortality (“When you’ve lived life to the max, dying seems especially slow and clumsy and mean”), his craft (“And yet, and yet … against all logic we go on tinkering with words, moving them about, listening to their cadence, standing them on their heads, turning them inside out, waiting, hoping, praying”) and Willie Nelson (“The rules were mapped on his face and crusted in his voice, which has always seemed less melodic by daylight”).

  Four marriages and three children later, Cartwright has mellowed some (“What seemed like a grand journey into the all-knowing was actually double time to nowhere”). The older and maybe wiser Cartwright writes of his health woes that they have “encouraged in me two virtues that had never troubled me before — patience and humility.” Others have made this comparison but it is apt — Cartwright is Texas’s answer to Hunter S. Thompson. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gary-cartwright/the-best-i-recall/
  Word count: 380

  THE BEST I RECALL
  A Memoir
  by Gary Cartwright
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  The raunchy, raucous life of a Texas journalist.

  Reporter and screenwriter Cartwright (HeartWiseGuy, 1998, etc.), winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement, displays his talents as a storyteller in this snappy memoir of his 50-year career. Praised for his writing by a high school teacher, the author gravitated to a degree in journalism; in 1958, he began a stint as sportswriter for the Fort Worth Press. There, he met two writers who became lifelong friends: Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins. “Bud, Dan, and I drank together, plotted together, and talked nonstop about the books we intended to write,” Cartwright recalls. Soon, the three moved on to the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Morning News, forming “the best staff of sportswriters anywhere, ever.” In the 1960s, life in burgeoning Dallas was good, made better by beer, Dexedrine, and “the joyous and liberating effects of pot.” Besides his career, Cartwright chronicles his four marriages and many girlfriends; children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; and his travels, houses, restaurant feasts, and birthday parties. The deaths of his eldest son from leukemia and of his third wife from cancer are quiet and moving interludes in a tale that rolls merrily along. Cartwright recalls some of his big stories: a profile of the notorious stripper Candy Barr; a piece on satanic rituals allegedly perpetrated on children in day care; a sad portrait of a family on welfare, which won the 1977 Stanley Walker Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; and an exposé of Filipino holy men who claimed they could perform medical miracles. These were contributions to Texas Monthly, where Cartwright found a welcome home and worked for 25 years. Although modesty does not seem one of the author’s attributes, gratitude is, especially for good friends, such as Willie Nelson, Ann Richards, and, of course, Bud and Dan.

  A crisp, entertaining memoir from a happy man.
  Pub Date: June 1st, 2015
  ISBN: 978-0-292-74907-8
  Page count: 278pp
  Publisher: Univ. of Texas
  Review Posted Online: May 13th, 2015