Monday, December 2, 2013

A Manual for Neanderthals

manual for neanderthals

The Oak Forest area of Houston produced quite a few interesting folks over the years, but to me, the most interesting may have been a fellow named Hubert Mewhinney.

He was a widely-read columnist who wrote for the Houston Post. His wife was a sixth grade teacher at Oak Forest Elementary, and his daughter, Nona, was a classmate of mine, but I first met Mr. Mewhinney when I stopped to talk to him as he stood in his front yard.

His yard, at 1229 Dubarry Lane, stood out to say the least.  While every other yard on that street was carefully tailored and impeccably maintained, Mewhinney’s was a scruffy tangle of vines and weeds.  With all the tact of an eight year old, I pulled my bike to a stop and asked him why his yard looked like an abandoned homestead.

Rather than take offense, he explained that it was a sort of experiment – he was trying something called Xeroscaping. He said that it was the coming thing, especially in arid climates, and he wanted to see if the same principles would apply in an area as damp as Houston.  I told him that I thought it was a great idea since (even at my young age) I was sick of mowing the grass.

We became friends that day, and whenever I saw him on my neighborhood rambles I would always stop and talk. 

His interests were eclectic to say the least, and the subject matter of our conversations  ranged from entomology, to etymology to wolves.

As far as I know, the book pictured above is the only one he ever published, and it is still available on Amazon today.  After reading an article about flint knapping, he gathered up a bunch of stones and taught himself to make primitive tools.  That experience led to his writing the book.  The “manual” published in 1957, is described by Amazon as the first of its genre.

I would say that he was ahead of his time – he was an environmentalist well before the term was coined – but in another way, he picked the perfect time to live.  He was able to make a very good living writing intelligent, thought-provoking columns about anything that piqued his interest, something the decline of newspaper publishing would make almost impossible today.

I’m not the only one who considered Hubert Mewhinney remarkable.  Another Post columnist, who went on the write for the Houston Chronicle for years, was Leon Hale.  Two years ago, Hale mentioned Mr. Mewhinney on his blog:

Hubert Mewhinney was the most unforgettable character I met in the newspaper business.

Wonder if anybody out there remembers when he was carrying on his strange Jack Wray Wolf and Wildflower Project in Colorado County. He’d spend nights out in the pasture, sleeping on the ground with a bottle of bourbon and what he called his “trenta trenta,” meaning a 30-30 deer rifle.  The reason Mewhinney spent days and nights in those Colorado County woods, he was interested in hearing the howls of what he called wolves, which were probably coyotes, and he was also trying to get a variety of wildflowers established in the area where he camped. Far as I know,the whiskey and the rifle were not necessary to Mewhinney’s project. He was known, however, to be fond of guns, and whiskey as well.

The newspaper business at one time produced eccentric, often highly intelligent individuals, but I don’t hear about them now, if any are still around.

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