Leaving a Writing Legacy

Note: This first appeared today, Friday February 7, 2020, as a guest post on the Mysteristas blog. It is reprinted with their kind permission.

I was surprised to see Debra Winegarten’s name come up  on my phone that morning in the summer of 2018. I knew her but not well, though if you were lucky enough to be Debra’s fiend, it was a binding relationship. We knew each other online through the Story Circle Network Work-in-Progress group, a small and close-knit writing circle. We met only once.

I was drawn to Deb because she was openly and enthusiastically Texan, Jewish, and gay. She had written books about people I knew about—Oveta Culp Hobby and Katherine Stinson, “the flying schoolgirl.” She was a tireless promoter not only of her own work but that of others. She spoke to every group that invited her and invariably sold a lot of books. She taught the rest of us to make “outrageous requests” when negotiating with publishers. She was insanely happy with her partner, poet Cindy Huyser, and their two cats. And she didn’t laugh when I wrote about my fondness of Jewish food, a hangover from a marriage gone wrong. We shared that liking.

When she called, I knew the Debster, only 60 years old, had been hospitalized with what appeared to be bone cancer in both hips, and I knew that months earlier she had developed a strange hoarseness. That morning, in her whispery voice, she asked, “Will you write my book?”

She was under contract with Roman & Littlefield (a subsidiary of Globe Pequot) to write a Two Dot book about the second battle of the Alamo, when two determined women saved the mission from demolition to make way for a hotel and parking lot. I had encouraged Deb to focus on it. She was so energetic and enthusiastic that she was distracted by everything from speaking engagements and school appearances to the memoir she wanted to write about her mother, Ruthe Winegarten, activist, author, and historian.

Asking me if I would write the book was like giving me an immense gift. I had secretly envied her the project, even while applauding.  Of course I would do it. By September, when Deb died, her partner had given me two boxes of research and a carton of books on the Alamo. Her editor, Erin Turner, had issued a new contract, and we had worked out the details of the change in authors. My deadline was May 2019. I never spoke to Deb after that first phone call.      

I dug into those boxes which I’m sure made sense to Debra but were utter chaos to me. It was a giant puzzle that, once pieced together, told a fascinating story. Together, Adina De Zavala and Clara Driscoll represent two qualities that Texans prize: heritage and money. Adina, granddaughter of the first vice president of the Republic of Texas, had the passion for historical accuracy; Clara had the money. Theirs was a natural union but hard headedness—sometimes also a Texas trait—turned what was once a friendship into bitter rivalry.

I lost myself in Alamo material and produced a manuscript by March. The Second Battle of the Alamo: How Two Women Saved Texas’ Most Important Landmark shipped January 10, 2020, two months ahead of schedule. The title page reads, “By Judy Alter, based on the research of Debra Winegarten.” It’s still Deb’s book, and our writing circle was sure Deb was doing the happy dance in heaven.

I owe Debra Winegarten an enormous debt. In 2019 I signed contracts with Rowman & Littlefield for another book on Texas history and for reprints of five of my historical novels. Debra opened a whole new career door for me. In turn, I like to think her mind was at ease those last days about a project to which she had dedicated so much time and effort.

For me, this experience has reaffirmed a lesson about writing groups. I never would have written historical fiction about women of the American West if I hadn’t joined Western Writers of America; I never would have written cozy mysteries without joining Sisters in Crime and the Guppy online chapter; and I never would have had my writing take this new direction without the Story Circle Work-in-Program group. It’s what writers do—we support each other.

Two kids from Chicago

For almost ten years, I turned from writing about the American West to writing mysteries, albeit all set in contemporary Texas. But life brings you funny opportunities, and a sad death opened a door for me—it’s a long story, but when my friend Debra Winegarten knew she was dying, she asked me to write the Alamo book for which she’d done so much research. I had encouraged her work on this project, urged her to set other things aside and focus on it, because it was a book I would have loved to write and I thought it offered her a great opportunity to enlarge what was already a burgeoning career. You’d have had to know Deb to understand that, but she was the Energizer Bunny with boundless enthusiasm and incredible chutzpah (good Jewish girl that she was, she’d have loved that description). Her most outstanding trait: she made outrageous requests of publishers and others and usually got what she was after—a lesson for all of us to put timidity aside. With some sadness, I took over project. The Second Battle of the Alamo will debut next March, probably on the 7^th and probably at the annual meeting of the Alamo Society at the historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio. I hope Debra will be there in spirit and is looking down on me as I write tonight, on the first anniversary of her death.

That book led to another contract with the same publisher—Globe Pequot—and the same editor—Erin Turner, who I like a lot and feel fortunate to work with again. So now I’ve been researching the Waggoner Ranch in North Texas, still to this day the largest ranch in Texas under one fence. It’s a fascinating story that ultimately boils down to a conflict between heritage and wealth. With a history of the grit and determination that built the ranch, the last heirs sold the land in 2017. Wealth—or greed to be blunt—won out, and in a sad break with history, no Waggoner descendant lives on or owns any of the 197,000-square mile ranch. Other family-owned Texas ranches—the King, the Pitchfork, the Burnett Ranches, Lambshead—remain in the hands of descendants of the founders. But not the Waggoner. It makes me sad.

But it also brings me to what I meant to write about tonight. The listing of this massive ranch for sale in 2015 prompted several YouTube videos—I suppose as marketing tools. But they are impressive—the cinematography excellent, the landscapes sweeping and magnificent, the scope of the ranch—oil, cattle, and horses—well covered. I have watched several times, enthralled each time.

So I called my brother, who runs a few cattle down by Tolar, some forty-five miles southwest of Fort Worth. I called him because I thought he, a retired physician who has always loved the ranching life—dare I say this? since our uncle’s horse, pulling a wagon with John and Uncle Floyd in it, ran away when he was a tiny kid and all he could think was he wished he was home in his bed. Today of course, he has a more seasoned approach to ranching, but he loves the land and the cattle. I thought he would enjoy the video—and he well may when he figures out how to find it on the internet. (Clue: do a search for “YouTube sale Waggoner Ranch” and go for the six-minute video.)

But even as I called him, I had this funny thought about the strange tricks that life plays on us. Here we are, two kids from the South Side of Chicago, now in our “golden” years, and one of us raises cattle and the other revels in Texas history. I’m sure our parents would be surprised, and I am pretty surprised myself.

Maybe another day, unless you’re bored, I’ll trace the roots of my interest in Texas history. Most of my career has been spent writing about Texas and the American West, and particularly about the women. It’s where I belong, but it’s a far cry from Chicago’s South Side.

So here’s to Debra, may she rest in peace and smile upon us as we carry on her work, and here’s to John, a Chicago kid turned rancher. Pretty amazing.