Drinking a Toast to the Real Sam Malone

Print this entry

I drank a silent toast to Sam Malone on March 2, as I do every Texas Independence Day. Not the fellow on “Cheers” but the real Sam Malone — as we called him back in the day. Sam was the archetypal country newspaper editor with a bottle of cheap whiskey (Evan Williams preferred) in his desk drawer, a loaded shotgun in the corner of his office, and a foul-smelling cigar constantly clamped between his dentures.

Sam was born on Texas Independence Day in 1920 and died in 2000 just a few weeks short of turning 80. He packed a lot of miles into those 79-plus years, all of it spent in newspapering in burgs from the high plains of the Llano Estacado to the pine dungeons of Deep East Texas. His dad, Big Sam Malone, taught him as a kid how to set type back when a newspaper page was created literally one metal letter at a time placed inside a frame.

Sam was proud of his birth date, which he also shared with Sam Houston — along with the aforementioned fondness for whiskey. That confluence of events occurring on March 2 explains Sam’s love for Texas history. He devoted untold hours to reading about it, published a couple dozen arcane titles of Texana in his print shop, and infected me with the same fascination.

I first heard of Sam in the late 1970s, when Texas Monthly writer Richard West featured him in a story about San Augustine, where Sam had founded a lively weekly called The Rambler. West recounted how Sam took on the entire school board in his paper and managed to get a reform slate of candidates elected. A losing member cold-cocked him on election night with her purse, an event that Sam duly recounted in the following issue.

A few years later I was slowly going insane working as a bureaucrat in Austin for a state agency. On a whim I called Sam and asked if he needed any help. He had sold the newspaper, but the new owners were looking for a managing editor. A few weeks later we were driving a U-Haul to San Augustine. Several months after that I ended up buying the paper and stayed five years. Sam owned the building and still ran the print shop next door. Thus began a friendship that lasted until his death, more than a decade after I had left San Augustine.

For a few years I leased the public access channel from the San Augustine cable company in vain hopes of making some extra bucks. Two weekly newspapers battled in this town of 3,000, so making a living was tough. Sam conjured up the idea of us producing a weekly 30-minute show on Texas history, since Texas in 1986 was celebrating its sesquicentennial. Every Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 we would sit behind his desk, piled high with papers and empty coffee cups — cigar ashes everywhere. Ventilator the Cat usually perched on the chairback behind Sam’s skull, licking his crewcut on camera. We each held coffee cups. I tried to keep mine from clinking since both contained ice cubes and Evan Williams whiskey cut with tap water. Sam didn’t care whether his clinked or not.

Rambler Channel 2 undoubtedly vied for imaginary honors as one of the worst-produced cable-access stations in the state’s history. A cheap video camera was propped on a tripod in the corner, and Sam’s ancient mike was held together with duct tape. (He also did a morning radio show each day for 15 minutes.) We rebroadcast the Wolves’ football games each Saturday morning, using the grainy tape shot by the coaches in the pressbox. Sam would do the play-by-play, and I was the “color” commentator. Sam actually knew what he was doing, having covered football since the Gipper suited up for Knute Rockne. On the other hand, I didn’t know a tackle from a guard, or a tight end from a wide receiver. I still don’t.

But I learned a lot of Texas history in those weekly programs, enough to actually get a modest book published a few years back on a small slice of East Texas’ past. I wish Sam had been around for that event.

Texas celebrated 175 years since independence on March 2. I toasted a glass of whiskey in Sam’s memory after work, though it wasn’t Evan Williams. I never could develop a taste for that stuff.

Print this entry