Three Rights Make a Left

In late December of 1972 I was a 16-year-old high school kid growing up in Floresville, Texas 30 miles south of San Antonio. A very rare thing happened at the NorthPark Theater on Loop 410 and IH 10 in North San Antonio. There was the world premiere of a movie. Not Hollywood, not New York, but there was an actual world movie premiere in San Antonio.

The picture was “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” that was directed by the legendary John Houston and starred Paul Newman as the title character. It was too big of an event for my cousin David Taylor and me to miss. The movie was “loosely” based on the real life of Judge Roy Bean and by “loosely”, I mean mostly made up. We had seen trailers for the movie that boasted, “If this story ain’t true, it sure shoulda been.” I was already smitten by Texas history at that age, and the gala was more than I could pass up. So, I gassed up my 1966 Buick Special Convertible, and we headed attend a world movie premiere….in San Antonio.

It was a memorable movie with a rich cast of characters including Steve Kanaly who played “Lucky Jim”, who I got to meet a year and a half later on the set when I was an extra in Stephen Spielberg’s first “big screen” movie, Sugarland Express. (But that’s a story for another time.) There is one character in particular I want to mention. Stacy Keach played the evil “Bad Bob”, an albino villain with long flowing white hair and a melodramatic flair. He came to the town of Vinagaroon gunning for the Judge, and in an iconic scene he faced the Jersey Lilly Saloon and called the judge out into the street. Behind Bad Bob is a stable, and as he stands waiting to send Judge Bean to his maker, the door opens on the loft of the barn behind him and there in the loft we see the judge. Bean fires his gun, shooting the villain in the back and the last thing Bob sees is his shadow on the ground in front of him with the sun shining through a huge hole in his chest delt by Judge Roy Bean.

I told you that story to tell you another story. Only this one will be much closer to the truth than the fictionalized story of Judge Bean and “Bad Bob”. There was a real “Bad Bob” in Texas History, probably meaner than the caricature of the man played by Stacy Keach in the movie. His name was Robert P. Barnett, but people here in Lone Oak, Texas knew him as either “Bad Bob” or “Backshooter Bob”, both names well-earned but I doubt he was often or ever called them to his face.

In 1892 (or 1893) Bob Barnett built the house that my wife Lori and I now live in. We bought it from Bob and Patricia Lambert and had no idea the story and secrets this old house holds. Being a former history teacher and lover of anything historically interesting, I am indebted to Patricia for giving me a copy of an article that appeared in True West magazine over 25 years ago in August of 1996. This article was written by Sam L. Van Landingham, who grew up in Lone Oak, based on recollections of his father Grady Richard Van Landingham (also from Lone Oak) who was an eyewitness to many of the events that I will talk about.

A lot of what I will write in the next few weeks are recollections of people in and around Lone Oak from stories that have been passed down. Some of it is from newspaper articles and research done on Ancestry. com by my friend and “twin sister” Kim Kozelski (we were born on the same day in 1956).

Truth really is stranger than fiction, and this story will convince you of that.