Glen Castlebury has clear-blue eyes, a meticulously tended garden, and, usually, a cigarette in his hand.
He wakes up in the dark at 4:30 each morning and gets coffee at 7-Eleven because it’s the only place awake with him. A few hours later, he brews some of the strongest coffee known to man. That pot’s for his wife, Carol Castlebury.
His shirt is speckled with paint from one of his recent projects. His breakfast table is covered in yellowed newspapers with his byline all over them, pulled out especially for the occasion of this Chronicle interview about his life. There’s the front-page story that ran right after the Charles Whitman shooting at UT-Austin. There’s a black-and-white photo of Glen, then Capitol bureau chief at the Austin American-Statesman, shaking hands with President Lyndon B. Johnson. There’s also a new issue of the newspaper from his small panhandle hometown, though he hasn’t lived there in more than 60 years.
Glen doesn’t tell stories chronologically. He waves a hand in the morning light and the hanging smoke. “Here’s another vignette for you,” he says and acts out voices like a radio play.
“When I was just a little fart,” he says, “my daddy would get up at pre-dawn just like I do now and go to the kitchen and my daddy would set me on his lap and spoon-feed me coffee with sugar.” And then they’d turn on the radio. That’s how Glen learned “every goddamn word of every goddamn country music song.”
His mother boiled everything they ate – turkey, beans, pigs’ feet – and put up with Glen’s father’s antics. “In my growing-up years,” Glen says, adopting a stiff posture and an old-timey Southern lilt dripping with sarcasm, “Women didn’t have opinions. Women cooked.”
Glen knows about his father’s antics because he was there with him at beer joints. He says women liked him because he was a kid and he liked them because they smelled good and they looked nice and they’d buy him a coke with peanuts and give him a nickel for the jukebox. Little Glen would pick Hank Thompson or Jimmy Wakely.
“I was smoking and drinking coffee. With Miss [Lady Bird] Johnson’s permission, with Miss Johnson’s ashtray. Why not?” – Glen Castlebury
Glen moved to Austin in June 1958 to attend UT-Austin and started at the Statesman that year. Though he took a break from Austin for a beatnik-inspired roadtrip to California with a close friend, most of his life since 1958 played out in Austin.
When Glen met his wife Carol, then a typist for the Statesman, there was an Associated Press photographer at the Capitol named Ted who would administer what he called “Ted’s test.” (Glen points out Ted was bored from being lazy and not having enough to photograph.) Each day, Ted had Carol stand right up against his desk to check if her skirt was too long. The hem had to fall above the edge of Ted’s desk. “Dirty old man,” Glen says. “She had to put up with it. What was the alternative? Slap him upside the head and say, ‘Screw you, dirty old man.’ That would have marked her.” He says he can’t imagine how frustrating it was for his future wife and other women at the paper.
As he remembers it, there were a handful of women in the newsroom who seemed to get some respect. Carol McMurtry Fowler comes to mind (not his wife, another Carol). “Carol was stronger than onions,” Castlebury says. She was covering the courthouse and uncovering scandals. “I mean, she could walk in that courthouse, and people started shaking in their boots.”
Glen can tell you the full history of the construction of I-35 in Austin. He can tell you about the Texas Legislature when it was racially segregated and the theatre at UT that he and other students protested to integrate. He can tell you about the local brothel that kept moving south and was once burned down for insurance money. He can tell you dozens of stories about his wife, about his work, about playing soldier as a child during World War II, and about the drunken conversations he had with actual veterans in beer joints after work in the Fifties. I could tell these stories to you here, too. But there isn’t enough room on the page, and some of his most vivid memories, at least the ones I like most, have “nothing to do with nothing.”
One day during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, Glen found himself in Washington, D.C., to speak with U.S. Rep. J.J. Pickle. “My editor Dave Shanks was looking for every excuse in the world to send me places. I was his pet, let’s face it.” In Pickle’s office, Glen was sitting at the desk of a woman named Molly, who Glen was fascinated by.
So when Molly invited Glen to join her at the White House to meet with Lady Bird Johnson’s social secretary, he enthusiastically agreed. There, Lady Bird herself approached the pair. The first lady apologized to Glen and said she needed to speak with Molly for a few minutes. Could he join them for coffee?
They moved into a mess hall with white linens “and all that shit,” Glen says. A server brought coffee and key lime pie, and Glen ate pie and listened to Molly and Lady Bird plan a party – how to format the invitations, all the details – wondering all the while how he got from small-town Texas to this table. In the middle of his wonderment, Lady Bird interrupted her conversation with Molly to ask Glen if he smoked. He said yes, and a server brought a crystal ashtray in the time it took Lady Bird to briefly discuss Lyndon’s smoking habit.
Glen’s memory of the cigarette that followed is hyper-detailed. The linen, the crystal, the pleasant conversation about party planning that he had no part in. “I was smoking and drinking coffee. With Miss Johnson’s permission, with Miss Johnson’s ashtray. Why not?
“That story didn’t have anything to do with international disarmament, did it? It didn’t have anything to do with race relations. It didn’t have anything to do with the Vietnam War. Didn’t have nothing to do with nothing.”
This article appears in The 34th Annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival.