Ben K. Green

Of the many who have been called Texas writers no one was more Texan than Ben K. Green, who wrote the classic “Horse Tradin’” and several other wildly entertaining and mostly true books. That book and the bestsellers that followed were written late in his life after he had spent five decades around horses. Ben Green knew horses and he knew people and he knew how to tell a story.

How he told a story was he told it – recorded it – and gave it to his secretary to type. He’s one of the few writers who can drop every “g” in a story and make it sound natural. The late A.C. Greene, an esteemed Texas writer, historian and man of letters, turned me on to Ben Green when I interviewed him several years ago. “He writes the way Texans talk,” A.C. said. “It’s not easy to do. All of us would like to be able to do that, wouldn’t we?”

A.C. credited Angus Cameron, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf in the mid-60s, with “discovering” the cowboy writer. Cameron read a story in Southwestern Historical Quarterly by Green called “Gray Mules” and phoned A.C. to ask if he had ever heard of Ben K. Green, D.V.M. A.C. phoned Ben and as he put it “started on a literary adventure not to be repeated; there can only be one Ben Green in a lifetime.” Greene included “Horse Tradin’” in his “50 + Best Books on Texas.”

Born in 1912 in Cumby, in Hopkins County, Green moved with his family to Weatherford when he was a boy and attended school there. One of his grandfathers, David W. Cole, patented Republic of Texas land in Cumby in 1841 and 1845 and founded the town, first called Black Jack Grove. Ben apparently went from the crib to the corral and he never stopped buying, selling, trading, breeding and doctoring horses.

At various time he claimed to have attended Texas A&M University, Cornell University and the Royal College of Veterinary Medicine. At other times he denied having ever attended any of those institutions. At any rate, the “D.V.M.” was removed from his name after the first printing of “Horse Tradin’,” though he practiced as a “horse doctor” in Fort Stockton for many years and wrote a book about it.

Ben Green was in his fifties when he started writing, or at least publishing, and he was in high demand as a speaker as well as a writer. He might have been a big media star of his day, but he got off to a bad start and never recovered.

“Ben Green worked by his own rules,” Greene wrote of Green. “One night he called and asked about a contract he had with ‘KAY-nop’ (his version of the publisher’s name). ‘I’ve got a contract for 85,000 words,’ he said. ‘Does that include the Introduction?’ I said the exact figure didn’t matter. ‘Th’ hell it don’t,’ Ben said. ‘I ain’t givin’ ‘em nothing they ain’t paid for.’ He cut 640 extra words from the Introduction.”

A.C. acknowledged that Green was vain and cantankerous, making up and leaving out a whole lot from his stories when the details involved his own marriage, arrest record, or false D.V.M. credentials. A.C. recognized in Green a certain humanity that other writers missed and, as a mentor of sorts, he tried to keep Ben out of trouble. But that was a hard proposition.

An ill-fated interview with Barbara Walters is a good example. Walters interviewed Green about one of his stories, the hilarious classic “The Last Trail Drive Through Downtown Dallas.” In that interview, Green casually dropped the “n” word. Walters exploded and Ben Green was never interviewed by another national TV network again, though his books continued to sell well.

Late in his life, A.C. commented on the episode to publishers of a special printing of “The Last Trail Drive Through Downtown Dallas.” A.C. sympathized with Ben on the matter but only up to a point.

“He was cussing out Barbara Walters for being too thin-skinned (political correctness hadn’t been invented) but I told him he should have known better,” A.C. said. “He protested that he had never been a racist and had worked with Negroes all his life, etc., but I still insisted. I wasn’t defending Barbara Walters, I was simply saying Ben should have known better. I think the whole episode truly puzzled Ben.”

Ben Green died from a heart attack in Kansas in 1974 when he was 63 years old. He had given the Cumby cemetery four acres for his burial plot because, as he put it, “I don’t aim to get hemmed in when I die.” He stipulated that if anybody were buried within 50 feet of him the land would revert to his heirs.

“We sure weren’t about to arouse Ben’s ghost,” the undertaker said, “so we sent a surveyor out here to make sure of the distance.”


© Clay Coppedge November 2, 2013 Column
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