MARK OWEN
Interviewed by Cheryll Dennis
Mr. Owen has lived in Elgin for over 40 years, raising his family, practicing law, and investing in real estate. His experiences in the community range from the development of the Cedar Hills subdivision to representation of clients throughout the State of Texas. His family roots in Eastland County, Texas, and West Virginia have given him a strong foundation to appreciate rural life, the environment, and wildlife--subjects that he incorporates into his published works, "Little Bill" and "Wingman." This interview addresses these topics and offers insight into Elgin's past and future.
The interview was conducted by Cheryll Dennis, a member of the board of directors of the Elgin Oral History Project. Cheryll has a PhD in reading education and has experience as a professor at Texas State University. She is active in Elgin's community life.
INTERVIEWER: Good morning. This is Cheryll Dennis, and today is September 5th, 2023. I'm a member of the Elgin Oral Historical Project Oral History Project, and I am interviewing Mark Owen, a long-time attorney here in Elgin. So, thank you for allowing me to come and listen to your stories because you are quite a storyteller.
OWEN: Well, it might depend on your questions, so let's get going.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. How long have you practiced law in Elgin? Let's first do practice law all together.
OWEN: Well, I graduated in December of ‘71. I started law school in September of ‘67, was drafted out of law school, and spent two years in the Army. My wife and I got married between basic training and A.I.T. When I came back from the Army, I finished law school, and then I worked for the Supreme Court of Texas as a briefing attorney, which was a one-year job. It’s a really wonderful opportunity for a young lawyer. I clerked for Zollie Steakley.
INTERVIEWER: Who is that again?
OWEN: Zollie Z-O-L-L-I-E Steakley, who was famous for a Sunday religious program. In any case, after I got out of the Supreme Court job, I went to Corpus Christi and worked for a couple of years. It was after that that I moved to Elgin.
INTERVIEWER: So you've been here a while then?
OWEN: I have. Even though Miss Carter considered me a newcomer . . . she worked at the bank and talked about "new people." I got to be an old person, but I don't think I ever qualified as an Elginite In her mind. You had to be born here.
INTERVIEWER: Yes. Some people here think that for sure.
OWEN: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: So you were practicing law and then you started developing the housing development, which is called Cedar Hills. Can you tell me about how you got engaged in that?
OWEN: Yes! That occurred before I came here to practice law. My father-in-law was a developer named Lee Blocker, and Lee started, for example, Lakeway that everybody knows about. While I was in the Army, he and I talked back and forth about doing something entrepreneurial. Being in the Army could be a little frustrating at my age at that time. He owned some land out there that became Cedar Hills that I think he had purchased for like 60 bucks an acre.
INTERVIEWER: Wow!
OWEN: He and I thought that we would develop that. I really didn't know anything about it, and it wasn't a real intelligent research project--thinking Elgin would be a good place for a subdivision! But we started that while I was still in law school. I formed Mina Land Company and included my wife and her two sisters and their significant others. One of them was still a teenager so hers was a trust, and it was Mina Land Company that developed Cedar Hills.
INTERVIEWER: Is that M-E-N-A?
OWEN: M-I-N-A, which has some historical connection with the county actually. We brought Bill Webster in, and I think he was from Mississippi, to be the front man. I drifted in and out while I was working for the Supreme Court and drifted in and out when I was a lawyer in Corpus Christi.
Bill was our front man, and we were selling lots for like 2300 bucks apiece in 1970 - 71. I have to say that we stuck with it, but from a developer standpoint, Cedar Hills was not a triumph. No big problems; it just wasn’t fast. I think that's what made it such a delightful community.
It's got . . . we put in a pool. I mean, we put the pond in, first thing. I got to know O. L. Flowers and Shirley Flowers, working with them. I really didn't have any connection with the town of Elgin during those days. I would just drive past and go to the Hicks’s filling station. Do you remember when they were out on the highway?
INTERVIEWER: I don’t.
OWEN: Well, I didn't drive through town. I didn't know anybody. We were just doing a little development, but I'm really grateful for the way it worked out. You can drive through there, and the houses look different--the lots are big, and people walk around. It's really nice, but I certainly can't say that I became wealthy during that time.
INTERVIEWER: I would say it is a success still today. It's a lovely place.
OWEN: Mina Land Company does not own any property out there anymore. We’ve sold everything and Mina Land Company--just its existence--is probably based on the place of Dead Man's Grotto, where we still own five acres out there on that wonderful Grotto. And then just to tie up the law practice with the Cedar Hills , , , We developed everything on Highway 95 side of the railroad tracks, and we had like 140 acres on the other side of the railroad tracks that was not in the subdivision. After two years of law practice and Corpus, my wife and I felt the need to move. We were in the city, and I'm a country boy, and I think that, as I said in my book, I think that might have been the reason she originally liked me. She was maybe fascinated with a country bumpkin having grown up in Houston.
INTERVIEWER: And so where did you grow up?
OWEN: I grew up . . . I was born in Austin and moved to West Virginia in 1950. And there's an interesting picture of the old family place in West Virginia.
INTERVIEWER: This one right here?
OWEN: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Uh huh.
OWEN: I was in West Virginia from second grade, and I . . . One interesting thing about my growing up is that I was always the new kid. For example, I went to five different institutions--different schools, public and private, between first grade and graduating from high school.
INTERVIEWER: Wow, wow!
OWEN: So being the new kid was nothing for me--the new kid at the Supreme Court; my law school experience was bifurcated such that I got to be a new kid as a freshman and kind of a new kid again when I came back two years later. So being a new kid in Elgin was nothing really new to me in terms of being a new guy. So we got to thinking, "Well, where are we going to move?" And I said, “Well, let's move behind the tracks in Cedar Hills.” And we did. We built a house out of one of the old torn down Elgin schools.
INTERVIEWER: Oh my!
OWEN: Every piece of wood you can see in that place is from that school.
INTERVIEWER: How interesting! Do you know what the name of that school was?
OWEN: I don't know, but others do. I know Carl Hebb was the guy that was storing all the materials. Another guy I met early on . . . I rented from Vernon Smith. He had the pharmacy on Main Street.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
OWEN: And the pharmacy used to . . . well, that building went through a lot. It burned years ago, and it became a one-story building. But I have told this story before . . . I rented from Vernon for $100 a month.
INTERVIEWER: Wow.
OWEN: And I had an IBM Selectric Typewriter, rented for $50 a month. Rosemary Vickers came to work for us half time. I had an old law school friend named Jerry Jones who joined up with me. And we opened that office and started practicing. I think my first case in Elgin involved a lady who was a foster mother and was unhappy with her grocery bill, and I think she got overcharged maybe $60.
INTERVIEWER: Which was probably a lot in that time.
OWEN: But there wasn’t much room for attorney’s fees in that case.
INTERVIEWER: Right. [Chuckles]
OWEN: But it was, it was, it was a tough go. Elgin really wasn't ready for a very dynamic law practice, as you can imagine. I got called back to Corpus for a medical malpractice case, which was pretty notorious. It gave us a leg up. I probably should have stayed in Corpus after that. But I want you to see something on the wall about the guys that I was up against. There was a pretty notorious local usury case that helped get us off to a good start. I was literally sitting on my front porch with my head in my hands when Harvey Condron called me. Do you know Harvey?
INTERVIEWER: Harvey, what's his last name?
OWEN: Condron. C-O-N-D-R-O-N. Harvey was a retired Exxon executive who had retired on the family home off 95 North of here. I'd gotten to know Harvey because he was on the board of the hospital and I was working pro-bono as sort of their lawyer, and this was the time when the hospital sold itself.
INTERVIEWER: You're talking about the Fleming Hospital?
OWEN: Yes, I am. But anyway, I was sitting there with my head in my hands, and Harvey called me and said, “Mark, can you get an airplane?”
OWEN: And I said, “Of course, but where are we going?” He said, “Anahuac.” And I said, “Where in the world is that?” He said, “It’s down where the Trinity River passes through it. It's in East Texas.” So we flew down there, and he introduced me to these longtime friends of his, named the Ezers, E-Z-E-R, who were named in a will for about 6000 acres, a bunch of cattle, and a couple of oil wells. Everybody in Chambers County, aided by lawyers from Houston, was trying to take it away from them. That was one bizarre case. By that time, Ernie Bogart had joined the firm, and he opened an Austin office for us, but I eventually got him to Elgin. He and I tried that case; it was like a two week-long case, and we won it. The Ezers are still my clients. And that was like 1978 – ‘79.
INTERVIEWER: Wow.
OWEN: Of course, that really helped get us off square one. Then in adjoining counties, there was a big oil play. All of us were doing oil and gas, what they called drilling opinions and division order opinions. You'd go to the post office and pick up a run sheet prepared by a land man and then write an opinion and then go check it at the courthouse, put it back in the mail, and then you'd get a check. It was wonderful!
INTERVIEWER: So, you said there were they were drilling opinions. And what else?
OWEN: Division opinions. They were title opinions.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
OWEN: I met Ray Arbuckle, and I started doing all the real estate documents for Remington Savings--very grateful to him. Dr. Cardwell became a client and he and Ernie worked together until recent years.And so, we've made some lovely friendships here, and the town has really changed a lot.
INTERVIEWER: I would imagine it has.
OWEN: You had the Simons, you had the Mikulencaks at the five and dime, the Wortheys at Western Auto, all of them on Main Street. Of course those, those things all changed, and in 1984 we bought this place and there was another move.
OWEN: Who's our friend?
INTERVIEWER: Gus Mecey?
OWEN: No, Gus and I were never on the same side of anything.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
OWEN: Bob Barker!
INTERVIEWER: Oh, Bob Barker, my neighbor!
OWEN: Yeah, Bob. Bob was typical of other Elginites and was moving his business out on 95 north of here. And so, he made me a good deal, and I bought this from him--my partners and I did. We got the Sharp brothers who fixed it up for us. As you may know, this third floor had old coffins in it, and bodies were displayed next door in what is now the bar--Liberty Tree.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
OWEN: And I figured, fellows, let's fix up the upstairs, because if we don't put our law office up there, it will never be fixed up. And we did. Ernie was married to Barbara Bogart--Barbara Bailey-- downstairs in this building and little things like that. Uh, Ernie and I are both retired. Jerry Jones, who started out with us, moved on to Austin years ago, and we had a couple of other people working for us, but that was the main team. And then my daughter Elizabeth joined up with us, and she's really holding down the fort now in terms of the practicing law. Now where are we?
INTERVIEWER: We've talked about your original office, and could you tell me where it was?
OWEN: Yes, it was on Main Street where the, next door to Harold Dildy’s Western Store--right there at the corner across from the bank was where our original building, our original practice was. And my office was in a little space with flickering fluorescent lights where the kitchen was. I think Mr. Smith separated his pharmacy into two spaces because he didn't need the other space anymore. I think they had a little restaurant in there, but it didn't last very long. And then he got the big bucks from me at 100 bucks a month!
INTERVIEWER: Yes. Okay. Um, so you've told me how you acquired this place and the renovation. About how long did it take to renovate?
OWEN: We put it on a pretty amazing fast track. Let’s see. We started in, I would say, ‘83, ‘84, and it was done.
INTERVIEWER: Wow. Okay.
OWEN: And they did a beautiful job. I’m really grateful. I really think about the Sharp boys every time I walk in here.
INTERVIEWER: Are they still around?
OWEN: They're still around, but they're not building anymore.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. And did they also renovate the downstairs as well?
OWEN: Yeah, we did a lot of . . .
INTERVIEWER: Okay, so then tell me how Gus Mecey, because Debbie mentioned him and how he came into your life. What was that suit about?
OWEN: Well, I don't want to pick on anybody. Mr. Mecey is gone. He ran the Paradise Bar, and he loaned money out of there. One of his borrowers came to me, and it was clear that he was charging usurious interest. We had a lawsuit, and it's interesting. I've heard nothing but nice things about him, in subsequent years, and about his daughter and his family and stuff. And so consequently, I don't want to delve into it too much, but I think that was the largest civil judgment that this county had ever seen at the time. It was appealed to the Supreme Court of Texas, and that was resolved in the farmer’s favor.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. And so, were you practicing here at that time in this building?
OWEN: Not in this building.
INTERVIEWER: Not in this building. Over on the other side. Down the street?
OWEN: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. All right.
OWEN: But it was those early cases I told you about. I was picking up the Chambers County case, the Nueces County medical malpractice case, this usury case, and then the oil and gas practice. All of those commenced when we were in the little Smith building. Because of the success of those cases, buying this building and spending a bunch of money fixing it up was possible. That would have been impossible back when I moved here in ‘74 – ’75.
INTERVIEWER: You'd still be in that little office with the flickering light.
OWEN: Actually, I might have started doing something else for a living.
INTERVIEWER: Well, that is good that you had those cases,
OWEN: We've had a pretty dynamic practice over all the years. I've negotiated with British lawyers over a case where they were pursuing American investors for Loyd's of London, and at one point we were thinking about creating a map, showing all the places, where we had tried lawsuits because we'd been all over the place. But at this point, I would say that Bastrop County has grown to the extent that my daughter, for example, has specialized in probate and estate law, and there wouldn't been any way in the world she could have made a living doing that in 1975 – ‘76 when we started.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
OWEN: But she had a good background. She worked for the IRS trying tax cases. And when her second maternity leave was wearing out, she came to work with us.I hadn't tried a case in Bastrop County for years. I would like to think that was because other lawyers knew who I was, and we were smart enough to settle most cases without having to go to court. But interestingly enough, we got two or three cases where Elizabeth came in and was able to try the cases, second chairs to me. They were in the probate area and estate contests--things like that. We won those. She just grabbed the Probate Code, read it through and studied it, and took the exam and was certified as a probate and estate planning specialist. Me, I never specialized.
INTERVIEWER: But you didn't really need to, it sounds like.
OWEN: Well, I’ve got to say that in the experience working for the Supreme Court, I got to see almost every kind of civil case you could imagine in the one year that I worked there. It made me pretty confident talking to judges and real comfortable and confident about legal research.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
OWEN: It was real leg up for me, uh, just in terms of being, feeling confident to do those things. I'm going to an oil and gas conference Wednesday in Houston just to stay on top of that. I was sued by a big oil company in West Virginia, just a couple of years ago.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, really?
OWEN: And that was . . . They would say to me, “Well, you're coming up here and telling us what oil and gas law is?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” And then when we got closer to trial, they had an expert, and guess where he was from?
INTERVIEWER: Texas?
OWEN: Yeah. And anyway, we settled out by mediation. Mediation is a great part of the practice of law where both sides agree to talk and see if they can avoid the costs of trial. I got into that early on, encouraging mediation, and that's why I didn’t even try a bunch of cases in Bastrop County for a number of years because we mediated them.Then unfortunately the courts got involved in that and would require people to mediate. That takes the substance out of mediation. What you want is two parties smart enough to realize that their best interests reside in finding out the middle. Once court started requiring mediation, it just became one more way for one side to beat up on the other one by putting them through the expense of mediation as well as all the other pretrial expenses. But it's still, it's still a good thing, you know.
INTERVIEWER: Good. Why don't we shift gears here and talk about you as a published writer. So how did that begin?
OWEN: There's a derogatory term for people who write a book and then make sure it gets published. And so, it wasn’t as if I wrote something and was prompted by the public to publish it.
But as you might guess, being a lawyer, I wrote a lot of stuff. I wrote trial briefs and things like that, and I always enjoyed doing it. And one early little anecdote I'll tell you about is, when I was dealing with those British lawyers. I was real proud of this letter that I wrote, which was sort of like Churchillian pre-World War Two stuff--"we will fight you on the beaches; we'll fight you in the countryside; we'll never give up!"
INTERVIEWER: Yes. (chuckles)
OWEN: That's what I said to this British lawyer about trying to come after my client. We'll fight you on the beaches; we'll fight you here; we'll fight you there; we'll never give up. And the lawyer responded--and a lady lawyer, by the way. I was real proud of how she talked about the "sheer parade" of my letter! I read that to my son, who's no dummy. And he said, “Dad, I think you need to look up parade, because I think she was being a little facetious when she said the sheer parade of your letter.” And he was right. A parade can be a wonderful Western Day's celebration or 4th of July celebration. And it can also be kind of an ostentatious show without a lot of substance or anything else. But anyway, I always enjoyed writing and so I just started writing my little book, Little Bill, and it's sort of a chapter book. I’d write a chapter, and then my sweet wife Miriam would look at it, and we’d chortle over it--critique it a little bit. Then I just had a book written on legal pads. I have to credit Miriam. Here's what the first edition of it looked like. She got a hold of an artist, and she got a hold of a bookbinder and made a really nice little book.
INTERVIEWER: Very much so.
OWEN: We bought . . . we had a number of hardback copies made, and they sat pretty much in boxes in my attic for a long time.
OWEN: But then after Mimi passed away, I got to thinking about the sequel, and I wrote the sequel to Little Bill. My son Will and I had fun with it in sort of the same way that Miriam and I had had fun with the original. Then my son-in-law Bob published paperbacks of both the original, Little Bill and the sequel, Wingman. My theory about writing those kinds of books was, “Well, I don't want to try and be too serious. I don't want to be subject to the same kind of criticism I got from my son on the word parade. So, what I think I'll do is just write a little book for kids.” So, the star of the show was a magical goat named Little Bill and the characters, for the most part, were crows, parrots, and creatures of that sort. But it ended up carrying out a little bit of my personal philosophy and stuff. I would like to think that grownups would like it, and it might be over the head of little kids, but thanks to John Wilson, the guy that did the artwork, you can at least look through at the pictures, which are pretty nice.
INTERVIEWER: They are.
OWEN: It's on Amazon. I think I might be in addition to myself, there's only one other person that ordered a copy, but I've ordered a bunch of them and given them away, but it's fun. I would like to keep doing it, but I notice that most authors, famous authors, are a hell of a lot younger than I am. I did what they did, but that that should be paramount because it's fine. You need to have something fun to do.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, absolutely, and you were quite busy with your paying job. So, you said your son found the illustrator, no, your wife found the illustrator?
OWEN: Oh, yeah. Miriam found the illustrator, John Wilson, who lives in Austin, and he's done some really fun pictures. And so, Wingman was, I mean, Little Bill was written back in 2005, I guess, and Wingman was just recently done.
INTERVIEWER: Well, I look forward to reading Wingman, for sure, because I enjoyed Little Bill and perhaps that could even be good for high schoolers because there's so many different levels of comprehension in it.
OWEN: Oh, I think high schoolers would benefit from reading it. There's a lot of little philosophy, doing the best you can, not just for yourself but for other people as well, that kind of stuff runs through it, and I feel like a lot of it was inspired by my love for my wife.
INTERVIEWER: Well, I think a rich discussion could come out of these books for sure, especially I know Little Bill. I'm sure Wingman could, too. Let's move to your, this house on Main Street 1004 [1010] North Main Street. You purchased that from . . .
OWEN: The Moore family.
INTERVIEWER: From the Moore family. All right. And tell, talk about the renovation.
OWEN:: Okay, my daughter's house is right across the road. We were sitting on the porch of her house and seeing that the old Moore house was in pretty bad repair. I think that planted the seed of doing something. I think the Moores were pretty sophisticated in the sense that one son was a lawyer, one's an electrician, insurance man and so on. And I think they recognized it as a big problem and they sold it to me under pretty favorable circumstances. Cleaning it out was a big job to begin with. And there were a lot of structural problems with it. I had to augment the piers underneath the house dramatically. I had to do an awful lot of stuff to the roof from the underside and had to stabilize the second floor walls by supporting them from the ground up, as opposed to just by the second floor. We've got it in a way that we're really ready to move on. But we've been static for a long time. We decided to turn loose . . . we had 11 guys, as many as 11 guys, working on an hourly basis on that house under my son Will's supervision. And they got all this done. I mean, guys spending a day underneath the house, if you can imagine. And so those guys--I give them a lot of credit for doing a lot of good work. The house is fundamentally and substantially strong now. When we turned loose the guys, the city also came along and red flagged us for not having permits for additional parts of the work. My son had the materials for that, but we had changed the house so much that he had to redo them. And so, we've gone through that. And I think this big heat spell has slowed us down a little bit, not really wanting to think that a poor guy has to be on the roof.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
OWEN: But we're ready to roll. And rolling will mean getting the electrical contractor, the air conditioning contractor, and the plumbing contractor in there. They'll be working on bids and they'll be in and out of there fast, just like new construction.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
OWEN: But old construction, old reconstruction, is not fast. We've done some finish work. For example, all exposed brick in the house has been smoothed and finished. You see how this is in this office?
INTERVIEWER: Yes. Uh huh.
OWEN: It isn't finished. I mean, it's just the old brick. But in the house, you can run your hand down; it just feels like a baby's bottom, and that, there's a lot of that. And so, we've made some good progress. We've [unknown] finished [unknown] we changed it so a lot of the reconstruction in Elgin has enjoyed the benefit of not having to change things to meet code because it's grandfathered.
INTERVIEWER: Mm hmm. Mm hmm..
OWEN: But then one of my Cartwright neighbors walked up there. These guys are all huge. Six-seven, something like that. We changed the main staircase so that a large person could walk up there safely. Then we built a stairway in the rear where there always was a little stairway to reach the third floor. The third floor has been opened such that it gets natural light and everything, and it'll be a part of the house as opposed to just an attic.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
OWEN: We put big new bathrooms in there. But of course, we don't have them plumbed yet but it's ready today. But I look for it to be--I've gotten teased a lot because we've run right past my finish date. But we'll get it done this, this coming fall and year.
INTERVIEWER: Well, it's a beautiful house. We moved here 2006 and so it's exciting to see it being redone in a very safe way and all.
OWEN: I'm grateful for . . . we've had fun. My son and I have enjoyed working on it together, and at this stage in my life, I found that if it ain’t fun, I ain’t interested.
INTERVIEWER: There you go. That's a good attitude for sure. Does your son Will live here in Elgin?
OWEN: My son lives in Austin.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
OWEN: My daughter Elizabeth lives across the street, and my other daughter lives in Cedar Hills, in a house that my son Will built, that's right across the railroad tracks from my house.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, that's neat. So, she's close by, then?
OWEN:: You must take a ride out there. I call my place The Shack Behind the Tracks. And this is the fair picture of it in Little Bill.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. That's neat that the illustrator just portrayed your house. Very cool. I'll have to drive out there some time, for sure.
OWEN: You're welcome, for sure.
INTERVIEWER: I think that is the end of my questions. So, was there any other story you wanted to tell me before we turn the recorder off? Now's your chance.
OWEN: It's a kind of a dangerous request. I'm full of stories, but I think I might be . . . my daughter Molly gets a little irritated with me when I brag about myself. And so I think we managed to avoid that. Here's a wonderful picture of me and Molly. It's a double exposure.
INTERVIEWER: Uh huh.
OWEN:: I just love it.
INTERVIEWER: I love that. Yes.
OWEN: But anyway, uh.
INTERVIEWER: So who is the oldest?
OWEN: Elizabeth is the oldest, the lawyer. And then Will and then Molly.
INTERVIEWER: Okay,
OWEN: Uh, well, I wouldn't want to end, without, if I’m invited to say something. I would want to brag on my partnership with Ernie Bogart over all these years. He and I have worked real closely together on those first cases. And then in the interest of the law firm, we both worked separately, but we came together any time it was important. And I just love the guy and am grateful to him for the long, congenial time we've enjoyed together. And I must say the same for my long-time secretary, Rosemary Vickers. I've really been fortunate over my life. Women have always taken care of me. I've always been able to work and live in a neat environment, whether it was when I was growing up or when I was married to Miriam and here at the office. Rosemary always kept things looking bright. And Shirley Markel, who worked for us for years . . . we had a real nice little team of folks. Ernie and I are both retired. I come into the office because I'm dealing with real estate stuff. At one point, we bought the title company, Bastrop Abstract Title Company.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, okay.
OWEN: During the course of that ownership, we got my pal Ed Rivers involved. One story about Ed is that he was in the air conditioning, plumbing business with his friends, the Carters.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
OWEN: He came when I was fixing this building up to talk to me about the air conditioning and plumbing.
OWEN: And we were we were talking about how much they were going to charge me. I said to him, “Well, how much do you want to make?” And so that was kind of a cost-plus question. But anyway, I was impressed with young Ed's understanding of this, that, and the other thing and his intelligence and so forth. Bobby Jenkins and I, who were on opposite sides in that usury case, became friends. And he and my eventual partners, Kay Rogers, Ernie, and I bought the title company. Bobby Jenkins' family owned it, but he came in with us. Then I said, “Let's hire Ed Rivers.” They said, “Well, he doesn't know anything about the title business.” I said, “He's smart enough to learn about it.” He's been at the cutting edge for years, and what we did was we decided to buy some property because, I mean, the title company was doing fine, but it wasn't particularly remunerative to the owners. I thought maybe it'd be a smart thing to do to buy some property. So, we bought the buildings that the title company operated in, and we fixed them up and we owned four buildings on Chestnut Street in Bastrop. That’s the street you drive into town on, and we bought a string of buildings on Main Street in Elgin next to the Independence Title Company building, which we also bought. We sold the ones where we did a little fix-up work and then the other people finished it up--where the yoga center is.
INTERVIEWER: Right
OWEN: We owned a bunch of buildings, and now everybody's old and we're trying to get rid of them. We did sell two of them for a real nice bonus, considering what we paid for them. But that's been another dynamic of our little experience here in Elgin and in Bastrop. I loved the friends that I met here. Harold Dildy, next door to me, and I’d go in and talk with Vernon Smith, the older guys, and Dr. Cardwell, Ray Arbuckle--wonderful fellas. I had fun with them, going hunting and stuff. My partners, Jerry and Ernie, did things like joining Kiwanis and doing this and that and the other. I was never much of a joiner, so that wasn’t my jive.
OWEN: And so, I when I started building this house and I had the pleasure of getting to know Dorothy Cartwright, sitting on the porch with her while assessing the progress of the work, I met Debbie.
INTERVIEWER: Oh!
OWEN: And she made me feel like the new kid in town again.
INTERVIEWER: And you've had experience at being the new kid!
OWEN: I have. It's kind of fun, too.
INTERVIEWER: Uh huh, Uh huh. That's neat. Such a neat story. Well, I think we'll stop. I'm going to stop the recorder here shortly, and I'm going to ask you some spellings of some of the names.
OWEN: Okay.
INTERVIEWER: You'll do your best, but I don't know, for sure. So, thank you so much, Mark, for sharing your stories with me. It's been a pleasure listening to you.
OWEN: Oh, bless your heart, and I'm glad we stopped. But that doesn't mean we can't talk about a bunch of stuff in the future that doesn’t get recorded.
INTERVIEWER: That's true. Yes. I love your stories.