By Charles McClure
news@ltview.com
I first met John Henry Faulk when I was a young writer covering the late, great, Highland Lakes Festival of Music and the Arts.

I digress. A history lesson is in order. The festival was the brainchild of my longtime friend Michael Amerlan, who was a musician and visionary who grew up on Lake Travis before the great migration came and ran the goat farmers out of town. His parents ran the ORIGINAL La Hacienda restaurant on the lake, a great little Mexican food eatery.
Michael was and is a genius — just don’t tell him I said so. I am long overdue to tell his story, and I will soon, but not on this occasion.
In 1982, Michael cooked up the idea that he could put on a music and arts festival in his father’s massive backyard just off Hudson Bend Road. So with all the zeal of Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams,” Michael built a beautiful amphitheatre right on the shoreline of Lake Travis. However, in Michael’s case, the proverbial “they” didn’t come, as they did in “Field of Dreams.” In those days the lake was just too far off the beaten path for mainstream Austin,.
It was the most beautiful live music venue EVER on the lake — even to this day it stands alone. It was, in essence, a combination of The Backyard and One World Theatre long before those facilities came into fruition. He was just a decade ahead of his time. True visionaries sometimes do things like that.
The first Highland Lakes Festival had some of the finest artists of the day on its bill. Wynton and Branford Marsalis made their Austin debut there. Ballet Austin and the Austin Symphony also performed. It a word, it was “magical.”
However, the idiots reviewers in the local press could not comprehend what an artistic masterpiece had been bestowed to the local residents and most pummeled the event.
I was covering the festival for the Daily Texan and writing short stories for literary magazines — back in the day when people actually use to read literary magazines.
John Henry Faulk was on the bill. For the uninformed, Faulk was one of the greatest humorists of all time. He was arguably in the same league with the immortal Will Rogers.
I was well aware, even back then, who Faulk was. That probably has something to do with my historian father and my longtime friend Cactus Prior, who was a protogé and friend of Faulk’s.
Faulk was an Austin native who grew up in the house that is now Green Pasture’s Restaurant (a legendary area dining establishment). Like my own father, he studied under the great historians J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb at UT and his thesis, “Ten Negro Sermons,” is the stuff of literary legend.
For my money, Faulk’s legacy is the most significant of all the great humorists due to a singular event that took place in his life. For years, Faulk had a radio show on CBS in New York. But in 1957 his radio career ended after he was wrongfully blacklisted as a communist by AWARE, Inc., a for-profit corporation inspired by the infamous Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Of course, he was fired. Worse still, AWARE was actively working to discourage radio stations from offering Faulk employment. The former World War II Merchant Marine was incensed, and rightfully so. So he sought to clear his name and sued AWARE.
While others had attempted to take on the evils of House of un-American Activities and its ilk like attorney Roy Cohn — most notably Edward R. Murrow — it was Faulk who truly put the nail in the coffin of that sad chapter of the story of this nation.
Cohn managed to stall Faulk’s attempts to clear his name for five full years, but in the end, he got his day in court and a jury thought he had been so badly wronged that it awarded him more compensation than he had asked for — $3.5 million — although an appeals court later sliced the settlement to $500,000.
The battle left Faulk in some big debt, However, he probably could not have been able to wage his battle at all without the help of Murrow, Parks Johnson (a Wimberley native who was known as “Pop Vox” during the 1930s-40s in his radio show out of New York. Johnson, who created the “man on the street” interview, came to be known as “the voice of the U.S. military during World War II), and one other famous friend — the late, great Walter Cronkite.
Faulk subsequently wrote “Fear on Trial” about his experiences, which was later made into a television movie staring George C. Scott. I read the book and saw the movie years later, but I got to hear the story first hand right here on the shores of Lake Travis in an all night marathon converstation that cemented our bond.
Faulk’s career recovered and he would go on to be a regular on Hee Haw, while constantly reminding the uninformed that freedom, tolerance and constant self examination are the foundations of all true patriotism.
John Henry (that’s all he ever allowed me to call him) and I hit it off from the start. We had extremely similar family backgrounds — old Southern wealth with rich heritage and families dedicated to civil rights long before it was hip to fight racism. It probably didn’t hurt that I had frequently performed on Prior’s old television show on KTBC during the late 1970s.
Oh yeah, and then there was the food! We both grew up with a love for the art of those who could do magic in the kitchen.
The only thing that seemed to separate our spirits were the 50 years of age difference.
And, much to my shock, he had read a short story I managed to get published in a literary magazine in the early 1980s, “Tales of My Grandfather Shapoe.” He constantly encouraged me to quit writing journalism and try my hand in longer formats.
It wasn’t always roses. John Henry could be caustic like a hot acid bath in the face of stupidity — and at that age — I was even more the face of stupidity than I am now. But if he took a shine to you, as he did with me, he was willing to teach. John Henry, like Cactus, was an inspiration, and an example to me.
John Henry died in 1990. I was in the midst of a battle with the Ku Klux Klan (one of two) in East Texas at the time and was unable to attend his funeral. However, that is where he would have wanted me to be — on the front lines.
But he is with me always, with every word I write, just as Cactus is. It is for them — and my father — that I trudge on with “la familia” — stories about people and the past that may just die with me when God comes calling my number.
And there are so many yet to tell — not just the stories of what has been — but of what has yet to happen.
Of course, Austin has changed over the years. The old ways — as well as the wise ones — are all but gone. Yet there is always a desperate need for folks who are willing to pick up the ethical ball and attempt to run with it. Sadder still — so few care.
Alas, I will never be as concise as my father, as funny as Cactus, or as gifted as John Henry, but in my heart I have a glimmer of each of them. I am not a rich man, but I am rich in spirit and free in America thanks to the sacrifices of folks like John Henry, and that, my friends, is true wealth.