<\/p>\n
Lonn Taylor, writer and historian died at home in Fort Davis on June 26, 2019. He was 79. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jeff Davis County Justice of the Peace Mary Ann Luedecke said, <\/span><\/span><\/span>\u201cIt is a huge, huge loss for the area. He was such an amazing historian and always had a fun story and could make us all chuckle about it.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Taylor worked as a historian and curator for the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of American History <\/span>for twenty years and authored ten books, the most recent of which is Turning the Pages of Texas <\/em>(TCU Press, 2019). He had a weekly column and podcast called \u201cThe Rambling Boy\u201d with the newspaper The Big Bend Sentinel<\/em> and Marfa Public Radio, in which he covered all manner of esoteric Texana-Americana and history. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Taylor was born in South Carolina. He came to Texas in 1962 from New York City to attend a summer class in Austin. According to an interview he gave to Texas Highways<\/em> last year, Taylor \u201chappened to move into a garage apartment next door to the legendary rock singer [Janis Joplin], whose late-night jam sessions with her \u2018seven or eight\u2019 musician roommates proved more compelling than Taylor\u2019s coursework. \u2018About the second week, I quit going to class,\u2019 he confesses. \u2018I never went back to New York. I never got a Ph.D.’\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Taylor spent the majority of his career in Washington, D.C., but retired to Fort Davis in 2002 after he came back to Texas for a visit. In the Texas Highways<\/em> interview, he says: \u201cI attended a conference at Sul Ross in Alpine. It was an absolutely beautiful spring day. I was driving back to the airport in Midland when I stopped in the Fort Davis Drugstore to have breakfast. They still had payphones then, so I called Dedie [his wife] and said, \u2018Dedie, quit your job. Sell the apartment. Get down here! This is the place.’\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n According to Marfa Public Radio, before his death, Taylor was working on an autobiography.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lone Star remembers writer and historian Lonn Taylor, who died on June 26, 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9,175,8,22,15],"class_list":["post-2041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lonestarliterarylife","tag-lonestarremembers","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-newsbrief","tag-texasauthor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}