Robert "Hoot" Gibson

So as a good, liberal Texan who wants to keep abreast of her state’s shenanigans, I subscribe to Texas Monthly. The last page of every issue is the Texanist, “offering fine advice and keep obesrvations since 2007” by David Courtney.

This month’s quandary goes like this:

When I was growing up in a Humble Oil and Refining Company employee camp in Andrews County, I knew a man named Hoot Gibson. After seeing that name in an obituary, I did some research and found a movie star, an astronaut, an MLB pitcher, and others named Hoot Gibson. I’m wondering about the origin of Hoot, especially if it has any Texas ties.

I got chills down my spine. My dad was what they called a roughneck in the Texas oil fields in the 80s, and his nickname, the name I heard everyone call him, was Hoot Gibson.

It was a strange job for my father, who studied theater in college and once bragged to me that he brought the Moorehead janitor to tears for his portrayl of Walter Mitty in James Turber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” (A fact he shared with me when I told him I was nominated for a Thurber Award. I would have been upset but I knew my dad had the unfortunate combo of being both a Boomer and a Drama Queen).

After Vietnam and accidentally starting a family, he moved my mother and me from Echo Park, LA, to his grandmother’s house in McLean, Texas, population 500, where the jobs were, as we say in Texas, slim pickin’s.

My dad got a job in the oilfield, and I remember him coming home absolutely filthy from a job of very demanding work that he somehow kept up despite his smoking habit. He would rinse the grime off of him and come out a new man, but refusing to wear anything but Fruit of the Loom threadbare briefs.

We then moved to Ohio, then to Kentucky, and finally to Texas again, where he took an office job at Raytheon, managing materials for refinery construction from the comfort of a desk. When I was in college, he was sent to Venezuela, where he worked on the ground there for a year. It was dangerous work, and somehow he came back thinking he could kiss everyone on the mouth. That was the last job he had in the oil industry. For 20 years, he was retired, planting watermelons, putting his hair scraps in a weird wire basket so the birds could use it to build nests, and of course, being the funniest person I ever knew. That’s why he was called Hoot, cause he was one.

My dad was a strange man, but this article got me wonderin’ if this man knew the young, dirty guy my dad was in the Panhandle. My dad kept a lot of things secret. His childhood, which was mostly spent in a military school, and his first marriage, which I only found out about when I was organizing his pictures (apparently she left him for his best friend, I found out when I asked him after coming out of anesthesia, which was slightly manipulative of me).

There are just over 18,000 people with the last name Gibson in the state, so who knows. But I am going to reach out to David Seay and see where this rabbit hole goes.

Could be a dead end.

But it might could be a hoot.