This article first appeared in The Houston Post, Thursday, September 9, 1977.
At La Grange I stopped to see Buddy Zapalac, who operates The La Grange Journal. He took off a while and rode with me up in the north part of Fayette County.
I like to ride around with a country editor in the territory where his paper circulates, and everybody knows him. Even if you are a suspicious looking character, the local folks will generally figure you are at least harmless if the country editor is riding with you.
We drove to the little town of Winchester and got permission to poke around in the old blacksmith shop and filling station behind Karisch’s Store. It’s a peculiarity of old blacksmith shops that they sit there and just get better and better, even after the blacksmith is no longer at bis forge. Old shops that way are full of stuff that people want to buy and take home and put in the back yard.
Old filling stations are getting the same way. There at Karisch’s are two greasy oil dispensing tanks with hand cranks. Before the oil companies began putting oil into cans, filling station people would dispense oil out of hand-crank tanks. They’d pump it into those copper-colored pitchers with flexible spouts and feed it into your crankcase.
A greasy hand-crank oil tank is surely not pretty to look at and yet somehow it has a special look to me now. I don’t know that I would care to have one in the back yard, but I couldn’t turn it down if anybody offered me one. Nobody has and isn’t apt to. People bang tight to old stuff like that.
From Winchester we crossed over into Lee County a little way and stopped at Northrup and went in the combination grocery store, filling station-cafe-tavern. Inside there’s a big banner with a sign in German. Of course, around Northrup you have a lot of people with German backgrounds.
The sign reads, ”Die kleine stadt Northrup, Einwohner 38.” Roy Lehmann was sitting there at the counter and he translated the sign. ”The little town of Northrup, population 38.”
I asked if he was one of the 38 and Lehmann said, “No” but he was one of the 38 who live over at Warda, a few miles back east.
The outside walls of that Northrup store are decorated with large cartoon figures. Some are raised, and have moving parts made out of plywood, and painted in bright colors. Lehmann said the cartoons were done by the pastor of his church at Warda.
It pleases rural people so much for the minister of their church to do something you don’t normally expect a minister to do. Like drawing pictures, or riding bucking horses, or jumping out of airplanes with a parachute. Peop1e seem prouder of that than they are of their preacher’s regular work. I bet Zapalac and I had half a dozen people explain to us that the cartoons were done by Pastor Marc Wolfram.
We decided to run over to Warda and see him a minute. You know from the way people call him Pastor Wolfram that he’s a Lutheran. Far as I know the Lutherans are the only bunch that call their ministers pastor. The others will call him doctor or brother, or father, or sometimes just mister, but with the Lutherans it is generally pastor.
The place you stop at when you get to Warda is Fred Kasper’s. It’s another one of those combinations that are so common in the country. Fred’s is a combination grocery store and Post Office and tavern. A popular meeting place. I have been stopping there for 20 years when going up U.S. 77.
Pastor Wolfram came over from the church to visit a few minutes. The back wall there in Kasper’s place is partly papered with his cartoons.
The subject of most of Pastor Wolfram’s cartoons is baseball. Local baseball, I mean. Warda has a team in the Community League. People in that part of the state take baseball with a mighty seriousness. The Community League has a dozen teams, and some of the players will hang in there and keep chunking till they’re gray and have false teeth.
After every game, Pastor Wolfram does a cartoon, a sort of comment on the contest, and this cartoon goes up at Kasper’s and everybody comes to see it. Like once when Warda whipped the Serbin Jackrabbits 29-1 (Community League baseball is usually a lot better than that), the cartoon showed a rabbit in emergency surgery at the hospital, and a doctor announcing that the patient nearly died, as 29 bullets were removed from him.
Around a country town, for a specialty like cartooning, there is no fame that can approach the local brand. I doubt you could find a citizen of Warda who would name a cartoonist they considered better than Pastor Wolfram.
It would be my guess, though, that the Serbin Jackrabbits would not class him as all that good.