Lone Star remembers writer and historian Lonn Taylor, who died on June 26, 2019.<\/p>\n

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Lonn Taylor, writer and historian died at home in Fort Davis on June 26, 2019. He was 79. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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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

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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

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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

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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

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According to Marfa Public Radio, before his death, Taylor was working on an autobiography.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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