Owen White

Owen White

Owen Payne White, a son of Dr. Alward and Katherine Payne White, was born in El Paso on June 9th, 1879, two years before the arrival of the railroads. He graduated from El Paso High School in 1896, and briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin in 1898. He studied law at New York University, and during World War I became a sergeant while serving in a medical unit. On January 22, 1920 he married Hazel Harvey and that same year went to work as a columnist for the El Paso Herald. His first book, Out of the Desert, a history of El Paso, was published in 1923. H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, thought it a great book. It received an excellent review in the New York Times, and later White was asked by that newspaper to cover the election and inauguration of "Ma" Ferguson, the first woman governor of Texas. White accepted, and did such an outstanding job that the New York Times hired him as a reporter and columnist. In 1925 White moved to Cutchogue, Long Island, where he lived until his death, although he often visited in El Paso. He continued to write books: among them two of my favorites, Them Was The Days(1925) and Trigger Fingers(1926). His other books were: Lead and Likker(1932), My Texas Tis of Thee(1936), Texas:An Informal Biography(1945), and two collections of verse: Southwestern Ballads(1922) and Just Me and Other Poems (1924). When he died in New York on December 7, 1946, he was working on a book called Western Trails.