Hondo Crouch

John Russell Crouch, who went by Hondo, after the town he was born in, bought a near abandoned village in the early 1970s and turned it into a joke that outlived him. He had been a serious athlete first: a Southwest Conference champion swimmer at the University of Texas, a two time All American and team captain who competed in western clothes and was known as the Swimming Cowboy. He wrote about six hundred columns for the Comfort News between 1963 and 1975 under the name Peter Cedarstacker. His business cards said Imagineer. He declared himself mayor of a place with a population in the twenties, appointed ambassadors to foreign countries, and invented the Luckenbach World's Fair, a No Talent Contest, the Return of the Mud Daubers and a Non-Buy Centennial on 4 July 1976.

The town had come up for sale in a newspaper advertisement reading, by its own account, town for sale, lock, stock and dancehall. Crouch bought it with Guich Koock and Kathy Morgan. The Texas State Historical Association dates the purchase to 1971 and the state marker at the site says 1970, and neither states a price worth repeating.

Then the thing he had built got away from him. Chips Moman and Bobby Emmons wrote a song called Luckenbach, Texas without having been there, Waylon Jennings recorded it with Willie Nelson singing the last refrain, and it held number one on the country chart from 21 May to 25 June 1977. Crouch had died of a heart attack on 27 September 1976, about six and a half months before the record came out.