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Photography by Joe Nickle/Cover design by Tim Harrington

When I tell Tom Murrell I consider him a cultural artifact, he laughs and says, "Girl, I'm only 83!" Tom Murrell is a walking Shreveport treasure who has owned more businesses than he has fingers to count. Murrell has acted as community grandfather to innumerous Shreveport citizens and has the two essential criteria of grandfatherhood to prove it: a constant supply of good advice and a pocketful of peppermints.

"Some of the folks I've taught to ride as kids have grown up and have kids of their own," Murrell said. "Then we start all over again with the new generation. To this day, I still get calls from some of my 'children.' In some families, I've taught three generations to ride."

Murrell moved to Shreveport in 1935 to attend Centenary College after graduating from a small high school in Oklahoma. He has been owner and operator of such businesses as: dairy farming, auction barn operation, plantation management, livestock service, boarding stables and rental horse operation. He acted as loose livestock man for the Shreveport Police Department and the Caddo Sheriff's Department, was a fireman, a Caddo Parish Constable for 19 years, a Justice of the Peace for over a decade and published a book of his life in 1996 entitled Stories of the Life and Times of a Son-of-a-Cowman. He had a hay-cutting contract with the city of Shreveport until a few years ago and now boards horses both in his residential pasture and at Murrell's Horse Keepers on Dixie Garden Road.

Murrell was born July 9, 1917, in Cooke County, Texas, on a Red River Valley farm and was raised on a farm in Empson Valley, Oklahoma in Pusmataha County. Upon moving to Oklahoma from Texas, the family's belongings were loaded on the Frisco Railroad train and the family rode in the passenger section. The train's depot was ten miles from the ranch so the Murrells traveled the rest of the way by wagon.

"Since I was only one year old," Murrell said, "Daddy and Mother decided that the wagon bumping over the rocky road was too rough for me. So Daddy walked that 10 miles carrying me in his arms, and that's how I went to our ranch in Oklahoma that first time."

Murrell remembers many stories about being a child in the early 1900s. Some of the stories he remembers are in his book Stories of the Life and Times of a Son-of-a-Cowman. One story tells how the Murrell's survived a drought which dried all the creeks and water wells, forcing the family to go to mountain springs with their livestock for water. Another details Murrell working as a child picking cotton with farmers. "Some of the men on the cotton crew could pick 300 pounds of cotton a day. At one cent a pound, a man could bring in three dollars a day if he worked hard at it. I think I only got about 35 cents."

Murrell still remembers how to make beer from an old Choctaw Indian recipe and remembers a recipe for "Chicken in the Mud," where a chicken is killed and rolled (feathers and all) in mud until completely covered and then roasted over a campfire.

"My friends and I would cut the chicken's head off and remove its insides," Murrell said. Then we'd shape it into a huge mud ball and let it sit at the edge of the fire with coals and ashes all around it. After that, we'd fish for about four hours. When we came back, the clay-type mud would be baked around the chicken like a little mud oven. Then we'd take a rock and crack the shell off of the chicken. As it came off, the dried mud would pull all of the feathers off, too. Then we had a perfectly baked chicken with all the flavor still in it. It was delicious."

Another interesting recollection of Murrell's was the Spencer School, which was a one-room schoolhouse he attended as a child. Murrell remembers entering the first grade alongside four grown men who had been raised in Indian Territory and who had never learned to read or write.

"I went to the Spencer School until they consolidated all of the one-room schools in the county," Murrell said. "There was a high school up to the twelfth grade and a grade school up to the eighth grade. I started going to the big school in the fourth grade and attended until I graduated from high school. There were only 12 people in my graduating class."

Murrell also remembers helping his father's crew of men cut and bale hay. "The cook had made lunch and all of the hired hands gathered around the chuck wagon to eat. When I got my plate, I noticed there were reddish-brown streaks in the biscuits and asked Daddy what they were. He shushed me and later said that if anyone complained about the food they would have to take over the cooking. I noticed that the cook had a finger bandaged up and realized he must have cut it while making up the dough for the bread. Daddy told me that since they were cooked up well, it wouldn't hurt to eat them. Once, I watched a man eat his lunch on an old cow-chip he used as a plate, so the biscuit story wasn't that bad."

Murrell's love of animals, particularly horses, interested him enough that he decided he wanted to work with animals as a career. "I grew up around them and studied them," Murrell said. "One odd story I have about my experiences with the nature of dogs happened when I was a child. We had one barn with a partition down the middle of it that two cow dogs lived in. There was a hole in the wall so, in cold weather they could crawl over to the other's side to sleep together. The two dogs happened to have their puppies around the same time and the mothers kept thinking that the other mother's puppies were her own. They would go back and forth carrying all of the puppies through the hole. I guess their scents got all mixed up. When one mother dog grabbed up a puppy out of the other mother's mouth neither would let go. When we finally noticed the situation, every puppy had been pulled in two. My daddy said he had never seen anything like it before."

Murrell roped and hunted with his older brother Lendon and learned to drive his sister Hallie's Model-A Ford. As a high-school student he had a job driving the grade-school bus to and from the grade and high schools. "I was lucky to have that job," said Murrell. "Compared to manual labor, it was an easy way to make money."

At 13 years old, Murrell won ten dollars in a bet with his father that he could go 84 miles in a day to bring back cattle that had strayed from the ranch. "We got a postcard from a man 42 miles away who had five of our cattle," Murrell said. "Daddy bet me ten dollars that I couldn't get them in a day. I left at three in the morning and was there by 11 a.m. You can't run cattle that far back, so I road broke them and walked them home. At about 9 p.m., I shouted to my daddy, 'Open the gate and give me my ten dollars'!"

After Murrell graduated, his cousin Val Murrell invited him to move to Shreveport to work for Broadmoor Riding Academy, which was walking distance from Centenary College. Val Murrell was president of the Commercial National Bank and the Continental American National Bank at the same time. He spent four hours a day at each bank for 35 years and thought Tom had a lot of ambition and energy. Not only did Murrell take the job at Broadmoor Riding Academy, but within three months the business was transferred into Murrell's name and the entire operation was in his care. He ran the stables while attending college and by the end of the year, the usual eight horses that had been boarded at Broadmoor had increased to 45.

After running the Broadmoor operation for three years, it sold and Murrell decided to join the Shreveport Fire Department, where he served for seven years. During this time, Murrell was involved in the dairy business and horse-training business on the side and was raising four children himself with his wife, Beth. Murrell said that since firefighters worked a day and were off a day, that almost all of the firefighters had second jobs.

"My wife was always supportive of any job I wanted to try or business I wanted to open," Murrell said. "She passed away in 1993, but for 53 years she was the backbone of the family. I met her on a blind date and knew I was going to marry her that same day. I proposed to here two weeks after we met and we were married within three months and never regretted it."

Murrell's children, Tim, Avis, Val and Mary Lola were all taught to rope and ride and have won many awards in those areas. The walls of Murrell's house are filled with awards and ribbons along with numerous family portraits of his children's families.

Murrell's family has a rich history. His grandfather was friends with Jesse and Frank James, and Murrell's daddy remembers meeting the men as a child while in Sherman, Texas, before the James's' father was killed and the boys became wanted outlaws for revenge of their father's death. Murrell's mother taught school in a little town called Valleyview near Gainesville, Texas and two of her pupils were Governor Hogg's daughters, Ima and Youra.

Murrell's paternal grandparents Thomas and Anna Murrell were both murdered, along with his great uncle Morgan in Cooke County, Texas in 1894. The man who murdered them, Jack Crews, was a runaway whom the Murrell family adopted while Crews was a child of ten. The Murrells already had three sons, Lendon, Hal and Morgan, but told Crews they would raise him to be a man if he would work and go to school. When the four boys reached adulthood Murrell's grandfather gave each of his sons a farm, but put Crews on a portion of the Big Red River as a sharecropper. The disgruntled Crews murdered Thomas, Anna and Morgan Murrell because he was upset he didn't receive a farm of his own, as well. Crews' mission was to kill Hal and Lendon, too, (Murrell's uncles) but he was caught before he could accomplish the crimes. Crews was hanged for it and Murrell's uncle Floy Murrell said that there were so many people at the courthouse square that day that people were elbow to elbow. 

Murrell now lives on Dixie Meadow in Shreveport and is not looking to retire anytime soon. "If I had my life to live over, I wouldn't change a thing. Life has always been exciting with never a dull moment. To anyone who wants advice, I say, 'Do it like a cowman, not a cowboy, but if you have to cowboy then you should be capable of doing so."

Tom Murrell sells his book, Stories of the Life and Times of A Son-of-a-Cowman, out of his home and has sold, single-handedly, almost all of the copies. His humor, both in the book and in person, can be as dry as The New Yorker or cornier than a barn floor. Murrell always has a joke ready for any occasion and sound advice for anyone who asks for it. Most importantly, he has acted as sage and mentor, to countless Shreveporters, this author included. This is my tribute to a legend. 

Charlotte Rice, Forum News Feb. 23, 2000