Dudley Dobie Collection

Dudley Richard Dobie, Sr. was a third generation Texan, antiquarian bookseller, writer and educator.  He was born in 1904 in Lagarto, Texas, in southern Live Oak County.  His parents, William Neville and Mary E. (Mills) Dobie, were prominent South Texas ranchers.  The Dobie’s first settled around Harris County, Texas in 1828, a few years before the outbreak of the Texas Revolution.  His branch of the family moved to Live Oak County in the late 1860s.

Famed southwestern folklorist, J. Frank Dobie, Dudley Dobie’s first cousin, grew up on a neighboring ranch.  Due to a sixteen-year age difference, Dudley and J. Frank were not close as children but developed a strong friendship and shared a similar worldview as adults.  Their shared ranching heritage also strongly influenced and shaped their character.  Dudley attended Lagarto’s primary and secondary school and graduated from Mathis High School in 1923 as valedictorian. 

In 1924, after a year of unproductive job searching, Dudley began attending Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University) in San Marcos, Texas.  He graduated with a degree in history in 1927 and soon became the principal of the Westover School in western San Marcos.  A few months later, he married Deborah Galbreath (nicknamed Bibba), and together they had three children.  According to his own recollections, Dudley’s hobby of serious book collecting began in the winter of 1927 - 1928.

In the summer of 1928, Dudley began graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin.  He visited the campus every summer for four years, completing his MA in history in 1932.  His master’s thesis, “A History of Hays County, Texas,” was supervised by historian and author Walter Prescott Webb.  In 1933, Dudley left the Westover School to become an educational advisor for the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal relief program operating from 1933 to 1943.  Throughout this period, Dudley wrote several historical articles for a variety of newspapers and magazines in Texas. Dudley Dobie became a San Marcos-based bookseller in 1935, supplementing his income with freelance writing.  Dudley also scouted Texas for artifacts for the Hall of State at the Texas Centennial Exposition and Fair, which opened in Dallas in 1936.  Throughout the 1930s Dudley continued to collect books and made a number of literary connections across the state.  He regularly attended annual meetings of the Texas State Historical Association, the Old Trail Drivers Association, and the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.  He was also a member of the Texas Folklore Society, where J. Frank Dobie, his cousin, served as the secretary-editor for twenty-one years until his death in 1964.  Dudley built long-lasting friendships with various people from these assorted organizations.  He also maintained a friendship with U.S. Senator Ralph W. Yarborough, a liberal Texas Democrat, during these years.

In the winter of 1940-1941, Dudley assisted with the Texas State Historical Association’s first book auction, now a traditional feature of the organization.  He also ran a mail-order book business out of his San Marcos home, occasionally loading up his car with various books and traveling to Austin and San Antonio to solicit potential customers at their homes or businesses.  Dudley worked at Southwest Texas State Teachers College part-time as a non-tenured history instructor and part-time as a museum director for ten years.  By working part-time for the university, Dudley was able to teach and run his bookselling business.  His first printed catalogue, Spirited Southwest: Roundup No. 1, came out in 1947.  Dudley also served as a San Marcos city alderman from 1949 to 1951.

In 1952, Dudley opened his first bookstore in Austin, at the current site of the Dobie Center, near the University of Texas’s main campus.  However, he did not find much success and was forced to close the store.  Later he dabbled in politics, making an unsuccessful run for school superintendent in Hays County.  In 1955, he opened a bookshop and gift store in San Marcos, but success remained elusive.  Fortunately, during this time he received an unexpected offer to teach history and direct the Big Bend Memorial Museum (now the Museum of the Big Bend) at Sul Ross State Teachers College (now Sul Ross State University) in Alpine, Texas. Dobie taught at Sul Ross, excluding the 1958-1959 academic year, until his retirement and return to San Marcos in 1966.  From 1966 until his death in 1982, Dudley continued to sell books via mail order from his San Marcos home.  He also served a term as the Hays County Democratic Chairman and was a ten-year member of the Hays County Historical Commission. Although he made several notes intended for his memoirs, he never completed it. 

Dudley was an educator, writer and folklorist who loved sharing stories of frontier life in Texas.  He knew a great deal about this subject from a wealth of reading and his personal and family experiences.  He wrote several newspaper and magazine features and privately published A History of San Marcos and Hays County (1948) and Adventures in the Canyons: Mountains and Desert Country of the Big Bend of Texas and Mexico (1952).  He succumbed to colon cancer on April 17, 1982.