robert e. howard
  According to its demographics the city of Abilene, Texas is home to approximately 116,000 people -- I'm not sure where they were when we rolled through town, but that's what it says.  
         
  My wife reluctantly accompanied me on the trip - we've done quite a bit of traveling together but she was unsure of this whole Robert E. Howard thing. If it hadn't been for the questionable flick "The Whole Wide World" she probably wouldn't have gone.  
Abilene. The biggest ghost town in Texas.		  
         
  I hunted down the movie after learning of its existence on the Internet - went to every movie place in town before finally locating it at the evil empire of Blockbuster Video. While I am vehemently against Blockbuster Video and all of its various misdealings, I nonetheless rented it there, and promptly took it home to watch it. She was elated to hear I had finally done something with her in mind - I had rented a love story. (Well, I tried to convince I'd done it with her mind, but she wasn't buying it ...)  
         
  Those of you unfamiliar with the book on which this movie was based, ONE WHO WALKED ALONE is a book by Novelyn Price, a girl with whom Robert Howard once had a relationship in the years before his suicide in 1936.
Shot from the 1996 Sony Pictures release Whole Wide World		  
   
 

Novelyn Price was a debate student and an aspiring writer who kept a detailed journal of her relationship with the man who was by some coined "the greatest pulp writer" ever. One of the prompts for the Price book was the bad reputation Howard posthumously developed in literary circles for being mean-spirited and "crazy." Fans will point the finger at L. Sprague deCamp for starting this untrue rumor, in part due to his less-than-well received biography of Howard, DARK VALLEY DESTINY. While eccentric, Howard was not mean-spirited, and Price in her later years wanted to set the record straight. The movie stars Vincent D'onofrio as Howard, and is based on ONE WHO WALKED ALONE, which is a fantastic book and comes highly recommended for any Howard fan.

Back to the trip ... I couldn't wait to get to Cross Plains, but it had been a helluva drive, so we stopped in Abilene and got a room downtown. We wanted to make sure we got down there in time for the guided tour of the Howard home, so we figured we'd hang out in Abilene, then get an early start.

There wasn't much of a night life in Abilene. A couple of dudes were playing guitar at the coffee shop next to the old folks home, and we were too late to catch the end times prophecy seminar, so we headed down to a family-owned Mexican food restaurant that we'd seen on the way in. The family that owned the place lived in a house connected to the restaurant itself, which had murals painted on the walls, old cowboy photos, and a big screen television in the corner that showed a brain surgery in progress while we ate.