Mr. James Beau Hoyt (Beau) Humble

September 29, 1952 to August 20, 2012

Poem by William Wordsworth:

MY heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began,

So is it now I am a man,

So be it when I shall grow old

Or let me die!

The child is father of the man:

As I thought about the words that I would write regarding Beau’s life I was reminded how much his personality and temperament reflected the Humble side of the family. Beau as a child was profoundly influenced by the men in the family. His personality reflected a lot of the manly qualities of my father and his younger brother, my Uncle Herman, Scott’s father. Quiet, steady, tough, competent, proud, honest, dependable and above all loyal to family, but also stubborn and independent, always independent, the kind of man that you could depend on during tough times, the kind of man you could trust your life to. In a sense these were throwback virtues, Texas virtues that might have been out of place in the 21st Century but were survival attributes in the 19th and 20th Century and passed down generation to generation. Beau became the same man as my father, he became Uncle Herman, he became the man that reflected the Humble values, values learned during tough times, the most important being loyalty to family.

In writing this eulogy to my brother, I drew on the lessons I learned from my neighbor and second father Ray Cruce. Ray wrote a beautiful and moving eulogy for my father which I have used as inspiration. Much of my early intellectual formation was learned from and influenced by Ray. What I learned from Ray was to write about what you know about the person. You don’t have to catalogue their life, but write about what you saw and what you knew and what it said about the person’s values and soul. Ray had a very simple and straightforward formula-you say what you know-his writing style was both eloquent and homespun at the same time, when you heard his words this was not a contradiction but simple truths. Beau had all of the attributes that I described above but Beau was also unique, he was a rebel his whole life. He had a dash of Elvis and a dash of James Dean. Anyone who ever saw him riding his motorcycle at 160mph would understand the comparison. Beau lived a part of his life in places that few of us ever experience, and that was part of his personality also. Anyone that ever saw the movie HUD or read the Larry McMurtry book it was based on Horsemen Pass By (my English professor at Rice University) would understand that rebellious part of Beau’s personality, much like the rebellious Hud. McMurtry would have understood Beau, and maybe even written about him if he knew him.

I had the pleasure and honor to work with Beau. I hired him to work in the bakery I ran in Austin and he was a terrible baker. He hired me to work in his race shop and I was an equally terrible mechanic, but we were brothers and we were supportive and patient with each other, and shared a lot of nice moments working together. As I said, I ran a bakery in Austin and when he first came to Austin he lived with me while he established his foothold in life. What bothered Beau was the fact that the bakery had a large picture window and patrons, strolling through Dobby Mall, could look in and see the colorful bakers at work. Beau hated being stared at and every once in a while would throw cookie dough at the window just to amuse himself and startle anybody that lingered too long staring. Sometime he would superimpose cookie dough over the large wall clock in place of the clock hands, turning it into a kind of a surreal, drooping, melting clock similar to a Dali painting. Beau was always part artist, part artisan, and part performance artist (and he always had a “trickster” part to his personality). He would make little animal figures out of dough and put them in the window and as the yeast expanded they would grow from small cute dogs or turtles to gigantic freaky sculptures…like I said Beau didn’t have the patience to be a baker and mostly amused himself. However, he soon found his calling as a race mechanic and then as a highly skilled machinist. Beau had a precision mind. He could work with metal down to tolerances of a thousandth of an inch. But Beau went well beyond merely working with metal, he had the ability to visualize how things worked and could turn out specialized tools to perform specialized tasks or do fine gunsmithing. In this sense he was more of a throwback to the era when men visualized and then created concepts in metal. Think of Orville and Wilbur Wright brainstorming with each other and then walking over to the bicycle shop and creating a wing that would lift an airplane or twist and turn it…in other words the thought and then the creation was one step. That was Beau at his best,-the thought and the creation was one act.

Beau was a smart guy; he had the quickest mind I have ever been around at “deconstructing” any motor, machine, or system. He intuitively understood how things worked and once he understood its function he could then work backwards quickly to understand how it worked, and then he knew everything he needed to know to build it or fix it. Later in life my father got him a library card for the Rice engineering library where he taught himself how computers worked and web building. These became important to him later in life as he leveraged this knowledge into small business ventures, but it still was an amazing feat of intelligence to be smart enough to co-opt and facilitate this knowledge from one of the premier engineering libraries in the country.

Beau also loved animals and anyone who saw his menagerie over the years could understand his delight in animals and their delight in him. I guess animals brought out the best in Beau-rabbits, chickens, hamsters, dogs, cats, rabbits, and of course horses over the years. He did funny things with his animals; this was the trickster in him. He trained his pigeon to alight on his head whenever he stepped outside, so anyone who saw him would see a guy walking around in the yard with a pigeon on his head, sometimes evoking the obvious comment from neighbors “Do you know that there is a pigeon on your head?” He had a chicken that he used to “hypnotize” by laying it out on the driveway and drawing a chalk mark away from its eyes and the chicken would stare, unmoving, at the mark until you moved him, truly a “stupid animal trick”. But mostly the love affair was between Beau and his dogs. AC, his black Labrador, and Bonnie his Golden Retriever, were his friends and companions for many years and he delighted in their presence and they in his. These were the quiet and private moments in his life.

I have always felt that there is a perfect moment in each person’s life that shapes and defines them. Sometimes we are aware of it, and sometimes it has a subtle subconscious influence, a shadow or cocoon on your life. For me, Beau’s perfect moment was on his motorcycle. Beau had a racing motorcycle that he had turned into the perfect machine; he had perfected it to the limits of engineering. Beau and I had taken a trip in 1973 down to Brownsville from Austin on a fishing trip. I was driving my old 1936 Chevy pickup that Beau had helped me to re-build. Beau was riding “chase” on his motorcycle. We came down a long stretch of Texas highway with no traffic and no curves and I asked Beau to show me what his bike would do. He dropped well back of my truck and throttled his bike up to top speed. One moment he was a black dot in my rearview mirror and the next moment he was a black and yellow bolt of lightning flashing past me at 160 mph, lying flat on the bike, under the wind with his long hair streaming out behind with a perfect blend of muscle, sinew, coordination and daring, perfect, and perfectly in the moment, literally a “human bullet”. This may have been Beau’s most perfect and most pure moment and the way I will always remember him, flat out and fearless, under the Texas sun, young forever in my memory.

With Love Brother,

Rip Humble September 3, 2012