Book Festival 2012: Royal & McEachern
Edith and Darrell Royal have been married since 1944. Photo from the Royal family courtesy University of Texas PressAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
After some bumpy moments this season, some people wonder how much longer Mack Brown will be head football coach at the University of Texas. Longhorn coaches come and go, but for some, there’s only one “coach”: Darrell Royal. He coached the Longhorns for 20 seasons, including three national championships.
Head football coaching is tough on the coach and family, and Royal’s wife, Edith, has plenty of tales to tell. She and author and former Longhorn cheerleader Jenna Hays McEachern have created a scrapbook of Royal photos, mementos and family stories. Edith Thomason and Darrell Royal met as teenagers in Oklahoma and got married in 1944. She and McEachern spoke with KUT’s Jennifer Stayton about the memoir and how the Royals stayed married all those years.
We got mad at each other, just like everybody else. I remember one time when he took up golf, and he’d forget to come home and come get me to take me to some big important party that I thought I had to go to. So I visited one of my psychiatrist friends, and I said, ‘I just don’t think I want to live with this man any longer, he just neglects me, and he forgets about me, and he just thinks about playing golf all the time.’ He said, ‘Edith, just stick with him long enough, and you’ll just come to the point where you just love that he goes to the golf course.’ And he was absolutely right.
Listen to their full interview by clicking the player above.
You can find more interviews with Texas Book Festival authors here. McEachern and Royal will be speaking this Sunday afternoon at the festival.
Podcast: Download (47.9MB)
Sorry to hear about Coach Royal’s Alzheimer’s, I & my family know the stress of living w/that condition. However, I grew up in the times of Royal & the Longhorns in Manhattan, KS when Royal deliberately would pick K-State early in the season just to run up the score on a poor football team. It was humiliating! I’ve had nothing but distain for Coach Royal, & his ilk in the coaching world, and hatred of the UT Longhorn football program that has lasted almost 5 decades…& can’t wait for K-State to return the favor in Manhattan 1 December.
I am prejudiced about this particular book since I helped compile the photographs and contributed a small bit to the telling of DKR and Edith’s story. But I must say that after all of the books about my father, going on about the glories of UT football and recounting particular games and visiting UT football history and so on… this excellent book is very unlike all others on the subject of Darrell Royal.
This book is really good! Anyone can enjoy looking at the photographs of two kids married in the middle of WWII, moving all over North America pursuing a career, and finding the place that they finally settled. THEN we get to visit the glory days in a new perspective. As a member of the family, I can tell you that we were just as thrilled as anyone about DKR’s fabulous success at UT. And I’m glad that someone like Edith and Jenna finally came up with such a readable and interesting account of the entire man and his family and friends. The writing is top notch. The photographs, well, I took so many of them myself that I can’t brag too much about them, but they tell a story of their own. Taken together, I have to call this book a classic of the genre.