The cars that had brought these people—pulled up in a long line behind the crowd—were dusty with travel. “Most of the crowd was old people,” Stella Gliddon recalls. “You know, people that Mr. Sam had gotten pensions for. Some of them had come a long way.” One aged widow, so crippled by arthritis that she hadn’t left her house in five years, had insisted that two of her sons carry her out to their car and drive her from their lonely ranch in Marble Falls. Some had come farther. Members of Sam’s little band of legislators had come to say goodbye to the man who had fought beside them for “the
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