"Sandhills Boy" is Kelton's memoir, a funny and poignant story of "a freckle-faced country boy, green as a gourd, a sheep ready to be sheared," growing up in the wild, dry, sandhills of West Texas. The son of a working cowboy and ranch foreman, Elmer was expected to follow in his father's footsteps but learned at an early age that he had no talents in the cowboy's trade. Buck Kelton said Elmer was "slow as the seven-year itch," and reluctantly supported his son's decision to become a student at the University of Texas, and, eventually, a journalist and writer. Kelton writes with great feeling of his service in WWII in France, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, and the romantic circumstances which changed his life in the village of Ebensee, Austria. His life in ranch and oil patch Texas during the Great Depression is told with warm nostalgic humour animated with stories of the cowboys - and their wives and children - who gave the time and place its special flavour.
- ISBN10 0765315211
- ISBN13 9780765315212
- Publish Date 15 May 2007
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 20 July 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Forge
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 256
- Language English