Boots walked, then walked back
If you’re in Texas long enough, you’ll meet somebody who answers to “Boots.” It didn’t take me much time. Within 48 hours of arriving in Stephenville, I was shaking hands with Boots Elliott, local high school football broadcaster, radio station co-owner and the golfer to beat hereabouts.
Boots — and for the record, his full name is Robert S. Elliott Jr. — is also the fellow who dreamed about getting out of Stephenville, and later dreamed about coming back.
Elliott grew up in Stephenville in ’70s and ’80s, when the town had considerably fewer people than the 17,000 or so who live here today. Teenagers entertained themselves by driving endlessly between the two Dairy Queen outlets on either end of Washington Street, the town’s main drag. Aside from sports, there wasn’t much else to do. When time came for Elliott to go to college, he passed up Stephenville’s Tarleton State University to go elsewhere. (It helped that his father pointedly said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Son, you need to get out of the house.”)
Elliott attended a small liberal arts college in another part of the state, then landed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — the most heavily populated spot in Texas, and a place where Stephenville’s total citizenry wouldn’t even register as a census worker’s rounding error. Yessiree, Elliott was a big city fella, right up until the day in 1991 he realized he wasn’t.
That’s when Elliott moved back to Stephenville to sleep on his parents’ couch while he looked for work. He eventually found a job selling air time for a local radio station. Within seven years, he was the owner and general manager.
One problem, though: Elliott came back too soon. There was, as he quickly learned, a gap in the social continuum. Stephenville is a kid-centric place, and also flush with college students most of the year. So the under-22 crowd is well-represented, as is the over-35 slice of the population. In between, it was thin pickings, demographically speaking.
The specific problem? “I had to go find somebody [to marry], because there was nobody here my age,” he says.
San Antonio provided what Stephenville couldn’t: a wife. Elliott and Misty now have two daughters. He expects they’ll eventually leave home, just as he did. “I don’t know many kids who graduate from Stephenville [High School] and don’t go somewhere else” for either college or work, he says. But, he adds, a lot of them realize it’s a great place to live. That’s when they come back.
But only after their dating days are behind them.