Roy Bedichek

Bedichek wrote his best-known book in seclusion. The Handbook of Texas says he took a year's leave from the University Interscholastic League in 1946 and went to Walter Prescott Webb's Friday Mountain Ranch near Austin to write Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, urged on by J. Frank Dobie and Webb. Camping on school visits had made him a birder. Karankaway Country (1950) won the Carr P. Collins Award, as did his league history of 1956, and The Sense of Smell appeared in 1960. He rose before dawn to write in a separate building and died in 1959.

What the plaque says

Roy Bedichek (June 27, 1878 - May 21, 1959) Born in Illinois to J. M. and Lucretia (Craven) Bedichek, Roy came to Falls County at the age of six. Educated first in his parents' school at Blevins and later at the Bedichek's Eddy Literary and Scientific Institute, he graduated from the University of Texas in 1903. He and Lillian Greer were married in 1910; their children were Mary, Sarah, and Bachman. Bedichek was a reporter, editor, teacher, and homesteader before joining the staff of the University of Texas in 1917; he became the second director of the University Interscholastic League (UIL) in 1922. For twenty-six years he tailored league policies to the American ideal of education for every child. His use of educational competition as "a spur to industry and a whetstone of talent" has shaped the lives of the countless students who have participated in UIL academic, athletic, and musical contests. A lifelong outdoorsman and animal lover, Bedichek wrote "Adventures with a Texas Naturalist," which was published in 1947; his letters, evidence of his enthusiastic correspondence, were collected into two books. Bedichek is fondly remembered as a conversationalist, folklorist, and storyteller who related all experience to the natural world. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 13 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 14 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 20 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 20 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Eddy — 0.8 mi
• Bruceville Baptist Church — 2.7 mi
• Site of Bruceville Methodist Church — 2.8 mi
• Martin Irons — 3.0 mi