Woody Guthrie

Pampa gave Guthrie more than a counter job. He painted signs for money, played with bands at nightclubs and on Panhandle radio stations, and found a spiritual mentor in the poet Kahlil Gibran. In 1933 he married Mary Jennings, a Pampa girl. Decades later the town claimed him back. Its first annual tribute was held on October 3, 1992, which Gov. Ann Richards proclaimed Woody Guthrie Day in Texas, and the city dedicated a 150-foot cast iron sculpture bearing the staff and notes of "This Land" and named U.S. Highway 60 across the Panhandle the Woody Guthrie Memorial Highway.

What the plaque says

Woody Guthrie American folk musician Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (1912-1967) moved to Pampa from his native Oklahoma at age 17. Here he learned to play the guitar and joined with other musicians to perform for area events. Guthrie briefly attended Pampa High School and, from 1930 until 1935, worked as a soda jerk at this site, home of the former Harris Drug Store. He also spent much time reading books in the Pampa city library, preparing him for his most productive years as a poet-lyricist and folk balladeer during the 1940s and early 1950s. He left Pampa for California in 1937 and in 1940 went to New York City, where he was recognized for his writings and performances. He died there in 1967. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — steps away
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• White Deer Land Museum — steps away
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Roberts County Museum — 21 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 26 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D. — steps away
• Pampa — 0.2 mi
• First Methodist Church of Pampa — 0.2 mi
• Gray County 50th Year Anniversary — 0.3 mi