Tuesday, October 3, 2000

Couple handles surprise with ‘Grace’

By Bill Whitaker

Pretty much without trying, The Grace Museum remains in the spotlight — for better or worse. It was definitely for the better during a “surprise party” thrown for Kirby and Delores Leeson at The Grace on occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. Back when The Grace was a downtown hotel, it provided the Leesons with stately lodgings on their wedding night.

“Our wedding night was on the third floor except back then it was the Drake,” recalled longtime civic leader and retired banker Kirby Leeson, who happened to chair the city’s building standards board when Hotel Drake was renovated into The Grace.

“My wife and I both worked at the time and I was going to McMurry and my brother John got me the room,” Leeson said. “We had been planning on spending the night in a trailer park, but John sprang for the room and even paid for the preacher.”

Veteran educator Deborah Jeter and globe-trotting, award-winning Dallas Morning News photographer David Leeson intended for the party to be a surprise.

But limelight-shirking Kirby and Delores — ever suspicious of their mischievous offspring — discovered the ruse early on.

Fortunately, no nudes were hanging in The Grace at the time, so any scandal was averted.

The evening’s only embarrassment came when someone at the party began telling an outrageous, utterly amusing and totally erroneous story about Kirby Leeson’s dutifully going out to Tye to ask Delores’ father, a noted farmer, for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

“Sure,” the farmer supposedly replied, “but, you know, she’s gonna need a lot of dental work.”

The tale generated lots of guffaws the other night, but the Leesons insist the absurd account has no teeth whatsoever.

“Why,” Delores protested, somewhat indignantly, “I’ve got great teeth!”

Best foot

Speaking of Grace goings-on, famed outdoorsman Tommy Wideman, the museum’s most colorful docent, found himself in pictures this month.

At least, sort of.

Wideman, who gained the attention of the Gokey Boot Company after officials caught him on the 1992 National Geographic Society TV special about rattlesnakes, has ever since tested their snake-proof boots and traveled nationwide to open stores stocking Gokey Boots.

However, this season’s Orvis mail-order catalog for the first time features Wideman in its pages. Or, rather, it features Wideman’s boot, resting amidst hundreds of venomous rattlers.

“Oh, it’s definitely my foot,” Wideman remarked, referring to boots reportedly once favored by Teddy Roosevelt. “I’ve got the picture and what they did was simply cut me off at the knee. I don’t know how long it’ll be before the rest of me gets into their catalog.

“It’s taken me this long just to get my foot in the door.”

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out Bill’s previous columns at www.brazosbill.com.