The Ghost of Ramsey Yelvington: Baylor’s Great Cowboy Playwright Still Haunts His Final Stage

Since the Paul Baker era, the Baylor Theatre has always punched far above its weight on Broadway. From the beloved actor Carole “Cookie” Cook to Robert Askins’ award-winning dark comedy Hand to God, dozens of Bears have graced the stages of the Great White Way.

Baker’s Baylor was a particularly rich and nurturing home for playwrights, including Eugene McKinney, Robert Flynn, and the first Texas playwright–so his tombstone says–to have a play produced on Broadway, Ramsey Yelvington.

Despite a long career filled with accolades and awards during his lifetime, Yelvington is barely remembered today. Perhaps it was because Ramsey simply refused to play the game–he scarcely ever left his ranch near Wimberley, doggedly wrote about what he knew best, and emerged only rarely with yet another play.

Yelvington was born in 1913 in tiny West Point, Texas, between Smithville and LaGrange, the son of a Baptist preacher–and a fourth-generation Texan. His father, Jessie L. Yelvington, was an evangelist with the Baptist General Convention and was on the original committee that raised the funds to build the Tidwell Bible Building.

Ramsey attended first Howard Payne University, then Baylor, but left just a few hours short of earning a degree, having trouble finding time for the mandatory chemistry lab. 

When Baker arrived on campus in 1938,  he writes that Yelvington was the first Baylor student “with whom I had any real contact.” Quite by coincidence, the two had rented adjoining rooms in the old Lattimore House near campus. Ramsey had earlier failed an audition for the school’s Little Theater (the precursor to the Baylor Theatre), but Baker made him stage manager for his first productions on campus anyway.

After leaving Baylor, Yelvington drifted through various writing jobs and spent time as a writer/announcer for radio stations in Waco, Austin, Houston, Corpus Christi and San Antonio. When World War II arrived, Yelvington spent three years in an office while stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Ramsey was not, Baker wrote later, “much inclined to the military.”

When Yelvington wrote his first full-length play at age 36 as a “civic program” in San Marcos, he reluctantly sent it to Baker, whom he’d stayed in touch with since his time at Baylor. Baker promptly urged him to rewrite it to remove the livestock from the stage and produced Home to Galveston as part of his popular Southwest Summer Theatre in Waco in July 1949. Baker called it “one of the most successful comedies we have ever produced.” “Those who missed this show,” he told The Baylor Line, “may have missed on what will someday be on Broadway.”

Baker invited Yelvington to return to school, finish his degree and write more plays. And thus began one of the most successful partnerships in the history of Texas theater–a history that includes legendary names like Horton Foote and Preston Jones. Baker’s prestige was such that the Baylor production of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and a River in Spring 1951 was favorably reviewed in a host national publications, including The Saturday Review, Time, and The Christian Science Monitor. Legendary actor Charles Laughton, who came to Baylor to act and direct on more than one occasion, often praised Baker in interviews. “This man Baker is a fantastic genius,” Laughton once said. “He could change the whole course of the theatre. Baylor Theatre is the only thing completely new in the American Theatre.”

In November 1954, Baylor was all a’twitter over the presence of hot young evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, as part of the second Conference on American Ideals on campus which, coincidentally, coincided with a football game versus the University of Texas. (Graham wore a “Beat Texas” ribbon and gave the pre-game invocation.) Yelvington’s latest play, A Cloud of Witnesses, was written for the occasion, though sections of the play had been sent piecemeal to Baylor as he completed them–including the pivotal battle scene, which only arrived three days before the play’s opening. 

Ramsey himself showed up on that unseasonably hot day, Baker writes, “having arrived on a slow train from San Marcos and walked the 14 blocks to the theater. He said he had been afraid to wait for a bus, and there were no taxis about.”

A Cloud of Witnesses, Yelvington’s best-known play, is a mythical, spiritual re-telling of the story of the Battle of the Alamo, told in poetry and staged like a classic Greek drama, complete with a Greek chorus composed of the widows of an earlier battle. The play required nearly 100 actors and the dozens upon dozens of speaking parts serve as vehicles for Yelvington’s meditations on serious topics, including place, violence, and memory. A Cloud of Witnesses was adapted as an outdoor drama and, in July 1955, opened for what would be a decades-long run at the San José Mission on San Antonio’s southern edge and elsewhere in the Alamo City and Texas as Drama of the Alamo.

A Baylor Line article in 1955 heralded still another new play, The Seeker, commissioned by Baylor President W. R. White on the life and influence of the original Baptist, Roger Williams. Also in 1955, Ramsey’s daughter Margaret came to Baylor, making her the third generation of Yelvingtons to do so. 

In March 1958, Yelvington’s play The Long Gallery made its New York debut at the RNA Theatre in the Greystone Hotel on Broadway and 91^st Street. The Long Gallery—the house-length front porch of a particular kind of Texas home–concerns two generations of a family and was based on Ramsey’s own family. The New York Times’ critic “L.C.” lauded some of the individual performers, including Baylor graduate Clu Gulager, but ultimately found it unsatisfying, calling it “sometimes effective in parts, but as a whole it is undistinguished.” L.C.’s main complaint is that Yelvington attempted to “cover too much ground, rather than concentrate on the fine details that makes for successful character definition.”

By 1959, Baker writes, Yelvington had already written ten full-length plays, two long pageants, and a number of short plays. Baylor produced six of the plays. Of their relationship, Yelvington once said, “I believe that nowhere else in the United States, at the time, could I have received the understanding and imagination, in combination, which I got at the Baylor Theatre under Paul Baker’s direction.” He was also elected to the Texas Institute of Letters in 1959.

It was while at Baylor that Yelvington wrote the first two of what would become an acclaimed Texian Trilogy of plays: Women and Oxen, which dealt with the immigration from the United States into the Mexican state of Texas and the events leading to the Texas revolution, and A Cloud of Witnesses. 

Despite the scale of these and other plays, William B. Martin notes that Yelvington wrote for Baylor and Baker’s fabled “enveloping stage” with its side extensions. Still, with the size of the casts and the complexity of the productions (including multiple sets), Yelvington’s plays sometimes “strain[ed] the theater’s ability to contain them.”

Baker also praised Yelvington, saying that he “writes with fury, with deep understanding of character, and with a fine insight into human values as related to their environment,” and called A Cloud of Witnesses “one of the great historical dramas written by an American.”

But Ramsey had another side–he wrote for a host of regional publications, short stories, articles, and essays on a variety of topics, as well as the novel The Roaring Kleinschmidts. He even wrote two genuinely self-effacingly funny articles for The Baylor Line: “It’s the Same Red-Faced Ramsey – Even After All These Years” (September/October 1949) on his relative lack of financial success combining ranching and writing and “On the Advisability of Segregation: Graduate from Undergraduate, That Is” (September/October 1957), about coming back for his 20^th class reunion at Baylor.

In the “Red-Faced Ramsey,” he quoted his friend and fellow Baylor Bear Ted Griffin, who had traveled from Shreveport to see the first production of Home to Galveston:

Ted spoke words that deserve to be carved in the Font of Meditation. Said he, “I quit reading the Baylor Line because it makes me melancholy to see so many successful guys’ pictures. And I don’t come back for Homecoming because I’m afraid I won’t see anybody I know much, and it’ll be a bust. These little things running around here now, they ain’t no consolation to me.”

In December 1958, Life–the most influential magazine in the country–devoted 10 pages to “Stage-Struck Texas,” chronicling the explosion of theater throughout the state, in cities both large and small. Baker’s Baylor Theatre, of course, was prominently featured: “At a conservative Baptist school in Waco, Texas, the nation’s most brilliantly unorthodox drama department is going great guns.” And, naturally, Yelvington’s A Cloud of Witnesses was spotlighted. Baylor productions would appear on at least two covers of Life magazine during Baker’s tenure at Baylor.

The third installment in Ramsey’s Texian Trilogy, Shadow of an Eagle, a play about the life of Sam Houston, premiered at the Dallas Theatre Center in 1961.

Yelvington at long last completed his bachelor of arts degree in 1962, and the following year his master’s degree. In short order, he was awarded the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and became Playwright-in-Residence at Baylor, while still commuting from his Hays Country stock farm near Wimberley.

Yelvington’s last production at Baylor was The Choir Boy in Summer 1962, a play he originally wrote in 1951–but had been urged not to produce because of its controversial nature. Not only did Yelvington write the play, he both directed it and gave himself one of the leads as a popular but aging singer. Yelvington had appeared in a number of plays in both Waco and Dallas, including as Satan in A Cloud of Witnesses. 

The Choir Boy is a darkly comic look at three of America’s obsessions–religion, sports, and entertainment. Yelvington cast noted actor Jim Harrell as the football coach and dual cast actors Vicki Vinson and Jernine Wagner as the wife of a well-known pop singer. Yelvington played a the Frank Sinatra-styled singer, complete with cheap toupee.

When the Baylor administration famously cancelled the Theatre’s production of A Long Day’s Journey in Night in Fall 1962, Yelvington resigned, along with Baker and most of the Theatre department. Baker then moved to San Antonio to create the theater department at Trinity University. 

Yelvington eventually rejoined Baker at the Dallas Theatre Center. Perpetually sporting well-worn western work wear and a battered cowboy hat and with a ruddy, sunburned complexion from working his ranch on the weekends, Yelvington quickly became a popular fixture both on and off the stage in Big D. But, as he told The Dallas Times-Herald’s Paul Rosenfield, “I was reared in the country, and I prefer it. The pace here is a little frantic. That traffic on Lemmon Avenue isn’t for me.” 

Eventually, Yelvington returned permanently to the small home he built for his family above Cypress Creek on River Road near Wimberley. He then spent more than decade teaching playwriting at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University) in San Marcos as Playwright-in-Residence.

The common theme among Yelvington plays, as William B. Martin writes in Texas Plays, is a complex morality play about humankind’s constant struggle contrasting “Satan’s view of history as cyclical force and the Romantic view of history as determined by courage and sacrifice,” in addition to their carefully researched history.

Yelvington told Nan Elkins Cooke in 1971 that he “always” wrote from titles. “I’ve got a list of titles that I’ve had for years of all of the plays I wanted to write,” he said. “There are only seven or eight left. When I feel the ideas are formulated in my own mind and are ready, I begin. I’ve never started a play that hasn’t been finished.” 

“I’ve learned that you don’t make money out of plays,” he told Rosenfield, “so I write in the way I want to.”

As Yelvington’s career progressed, he protested loudly and often about the dismissive term “regional playwright”–a phrase sometimes used by New York critics to describe the works of Texans Yelvington, Foote, and Jones, as well as Oliver Haily, Jack Heifner, R.G. Vliet, Carlos Morton, Mary Rhode, James McLure, and others. He told one magazine that “a good–even closed case can be made that there is no such animal as the regional playwright.” Instead, he argued, “a playwright is either a playwright or he is not. What bestows the title is the quality of the work.”

Ultimately, Yelvington told Texas Libraries that the problem was a uniquely American combination of snobbery and geography:

The regional playwright has a problem the regional novelist does not because a play to be a play must be staged, and if it is not staged in New York it will be inadequately appraised (and not always adequately there!) because there are no magazines and newspapers of sufficient national significance originating outside the New York area … engaged in first-drama criticism, and those in the New York area make, at best, a pretense of covering the entire country. 

On July 26, 1973, Ramsey Yelvington died of a heart attack. It was opening night for his 18^th and final play, The Folklorist, at the Southwest Texas State theater. The Folklorist was to be directed by his daughter, Harriett. 

And here’s where Yelvington’s story takes a final twist.

Yelvington was so beloved that the student theater organization at Southwest Texas State renamed their own version of the “Tonys” for outstanding performances the “Ramseys.”

A portrait of Yelvington hung in the lobby of the university’s theater for many years until a new theater complex was opened on the Texas State University campus.

And finally, shortly after Ramsey’s passing, odd things began to happen. Current TSU professor Vlasta Silhavy said that as late as the early 2000s, theater majors began to talk about Yelvington’s ghost. 

 “A lot specifically that he lived in the mainstage theatre and that when a light would randomly flicker on or off, we would all say that it was Ramsey,” Silhavy said. “It was somewhat of a lore that students used to explain when something would fall on stage and so on.”

Ghost tours in San Marcos always include a stop at the TSU theater and retell the unusual–but always benign–events that sometimes happened in the theater that are attributed to Yelvington’s ghost. The unexplained occurrences happen, it is said, because the Texas State theater building is surrounded by water, which binds the spirits there. Ramsey’s ghost apparently derives particular enjoyment from messing with the new theater students.

John Fleming, Dean of Fine Arts & Communication in the College of Fine Arts & Communication, who spent long hours in the theater while a professor–including TSU’s famed 24-hour play festival–calls himself a “skeptic” on any ghost but was delighted that Yelvington’s name and legacy endures at the university more than 50 years later.

At his passing, the Waco Tribune-Herald featured a tribute to Yelvington on its editorial page on July 29 that ended with this affectionate tribute: 

“The fact that both [Baker and Yelvington] hit their artistic strides here in Waco before going on to San Marcos and San Antonio and Dallas gives all of us a special reason to join in mourning Ramsey Yelvington’s passing. But all of Texas has plenty of reason to do that.“

The Baylor Line also published an emotional tribute to Yelvington by his friend, playwright and director Orlin Corey, co-creator of The Towers of the Brazos, in April 1974. Corey called him the “first playwright of Texas, indeed as the first important playwright of the Southwest” and declared that Yelvington’s “greatest contribution is to the future, which will discover him beyond his era.” 

But Corey also celebrated Ramsey the man:

“Soft-spoken, understated, preferring the suggestion to the command even in the theater where he was master, this man was intuitively courteous. He was alive in the deeps to every nuance of his associates and his era. He possessed a relaxed capacity for action, action at all the levels of the word – physical labor, sports, insight, suffering, ideas, language. He was adept at all degrees of the word.“

As you might expect from such a modest man, Yelvington’s gravestone in the San Marcos Cemetery simply reads, “Texas’ First Playwright, Baptist.”