Mr. Noble Willingham Sr.

High Profile: Noble Willingham

The Mineola native hopes to take his act to Congress

01/30/2000

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Like other cast members, Mr. Willingham, 68, has grown accustomed to the scene.It's a moment that plays out on a weekly basis in Dallas, his adopted city; in Mineola, his "permanent residence" and boyhood home; and in Palm Springs, Calif., where he also lives from time to time.

You can't really call it name recognition, but you can make a case for face recognition.It's one he hopes to trade on in his new pursuit, which some view as a radical departure for a character actor with 30 years' experience in Hollywood.

He recently gave up the lucrative assignment of being a regular on network television to announce that he's running for Congress.That's right, Congress.He hopes to follow in the footsteps of other actors-turned-public servants, such as Fred Thompson, Shirley Temple Black and - oh, yeah, a guy named Reagan - and end up with Washington, D.C., as his fourth residence.

And why does he wish to do this?

"I don't think I ever really left," he says wistfully of Texas' 1st Congressional District, which includes Mineola, Longview, Paris and Texarkana."I never really made a clean break from it.I want to go back.I don't have any agenda.I'm beholden to no one, there's nobody I owe anything to.I don't have a family, but I have the time and I have the interest."

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"I can go to the door and knock and he'll know me," Mr. Willingham says, "and that'll be a big plus for the people of my district.I'm not a politician and don't want to be one.I will be their public servant.I want to fight for Social Security as a true trust fund so Congress can't get in and out of it and borrow from it.I like the idea of a flat tax, but I'll have to look at it a little closer.I have to find out what the folks back home think about it, but I want folks to quit havin' to pay so damn many taxes."

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Of course, Mr. Willingham first will face an opponent in the GOP primary.Assuming he wins that, his next opponent most likely would be the two-term incumbent, Rep.
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Mr. Willingham responds by saying that he never really left Mineola, where his late father was a railroad worker and farmer.He considers himself a permanent resident of the Wood County town, which also produced San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a flamboyant liberal Democrat and one of Mr. Willingham's favorite people.

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Mr. Willingham describes himself as a fiscal conservative but "a champion of civil rights.No matter what your color or creed, we're all equal in this country, or at least we should be."

Taking a position far removed from many Republicans, Mr. Willingham says he favors "government funding of the arts.No private individual is rich enough to have art exhibits and put on plays.One of the finest things in our history was the Mercury Players, who performed as a WPA project during the darkest days of the Great Depression.Goodness, even Orson Welles came from that."

He lists among his greatest joys going to black churches as a boy and listening to what he calls a majestic gospel choir.But it always saddened him, he says, to hear pianos so woefully out of tune that they never did justice to those "angelic voices that seemed to come from heaven itself."
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John Glover, the college's vice president, says Mr. Willingham has given money to the school for years.
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Despite announcing his political intentions, Mr. Willingham assumed there would be no problem in finishing out his contract, which expires at the end of the current season.

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"Noble's been an integral part of the show for seven years.He'll be sorely missed," the statement said.

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But that doesn't mean Mr. Willingham is barred from appearing in any dramatic role on television.
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"Noble is the easiest person you'd ever want to get to know.He's a classic example of what growing up in the South means.He's friendly and welcoming and he loves to talk to people."

She holds him in high esteem as an actor, she says, citing in particular his penchant for improvisation.

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When Mineola's Lake Country Playhouse was on the brink of financial collapse, Mr. Willingham persuaded Ms. Wilson to join him in a benefit performance of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters, which, in their case, followed the story line of older man/younger woman.
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"Noble teaches every time he acts," Ms. Wilson says.
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Fate lured Mr. Willingham to acting.In 1970, he was teaching government and economics at Sam Houston High School in Houston, where the drama teacher cornered him one day and urged him to audition as one of the townspeople in Peter Bogdanovich's forthcoming movie The Last Picture Show.

Near the end of the movie, he's seen as Chester, who's working the chains at a high school football game and chatting with Sonny, played by Timothy Bottoms, who regretfully discovers that the football team at Anarene High - woeful losers in his day - is now a win-every-week powerhouse.What ensues is a priceless bit of dialogue between Sonny and Chester, whose lines get a perfect delivery from the rookie actor from Mineola:

"Boy, we've finally got us a team!"Chester says."Didn't back in your day, did they, Sonny?"
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It was a crisis of such prolonged agony and suffering that it shaped Mr. Willingham as nothing else could or has.

As an only child, such an event "hits you right square on the shoulders, and you don't have anywhere to disperse that.When there's upheavals in the home, and there are in any home, you get critical mass.You don't have another child to turn to and say, 'Hey, brother, what about this?What about that?' You learn to take your own counsel.You learn pretty quick that surviving is up to you."

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Sensing his son's utter anguish in the wake of his mother's death, his dad pointed to the mountainous pile of bills lying on the kitchen table and said, " 'You know, Noble, we owe everybody but the pope.' And the two of us just died laughin'.At that moment, he knew exactly what I needed, not that it made it much better."

His father incurred more than $34,000 in medical expenses caring for his mother, but despite never being paid more than $6,000 a year, "Daddy paid back every penny," he says.

His father, who died in 1974, taught his son that having a work ethic was one of life's most important essentials, which accompanied the son into a multitude of callings.Before moving to Hollywood, he worked as a butcher, a highway builder, a railroad worker, an oil-field roughneck and a teacher - after completing a master's degree and beginning a doctorate.

Mr. Willingham entered what was then known as North Texas State College, in Denton, in 1950.He paid his way by making sandwiches, pouring concrete, assisting carpentry crews and helping to build airplanes at Chance Vought in Grand Prairie.

He started college with his father's financial blessing - a single $20 bill, placed in his shirt pocket a moment before the car pulled away.When he graduated after only three years, he returned to the East Texas oil fields while waiting to be drafted.He served 21 months in the Army during the Korean War, though he never saw action in Korea.He then enrolled at Baylor University, obtaining a master's degree in educational psychology in 1959.He says he paid his way through Baylor by running an all-night gas station in Waco.

After Baylor, it was on to Houston, where for several years he worked for an oil company and then the railroad while pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Houston.Before he finished, though, he ended up at Sam Houston High, where he taught for four years until The Last Picture Show became the springboard to a new beginning.

A new sorrow

In 1956, Mr. Willingham married Doris Humphrey, with whom he has a daughter named Stori.While living in Burbank, Calif., he and his wife said goodbye to their only child, who left to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley.

He says his wife started "actin' a little funny" when his daughter went to college.
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Seven years ago, when the producers of Walker, Texas Ranger approached him about playing C.D. Parker, Mr. Willingham jumped at the chance.
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"Few people know the incredibly intelligent side of Noble Willingham.I think he got to a point where he asked himself, 'What else in this life really interests me?' And one career he he'd never pursued, out of the many that he has pursued, was politics.It was one thing he'd always wanted to do, so why not?It might seem odd for some pe