our history: LONGHORNS
The Longhorn Man With
The Dude Ranch Dream
An 18-year-old with Montana on
his mind ends up in Cowtown and
eventually moseys on out to rural
Parker County and the good life.
H
e didn’t make Montana back in ’66. But he meant to
… I believe that.
“I graduated on a Tuesday night and I left at 8 o’clock
the next morning with a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket,”
Pat “P.R.” Potts recalled. “I was headed for Missoula,
Montana. Me and another boy had a job up there at a
dude ranch. He got sidetracked by a good-looking young
girl and couldn’t make the trip. But I was going on. In my
18-year-old mind, I wanted to be up there with all those
good-looking girls at the dude ranch. I was going to take
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BY MEL W RHODES
care of the horses and all those girls were just going to
love me. That’s what an 18-year-old boy thinks.”
Perhaps Pat was a bit girl-crazy, an d maybe with good
reason. His graduating class at Sterling City, Texas, num-
bered 14 with only three girls in the lot.
He barely made the New Mexico line before his
plans were hijacked. The road to the Big Sky Country ran
through Hobbs, NM, where he stopped to visit his half-
brother, Bob, no doubt to regale him with talk of his great
expectations, amorous and otherwise. Perhaps he’d send a