Leon Tanner with Mary Kemp on her 80th birthday
watch the sunset and talk things
over. I do that now with my kids and
grandkids. When the city re-did the
square, they wanted to take those out
but I didn’t let them. It wouldn’t be
the same without them.” Judy began
referring to her brother and herself as
the “Square Brats.” “Then our kids
came along and they were Square
Brats; now the grandkids are the
Square Brats,” she said.
Mary and V.E. Kemp bought the
Shaw-Kemp Ranch in 1975. Mr.
Shaw called Mary Kemp out of the
blue one day and told her, “I am not
going to live much longer and I want
you to buy my place.”
They bought the 400-acre ranch.
“We signed a document that says
that we will never sell the property
for a subdivision. We never have.
When my husband died, Judy bought
the propane business.”
Mary Kemp loves to tell the story
about the time her husband was out
hunting when he became exhausted
and took a short snooze with his
head resting on a rock.
“When he woke up,” Mary Kemp
said, “he noticed that the rock he was
resting on was really a tombstone.”
When he came home and told
his wife, they went out to take a
closer look. The headstone was
one of many. “It was so sad to me
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
White. “It was a major deal. Mother
was quizzing him on the road trip
down there. He just had to pass that
test. She’d ask the questions and he’d
give the answer. After a while, I knew
the answers so when mother would
ask the questions, I started blurting
out the answers. I was in trouble.
My parents didn’t think that was
funny.” V.E. Kemp, of course, passed
his exam on the first try and Texas
Butane was in business.
By 1964, the Kemps owned
Texas Butane in its entirety and Mary
Kemp worked for the company fulltime. “My children were little then,”
Mary Kemp said. “They would ride
their scooters in front of the office
and in the back alleys of downtown
Weatherford. There was a drug store
where Downtown Café is now. They
had the run of downtown and everyone knew them. I never had to worry
about somebody harming them. It
wasn’t like that back then.”
Judy has fond memories of growing up with her brother at the family
business. “They were all nice to
us. The people on the square have
always been like a family. The thing
that I remember most is about those
metal footings in front of the office,”
Judy said. “At night I’d go out and sit
out on the steps in the evening and
talk about things with my dad. We’d
JANUARY 2016
engaged in November of 1944,”
Mary Kemp recalls. “He came home
in March of 1945. The day he arrived
is the day we were married,” she
said. “My father was working for
General Dynamics and couldn’t get
off work.” The pair didn’t waste any
time becoming man and wife.
“We got our marriage license at
4 o’clock and we got married at 8
o’clock,” Mary Kemp said. ”I lived
at Mrs. Swafford’s house, the house
that later became J.A. Bagwell’s
studio. Mrs. Swafford and her
daughter picked bluebonnets for my
bridal bouquet. My mother and I had
bought an orchid jacket and skirt, a
pink blouse and pink hat.”
They were married at Couts
Memorial United Methodist Church,
the building that is now GalbreaithPickard Funeral Chapel. Their
honeymoon was spent in Parker
County. “The next day we walked
around town,” said Mary. “That’s
what we did—we walked around
town. We had seven whole days
before he had to leave. We were
thinking he was going off to
war.” Instead of going to battle, V.E.
was shipped off to Mississippi, then
he headed for California. From there
he was to be shipped to the Pacific
Theater. But he never faced enemy
fire. He served out the remainder of his hitch in the occupied
Philippines and came home in June
of 1946. Mary Kemp recalls they
went broke in the cattle business
in the early 1950s and bought into
a Humble service station on Fort
Worth Highway. Mary said she and
V.E. worked six days a week from 6
o’clock in the morning and until 9
o’clock at night. “Our lives were full
of work,” she recalled. The Kemps
and their two children, Rusty and
Judy, lived in a house at the back of
the station. In 1958, they founded
Texas Butane, still a fixture on the
Weatherford Square. Their daughter
Judy and son-in-law Morris White
run the business today. Mary Kemp
also worked for the superintendent
of Weatherford Public Schools for
18 years. “I remember riding down
to Austin with my mother and daddy
when Daddy was going to take his
test (for his state license to operate
a butane business),” said Judy Kemp
27