January 2008 Issue

Del Rio businessman/outdoorsman Kurt Lemp is also a happy amateur chef in his own kitchen. This month’s recipe comes from the Lemp household, with his indulgent wife, Elaine, helping prepare a meal fresh centered around white-winged doves, fresh from local ranch fields and watering holes.

H.T. Langford doesn’t do anything fancy at Regency Chevrolet—no pressure, just consumer-oriented car sales. It’s got to be that way to survive in the car business the way Regency Chevrolet has.

Smack in the middle of Sonora, the Eaton Hill Wildlife Sanctuary is a 37-acre slice of West Texas as it used to be.

Maj. Gen. Gerald Prather (USAF, retired) took up permanent residence in Del Rio 21 years ago, not only because of his roots at Laughlin Air Force Base and a family that grew from and in Del Rio, but because he loves the community and the people in it that support his beloved U.S. Air Force. For 32 years, Prather wandered the globe in service to his country, and now that energy is focused locally, with no less intensity. Here, he is known simply as “The General.”

Ranchers. The term itself sounds like an anachronism. But the proud few who cling to old traditions – and find ways to make a little money doing it – defend their choices with generations-old customs they choose to practice and preserve. Jack and Missy Harrington honor European ancestors who arrived here to peaceably raise cattle and sheep after southern slave-holders and northern industrialists stopped killing each other in this country’s Civil War. (Warning: Graphic Pictures)

Jack Skiles, one Val Verde County’s most respected, polished and civic-minded stewards of the land and the people who have lived on it for thousands of years, recounts his life in Langtry, Texas, protecting the vast limestone bowl below his home. Eagle Nest Canyon is not only sheep and goat range, but a repository of clues to world-famous, ancient cultural mysteries.

Brothers Kerr and George Wardlaw have pledged their allegiance to the family spread, the Martin Wardlaw White Ranch, not far from Dolan Falls and the Devils River watershed in northwestern Val Verde County. Both men intend to live on the land their ancestors pioneered, and keep it profitable.