We just lost a real one here in Tyler County.
My friend, and a good friend to too many folks to even begin to comprehend, Mr. Fred Sullivan, passed on to his sweet spot in the afterlife last Wednesday morning. Eighty-three years young and still keeping up a schedule that made my head spin, and still minding the store over at Sullivan’s Hardware.
The list of Fred’s achievements and all of the good he did for Woodville and Tyler County is beyond staggering. I’ll say this, though: the man lived his faith, evident in the joy he expressed and the limitless community service he performed through his life. He truly believed the Rotary International motto of “service above self.”
For brevity’s sake in this space, I want to remember my friend for one of his lifelong passions that we shared: history.
It’s still hardly possible for me, personally, to imagine a Woodville, Texas without Fred Sullivan as a part of it.
Fred was the keeper of our history here, with his scalpel-sharp mind still taking on new information all the time. He was a lifelong learner, and took his role as a historian seriously, as he did every other pursuit in which he engaged.
Woodville, Texas, which provided the fertile ground for Fred Sullivan to grow up, and to return after college and make a life, is more than the collection of buildings and the thoroughfares that cut through it. It is a collection of living stories shaped by the people who came before; people who Fred personally knew, or quite intimately, knew of, and could explain their stories and how the affected the area. Fred knew that preserving our history is not just an exercise in nostalgia, but an investment in identity, continuity and community pride.
Communities, when they understand where they come from, gain a clearer sense of why things are a certain way and what the future might hold. Fred Sullivan understood all of this. He had a giant heart for Tyler County and, especially, its county seat, and never stopped caring about the future, because he possessed volumes of information about where we’d been.
I could never imagine myself as being anything close to the world-class mind that Fred had, but from time to time people do come to me or give me a holler by phone to help them with research into some historical topic. Many times when people would stop by my office to inquire about a topic of local/regional history, if it was something with which I was not familiar, I’d send them two doors down to Fred. Usually, though, when someone asks me about research methods, I typically tell them that the best source materials are never the myriad books found on any one topic, but original newspaper reportage and letters or personal papers from those who shaped the events, if one is lucky enough to get their hands on such things.
Fred had these items – newspaper clippings, old photographs, etc. – but he rarely had to drag them out to explain a topic to folks who came to him for information. His memory could rival the Library of Alexandria, in terms of Texas history, especially, and particularly, on Tyler County
Our history, whether imprinted onto old photographs, newspaper clippings or weathered landmarks, tell stories that are seldom published into big-deal history books or textbooks, but those stories matter most to residents within our area. Fred knew all of this. He could tell you why Town Bluff ended up as a ghost town, more or less, or why certain traditions in the county have endured. He could also share how past generations of Tyler Countians endured hardship and persevered, and of opportunities here, both in the past and the potential for growth in the future.
Stories, like the ones Fred Sullivan was so gifted at telling, help anchor a community, and they serve to remind us that progress doesn’t have to come at the expense of memory.
Big box stores that pop up on the main highway did not excise the need for Fred’s hardware store, nor the need for him as our community historian. Fred was a steward in so many avenues of his life, and the archives that his mind held were always accessible to anyone willing to listen and learn.
As painful as it is to think of our lives here in Tyler County without Fred Sullivan as a part, I would like to implore everyone reading this, especially young people, to take his example, if nothing else, as a tribute. Embrace your community’s history and dedicate some of your time to preserve some aspect, or aspects, of that history before it disappears.
Knowing one’s community history is invaluable. History is so much more than just dates and facts, and without an interest in it, history too often quietly disappears. Careless hands toss away boxes full of priceless artifacts or records; voices are silenced by time’s transition and those stories are forgotten.
Whenever young people can hear first-hand accounts of how their town weathered economic downturns or natural disasters, history becomes personal, rather than some abstract concept taught from textbooks (modern classroom texts, by the way, are more like encyclopedias instead of actual history texts, but that’s another soapbox for another day).
Those stories help foster empathy, pride and encourage community involvement and a sense of shared responsibility, and I’d be remiss in not saying that teaching young people history helps bridge generational divides.
Preserving history is also about respect – respect for those who build a community, those who struggled within it and left their mark. Fred Sullivan certainly left his mark on Woodville and Tyler County and is worthy of an unquantifiable amount of respect.
