This former Star-Telegram paperboy is headed to the Texas Radio Hall of Fame

As a youngster, Tumbleweed Smith delivered the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to mansions on Broad Avenue, the wooded street where the paper’s publisher Amon G. Carter lived.

“Amon wanted two copies every day at 6:20 a.m., and he was always there waiting for me,” Tumbleweed, now 90 years old, recalled. “I tried never to be late. He would greet me wearing a white starched shirt with a little spur tie tack from Nathan’s jewelers in San Angelo. They gave that tie tack to all the influential people.

“I don’t know whether that paper route had anything to do with my ending up in journalism, but maybe,” he mused.

A baritone-voiced radio personality, Tumbleweed — whose given name is Bob Smith Lewis — followed his famous customer into journalism and is still spreading the news.

On Nov. 1, he will be inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame in Kilgore for his syndicated show, “The Sound of Texas.” Since 1969, Tumbleweed’s broadcasts have aired five days a week on small-town stations from the Piney Woods to the West Texas mountains. Each program features twangs and drawls from Lone Star storytellers who describe their penchants and pastimes, their folk tales and folk remedies.

On Oct. 15, Tumbleweed was in The Woodlands receiving the Media Award from the Country Music Association of Texas. Twelve years ago, he was honored with a bronze star in the Fort Worth Stockyards Texas Trail of Fame. His collection of 14,000 oral-history interviews is destined for the Texas Archives at Baylor University.

Tumbleweed, who called Fort Worth home from 1944 to 1953 and again in the 1960s, now lives with his wife Susan in Big Spring, seven counties west of Fort Worth. He has crisscrossed Texas hundreds of times since his sunrise stops at Amon Carter’s mansion — an architectural landmark constructed in 1912 and bulldozed in 2013.

Surprisingly, the modest, white stucco home where Tumbleweed grew up on a corner in Arlington Heights still stands. The one-story house, constructed in 1923 at 3700 Mattison St., has become a dining landmark.

“Right now that’s a fancy, Italian restaurant — Piola,” Tumbleweed chuckled.

When he and Susan wandered into Piola Restaurant and Garden several years ago and he introduced himself as a former resident, the excited staff showed him around.

“They greeted us real warmly. Took us on a tour,” he said. “I saw my mother and daddy’s old bedroom and the bedroom that my brother and I shared.’’ The shaded backyard, where he and his kid brother, Jerry, played fetch with their dog, has been transformed into a “real fine outdoor dining area.”

The cozy house with it’s A-framed entrance is four blocks west of another landmark, North Hi Mount Elementary. It opened in 1936 and is where Tumbleweed walked to school.

The family’s old homestead is three blocks north of the red bricks that pave Camp Bowie Boulevard and a short walk to the Bowie Theater, which opened in 1941 with a Gary Cooper film. It closed in 1982 with Star Trek II. The distinctive Art Moderne building still has its vertical, neon sign. Instead of a movie screen and a slanted floor, the interior is a sleek branch of Frost Bank.

In its heyday, the cinema accommodated 900 movie goers. Scattered throughout the auditorium were “love seats, two-seaters,” Tumbleweed said with a smile. “If you had a girlfriend you’d sit with her. ”

His most memorable night at the movies was in September of 1967 when an outing to the Bowie — with his wife and 3-year-old son, Kevin — turned into a front-page story in the Star-Telegram.

A movie experience to remember at the Bowie Theater

The family had purchased tickets for Shirley McClain’s satirical romance “Woman Times Seven,” a Golden Globes nominee advertised “for mature audiences.” Susan was so absorbed in the adulterous romances on the screen that she kept twisting the wedding ring on her finger.

Suddenly, “she gasped,” wrote George Dolan, the Star-Telegram’s legendary page-one columnist. “The ring had dropped in the darkened theater.”

Tumbleweed, Susan, and Kevin “began prowling around, under seats, looking for the ring. Three ushers joined them with flashlights.”

There was such a commotion that the projector stopped. The house lights came on. Others joined in the search, to no avail. Eventually, the theater darkened, and the movie resumed.

But, “something else was missing,” according to the Star-Telegram. The family’s 3-year-old son Kevin had climbed “on the stage, in front of the screen” and was prancing around, creating a menacing shadow. Tumbleweed “hurried forward and grabbed Kevin,” who cried. He took the boy to his parents’ home a few blocks away and returned.

Susan, anxious about her wedding ring and embarrassed by her son, was on the verge of tears.

When the show ended and the house lights once again came on, “there was the ring, two rows in front” of the family’s seats. “One of these days,” the Star-Telegram predicted, they “are going back and see that picture.”

They never did.

Hollace Weiner, an author, archivist and director of the Fort Worth Jewish Archives, was a full-time Star-Telegram reporter from 1986 to 1997.