Cowboy poet Red Steagall chats with the legendary lawman of McLennan County, Texas, Sheriff Parnell McNamara.
Red Stegall: Parnell, thanks for joining us and taking the time. I know that being a sheriff, you’ve got to be busier than the dickens.
Parnell McNamara: Red, I’d rather be here than back there doing my work.
Red: Tell us about your background and how you grew up.
Parnell: I grew up in a law enforcement family. 2022 [marked] 120 years that our family has been in law enforcement in Texas, starting in 1902 with my great-uncle, Guy McNamara. He was a constable. He later became the chief of police at Waco. And then Franklin Roosevelt, our President, appointed him the head United States Marshal for the whole Western District, which went from Centerville to El Paso.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
His brother — my grandfather, Emmett Parnell — was a deputy sheriff in Waco in 1905, and then he later became a marshal. My father, T.P. McNamara, was the chief deputy sheriff in Waco when he was 21 years old. He became a deputy U.S. Marshal in 1942, and he put in almost 37 years with the U.S. Marshal Service. People ask me, “How did you get to be a U.S. Marshal?” I said, “It wasn't any great thing I did; I just inherited the job.” My brother, Mike, and I hired on with the U.S. Marshals in October of 1970 right out of Baylor [University]. Mike and I had actually been working as guards for my father all through high school and college starting in January of 1963 when I was 16 years old.
Red: I remember you told me one time that if your dad was transporting a fugitive somewhere, you guys would ride in the backseat with him and play cards with him.
Parnell: Both my parents were big snow skiers. He had to take a prisoner to the prison in Englewood, Colorado, so we all loaded up. I was in the sixth grade, Mike was fifth, and our little sister’s in first grade. Mike and I were in the back with the criminal, a bank robber. We had all these snow skis on top of my dad’s Cadillac. We pulled up to the prison and he walked him in. Of course, we’d been talking to him all the way up there. And he told us he was friends with Elvis Presley. He had one of those big peckerwood hairdos like Elvis. I assume he was friends with Elvis. He told us how many Cadillacs he had. His name was Ted.
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“The Bell On Old Blue”
Let me tell you a story ’bout a tarnished
old bell—
It’s in the hands of Grant Speed, my
good friend—
A graphic reminder of the glorious
West
And of horses and cattle and men.
It hung ‘round the neck of an old
Goodnight steer,
The big one the cowboys called Blue.
The Colonel had got him on the
Bosque from Chisum
In the winter of ’72.
The Colonel sent thousands of steers
up the trail.
They learned to follow that bell day
and night.
At sundown the boss put a strap on the
clapper
So the steers would stay bedded and
quiet.
If Old Blue got restless and started to
roam,
There’d be a stampede sure as hell.
The cattle would immediately be on
their feet
And move toward the sound of the bell.
Excerpted from Ride For the Brand: The Poetry and Songs of Red Steagall (1993, TCU Press).
From our November/December 2024 issue.
Red Steagall is the Official Cowboy Poet of Texas. Find the full episode of Red Steagall Is Somewhere West of Wall Street, featuring the conversation with Parnell McNamara, at Cowboy Channel +.
HEADER: Sheriff Parnell McNamara, left, discusses his life and career with cowboy poet Red Steagall.
