WORLD-OBITS-L Archives

From: "Peter_McCrae" <>
Subject: MAYSEL: Lou Maysel-19/11/2005>usa
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 23:42:15 -0000

AUSTIN,TX
Former sports editor was authority on UT football
Lou Maysel 1923-2005


Saturday, November 19, 2005

Lou Maysel, sports editor of the Austin American-Statesman from 1956 to 1977
and a columnist thereafter until his retirement in 1988, was an
authoritative historian of University of Texas Longhorns football.

Maysel, whose two-volume history, "Here Come The Longhorns," was the first
definitive history of the game from its inception at UT in 1893 through
1977, died Friday at Brackenridge Hospital.

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He suffered from a brain hemorrhage caused by a fall Thursday night on a
staircase at Lost Creek Country Club. He was 82.

"He was kind of like your friend," said James Street, quarterback of the
Longhorns' national championship team in 1969. "He was not intrusive at all;
he was gentle. You felt comfortable talking to him."

Former Longhorns football coach Darrell Royal remembered Maysel as a man he
could trust to keep his confidences.

"I remember in tough situations," Royal said, "I used to be able to tell Lou
the whole story and give my side of it, and then say, 'Lou, now I'm on the
record.' He never violated that."

Maysel was an honorary inductee in the UT Longhorns Hall of Honor.

He was born on his family's farm a few miles north of Brenham in the summer
of 1923, the eldest of three children. Their father, who had been disabled
as a soldier in World War I, spent most of his time at an Army hospital in
San Antonio. He died when Lou was 10.

By then, the family lived in Austin.

"Their first home was on the spot where Gregory Gym now stands," said his
son Kent Maysel, 45, of Austin. "So he lived right next to the 40 Acres."

His mother took in laundry and did other domestic work to raise her two sons
and a daughter.

"He never really told me a lot about her," Kent Maysel said, "except that
she had tremendous personal strength and she raised the family the best she
could."

Lou Maysel graduated from Austin High School, where he was the 11th player
on a 12-player basketball team. He attended UT but his class work was
interrupted by World War II. From 1942 to 1946, he served as a radar
repairman at an Army Air Corps base in Greenland where bombers made
refueling stops en route from American factories to England.

He met his wife, Naomi Hegar, of Temple, the daughter of a minister in the
Czech-Moravian Church, when they were both majoring in journalism at UT.
They married in San Antonio in 1950, a year after he had graduated from UT
and begun work as a sports writer and copy editor at the Corpus Christi
Caller-Times.

They had two sons, Kyle and Kent, and Lou went on to be a sportswriter for
the San Antonio Express-News and the Waco Tribune-Herald before moving the
family to Austin, where he was named sports editor of the American-Statesman
in February 1956. He spent the rest of his life in a home he had built for
the family in South Austin.

Texas men's Athletics Director DeLoss Dodds first met Maysel at the Texas
Relays when Dodds was coaching track at Kansas State.

"He was just the best there was," Dodds said. "When you'd come to the Texas
Relays, he was part of the deal."

Although his family had immigrated to the United States from Germany in the
1880s, Maysel was an American Civil War buff who enjoyed attending meetings
of the 250-member Civil War Roundtable at the Lost Creek Country Club. He
was there Thursday night for a lecture when he lost his balance on a
staircase and suffered the brain hemorrhage.

"He didn't trust his driving at night, so I was giving him rides to the
roundtable," said his friend, Austin retiree Hubert Booher. "He seemed to be
very knowledgable about the history of the war."

Maysel's brother, sister, and wife preceded him in death. He is survived by
his sons, Kent Maysel of Austin, and Kyle Maysel of San Marcos.

The family said he requested that there not be a funeral or memorial
service, and that his remains be cremated and interred at a private ceremony
at an Austin cemetery.

For all of his years in sportswriting, and his fond association with UT
sports, Lou Maysel really wasn't the ultra fan, Kent Maysel said.

"He saw sports journalism as a job and a career," Kent Maysel said. "But he
had great affection for the university in general and the sports program
there."

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