December 2025 | By Tumbleweed Smith

Author

Tumbleweed Smith

Born in 1935 in Waco, Texas, Bob Lewis broadcast across Texas and adopted the name Tumbleweed Smith in 1970.

Kenneth Tidwell of Andrews grew up in the nearby town of Wink.

“I was raised over there and started to school over there and graduated over there,” he says. “I started working in a barber shop shining shoes when I was fifteen. A shine was a dime. I had lots of customers. Back then all the men wore leather shoes and kept them shined. Now they wear tennis shoes.”

One of his school mates was Roy Orbison who sang and played his guitar in front of a drug store.

“He’d sit out there on the sidewalk and perform. People would come by and buy him ice cream and cokes. He formed a little band called the Wink Westerners and they played around Wink and in nearby towns. He was something else. He knew what he wanted and went after it. Just before he went off to Nashville, he told a local grocer that the next time he would see him he’d be driving a Cadillac. The grocer said ‘Roy, you’d be lucky to even see the inside of a Cadillac.’”

“Roy was gone for a long time and became famous. He came back to Wink with two Cadillacs. He went to the grocer and asked him ‘would you like to see the inside of my Cadillac?’ The grocer replied with a laugh ‘you got me.’”

After high school Kenneth went to Hardin Simmons for three semesters then joined the Army and went to Korea where he served on the front lines.

“We’d go up front and stay so long then come back and another company would go up there. It was bad over there. I saw some terrible sights. I felt real lucky that I wasn’t wounded. When I came back home, I went to work in the oil field. I worked on drilling rigs a long time, then worked on pulling rigs.”

When things got slow in the oil patch he got a job as a painter.

“When they interviewed me, they asked me if I could run a sandblaster. I had never even seen a sandblaster. I told them sure. I needed a job.”

Later he had his own sandblasting business. Then he met a girl who lived in Kermit, forty-eight miles from Andrews.

“I dated her for three weeks driving back and forth every day. One weekend I told her I’m not driving over here anymore. Let’s go to Andrews Monday and get married. Her mother asked me if I was crazy. I said no, that we were in love and wanted to be together.”

They became husband and wife and had two children, a boy and a girl. They both live nearby. Kenneth is 92 years old.

“I’m still contract pumping some oil wells out here,” he says. “I go pumping every morning seven days a week. I’ll probably still be pumping when I’m a hundred and two.”