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RICK SMITH: Stories of an unusual West Texas legend
By Rick Smith
San Angelo Standard Times
Posted July 6, 2013 at 8:28 p.m.
SAN ANGELO, Texas — While searching the Internet for information about our oil boom I
rediscovered a West Texas legend.
You know you’re from McCamey if you have a story about Pansy Carpenter.
My story starts in McCamey’s Mendoza Trail Museum years ago. I spotted a red children’s
wagon among the artifacts and wondered what it was doing there.
“That was Pansy’s,” the curator told me.
The legend of Pansy Carpenter, an eccentric, reclusive woman, still lives in McCamey and
elsewhere in West Texas.
Here’s how much we know for sure: She was born in Oklahoma in 1894 and died in 1972. She
came to McCamey about the time oil was discovered in 1925. That’s fact.
Legend says Pansy and her husband traveled to McCamey with a circus troupe. During one of
the McCamey performances Pansy and her husband fell from the high wire. He died. She
suffered a serious head injury and never really recovered.
True story? Who knows.
For reasons only Pansy knew, she left the circus after her husband’s death and built
herself a small house out of scrap lumber in McCamey.
She also built shacks in her yard and rented them to oil field workers who then — as now —
had trouble finding housing during the boom. When she ran out of rental shacks Pansy
emptied shells of abandoned cars and rented them to truly desperate workers in need of
shelter.
The stories go on and on. Some claim she had a fortune and regularly walked the
90-something miles to San Angelo to consult with her banker.
Others said she once pulled her little red wagon to San Angelo, bought a commode, and
pulled it back home.
There’s no question Pansy was odd.
As one former McCamey resident once put it, “Pansy was quite the town character.”
Townspeople regularly saw her pulling the wagon around town, picking through trash others
threw away.
The sight of the woman picking through trash scared some residents, but she never bothered
the townspeople, and they didn’t bother her.
When Pansy could no longer pull her wagon, she left McCamey. She died at age 78 in
Kerrville, where several of her family members lived. Pansy was buried in the Oak Rest
Cemetery in Medina County.
And her legend lives on.