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The prize was a thousand dollars in gold pieces (plus the $200 in sales commissions). This achievement attracted national publicity, as there had been some 50,000 entrants, mostly from larger cities. He had demonstrated early business acumen by age eight by winning the grand prize in a contest selling subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post, an endeavor that involved the entire family. (Posture was a key part of this I can still hear him telling me, "Head up, shoulders back!") He built himself up in much the way promised by Charles Atlas, whose ads in the back pages of comic books promised to turn a "weakling into a He-Man," growing to a hirsute six-foot one inches and weighing in at a muscular 180 - 190 pounds throughout his life. My father's childhood was marred by illness, which weakened him but also made him determined to overcome his malady and pursue a physical fitness regime that became an integral part of his life. Two years later, the family returned to Texas, when he began work at the Republic National Bank of Dallas. In 1917, the senior Lomax left his administrative job at the University of Texas and moved to Chicago, where he had taken a job as a bond salesman.
![john and alan lomax john and alan lomax](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/lomax.jpg)
He was widely sought after as a lecturer, and as children, my father and later Alan, sometimes accompanied him on lecture tours in different parts of the country. Lomax, Sr., published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier BalladsĀ and shortly thereafter he became one of the founders of the Texas branch of the American Folklore Society and was subsequently twice elected president of the American Folklore Society. When John was three, his father, my grandfather, John A.
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The family (older sister Shirley, younger brother Alan, and younger sister Bess) lived in a two-storey house on West 26th street, overlooking Shoal Creek, with a steep, wooded hillside just beyond the backyard. John Avery Lomax, Jr., my father, was born at Seton Hospital in Austin, Texas, June 14, 1907, second child and first son of John Avery and Bess Bauman Brown Lomax.