Cuero -- The last living child of Babe and Mary Rickman has died. Homer Jackson "Jack" Rickman, 92, was a plowboy, a cowboy, and a cotton mill hand with so many good stories he just had to share them.

For much of his life, he was a farmer-rancher from Cuero in partnership with his wife Alma Opal Dromgoole Rickman. In another life – had his pretty-darn-good knuckle ball been in reality what it was for daydreams – he might've been a re-known baseball pitcher from New York City with his beloved Yankees.

However, he did become a baseball pro. In a sense. He had an uncanny ability to recall the game's minutiae that were seldom noted else quickly forgotten by most folks.

That easy recall made him a baseball "star" of sorts around many campfires shared during late-night fox/wolf hunts across South Texas with the likes of Clinton Wright, Homer Wright, Frazier McCracken, Bill Luker, Newt Gohmert, Walter Pieper, Ben Parma, and many occasional others. However, the thrill of his hound dogs – Beauty and Squeaky were all-time favorites – "striking a trail" was sure to put to bed baseball trivia for the rest of any hunt night.

Never was the Grand Ole Opry, a Bluegrass music event, or an "Ol' Fiddlers Contest" too far away, so long as someone else would drive. While riding his cowpony to a pasture six miles out the Stratton Road in 1948, Jack lost his (never-to-be-recovered) wallet containing a dollar bill and his driver license. He grieved that lost dollar bill, but decided he really wouldn't miss the driver license – so long as he had a wife who liked to drive and a Vela saddle to throw on a good-riding horse (of which Pablo was the best).

Early on Jack had started riding horses. When only four or five years old, he herded turkeys and poults out to graze along the Navidad River bottoms. He was fond of saying that even though he spent all day following his family's turkeys – bare-footed – for 10 to 15 miles, he never walked a step; "I rode," he would say. "As smooth a ride as I ever had; all day long on my stick horse."

He could introduce any interested child to most all flora and fauna in his countryside by their common names. After years spent shooting squirrel, dove, and deer, he gave away his guns and disavowed such killing later in life. Rather, he found great pleasures, he said, in things like incubating a nest of eggs rescued from a mower accident and then having that covey of quail following their "mother" (him) around the pastures.

The fourth Jack Rickman was born in the home of his parents Andrew Jackson (Babe / Jack) Rickman III and Mary Frances Hall Rickman, on the east bank of the Navidad, across the river from Rickman Chapel community in Lavaca County, Texas. He was birthed on Nov. 4, 1916 with grandmothers Mary Ellen Works Rickman and Frances "Fannie" Wood Hall assisting as midwifes. He died on December 12, 2008, in Cuero, Texas.

Rickman Chapel community centered around the early Methodist church of the same name built on a site provided by the first Andrew Jackson Rickman, godson and namesake of the war hero who would become the 7th President of the United States.

Joshua Rickman, father of the first Jack, was a Tennessee pioneer and the protégé of his older cousin Howell Tatum (the one-time Tennessee Supreme Court Judge and Nashville attorney who, at the behest of his friend Gen. Jackson, served as the topographical engineer for the General's Battle of New Orleans campaign). Joshua Rickman was guided by Tatum in participation with Jackson and George Deaderick in settling Tennessee through North Carolina's land grants to Revolutionary War veterans.

The first Jack Rickman and his wife Martha Lay (along with her uncle Allen Garrison Lay and his family as neighbors) moved to Lavaca County, Texas in the early 1850s. They settled on the Navidad River to grow cotton and develop land. During the Civil War, Rickman and Lay braved the dangers of the "Cotton Road" to circumvent the Union blockade and deliver their "King Cotton" – both raised and brokered – by wagon trains to the international market at Bagdad, Tamaulipas, Mexico. The grave dangers they faced from robbers and thieves were such that on one of those trips, Allen Garrison Lay was buried on the King Ranch.

Some ancestors, including Methodist circuit rider Nathaniel Nelson Graves Allen, were in Texas by the early 1820s, making Homer Jackson Rickman a seventh generation Texan. Even earlier, though, his immigrant ancestors Nathaniel Tatum and Cheney Boyce were accorded Ancient Planter status for their roles, between 1610 and 1618, in making Jamestown the first successful Anglo colony in North America.

On Feb. 6, 2005, Jack was preceded in death by his wife Opal after 68-plus years of marriage. Their survivors include three sons, their families, and others:

·Jackie and Laney Rickman (Cuero), Che Rickman Crawford and husband Matt and their daughter Sway Opal Crawford (Houston);

·Charlie and Sharon Rickman (Hungerford), his children Robin Rickman (Victoria), and Jay Rickman (Rockport) and Jay's daughters Chelsea and Jacie Rickman (Yorktown);

·Derryl and Linda Rickman (Victoria), Jack Roger Rickman (Dallas), Kimberly Rickman and her son Steven Rickman (Victoria), and Jonathan and Kara Rickman (Boerne);

·Emily Martinez, the daughter they never had and the longtime provider of loving care to each of them.

·Sylvia Rickman Police of San Antonio and many other nieces and nephews.

In addition to parents and wife, Homer Jackson "Jack" Rickman was preceded in death by four brothers (Koyn Autry, Earl Woodly "Mac", Richard Thomas "R.T.", and Walter Lee) and four sisters (Ethel Corrine Schilhab, Frances Ellen Criswell, Lena Merle Whiddon, and Virgie Catherine Rickman). All were born in Rickman Chapel, Texas, community before the post-WWI Farm Depression eventually forced a decision to sell the family's depressed agriculture holdings and, in 1929, migrate to Cuero to work for wages at Guadalupe Valley Cotton Mill.

A graveside memorial service and interment of Jack Rickman's cremains will be held on February 6, 2009, in Hillside Cemetery, Cuero.