Kinky Friedman: Any Man Who Treats His Dogs Well is Good By Me!

According to The New Yorker interview:

Leaving Houston, Kinky stopped briefly in Austin, and then drove off to Echo Hill Ranch for a rest. Echo Hill is a four-hundred-acre property in the Texas Hill Country, about an hour and a half west of Austin. Kinky's parents bought Echo Hill in 1952, and founded a children's summer camp there that became an important summer community for Jewish Texans. The elder Friedmans, the children of Polish and Russian immigrants, who spent their lives as educators, ran it until they died; Kinky's sister, who works for the State Department, helped run the place for years, and now his brother, a psychologist, has taken over.

The Friedmans moved to Texas from Chicago in 1945, a year after Kinky's birth. (Of Chicago, Kinky, who was born Richard Friedman, has written, “I lived there one year, couldn't find work, and moved to Texas, where I haven't worked since.”) Echo Hill is the site of many of Kinky's happiest memories, and when he's not on the road he spends most of his time there, in a small, slightly dilapidated one-story lodge, decorated with old Jewboy posters and countless photographs of his family and friends. He putters around, refills the hummingbird feeders that his mother put out decades ago, takes phone calls. He makes occasional trips into town, but not often. He lives alone, except for four profoundly unruly dogs whom he calls the Friedmans and on whom he dotes as if they were grandchildren. Over a meal of steak and beans—in fact every meal we ate at the ranch was steak and beans—the dogs are likely to end up with most of the steak while Kinky gets the beans.