On September 15, 1936, Jimmy Paul McLaughlin was born in a one-room, dirt-floored farm worker’s shack at a place called Broadview Gin, Lubbock County, Texas. His parents, Paul Rufus and Elsie Eileen McLaughlin left Ringgold, Texas, and planned to work their way to California. They stopped in Lubbock for two years, and Jimmy Paul came. They were still saving for California when, less than two years later, Jerry Dwayne was born. Less than a year after that a baby girl, Carol Ann, completed the family and used the last of the California money.
Jimmy Paul was always glad they never made it to California. His father, Paul, hoboed his way out there during the depression, and considered it the “land of milk and honey”. He wanted to go back there to put down roots and build a life, but the needs of a wife and three children forced him to put down his roots and build a life in the hard, dry dirt of the Texas Panhandle.
So far as Jim McLaughlin is concerned, it was the generous, kindly hand of fate that kept them in Lubbock. In Jim’s mind, there was no better place to live or a better time to grow up than Lubbock in the forties and fifties. Jim graduated from Lubbock High School, along with 525 others, on May 27, 1955, and attended Texas Tech, off and on, for the next seven years.
Although several teachers encouraged him to write, Jim wanted to build a construction company from the ground up, and his heart just was not in the academic world. He took time off from college to join the Marine Corps, and later, dropped out of school. After working for a year in Las Vegas, Nevada, he moved to Dallas, then to Houston and began his career in construction.
Fast forward thirty years. Jim retired and escaped Houston to the Texas Hill Country. He realized most of his ambitions. His company did prestigious work from coast to coast. Jim traveled extensively for business and for pleasure and developed close friendships with varied and interesting people.
To this day, his best friends are the guys he ran around with in high school. The Lubbock Boys he grew up with have stayed in touch with each other and remain close friends. All of them went their separate ways, built their families and careers, and kept in distant touch with each other. At times, their lives kept them apart for several years, but when they reconnected, it was a simple matter to pick up an old and valued friendship.