The nucleus of the group consisted of writers Bud Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, Pete Gent and Larry L. King along with actor Dennis Hopper and singer/ songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker.
At a time when most of these men had established strong profession al reputations and somewhat scan dalous personal ones, they got to gether and decided to buy a town where they could do whatever they wanted without a lot of interference from authorities.
After all, it would be their town. Or so the reasoning went.
The first town they decided to buy was Shafter, an abandoned mining town in West Texas. That didn't work out, so they started looking at Sisterdale, in the Hill Coun try. The asking price was $60,000, but once the real estate agent got a look at the men, the price went up to $600,000.
'Well, ol' Molly in the office, she never was never too good with them zeroes,' the agent explained when the Mad Dogs balked at the sudden jump in the asking price.
Finally, the Mad Dogs decided to check out Theon, in Williamson County, just south of Corn Hill and north of Walburg.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Shrake, Cartwright and maybe a couple of other Mad Dogs (particulars are sometimes hard to pin down with this group) went to Theon and spent the day with a real estate agent, looking the town over. They liked what they saw just fine, then dropped by the Squirrel Inn to discuss their proposed purchase.
It's hard to imagine a group of free-spirited writers and artists of this ilk making a go of it in Williamson County, which takes its reputation as a law-and-order place quite seriously. The sign above the courthouse steps reads: 'Watch Your Step' and it is meant figuratively as well as literally.
According to accounts by Shrake and Cartwright, the evening at the Squirrel Inn was going along just fine until Shrake decided to pour a pitcher of ice water into his scotch.
'The barmaid wasn't there and it's not really a luxurious place, and there was a refrigerator and I took out what I thought was a pitcher of ice water and I poured this much scotch in there and then I filled the rest of it up with ice water,' Shrake recalled in a 2001 interview. 'I was quite thirsty and I just slugged it down.'
What Shrake thought was ice water turned out to be kerosene. Coal oil, it was called. The barmaid returned to the scene to find Shrake in extremis
.
'All of a sudden I was dying,' Shrake recalled. 'This was it for me.'
The barmaid ran outside and came back with a pitcher of goat's milk - the antidote.
Shrake was laid out in the back seat of his van, on the way to the nearest hospital, when the van was pulled over by a DPS trooper. Things deteriorated from that point as Cartwright got into a scuffle with the trooper.
Shrake, observing all this from the backseat, reviewing his life, and thinking, 'We're all dead now. I'm going to die and they're going to kill him.'
No one died.
Instead, the inebriated Mad Dogs and the inebriated and poisoned Shrake were taken to the Williamson County jail, where Shrake used his phone call to summon a doctor who arrived on the scene and, for reasons that are unclear, administered amphetamines to Shrake.
Shrake bounced around his jail cell and rather specifically rued the day before being released the next morning.
'Three towns. That's all we tried,' Shrake said. 'After Theon, I lost my desire.'
Shrake recovered sufficiently to write the best-selling sports book of all time, 'Harvey Penick's Little Red Book,' biographies of Barry Switzer and Willie Nelson and 'Borderlands,' a novel that was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the year's 10 best works of fiction.
Theon survived its close call with Texas' gonzo artists just fine, and remains much the same as it was when Mad Dogs' ill-conceived plans were hatched.
The Squirrel Inn has been replaced by the Possum Creek Inn.
No one, as far as can be ascertained, has mixed Scotch with kerosene since Shrake tried it back in those screw-loose and fancy free days.
