Weems was a meticulous re searcher as well as a skillful writer who tried as much as possible to let the people he wrote about tell the story.
He used the same approach in books like 'Men Without Countries,' which tells the stories of Philip Nolan, James Wilkinson and Peter Ellis Bean, three opportunists who lived exciting lives but re mained always loyal to the highest bidder.
For his book on Texas history, Weems used the diaries, journals and letters of settlers like Samuel Augustus Maverick and his wife Mary - along with a dozen or so others - to create a pano ramic history of those pivo tal and turbulent times.
'Dialogue is used,' Weems told an interviewer in 1970. 'But it is only direct quotations of written material left by the speakers.'
Readers were left with such a feeling of immediacy that some of his books were occasionally mislabeled as novels. In time, the use of fiction al techniques in the writing of non-fiction would become known, at Tom Wolfe's urging, as 'the New Journal ism.'
Later, a documentary filmmaker named Ken Burns would use the same techniques to tell the story of the Civil War as well as the histories of baseball, jazz and the Lewis and Clark Expedi tions.
Weems was telling his stories in that manner as early as 1957, when his first book, 'A Weekend in September,' was published.
In that book, Weems recount ed the hour-by-hour horror of the 1900 Galveston hurricane. It remains his best-known book, and has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in the wake of the Erik Larson best seller 'Isaac's Storm' about the same hurricane, and last year's double-whammy of hur ricanes Katrina and Rita.
Roger Weems, a schoolteacher and minister in the Dallas area, was John Edgar Weems' first cousin. He said friends and family called the writer 'Eddie Jr.' to distinguish him from his equally distinguished father, Eddie Weems, Sr. a teacher, minister and track coach of some note.
'He (Eddie, Jr.) was a quiet and almost painfully shy man but when he sat down to write he came alive,' Roger Weems said last week. 'His historical prose was just so vivid. He used to say, 'I'm not making anything up. I'm just turning a phrase.''
Weems was well acquainted with Bell County. J. Eddie Weems, Sr. was born in the old Bell community of Stringtown and graduated from Temple High School in 1918.
The elder Weems was a track star at Texas Christian University, and later started a highly successful track and field program at Abilene Christian University where his ACU teams won eight consecutive Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association championships. He was also the first track coach at Pepperdine University in California and was posthumously inducted into that school's athletic Hall of Fame.
All the while, the elder Weems taught English and served various Church of Christ congregations as a minister.
After leaving California, the elder Weems and his wife, Anna Lee, bought a ranch on Deer Creek in the northern part of Bell County. Eddie Jr. took a job at the Telegram.
He had the day off from the Telegram on May 11, 1953, and was instead working laboriously with his father on the Deer Creek ranch, all the while keeping a close watch on an approaching storm. This was during the drought of the 1950s, and the Weems hoped that storm cloud would bring some rain.
When he returned home he got a call from his managing editor who asked if he could drive to Waco and investigate reports that a tornado had struck the city.
'I did, and with awe saw the desolation wrought by the very cloud we had been courting only hours earlier,' he wrote in his book 'If You Don't Like The Weather...'
'It had made a shambles of downtown Waco, demolishing brick buildings, smashing automobiles almost flat under tons of debris, and killing at least 114 persons.
'Never since that day have I yearned with quite the same ardor for a drought-breaking rainstorm.'
Weems would later turn the events of that day into another book, 'The Tornado.'
In addition to his books on Southwestern history and weather, Weems also wrote two highly acclaimed books about Arctic explorer Admiral Robert Edwin Peary.
John Edward Weems served as an assistant to the director of the University of Texas Press for a time, and was a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. An award named for him is given annually by the Institute.
His parents died in a car wreck in 1976.
Eddie Jr. died at age 74 in September of 1999. His beloved wife Jane died six months later, in March of 2000. Rogers Weems performed the funeral services for both, and both are buried in the Hillcrest Cemetery in Temple.
