Page 44 - Senior Link Magazine Winter 2024 - Online Magazine
P. 44
LOCAL LEGENDS
The Lord Had a
Different Idea
The Polk Brothers
by Chip Polk
my brother there on the stage The day after we sold our business,
with them, in tunic and tights and April 1, 1995, I told Glenn I had a
carrying a battle-axe, he seemed plan. I wanted to write a musical
far larger-than-life than when he called Ragtown and build a theater
had “gone away to college” the where he could direct and star in
previous year. the show every summer, like the
musical, Texas, in Palo Duro Canyon
Glenn’s ambition had always and the Fandangle in Albany. The
been to be in movies, but the musical would celebrate the
Lord had a different plan for his colorful and unique story of the
life. It started with Twila, whom founding of our hometown, C.W.
he met and married in his senior Post’s utopian city.
year at Tech. The responsibility of
becoming a husband and father He said, “Let me play a little golf
made the dream of following his first.”
old classmates out to Hollywood a
wistful memory. He was content to I think he thought it was an April
satisfy his love of acting with roles Fool’s joke, but over the next seven
in regional theater. years, I wrote the musical. Before
Glenn and Chip Polk at the piano it was finished, I took a break from
in 1963.
At KPOS, the radio station in working on it and wrote my first
our hometown of Post, Glenn gospel-based play, Paul the Apostle.
t was surreal, although at ten and I spent a year of what would Glenn began traveling, presenting
years old, I didn’t yet have eventually become decades of that play, church to church, city to
Ia word to describe it. I was working in tandem. After that city. Over the years, he has literally
watching my brother, Glenn first year in radio, we ended up at traveled halfway around the world,
Polk, on stage in the dazzling different stations but entertained touching thousands of hearts with
inaugural production at the newly the notion of owning a radio station his moving portrayal of Paul.
constructed University Theater together someday.
on the campus of, what was then, In 2002, Glenn and Twila agreed
Texas Technological College. The Again, the Lord had a different it was time to build that theater.
play, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, idea. We would be partners in a We’ve often shared the story about
was truly spectacular. business, but it wouldn’t be a radio consulting an architect about the
station. Instead, it would be Family design. When we got the bill for
In addition to my brother, his Home Health Equipment, a medical the consultation, we realized we
friends and future actors of note, equipment company that grew to couldn’t even afford to talk to an
Barry Corbin and G.W. Bailey, five locations. We started and ran architect.
were in the cast, stars in Lubbock the business with our wives and
theatre long before the rest of another couple, Bourley and Rita Fortunately, Texas Tech had
America discovered them. Seeing Gray, as partners. perfectly equipped yet another
44 Lubbock Senior Link
