Earl campbell biographies of women

Asher Price is an American-Statesman reporter whose book, "Earl Campbell: Yards After Contact," will be published in September by UT Press.

In honor of Mother's Day, he put together a condensed look at the relationship between Ann Campbell and her 11 children.

Forty years ago this month, a long line of residents of the East Texas community of Swan lined up to visit a new four-bedroom house amid the pines and farmland northwest of Tyler.

In many ways, the house — brick, low-slung, insulated — was unremarkable, a middle-class sort of place, one that wouldn’t be out of place in any number of 1970s suburban developments.

But here, in poor and rural Texas, it was a monument to tenacity and frugality and, chiefly, to a remarkable single mother’s love for her 11 children, including the one who had paid for the house with his first professional contract, Earl Campbell.

When her husband died 13 years earlier, in 1966, Ann Campbell had tw