#OBSERVER OBITUARIES FREE#

Although a lifelong defense lawyer, he represented District Attorney, Tom Curtis and Judge Morris Overstreet, during “Potter Gate”, and represented dozens of Panhandle law officers during his practice, which lasted 50 years.

#OBSERVER OBITUARIES FREE#

He served as a Texas ACLU cooperating lawyer in the Panhandle, the most conservative part of Texas, dealing with the issues of free speech, death penalty, freedom of association and single member district political cases.

Mary’s Law School in San Antonio, where he graduated with his Juris Doctorate in l967.Īfter a stint as counsel for Pioneer Natural Gas Company, he began his lifelong work as a lawyer for the ‘citizen accused.’ He tried cases in all the Panhandle Courthouses. Hale worked for several years as a writer for the Amarillo Daily News until he graduated from West Texas State University in 1965. He joined the United States Marine Corps in 1960 and served as an enlisted man in the Amarillo Reserve Unit on active and reserve duty.

His mother, Pauline Owen Hale, came from a pioneer “Sooner” ranching family on the Washita River near Sayre, Oklahoma.īorn on December 7th, in Shattuck, OK in 1937, he attended schools in Spearman and Gruver, TX. Hale, Jr., a pharmacist, and he were both raised along the banks of the Palo Duro Creek in Hansford County. Hale, from Indiana, settled in the original county seat town of Hansford shortly after 1900 and served as the first County Judge of Hansford County.

Hale’s great-grandfather Melville Bond Wright settled permanently in the Texas Panhandle in the spring of 1877 after temporarily living there in 1872. Hale III, son of a pioneer Northern Panhandle family, passed away on September 7, 2022, at the age of 84.

Observer obituaries