Les Harrison lifts away a ladder to show a George Washington head once used in an annual parade in Laredo honoring the first president. (Photo by Wes Ferguson)
by WES FERGUSON
They wait in the dark, gathering dust in a dead man’s barns in Old Town Kyle.
Blue-skinned maidens shed crystalline tears. Little boys are frozen in time, their faces cracking and peeling with age. Winged angels, smiling elephants and garish totem poles clutter the shelves near an eight-foot-tall head of President George Washington. By the front door, a bare-breasted mermaid is caught emerging from a conch shell.
In the shadows, some of the figures are so lifelike, it seems they might come alive the moment you turn your back on them.
The creator of these scores of oddities was a commercial artist and former Broadway dancer from Kyle. P.J. Allen made the papier mache figures in his barns and workshops for half a century, earning a comfortable living as he built elaborate parade floats and decor for debutante balls, weddings, Christmas wonderlands and other festive events.
But Allen left them behind when he died five years ago. After resting in the dark for the past five years, however, his oddities are about to see the light of day again.
His heirs are set to auction them off on Saturday.
“At first, after P.J. died I just couldn’t deal with it,” said his niece Loraine Harrison, who inherited the barns and their contents from Allen. “But I feel like we need to share this artwork with people who’d like to have it.
“It does nobody any good sitting in these warehouses,” said Harrison, who is the former mayor of Martindale. “It just doesn’t.”
Earlier this week, Harrison and her husband, Les, were going through the barns’ contents and readying things for cataloging by an auctioneer. Les pulled an antique baby carriage from a pile of supplies and pushed it past a statue of the Lady of Guadalupe.
“Every time you come in here, you find something different,” he said.
Allen was 85 years old when he died. The youngest son of a prominent Hays County family – his father was the county sheriff and a Texas Ranger – Allen was remembered as a friendly, eccentric man. Family members still talk about the time he showed up to an Easter brunch wearing a toga.
He was also a gifted dancer. At San Marcos High School, Loraine said, “All the girls wanted to dance with him, because he was the best dancer. Self-taught, I’m sure. I doubt he had any professional training at all.”
After graduating from what is now Texas State University, Allen fought in World War II and danced at the Roxy Theater in New York City, appearing in shows alongside Ethel Merman.
Back in Texas, he began his commercial art business in a barn where his family had once kept their milk cow and chickens. Over a 50-year career, he did window decor and holiday decorations for the Joske’s department store in San Antonio and built many floats for parades in San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi and Laredo.
