William Wadley

I came to know Chris Etter in my senior year at Paschal, after he unexpectedly showed up one night at a Mildew Brothers concert in a cross-town high school auditorium, where Mark Casstevens was dazzling the audience with his banjo plucking, John Hudnall was expertly picking his Gibson Hummingbird guitar, and I was torturing our listeners with rancid vocals and my new pet project of learning to play (badly) the mandolin.  What Chris did at that concert was hilarious.  Sneaking backstage, he began experimenting with the theatrical props, locating the thunder machine and putting on a deafening sound show that raised the roof and cemented the place of the Mildew Brothers as the inventors of the special effects musical stage show.  Not.  But the thunder machine part of the story is true.  How could you not immediately like Chris and appreciate his flamboyant and uninhibited sense of humor?  This was a guy I wanted to know better!  For many years thereafter, he and I were close friends.

At Paschal, Chris was a talented artist and a member of the swim team.  As Benny Hall recollected in his memorial, Chris participated in many of our high school antics, including the legendary Benbrook Lake crossing.  After Paschal, I knew him as an avid outdoorsman who especially enjoyed backpacking, canoeing and tent camping.  Over a period of three decades, he and I, together with other backpacking friends, met in various states to hike a mountain trail or canoe a scenic river.  He was an entertaining story teller, with an experienced life to narrate.  He loved music and the arts with the same zest he held for life itself.  I can recall running into him at the Fort Worth Opera one evening in 1970, and several years later, when I was visiting my parents at Christmas, spending time with him as he eagerly played for me an album of bluegrass versions of 1960s soul songs.  He worked for many years for the Fort Worth Independent School District, married, and was a devoted and attentive father to his sons, Lee and Scott.  He did not serve in the military and was not a sniper, as one rumor suggested.  Such anecdotes probably arose because Chris was always an adventurous soul who filled his life with experiences of all kinds.  Chris, enriched the lives of everyone in his circle.  I miss him deeply.    

?Below: Chris and I camping in Big Bend National Park in the late 1980s.