(This Memory is from the Okie Boomer's reporting years in Texas)

I must have seen a million Willie Nelson concerts when I was a reporter in Waco back in the 80s. It even feels like I knew him personally, because I interviewed so many people who did.

Like Marge Lundy, who was one of those Bigger Than Life characters in Central Texas.

She and her husband owned the famous Nite Owl honky tonk in the town of West, which is just north of Waco. They'd given Willie his first paying gig when he was just 15. He and his sister Bobbie played there countless times in the following years.

Marge (pronounced Margie) had reluctantly agreed for talk to me for a story I was writing about Willie, who

. ne When I told him I was going to interview Marge, he reeled off Marge (pronounced Margie) had reluctantly agreed for me to interview her about Willie.

But even so, when I walked in, she was standing behind her bar with a scowl on her round, sixty-something wrinkled face.

It gave me pause.

I had already been warned by a McLennan County sheriff's deputy NOT to get on her wrong side. He told me half a dozen stories to reinforce that point.

Like the night a would-be robber stormed into the Nite Owl, stuck a 30-30 in her face and demanded that she empty her till.

Marge yanked the rifle out of his hands and beat him with it as he ran out of the bar.

The next Marge-gun-police story that I had to write was not a happy one.

I was working as a nightside police reporter when the police scanner "lit up" about a shooting at the Nite Owl. I jumped in the Tribune-Herald car and raced north.

It looked like a police convention when I arrived, with red flashing lights everywhere. I quickly learned the shooting hadn't happened in the bar, but in Marge's house in the back.

When I went inside, Marge was surrounded by downcast young lawmen who had probably started drinking in her bar when they were teenagers.

Nobody wanted to cuff her, but she had to be arrested. There was a dead man on the floor.

She told police she'd emptied her pistol into the back of her brother-in-law in self defense, since he had threatened to get his gun and kill her.

A jury of her peers (and possibly Nite Owl customers) believed Marge found her Not Guilty.

It didn't hurt her case when Willie took the stand as a character witness. He charmed the daylights out of the jury as he melodiously sang Marge's praises and explained what a wonderful woman she was.

"I just love her. She's part of the family,' Nelson testified. 'She just kind of raised me."

#willienelsonstory #happybirthdaywillie #legendarymargelundy #niteowlwesttexas