“Old Yeller” Author Couldn’t Handle Success

At the peak of the “Old Yeller” craze, the Palace Theater in Dallas invited dogs and their human companions to a special showing of the big screen version of the best-selling book on Jan. 11, 1958. Frederick Benjamin Gipson was born on a farm near Mason in 1908. Life on the western edge of the Hill Country was more hardscrabble than idyllic, but to the young boy it was a rustic paradise that…