I knew Charlie Wilson for many years, first as a State Senator and then as a Congressman and I liked him very much. He was fun to be around and he knew the ways of the Legislature and the Congress. I use to party with him and spend time in his DC office with Charlies girls, all of whom were smart and good looking. I also knew Joanne King Harring when she was married to Bob Herring, who I worked for.

Charlie was an orginal and I am happy to have known him.

Here is the Houston Chronicle story of his life and death.

“Charlie Wilson, the larger-than-life Texas congressman whose efforts to fund Afghanistan’s resistance to the Soviet Union in the 1980s were made into a movie, died Wednesday of heart failure.

He was 76, and for a little more than two years had been living with a transplanted heart from Houston’s Methodist Hospital.

Old friends said Wilson was most proud of his role in defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan, bringing a Veterans Administration clinic home to Lufkin, and helping to create the Big Thicket National Preserve. But they said he represented more than all of that.

“First he was a wonderfully kind and generous person,” said John Wing, who traveled with Wilson to Afghanistan and Pakistan and remained close to him. “That kindness and generosity extended to everyone, no matter whether they were president of a country or a person down and out and looking for a job. Charlie saw no colors, no difference in people’s worldly standing. He just saw people.”

Wing notes that Wilson represented the 2nd District in East Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973 through 1996, and that he was always ranked first or second in constituent services.

“And that was a damn good thing because he was not the prototypical East Texan,” said Wing, founder and chairman of Wing Aviation. “There’s not a lot worth recording about his behavior or mine when we were both single.”

Wing says Wilson gave up drinking and womanizing when he fell head over heels for his wife, Barbara. They recently celebrated their 11th wedding anniversary.

Pain and praise Wednesday afternoon, as high-powered politicians sang Wilson’s praises, it was his old friends who sounded deeply pained.

One was Buddy Temple, who knew Wilson since 1964 and was with him when he collapsed.

Wilson was born June 1, 1933, in the small East Texas town of Trinity.

Temple can’t remember exactly how old Wilson was, perhaps 13, when he entered politics.

Wilson himself told the story many times : his beloved dog used to run into a neighbor’s yard, and in retaliation the neighbor, who happened to be a city council incumbent, poisoned the dog.

Wilson ran against the man and won because he ferried so many voters, mostly poor and black, to the polls.

Wilson went on to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy, then serve as a Navy officer and spend six terms in the Texas Legislature.

Tom Bacon, who spent a year as a legislative and press aide to Wilson shortly after he was first elected, said his boss had a tendency to write his own press releases. That infuriated Bacon, in part because that was his job, in part because Wilson was a poor writer.

Finally, the aide had enough and quit.

“I went storming down into his office ready to fight,” Bacon recalled. “He kept intruding on my job. But when I left, I was drinking whiskey with him. He had the knack of making you like him.”

Wilson was married when he went to Congress in the early ’70s, but that marriage didn’t last long in Washington, where he was surrounded by temptation.

He was known for and hiring gorgeous women in his office who came to be known as Charlie’s Angels.

“Yes, he was a good-time guy and a womanizer,” says Houston attorney Terry O’Rourke, who worked for Wilson in the Texas Senate, then in Congress. “But he was hiring very intelligent women before anybody else, and they were a part of his success.”

Wilson took seriously his constituents but little else until he became involved in Afghanistan. He was convinced that the Communism was going to spread there and beyond unless they were stopped. In the ’80s, he helped channel billions of dollars in American aid to the war effort.

Helped by Houstonian His partner in the effort was Joanne King Herring, a Houston socialite, crusader and staunch anti-communist. During their brief love affair, they lived and breathed the Afghanistan conflict, and the Soviets found themselves outmanned, outgunned and outsmarted.

Detractors say the arms they helped provide the Afghan mujahadeen wound up in the hands of the Taliban government, which was harboring Osama bin Laden at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Wilson and Herring’s relationship died a natural death, but they got back in touch when George Crile wrote a hard-to-believe-but-nonetheless-true account of their adventures, Charlie Wilson’s War.

Tom Hanks played Wilson and Julia Roberts played Herring in the 2007 movie version. The surrounding hoopla put Wilson and Herring back in the limelight.

Wilson loved the book, loved the movie and loved hobnobbing with the Hollywood stars. By then, however, he was recovering from the heart transplant and his activities were limited. He made it to the Los Angeles opening accompanied by not just Barbara and his old friends Wing and Temple, but also his cardiologist and large amounts of medical equipment.

Herring, unencumbered and in excellent health, said, “I would have hated it if Charlie had missed this. This is his moment.”

‘He left us a legacy’ Wednesday evening, a saddened Herring described Wilson as a patriot and dear friend.

“He left us a legacy that we must fulfill,” she said. “We have to rebuild Afghanistan so that the people can maintain themselves and our soldiers can come home. The villagers can do it. We just have to help them with health care and education.”

Wilson actually went to a meeting with his friend Temple on Wednesday morning, and the two men were together when Wilson started to go into cardiopulmonary arrest.

“He was sharp, very sharp at the meeting, but he hadn’t been feeling 100 percent for a while,” Temple said. “We have lost a giant. There won’t be another like him for a while.”

Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson contributed. ”

I was 1955 and I was an 18 year old who had just graduated from High School in Rapid City SD. I got a job as the salad chef at a hotel, Sylvan Lake Hotel in Custer State Park. Little did I know that a movie, The Last Hunt, was being filmed in Custer State Park and that several of the movie stars were staying at the hotel.

The movie was directed by Richard Brooks and stared Robert Taylor, Stewart Granger, Lloyd Nolan, and Russ Tambyln. Taylor and Granger eat at the hotel most nights and had breakfast in the kitchen with the cooks and with me in the morning.

The first morning Mr. Granger asked me to do him a favor and wake up his wife, Miss Jean Simmons, a movie star, who was also staying at the hotel. He explained that Miss Simmons needed coffee when she awakened and it was important for me to stay until she had her coffee. I readily agreed. And I did wake her up and wait to she had her coffee and chatted with her about the Black Hills.

For the next two weeks I had the honor of getting to spend some time with Jean Simmons. She was 8 years older than me and a very nice British lady. So, when I had time, I took her horseback riding, fishing and boating while she waited for Mr. Granger to return from the set. I even by chance was at the airport when she left to return to California and she went out of the way to introduce herself to my parents and grandparents. That was as close to Hollywood that I ever got and this weekend I stopped to think about her as the word came that she passed away on Jan. 22 in California.

According to reports, Simmons, who was 80 and had lung cancer, died at her home in Santa Monica on Friday night. The report went on to say “Born in London, Simmons started acting in British films as a teenager and later moved to the United States to star in movies such as the 1955 musical Guys and Dolls with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus with Kirk Douglas in 1960. Simmons won a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for playing Ophelia in Hamlet in 1948 and a best actress nomination for her role in The Happy Ending — a 1969 film directed by her second husband Richard Brooks.

Her marriage to Brooks ended in divorce in 1977. She married Brooks in 1960, months after divorcing actor Stewart Granger.”

And I did wonder many years later if Miss Simmons met Mr. Brooks while in South Dakota making The Last Hunt?

This is a video of me and some of my friends talking about the storm call Ike.

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