Fay McCormick Yauger: A Texas Poet of the Great Depression (1902–1994)

Laura Fay (Faye) McCormick Yauger, Texas poet during the Great Depression era, was born in Weiser, Idaho, on October 2, 1902. The daughter of James T. and Augusta Elizabeth (Smith) McCormick, she lived with her family on various farms in southern Idaho until she was about seven years old. She then moved to a mining camp deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where her family had joint ownership in a miner’s supply store. The isolated camp was frequently snowed in for months at a time, and she later recalled that their Christmas mail could not be delivered until May one year. Fay McCormick eventually returned to southern Idaho with her mother. She attended high schools in Moscow and Twin Falls, Idaho; Long Beach, California; and Wichita Falls, Texas, before completing her secondary education at Lindenwood College in St. Charles, Missouri. She began college work at Lindenwood, where she specialized in speech, and continued her education at Wichita Falls Junior College (now Midwestern State University) in Texas and at the Emerson College of Oratory in Boston, from which she graduated in 1927. She married Cyrus Ramy Yauger on August 3, 1923, in Wichita Falls, where the couple made their home. A son, James Townsend, was born seven years later.

Fay Yauger published her first poem in 1929 in the initial issue of the poetry magazine Kaleidoscope (later called Kaleidograph). Three years later the magazine awarded her first prize in a national poetry contest for the poem “County Fair.” This poem was included in her only book of poetry, Planter’s Charm (1935), which also won first place in Kaleidograph’s publication contest for 1935. In 1933 the title poem of the book, which had previously won an award from the Poetry Society of Texas, captured the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America. Folklorist J. Frank Dobie later identified “Planter’s Charm” as the best poem by a poet of the Southwest in his bibliography Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (2nd edition, 1952). These poems, like most of her work, have rural themes.

Yauger’s poems appeared in such publications as the American Poetry Journal, Bozart, Carillon, Crisis, the Dallas Morning News, Homemaker, Kaleidograph, L’Alouette, Literary Digest, Lyric, the New York Sun, Poetry World, and the yearbooks of the Poetry Society of Texas. Her works also appeared in several collections, including Bright Excalibur (1933), A Century with Texas Poets and Poetry (1934), New Voices of the Southwest (1934), Texas Poets (1936), and The Poetry Society of America Anthology (1946). In addition, two of her short stories appeared in Household Magazine.

Yauger was a prominent lecturer and literary critic in Wichita Falls and was active in social clubs there. She served as president of the Manuscript Club of Wichita Falls alongside other notable Texas writers, including fellow poet Fania Kruger. Yauger’s other memberships included the Poetry Society of Texas, the Poetry Society of America, the Texas Institute of Letters, the Woman’s Forum, Eta Upsilon Gamma, and the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs (she was poetry chair of the first district). Her husband, owner of the Typewriter Sales Company, predeceased her in 1962. By 1970 she had relocated to Nacogdoches, where her son taught speech at Stephen F. Austin State University.

Fay McCormick Yauger died at the age of ninety-one at a Wichita Falls nursing home on January 16, 1994. She was interred at Highland Cemetery in Wichita County.