F. F. "Flip" Calhoun

Flip Calhoun played a critical role in delivering Plainview from the sporadic but highly damaging floods on Running Water Draw. He was a leader in conceiving, planning, winning political approval for, obtaining funding for, and implementing the plan to protect the city by building a series of dams upstream on Running Water Draw in the mid-1970s. Floods in Plainview have been a thing of the past ever since. Many of today’s residents have no idea how big a problem they used to be.

Flip, who farmed west of Plainview for four decades, was also active in a wide range of agricultural and community activities, including soil conservation, helping push through legislation allowing farmers water depletion allowances, and Pheasants Unlimited. He was scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 68 in the late 1940s and early 1950s, an elder of the First Presbyterian Church, a longtime member of the Plainview Lions Club, and president of Plainview Country Club. But it was for his indispensable role in ending the floods that he especially deserves to be remembered.

Festus Farnsworth “Flip” Calhoun was born in 1910 in Galveston and grew up in Houston, gratefully using his childhood nickname until his death in 1994. He graduated from Rice in 1932, then worked as an oil company surveyor all around the western and southern U.S. On one trip he met and later married Dana Lorene Fryar of Matador. They moved to Plainview in 1947, and the next year city boy Flip took over the farm of his suddenly deceased father-in-law and, for the next four decades, worked it and an adjacent farm Lorene and he bought. They lived in Hillcrest with their two children.