[5] Looking back at his job interview at the Press, Shrake would write “it was a rackety, dirty city paper, with the teletypes clacking and a sense of urgency everywhere.

"[4] At the Press, he also worked under legendary sports editor Blackie Sherrod who said about Shrake, “he immediately showed talent and went on to remarkable success and acclaim far beyond the pressbox.

In 1964, Shrake moved to New York City, following Jenkins, to join the staff of Sports Illustrated, where editor André Laguerre considered him a "literary" sportswriter.

The novel's lead character is a TV Western star who quits his show and returns to Dallas to make a documentary.

[9] The book is based in part on Shrake's own life story: in November 1963, he was dating Jada, the star dancer at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club.

[5] Strange Peaches includes Ruby as a supporting character, and borrows the real-life moment when Shrake, standing with his camera at Main and Houston, locked eyes with Kennedy.

He intended the article for publication in Sports Illustrated, but it was rejected, possibly because an East Texas lumber company was a stockholder.

[10] Morris wrote that Shrake's story "struck a chord in me that I have never quite forgotten, having to do with how clean, funny, and lambent prose caught the mood of that moment in the country and mirrored with great felicity what we were trying to do at Harper's.

"[7] Shrake’s acidic look at his home state continued in Peter Arbiter (1973), a retelling of Petronius’ Satyricon that compares oil-boom Texas to Rome’s decadence.

Shrake's play "Pancho Villa's Wedding Day" (1983) started as a movie project with Hopper that never found funding.

[6] The success of Harvey Penick's Little Red Book in 1992, and its sequels, left him financially stable, enabling him to pursue his fiction writing.

His 2001 Billy Boy is a coming-of-age story set in Fort Worth that features John L. Bredemus as a guardian angel, golf champ Ben Hogan, and several rounds at Colonial Country Club.

Shrake's 2006 play The Friend of Carlos Monzon is based on the time he was briefly held in an Argentine prison during the 1970s while on assignment for Sports Illustrated.

"[6] George Plimpton called Blessed McGill “[a]n absolutely first-rate account of the rambunctious life and times of the Reconstruction years in Texas—an enthralling era of derring-do which finds its perfect chronicler in Mr. Shrake.”[9] United Press International’s review of Strange Peaches stated that it was “not only one of the best-written American novels since World War II, it entertains…a great book, not just for critics, but for readers.”[9] Screenwriter and photographer Bill Wittliff said that Shrake “was one of those who took the raw material of our history and was making real literature of it.

[1] At a Southwestern Writers Collection event in 2008, Shrake urged friends to heed Johnny Mercer's lyrics: "You've got to accentuate the positive.

At the graveside service, Jerry Jeff Walker played two songs: Charles John Quarto and Shake Russell's "Dare of an Angel" and the Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn standard "My Buddy.