[2] One of his mother's ex-husbands was Marshall Ratliff, best known as one of three perpetrators of the infamous Santa Claus Bank Robbery.

[2][3] Elkins was an all-around athletic star at Brownwood High School and turned down a $25,000 baseball offer to enroll at Baylor University.

He appeared on the Tonight Show Dec. 3, 1964 as part of the Look Magazine All-American Football Team with his contemporaries Fred Biletnikoff, Craig Morton and Gale Sayers.

From 1971 to 1978, he worked for Brown and Root Inc. in the safety, health, and claims department, both in the United States and in Europe.

Elkins described the years of 1982 to 1989 as "various midlife crises endeavors, including stints with the artistic peoples in the entertainment business."

He spent ten months renovating parts of Robert Duvall's horse farm in Virginia and took the actor all over Texas to research accents for his 1983 movie Tender Mercies.

After that, Elkins spent more than a dozen years in Saudi Arabia, where he was a consultant for the country's Ministry of Water, which managed twenty-six desalination plants and several pipelines and pumping stations along the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.