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Baytown Sun Article #3
December 1985

"Tauch considered Baytown 's foremost Artist"

'Pelly-ized painter also does inventing'

The house at 1604 Yupon is a dusty collection of ideas: a treasury of original art, stringed instruments that need tuning, sketches of fantastic mechanical inventions.

Albert Lee tauch, who at 81 is considered by many to be Baytown 's foremost artist, lives in the small, seven room dwelling in Pelly . It's the section of Baytown that seems closest - in heart and in body - to the nearby Goose Creek Oil Field.

"I've never lived at no other place," said the cigar-chomping Tauch, a retired Exxon sign painter. "I've been pelly-ized."

"I really don't like living here, but I can't leave. I'm just bound to it by living here so long."

Tauch said he sold his first painting in the early 1950s after he 'took some art lessons from a lady who came through these parts.'

"She told me I could sell my stuff if I'd paint it on canvas and frame it," he said. "So I did."

Since then he has sold hundreds of paintings, including between 300 and 500 of the same subject - Red Hill on Tabbs Bay , near present-day Bayland Park . A familiar pine covered hillside slopes into the bay, which is filled with pumping oil derricks.

"It's handy," Tauch said. "Whenever I do a scene of the oil field, people recognize it. I can't keep that picture. It sells as fast as I can paint it."

"I've painted that scene so many times I can paint it with my eyes closed. People think painting is hard, but it's so durned utterly simple it throws them off."

"You don't have to be smart to do it, because if you did I never would have got to first base."

Tauch paintings are popular because they are recognizable. They relate, in simple terms, the essence of Baytown - a community brought about by oil booms and an oil refinery.

"I don't paint to satisfy other artists," Tauch states in an almost defensive tone.

"I paint a portrait of what I'm looking at. That's my trademark. Kind of an impressionist thing."

But even though Tauch has no trouble selling each painting he produces, art is a "sideline" for him.

"I'm an armchair engineer," he said. " I'm an inventor. And I'd be a millionaire 100 times over, but I've let it slip out of my fingers."

Inventions (none of his versions ever went past the model stage) include the following:

• The gyromobile. "I was working on that thing 20 years ago," Tauch remembers. The strange looking automobile uses a large internal flywheel that acts as a gyroscope, enabling it to balance on its one wheel. The craft would parallel park like a dream, he said. He shelved the miniature prototype after the wildly spinning creation "nearly exploded like a hand grenade" during a test run.
• Pulltop beer cans. "Back in 1941, I thought there had to be a better way to open a beer can." he said. "I used to be a big beer drinker, and I was always losing my can opener." Tauch could never get acceptance for his idea, but since then, pull tabs on beverage cans have gained wide use.
• Solar heat concentrator. "I spent nearly a year and a half working on that thing." He said. The device uses special mirrors to catch the sunlight, concentrate it and heat water until it steams. The steam would then power a turbine that creates electricity.
• Electrical linear motor. "I don't dabble with little things," he said. Tauch said some trains today use electrically switched magnets to propel themselves at incredible speeds. The tiny model Tauch designed shot a hunk of steel into his living room wall. " I was unsuccessful in getting it patented in 1927," he said. "I guess they thought I was nuts."

"You've just got to sit down and think these things out," he said. "Most people think inventors are nuts, but inventing is just foreign to their way of thinking. You'd be surprised how dumb people are."

Born in Flatonia in Fayette County , Tauch traveled with his family to Louisiana and Arkansas - "We all liked to died there from malaria" - before coming back to Texas in a covered wagon.

Tauch followed his family to Goose Creek and he eventually got a job at the Baytown refinery.

"I dropped out of High School in the middle of the 10 th grade because I was going to fail. Plus, I was getting too old to go to school."

"So I started work at Humble (Exxon's name then) Half a high school education in a joint like that and you was at the top of the heap."

Tauch soon left his refinery job and began work as a sign painter in Galveston , earning "$2 or $3 a day - just enough to eat on."

In 1936, he came back to the Baytown Refinery to paint signs. The same year he married Rebecca. She died about 10 years ago.

During 1942-44, Tauch served in the Seabees of the U.S. Navy. Stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, he sketched the snow-covered mountains that drop into gray, tumultuous seas - a far cry from the warm green waters of Tabbs Bay .

"We lost 3,000 men during the winter of 1942," he said. "The thing is, I was old enough to get out when I went in."

These days, Tauch keeps himself busy with his artwork, his sketch pad and his music.

His tiny living room is literally stacked to the ceiling with unfinished paintings, frames, stringed instruments, small organs and notebooks. Visitors do not walk blindly in the home of Albert Tauch without tripping over a wire or some puzzling gadget.

"I'd be a musician if I could sing," he said, strumming a homemade electric guitar. "I'm not no entertainer. I just play for myself."

"I've got a lot of ambition. I just ain't got what it takes to do it all anymore."

Because of arthritis, he walks slowly with his back bent.

"Too damn old," he said. "Just too damned old."

His mind, though, is quick, jumping from subject to another.

"I like to paint a couple hours, work on my music a couple hours, visit town a couple hours."

"I like to shoot the breeze a couple hours each day too. I stay busy."

 

Source: Tauch Considered Baytown's Foremost Artist by David Byford, the Baytown Sun . February 3, 1985 , page 4-B

Photo by David Byford