Throwing in the towel

Texins Retiree Club president Lucy Salas has been making and giving away kitchen towels for the past 15 years

By Paula Felps

If it weren’t for a charity craft sale, Lucy Salas might never have discovered the hobby for which she’s become known. Proving that necessity is indeed the mother of invention, Lucy began making hanging kitchen towels in 1986, when Does, the Elks women's auxiliary, organized a craft sale.

"They decided that everything should be hand-made, but I didn’t know what I was going to do," explains Lucy, who is President of the Texins Retiree Club and also serves on the Activities Committee for the TI Alumni Association. "I didn’t have a hobby. So I went home and was wondering what I could do when I looked at one of the towels I had hanging in the kitchen. I thought, ‘I can make one of those,’ so I did."

Lucy doesn’t actually make towels, she transforms them with her hand-crocheted hangers. Each towel is cut in half and then rejoined by her crocheted bridge, which makes it possible for users to hang her towels on the refrigerator door, a kitchen cabinet or anything else with a handle. The towels were a hit at the craft show, and Lucy has been making them ever since. They even became something of a signature item for her once she began handing them out.

"I had been going out to the talk shows at Tony Roma’s after the [Cowboys football] games since 1979," says Lucy, a devoted Cowboys fan. "I met a lot of the players, and when I started making towels, I started taking them out to the shows and giving them to the players. I put a little poem inside each one, and they seemed to like it."

She is preferential to Cowboys, but other celebrities qualify for the towel treatment as well; radio and TV personalities whom she encounters while she’s out and about also walk away with the kitchen addition.

Word of her towels has spread through the years, and now getting a Lucy Salas kitchen towel is something of a rite of passage for Cowboys football players. At training camp in Wichita Falls last year, players and personnel greeted her so enthusiastically that it caught the attention of the local newspaper, which wrote an article about Lucy and her towels. In January, she was featured on KDFW-TV Fox 4 News "Hometown Heroes" segment with Clarice Tinsley.

"I was at my church helping with elections in November, and Bud Gillette from Channel 4 was there, so I gave him a towel," she explains. "He asked me about it and I told him that I’d been doing that for several years, and then two days later, Clarice Tinsley calls me and said she wanted to do a story for Hometown Heroes."

The piece aired on Jan. 16, giving Lucy some well-deserved recognition. She gives the towels away, which can become a pricey practice, considering she’ll do as many as 90 towels a month. To pay for the towels, she often goes to KVIL-FM radio contests that feature the Cash Cube: Contestants draw a number and, when their number is called, they have a certain amount of time to grab all the money they can. With whatever cash she grabs, she buys kitchen towels, buttons and yarn.

"It’s just something I like to do," says Lucy, who retired from TI in 1991. "I have a whole big scrapbook of pictures of me with Cowboys players and their towels. It’s something that’s a lot of fun."

That’s evident from her scrapbook, which includes photos of Lucy with the great Tom Landry and a gallery of Who’s Who in Dallas Cowboys players. Of those, she admits her favorite was Troy Aikman, but she doesn’t play favorites when it comes to distributing her gifts.

"I’ve given out so many over the years, but it always makes me feel good," she says. "The players remember me. When I come back, they always say hello."