James A. Mangum

Former Sky Marshal, Special Agent, Federal Game Warden, Oil and Gas Mogulito, City Manager, Civil Rights Investigator, National Security Investigator, Now Folk Artist and First Novelist.

Jim Mangum was born in Beeville, Texas, between World War II and the Korean War. He grew up in the small oil and gas towns of South Texas and attended Southwest Texas State University and Texas A&I, Kingsville.

Mangum's first job out of college was as a "Sky Marshal." "This was in the early 70's," Mangum explains, "when there was a rash of hijackings, mostly by Cubans trying to get back home. Richard Nixon decided to start a Sky Marshal program, and they were hiring just about any warm body they could get their hands on. I had never been on an airplane and never held a handgun. A month later I was riding aboard commercial airlines protecting the flying public from free trips to Cuba, etc. The program only lasted a year or so and then someone had the sense to invent metal detectors so at that time Sky Marshals became dinosaurs. They made a comeback after 9/11. I was very glad I was too old for the program."

When the Sky Marshal program ended, Mangum became a Special Agent with the U.S. Customs Service, working in Houston and El Paso. It was just as the Drug Enforcement Administration was forming, with agents from Customs and Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs combined. He worked on gold/drug/weapons smuggling cases and white collar crime. However, his favorite case, however, was the great "pinto bean smuggling caper."

After five years with the U.S. Customs Service, Mangum and his wife became self-described semi-hippies until, "before we figured out what was happening, we had four children." Mangum re-joined the Feds, this time as a Federal Game Warden with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The job required him to be away from his family for months at a time, so after three years, Mangum joined his father and brother in a small oil and gas gauging business in South Texas. The tiny town they worked in was the basis for Dos Cruces in Dead and Dying Angels.

When his father died suddenly, Mangum and his brother were left with the business and started buying gas wells that were too anemic for big companies to deal with. They did all right for a few years but when the price of natural gas plummeted 80%, Mangum returned to the Feds, this time working as an investigator with the Office of Federal Investigations. He did national security background investigations at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington state, one of the three original sites of the "Manhattan Project" which resulted in the invention of the atomic bomb. "I cannot begin to tell you how scary it is that these sites exist. Before I started glowing in the dark, or more importantly, before my small children started glowing in the dark, we moved back to Texas."

Back in Texas, he worked as an investigator with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and moved on to being a City Administrator (Manager) in three Texas towns – Devine, Castroville and Eldorado.

Officially "retired" from public service, Mangum now lives in Shiner,"the cleanest little city in Texas," home of the Shiner Brewery. He is a writer, "rescuer of wayward homes," and professional folk artist, making carved and painted patron saints, angels, Nativities, Noah's Arks, and carousel animals which he creates and displays in his gallery.