Notable Residents and Natives
- Actor Lee Horsley was born in Muleshoe on May 15, 1955. He played the fictional detective Matt Houston on an ABC series of the same name and later starred in the CBS western Paradise.
- Harvey Lee Bass (October 11, 1918–February 7, 2007) was a businessman and the Bailey County Democratic Party chairman for more than a quarter century. He operated an appliance and furniture store for fifty years and served on many boards and commissions designed to promote the image of Muleshoe. A native of Jones County in central Texas, Bass worked for Burleson-Garrett Engineering and laid telephone line in east Texas. Prior to World War II, he worked for North American Aviation in California, having helped to build P-51 Mustangs and B-25 bombers. Bass was a deacon in the Primitive Baptist Church and taught church singing schools throughout Texas and Oklahoma. After the war, he returned to Texas to join with a brother-in-law, Afton Richards, to publish the Aspermont Star, a weekly newspaper in Aspermont in Stonewall County near Abilene in west Texas. Prior to Bass' tenure, The Star was briefly owned and operated by former State Senator Marshall Formby. It is now called the Stonewall County Courier. Bass and Richards also took over the publication for a time of The Banner of Love, a Primitive Baptist monthly newspaper first published in 1932 in Lubbock. After his health declined, Bass moved from Muleshoe to Snyder, the seat of Scurry County. He is interred at Snyder Cemetery.
- Frank Harrison Ellis, Jr. (September 13, 1927–December 17, 2009), was a mortician, director of the First Bank of Muleshoe, and a community leader who served on the Muleshoe City Council. The Amarillo native graduated from the Landig College of Mortuary Science in Houston. He was co-owner of Ellis Funeral Homes in Muleshoe, Earth, Morton, and Sudan. He formerly owned funeral homes in Friona, Stephenville in Erath County, and Odessa. He was a past president of the trade association, the Texas Funeral Directors Association. The Panhandle association twice honored as "Funeral Director of the Year". Survivors included his wife, the former Marcella "Sally" Pingel, whom he married in 1950; three sons, Frank "Trey" Ellis and wife Tracy of Friona, Dan Ellis and wife Teresa of Smithville, and Todd Ellis and wife Starla of Muleshoe; a sister, Berna Ruth Ellis of Amarillo; seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Services were held on December 21 at the First United Methodist Church of Muleshoe. Interment was at Muleshoe Memorial Park Cemetery.
- Magnus D. Gunstream (1922–2008) of Muleshoe was one of the organizers of First National Bank, now the First Bank of Muleshoe. Gunstream, who also maintained a residence in Ruidoso, New Mexico, was born in Childress County. He graduated from high school in Memphis, the seat of Hall County, and served in the United States Navy during World War II. Gunstream studied banking under Thomas E. Noel (1994–1996), president of First National Bank of Memphis, and was the cashier of the Memphis bank before he relocated in 1955 to Muleshoe.
Other notable Muleshoe residents include former businesspersons Gil Lamb, Joe Bailey Duke, Sr., and Norma Ruth Duke, Oscar and Erma Ray, Murray and Geneva Lemons, and the Wagnons.
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Famous quotes containing the words notable, residents and/or natives:
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—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent—and often up to 75 percent—of the residents in any given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“If a foreign country doesn’t look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)