What kind of dog was JR? Collie x ?

Wow he looks like he could be purebred smooth-coated Collie. I want to say Smooth Collie X Greyhound mix. 

 i'm gonna say GSDXCollie..

 I am leaning toward Smooth Collie, but his tuck up is higher than you see in them now, and he is certainly lankier.  One of the views makes me think there might have been a Dobe in his history somewhere, maybe a generation back.  In the 80's, Dobes were the Pit Bull du jour, so not impossible to have that kind of a cross anywhere in the country then.  But, he certainly was a nice looking boy.

 That looks all smooth collie, old time, or else a "farm collie" which is basically a dog with Border Collie/Collie genetics but random bred for farm work.  The Border Collie was developed from "sheepdogs" or "collies" in Britain, as were the dogs we call collies today (as were Beardies and a couple other breeds).  The smooth coat is unusual but I'd imagine then as today that smooth coated farm dogs were to be preferred in Texas.

I think it would be safe to call that dog a smooth farm collie. 

I think Collie, mostly Collie.  I really don't see any characteristics of a GSD, more likely Mal if anything based on the look of that dog but it doesn't seem likely. 

 Thanks for the input!  It certainly is interesting and he's always intruigued me. 

 Dogstar, it is certainly not far from you.  It's the area just northwest of DFW.  My whole family lives there.  We were one of the first groups of people to settle there (9 generations ago) and we even have streets named after us and a historical marker because one of us was the last person to be killed by Indians in the sounty.

 Both my parents grew up on farms.  Mom was on a smaller farm and Dad lived on a diary farm all his life.  Dad's brother ended up working cows for a long long time in TX and OK.  He always used either ACDs or Rottweilers, interestingly enough.   Typically I saw people using ACD type dogs for the cows.  That area was and is still a big agriculture area, all my cousins were into showing livestock. 

Dad always talked about having a collie when he was young that they got from another farming family.  I always imagined Lassie but when Grandad died we found a bunch of pics of them with the dogs and the collie was definitely more along the lines of a farm collie or english shepherd than a rough collie.  He also had a dog that to me suspiciously looked like a beardie mix.  And come to think of it as recently as the early 2000s my grandmother found a collie dog wandering a road and kept it.  I forget that dog's name but she was slightly longer coated than JR but eerily similar to him in build/shape.

 According to Dad JR's temperament was a lot like Trey, one of our shelties.  He said JR had more energy but was very similar in mannerisms and the fact that he was very aloof around new people.

 He might well be all smooth collie then- Peggy (Conger, Con-Te) STILL places a lot of her pet-quality smooths on farms in the Weatherford/Mineral Wells area. (Although in these days, it's on limited registration- not an option back then.)