Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i Texas Highways Magazine

Last month’s issue marked the 46th anniversary of Texas Highways. It was also the first time the magazine has been produced by a staff working entirely from home, and without one piece of paper printed. It’s a milestone as unanticipated as the rest of the adjustments we’ve all had to make over the past two months, and certainly a minor inconvenience compared to the daily sacrifices of frontline workers. The Texas tourism industry continues to face unprecedented challenges, as do small businesses across the state. For our part, we’ve shifted our focus at texashighways.com to covering how small towns are being affected by COVID-19, including a searchable database that details how to support small businesses through online or curbside orders. In our new series, Small-Town Dispatches, our contributors have been…

Road Trippin’ Hats off to Texas Highways for the road trip issue [May]. So many cool places to see across the state. However, in this time of COVID-19 lockdown, I’m not sure whether to curse you for showing us what we’re missing or praise you for giving us inspiration for the (hopefully) not too distant future. Great stuff either way. Danny Boote, Little Elm Tejano Hero Just received the May issue and was really blown away by the Texana story “From Goliad to Glory.” You have given me a sense of pride to be fifth-generation Tejano. Please keep up these types of stories, and I thank you for not forgetting Tejano history. My family was one of the first few to have lived in Central Texas around 1836 in the…

Back in the day—from 1933 to 1958—travelers on the Bankhead Highway were greeted with an unusual sign as they drove through the heart of Palo Pinto County’s biggest town. “Welcome to Mineral Wells,” read the sign spanning the roadway, “Home of Crazy.” An arrow on the sign pointed toward the seven-story Crazy Water Hotel, two blocks away. Postcards of the novel greeting often showed the 14-story Baker Hotel towering in the background. After the city removed the original porcelain sign in 1958, it went missing. Reports of the sign surfaced from places like a Dallas junkyard, but it eluded discovery. Now Mineral Wells residents can once again salute the sign after a local group raised funds to build and erect a replacement—completed in March—over State Highway 180. “We searched and…

“WHEN MY OLDEST BROTHER HEARD WE WERE FREE, HE GAVE A WHOOP, RAN, AND JUMPED A HIGH FENCE, AND TOLD MAMMY GOOD-BYE. THEN HE GRABBED ME UP AND HUGGED AND KISSED ME AND SAID, ‘BROTHER IS GONE, DON’T EXPECT YOU’LL EVER SEE ME ANYMORE.’ I DON’T KNOW WHERE HE WENT, BUT I NEVER DID SEE HIM AGAIN.”⁃Susan Ross, from the Texas Slave Narratives For several of my adolescent years in the 1960s, my family motored 45 miles northwest on US 290 from southeast Houston’s Sunnyside neighborhood to Prairie View’s small community of African American farmers. There, we joined several other black families for what was billed as a picnic. It became a much anticipated ritual that, to me, had no significance other than an opportunity to spend a day in…

When a baseball league has been around for more than a century, you know it’s got some stories to tell. That’s certainly the case for the Texas League, whose teams have been taking the field since 1888, longer than any other pro league in the state. Consider the game in 1902 when Jay Clarke, the catcher for the Corsicana Oilers, hit eight home runs in one outing against the Texarkana Casket Makers. Clarke’s feat remains unmatched in professional baseball. With 21 home runs as a team, the Oilers won the game 51-3. “There’s a backstory to this,” explains Tom Kayser, president of the Texas League from 1992 to 2017. “Texarkana’s team owner asked the manager if he’d do him a favor by allowing his rookie son to pitch. The manager…

Fishing is a great equalizer. A fish doesn’t care whether you have a fancy rod or, like these men on a Corpus Christi jetty, a simple cane pole. As long as your heart is pure, your presentation good, and your hat worn just right, the fates may smile upon you. I once met a 91-year-old angler named Shorty on Bob Hall Pier in Corpus Christi. He told me a fisherman is forgiven on Judgment Day for any lie he tells about a fish and all of the time a person spends fishing is given back to him at the end of his life. “Shorty,” I said, “that means if you never leave this pier, you’ll never die.” A twinkle in his eye, Shorty responded: “That’s right. I’m going to live…

There are three things about singer-songwriter Ryan Bingham, this month’s Speaking of Texas subject (Page 79), that fascinate Texas Highways contributing writer Michael Corcoran: the bittersweet lyrics of his songs; his down-to-earth nature; and his devotion to his dog, Boo (“He’s just one of those guys that’s really good with dogs, you know? I respect people like that.”). After winning an Oscar and a Grammy, Bingham hasn’t gotten a big head, says Corcoran, who first met him in 2008. “He’s an easygoing guy,” the longtime music critic and author of three music history books says. “He’s got a really interesting story. You just have to let it unroll at his pace.” Bingham shared some of that story during a small 200-person show in Alpine. “There was a real closeness with…

Photographer Kenny Braun captured this group heading into the water at South Padre Island in 2003 while taking pictures for his book Surf Texas. “I think surfing is man’s most intimate and poetic relationship with nature,” says Braun, who lives in Austin but travels frequently to the Texas coast. “I’m a surfer, and it reminds me of walking out to surf with my friends. I grew up surfing on these beaches in the mid-’70s. I wanted to show what it felt like to surf and also to convey a sense of place that is the Texas Gulf Coast.” Braun says South Padre Island, with its focused swells and emerald waters, often has the best waves in the state.…

The Sunday afternoon scene in the San Leon Beach Pub is even more laid-back and mellow than it is on most Sabbath days. “The jam session’s canceled this week,” says the blonde 40-something bartender. “That’s ’cause we had three last weekend—Steve-O’s memorial benefit, the biker run, and the regular one. Everybody’s recoverin’.” Still, about a half-dozen 60-something men puff on Marlboros and Pall Malls and nurse cold beers and bloody Marys around the horseshoe-shaped bar on a sunny day this February. The burning issue of the moment: How to fix the bar’s water heater? One of the ad hoc plumbers surmises that the appliance’s nipple might be awry. “It’s always the nipple,” one of the drinkers sighs, staring up into a cloud of blue smoke. A mix ranging from Conway…

As a young boy growing up in Fort Worth, Doug Renfro never dreamed he’d eventually run his grandparents’ condiment business. Back then, the company best suited him as a place for games of hide-and-seek among hundreds of cardboard boxes in the warehouse with his cousins, James Renfro and Becky Renfro Borbolla. “My dad and uncle set up a Halloween haunted house in the warehouse for the neighborhood when we were kids; we thought that was fabulous,” Doug recalls. “Then I worked there over a lot of summers, sweeping or carrying sacks of cabbage or mixing spices for five to six hours at a time. None of that was exciting to me.” Now adults, Doug, James, and Becky lead the nation’s seventh most popular salsa brand, according to retail research data.…

Back before there was Texas or Mexico, there was Goliad. In 1749, Spanish missionaries moved Mission Espíritu Santo and its fort from the banks of the Guadalupe River near present-day Victoria to a hill overlooking the San Antonio River. A village named La Bahía, Spanish for “the bay,” grew around the mission compound and became an essential hub of Spanish life. In 1829, Mexican authorities renamed the town Goliad, a place that would become forever linked to the Texas Revolution. The town was the site of the Battle of Goliad in October 1835 and the Goliad Massacre in March 1836. Historical tales have always been part of life for Pat Vargas Morales, whose local roots go back to at least 1889, the year her grandmother was born in Goliad. Morales…

The Texas Gulf Coast may be referred to as the Third Coast behind the more popular East and West coasts, but we can live with that so long as it continues to discourage the masses from cluttering our beaches. Our coast—all 367 miles of it—is No. 1 in our hearts, and that’s all that matters. “The Gulf Coast was my first beach,” says Kenny Braun, an Austin-based photographer, “and you never forget your first.” Braun grew up in Houston and for the last 50 years has visited the coast for fishing, surfing, and family outings. Last year, he drove nearly the entire length of the coast with Texas Highways writer-at-large Clayton Maxwell for her story “Eye to Eye with the Texas Coast.” Braun knows the area so well, he could find…

On a typical day, Peggy Galloway navigates traffic-clogged streets as a bus operator in Houston. But today she’s making her way through an East Texas field, snapping purple hull peas from leafy vines. “Pick and pull,” she tells herself as the bag gets fatter and fatter. “Pick and pull.” Displaying a technique she learned decades ago on an uncle’s farm, Galloway picked enough peas to win the pea-picking contest at the 2019 Texas Purple Hull Pea Festival, held annually in June in the small community of Shankleville. Named for the color of their elongated pods, purple hull peas are unknown to many Texans. But throughout much of East and Southeast Texas, the peas are not only a treasured presence at the dinner table, they’re also a revered part of the…

1 Abilene Convention & Visitors Bureau 2 Andrews Chamber of Commerce & Convention & Visitors Bureau 3 Bandera County Convention & Visitors Bureau 4 Bastrop County Tourism 5 Beaumont Convention & Visitors Bureau 6 Blanco Chamber of Commerce 7 Boerne Convention & Visitors Bureau 8 Brady/McCulloch County Visitors Center 9 Brazosport Convention & Visitors Council 10 Briscoe Western Art Museum 11 Bullock Texas State History Museum 12 Burnet County Tourism 13 Cedar Park Tourism 14 City of Denison - Tourism 15 City of Austin Parks & Recreation 16 City of Gonzales 17 City of Grand Prairie 18 City of Harlingen Convention & Visitors Bureau 19 City of Huntsville 20 City of Kyle 21 City of Llano-Community Development 22 City of Longview - Tourism 23 City of Manor 24 City of…

Singer-songwriter Ryan Bingham won an Oscar, a Grammy, and an Americana Artist of the Year award all before he turned 30. He’d also endured a turbulent adolescence and lost both of his parents prematurely, his mom to alcoholism and his dad to suicide. Thanks to the healing nature of music and the love of his wife, Anna Axster, the 39-year-old Bingham has since found peace as the father of three young children. His sixth studio album, last year’s American Love Song, was a hit, and he’s got an acting role in Yellowstone, a TV drama starring Kevin Costner. But there remains a lingering sadness in Bingham’s Texas rasp. It’s all there in the starkly autobiographical song “Nobody Knows My Trouble,” which takes listeners from Bingham’s aimless upbringing to a turning…