Jump to content

Traces of Texas' new Collaboration with Texas Highways Magazine

Hornius Emeritus

By Hornius Emeritus
in Daily Texan

 Share

Recommended Posts

  • Popular Post
Hornius Emeritus

Hornius Emeritus 12480

Posted
  • Popular Post
Posted

For some deranged reason, Texas Highways magazine has decided to give me ---- Traces of Texas ---- a monthly Texas history column. I'm crazy excited to do it as I've always loved the magazine. In honor of this auspicious event, they're giving my readers a deeply discounted subscription offer and I thought I'd pass it on to y'all, too: $17.50 for one year and $29.50 for two years. You have to use this link. The offer expires Nov. 3:

https://ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/THM/app/live/subscriptions?org=THM&publ=TH&key_code=JXTOTX&type=S&gift_key=J5FXGFT&fbclid=IwAR1hYa8SNahPZ5tk9nB1booXjZku5nrwBogh62UM53G3zcxZk7UHodDuXRE
 

As you can imagine, I'm beyond happy to be collaborating with Texas Highways, being that I've been a reader for 45 years. I'll be getting the inside back cover of each issue. The first issue with my Vintage article is the November issue and it was just published. I posted the photo/article below. As you can see, this is a photo that reader Cecilia Thompson sent in to me. I was very, very happy that she shared it and allowed Texas HIghways to publish it because it's so utterly classic in every way. These kids in Dallas have a true "Dennis the Menace" quality and you just KNOW there's a slingshot in the back pocket of at least one of them. Those cane poles, the cans of worms ... too much.

Anyway, for a year's worth of great information about what to do in Texas, where to go, all kinds of great info etc...  it seems like a pretty good deal to me. I'm thrilled to be able to collaborate with the great folks at TxDot  who put out the magazine.

Also, if you have a great Texas history photo and you'd like to see it published, please send it to me at this email address: tracesoftxphotos@gmail.com   Please include as much relevant information as you can think of.


73141113_2762700840428694_20662193878361
 

  • Hook 'Em 4
  • Like 45
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
El Diablo

El Diablo 4232

Posted
Posted

Great news! Very happy for you and proud to be Surly with you. I'll be subscribing. We had a subscription to the magazine all thru my childhood and it was the source material for many family weekend getaways and always had great photographs. It's still one of my favorites to pick up when I'm at the barber shop.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Nueces River Rat

Nueces River Rat 5539

Posted
Posted

Holy Cow so it's you.  I absolutely love your posts on Facebook and missed them while you were MIA over the summer.   I've always been a Texas history fan and love traveling the state.  Now with my kids save one leaving the house and a possible move to the Hill Country soon, I'm looking forward to doing a lot of in state travel.   Keep up the good work and a new subscription is on the way.  Used to read that magazine all the time as a kid wherever their was a waiting area and still do when I get a chance and I'm off my darn phone.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Hornius Emeritus

Hornius Emeritus 12480

Posted
  • Author
Posted
On 10/31/2019 at 7:13 AM, Nueces River Rat said:

Holy Cow so it's you.  I absolutely love your posts on Facebook and missed them while you were MIA over the summer.   I've always been a Texas history fan and love traveling the state.  Now with my kids save one leaving the house and a possible move to the Hill Country soon, I'm looking forward to doing a lot of in state travel.   Keep up the good work and a new subscription is on the way.  Used to read that magazine all the time as a kid wherever their was a waiting area and still do when I get a chance and I'm off my darn phone.  


Thanks, Rat.  The current issue has an OUTSTANDING article about Caddo Lake  by S.C. Gwynne, who wrote "Empire of the Summer Moon"  about Comanche chief Quanah Parker. . The photos are haunting, too:

https://texashighways.com/things-to-do/on-the-water/lakes/against-all-odds-caddo-lake-prevails/

 

As I say, I'm pretty proud of what the magazine has become. It's way better than it was 10-15 years ago.

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 2 weeks later...
HornOnTheBayou

HornOnTheBayou 8944

Posted
Posted

Image may contain: mountain, sky, outdoor, water and nature

I can't get over how awesome this image is. The Battleship Texas passes through the Panama Canal in 1929. STUNNING! It's amazing to think that so many Texans have been on the very decks that those sailors are standing on!

 

Seriously, if y'all aren't following Traces of Texas, you need to rectify that immediately.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites
ROFL BOX

ROFL BOX 6649

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, HornOnTheBayou said:

Image may contain: mountain, sky, outdoor, water and nature

I can't get over how awesome this image is. The Battleship Texas passes through the Panama Canal in 1929. STUNNING! It's amazing to think that so many Texans have been on the very decks that those sailors are standing on!

 

Seriously, if y'all aren't following Traces of Texas, you need to rectify that immediately.

22228474_10214485956292354_6223900841745

 

Onboard the Texas for a Scouting overnighter.  Glad we got to do the "Live Aboard" before all the upcoming headaches with moving her for the [much needed] repairs.

 

22308948_10214485987773141_3937360091891

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 2 weeks later...
Ten Bears

Ten Bears 2483

Posted
Posted

Legitimately loled at the TOT Facebook entry today.  It was a Christmas miracle.

Quote

I feel a little guilty laughing at The Texas Quote of the Day, which needs a little historical background. Once upon a time, meaning the mid-1950s, Jules Loh, who would go on to become a national prize-winning writer in New York for the Associated Press, labored as a young reporter for the Waco News-Tribune. He was sent to report on a Nativity pageant being staged in the rural community of Blooming Grove, Texas. This is the pageant story as seen through his eyes. The News-Tribune declined to publish this:

"BLOOMING GROVE, Texas

They held the Nativity pageant here Monday night, and if it had happened in Bethlehem like it happened in Blooming Grove, Christmas would be a day sooner - or maybe not at all. For a year the good people of Blooming Grove, Barry and Emhouse, Texas, had prepared for the pageant. They practiced religiously, as it were, and sacrificed nothing to realism. The women made the costumes; the men gathered their sheep. Somebody even found myrrh. The Blooming Grove preacher, a former tent show operator called Brother Bill, arranged the setting.

The manger was in an old barn. A milk cow and an old ram were tied to the manger. At the left was the inn, and at the right were the fields where shepherds, costumed and holding long crooks, were watching over their sheep by night. Brother Bill had put spotlights on both sides, which were to follow the characters as they entered. Miss Alva Taylor was the reader. As she read the Christmas story from the Bible the characters would enact the passage. However, some things got enacted that weren't exactly Biblical.

The choir began to sing, the reader began to read, and the pageant was on. Out of a pasture behind the barn came Mary and Joseph on their way to enroll; Mary riding a donkey, Joseph walking beside. The donkey was balky. He kept stopping, and Joseph kept yanking at the halter. Finally, right before they got to the inn, the donkey had enough. With a grand bray, he rared back and pitched Mary right on her bundle of swaddling clothes. She lit with both legs up in the air. The audience gasped. Some of the women thought she was actually pregnant. The donkey went down on his side. Joseph thought the donkey was hurt. The donkey wouldn't get up. While Mary picked herself up, Joseph inspected the donkey's legs. He finally decided it was a too tight saddle girth that caused him to pitch. There was Mary brushing straw off her clothes, and Joseph loosening the saddle girth, and Brother Bill hollering, "For Lord's sake, get those spotlights off'em! Shine 'em on the inn!" Mary was fixing to mount up again for another try, but the saddle was too loose so she and Joseph decided to walk the rest of the way to Bethlehem.

Joseph stopped at the inn and just as he was about to knock, the door opened with the innkeeper shaking his head. Mary had forgotten about the inn and was already kneeling at the manger. The ruckus didn't phase Miss Alva a bit. She kept fight on reading and managed to stay about four verses ahead of the rest of the pageant. Then it came to pass for the angels to appear to the shepherds.

At about the same time the spotlights shifted to the fields and the choir began with "Angels We Have Heard on High," the sheep spied that ram tied to the manger. The sheep started for the ram. The angel popped up from behind some cedar boughs and said, "Fear not!" but the shepherds were sore afraid. They were running this way and that, swatting the sheep with their crooks, trying to keep the whole flock from charging the manger. A few got away - about six. They crowded into the barn next to the ram, and began eating the straw out of the manger. Happy now, the old ram went "Baa, baa" the rest of the night, and it was somewhat disconcerting to Miss Alva. She would look over at that ram disgustedly, lose her place, find it and continue.

Out of the east came the wise men, slowly, following the star. They deposited their gifts before the manger - all except one of them who had a vase and couldn't get it to stand up on the straw. Finally he got it balanced, stepped back. The old ram stepped up and kicked it over. The wise man shrugged and let it lay. Now all were in the barn - Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, sheep and cow - for all to watch and meditate while the choir sang. But there was more excitement. In the middle of "Adeste Fideles," the loudspeaker went to shrieking. And during the deathly pause while it was being fixed, the old milk cow raised her tail and let loose fight where somebody was sure to step in it. Then the Blooming Grove Nativity Pageant was over. "Amen," said Brother Bill, and the audience answered, "Amen."

 

  • Like 2
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 2 weeks later...
Hornius Emeritus

Hornius Emeritus 12480

Posted
  • Author
Posted
On 12/2/2019 at 12:17 PM, Ten Bears said:

Legitimately loled at the TOT Facebook entry today.  It was a Christmas miracle.

 



Thank you.  Here's today's Texas Quote of the Day, which is a lovely paean to Christmas and family in The Hill Country:
 

"When I return home during the Christmas season, I usually spend the first day just standing around in rooms. I peel tangerines while my mother talks about the hometown goings-on; I stare at the same family photographs I have been looking at in the bedroom for the past thirty years; I lean against the fireplace mantel and shell pecans. After dark I stand in the kitchen talking to my father, home from work at his feed store, and having perhaps my sixth or seventh cup of coffee of the day as I listen to my father's often-told tales. But on the second day I excuse myself from the house about noon and get into the car and take my traditional half-day drive: my simple-minded but satisfying tour through hills and trees and river places. I prepare myself, of course: I select a paperback or two from the grocery bag of books I had put in the trunk for Christmas reading; I stop at a 7-Eleven for a Lone Star and Fritos; and then I ease on down the road toward Medina, the first of the small hill country towns on my itinerary.

It is a rewarding thing to do, this slow driving along the highway. I munch a Frito, gaze benevolently at the barbed wire of a rancher's fence, thinking of .... damn .... just about everything. My thoughts freewheel nicely on that curving farm-to-market road. I notice, I welcome, the steady yellow lines down the center, the silvery shine of metal sign poles, the continuous fence-line posts, the white caliche roads that lead off to hunting cabins and farms. I coast through the mellow browns of winter grasses, pastures, hills while the sun covers the land like the bright fur of a hibernating animal. Cedars stand along the roadside like friendly country cousins. Midday shadows lie intimately across the road: beguiling, weightless pools. I feel almost sinfully pleased by such an agreeable home territory. I turn each curve knowing that I can come again in any season and drive along these same roads, gaze into these same fields. I look out my window and I smile: this is my place of worship, my personal museum of art.

In Bandera I go into Hilbrunner's Drug Store and head for the snug little Christmas corner behind the pharmacy's small counter: three tables, men drinking coffee. I sit at the counter and have hot tea. A rancher sitting next to me is wearing a new leather jacket, new Stetson, thick glasses. I drink my tea and look secretly at the mystery of his large old rancher ears, the red broke veins in the rancher nose.

In Camp Verde I buy a bag of peanuts and another beer and stop for a look at Verde Creek. I get out, walk beneath the trees. Birds are moving slowly through the cypresses, not singing, flapping their wings heavily: cardinals, woodpeckers, robins down south for the winter. There is no wind, just sunlight coming strongly in an afternoon slant, the clean smell of the creek. Back in the car I pick up Brighton Rock and read a little. In Center Point, just about dusk, in clear Wyeth-light, I park beside an unplanted field. Beyond the field, several children are still out, idling away the last moments before dark.

But the light, the light. It is ordinary for The Hill Country, for December, yet as I stand there beside the wire fence, with a windmill rising behind the field, with red and green Christmas bulbs strung around the side windows of nearby houses, with unpaved streets wandering off into the countryside, such light is almost like a voice, a soundless, continuous speaking from the sun-haloed oaks. Darkness comes; the land shuts down. I drive back toward home, sated, having feasted on cattle guards, creeks, pecan trees, earth."

----- Elroy Bode, "This Favored Place," 1983. This book is a sensitive meditation on life and values and The Hill Country and comes highly recommended.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Hornius Emeritus

Hornius Emeritus 12480

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

 Former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz died on the same day, February 12, 2000. On that day, cartoonist Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press newspaper produced this amazing cartoon, which nearly knocked me out of my chair when I saw it. Somehow, I was not aware that Coach Landry and Charles Schulz passed away on the same day.


79442254_2874059332626177_10724012272679

Edited by Hornius Emeritus
  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Deej

Deej 76875

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

 Former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz died on the same day, February 12, 2000. On that day, cartoonist Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press newspaper produced this amazing cartoon, which nearly knocked me out of my chair when I saw it. Somehow, I was not aware that Coach Landry and Charles Schulz passed away on the same day.


79442254_2874059332626177_10724012272679

Cut the holder.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 45697

Posted
Posted
On 12/13/2019 at 11:20 AM, Hornius Emeritus said:



Thank you.  Here's today's Texas Quote of the Day, which is a lovely paean to Christmas and family in The Hill Country:
 

"When I return home during the Christmas season, I usually spend the first day just standing around in rooms. I peel tangerines while my mother talks about the hometown goings-on; I stare at the same family photographs I have been looking at in the bedroom for the past thirty years; I lean against the fireplace mantel and shell pecans. After dark I stand in the kitchen talking to my father, home from work at his feed store, and having perhaps my sixth or seventh cup of coffee of the day as I listen to my father's often-told tales. But on the second day I excuse myself from the house about noon and get into the car and take my traditional half-day drive: my simple-minded but satisfying tour through hills and trees and river places. I prepare myself, of course: I select a paperback or two from the grocery bag of books I had put in the trunk for Christmas reading; I stop at a 7-Eleven for a Lone Star and Fritos; and then I ease on down the road toward Medina, the first of the small hill country towns on my itinerary.

It is a rewarding thing to do, this slow driving along the highway. I munch a Frito, gaze benevolently at the barbed wire of a rancher's fence, thinking of .... damn .... just about everything. My thoughts freewheel nicely on that curving farm-to-market road. I notice, I welcome, the steady yellow lines down the center, the silvery shine of metal sign poles, the continuous fence-line posts, the white caliche roads that lead off to hunting cabins and farms. I coast through the mellow browns of winter grasses, pastures, hills while the sun covers the land like the bright fur of a hibernating animal. Cedars stand along the roadside like friendly country cousins. Midday shadows lie intimately across the road: beguiling, weightless pools. I feel almost sinfully pleased by such an agreeable home territory. I turn each curve knowing that I can come again in any season and drive along these same roads, gaze into these same fields. I look out my window and I smile: this is my place of worship, my personal museum of art.

In Bandera I go into Hilbrunner's Drug Store and head for the snug little Christmas corner behind the pharmacy's small counter: three tables, men drinking coffee. I sit at the counter and have hot tea. A rancher sitting next to me is wearing a new leather jacket, new Stetson, thick glasses. I drink my tea and look secretly at the mystery of his large old rancher ears, the red broke veins in the rancher nose.

In Camp Verde I buy a bag of peanuts and another beer and stop for a look at Verde Creek. I get out, walk beneath the trees. Birds are moving slowly through the cypresses, not singing, flapping their wings heavily: cardinals, woodpeckers, robins down south for the winter. There is no wind, just sunlight coming strongly in an afternoon slant, the clean smell of the creek. Back in the car I pick up Brighton Rock and read a little. In Center Point, just about dusk, in clear Wyeth-light, I park beside an unplanted field. Beyond the field, several children are still out, idling away the last moments before dark.

But the light, the light. It is ordinary for The Hill Country, for December, yet as I stand there beside the wire fence, with a windmill rising behind the field, with red and green Christmas bulbs strung around the side windows of nearby houses, with unpaved streets wandering off into the countryside, such light is almost like a voice, a soundless, continuous speaking from the sun-haloed oaks. Darkness comes; the land shuts down. I drive back toward home, sated, having feasted on cattle guards, creeks, pecan trees, earth."

----- Elroy Bode, "This Favored Place," 1983. This book is a sensitive meditation on life and values and The Hill Country and comes highly recommended.

This could have been written today and still be accurate. Love that drive. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 1 year later...
  • 3 weeks later...
  • Popular Post
Hornius Emeritus

Hornius Emeritus 12480

Posted
  • Author
  • Popular Post
Posted

Hey y'all, I wrote an article for Texas Highways re: small-town Texas. Lots of historical photos of small-Texas towns. It was quite a bit of work and I'd be obliged if y'all would take a gander.

 

 





Still working out some issues with formatting these articles so if you have any difficulty viewing this if you'd post what you're viewing it on (Android, Iphone, tablet/pad, computer etc..) and what operating system/version you're using that would be most helpful. Finally, any comments on content or factual corrections would also be welcome.

  • Hook 'Em 20
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13050

Posted
Posted

That was awesome!

I really want to find some of those Tom Watson watermelon seeds now. Those melons were huge!

Also enjoyed the courthouse collection. One of our favorite past-times as we drive north across the Red River. We usually leave the interstate and travel through the small towns, like Dew and Cayuga. I guess Paris isn't necessarily considered small, but they have a lovely courthouse, too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing


Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business and Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Subscribe!... Donate!... Advertise... COOKIE MONSTER!

×
×
  • Create New...