Return to The Gay Place
“The country is most barbarously large and final.” It is one of those rare first lines that readers remember all their lives. Published forty years ago, a novel called The Gay Place captured a period...
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Earl Campbell
Photograph by Laura WilsonIn 1981 the legislature enshrined Earl Campbell as an Official State Hero Of Texas. Only three other favorite sons—Davy Crockett, Stephen F. Austin, and Sam Houston—had been...
View ArticleTony Sanchez’s New Deal
Tony Sanchez loves maps. In the “war room” of his oil-and-gas company office in Laredo, the candidate for governor leads me past a long wall filled with oversized maps of Texas. “Overlay this one on...
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Kid Gloves
THE COURAGE OF A BOY CHILD in Texas is equated with his balls. It’s a crude metaphor, but it declines to go away. Male Texans are supposed to be rough, tough, and ready for whatever comes down the...
View ArticleThe End of the River
ON A WARM JULY AFTERNOON I am going to see the mouth of the Rio Grande for the first time. Sixteenth-century Spaniards called the stream Río de las Palmas; the bright forest of palm trees around the...
View ArticleThe Warrior’s Bride
ON THE MORNING OF MAY 19, 1836, a young Comanche Indian rode into Fort Parker, in East Texas, with a band of warriors, snatched a blue-eyed nine-year-old girl from her mother, and galloped off with her...
View ArticleRednecks, Armadillos, And Me
I WAS 29 WHEN THE IMPROBABLE RISE OF REDNECK ROCK was published. I had been anxious to write a book but had little idea of how to go about it. Apart from a few months of toil at small-town newspapers,...
View ArticleThe Metamorphosis
IN 1974 AMERICAN THEATERS WERE briefly graced by a movie called The Sugarland Express. Based on a true story, the film proposed the adventure of a fugitive Texas convict and his spunky harebrained...
View ArticleThe Man With the Plan
TOM DELAY HAS A RARE GIFT for planning ahead, for being able to conceive a chessboard and a sequence of moves that sprawls across years. Then the majority whip of the U.S. House of Representatives, the...
View ArticleThe Good Doctor
“FIRST IMPRESSIONS CAN point to the most important diagnoses,” said Abraham Verghese, leading the way through a warren of drab hospital corridors in San Antonio this summer. We were hustling toward an...
View ArticleMe of Little Faith
I WAS AFRAID THE THIN and drenched cotton gown would cling to my bony haunches as the preacher led me up the steps of the baptistery. In the faith of my upbringing, the Church of Christ, baptism was...
View ArticleRocket Man
AMONG THE CROWD OF LEGITIMATE PLAYERS in the race to experience private space travel, a few like to think of themselves as the dashing descendants of Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh,...
View ArticleSeems Like Old Times
AS THE DRINKS GO DOWN AND THE LAUGHTER builds at my high school reunion, a DVD of the 1961 state semifinal football game between our Wichita Falls Coyotes and the Fort Worth Paschal Panthers flickers...
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Ann
The first time I saw Ann Richards she was playing bridge with old friends at the home of Fletcher and Libby Boone in the hills overlooking Austin. With kids whooping in the bedrooms, a half-dozen card...
View ArticlePhysician, Heal Thyself
SAM HASSENBUSCH HAD BEEN HAVING HEADACHES. They weren’t severe—he could knock down the pain with Tylenol—but they kept coming back. He mentioned them to his wife, Rhonda, who thought maybe he’d been...
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Citizen Cane
It happens all the time.You’re driving along, mind on the political yammer of the day or what you forgot to get at the grocery store, when someone makes a mistake and eight thousand pounds of hurtling...
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To Hell and Back
There’s a line from an old Rolling Stones song: “Please, sister morphine, turn my nightmare into dreams.” In the first of my dreams at Houston’s Hermann Hospital, I was riding in a truck driven by an...
View ArticleThe Cult of Keen
ON ROBERT EARL KEEN’S new live album, No. 2 Live Dinner (Sugar Hill), the chants of his adulators sound like those of a crowd swooning over a prizefighter on his way to the ring: “Robert Earl Keen!...
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He’s About A Mover
Excerpted from Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm, by Jan Reid, with Shawn Sahm. Published with permission from the University of Texas Press.Doug Sahm and his band, the Sir Douglas...
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Cold Case
One year ago, at about five a.m. on Easter Sunday, a 26,000-pound bus crashed at high speed into a wedge-shaped traffic barrier near the intersection of Loop 610 and Highway 59, in the Houston suburb...
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