Postcards from Texas Blog

Nobody in August 1965 could have foreseen that the Beatles would make very few tours as a band. For that reason, former KILT disc jockey, Chuck Dunaway, and other people in the radio business will tell you today that they tossed most of the Beatles memorabilia that they might have gotten as a perk of working for the promoter of the Houston shows. Conversely, another interviewee for our story, Jill Brooks, is thrilled to tell people she was one of the lucky ones who actually saw the Beatles perform live. She tells the story of once being able to stop a guy in his tracks who was trying to impress everyone with the huge number of concerts he'd attended. A simple "I saw the Beatles" ended his list abruptly.

One of the things cut from the story was a comment from John Nova Lomax of the Houston Press about the Fab Four's great popularity in Mexico, probably even greater than what you'll find in the United States. I can personally attest to the fact that on a four-day trip to Cancun about 2000, my friends and I spent every night at a bar with cheap beer and the best Beatles impersonator band I've ever seen. They sounded and looked just like them. We talked to them after one of their sets and discovered that they barely spoke any English at all but had learned the music and lyrics very precisely just by listening to the albums. Good times.

This past Saturday was the annual San Jacinto Symposium put on by the Friends of the San Jacinto Battleground. As always, it was a huge success. Every speaker had interesting information to impart. The lunch speaker was former Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby who had an informative and hysterical 18 minutes on some threads of Texas history plus some sterling insight into present-day Texans repeating some mistakes from 175 years before.

One of the most fascinating events of the day was the work done in the back of the ballroom by a forensic sculptor. As the conference unfolded, she was placing her clay over an exact replica of the skull of one of the Mexican soldiers slain at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. By the end of the day, attendees were able to see what this man looked like for the first time in 174 years.

The story of the skull and five others with similar stories was the subject of two speakers at the Symposium, Ron Tyler and Doug Owsley. Four of the six skulls were gathered by famed naturalist, John James Audubon, who visited the battlefield in 1837 and remarked, as had many contemporaries, that the remains of the defeated Mexicans still littered the ground. Audubon sent four of the skulls to a friend in Philadelphia, Dr. Samuel Morton, who had a huge cranial collection that is still intact today at the University of Pennsylvania. The existence of the San Jacinto skulls was just rediscovered recently thanks to attorney/historian Jeff Dunn and Google Books. Doug Owsley from the Smithsonian gave a real life "Bones"-type analysis of the existing injuries and cause of death of each soldier. Suffice it to say that the life of a Mexican infantryman in the 1830s left much to be desired.

The bridge connecting the Houston Ice and Brewing complex across Buffalo Bayou is mentioned a couple of times in our story about the city's breweries. That bridge was also a contributing factor in the creation of Harris County Flood Control. The two highest downtown stream gauge readings in the storied history of Houston flooding took place on Memorial Day weekend of 1929 and in December of 1935. Both times, debris piled up behind the brewery's structure over the bayou. Basically, the limbs and trash formed a dam and forced water into downtown. If you remember Allison and the water that reached the second floor of a few buildings along Commerce Street, this was worse. In response, the county formed a committee to clear up the problem. The brewery structure went away. To be precise, a good portion of it had collapsed into the bayou on its own. And the county built reservoirs at Addicks and Barker to slow the drainage process. By the way, the head of that committee was Harris County Auditor, Harry Washburn, a feature of a Postcards story back in mid-March.

As you can guess, we always have pieces that we have to cut for time. When shooting for our story on Jean Lafitte's treasure, Robert Schaadt, of the Sam Houston Regional Library, told a story from his area up near Liberty. At some point just prior to the Civil War, locals reported finding an old boat, with a metal sheathed hull buried in mud in a passage near Lake Charlotte in Chambers County. It was forgotten about for decades until a descendant of one of the original men recalled the story. By sticking poles down into the mud, they located the wreck buried so deep it couldn't be budged. It drew interest again in the years after WWII, but again no economical way to get to it. According to Mr. Schaadt, it was at this point in the mid-20th century that a legend became attached to the boat. The story was of Lafitte's pirates fleeing a pursuer and getting stuck in a small channel and having to abandon their prize. So as our experts said in the story, it's a desire to find something for nothing that might occasionally lead to a bit of embellishment.

A note on spelling, too. We have chosen to go with the more widely accepted spelling of the Lafitte's last name. You might have noticed that the Laffite Society goes a different route. They base that on a signature cut that seems to have been signed by the man himself. So perhaps they know best.

We had our first three-part show of the season. One of the many nice things about doing Postcards is meeting a world of nice people. The ones at First Presbyterian couldn't have been nicer. They hauled photos up from their basement and treated us to many more stories than time allowed to include in the segment. And the crew at the Prison Museum in Hunstville couldn't have been nicer. It is a very cool museum. If you have not been, allow yourself some time to stop in next time you find yourself in Huntsville or even passing through.

The Ice Cream story was fun for an entirely different reason. Namely, we got to eat great ice cream twice under the guise of getting still photos for the story. La King's on the Strand in Galveston is as tasty as ever, and we wandered around Memorial City Mall randomly taking photos of ice cream. The people who worked at places like Marble Slab, Cold Stone and TCBY must have felt very sorry for the poor bumpkins who had nothing more exciting to do than take photos of mall dessert places as a remembrance of their trip to the big city.

We did another two parter this week for our story about the POW Camps around Texas during WWII. The Camp at Hearne is the one featured most prominently in the story. As you're reading this, there are a group of dedicated volunteers at Hearn working to create a museum at the old campsite there. The very weekend that our segments first aired, the historians in Hearne had painters out at the campsite working on a replica barracks building, though many of the originals were made of tar paper that would not be a sturdy enough material to accommodate swarms of curious school kids. To capture the look, they painted the wooden replica black and put up batten boards. You can learn more at camphearne.blogspot.com.

While a story about government accounting might not seem all that electric at first, Harry Washburn's control over Harris County was rather incredible. One story that I found in a memoir recounts a courthouse janitor who stopped Harry on his way out of the building one night. He asked the county auditor if it might be possible to get a couple of vacuum cleaners for his staff. "Do you really need them?" Harry asked. When assured that they did indeed need them, Harry signed off on it. It is tough to imagine a top government official paying that much attention to minutiae today.