Grandpa 1963

Posted on May 10, 2015 by admin

I don’t have that many images of my maternal grandfather — most of them are at my mother’s house — but there are a few kicking around here.

The picture is dated “Mother’s Day 1963,” which was May 12, 1963, a Sunday. Grandpa — even at this late date, I can’t call him “James” or anything else — aged nearly 70, is sitting in his back yard in Alamo Heights with his dog Georgette. I remember Georgette better than Grandpa, since he died in 1966, when I was five; the dog lived until sometime in the late ’60s.

I remember the back yard pretty well from visits later than 1963. Behind him to the right is the detached office-laundry room-garage behind his house. The office even had a nickname: the Pout House, which seems to speak to some long-ago family joke. Even further back is a fence lined with bamboo, which I believe he planted.

As I mentioned before, he was Texas A&M Class of 1916 and member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during and after the Great War. He was a civil engineer by profession during the great age of 20th-century road building in Texas, and aspired to work on building the Alaska Highway, but that didn’t happen. He and Grandma (Edna, 1894-1971) currently have 13 living descendants, age 12 to age 89.

This is in McKinney, Texas. The pic manages to capture my mother on the left, me (the small face under hers), Jim (under me), Grandpa and Grandma (holding another camera?). Grandpa’s hearing aid is clearly visible. One thing I know: by this time, he was quite hard of hearing.

It’s dated Spring 1963, at some time when Grandpa and Grandma were up for a visit from San Antonio. I feel certain they would have driven up, and I hope used the parts of I-35 that were finished at the time, which would have been spanking new. As a civil engineer, I’m sure Grandpa would have appreciated it more than most (and it wouldn’t have been the crowded mess it is in the 21st century in some places).

Jay tells me, about that picture, that Grandpa grew the beard about the time Ralph was born (our cousin, born April 1963) with the idea that it would make him look more familiar to Ralph, whose father wore whiskers. “Dr. Colvin [a psychiatrist we knew] happened to see a picture of Grandpa with the beard and asked if he had been a psychiatrist. (There is, I suppose, something Viennese about it.)”

“Agora”

Posted on May 6, 2015 by admin

As far south as you can go in Grant Park, near the corner of Michigan Ave. and Roosevelt Rd., there’s a permanent sculpture installation called “Agora,” by the Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz.

“Agora” includes iron figures that look like this from one angle.

And like this from another.

They look alike at first glance, but actually the texture of the iron is different on each one. There are 106 of them.

They’re roughly in two groups, but some of them are at a distance from the rest. Abakanowicz cast them at the Srem Foundry in Poland from 2003 to ’06.
The work also seems to attract the attention of roving bands of Segwayers.

As I looked at the half-figures, I thought, they seem really familiar. Where have I seen them before, or at least something similar?

The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in ’13, that’s where, which has another grouping of cast-iron figures by Abakanowicz. The headless halves were in long lines instead of milling around like at an agora.

Naptimes, 30 Years Apart

Posted on May 3, 2015 by admin

Last time I was in San Antonio, I dipped into my father’s collection of slides, mostly unexamined for at least 50 years, and pulled out a handful for scanning. The handwriting on the following slide said: “Jay Stribling sleeping, May 1956.” My brother that is, when he was four. No place is noted, but I suppose it was in Germany.

I looked up The Golden Geography. It’s by Elsa Jane Werner, illustrated by Cornelius De Witt, and originally published 1952. A lot of them must have been printed, since they seem easily available now online. I don’t remember it around the house in later years, which can mean only one thing. The only reason a book ever left our house is that it fell apart completely.

A casual Google search doesn’t uncover a scan of that Nancy & Sluggo comic, and it isn’t worth pursuing very far. The Eiffel Tower was a souvenir from my parents’ trip to Paris. I’m told they went without their small children, my brothers, which is what I would have done. They bought one for Jay and one for Jim, and the towers are still in my mother’s house, though not so shiny these days.

When I sent the image to Jay, he shared it with his sons. The eldest, my nephew Sam, sent us a picture of him at a similar age (in the 1980s) and in similar repose.

Time flies, things don’t change.

The Very Early ’70s

Posted on March 22, 2015 by admin

Of the five group photos of my elementary school classes, I only put the exact date of the picture on one of them — the third grade shot. Why I did that, I can’t remember. But there it is: March 17, 1970. Forty-five years ago.

Not the first time I dated an image from that grade, either. I also wrote everyone’s name, though I did that every year. Glad I did. Among other things, it preserves a sample of mid-century children’s names, most of them common, but not all. I always had the least common name.

Top row: Lester, Dees, David, Jerry, David, Ellen.

Next row down: Susan, Jack, Karen, Tom, Cole.

Next row down: Marie, Ruth Ann, Gary, Luis, Renee, Leslie.

Bottom row: Shirley, Mariann, Art, Maura, Steven, David.

Few surprises there. For example, according to the Social Security Administration, David was the no. 2 popular boys’ name for the 1960s. Everyone in the picture except for Mrs. Bigelow would have been born in 1960 or ’61.

San Antonio Debris

Posted on March 5, 2015 by admin

I come by my packrat nature honestly. While at my mother’s house last month, I found a number of things tucked away, all of them stashed for decades. Such as some old license plates in the garage.

That comes from the former practice by the state of issuing new plates every year, rather than the cheapo modern practice of issuing stickers. Once upon a time, I guess, the state had to keep its prisoners busy. Or at least I always heard that prisoners were the ones making the plates.

For the above plate, the year is special: 1968. Texas hosted a world’s fair that year, the punning HemisFair by name, which I was fortunate enough to attend. So the plates boasted of the fair.

I was astonished to find this tucked away among some papers in a cabinet.

A poll tax receipt from 1963 for my father’s payment of the tax. Fortunately, that execrable practice was well on its way toward ending by then, but it was still hanging on in Texas and a few other states. The nails in the coffin were the ratification of the 24th Amendment the next year, and the Supreme Court decision in 1966 that the amendment applied to all elections, not just federal. Interestingly, the Texas legislature got around to ratifying the amendment in 2009, no doubt as some kind of symbolic gesture.

I also spent some time in our library. When my mother bought the house, it was a porch covered by the roof, but open to the elements. About 40 years ago, she hired a contractor — who did a terrific job — to add a wall and put bookshelves on every wall, with some cabinets on the lower levels. It’s full of books, as a library should be, though in some disarray.

Many are the SF titles that my father and brothers amassed. In high school, I alphabetized most of them, and so they remain. Here’s a row of Poul Anderson novels. The only one I’ve ever read was The High Crusade, during my bus trip to Utah in 1980, though I also read the story “The Man Who Came Early” at one time or other.

Elsewhere on the shelves, I found three books I decided to bring home to read eventually. The Man in the High Castle, because I’ve never read any Phillip K. Dick, and I want to read at least one; Metropolis, because I didn’t know it was a book before becoming the famed silent movie; and a collection containing “The Marching Morons,” whose notoriety I’m curious about. All of the editions are 50 years old or more. Cheap to begin with, they’re yellow and falling apart now. I might be the last person to read these particular editions.

A Gazebo and More

Posted on March 4, 2015 by admin

What this country needs is more public gazebos. There, I’ve said it, and I don’t care who knows it. I’m pro-gazebo.

World-Wide Words tells us that the word gazebo “is surrounded by more mystery than an earnest etymologist would like. It appears in 1752 without any warning or antecedent in part four of a book by William and John Halfpenny with the title New Designs for Chinese Temples, an influential work that was aimed at the then new English fashion for the oriental in design and architecture.

“Little is known about William Halfpenny, who called himself an architect and carpenter, not even if this was his real name… The word gazebo is equally mysterious. A lot of people have assumed that — like the temples described in the book — it must be of oriental origin. If it is, nobody has found its source.

“Failing that, etymologists make an educated guess that he named the structure tongue-in-cheek, taking the ending -ebo from the Latin future tense and adding it to gaze, so making a hybrid word that might mean “I will look.” If true, the model was probably videbo, “I shall see,” or perhaps lavabo, literally “I will wash,” taken from the Latin mass of the Roman Catholic Church to refer to the towel or basin used in the ritual washing of the celebrant’s hands.”

If you’re ever in Milam Park (see February 26) in San Antonio, you’re likely to find yourself looking at this fine gazebo.

An attached plaque says, in English and Spanish, “The people and government of the state of Jalisco, Mexico, offer this kiosk to the noble city of San Antonio de Bexar, in tribue to the relationship, tradition, and cultural inheritance of our people. May 1993.” Why Jalisco and San Antonio have a special relationship, I don’t know, but it was good of them to send a gazebo, even if they call it a kiosk.

To the north of the park is Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital. Or at least that’s what I’ve always heard it called — the formal name these days is the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio, which is part of the Christus Santa Rosa Health System, which has five hospitals. Last month workmen were busy adding color to the side of the building, which had previously been a drab structure.

On one side of the hospital’s an enormous mural — eight, nine stories tall?

One thing I need to do in the future is look at some of San Antonio’s many building-side murals. This is a start. It’s called “Spirit of Healing.”

According to the San Antonio Express-News, the hospital’s exterior “[is] taking its color cues — purples, oranges and blues — from the adjacent… mural by Jesse Treviño, the façade of Santa Rosa Hospital cheerfully is being transformed… Colorful channel glass panels are being hoisted into place on the hospital’s south side facing Milam Park and El Mercado. Roughly 11 feet by 3 feet, there will be 300 of them when all is said and done.

“Backed with LED lighting, at night they will glow like Christmas lights. During the day, the visually dynamic custom cast panels — lightweight to span large distances yet strong, durable and wind-resistant — mark the building as a special place.”

The Spanish Governor’s Palace

Posted on March 3, 2015 by admin

Across Military Plaza (Plaza de Armas) from San Antonio City Hall is the Spanish Governor’s Palace. It too was a place I’d been before, maybe as long ago as the 1970s, so I dropped in for a revisit. It’s a well-done re-creation of the Spanish colonial period, including 10 rooms, some dating back to earlier centuries, others added in the 20th century.
Once again, from that fount of all things Lone Star, the Texas State Historical Association: “The Spanish Governor’s Palace, at 105 Military Plaza in San Antonio, was constructed in 1749. The name, something of a misnomer, is traditional; the building was not the home of the Spanish governor but served as the residence and headquarters for the local presidio captain. [So the governor didn’t live there, and while very nicely restored, it isn’t a palace. At least it was Spanish. At first.] The one-story masonry structure is built in the Spanish Colonial style; in the rear is a large patio.”

It’s a very pleasant spot on a warm day, this patio.

The association continues: “A keystone above the entrance bears the date of construction and the Hapsburg coat of arms. After the end of Spanish sovereignty, the building passed into private ownership. In the late 1860s it was purchased by E. Hermann Altgelt, founder of Comfort in Kendall County. He and his family lived there at various times, and the property was held by his widow, Emma Murck Altgelt, until the early 1900s. Then the building fell into a state of disrepair.

“In 1928, voters in San Antonio passed a bond issue for the purpose of purchasing and conserving the building, and in 1929–30 the building was restored under the supervision of architect Harvey P. Smith. Members of the San Antonio Conservation Society aided in restoring and furnishing the historic structure. In 1962, the building was registered as a recorded Texas historic landmark and is now a national historic landmark.”

This gentleman makes an appearance in the building, at least pictorially, looking every bit the Spanish nobleman of the early 18th century. The sign next to him said: “Jose de Azlor, the second Marques de San Miguel de Aguayo, was born in Spain and came to Mexico in 1712, where he owned a large ranch in Coahuila. After being appointed governor of Coahuila y Texas, Aguayo visited the site for the Presidio San Antonio de Bejar and ordered that the fort be built at this location.” That was just one thing. He had a busy time as governor of Coahuila y Texas.

The Old Spanish Trail Zero Milestone (One of Them, Anyway)

Posted on March 2, 2015 by admin

From San Fernando Cathedral, I made my way past San Antonio City Hall, which is a handsome Italian Renaissance Revival structure dating from the 1880s.
Among the other monuments and markers on the grounds is a boulder with a plaque stuck to it. I have to say I’m a sucker for boulders with plaques stuck to them. This one’s apparently been there over 90 years.

ZERO MILESTONE
OLD SPANISH TRAIL

St. Augustine – Pensacola – Mobile – New Orleans – Houston – San Antonio – El Paso – Tucson – Yuma – San Diego

Dedicated by Governor Pat M. Neff
March 27, 1924

Erected by the San Antonio City Federation of Women’s Clubs
Mrs. J.K. Beretta, President

Zero milestone, eh? Odd, considering that San Antonio is roughly in the middle of the route described by the cities on the plaque. This Old Spanish Trail, incidentally, has nothing to do with Spanish colonialism in North America, except that it passed through territories that were at one time or another part of the Spanish Empire. The OST was a 20th-century invention. (Confusingly, OST also refers to an earlier, non-motorized trail between Santa Fe and Los Angeles that did involve actual Spaniards.)

As this excellent article published by the Texas Transportation Museum notes, “…a very grand vision arose for a continuous highway from the Atlantic at St. Augustine in Florida to the Pacific in San Diego California, a distance of 2,817 miles…. The route was given a picturesque name, “The Old Spanish Trail,” as a marketing tool, much as naming the first Northern transcontinental route from New York to San Francisco, “The Lincoln Highway,” first proposed in 1912. The names were designed to capture the imagination of cities and counties along the proposed routes and encourage participation in the construction of the route, as the OST organization could not even begin to pay for all the roads and bridges that would be required.”

But why is there a zero milestone in San Antonio? Google “zero milestone Old Spanish Trail” and you’ll also find information about a plaque on a sphere in St. Augustine — dating from 1928.

Back to the Texas Transportation Museum article: “Governor Neff dedicated an OST zero milestone outside San Antonio city hall in March 1924. It is still there today… The first ceremonial drive across the 2,817 miles of continuously improved road, lined with signs put up by each state, began in San Diego, California on April 4 1929. Their arrival in San Antonio was ceremoniously greeted with a dinner at, of course, the Gunter Hotel.”

That doesn’t really answer the question. Maybe the San Diego-San Antonio stretch was finished first. Or more likely, the San Antonio City Federation of Women’s Clubs really wanted a marker.

San Fernando Cathedral

Posted on March 1, 2015 by admin

Where are the copy editors? Maybe the Chicago Tribune laid off all its copy editors. On Wednesday, the paper ran a review of The Royale, a play now on stage in Chicago, and it begins like this: “In 1910, Jack Johnson, a boxer who had long dominated the World Colored Heavyweight Championship, finally coaxed the formerly undefeated James J. Jeffries out of retirement… Johnson’s July 4 victory in Reno, Nev., over the white opponent was hailed as a singular moment for the advancement of African-Americans, many of whom felt enormous pride as they listened, huddled around radios, as the Galveston Giant laid his doubters, and, symbolically, white America, flat on the canvas.”

Is it too much to ask that someone at the Tribune know that there were no commercial radio broadcasts in 1910?

I didn’t remember the last time I visited San Fernando Cathedral, which is in downtown San Antonio — probably in the early ’80s — so I figured it was time to go again. A church has been on this site since the 1740s, though as usual with this kind of thing, the structure’s been modified and enlarged and restored and otherwise changed over the centuries.

In our time, it’s a handsome structure with a Gothic Revival nave, triple entrance portals, a gable roof, and twin bell towers and buttresses.

Just inside the entrance, in the narthex, you’ll find this marble coffin.

The nearby plaque asserts that:

Here lie the remains of Travis, Crockett, Bowie and other Alamo heroes. The Archdiocese of San Antonio erected this memorial May 11, AD 1938 R.I.P.

Formerly buried in the Sanctuary of the old San Fernando church

Exhumed July 28, 1936 Exposed to public view for a year Entombed May 11, 1938

If it’s written in stone, it must be true. Right? But not everyone’s so sure. Ashes and bits of bone were found buried in the sanctuary in 1936, and the archbishop at the time concluded that they were the defenders of the Alamo, whose bodies were known to be burned. This article posits that the archbishop pulled that assumption out of his miter, and that the remains might actually be casualties — Spanish loyalists, no less — of the little-known Battle of Rosillo fully 33 years before the Battle of the Alamo.

San Fernando’s lovely inside. The view toward the apse.

And back through the nave.

Not far from where I took this picture was a brass plaque embedded in the floor that said: Official Center of San Antonio by Ordinance of the City Council. Another plaque in the floor of the church said: Original Entrance to the Church of the Villa de San Fernando. Demarcation of the Center of the City 1731.

The Texas State Historical Society outlines the early history of the church: “Although information is contradictory, the cornerstone for the first attempt to build a stone church was laid most likely on May 11, 1738. In 1748 the viceroy approved a donation of 12,000 pesos to complete the church. With funds secured, two artisans from San Luis Potosí, Gerónimo de Ibarra (a master stonemason) and Felipe de Santiago (a stonecutter), were hired to continue the project. Ibarra razed the earlier construction and enlarged the dimensions of the building. He completed the church in 1755.”

After that, of course, came damage and repair and modifications and even a part for the structure in the Battle of the Alamo, when “Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna not only used the church as a lookout but ordered a red flag flown there to signal that the Texans at the Alamo would be shown no mercy.”

The reredos. Maybe it would be a retablo in this context. In any case, a shiny bit of work.
To the right were a number of stone tablets embedded in the wall that looked they might have been burial stones that used to be part of the floor. One of them, in Spanish and English, was that of Eugenio Navarro, brother of Jose Antonio Navarro, who lived a lot longer.

HERE RESTS The Remains of EUGENIO NAVARRO Native of the City of Bexar who departed this life on the 6th of May 1838, Aged 34 Years, 5 Months & 21 days He fell an innocent victim, by a shot from the Pistol of a vindictive adversary, who also lost his life by the dagger of the brave defender, of his honour and person.

That is, someone shot Eugenio, but he was able to dispatch the attacker with his knife. In 1836, he’d had a critical part to play in the Texas Revolution, especially in warning the Texians in San Antonio that Santa Anna was coming, and in force. More about him here.

A Few San Antonio Statues

Posted on February 26, 2015 by admin

I didn’t specifically seek out statues while visiting San Antonio, but sometimes I would be wandering along and there was another one. Such as this fellow, important enough to get a life-sized bronze downtown, on Houston St.

It’s Thomas Claiborne Frost (1833-1903): frontier lawyer, Confederate commander, wool merchant, and eventually banker. Frost Bank exists to this day as a major regional bank focusing only on Texas markets, and most recently it had the distinction of not being caught with exposure to the bum mortgages of the 2000s, and so turned down TARP money.

Sculptor Robert L. Dean Jr. did the Frost statue. He’s better known for a number of Eisenhower statues, including ones in Denison, Texas; West Point; Ike’s presidential library; and in London and Normandy. He also did Patton, Bradley, DeGaulle, and Eddie Rickenbacker, among others. I’d never seen the Frost bronze because it’s fairly new, put there only in 2001.

Here’s a person I didn’t know had a bust in San Antonio.

President Roosevelt, looking not quite like the FDR we know from photos and movies, but never mind. The memorial is on the grounds of San Antonio City Hall, a 1946 gift from Mexico — specifically, the Comite Mexicano de Accion Civica y Cultural. The sculptor was from San Antonio, however: Louis Rodriguez, a member of a family that still carves memorials and gravestones. Louis and his brother James best-known work is the Alamo Cenotaph.

Not far away is “The Conquistador,” a bronze outside the Spanish Governor’s Palace.

It too was a gift to the city — by the government of Spain in 1977, “as a symbol of the close ties of Spain and San Antonio,” according to the plaque at the foot of the work. The sculptor was Enrique Monjo, who also did work at the National Cathedral.

Here’s a fellow in a Texas pose.

Who holds his weapon so defiantly? Texian Ben Milam, in Milam Park downtown. He was one of the leaders of the Texian forces in the Siege of Bexar in late 1835, which resulted in the capture of San Antonio from Mexican forces under Gen. Martin Perfecto de Cos, an incident that precipitated the better-known Battle of the Alamo a few months later. Milam didn’t live to participate in that, or even the conclusion of the Siege of Bexar, since a Mexican bullet hit him in the head on December 7, 1835, two days ahead of Cos’ surrender. Besides Milam Park, a scattering of other places in the state are named for him, such as Milam County, northeast of Austin. But the Ben Milam Hotel in Houston is no more.

One Bonnie McLeary did the statue, which was commissioned for the Texas Centennial in 1936, along with a number of other statues around the state. She’s better known, according to A Comprehensive Guide to Outdoor Sculpture in Texas (1996), for her “garden sculptures and her portrayal of children.”

Then there’s Jolly Jack.

He stands outside of Sea Island, a restaurant on the North Side of San Antonio, near North Star Mall. Remarkably, I’ve been able to find mention of its creators, two Austin artists named Dana Younger and Kevin Collins, at least in this 1998 Austin Chronicle article: “In August, the area was dominated by Jolly Jack, a 10-foot-tall statue commissioned by Sea Island Shrimp House. Jack is the regional seafood chain’s answer to the classic Bob’s Big Boy, an oversized cartoon fat kid [looks like an old-time jack fisherman to me, not a fat kid] in cut-off blue jeans and bare feet, with a red-and-white striped shirt and a black top hat. He proudly holds a five-foot-long fish up in his left hand to entice potential diners. Collins and Younger were paid $9,000 to make the mold and will get $3,000 for each of three more Jolly Jacks.”

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Texas