Big Bend Camera Failure

Posted on April 30, 2023 by admin

Though I grew up in Texas, I never got around to visiting Big Bend NP until five years ago in April. Didn’t give it much thought while I schemed to go other places. The distance to the park is more psychological than geographic, I think. From San Antonio, for example, it’s a full-ish day’s drive to the park (six hours), but since when have Texans ever said, That’s too far to drive?

I had two cameras with me on the trip. One, my sturdy Olympus, model number I can’t remember, a standard and not especially expensive digital camera I acquired in 2012 so I could take pictures at events for a new freelance job. It took good pictures, better than I expected. The other digital image-maker at Big Bend was my camera phone. It was newer than the Olympus, since I got it to go to Mexico City a few months earlier. Even so, it only intermittently produced good pictures.

I started capturing the Big Bend scenery with the Olympus, as usual. It started taking vastly overexposed images, often the second or third of the same scene.

A thing that made me go hm.

Still, I got some decent images with the Olympus. It’s hard to go wrong in Big Bend.

By the time I got to Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande, the Olympus had quit taking anything but overexposures. So I resorted to using the camera phone, producing lower-quality pictures that were sometimes OK.

The Olympus revived to create some good images later in the trip, but was increasingly unreliable. That was its last trip. Later I checked its settings, tried different settings, tried different data storage cards, and poked around online for some reason for it taking overexposures, to inconclusive results.

Once upon a time, you’d have taken your broken camera to a shop for examination and possible repair, but now? I figured I’d gotten my money’s worth out of the Olympus, and soon acquired just as good camera — better in some ways — in the form of a used iPhone that was no longer a communication device.

The failure of my camera on a trip was a kind of inconvenience, though barely even that. Back when Ann went to Washington, D.C., with a junior high group, some camera error or other meant she returned with few images. This upset her. I told her I was sorry she lost the images. But as worthwhile as capturing images can be, or sharing them, seeing a place yourself is the important thing.

The Sunken Gardens, 2013

Posted on March 5, 2023 by admin

I’m not sure I realized it during my visit in March 2013, but the Sunken Gardens in Brackenridge Park in San Antonio had been restored only about 10 years earlier, by a public-private partnership. Nice work.

The Sunken Gardens is another one of those places I’ve visited across the decades with a shifting array of companions: my grandmother, first of all, but also every one of my immediate family, cousins, high school friends, visiting girlfriends, other out-of-town visitors, my fiancé-then-wife, my children. It’s a personal favorite of a place.

It isn’t authentic in the sense that Japanese garden designers created it. Rather, the city parks department created it from an abandoned quarry in the 1910s, probably after consulting photographs and maybe other sources on Japanese gardens, but I don’t know that. Maybe the department just winged it.

It is authentic San Antonio: an interpretation of a Japanese garden that whatever the inspiration, is inspired.

The main pavilion, an impressive bit of rock laying.

And of woodwork.

Ah, Texas in March. Spring green, ahead of summer brown.

Youth.

Been 10 years. I ought to go back if I can, but I’ve accumulated a lot of personal favorite places over the years.

McNay Art Museum, 2015

Posted on February 26, 2023 by admin

Remarkable how the 2010s are receding so quickly. How is that possible? The tumults of the early 2020s, with the prospect of more to come? A kind of red-shifting of past years that gets more pronounced as old age sets in?

After all, the more moments you’ve had, the less any particular one might count, even relatively recent ones. Or does it work that way? No doubt there are TEDx talks about the plasticity of memory, all erudite and maybe even persuasive — until some future decade, when they’ll be considered wrongheaded if they’re ever watched, which they won’t be.

These thoughts occurred as I was looking through my picture files for February 2015, when I spent some high-quality time in south Texas. One evening during that visit, I popped over the the McNay Art Museum, one of San Antonio’s lesser-known treasures.

I’d been visiting the museum for years. Decades. We went there on field trips in elementary school in the early ’70s. It helps that it’s conveniently located near my mother’s house and the school I went to — no more than a mile away.

“Ohio-born heiress Marion Koogler first visited San Antonio in 1918, shortly after her marriage to Sergeant Don Denton McNay, who was called to active duty in Laredo, Texas. Later that year Don McNay died from the Spanish flu,” the museum says.

“In 1926, Marion moved to San Antonio, where she met and married prominent ophthalmologist Donald T. Atkinson. The following year, she purchased her first modern oil painting, Diego Rivera’s ‘Delfina Flores,’ and the Atkinsons commissioned San Antonio architects Atlee and Robert Ayres to design a 24-room Spanish Colonial-Revival house that would one day become the core of the McNay Art Museum [which opened in 1954]”

There was a later addition (2008) to the house to expand the museum, which now has about 22,000 works, mostly 19th- to 21st century, many regional, but not all.

I’m especially taken with the gorgeous courtyard. I’ll bet more than one proposal of marriage has happened there.

The courtyard features a few works from the collection, such a Renoir, “The Washerwoman” (1917).

The heart-wrenching “War Mother” (1939) by Charles Umlauf (1911-94), a sculptor originally from Michigan, but living in Chicago and working for the WPA when he created it.

The work is credited with helping him get a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin in the early ’40s, which he held to 40 years.

Another Umlauf: “Cruxifix” (1946).

A remarkable talent. One of these days, I want to visit the Umlauf museum, which is in Austin. And of course, I want to go back to the McNay again.

The National Shrine of St. Thérèse

Posted on January 8, 2023 by admin

Well over a decade ago, during a summertime visit to San Antonio, I drove to the west side of the city to see the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower, which I’d never seen or even heard of before, despite growing up in that city. It was very hot that day, as it tends to be that time of the year, so I didn’t linger outside to take many pictures, though I snapped a few marginal ones.

This is a better image. I’m not sure at what point I realized that the basilica in San Antonio and the National Shrine of St. Thérèse in Darien, Illinois, were dedicated to the same person, Thérèse de Lisieux, but I know now. And whatever else I know about St. Thérèse, I also have some sense of her immense popularity as a saint, inspiring edifices around the world in her honor.

We arrived at the Darien shrine just before noon on December 29, an overcast but not especially cold day. Above freezing, anyway. There it is, I told Yuriko.

So we went in. A few minutes passed before I realized that we not in the shrine, but in the nearby museum building, which I believe was the shrine before a new one was completed a few years ago. The sign on this building makes me think that. If so, there needs to be a signage update.

This is the current shrine.

In effect, this is the fourth shrine to her that has existed in the Chicago area. The first two were in the city, a larger one succeeding the original as her popularity grew in the 1920s.

The church that housed the second shrine burned down nearly 50 years ago, but by the 1980s the Carmelites were able to find the scratch the build a third shrine out in the suburbs. The demographics were going that way anyway.

The Carmelites tasked Charles Vincent George Architects, based in nearby Naperville, to design the fourth and latest shrine, which was completed in 2018.

Behind the altar is St. Thérèse in glass.

“The architectural solution pays homage to St. Therese throughout, from the main building’s shape, inspired by the unfolding petals of a flower, a nod to St. Therese’s nickname ‘Little Flower,’ to key structures, such as the plaza clock tower, reminding us of her clockmaker father, and the 24-column colonnade, serving as a symbol of St. Therese’s 24 years of life,” CVG notes.

“As St. Therese had humble beginnings, special attention was taken to provide simple building materials using stone, brick and the limited use of wood for construction materials. The entire building layout focuses on the center altar and image of St. Therese etched in the chancel glass wall, through which there are views of her statue built out into the lake behind the chapel.”

In December, St. Thérèse is the star of Christmas trees in the shrine.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tree decorated with prayers before, but there it was. All of them to the saint.

The museum included some seasonal features as well, such as a nativity under a more permanent woodwork depicting the saint.

Just in case anyone is uncertain, labels come with the nativity scene. Guess that’s helpful for kids who have just learned to read, but I as far as can remember as a kid, the figures were something that everyone knew. Essential Christmas lore, even for public school children. Maybe that’s not true anymore.

Modern stained glass. Some nice abstractions plus holy figures.

What would a saint’s shrine complex be without some relics?

I didn’t know dust could count as a relic, but I’m not up on what can and can not constitute a relic. The museum also has a few relics of Thérèse’s parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, who happen to be saints as well.

“Louis had tried to become a monk, but was rejected because he could not master Latin,” a sign in the museum says. “Zélie Guérin tried to become a Sister of Charity, but was rejected due to poor health.”

They couldn’t take vows, but apparently did the next best thing: produce five daughters (the survivors of nine children), all of whom became nuns.

Young Mid-Century Doctor

Posted on December 11, 2022 by admin

I have in my possession — because I lifted it from the large collection of photos at the Stribling manse in San Antonio — this square black-and-white snapshot. I think I brought it back at the same time as my pre-1960 election Ken and Sue shot.

In light pencil on the back, my mother wrote, “V.A. Hospital Party 1958.” December is on the edge of the print, so a Christmas party would be a good bet. My father probably took it. He was handy with a camera.

Unfortunately, my mother didn’t write anything else on it. My father worked for the VA at the time, so I have to assume this is a picture of a colleague. I don’t know who he was. My recollections of 1958 are vanishingly small, after all. Zero, as it happens.

I suspect no one would have given much thought about cigar-smoking at a party, or cigar-smoking by a doctor, though I imagine that my mother didn’t care much for the second-hand smoke. As a matter of individual taste, that is, and probably not as a health concern.

Via the magic of easy photo enlargement, most of the bottles can be identified.

The big bottle on the shelf is Canada Dry, which must have been a mixer. Next to it is the familiar shape of a standard Coke bottle, recognizable down the decades. A mixer as well, at least for some partygoers. Good to see a bit of continuity with the present, even if it’s in the shape of a commercial object.

Not sure about that left-hand bottle in the row of four, or the right-hand one either, but there are clearly more Canada Dry bottles in between.

The lower shelf features more Coke and gin.

Hiram Walker’s gin, as it happens. I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that’s still in stores, too.

Thanks, Grandma

Posted on July 10, 2022 by admin

Fifty-five years ago, my grandmother — Grandma, always — took me on a train ride from San Antonio to Austin. I found evidence of it tucked away in an envelope at my mother’s house some time ago.

Grandma thoughtfully made a note of the fact that it was my first train ride, and the date: July 8, 1967. I was visiting Grandma for a while that summer, as I did in the years before we lived in San Antonio.

Come to think of it, the next summer while I visited her, my family moved from Denton to San Antonio. (Not the stuff of a sitcom; I knew perfectly well we were moving.) Grandma was the one who first took me to visit the house that my mother had bought, and would live in for nearly 50 years.

I find it amusing that a child counted as half a person for the purposes of train fare. Grandma thus paid fare $4.41 for one and a half riders. Adjust that for inflation, and she paid more than $38 in our current, beleaguered dollars.

Good old Missouri Pacific. Mopac.

We must have been visiting someone she knew in Austin, but I don’t remember anything about that. I do remember wisps from the ride itself, mostly the view out the window. I’m sure she knew a train ride would be a thrill for a six-year-old.

But there was more to it than that. I also remember that she told me that it might not be possible for me to ride a train when I was older, so she wanted to take me. Certainly Grandma knew, by 1967, that the writing was on the wall for U.S. passenger train service, or at least Mopac. Maybe she wanted a last ride herself, before passenger trains went the way of the buffalo.

(Outdated analogy. Like the buffalo, passenger trains came to a population bottleneck known as Amtrak, rather than total extinction.)

I imagine an older version of myself — not even now, but perhaps from mid-90s — appearing to her and saying, Grandma, I’ve ridden a lot of trains. In Europe and Asia — and once across Russia from Asia to Europe. I’ve taken the bullet train, and even Amtrak from San Antonio to San Francisco in 1990, though it was distinctly second rate.

And those are just the intercity trains. I’ve lost count of how many different subways and light rail lines I’ve taken, but it would be dozens.

She probably would have been a mite skeptical of those assertions.

It was a one-way ticket. We returned by bus the next day.

Go Greyhound. Grandma also noted that it was my first bus ride. She was being thrifty in not taking the train back, I think. The bus fare is recorded as $1.35 (just short of $12 now), though I don’t know whether that was for the two of us or just me. Even if she paid double that herself, that would have been less than the train.

She probably didn’t think buses would quit running. I don’t remember the bus ride at all.

Future me could pop up again: Grandma, I’ve been on a lot of buses, too, in lots of states and countries. I took one across Australia once. But even in America, I’ve gotten around — all the way from Boston to Los Angeles, once, and that was just part of the trip!

Isn’t that nice, she’d say, thinking at least that her grandson has a healthy imagination.

Down in Galveston, Up in Yellowstone

Posted on June 16, 2022 by admin

Back to posting on Tuesday, since of course Juneteenth is a holiday. I just found out that since last year, there’s been a mural in Galveston commemorating the issuance of General Order No. 3 by (Brevet) Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, who would be wholly obscure otherwise. The artist, Reginald C. Adams, is from Houston.

Something to see if I ever make it back to Galveston, which is more likely than, say, Timbuktu. But I don’t believe I’ll go to Galveston in the summer again.

I downloaded a National Park Service image (and thus public domain) today of the road near the north entrance of Yellowstone NP, showing the damage from the recent flooding. Damn.

Many more pictures of the flooding in the park and in Montana are here, along with a story about the curious absence of the governor of Montana.

“Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance,” the NPS says. “Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.”

No doubt. We entered the park at the north entrance back in ’05 and spent some time in that part of Yellowstone. The Gardiner River was much more peaceful then.

“Just south of the park’s north entrance, there’s a parking lot next to the Gardiner River. Just beyond the edge of the lot is a path that follows the edge of the river, under some shade trees,” I wrote at the time.

“The river is very shallow at that point, with a cold current pushing over piles of very smooth stones… piles of rock moderated the current a little, so that you could sit in the river and let it wash over you. It wasn’t exactly swimming, but it was refreshing.

“Along the road, just at the entrance to the parking lot, there were two signs: ENTERING WYOMING and 45TH PARALLEL of LATITUDE HALFWAY BETWEEN EQUATOR and NORTH POLE.”

Wonder if that sign is still standing.

Uncle Walt’s Band, 1982

Posted on June 12, 2022 by admin

Nearly two years ago, media distribution company Orchard Enterprises provided 21 songs to YouTube, cuts on a collection called Uncle Walt’s Band Anthology. Subtitled — and it really captures the essence of that band — “Those Boys From Carolina, They Sure Enough Could Sing…”

Sure enough. The three-man band, Walter Hyatt, Champ Hood and David Ball, all originally from Spartanburg, SC, existed for a few years in the early 1970s and again in the late ’70s and early ’80s. They produced four original albums, did solo work, and played with a good number of other musicians in Austin and Nashville over the years. Those few reviews one can find about Uncle Walt’s Band tend to characterize them as Americana, and I supposed they were — a mix of American styles by South Carolina musicians who honed their skills in Nashville and Austin both.

Though fondly remembered by a few, especially other musicians, wider fame eluded Uncle Walt’s Band. I already knew that, but the point is hammered home by looking at the view count for some of their wonderful songs on Anthology — such as the fun “Seat of Logic” (only 533 views after two years, not 533,000 as by rights it ought to be); the winsome “Ruby” (only 569 views); and the sweetly melancholic “High Hill” (only 344 views); and on and on.

Forty years ago this evening I had the exceptionally good fortune of seeing Uncle Walt’s Band live in Nashville. “Crystalline sound,” I wrote in the diary I kept at the time, along with other unhelpful scraps when it comes to remembering it now. Still, the show was some of the best live music I saw in college, or ever really. A less fanciful way to characterize the gentlemen who played for us that evening would be near-perfect three-voice close harmony, with guitar, fiddle and bass.

I had taken a month-long trip not long before that evening, returning to Nashville less than a week earlier, with plans to attend summer school, but not take it all that seriously. That is exactly what I did and I don’t regret a moment of it. While I was away, my friend Dan had obtained the records Uncle Walt’s Band (a renaming and reissue of the 1974 Blame It On The Bossanova) and An American in Texas (1980, the same year the band appeared on Austin City Limits).

To put it in music biz terms, those records were in heavy rotation around the house where Dan and Rich lived, and where Mike, Steve and I were constant visitors that summer. As soon as I returned to Nashville, I heard it too. Then we got wind of the fact that Uncle Walt’s Band was playing live on Saturday the 12th at a place called The Sutler. We couldn’t believe our luck, and we weren’t about to miss that.

At time I called The Sutler “a tavern next to a bowling alley, a bakery and a restaurant,” which it was, though I didn’t record its address on 8th Ave. South in the Melrose neighborhood. That was further than we usually went, though (I know now), not that far from campus. Dive might not quite have been the word for the place, but it certainly wasn’t posh, and while I’m pretty sure I went there a few times in later years, I only remember seeing UWB there, and the joint’s last iteration closed only this year. It was standing room only for a while, but eventually we got a table. We stayed for the whole show. My mind’s eye can visualize it even now, and my mind’s ear can hear a crystalline echo of their sound.

UWB broke up for the last time the year after we saw them, but their musical presence that summer made an impression on me. Enough that in the late ’80s, when I was visiting Austin, I noticed a small poster somewhere advertising a show by Walter Hyatt at the famed Waterloo Ice House on on Congress Ave. We have to go to that, I told Tom Jones, whom I was visiting, and so we did.

During one of the breaks in that show, I asked Hyatt where I could buy copies of the two records that I remembered so fondly from the summer of ’82 — I think I even mentioned the show at The Sutler — since finding obscure music was more of a chore in those days. He gave me an address to send a check to, and soon after I did, I received an audio cassette of Uncle Walt’s Band and An American in Texas, which I listened to periodically over the years and own to this day.

Forty years is a long time, and time has taken its toll. Walter Hyatt died in the ValuJet Flight 592 crash in 1996 and Champ Hood died of cancer in 2001. David Ball has had a successful career as a country musician and is now pushing 70.

One more thing: I didn’t realize until the other day that the subtitle, “Those Boys From Carolina…” was no random pick. Lyle Lovett, Texan of distinct hair and winning ways with song, mentioned UWB in a song he recorded long after the band was gone, but before Walter Hyatt died, the amusing “That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas.”

Those boys from Carolina,
They sure enough could sing.
But when they came on down to Texas,
We all showed them how to swing.

Obscure Texas Memorials

Posted on April 3, 2022 by admin

In April 2014, I visited Texas, and among other things drove south from Dallas with my brother Jay, not by way of the congested I-35, a road I’ve driven too many times to count, but by I-45 in the direction of Houston. We diverted from that highway to College Station, home of Texas A&M, and spent a little while at Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site, before heading to San Antonio.

Among other memorials at Washington-on-the-Brazos was a fairly new one. At the time, only five years old.

Ron Stone (1936-2008) was a highly regarded local news anchorman in Houston who also wrote books about Texas history.

A tribute to Ron Stone

Ron loved Texas history and delighted in teaching others about our great Lone Star legacy. An award-winning TV anchorman, “Eyes of Texas” reporter and Sons of the Republic honoree, Ron served as master of ceremonies of Texas Independence Day for over two decades.

Fittingly, the stone says it was dedicated on Texas Independence Day in 2009.

What fascinates me about obscure memorials? Most people don’t share that interest. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be obscure. The feeling goes back a long way, too. I might have taken this picture with our Instamatic 104 in the early ’70s, during a short family trip through the Hill Country; but even if my brother Jay took it, I found the image intriguing.

It’s a memorial to one Oscar J. Fox (1879-1961), just off the road on U.S. 281 near Marble Falls, Texas, with a view of the Colorado River. In pre-Internet days, finding out its story would have taken more research expertise that I could have mustered as a child or even an adolescent, so it remained an enigma for years, there with the more recognizable subjects in our family photo album.

“The Hills of Home”
Memorial to Oscar J. Fox
Composer of this song
1879-1961
This is the view which gave
inspiration for this beautiful song.

These days, it’s no trick to find out more about Oscar J. Fox (here and here), who was known as a composer of cowboy songs, or at least an arranger of traditional cowboy songs. It’s also not hard to find recordings of “The Hills of Home,” though I have to say Nelson Eddy’s recording doesn’t do anything for me. Must have been a sentimental favorite for some people long ago, though.

Lawless Roads, A Greene Enthusiast & The Pecan-Shellers Strike

Posted on January 24, 2022 by admin

Really nice sunset today, red-grays among the lingering clouds that had dropped snow earlier in the day. Too good, I decided, to capture in digital image form. Besides, it’s cold out there.

I picked up Lawless Roads again last night. It was the book I took with me to New York last month, reading about half. Very near the end of my outbound flight, a youngish fellow in the middle seat next to me spied the cover and told me he’d never heard of the book, even though he thought he’d read all of Graham Greene.

I told him it was one of his handful of travel books. He said he would find it and read it. We had to get off the plane pretty soon after that, so I didn’t discuss Greene any further with him. That may be just as well, since I’ve only read a few of his titles, such as The Quiet American, Journey Without Maps, The Third Man, and Travels With My Aunt. I liked all of them, but don’t count myself as an enthusiast.

Early in the book, Greene visits San Antonio, and mentions in passing the city’s pecan shelling industry, whose poorly paid and ill-treated workers were on strike at the time (early 1938).

One thing that struck me was the size of the industry: “Forty-seven pecan shelleries lying discreetly out of sight in San Antonio and they shell in a good year, twenty-one million pounds of nuts,” according to Greene.

“In the 1930s Texas pecans accounted for approximately 50 percent of the nation’s production,” the Handbook of Texas says, revealing an even larger industry than Greene thought. “San Antonio was the Texas shelling center because half the commercial Texas pecans grew within a 250-mile radius of the city.

“The pecan-shelling industry was one of the lowest-paid industries in the United States, with a typical wage ranging between two and three dollars a week. In the nearly 400 shelling factories in San Antonio the contracting system was prevalent; the large firms controlled the supply of nuts as well as the prices for shelling.

“Working conditions were abysmal — illumination was poor, inside toilets and washbowls were nonexistent, and ventilation was inadequate.”

It was a brief flowering for the labor movement in San Antonio, with mixed results, and in a few years the point was moot, with hand shellers generally replaced by machines. By the time I came along, all traces of the industry had vanished, at least as far as I knew. Its memory had vanished as well, again at least as far as I knew.

As labor actions go in San Antonio, that was one of the more memorable ones, yet somehow by the 1970s not even my former Wobbly high school U.S. history teacher, the spirited Mrs. Collins, mentioned it in class. She was from upstate New York, so perhaps had little knowledge of it herself. I had to hear about it from my Government teacher at UT Austin in the summer of ’81, who said he was an adherent of anarchism, but that’s a story for another time.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Texas