Tag Archives: Texas

San Antonio Riverwalk Views

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Summer’s pretty pleasant here in the not-so-hot reaches of Illinois. Up in the sky.
And down toward the ground, where strange critters lurk.
So pleasant that I’m taking a week off from work and posting. Back on August 5.

Both of the places I visited in San Antonio recently were near the San Antonio River and thus the Riverwalk. So I took a few minutes each time to go down to the river.

Near the King William District, the walk was almost deserted.
Temps were in the 90s, of course, which might have contributed to it, but I suspect not many people come this way anyway.

A few do. Here’s a view of the Arsenal Street Bridge.

A view from the Arsenal Street Bridge, looking north toward downtown San Antonio.
The building poking over the trees, with the flag, is the Tower Life Building, though I’ll always think of it has the Smith-Young Tower, completed in 1929. One of the city’s finest office buildings. I understand that once upon a time, my civil engineer grandfather had an office there.

After visiting the Briscoe Museum, I walked over to the Riverwalk — it’s only a short distance away — at one of its more touristed spots.

This is the Arneson River Theatre.
The stage is on the north side of the river, while 13 rows of grass are on the south side for seating. Just another idea of the Father of the Riverwalk, H.H. Hugman, finally realized as the WPA built the Riverwalk in the late ’30s. Arneson was the WPA engineer who was to have been in charge of building the Riverwalk, but he died before the project really got under way.

The San Antonio Museum of Art

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Besides the Briscoe, last Tuesday I visited the San Antonio Museum of Art, which is just north of downtown and also happens to be no charge in the late afternoon and early evening every Tuesday.
The SAMA complex is a major adaptive reuse project from the 1980s. The former Lone Star Brewery, whose solid brick buildings dated from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was transformed into the museum, complete with neon-decorated skybridge on the fourth floor. Sounds Vegas-like, but it isn’t garish.

The museum has a sizable collection befitting its location in a sizable city, including ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman art, North American, Latin American and Spanish colonial pieces, collections representing Japan, Korea, and India, three galleries of Chinese works from early times to later dynasties, Near Eastern art, an Oceania gallery and more.

I decided to focus on two of the museum’s strengths — art from Antiquity, especially Rome, and Latin American folk art — though I did spend some time looking at American paintings and Texas artwork.

Here’s something that gets your attention, or ought to, right when you enter SAMA’s commodious Roman art gallery.
A second-century CE statue known as the Landsdowne Marcus Aurelius. Wonder what the original colors looked like.

“Begun by Gavin Hamilton (1723-98), one of the most prominent British explorers of classical sites of the eighteenth century, the Lansdowne Collection came to hold more than one hundred stellar examples of classical statuary, displayed in a specially designed gallery in Lansdowne House in London,” says a blurb for Reconstructing the Landsdowne Collection of Classical Marbles.

“The collection, however, was dispersed in the years after 1930, and its works are now scattered across the globe.”

This particular one wound up at SAMA, a donation of the 20th-century American owner of the piece, a rich fellow I’ve run across before: Gilbert Denman Jr. In fact, he left his collection of ancient art to the museum, making the gallery possible.
Another Denman bequest: the Lansdowne Trajan. The Romans were clearly not shy about official nudity.
A beat-up portrait of Hadrian.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: Etruscan art.
In this case, a lid from a sarcophagus. Considerably worn, with an unsettling face that looks at us from across 25 centuries or so. As historical peoples go, the Etruscans are a half-remembered fragment of a haruspical dream.

I also spent time at the Latin American Folk Art gallery, which is part of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art. Rockefeller had his hobbies, and one of them was collecting Latin American folk art.

As the NYT reported when the center opened about 20 years ago: “When Nelson A. Rockefeller made his final trip to Mexico in 1978, several months before his death, his eye was drawn to a small hacienda surrounded by a picket fence along a rural road in Oaxaca. Atop each picket was a tall, strangely striking figurine made of rough pottery.

“The former Vice President stopped the car, walked to the door and discovered the shop of a family of potters. Each statue on the fence had been damaged somehow in the making and just perched on the fence to help advertise the shop. They were evocative pieces spanning many years, left to bake in the Mexican sun. Rockefeller bought them all.”

These fellows greet you at the gallery.
Molds for papier mache figures, ca. 1930, artist unknown, from Celaya, Mexico.

The work of another unknown artist.
A Parachico Mask (Mascara de Parachico) from Chiapas, Mexico. Polychromed wood, glass, ribbon and cactus fiber. Ca. 1970 and about as funky as can be.

By contrast, the artist of these delightful creations is well known.

They’re painted earthenware by Candelario Medrano, a Mexican artist who died in 1988. “Medrano began his career by producing toy whistles, mermaids, roosters, and other animals,” the museum says. “Later, he placed them on airplanes, boats, towers, merry-do-rounds and trucks, thereby creating delightful and colorful scenes of fantasy.”

As usual, the museum isn’t selling postcards based on artwork that would make unusual cards, like this.

“The Psychoanalyst (El Psicoanalista),” ca. 1994 by Jose Francisco Borges of Brazil.

The Amy & V.H. McNutt Sculpture Garden

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Just outside the Briscoe Western Art Museum in downtown San Antonio is the Amy & V.H. McNutt Sculpture Garden. It’s shady, so even on a hot day it was pleasant for a short visit.
V.H. McNutt was a mining engineer who made a fortune in potash in New Mexico in the 1920s. Later he and his wife owned a large ranch near San Antonio. The McNutt Foundation is in San Antonio even now.

Many of the sculptures involve Native American themes. Such as “Strength of the Maker” (1990) by Denny Haskew.
“Bird Woman” (2001) by Richard Greeves.
“Rainmaker” (1998) by John Coleman.
“Dance of the Eagle” (1986) by Allan Houser.

“Crow Brave with Fan” (1985) by Doug Hyde. Unlike most of the other pieces in the courtyard, a work in granite.

“Chief Quanah Parker” by Jim Reno. No date noted that I could see, but I suppose before 2008, since the artist died that year.
Quanah Parker had a prominent place at the small museum at Palo Dura Canyon State Park that I visited earlier this year. He was one of the leaders the last of the Comanches’ big raids, the Battle of Adobe Walls, in 1874.

The statue’s a good one, and he certainly looks like a Comanche war chief, though it would be more interesting if Quanah Parker’s statue looked like this.

This is “Thank You Lord” (2011) by Harold Holden.

And a detail from “El Caporal” (2015) by Enrique Guerra.
Detail because he appears to be driving some bronze cattle, not pictured here, ahead of him.

The Briscoe Western Art Museum

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On Tuesdays, the Briscoe Western Art Museum in downtown San Antonio — in full, the Dolph and Janey Briscoe Western Art Museum — offers free admission from 4 to 9 p.m., so after wrapping up my work that day last week, I decided to visit within that window of discount opportunity. It’s still a fairly new museum, open only since 2013, so I’d never been.

The building, which is on W. Market St., is not new. It was the main city library from 1930 to 1968, so I don’t remember it as that, though my mother and grandparents would have known it.

The lobby is striking. This image was taken before the installation of a reception desk toward the back, and a large bronze, John Coleman’s “Visions of Change.” A lot of restoration apparently went into bringing the interior roughly back to its library-era look.

For some decades after the library moved, the building housed the Hertzberg Circus Collection, an enormous array of circus artifacts that the library used to own. That I remember. Vaguely. I know I went once as a kid. Around the beginning of the 21st century, the Witte Museum acquired the collection and plans were laid for the current museum.

Something like the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, the Briscoe focuses on art from both the Indian and non-Indian populations of the West, but it also has a lot of artifacts. In nine galleries on three levels, that includes paintings, sculptures, guns and other weapons, such as a fancy sword owned by Santa Anna, saddles — Pancho Villa’s and Roy Rogers’ — jewelry, Mexican santos and retablos, a chuck wagon, a replica stage coach, and a collection of spurs that takes up an entire wall.

There are some Texas touches, such as a windmill in motion. Other Western states have them, but windmills have a special place in the history of Texas.

There’s a de facto shrine to Dolf and Janey Briscoe in the form of Dolf’s desk and some other items. As you’d expect, the Briscoes donated art and ponied up money to make the museum possible.
Good old Dolf. I think of him as a mellow governor, as befitting his ’70s time in office. I’m sure that’s nonsense, though: you don’t get to be a successful politico, much less governor of a large state, by being mellow. Not even if you start out as one of the richest men in the state. Rich in a traditional Texas way, too: a vast ranching operation. None of this microchip or cyber-fortune wealth for Dolf (well, maybe he branched into all that before he died in 2010).

My own favorite item in the museum: a large diorama behind glass walls depicting the storming of the Alamo. Carelessly, I didn’t check to see who created it, though it might be the work of one Tom Feeley. The museum’s web site is unhelpful in telling me. But whoever it was did a first-rate job.

The diorama includes all of the walls standing at the time of the siege, plus the buildings, and thousands of two- or so inch figures — armed Mexicans and Texians, horses, cannons — all done with incredible attention to detail. It captures the moment when the defenders, surrounded on all four sides by masses of Mexican soldiers, are about to be overwhelmed; but they’re still fighting.

Headphones are attached to a low wall below the glass, and you can listen to short items about various participants in the battle — the big three of Travis, Crockett and Bowie, of course, but also Susanna Dickinson, Joe (Travis’ slave), Gen. Cos and Santa Anna.

Near the diorama is a life-sized bronze of Travis, “Col. Travis — The Line” by James Muir, who specializes in heroic and allegorical work. That is, it depicts Travis drawing his famed line in the sand. A se non è vero, è ben trovato sort of story if there ever was one.

The artists in the museum’s temporary exhibit were a little unexpected: Andy Warhol and Billy Schenck. The Warhol part of the exhibit is very late Warhol (he died the next year): his 1986 Cowboys & Indians series. The artist gave his colorful and instantly recognizable treatment to the likes of John Wayne, Annie Oakley, George Custer, Geronimo and TR, among others.

Warhol might have been at risk, in earlier decades, of being a hopelessly dated artist, one whose reputation is forever stuck in the 1960s. Somehow he seems to have avoided that.

I’m less familar with Billy Schenck, who, unlike Warhol, is still alive and working. He’s “Warhol of the West,” according to the museum, and there are some similarities, especially in his generous displays of color. On the whole, he’s a match for Warhol. His work on exhibit at the Briscoe includes a number of the pieces in the slideshow at his web site.

The King William District in July

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Just back from eight days in San Antonio. Most of the time I visited with family or worked, since my kind of work is mobile. Also, temps in the high 90s and sometimes over 100 degrees F. discouraged me from too much wandering around during the day.

Even so, last Sunday toward the late afternoon I drove down to the King William District, which is leafy this time of year and so not quite unbearably hot, and took a few short walks.

“The district encompasses land that was once irrigated farm land belonging to the Mission San Antonio de Valero, commonly known as the Alamo,” the City of San Antonio says. “When the mission was secularized in 1793, the lands were divided among the resident Indian families from the mission or sold at public auction. In the 1860s the area was subdivided into lots and laid out with the present streets.

“In the mid-nineteenth century… a great many Germans, who had immigrated to Texas in the 1840s, began to settle in this area… The area developed into an idyllic neighborhood of large, impressive houses designed in the Greek Revival, Victorian, and Italianate styles.

“The main street into the neighborhood was given the name King William in honor of King Wilhelm I, King of Prussia in the 1870s. During World War I, when America was at war with Germany, the name was changed to Pershing Avenue. A few years after the war ended the King William name was restored.”

These days there’s a Pershing Ave. in San Antonio, but it’s further north, fittingly not far from Fort Sam Houston. By the mid-20th century, the King William District was run down. By the late 20th century, restoration was under way.

One of my short walks took me along King William St., which is an important street in the district, but hardly the only one. The array of houses made me think of the East End Historic District in Galveston. In King William, there are large and historic houses such as the Villa Finale.
The Steves Homested. One of these days, I’ll take the tour.Edward Steves was a successful businessman in lumber in San Antonio in the 19th century, and Steves & Sons, which makes doors, is still around. I went to high school with a girl who was descended from Steves on her mother’s side.

There are plenty of other large and not-so-large houses on the street, most of which are worth a look.
That last one is the Alfred Giles House. One the architect of that name designed for himself. He’s thought to have done the Steves Homestead, and he certainly designed a lot of buildings in Texas, including some county courthouses (such for Goliad County and Presidio County) and even some in Monterrey, Mexico.

Recent Sounds

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I take my digital audio recorder some places that I go — I’m resisting the temptation to call it a “tape recorder” — and sometimes to step outside the door and record the ambient sounds.

Such as outside my mother’s house in San Antonio last month. The birds were a lot livelier than in the cold Illinois I’d left, and the selection of birdsong somewhat different, though I can’t pinpoint the exact differences.

In Marathon, Texas, late last month the wind blew much of the night and into the morning one day. I captured 20 seconds of it, but it went on without much pause for hours.

The spring rainstorms in northern Illinois have been numerous and loud recently. This is what I heard from my front porch about 24 hours ago.

The rain had stopped by the morning and the sun dried up a lot of the puddles today. But not everywhere. The back yard is still marshy.

Sightseeing at the Jetties Cafe 60-Odd Years Ago

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Here’s a postcard I acquired at a Missouri antique mall not long ago. To judge by the automobiles in the image, early to mid-1950s.

The image doesn’t seem odd, not at first, but the caption on the other side tells a different story:

“Aliens who have entered the United States illegally are being returned to Mexico on this ship passing the Jetties Cafe on Padre Island, Port Isabel, Tex. Usually a smaller boat follows the ship to pick up aliens who prefer to ‘jump ship’ before it clears the channel.”

As postcard subjects go, that’s one of the odder ones I’ve seen. A casual scene of mass deportation. Maybe it was a strange card even 60+ years ago. Or maybe it counted as topical, referring to a not-well-remembered action by the Eisenhower administration.

The publisher was Frank Whaley Post Cards of McAllen, Texas, and this card is numbered FW-457. A casual look reveals that he seemed to specialize in South Texas. Apparently he was successful enough to own a couple of postcard vans.

Trans-Pecos & Llano Estacado 3,600+ Mile Drive Tidbits

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Along U.S. 90, not far west of the town of Comstock, Texas, the road crosses the Pecos River. The east end of the bridge has a place to stop and take in the view. This is looking upriver.

Downriver, toward the Pecos’ meeting with the Rio Grande.

Hard to believe there’s that much water in West Texas. Anyway, the river (of course) marks the beginning of the Trans-Pecos.

One of the grand hospitality properties of the Trans-Pecos is the Gage Hotel in Marathon, originally developed in 1927 by West Texas cattle baron Alfred Gage (born in Vermont), and designed by El Paso architect Henry Trost. Fifty years later, Houston businessman J.P. Bryan bought the rundown property and made it into a modern boutique hotel.

I didn’t stay at the Gage, though I had a good meal there and used its wifi. Instead, I stayed at the Marathon Motel & RV Park down the road. It has all the charms of a tourist court — separate cabin-like buildings of two or four units, even a bottle opener fixed to the wall — at a more modest price than the Gage.

There is an astronomy enthusiast at the Marathon Motel in the evenings, Bob, who sets up a couple of sophisticated telescopes a short walk outside the property and shows guests the night sky, which is pretty dark out in Marathon. I spent about an hour talking with Bob and looking his scopes the first night I was there.

Trouble was, the Moon was waxing gibbous, which made the sky a lot less dark. But we looked at some easy-to-find brighter objects, such as Jupiter and some of the Galilean moons, as well as Mizar and Alcor, and tried to spot the Orion Nebula. Orion was trending toward the horizon, about to bid adieu for the warm months.

Bob said the sky would be dark again a few hours before dawn, but I didn’t get up at that time until the last morning I was at the motel. At about 5 that morning, I woke (for the usual reason), but also got dressed and wandered outside for a few minutes. Bob was right. The Moon was gone, and there was what I wanted to see, no telescope necessary — the wispy, luminous edge of the Milky Way, billions and billions of stars at a glance. It was like seeing an old friend.

Speaking of nighttime spectres, not long after I left Marfa, I stopped along U.S. 67/90 at the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center, which is essentially a rest stop with extra windows in the wall.

I wasn’t about to come that way at night and wait around for a glimpse of a desert will-o’-the-wisp, so I had to be satisfied with a daytime view of the direction of the Marfa lights. Eh.

While driving along I-20 in metro Midland-Odessa, I saw an official highway sign for the Midland International Air & Space Port. What? Space port? Seems a little optimistic on the part of the local airport authority.

Indeed, in 2014 the FAA approved the airport’s application to become first primary commercial service airport to be certified as a spaceport. XCOR Aerospace was due to start flying its Lynx spaceplane from Midland, but the company went bankrupt in 2017 before that ever happened. Oops. Maybe Fireball XL5 will start using Midland International soon. (That theme song has more traction than I realized. Even Neil Gaiman did a cover; once, anyway.)

In Amarillo, I saw another kind of sign. Fake street signs. I was driving along I forget which street, and saw a diamond-shaped sign, off to the side of the road but actually on private property, that said WE CALLED HIM COUNT DRACULA. It was a non-standard color, too: black with red letters.

Huh? But I had driving to do, and other cars not to hit, so the thought passed. Sometime later, I saw another sign — different color, similarly located — that said MINE BY RIGHT OF CONQUEST.

This got me to wondering, and I actually remembered to look into these odd signs. Doesn’t take long to find image collections of the signs, which are all over Amarillo, apparently.

According to Roadtrippers Chronicles — “The Raddest Stories From The Road” — “the strange signs are part of an art installation called The Dynamite Museum. Partially funded by oil heir and patron of offbeat art Stanley Marsh 3 (most famous for his work with Ant Farm on Cadillac Ranch), there are even a few in the nearby town of Adrian (it’s said that Marsh liked the idea of putting the signs in towns that started with the letter A).

“There was no rhyme or reason to the messages on the signs; the people behind the project would come up with ideas, or vote on suggestions sent in, and then install their favorites all over town.”

If I’d known that before I went to Amarillo, I would have looked for more.

The morning I left Amarillo, I had the radio to keep me company on the open road to Oklahoma City (I-40 in our time), and for a while I got a strong signal from Turkey, Texas, to the south. That day was Bob Wills Day in Turkey, and it sounded like a big to-do. The biggest shindig of the year for the town, probably. After all, Bob Wills is still the king.

I didn’t know until I looked it up that the King of Western Swing spent some of his youth on a farm near Turkey. The town of Turkey clearly remembers him. Sounded like fun, but it was too far out of the way. Just another thing missed because of scheduling.

Three West Texas Cemeteries

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Heading out from San Antonio on U.S. 90, I considered a stop in Uvalde, Texas, to see the Briscoe-Garner Museum. Briscoe, as in Dolph Briscoe, 41st governor of Texas (in the 1970s, so I remember him), whose family owned 560,000 acres of Texas land not long after his death in 2010. That’s about 875 square miles, or about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island, and not a lot smaller than the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Garner, as in Cactus Jack Garner, 39th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and 32nd Vice President of the United States, who famously said the vice presidency wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm piss.” Especially when you end up at odds with your president. So far he’s the longest-lived vice president or president in United States history, and, as some anonymous writer at Wiki points out, had the distinction of living during the presidencies of both Johnsons: Andrew and Lyndon.

Enough there for a pretty good museum, I’d say. But as I stopped at a rest area along U.S. 90, I did a little more checking and found that the museum is closed on Mondays.

So I decided to drop by Uvalde Cemetery and find Garner’s grave. It’s a large burial ground, marked by some trees and greenery, but not overly garden-like.

Still, I figured I could find Garner. There would probably be flag poles near him. So there were.

Here’s the grave of John Nance Garner and his wife Marietta Rheiner Garner. Imagine that, he was a fully grown man at the turn of the 20th century, and yet lived to see men travel into space.

How many vice presidential graves have I seen? That is, the resting places of men who were never also president? Only one other that I can think of. I got a look from some distance at the stone of John C. Calhoun in Charleston. I need to seek more of them out.

In Fort Davis, Texas, after visiting the National Historic Site of that name, I dropped by the Jeff Davis County Library to check my email, and found it to be a fine adaptive reuse of a late 19th-, early 20-century building complex that had once been a general store, post office, an early telephone exchange and other things.

Just off Texas 118 in Fort Davis is a sign that says Pioneer Cemetery. I had to take a look at that. A narrow path, completely surrounded by the kind of diamond wire-mesh fence that you might see in any suburb, led to the cemetery gate. That was the only entrance that I saw, and otherwise the cemetery grounds were surrounded by fenced-off private houses. That felt a little odd at first, but soon I got used to it.

Like the region, the cemetery is sparsely settled.

But there are a few headstones and fenced-off plots.
One old soldier that I could see, Joseph Granger, CSA.

According to the plaque at the entrance, the cemetery was active from the 1870s to 1914, which also says that immigrants named Dutchover are buried here, along with a madwoman and a couple of horse thieves. Sounds like a motley mix of pioneers, all right. Here are some Dutchovers.

Marfa, Texas, famed among the glitterati these days, still looks a lot like a small West Texas town, though with galleries, tony hotels and Manhattan-priced shops thrown in the mix. Unfortunately, after visiting the McDonald Observatory and Fort Davis, I didn’t have the time or energy to visit the sizable Chinati Foundation in Marfa, which I’m sure is a worthwhile destination.

I did look around at some other spots. The Presidio County Courthouse is handsome, for one thing.

The Hotel Paisano is decidedly handsome, too.
Before I left Marfa, I stopped at Cementerio de la Merced, a desert cemetery with a mix of wooden markers and more formal stones. Bet not many of the glitterati pause there to pay their respects.

The names on the graves are largely, but not completely, Hispanic in origin. Not far away, but separated by a fence, was a graveyard mostly of formal stones, and Anglo names.

Marfa Public Radio had this to say: “One cemetery is known as the Anglo cemetery. The other two — Cementerio de la Merced and the Marfa Catholic cemetery — are Hispanic…

” ‘Well, it was not legally segregated, but it was segregated by custom,’ says historian Lonn Taylor, a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC…

“In this part of Texas, Hispanics hold many key political offices. Yet a visible reminder of historic inequality are the cemeteries, where in death, people remain divided.”

Two Entertainers Who Died in Unfortunate Air Crashes

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I asked Ann about both Buddy Holly and Will Rogers not long ago. She was unfamiliar with them. That only goes to show a generational difference. As far as I’m concerned, both are visible threads in the American cultural fabric, people I always remember hearing about. But the tapestry is very large and changing, so every generation sees different threads.

While driving from Marathon, Texas, to Amarillo, I passed through Lubbock, a city I’d had scant experience with before. Maybe none, I’m not sure. So I took a short look around. If I’d had more time, I might have strolled around the campus of Texas Tech or visited the American Wind Power Museum or the Prairie Dog Town at Mackenzie Park.

But I only wanted to spend a few hours in town, so I made my way to the Buddy Holly Center.

The center, which is at 1801 Crickets Ave., and a block from Buddy Holly Ave., is a performing and visual arts venue that also includes a small museum dedicated to the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer from Lubbock whose surname was actually spelled Holley. The museum takes up two rooms. Really one and a half, since one room is more about other famous musicians and entertainers visiting the center, such as Sir Paul McCartney, who played a concert there in 2014 (and who, last I heard, owns the rights to Holly’s songs).

Still, I will say that the main exhibit room, which is guitar-shaped, was packed with items and full of things to read. Buddy Holly might have died at 22, and only worked for a few years as an up-and-coming professional musician, but he was busy. He wrote songs, made records, toured constantly, appeared a few times on TV, and somehow found time to get married. Clearly he’d found something he was good at — this new music genre — and went after it with great energy, creating a remarkable output in a short time.

On display are photographs, letters, post cards, tour itineraries, including one for the Winter Dance Party, recording equipment, a microphone, business cards, contracts, performing outfits, furniture, Buddy’s childhood record collection (all 45s), and his Fender Stratocaster, which is the last one he ever played. There’s a lengthy timeline posted on the wall detailing Holly’s life and career, and other one about the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll.

Also on display, oddly enough, are the horn-rimmed glasses he was wearing when he died. Apparently they were in an evidence locker in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, until 1980. The 750-pound giant glasses outside the center were fashioned in 2002 by a local artist, Steve Teeters, who died a few years ago.

No photography allowed in the museum. The clerk who sold me my ticket, and signs in the display room, were clear on that point. Something about copyright. No doubt the RIAA would release flying monkeys to snatch the camera away from anyone foolish enough to take pictures, and bill him $10,000 per image besides.

You can, however, take all the exterior shots you want, including across the street at an eight-and-a-half foot bronze of Buddy and his Fender Stratocaster, created in 1980 by San Angelo-born sculptor Grant Speed, well before the Buddy Holly Center opened in 1999.  The statue was moved from elsewhere in Lubbock only a few years ago, and now fronts a wall with various plaques honoring 30 years of inductees on the West Texas Walk of Fame.

I recognized only a handful of names on the wall besides Holly, such as Waylon Jennings, Mac Davis, Tanya Tucker, Roy Orbison (who lived in Wink when he was young) and Dan Blocker, whose alma mater, Sul Ross State University, I drove by in Alpine.

The Buddy Holly Center is an adaptive reuse. Long ago, the building was a handsome depot for the Fort Worth and Denver South Plains Railway Co., dating from the 1920s.
En route from Amarillo to Lebanon, Missouri, I made a stopover in Claremont, Oklahoma, not far from Tulsa, to visit the Will Rogers Memorial Museum. Strictly speaking, I’d been there before sometime as a child. But I had no memory of it.

Will Rogers, on the other hand, I’ve always seem to have known about. That’s remarkable for an entertainer who wasn’t actually of my parents’ time — my mother wasn’t quite 10 when he died — but rather of my grandparents’ time. I knew enough about him to go see James Whitmore do his fine impression of Rogers live, including a rope trick or two, on one of the Vanderbilt stages in the summer of 1984 .

Here’s the view of the museum from the back. John Duncan Forsyth designed the original 15,000-square-foot limestone building, though there was an addition in the 1980s.

Will Rogers has a good many more exhibits than Buddy Holly, as you’d expect, considering that Rogers’ career in entertainment lasted quite a bit longer, beginning with wild west shows when that was still a thing, and moving on to all the media available in the first decades of the 20th century: vaudeville, movies, radio, and newspapers. No doubt if Rogers had lived on into the 1950s — he was only 55 when he died — we’d remember an early TV program called The Will Rogers Show.

Before I went to the museum, I had only the vaguest notion of Rogers’ early life in the Oklahoma Territory. I imagined that his origins were quite modest. Probably he was happy to have people think that, but in fact his father, Clem Rogers, was quite prosperous. The museum hints that Clem considered his son something of a ne’er-do-well, slumming as a cowboy and lassoist.

The last laugh was on Clem, who died before his son got into movies or on the radio. Ultimately, Will Rogers built himself a 31-room ranch house in California, which (per Wiki) “includes 11 baths and seven fireplaces, is surrounded by a stable, corrals, riding ring, roping arena, golf course, polo field — and riding and hiking trails that give visitors views of the ranch and the surrounding countryside — 186 acres.”

When the nation loves you, you can afford such digs. Here’s what President Roosevelt said over the radio in 1938 to dedicate the memorial in Claremore: “This afternoon we pay grateful homage to the memory of a man who helped the nation to smile. And after all, I doubt if there is among us a more useful citizen than the one who holds the secret of banishing gloom, of making tears give way to laughter, of supplanting desolation and despair with hope and courage. For hope and courage always go with a light heart.

“There was something infectious about his humor. His appeal went straight to the heart of the nation. Above all things, in a time grown too solemn and somber he brought his countrymen back to a sense of proportion.”

Rogers, his wife, three of his children and one of his grandchildren are interred on the grounds.

Naturally, there’s an equestrian statue of Rogers on the grounds.

It’s now near the tomb. To judge from the ca. 1970 picture I posted a few years ago, the statue has been moved from wherever it was then. The view from the back of the museum:

I didn’t take too many pictures inside the museum, but I make an image of a painting I liked.
It’s by an artist named John Hammer, who lives in Claremore. (More about him here.) I knew his style at once, since about a year ago I saw an edition of Travel Buddy — a coupon book you get at rest stops — that had a painting of his on the cover, a portrait of another Okie of renown, Woody Guthrie.

I picked it up because it was so different that anything you might see on a publication like that. I kept it because I really liked it.