How a Bunch of “Hippies, Pickers, Slackers, and Geeks” Transformed Austin
In Austin, the funky slacker paradise turned buzzy big city, nothing is quite as certain as cedar fever, the line at Franklin Barbecue, a daily arrival of newbies—and relative old-timers who stand ready to reminisce about the city’s good old days. Joe Nick Patoski calls it the “You should have been here two years ago” effect. Read More »
How Beaumont Photographer Keith Carter Redefined the Artform
He’s one of the world’s great photographers, with a legendary sense for the mystery in the mundane. But right now he’s at home in Beaumont, and his longtime assistant, Cathy Spence, is calling for help from a side door. Read More »
Empress of Gulf Coast Soul Barbara Lynn Reflects on Her Decades-Long Career
Barbara Lynn was a left-handed young girl in Beaumont when she started sounding out notes and chords on a guitar made for right-handed musicians. She’s always done things her own way. The pioneering sound that grew out of those childhood guitar rhythms—fiery and percussive, complemented by her soulful singing voice and a poet’s command of songwriting—took Lynn around the world, from Beaumont to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and to the top of the charts in 1962. Read More »
A Cancer Survivor on the Healing Nature of Birds
The first time I encountered whooping cranes, my wife and I were stationed on an observation tower on the dry ... Read More »
My Hometown: ‘Unofficial Ambassador’ Faye Landham Dishes on Granbury’s Charms
During karaoke night at D’Vine Wine on the Granbury Square, Faye Landham works the crowd. Amid off-key singing and wine-fueled laughter, Landham, a regular at this lively gathering, greets friends and strangers alike with the latest town news and happenings. It quickly becomes clear why Landham is known around Granbury as an “unofficial ambassador.” Read More »
Remembering Texas Highways Founding Editor Frank Lively
We lost a true Texas treasure on Nov. 18 with the passing of travel industry titan and Texas Highways founder Frank Lively at age 90. In May 1974, Frank repurposed an internal highway department publication into a travel magazine—in his words, a “showpiece for Texas.” Within a year, the Texas Legislature had named the 33-page monthly “The Official Travel Magazine of Texas,” declaring that “every effort be made to enlarge its growing family of readers.” Read More »
Austin Hotelier Liz Lambert Talks Texas—from Midland to Marfa to South Congress
Penny the Chihuahua greets visitors with an inspection sniff outside the elevator leading to Bunkhouse, the ... Read More »
My Hometown: Southwestern History Runs Deep in the Border Town of San Elizario
Explore the adobe streets of this colonial Spanish presidio town with artist and history buff Al Borrego. As he guides walking tours of San Elizario, Al Borrego paints a vivid picture of the town’s 400 years of borderland adventure and enterprise. On Main Street, Borrego describes the day in 1598 when explorer Juan de Oñate marched through with an expedition of 500 colonists. Outside the immaculate San Elizario presidio chapel, Borrego explains how the community was actually south of the Rio Grande until an 1829 flood realigned the river. Read More »
Sarah Bird’s New Historical Novel Is Wild as an Acre of Snakes
In the debut of Texas Highways’ new monthly essay, Open Road, novelist Sarah Bird writes about walking the trails of J. Frank Dobie’s Paisano Ranch in the Texas Hill Country with the ghost of Cathy Williams, the only woman to join the Buffalo Soldiers, the African American army regiment formed after the Civil War. Since 1978, when Bird first heard about Williams at an African American rodeo, she had hoped Williams’ remarkable but mostly forgotten story would be told. After almost 40 years of waiting in vain, Bird decided that she would have to tell the story herself. The resulting novel—her 10th—is an exuberant, mind-opening page-turner of historical fiction, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen. Read More »
Former First Lady Laura Bush Takes Us on a Tour of Her Prairie Chapel Flower Garden
On a warm summer morning, former First Lady Laura Bush walked among the butterflies in the garden behind her dogtrot-style vacation house on Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford. The likes of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U2 singer Bono have ventured on these grounds before, but on this July day viceroys and queens were the VIPs. They flitted about as Bush interpreted the landscape. There’s antelope horns milkweed, she said. There’s gaillardia. There’s basket-flower, and there’s a gourd. “This one’s called purple mist, or blue mist,” she said. “If you want butterflies, then plant this.” Read More »
Executive Chef Gerard Thompson Embraces Biscuits and Frito Pie at the Lauded Rough Creek Lodge
Gerard Thompson wields a large, sharp knife with one hand and carries a wooden stand holding a cured hog’s leg in the other. He moves quickly to greet tables of newcomers and regular guests at Rough Creek Lodge. Thompson, the lodge’s executive chef, shaves off paper-thin slices of prosciutto from the ample pig trotter and hands them out as appetizers. Read More »
Need to Recenter? Try the Silent Treatment
In an attempt to quiet my mind and turn my attention inward, I’d come to the small town of Windom, an hour and a half northeast of Dallas, for a 36-hour silent retreat. Over a dinner of white rice, lentil curry, and homemade yogurt, my fellow retreaters at the Siddhayatan Spiritual Retreat Center, a Jain ashram, smiled knowingly as I folded my handwritten greeting into a square and tucked it into my pocket. “Oh, I did that for half a day once,” said Carmen, a 37-year-old mom from Saskatchewan, Canada, a devotee who’d come to the ashram to help out with a kids’ camp the following week. “It’s so hard if you’re a chatter like me.” Read More »
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