Texas Monthly articles from May 2002

Texas Monthly archives from May 2002

Gig'em, Ray: good-bye to A&M president Ray Bowen, who endured tragedy, won national recognition for Aggie Academics, and -- amazing but true -- didn't meddle with football. (Behind the Lines).(retirement of Texas A and M University president)
May 1, 2002... FEW WEEKS AGO TEXAS A&M University president Ray Bowen bought a new black pickup. The color is the sort of detail that would pass unnoticed at most universities, but A&M, we all know, is not like most universities. On the College Station...

Best of the West. (Roar Of The Crowd).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... THANKS FOR THE OUTSTANDING COVerage of Big Bend National Park ["Big Bend 2002," March 2002]. Joe Nick Patoski captured the spirit of the park as only an admirer could. VICKY LANSFORD Seguin LIKE ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN TO BIG Bend and...

Smoked out. (Roar Of The Crowd).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... MANY OF MY QUESTIONS ABOUT DAN Morales and his handling of Texas v. American Tobacco were answered by Lou Dubose ["So What's the Truth About Dan Morales and Tobacco?" March 2002]. It's tough to believe that five (or six) lawyers will split $3...

Ring of truth. (Roar Of The Crowd).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... I READ WITH INTEREST WHAT JAN REID had to say about growing up in Wichita Falls and his participation in kid boxing, a huge pastime there in the fifties and sixities ["Kid Gloves," March 2002]. Having grown up in Wichita Falls and being Mr....

Character analysis. (Roar Of The Crowd).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... I WAS ONE OF THOSE COATED-AND-TIED Rice students orchestrated by Bill Broyles in the sixties to protest the firing of the editor of the student newspaper, and I have been following his many careers since with great interest and admiration...

Minding our banners. (Roar Of The Crowd).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... I HAVE BEEN A VEXILLOPHILE SINCE THE age of six, when I made my first trip to the United Nations, where the flags of all the member nations fly alphabetically in front of the U.N. Plaza, and I can recall them still: Afghanistan, Albania,...

Cuban libre. (Roar Of The Crowd).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... I JUST FINISHED READING BRIAN D. Sweany's "The Franchise" [Sports, March 2002], and all I can say is, please, please, Mark Cuban, buy the Dallas Cowboys! GARY ELANDER Midland

Unfair attack. (Roar Of The Crowd).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... THE KINKSTER'S FANS IN THE TEXAS OUTDOOR community were sorely disappointed with his ill-reasoned rant against hunting [The Last Roundup: "Unfair Game," March 2002]. Unless you're a vegetarian and don't wear leather, it's hypocritical to target...

Around the state: a selective guide to amusements and events.
May 1, 2002... MAY 2002 SUNDAY MONDAY TUESDAY 5 6 7 Arts and Letters Former secretary Live in Dallas of state...

Fine art.(Austin Museum of Art's exhibit 22 to Watch: New Art in Austin)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... THE AWAKENING Unlike Houston, whose thriving art market allows its artists to live in the Bayou City and sell globally, Austin has always had a tough time cultivating a reputation with dealers as a serious visual-art town. Before the high-tech...

Straight talk. (Around The state).(basketball player Lisa Leslie)(Brief Article)(Interview)
May 1, 2002... MODEL ATHLETE Lisa Leslie, the starting center for the defending world champion Los Angeles Sparks, sashays into the Compaq Center on May 27 to play in the Houston Comets' season opener. First of all, let me congratulate you on winning the...

Dance. (Around The state).(contemporary dance performances)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... ALL THE RIGHT MOVES For someone who grew up studying classical ballet, modern dance seems foreign to me. Where are the outward foot positions? The high jumps? Of course, ballet and modern share some of the same principles, and this month you...

A great weekend in Houston. (Around The state).(events, performances, exhibits during Mother's Day weekend)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... TREAT YOUR MAMA RIGHT If Mom is an arts lover, then your search for the perfect Mother's Day gift is over: Treat her to a weekend in Houston. You wouldn't want to subject her to the inevitable Friday afternoon traffic, so arrive Thursday, May...

Sand trap: in the desert hideout of Lajitas, a wealthy developer is spending more than $80 million to build a luxury golf course and resort. That may not be enough to protect him from the elements. (Reporter: the state of our state).(Steve Smith)
May 1, 2002... THE DESERT SPORTS LOGO ON THE RIVER GUIDES' TRUCK WAS scarcely visible through the gathering dust as we crawled to the ghost town at Terlingua after a day trip to Mariscal Canyon. It's a long drive even by Big Bend standards: two hours creeping...

Pamela Colloff relativity: my long-lost Texas cousins turned out to be everything that my New York family is not. (First Person).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... WHEN I TOLD MY FAMILY THAT I was moving to Texas eight years ago, the news was greeted with sighs around my grandmother's dining room table. My family saw Texas as alien territory, the opposite of the intellectual New York Jewish world in which...

Cat Osterman: the UT-Austin softball star has olympic dreams -- and perfect pitch. (A Few Words With ...).(Brief Article)(Interview)
May 1, 2002... Cat Osterman loves Cocoa Puffs, the Dixie Chicks, and K's. By K's, of course, she means strikeouts. This season the six-foot-one left-hander for the University of Texas softball team has set team records for most strikeouts in a game (24), most...

Right makes might: a showdown over science textbooks proves a conservative think tank is a player in the power game, but GOP moderates suspect a hidden agenda. (on Politics).(Texas Public Policy Foundation)
May 1, 2002... IDEOLOGICAL BATTLES OVER THE CONTENT OF SCHOOL textbooks are nothing new to the State Board of Education (SBOE), but the most recent fight marked the emergence of a conservative think tank as a power in an increasingly factionalized Republican...

Cold comfort: for road-weary Texans the nostalgic pull of Dairy Queen is strong -- and its soft-serve ice cream as delicious as ever. (on Texana).
May 1, 2002... SOFT-SERVE ICE CREAM, ACCORDING TO MY FATHER, is--and I quote--"an abomination unto the Lord." That's a minority opinion in the family and probably one reason the rest of us love it so. But we won't settle for just any soft-serve: It has to be...

Tune in, turn on; Bobby Patterson, of Grand Prairie's KKDA-AM, is an old-school deejay who has no place in the cookie-cutter world of modern radio. No wonder he's my favorite. (on Media).
May 1, 2002... AN OFFICIAL-SOUNDING VOICE OPENS THE SHOW, rifting on the Superman theme: Faster than Emmitt Smith, more powerful than a DART train, able to leap the Longhorn Ballroom in a single bound!" A stream of guttural shouts, screams, and whoops...

Scott & White advancing medicine.(Scott and White medical practice and hospital services)
May 1, 2002... Scott & White - health care like no other for more than 100 years. When Arthur C. Scott, MD and Raleigh R. White, Jr., MD began their medical practice in Temple, Texas in 1897, they shared one fundamental conviction: medicine must serve...

Drive, we said.(traveling by car)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... TEXANS HAVE ALWAYS been highly susceptible to the call of the open road, and nowadays that call is stronger than ever. Not only do car trips celebrate independence (you decide when to eat, stop, or frisk yourself), they also embrace the...

San Antonio to El Paso on U.S. 90 and interstate 10: an old opera house, judge Roy Bean's grave, ancient pictographs--and a drug blimp.
May 1, 2002... THIS IS THE ROUTE INTO THE WIDE-open spaces, a path worn through the desert and uplands by Native Americans, conquistadores, pioneers, and the second transcontinental rail line. Sure, times have changed along the trail; it is only a few hours'...

Galveston to Quanah on Texas highway 6: a secret garden, a drive-through feedstore, presidential papers, tasty pinto beans--and a picasso.
May 1, 2002... OF ALL THE LONG-DISTANCE drives in Texas, Highway 6 is the most surprising. The purpose of a state route is to fill in the gaps between the major highways, not to go gallivanting off on its own--yet gallivant it does, from sea to Great Plains,...

Wichita falls to Brownsville on U.S. 281: rare books, blueberry pie, a faith healer's shrine--and one deep hole.
May 1, 2002... WITH THE TERRAIN OF A PULLED HAIRPIN-FLAT on the ends, bumpy in the middle--U.S. 281 changes little in landscape but a lot in personality over eight degrees of latitude. Beginning in Wichita Falls, I point my car south, with traffic whizzing by...

Beaumont to Texarkana on U.S. 69, FM 1013, Texas highways 87 and 21, and U.S. 59: cypress swamps, Tex Ritter memorabilia--and a spot that spooked Spielberg.
May 1, 2002... IF YOU WANT A QUIET GETAWAY WHERE THE TALL pines are plentiful, the wildflowers beautiful, and the folks down-home hospitable, then East Texas is the place. This scenic region is also rich in history: Prehistoric Caddo Indians made their home...

Brownsville to Laredo on U.S. 83 and Mexico Highway 2: vintage jukeboxes, puffed tacos, a deserted village--and a vision of Tom Landry.
May 1, 2002... AFTER THREE DAYS OF DRIVING U.S. 83 FROM Brownsville to Laredo, I decided that "the border" is an inadequate term to describe the curving corridor. The highway, which is one of the main arteries of Los Caminos del Rio--the Roads of the...

San Antonio to Loving on Texas Highway 6: huge apple pies, a Japanese submarine, handmade soaps--and a dressed flea.
May 1, 2002... TEXAS HIGHWAY 16 IS AN ODDS-AND-ENDS HIGHway, seemingly cobbled together from bits and pieces of preexisting roads. I'd be tempted to call most of it a two-lane blacktop except that the color has faded to gray. It starts on the west side of San...

Austin to Caddo Lake on Interstate 35, U.S. 79, and Texas Highway 43: African masks, two old steam locomotives, lady bird's childhood home--and miniature donkeys.
May 1, 2002... YOU FIND MORE THAN BARBECUE AND RED CLAY as you angle through East Texas on U.S. 79 and Texas Highway 43. There's European art, Sicilian donkeys, dusty pioneer trails, and gothic swamp things. Strangest of all, my wife and I realized that as...

Fredericksburg to Amarillo on U.S. 87: black-chinned hummingbirds, rusting tractors, chuckwagon breakfasts--and a restored brothel.
May 1, 2002... LIKE THE SONG SAYS, I'M NOT FROM Texas. That's okay; in the ten years since I moved here from my native U.K., I've learned to love it anyway. But just how much of it do I love? I'll find out on this trip, as a friend and I climb up from the...

Galveston to Corpus on FM 521, Texas Highway 35, and other roads: snow geese, the big tree, sandy beaches--and one gigantic chemical plant.(travel)
May 1, 2002... UNLIKE CALIFORNIA, TEXAS HAS NO SINGLE HIGHway that hugs the coast. To stay as close to the shoreline as possible, my husband, Kit, and I zigzagged around, navigating,some twenty roads as we made our way from Galveston to Corpus Christi. We...

Route 66: grain elevators, road coffee, the "town" of Amarillo-and a cowboy named Bronc.(driving the fabled highway)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... I DROVE THIS ROUTE THREE TIMES: FROM THE NEW MEXICO BORDER TO THE Oklahoma border, then back to the New Mexico border, then back to the Oklahoma border. The one-way distance is only 178 miles. Texas has the second-smallest piece of Route 66 of...

My favorite road trip: two traffic tickets, one lime-green VW bug, alsatian cheese pockets, and the wind-borne contents of a baby potty: Texas celebrities remember their most memorable drives.
May 1, 2002... DENNIS QUAID MY FIRST ROAD TRIP AS A BOY WAS DRIVING up from Houston to see my grandfather in East Texas. We'd stay at his house, and we'd take trips to places like Elk for dances at people's farms or to swim in the tanks. Later, my...

Giant: the third volume of Robert Caro's biography covers LBJ's senate years in excruciating detail, but give him credit: he knows how to tell a story. (on Books).
May 1, 2002... LYNDON JOHNSON'S JOHNSON WAS CALLED JUMBO. He named it that himself. As a friend of mine pointed out, in olives, at least, jumbo is not the biggest size. LBJ was nevertheless generous in displaying Jumbo--to women, of course, and to men as...

Moving pictures; at this year's FotoFest in Houston, digital art--once notable for its novelty--was actually done well, and the still picture seemed like an anachronism. (on Art).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... BY ANY MEASURE, HOUSTON'S FOTOFEST HAS grown into a cultural behemoth. This year's edition of the sprawling, month-long biennial, which was on view in March, ranged as far afield as Galveston and Beaumont and comprised some 160 separate...

Restaurant guide: a selective guide to food and drink.
May 1, 2002... MAY 2002 Policies and Definitions The Restaurant Guide is a service to our readers. The magazine accepts no advertising or other consideration in exchange for a listing. Reviews are written by resident critics in the cities that we...

It's no mystery: how can you become a critically acclaimed, groundbreaking, must-read novelist like me? Talent is the least of your worries. (The Last Roundup).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... MAY IS TEXAS WRITERS MONTH, and trust me, that's no oxymoron. We have many fine writers in Texas and, quite possibly, even a few great ones. The problem is, we're not sure who they are. When a young person tells me he or she wants to be a...