The Last Camel Charge – An intriguing look at America’s pre-Civil War desert military experiment – #bookreview

The Last Camel Charge: The Untold Story of America’s Desert Military Experiment
Forrest Bryant Johnson
(Berkley Caliber, hardback – Kindle)

The U.S. Army employed camels as transportation and pack animals in the American West during the mid-19^th century and tried to create “a U.S. camel cavalry, a true camel corps,” the author of this fascinating history work notes.

Initially headquartered near San Antonio, Texas, the fledgling camel corps soon became involved in expeditions of discovery, as well as fighting in several areas.

The notable actions included a victorious camel charge against Mojave Indians in the Arizona Territory and helping naval lieutenant Edward Beale’s successfully create a wagon trail from Texas to California.

The Civil War ended the camel corps experiment, the author shows. But Union and Confederate forces both used camels during the conflict, and the last U.S. Army camel died in captivity in 1934.

Meanwhile, rumors abound that a few wild camels, distant offspring of the Camel Corps, are still alive and roaming the most desolate and isolated areas of the American Southwest. Indeed, the author notes, several wild camels were photographed near a West Texas railroad track in 2003.

– Si Dunn

Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present – #bookreview #in #music

Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present
Jean A. Boyd
(Texas Tech University Press, hardback, list price $65.00; paperback, list price $39.95)

Fans of 1930s and 1940s western swing will find plenty to enjoy in this entertaining book by Jean A. Boyd, a  Baylor University music history professor and native of Fort Worth, Texas.

She celebrates the distinctive music and its Texas roots and highlights several groups that, unlike Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, did not or have not made it into the national spotlight.

Yet these bands have picked, fiddled, strummed and sung their way to regional stardom in Texas and Oklahoma.

Her book likely will also appeal to musicologists and performers. She includes musical analysis and transcriptions of recorded performances, as well as histories and recollections.

– Si Dunn 

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The New London explosion – Two views of America’s worst school disaster – #bookreview #texas #history

 My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion
By Ron Rozelle
(Texas A&M, hardback, list price $24.95; Kindle edition, list price $24.95)

 Gone at 3:17: The Untold Story of the Worst School Disaster in American History
By David M. Brown and Michael Wereschagin
(Potomac Books, hardback, $29.95; Kindle edition, list price $29.95)

On March 18, 1937, in East Texas’ tiny New London community, a natural gas explosion killed some 300 students, teachers and others at London Junior-Senior High School.

Seventy-five years later, the exact death toll in America’s worst school disaster remains uncertain. But its grim lessons are relevant and timely again as school districts across the nation struggle to cut their operating expenses without endangering student safety. 

Briefly, at least, the New London catastrophe made world headlines. Even Adolph Hitler sent a message of condolence. One of the reporters who covered the explosion’s aftermath was a young Dallas newsman named Walter Cronkite.

But 1937 was a year full of troubling currents and undercurrents, including the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Germany, Italy and Japan as military powers, and the Roosevelt Administration’s continuing struggles to lift the American economy out of the Great Depression.

Across most of the world, the devastating event soon faded into the global swirl of tensions and distractions. 

But not in New London. The shock continued to run so deep, townspeople “refused to speak of the explosion or of its victims, to the press or even to each other,” Ron Rozelle notes in My Boys and Girls Are in There.

Indeed, four decades passed before the first commemoration could be organized. And, 75 years after the school tragedy, some people still shudder when the explosion is mentioned. Pains and fears it created continue to be carried forward by survivors, witnesses, family members, and friends of the dead and injured.

“Sorrow is ambulatory, and refuses to be left behind,” writes Rozelle, an author and educator who grew up 80 miles from New London. Rozelle’s father was one of many volunteers who helped search the destroyed school for survivors and victims.

Rozelle’s book is written to read like a novel, yet its chapters arise from historical records, extensive follow-up research, and interviews with people who lost loved ones, survived injuries or otherwise were scarred.

Meanwhile, one of the authors of  Gone at 3:17, David M. Brown, also grew up in East Texas and has spent more than two decades interviewing New London survivors, rescuers and others. His co-writer, Michael Wereschagin, is a veteran journalist who has covered several large disasters. Their factual account likewise reads like a story. And, benefitting from doubled manpower, it offers some additional details on survivors, witnesses, investigations, and where victims were buried.

Both works are well-researched and well-written, and they bring fresh perspectives to the New London school explosion and its aftermath.  They also can be emotionally wrenching to read.

A key lesson from New London remains valid today as states struggle to reduce their school budgets. New London’s school was part of the London Consolidated School District, which may have been America’s richest rural school district in 1937. Tax revenues from oil production and related industries were plentiful. Indeed, London Junior-Senior High was the first secondary school in Texas to get electric lights for its football field. Yet, the superintendent and at least some of the board members still bore down hard on costs, to the point that money finally was put above student safety.

Late in 1936, the superintendent, with quiet approval from four board members, decided to disconnect the school from commercial natural gas and tap into a free, unregulated and widely available byproduct of gasoline refining: waste natural gas. Their hope was to save $250 a month.

Refineries pumped the waste gas back to oil rigs through networks of bleed-off lines, and rig operators were required to dispose of it. Most released it into the air through tall pipes, and the gas was burned, lighting the sky night and day with flaring orange flames.

“The practice of tapping into waste gas lines was something of an open secret in the oil patch,” Brown and Wereschagin write. Homeowners and business owners welded valves to some of the bleed-off lines, and they installed regulators to try to control gas pressures that varied widely. “With no one monitoring it, it came with no bill,” they note.

One pipeline passed 200 feet from New London’s school, and in 1937: “The [connection] crew had gone out in early January—a janitor, two bus drivers, and a welder the school had contracted….”

Blame for the blast often has been placed on the superintendent and on some of the board members he reported to. However, both of these new books highlight bad choices made by others, as well.

For example, refiners failed to enforce policies barring gas line taps, Brown and Wereschagin point out. And no one could smell the odorless gas as it leaked and collected in the school’s big basement, Rozelle emphasizes.

A single electrical spark from a basement light switch apparently set off the explosion.

Afterward, Texas quickly passed laws that might have been enacted sooner, if politics had not stood in the way. One law added a malodorant, “a distinctive, faintly repulsive scent,” to natural gas to provide as leak warning. Another law required “anyone working with gas connections be trained and certified as an engineer by the state.” Other states soon followed Texas’ action.

Today, Brown and Wereschagin stress,  most Americans “have never heard of the New London, Texas, school explosion” and have no idea how or why natural gas got its noxious smell.

These two timely books provide painful but important reminders why the New London school explosion and its grim lessons should never be forgotten.

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– Si Dunn is a novelist, screenwriter, freelance book reviewer, and former software technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist. He also is a former newspaper and magazine photojournalist. His latest book is Dark Signals, a Vietnam War memoir available now in paperback. He is the author of a detective novel, Erwin’s Law, a novella, Jump, and several other books and short stories.

 

The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison System – #bookreview #in

The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison System
By Michael Berryhill
(University of Texas, hardback, list price $29.95; paperback, list price $25.00)

A prizewinning journalist has dug deeply and impressively into a double killing that still haunts the Texas Department of Criminal Justice more than 30 years after it happened.

In 1981, a prison farm manager and a warden were killed by a black inmate who claimed self-defense. Many predicted the inmate, a convicted burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, would be executed.

But just a year earlier, Texas inmates had won a huge federal civil rights victory against “unrelenting cruelty” and brutal civil rights violations within the Texas prison system. In three trials that followed the killings, juries repeatedly considered the state’s evidence and found Brown innocent each time.

The verdicts, writes Berryhill, “marked the end of Jim Crow justice in Texas.” His account of Eroy Brown’s “astonishing” defense is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts and also draws upon Brown’s story told in his own words.

Berryhill, an excellent writer and researcher, chairs Texas Southern University’s journalism program. He previously has won a Texas Institute of Letters prize for nonfiction.

He has written for a number of well-known publications, including Harper’s, the New Republic, the Houston Chronicle, and the New York Times magazine.

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– Si Dunn is a novelist, screenwriter, freelance book reviewer, and former software technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist. His latest book is Dark Signals, a Vietnam War memoir available soon in paperback. He also is the author of a detective novel, Erwin’s Law, a novella, Jump, and several other books and short stories.

Looking anew at the intense feud between leaders of the Texas Republic’s Navy & Army – #bookreview

To the People of Texas
An Appeal: In Vindication of His Conduct of the Navy
By Commodore Edwin W. Moore, T.N., edited with an introduction by Jonathan W. Jordan
(DeGolyer Library, hardback, list price $60.00 plus applicable sales tax and $5.00 shipping)

A friend who knows that I enjoy naval histories recently sent me a copy of this intriguing but somewhat expensive book.

It was published last summer, yet it is still new enough and important enough to view as a “new” book worthy of wide consideration. It is a 2011 reprint of Commodore Edwin W. Moore’s 1843 defense of his conduct and strategies as leader of the Texas Navy. Only a few copies of Moore’s original manifesto remain in existence, mostly in rare book collections. So this is a welcome event for those who relish works of history related to the Republic of Texas, before it became a state, or rely on them for academic and artistic research.

The first two sentences of editor Jonathan W. Jordan’s well-written introduction go right to the heart of reason why Commodore Moore felt compelled to defend himself for more than 200 pages in his original book:

“Within four years of assuming his post, the Texas Republic’s greatest naval commander became the mortal enemy of its greatest army commander. The hatred that burned between Commodore Edwin Ward Moore and President Sam Houston would fuel a fifteen-year war of charges, insults, and invitations to duel that would corrupt the reputations of both Texas patriots before the U.S. Senate, the Texas Congress, and the peoples of two republics.”

Indeed, Jordan notes, “Their bitterness would endure to the end of both men’s days, far beyond the life of the frontier republic, and would shape the historical legacies of Moore, Houston, and the Texas Navy.”

What created this intense hatred between two essential military leaders? According to Jordan: “Judged from the words and deeds of the antagonists, the acrimony appears to have been a hybrid flower born of three toxic seeds: a divergence over what Texas should become; differences in strategy; and the age-old reality that army generals do not always grasp the best uses of naval power.”

Along with being a “vindication,” letters from and to Commodore Moore within the book give a fascinating look at life and politics within the upper levels of the Texas Navy.

For example, in one letter written on May 7, 1842, to George W. Hockley, Texas’ Secretary of War and Marine, Commodore Moore reported that “nearly every officer in the Navy has tendered his resignation to-day—the reasons assigned, are, that they cannot get their pay, and as they owe a large amount, they must resort to other means of paying it.”

That same day, Commodore Moore wrote another letter to Secretary Hockley reporting that he had just purchased the steamer Patrick Henry, adding: “…she is represented to me to be in a good running condition, and if she can be of any service to the Government to the westward, or any where else, the Government is welcome to the use of her, free of any charge, until I want her, which will not be for some time.”

Secretary Hockley responded to the first letter by telling Commodore Moore that “[t]he resignations of all who wish to leave the service, you will accept forthwith…”

And Commodore Moore responded by reporting that he had “advanced all my means, and used all my credit to sustain the Navy on repeated occasions, but each successive of the last three sessions of Congress have cramped it more and more until the officers have nearly despaired.”

He added that, based on existing promises of future pay and his own pleadings to his officers, “nearly all of them have withdrawn their resignations…” and agreed to serve their country longer without pay, even though “many of them at this time are without a decent pair of shoes….”

This fascinating work contains several pages of illustrations from the era, plus notes to the introduction, notes to the text and a select bibliography. Libraries, scholars, historians, lovers of Texas history and others should give special consideration to this important book.

The new DeGolyer edition can be purchased by sending $60.00 plus applicable sales tax, along with $5.00 shipping and handling, to:

 The DeGolyer Library
 Southern Methodist University
 P.O. Box 750396
 Dallas, TX  75275-0396

Include shipping information and make checks payable to “The DeGolyer Library.” The book’s publisher is “unable to accept credit cards.”

– Si Dunn‘s latest book is a detective novel, Erwin’s Law. His other published works include Jump, a novella, and a book of poetry, plus several short stories, including The 7th Mars Cavalry, all available on Kindle. He is a freelance book reviewer and a former technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist.

An omnibus of 3 novels from ‘the greatest Western writer of all time’ – #bookreview

Long Way to Texas: Three Novels
By Elmer Kelton
(Forge, hardback, list price $25.99)

Elmer Kelton, author of more than 50 books, primarily Western novels, died in 2009. But his works live on in popular collections and reprints.

This new omnibus from Forge gathers together three “rare” Kelton Westerns: Long Way to Texas, Joe Pepper, and Eyes of the Hawk.

The title novel, Long Way to Texas, focuses on a Confederate lieutenant in charge of a small group of riflemen who are running out of water and food after a Civil War battle at Glorieta Pass in New Mexico.

Joe Pepper is about a man whose strong sense of justice pushed him to the wrong side of the law and on to violence that is about to result in his hanging.

And Eyes of the Hawk tells the tale of a strong-willed man who would rather destroy a town than forgive someone who he thinks has wronged him.

Readers unfamiliar with Kelton but curious about Westerns can start virtually anywhere within his long list of novels and find many good books to read. This new omnibus is as good a spot as any to get hooked on Elmer Kelton’s realistic and nicely detailed tales.

The late Texas novelist has been hailed as “the greatest Western writer of all time” by the Western Writers of America—no small honor.

His other accolades include seven Spur Awards, four Western Heritage Awards, and a lifetime achievement award from the Larry McMurtry Center for Arts and Humanities.

Book reviewers frequently have noted that what Kelton does best in his writing is capture the essences of real people and real places and describe them clear, down-to-earth terms.

“I have often been asked how my characters differ from the traditional larger-than-life heroes of the mythical West,” he noted in his 2007 autobiography Sandhills Boy. “Those, I reply, are seven feet tall and invincible. My characters are five-eight and nervous.”

– Si Dunn‘s latest book is a detective novel, Erwin’s Law. His other published works include Jump, a novella, and a book of poetry, plus several short stories, including The 7th Mars Cavalry, all available on Kindle. He is a freelance book reviewer and a former technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist.

Five Recent Works of Nonfiction and Fiction – #bookreview

These five recent good books deal with a wide spectrum of topics, from artificial reefs to the Wild West to urban search and rescue. 

The Ship That Would Not Die: USS Queens, SS Excambion, and USTS Texas Clipper
By Stephen Curley – with an afterword by J. Dale Shively
(Texas A&M Press, hardback, list price $29.95)

This intriguing, well-illustrated coffe-table book tells the story of a World War II attack transport that became a luxury passenger-cargo liner and then the first Texas Clipper training ship for Texas A&M’s Texas Maritime Academy.

From 1965 to until mothballed in 1994, the Texas Clipper hauled merchant marine cadets and Navy ROTC midshipmen to sea. In 2007, finally worn out, the ship was towed into the Gulf of Mexico and deliberately sunk to help create an artificial reef.

In his afterword, J. Dale Shively notes: “Her fourth existence is now full of marine life growing on her decks and fish swimming in and out of her openings.” The sunken vessel reportedly now generates up to $4 million annually in fishing and diving revenues for Texas businesses.

Texas Task Force 1: Urban Search & Rescue
By Bud Force
(Texas A&M Press, paperback, list price $24.95)

Fort Worth, Texas, writer-photographer Bud Force’s inspiring overview focuses on one of the nation’s finest emergency response teams: Texas Task Force 1 (TX-TF1).

Organized in 1997, TX-TF1 has been called to some of America’s worst disasters, including the World Trade Center terror attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia.

Texas Task Force 1’s 450-plus members include firefighters, medical personnel, canine handlers, heavy equipment operators and others with special skills. Proceeds from the sale of this book help support Texas Task Force 1.

Lone Star Law: A Legal History of Texas
By Michael Ariens
(Texas Tech Press, hardback, list price $49.95)

Give this author credit for (1) biting off a bigger topic than anyone can chew and (2) producing an excellent and important study in the process. The ponderous and massive Texas legal system is built upon a multinational heritage that has included Mexican and Spanish civil law and English common law, as well as laws from the state’s days as a republic, he notes.

Texas’ current homestead and bankruptcy laws, for example, have roots in the days when the Republic of Texas was a haven for people from across the United States fleeing debts. And, “[a] willingness to do justice on the cheap” led to the creation, in 1891, of two supreme courts in the state.

Jade: Outlaw
By Robert Flynn
(JoSara MeDia, paperback, list price $9.99 ; Kindle edition, list price $0.99)

Tension quivers throughout this tightly crafted, well-written Western novel. A hater of Indians who is now a tormented outlaw finds himself falling in love with a woman who was kidnapped as a child and raised as an Indian. The outlaw also is being pressured to become a desperate town’s lawman, and he realizes it is almost the only way to save his life.

Robert Flynn’s previous novel, Echoes of Glory, won a 2010 Western Writers of America Spur Award. His newly published sequel to Jade: Outlaw is titled Jade: The Law.

Details at 10: Behind the Headlines of Texas Television History
By Bert N. Shipp
(The History Press, paperback, list price $19.99)

Bert Shipp’s memoir is drawn from his long career as a Dallas TV newsman, and the book is an entertaining blend of recollections and “true stories about the birth and early childhood…of one of the most pervasive electronic forces in our lives and of the news people who created it.”

Shipp worked at the heart of Dallas-Fort Worth TV news for nearly 50 years, lugging heavy cameras and sound gear to cover local, national and international events before advancing to top editor positions.

– Si Dunn‘s latest book is a detective novel, Erwin’s Law. His other published works include Jump, a novella, and a book of poetry, plus several short stories, all available on Kindle. He is a freelance book reviewer and a former technical writer and software/hardware QA tester.

The Mayor’s Daughter – #fiction #bookreview

The Mayor’s Daughter
By James Hoggard
(Wings Press, paperback, list price $16.95; Kindle edition, list price $9.95)

James Hoggard’s beautifully written family drama, set in the 1920s, begins with a simple and very familiar premise. An artistic, intelligent young woman who is still in high school falls in love with a young man who dropped out to work at an oil refinery. But her parents disapprove of him. They consider him far beneath their daughter.

The young man has no father, and his mother runs a boarding house of questionable repute, the parents point out. Furthermore, local rumormongers have said that men and women both live under its roof, so it might be a whorehouse.

The young woman, Ru-Marie Coleman, tries to expand her independence and continue her relationship with Buster Lopreis. But herr parents respond by escalating their efforts to break them up. Meanwhile, Buster keeps trying to win Ru-Marie’s parents over, even though they call him “the problem” and refuse to speak his name.

From there, the story’s tensions gradually build, until events finally spiral out of control and two families are ripped apart.

Along with love and hate, Hoggard’s engrossing tale delves into “the airs of superiority” that people who grew up in poverty can take on once they become financially successful or at least reasonably well off.

Ru-Marie’s father, Jeff Coleman, owns a sporting goods store in a growing Texas town known as Kiowa Falls. (It bears some slight resemblance to an early-20^th century Wichita Falls, where the book’s author is an English professor at Midwestern State University.) Coleman also has become Kiowa Falls’ mayor, with help from wealthy backers to whom he now owes allegiance.

There is irony in Jeff Coleman’s and his wife Eileen’s expanding hatred of Buster. “The problem” is almost a mirror image of who they used to be. The mayor grew up poor, living in a boarding house without a father. His wife grew up in a boarding house, as well.

Now that they have been accepted into their town’s society, one of their greatest concerns is what other people will say about them. Indeed, Ru-Marie’s mother has become obsessed with what’s “acceptable” and “not acceptable” for her daughter.

“He’s trash, Ru-Marie, just trash, and what will people think?” Eileen says during one of her many arguments with her daughter over Buster.

At one point, Ru-Marie complains to Buster about her father: “He won’t ever say it—I don’t even think he dares think it—but it crazes him to no end to think if I keep going around with you, I’ll end up p.g.—their damn silly term—and me somehow his surrogate, back in the same, impossible poverty he thinks he grew up in.”

Buster, ever the peacemaker, responds by urging her not to be hard on her parents. He remains hopeful that he can somehow change their opinions of him.

The Mayor’s Daughter takes on increasingly darker tones as it delves into secret marriage and one other aspect of early 20^th-century North Texas life: a lingering tolerance for “frontier justice” in a city that is now modernizing and growing rapidly.

With this book, James Hoggard, author of 19 other works including novels, short-story collections, poetry and translations, demonstrates once again that he is a masterful storyteller worthy of his many writing awards.

– Si Dunn‘s latest book is a novel, Erwin’s Law. His other published works include Jump, a novella, and a book of poetry, plus several short stories, all available on Kindle.

Courage Beyond the Game: The Freddie Steinmark Story – #football #biography #bookreview

Courage Beyond the Game: The Freddie Steinmark Story
By Jim Dent
(Thomas Dunne Books, $25.99 hardback; $12.99 Kindle)

In my one and only fall semester as a student at the University of Texas at Austin, I went to a couple of football games and watched Freddie Steinmark play safety for the Longhorns. I sat high up in the cheap seats and gazed down upon players who appeared to be about two inches tall. Football has long been a big deal in the Lone Star State.

Steinmark was good, very good, and he had a great reputation for hustling, hitting and knocking down opponents’ passes.

However, several other members of the Longhorns team also were getting good press. And the Horns were striving to recapture a national title. So, like many other fans, I didn’t focus much on one player.  I was more into watching the overall X’s and O’s and trying, mentally, to help drive the pigskin down the field.

Unknown to us all, tragedy would strike down Freddie Steinmark in just a few weeks. And, over the next two years and beyond, he would become a nationwide symbol of personal courage and inspiration.

When Steinmark moved to Austin in 1967, he was fiercely determined to play football for the University of Texas Longhorns. He was fresh out of high school in Wheat Ridge, Colo., and he weighed just 150 pounds. Many observers and coaches initially considered him too small for big-time college football.

But, as author Jim Dent points out in his well-written and poignant new sports biography, Courage Beyond the Game, Steinmark’s small stature had not stopped him from being a standout in every major high school sport. Off the field, he had been an academic leader, as well.

At UT-Austin, his determination and drive quickly convinced many that he might succeed after all, both in the difficult field of chemical engineering and as a player for one of America’s top gridiron teams.

Steinmark was “the golden boy from the moment he walked onto the campus,” writes Dent, whose five previous books include a New York Times best-seller, The Junction Boys.

Dent quotes one of Steinmark’s teammates, wide receiver Cotton Spreyer, as stating: ”No one was better than Freddie. He could run like a deer and he was quick.”

Darrell Royal, UT’s head football coach at the time, once praised Steinmark by calling him “as focused a young man as I’ve ever seen in my life.”

But a dark time soon — too soon — was coming, and Dent’s book smoothly moves beyond the traditional paeans of sports biography. It becomes a cautionary tale about placing too much trust and faith in the power of physical toughness.

Dent notes: “In the 1960s, a code existed that said players worth their salt did not complain about pain. You were expected to play through the bleeding, bumps, and bruises even if they did not subside in a reasonable time. Each afternoon, Darrell Royal and his assistants walked through the training room for the purpose of counting heads and identifying the players they considered ‘malingerers.’”

Steinmark had arrived at UT with a physical-toughness reputation that stretched back to early childhood. “In the midget leagues,” Dent reports, “he played an entire quarter with a broken arm. In high school, he played three quarters over two games with a broken leg. As a senior, he decided against seeking medical attention when he broke his right hand.”

The ethos of toughness was well embedded in Freddie Steinmark’s personality and values.

In his first season, Steinmark became a starting safety on UT’s freshman team. By the next fall, he was the Longhorns’ pass defense captain and co-leading the Southwest Conference in pass interceptions. He continued making top grades in his classes, and he continued dating his high school sweetheart, who now was attending UT, as well. 

He was “golden,” indeed. Prominent sportswriters now were labeling him one of America’s best and brightest football players.

His world suddenly spun a different way his junior year, while the 1969 Longhorns fought to regain college football’s top national ranking. He developed a pain that grew to feel “like a hot poker had been stuck into his left thighbone just above the knee.” Steinmark now limped in workouts and games but did his best to hide it. He also refused to tell his trainers and coaches for fear he would be pulled as a starter.

 Dent details how Steinmark continued the excruciating ruse all season until “the Game of the Century,” UT versus Arkansas, in Fayetteville, with President Nixon in the stands and the national championship on the line. The game also celebrated the 100th anniversary of college football.

In the great game’s last quarter, the worsening pain finally left Steinmark unable to cover pass receivers. Coach Darrell Royal sent in a substitute, and Texas held on to win 15-14.

 What happened next to Freddie Steinmark is movingly described in Jim Dent’s bittersweet and engaging book. Bone cancer — osteogenic sarcoma – was dicovered, and it took the young man’s leg but not his spirit. For the next year and a half, Freddie Steinmark was able to bounce around full of life on crutches, becoming Dent says, both an inspiration to other cancer patients and “a national symbol of courage” in the game of life.

Mack Brown, the Texas Longhorns’ current head coach, was a high school football player the last year Steinmark played. He watched “the Game of the Century” and the scrappy junior safety on TV. He never met the junior safety, but he hasn’t forgotten that Steinmark had his leg amputated, then showed up on the UT sidelines just three weeks later, on crutches, to watch Texas play Notre Dame in the Coton Bowl.

“In recognition of that courage,” Brown states in the foreword to Dent’s book, “to this day we have the players touch a picture of Freddie with the Longhorn salute before they go down the ramp to the field. Armed with the pride of the All-Americans, and in honor of the courage of Freddie, we ask them to go out and play as hard as they can.”

– Si Dunn

Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity – #bookreview

Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity
By Glen Sample Ely
(Texas Tech University Press, $34.95, hardback)

Many eyes are on Texas once again now that Gov. Rick Perry is running for President.

Of course, he’s now being slammed even by members of  his own party (including former officials in the George W. Bush Administration) for trying to be too much of a simplistic shoot-first, ask-questions-later Texas “cowboy” on the election trail.

So what is it about Texas and its Wild West reputation that stirs up so many arguments, passions, conceptions, misconceptions and occasional hatreds?

In Where the West Begins, Fort Worth, Texas, writer Glen Sample Ely valiantly grabs and wrestles with the electrified third rail of Texas identity: Is Texas a Southern state, or is it a Western state?

He starts with his own city, Fort Worth, which often bills itself as “Where the West Begins.” He calls Cowtown “representative of Texas as a whole,” and uses it to launch into the bigger topic of how the state’s various and varied geographical regions have contributed to its long-ongoing identity conflicts.

“Texans,” Ely cautions, “may want to consider carefully before augmenting their Lone Star lineage with either a southern or western identity, because both of these regions, like Texas, have confusing and conflicted legacies and plenty of historical baggage.”

For example, cotton, not cattle, used to be king in Texas, and one of the last battles of the Civil War was fought in Texas weeks after that conflict was officially over. Indeed, some parts of  Texas tended to be closely allied with the Confederacy and had sent cavalry units and soldiers to fight Union forces in other states. Yet other areas of the state had Union supporters mixed in — often violently — with supporters of the South. And West Texas had an “astonishingly high” level of disloyalty to the Confederacy, Ely reports, because it had long been heavily dependent on federal funds and U.S. Army forts and outposts for economic survival.

Today, many residents of West Texas identify themselves as living in the West or Southwest, not in the American South, he says. Yet many in East Texas still ally themselves with the Deep South.

Ely’s book is nicely researched and well-written, and it has a thick bibliography and notes collection.

It may possibly help you understand the enigma that is Texas a bit better. And it may possibly give you a few insights into the roots of Rick Perry’s “cowboy” mindset as his campaign gets underway and he tries to find traction with voters in 49 other states — many of whom remain openly suspicious of Texas after Lyndon Baines Johnson, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

– Si Dunn