The Marfa Library staff loves nothing more than to check out books to our patrons. But hey, folks! Those books need to come back in a reasonable amount of time. We don’t charge fines on books, and we don’t mind if they’re kept a little longer than the two-week ...]]> Overdue books make librarian grumpy

By RENEE MICK

The Marfa Library staff loves nothing more than to check out books to our patrons. But hey, folks! Those books need to come back in a reasonable amount of time. We don’t charge fines on books, and we don’t mind if they’re kept a little longer than the two-week check out allowance, so we’re pretty generous, we think. But when half of the books checked out are overdue, then we start to get a little grumpy. So if you’re a library patron with books checked out, please look around your home, round up overdue library books, and either return them or renew them. Many of the overdue books are way overdue, but we won’t say a word, we just want them back!

Thanks!

Renee Mick is the mostly not-grumpy Marfa Public Library director.

Librarians across Texas met at the Texas Library Conference April 24-27 in Fort Worth, and I was fortunate enough to be among them, thanks to the University of North Texas and the PEARL Project. And not just this year, but last year too!

Renee Mick, Marfa Public ...]]> Texas library conference report

By RENEE MICK

Librarians across Texas met at the Texas Library Conference April 24-27 in Fort Worth, and I was fortunate enough to be among them, thanks to the University of North Texas and the PEARL Project. And not just this year, but last year too!

Renee Mick, Marfa Public Library Director, is presented a check from the University of North Texas by Barbara Blake, Outreach Coordinator for the PEARL Project: Promoting & Enhancing the Advancement of Rural Libraries. The PEARL Project was funded by a grant from the Robert and Ruby Priddy Charitable Trust to assist rural public libraries in Texas. The library will use the funds for a children's author visit this summer.

The PEARL Project, Promoting & Enhancing the Advancement of Rural Libraries is funded by a grant from the Robert and Ruby Priddy Charitable Trust to assist rural public libraries in Texas. Participating libraries each developed unique programs as part of the project.

The Marfa Public Library offered the popular Book & a Movie program, for children and adults. Not only did participating libraries have the opportunity for the director to attend the conferences, but each library received a check for $1,000 after completing the program. The benefits for participating in the PEARL Project were numerous.

Joining other library directors at several meetings, attending the conferences, developing a strong program, these are the most outstanding, but many smaller benefits were derived also. We’re very thankful to the University of North Texas and the Priddy Charitable Trust for this very practical opportunity.

Special thanks goes to Barbara Blake, Outreach Coordinator for the University of North Texas, for her work with the Marfa Public Library in developing our program. And what will we do with our check? We’ll use it for a children’s author visit this summer!

The Marfa Public Library is very pleased to announce that the Dixon Water Foundation has pledged a generous amount to the capital campaign for the Marfa Public Library Community Room & Courtyard Project. This $25,000 pledge ensures that the library will receive funds from the ...]]> Dixon Water Foundation donation puts library fundraiser over the top

By RENEE MICK

The Marfa Public Library is very pleased to announce that the Dixon Water Foundation has pledged a generous amount to the capital campaign for the Marfa Public Library Community Room & Courtyard Project. This $25,000 pledge ensures that the library will receive funds from the Permian Basin Area Foundation and the Abell-Hanger Foundation, which in turn enables us to arrive at our fundraising goal.

Dixon Water Foundation

We sincerely appreciate this much-needed pledge from the Dixon Water Foundation, as well as those from the Permian Basin Area Foundation and the Abell-Hanger Foundation. The funds raised will allow us to transform an empty lot deeded to the library a decade ago by Henry Magallanez into a beautiful courtyard and a community room for the enjoyment of all in Marfa.

We have received many generous donations from area residents, both part-time and full-time; every single donation is sincerely appreciated. We’re very excited about the possibilities our project will bring to the community.

Many thanks to the Dixon Water Foundation for a very generous contribution that has enabled the Marfa Public Library to reach this first fundraising goal of $250,000. This will allow us to break ground on this public project.

More work needs to be done that will require more fundraising.

Renee Mick is the Marfa Public Library director. Contact her at rmick.marfapl@yahoo.com and 432-729-4631.

M is for the millions that I gave her.

O means that she’s only seeing green.

T is for her taking me to the cleaners.

H is for her heart that’s small and mean.

E is for her eyes with envy shining.

R means rapacious and that she’ll always be.

Put them all ...]]> For some athletes’ families, never enough green

By JIM GORDON

M is for the millions that I gave her.

O means that she’s only seeing green.

T is for her taking me to the cleaners.

H is for her heart that’s small and mean.

E is for her eyes with envy shining.

R means rapacious and that she’ll always be.

Put them all together they spell …

It’s only May, but already we have a frontrunner for 2013’s Mother of the Year.

Sports Mother of the Year, at least.

That would be Pam Bryant, Kobe’s mom, currently feuding with her son, the basketball superstar, over … guess what?

Right.

According to ESPN, Kobe has given Pam Bryant and Joe “Jellybean” Bryant — that’s the dad — millions of dollars over the course of his career, but the parents have their eye on a home in Nevada. Make that an additional home in Nevada.

Thus, Pam has made a deal with a New Jersey-based company to auction off an estimated $1.5 million worth of her son’s memorabilia that she has been storing. She already has received an advance of $450,000 — down payment money — after rejecting her son’s offer of $250,000 worth of house help.

According to the mom, she asked her son five years ago what he wanted to do with the items that were in her home, and he replied that they were hers. According to the son, he never gave the items to his mom and, in fact, specifically requested they be returned so they could be passed on to his kids.

You know where this is heading?

Actually, it’s already there, Kobe getting a preliminary injunction to halt the auction; now a trial date has been set for June 17. Meanwhile, the family feud is spreading, Kobe’s dad and a grandmother taking Pam’s side and Kobe’s sister taking his.

So, do we have a mother on the make, a skinflint son or a little of both? What’s the truth?

The truth is that nothing can mess up family relationships like money.

Ask Tyron Smith.

In 2011, the rookie offensive lineman received a $12.5 million signing bonus from the Dallas Cowboys; the vultures descended before the ink was dry.

According to Smith, he gave his family a great deal of dough in four installments, only to have his stepfather, his mother and some siblings come back for more.

“There was nothing wrong with helping them out and making sure they were taken care of,” Smith told The Dallas Morning News, “but not something to where they live the same lifestyle as you.”

That was just the beginning.

Unannounced appearances at his home and at Cowboys practices and threats “against the physical well-being of Tyron and the life of his girlfriend” led to a restraining order against Smith’s mother and stepfather. A million dollars disappeared, Smith alleges, because he trusted a financial adviser recommended by the pair.

Smith says he remains open to some reconciliation down the road, “if all the incidents stop and they just give me the space that I’ve asked for.”

Don’t hold your breath, Tyron.

F is for the fun, familial shakedowns.

A is for the avidity for green.

M is for …

With all that’s been learned about the link between concussions and dementia, perhaps there’s a connection between George Sauer Jr.’s football career and his death from Alzheimer’s.

If not, then it’s a terrible coincidence.

For Sauer, who died last week at 69 after a long bout with the ...]]> George Sauer saw the game all too clearly

By JIM GORDON

With all that’s been learned about the link between concussions and dementia, perhaps there’s a connection between George Sauer Jr.’s football career and his death from Alzheimer’s.

If not, then it’s a terrible coincidence.

For Sauer, who died last week at 69 after a long bout with the brain disease, was keenly aware of the toll that football took on those who played it. He called the game dehumanizing.

“Football is an ambiguous sport, depending both on grace and violence. It both glorifies and destroys bodies,” the former wide receiver wrote in 1983.

Not being able to, in his words, “reconcile the apparent inconsistency,” Sauer suddenly quit the game in his prime at age 27, two seasons after starring in the New York Jets’ stunning upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.

The violence wasn’t the only thing that led to his early retirement; there also was the regimentation, the being treated as less than an adult.

“When you get to the college and professional levels, the coaches still treat you as an adolescent,” he said in a 1971 interview. “They know damn well that you were never given a chance to become responsible or self-disciplined. Even in the pros, you were told when to go to bed, when to turn your lights off, when to wake up, when to eat and what to eat. You even have to live and eat together like you were in a boys’ camp.”

The game, Sauer said when he left the Jets, “does not do what it claims to do. It claims to teach self-discipline and responsibility, which is its most obvious contradiction.”

Raised in Waco, Texas, Sauer stared at the University of Texas before signing with the Jets. As a player, he was known for running precise pass patterns. His most notable game came in the 1969 Super Bowl, when he caught eight Joe Namath passes in New York’s 16-7 victory.

The game is famous for putting the American Football League, then in the process of merging with the NFL, on the map. Yet Sauer is known less for his role in making that happen than for his walking away at the height of his career.

It’s not that Sauer, who became a novelist and poet, didn’t appreciate the sport. He did. But as he put it, “My passion for the game was not sufficient.” He might have said that his perception was stronger than his passion.

Sauer, who played at the peak of the Vietnam War, saw a strong connection between the game and the country that loved it.

For too long, he said, we considered football a thing apart from society when, in fact, it is integral. “It mirrors our values and at the same time reinforces them,” he said.

“Survival of the fittest in its most perverted rendition is what’s behind football. The game is dominated by Vince Lombardi’s philosophy: ‘To play this game, you must have that fire in you, and there is nothing that stokes the fire like hate.’ ”

Sauer saw through the B.S. that many coaches spew as “motivation.” He also saw through the lure of the limelight and came to detest it.

“You stick out too much, the world enlarges around you to dangerous proportions, and you are too evident to too many others,” he said. “There is a vulnerability in this and, oddly enough, some guilt involved in standing out.”

Today, four decades after he left the game, Sauer does stand out — but for all the right reasons.

Jim Gordon, the vicar of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Marfa, is also a longtime journalist. He can be reached at gjames43@msn.com.

It would be difficult to find a stronger bastion of male chauvinism than bullfighting, and if that’s true today, imagine the courage of Patricia McCormick, who in 1951 became the first American woman to become a professional bullfighter.

Many people today consider bullfighting ...]]> Remembering a woman of bravery and skill, and that’s no bull

By JIM GORDON

It would be difficult to find a stronger bastion of male chauvinism than bullfighting, and if that’s true today, imagine the courage of Patricia McCormick, who in 1951 became the first American woman to become a professional bullfighter.

Many people today consider bullfighting cruel and inhumane. I’m one of them. That doesn’t change the fact that the Big Spring High School grad was ahead of her time — not in her love of the bullring but in her thinking and demonstrating that she could face danger as well as a man and perform just as well.

When McCormick, who died in late March at 83, entered the ring, she always faced two opponents — the bull and the machismo of spectators and matadors. She took on both for a simple reason: a passion for the sport.

The Indiana-born, Texas-raised McCormick fell in love with bullfighting during a family vacation to Mexico City when she was 7. In college in El Paso, she studied art and music but secretly sought knowledge of the toreador’s skills, crossing into Ciudad Juárez to watch and learn, then returning to practice in her dorm room with a blanket.

In time, she found a teacher — Alejandro del Hierro, a retired matador — and quit school to pursue what she loved.

In the bullrings of Mexico and Venezuela, McCormick, as a woman, was something different, but she was no novelty act. Unlike some bullfighters of her gender, she insisted on fighting the same large bulls as did the men — and, like the men, she fought on foot instead of on horseback.

In her career, McCormick was gored six times — most seriously in 1954 in Ciudad Acuña, the Mexican sister city of Del Rio, Texas. “The horn went right up my stomach,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “The bull carried me around the ring for a minute, impaled on his horns.”

A priest gave her last rites and had her carried across the border so she could “die in her own country.” Somehow, she beat the odds and survived, and continued her career for eight more years.

The bullfighting critic Rafael Solana called McCormick “the most courageous woman I have ever seen.” But she was more than courageous — she was good.

“She fights larger bulls than does any other woman, a torero said in 1966, “… and she kills well. Her only defect is that she is a woman.”

That “defect” kept her from ascending to bullfighting’s highest rank. For that, she needed money she didn’t have and the sponsorship of a matador, which she would never get.

Still, her bravery and her skill won over many aficionados.

“She was prestige,” Fred Renk, the father of a matador and a breeder of fighting bulls, told the Times. “She was real prestige. When she walked into the bullring, people cheered and she’d just bow her head.”

Said one top matador in 1963, “Had she not been born a woman, she might have been better than any of us.”

In the 1950s Texas State Highway 199, which ran 54 miles from Fort Worth to Jacksboro, was the most dangerous road in Texas. Actually, only the first 3 ½ miles of it were dangerous; the rest was reasonably safe. The danger came not from traffic but from the patrons of the 18 ...]]> Jacksboro blues

By LONN TAYLOR

In the 1950s Texas State Highway 199, which ran 54 miles from Fort Worth to Jacksboro, was the most dangerous road in Texas. Actually, only the first 3 ½ miles of it were dangerous; the rest was reasonably safe. The danger came not from traffic but from the patrons of the 18 eating places, 6 liquor stores, 7 night clubs, and 10 motels that lined the Fort Worth end between North University Drive and Lake Worth. Most of the eating places provided gambling opportunities in back rooms for their customers, and most of those customers carried pistols in their hip pockets. The Jacksboro Highway was notorious for shootings, stabbings, parking-lot fights, and the occasional gangland killing. As teenagers in Fort Worth, we called it the Jax Beer Highway and dared each other to go out there on Saturday night. None of us ever did.

The Jacksboro Highway was awash with characters with names like Chili McWillie, Wimpy Humphrey, Double-O Malone, Tinsey Eggleston, and Herbert the Cat Noble. (Noble, a professional gambler, met his end when someone put a bomb in his mailbox; Eggleston’s body was found at the bottom of a well). Elmer Sharp epitomized the Jacksboro Highway. He operated an after-hours club in the garage of his home, one of the few residences among the clubs and motels. You went in and gave Elmer ten dollars and you could drink beer until Elmer decided to close up. The garage was a favorite hangout for musicians after they got off work in the fancier places.

There is a whole cycle of Elmer Sharp stories. He once worked as a bouncer at Asher Rone’s Black Cat Café. One night, after the café closed, Sharp was next door at the Avalon Motel with one of the waitresses when he heard gunshots coming from the café. Four thugs had barged in as Rone was counting the night’s receipts and Rone had started shooting at them with a .45. Sharp came pounding down the gravel driveway wearing nothing but his undershorts, and as each would-be robber backed out of the café Sharp hit him on the head. When the police came the four unconscious men were laid out in the driveway. The officers discovered that none of them had a wallet, watch, ring, or any pocket change. Sharp had picked them clean before the police arrived.

On another occasion burglars tried to break into Sharp’s house at night. His wife heard them in the yard and woke Sharp up, telling him to go downstairs and scare them off. “Just lay quiet, Maydell,” Sharp said. “Let them get inside. Maybe they got some money on them.”

When Ann Arnold was researching her fine book about Fort Worth’s underworld, Gamblers and Gangsters (Austin: Eakin Press, 1998), she interviewed someone who told her “Elmer Sharp was so tough he wrestled his pet bear. But his mama was tougher.”

The Jacksboro Highway was largely a working-class entertainment district. The original customers, back in the 1930s, were oil-field roughnecks and slaughterhouse workers from the Armour and Swift processing plants in the nearby stockyards. During World War II  riveters and sheet-metal workers from the Consolidated Vultee airplane factory, country boys from West Texas who were  making more money than they had ever dreamed of building B-24 bombers, joined the fun. In the 1950s Strategic Air Command airmen from Carswell Air Force Base let off cold war tensions there. A grizzled master sergeant at Carswell used to tell his recruits that if they visited the Jacksboro Highway and got into trouble they were on their own; it was too rough for him.

There was music on the highway for customers who wanted to dance as well as gamble and fight. During World War II the Ringside Club, at the southern end of the strip, featured Paul Whiteman and the Andrews Sisters. The Ringside was dynamited three times before it burned down in 1951. At the other end of the strip, the more elegant Lake Worth Casino booked name bands from the 1920s until it closed in 1973. Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Kay Kyser, and Artie Shaw all played at the Casino, and their band members all drank in the after-hours places further back towards town, like the Skyliner Ballroom, which was halfway between the Casino and the Ringside. The Skyliner was built in the late 1930s as a dance club with a 2500 square-foot ballroom lined with blue mirrors, but in the 1950s the owners added the Annex, an all-night gambling room where pornographic movies were shown. The best-attended trial ever held in the Tarrant County courthouse occurred in 1953 when the Skyliner’s owners were charged with displaying lewd pictures and three films confiscated at the Annex were shown as evidence.  A few years later, the Skyliner provided the last stage for stripper Candy Barr before she went to prison for marijuana possession. The club closed forever in 1966.

The one place on the Jacksboro Highway that was above the fray, so to speak, was W.C. “Pappy” Kirkwood’s 2222 Club, which opened in 1932. The Four Deuces was a class act, a gambling club patronized by Sam Rayburn, the King Ranch’s Dick Kleberg, and Mrs. Amon Carter, the wife of the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Visiting celebrities like Frank Buck and Gene Autry were brought there by their hosts. The Four Deuces was so discreet and genteel that Mrs. Carter and her lady friends spent Sunday afternoons playing roulette there. The club was actually a private residence, set back from the highway and entered through a gatehouse, and Kirkwood, a dapper Oklahoman, treated his visitors as his personal guests, providing them with steak dinners and top-line drinks at no charge. Kirkwood knew and socialized with the other Jacksboro Highway club owners, but he would not permit them to gamble at his establishment. His son, Pat Kirkwood, once told a reporter that 15 of the men he had breakfast with every weekend when he was growing up had been killed in gangland wars. Pappy Kirkwood, beset by failing eyesight, closed the Four Deuces in the mid 1970s and died at the age of 93 in 1983. He outlived all of the clubs and joints on the Jacksboro Highway and most of their owners.

Lonn Taylor is a historian and writer who lives in Fort Davis. He can be reached at taylorw@fortdavis.net.