rambling boy

June 13th, 2013

A salad bowl of language in the United States

By LONN TAYLOR

Is this a great country or what?

A recent story in the New York Times by Joseph Berger reported a controversy over the proper spelling of the word that the winner of the National Spelling Bee spelled to win the bee. The word is knaidel, a …

rambling boy

May 30th, 2013

Postcard from Boquillas, Coahuila, Mexico

By LONN TAYLOR

I first visited Boquillas del Carmen, Mexico in 1961, when some college classmates and I drove from Fort Worth to the Big Bend, crossed the Rio Grande in a row boat, and spent two days drinking beer in a cantina there. In fact, we drank all of the …

rambling boy

May 23rd, 2013

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 …

rambling boy

May 23rd, 2013

Terlingua in the spring

By LONN TAYLOR

Sometimes Terlingua has a restorative effect on people. Sometimes it is just the opposite. One May several years ago we took my wife’s sister Laila, who lives in an idyllic English village surrounded by hedgerows and green fields, to Terlingua. It was her first visit to the Big Bend. My …

rambling boy

May 23rd, 2013

Shanghai Pierce

By LONN TAYLOR

Shanghai Pierce was the original loud rich Texan. In the 1880s and 1890s he owned 170,000 acres of coastal prairie in Wharton and Matagorda counties. His headquarters at the BU Ranch was just across the Colorado River from the town of Wharton and his range reached all the way to the Gulf. …

rambling boy

May 2nd, 2013

Américo Paredes and the beginning of Chicano studies

By LONN TAYLOR

This Cinco de Mayo is the 151st anniversary of the Battle of Puebla, in which a Mexican army led by Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza defeated an army of French invaders. It is also the 14th anniversary of the death of Américo Paredes, a Texan who fought …

rambling boy

April 25th, 2013

The regret of never having been to Saba

By LONN TAYLOR

My friend and frequent correspondent Jim Bratcher of Bulverde suggested some time ago that I should write a column about regrets that I have. Everyone has regrets, he told me, and therefore a column about regrets would strike a chord with all of my readers. It …

rambling boy

April 19th, 2013

A stiff drink is called for after shopping for wineglasses

By LONN TAYLOR

Several years ago the historian David Lowenthal wrote a book about the nature of history with the engaging title The Past is a Foreign Country. Over the past couple of months I have come to feel that for those of us born around the …

rambling boy

April 19th, 2013

Indian Lodge and the Civilian Conservation Corpos

By LONN TAYLOR

This year is the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal’s youth employment program which created jobs for two and a half million young men between the ages of 18 and 25 during the Great Depression. The C.C. C. was organized …

rambling boy

April 19th, 2013

The drive-in movie theater at Airstreamland

By LONN TAYLOR

Several weeks ago I wrote a column about Ballroom Marfa’s plans to build a drive-in movie theater in Marfa at a cost of $4.5 million. This column is about David Beebe’s drive-in movie theater, which Beebe estimates cost $2,500 to build and which is already operating on the …