the rambling boy – cattle brands and the stories they tell

May 17th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

In the late 1970s I had a job that was a Texas historian’s dream. I was the curator of history at the Dallas Historical Society, in charge of a collection of some 10,000 objects relating to Texas history. The collection, which included Santa Anna’s spurs and Fannin’s watch – the one he gave …

Rambling Boy – Lionel Sosa and HemisFair

April 19th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

I had a visit the other day from Lionel Sosa of San Antonio and his wife, Kathy. Sosa is a highly successful businessman, a partner in the largest Hispanic advertising agency in the United States, a consultant to presidential candidates, and an accomplished portrait artist. But that is not what this column is …

Rambling Boy – Norton Rugeley, my favorite cousin

April 12th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

March 18 would have been the eighty-sixth birthday of my favorite cousin, Norton Rugeley. Norton was born in Wharton, Texas, in 1926, which made him fourteen years older than I and ten years younger than his cousin, Horton Foote, whose plays and screenplays about Wharton emphasized the family ties among its people and …

Rambling Boy – riding the rails from New Orleans to D.C.

March 29th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

Last month I made a journey back to childhood. I took a train, the Amtrak Crescent, from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., a twenty-seven hour trip in a sleeping car. I first rode that line, then the Norfolk Southern Railroad’s Southern Crescent, as an eighteen-month old toddler in the summer of 1941 and …

Rambling Boy – Gems of historical facts in self-published books

March 29th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

Self-published books, made possible by the computer and by an ever-growing number of companies who bind and distribute authors’ works, have been a boon to grassroots historians, that is, historians who write about the lives of ordinary people. Self-published books often contain a wealth of detail about everyday life that cannot be found …

Rambling Boy – Fact & fiction in historic homes & sites

March 15th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

I have always been a sucker for visiting historic houses and historic sites. At most of them, visitors are given information by tour guides, and the quality of that information depends on how well the guide has been trained or how desperate the guide is to hold the attention of tour groups. Tour …

Rambling Boy – Small-town journalists

March 8th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

The death in December of former Pecos journalist Oscar Griffin, Jr., reminded me once more of the importance of freedom of the press in this country and of the American tradition of small-town newspaper editors and reporters standing up for what is right in the face of community pressure to sit down and …

Rambling Boy – Roped to Far West Texas

March 8th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

I was not able to attend this year’s Cowboy Poetry Gathering, due to obligations elsewhere, but the Gathering occupies a soft spot in my heart because it was due to the 1993 Gathering that my wife and I decided to move to the Big Bend.

That year the Smithsonian was considering producing a Cowboy …

Rambling Boy – Travels with my father

February 23rd, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

I cannot go on a long road trip without thinking about my father. He was a highway engineer, a member of the first civil engineering class to graduate from Texas A&M that studied highway construction rather than railroad construction. That was in 1924. He went on to have a long career with the …

Rambling Boy – El Indio cemetery tombstone mystery solved

February 9th, 2012

By LONN TAYLOR

The Karam Tombstone Mystery is solved. Faithful readers will recall that in my January 12 column I described a mysterious tombstone with an Arabic inscription in the El Indio cemetery between Presidio and Ruidosa. The tombstone commemorated two Lebanese peddlers, Ramon Karam and his fourteen-year old son, Salvador, who were murdered by bandits …