Dac Crossley's Western Blog

Camel Cold Patch and Rubber Bands

The first truly liberating experience in my young life was my first bicycle. My mother was dead set against it (“too dangerous”) but I prevailed. That bicycle took me all over Kingsville, Texas and far out into the countryside. All on my own.

In the 30’s and 40’s bicycles had balloon tires. Those narrow high-pressure tires didn’t come along until after WWII. Balloon tires used rubber inner-tubes to hold air. They were soft and flexible, which made them susceptible to a boy’s worst enemy – sand burs.

South Texas is a thorny land and we had all kinds of stickers to contend with – grass burs, devil’s heads and sand burs among them. Hard on your feet and hard on bicycle tires. They could stick right through the tread and punch a hole in your inner-tube.

Get out the Camel Cold Patch. Every boy soon learned the routine – take off the tire, yank out the inner tube, patch the leaks. Some were tiny and if you overlooked one your tire could go flat overnight. Bummer. Camel could stop leaks.

The top of the Camel Cold Patch can was a scraper. Abrade the tube surface, smear a little Camel goo on the leaky spot and press on a Camel patch. Let ‘er dry. It was a cold vulcanization process – you couldn’t rip off that patch. You’d tear the tube first.

Automobiles of that area also had balloon tires with inner tubes. The usual practice was to replace a leaky tube. Always use new inner tubes when you buy new tires.

Now, a discarded inner tube from a car was a real find. You could slice it for big rubber bands and make yourself a rubbergun.

Whittle out the silhouette of a pistol. Affix a spring-type clothespin to the handle. Stretch a big rubber band back from the end of the “barrel” and hold it with the clothespin at the handle. You got yourself a weapon!

Rubbergun fights could drag on for a while. You picked up your enemy’s ammo and shot it back at him. Combine rubberguns and bicycles and you’ve got boys jousting like King Arthur’s knights of old.

There are other ways to have fun today. Are they any better?

Dac Crossley
January 30, 2011

“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.” – Helen Keller.

Riding Your Thumb

My Dad was driving me along the bypass around Tallahassee, Florida, when he remarked, “The gas gauge in this darned Mercury doesn’t work.” Almost instantaneously, we ran out of gas.

That’s the last time I remember hitch-hiking. And we got a ride with a drunk, a city employee who was out at ten in the morning appraising commercial property. (This was some years ago. I’m sure the appraisals have been straightened out by now).

A youngsters we hitch-hiked everyplace. Clear across Texas, Amarillo to Brownsville. From downtown Kingsville to the outskirts of town. We'd gather in front of the Rialto Theater where people would stop and pick us up, give us a ride home. A simpler time indeed.

Yes, we’d occasionally hop into a car with a driver who turned out to be drinking. And sometimes we wound up in unusual places. I got let out one evening in the middle of nowhere in southwest Texas. Sun going down, no traffic in sight. I remember thinking, “It’s only ten miles to Benavides. I can walk that in three hours.” Luckily, I caught another ride.

Thumbing a ride is something you don’t do any more. Why is that? Has our society gotten meaner? Have the big city ways taken over the little country towns? Who’s afraid of whom?

Hitch-hiking is another one of those things we’ve lost, along with typewriters and Kodaks and good manners. Soon our paperboys will be gone, too.

I do miss the simpler times. Especially in the evenings.

Dac Crossley
January 20,2012

“I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.” – George Burns.

A Texas Rite of Passage

When I was five or six years old, my mother gave me my first pocket knife - a pearl-handled, single-blade jack knife with a blade probably two inches long. I’ll never forget that little beauty. Mom impressed upon me the responsibility that was now mine. Act in a reasonable manner, not like a wild Indian.

My grandfather Baird instructed me in the safe use of pocket knives. Always whittle away from you. I still recall his demonstration – his big hand taking slow, careful strokes that peeled curved slivers from a mesquite twig. Always whittle away from you. That little knife had a sharp blade!

In contrast to grandfather, my grandmother Baird was something else altogether. She taught me to play mumblety-peg. Down on your knees in the dirt, you grasped the knife by the blade and flipped it so it would stick up in the ground. There were several tricks you had to perform. One of them I remember involved flipping the knife over the back of your hand. If the knife didn’t stick up, you lost your turn. My favorite trick was “Slap the Baby.” You stuck the knife in the ground and then gave it a sharp slap, making it turn over and over. If it ended with the point stuck into the ground, you won.

Would a modern mother give her six-year-old a sharp knife to play with? Would a grandmother give lessons in knife play? I think mumblety-peg is a game long forgotten, except by readers of Mark Twain’s Missouri stories.

My fellow writer Irene B. suggested that a boy’s first pocket knife marked a gender difference. Girls did not carry pocket knives.

Irene, you didn’t know Grandmother Baird.

Dac Crossley
January 14, 2012

“The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.” – Jean Kerr.

The Doubtful Winters

Those of us of a certain age do remember those winters of doubt. Quiet evenings when our parents spoke in hushed tones or not at all, after supper near the fire. Children felt the pall covering everything, not knowing what to say, keeping quiet.

We kids heard it on the big Atwater-Kent radio, the depression word. It all seemed to fit together, the cold dark skies, silhouettes of leafless tree branches, black clay mud clinging to your shoes. This was South Texas in a railroad town. Hobos, dropping off on their way to the Border, made it all the way to our house on the edge of nowhere. Always there was mesquite wood to be chopped for the stove, and something or other to eat, but not many smiles.

Sears-Roebuck gave us the mail-order coats that kept us warm, as well as my favorites, aviator helmets complete with goggles. Our heroes in the 1930’s were aviators. It was the time of Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart, smiling at us from the newsreels at the Rialto. An aviator cap was absolutely essential on the school playground. Where are they today?

The winter of 1942. We were at war, fathers and uncles fighting someplace we didn’t know about. The news we got was not encouraging, mostly rumors. Older now, in our teens, we became aware of shortages, essentials becoming scarce. At that in-between space, too young to do anything, old enough to wish to contribute something to the war. And the cold winter rains again, the jagged mesquite branches against a gray sky.

Now, as those of us of that certain age realize, the torch has been passed. Men and women vie for controlling our future, strident voices on TV, endless analysis. Bare trees mock their efforts.

But hey! Spring will come. Today a clump of Crocus blooms by my driveway. Jonquils are up. And back in Texas, the mesquite will bloom.

Do not doubt.

Dac Crossley
January 11, 2012

“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.” – Sir Randulph Fiennes, Explorer.

In The Treasured Time

Back when we were children it was a dip in time, a treasured week. A stint outside the ordinary where your obligations just froze over. That time between Christmas and New Year’s, when school was vacant and you took the opportunity to show off your Christmas goodies to your friends. New coat, a bicycle or a football (I speak from the perspective of my gender). No responsibilities. Ignore that looming specter of next semester.

Here in a college town the old childhood dip between the holidays is observed joyfully by all. The college students are all away, traffic slows, life’s pace is less hurried. Children play in the street. Pancakes for breakfast. Nap in front of the TV.

Yet, this is the traditional time for accounting, for mending fences, forgiving debts. The Christmas decorations have become tawdry; how soon can we store them away? Our children might prefer to prolong the season. We are ready to see it pass.

For me at least, New Year’s Day is a welcome hangover from too much food, too rich. The solstice holidays are an emotional yo-yo, down and up and down again. Did we do everything required of us? There's always that hope of renewal in another year, and it's right there, just over the horizon. Take a deep breath.

Quo vadis?

Dac Crossley
December 30, 2011

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” – Joan Didion.

South of the Nueces River

It was the disputed territory, the despoblado, the Nueces Strip. The Republic of Texas claimed the Rio Grande as its southern border. Mexico insisted on the Nueces River. Neither country occupied the territory between the rivers.

When Texas joined the Union, the Nueces territory became a problem for the United States. And the little village of Corpus Christi became part of that problem.

Zachary Taylor and his army showed the flag by occupying Corpus Christi on the south bank of the Nueces, the only village in the disputed territory. Taylor’s army propelled what was essentially a trading post into a township. (Laredo, on the north bank of the Rio Grande, was in the disputed territory also. Nobody there spoke much English).

Murphy Givens, retired Viewpoints Editor for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, gives us the volume “Corpus Christi. A History.” I’ve enjoyed his columns, and feel a special connection to the Caller-Times. As a paperboy I delivered that newspaper. A great-great-uncle, Eli Merriman, was editor for many years. And finally, the current newspaper building stands on the plot of ground that one housed my great-grandfather. I’m comfortable with the Caller-Times.

Givens constructed his volume “Corpus Christi” largely from newspaper stories, judging by the citations and footnotes he provides. It’s well-written and readable, with a newspaperman’s touch for displaying the facts. I’d like to see more of the personalities of some of the players. I guess that’s another book. Corpus was the site of my childhood vacations, the amusement park on North Beach, Christmas shopping in the five-and-tens. For those with similar roots, I recommend "Corpus Christi."

The notion persists that the Nueces territory was uninhabited land, home to bandits and raiders, unsettled except for Corpus Christi. Not so. Mexicans had working ranches throughout the area, including the Santa Petronilla ranch quite close to Corpus Christi itself. Rancheros usually had residences in Mexico as well, refuges in times of Indian troubles or droughts.

In 1845 those ranchers and their people had to choose -- become US citizens or return to Mexico. One or the other. Angelica Reyes in her neat little novel, “Last Ride on the Ferry,” explains how many of them chose to stay with the land, theirs for generations, whichever nation claimed it.

In that choice - is there some hint of a solution to today’s questions about citizenship and legality? I believe we need to find answers soon. For south and north of the Nueces River. And perhaps the Rio Grande itself.

Dac Crossley
December 18, 2011

“A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” – Francis Bacon.

Supper-Table Stories and Cabeza de Vaca

I have a life-long interest in Cabeza de Vaca, dating back to stories mother told us around the supper table.

My mother, Eugenia Baird Crossley, found time for college when my brother Walter and I finally entered grade school. Mother pursued a Master’s Degree, and eventually wrote a thesis on the route of Cabeza de Vaca through South Texas. In the evenings, sitting at the supper table, she’d tell us what she’d discovered that day. Those people were alive for her, and she brought them to life for us.

Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions were the first Europeans to journey through Texas in the Sixteenth Century. Shipwrecked on Galveston Island, de Vaca and his colleagues were first befriended and then enslaved by Indians. Escaping, they made their way south, through my part of Texas and into Mexico. A miraculous voyage as de Vaca later described it, and a fascinating look at south Texas before the age of Europeans.

As she usually did, Mother made those tales come alive. Those suppers, and Mom’s enthusiastic tales of the castaways and Indians, are a cherished part of my childhood.

Thus, I was delighted to find a modern interpretation of de Vaca’s journey, A Land So Strange, written by Andrés Reséndez of U-Cal Davis (see my Shelfari page). This highly-readable account includes much detail about the origins of the Spanish trip through Texas. As always, I was interested – and puzzled – by the accounts of the Indians who finally befriended these castaways. Their seemingly miraculous cures of diseases endeared the Spaniards to the Indians.

Professor Reséndez offered me two new perspectives. For one, I hadn’t realized that when Cabeza de Vaca wrote his Relación it had to pass muster with the Church before it could be published. This was, in fact, the time of the Spanish Inquisition and de Vaca, like others, walked with caution. His account was filtered with that specter hanging over him.

The other perspective – well, something of a shock. Professor Reséndez says that “lots of ink has been spilled” over Cabeza de Vaca, which it surely has. When I looked at his list of Further Reading, I found that most of that ink has been spilled in the last twenty years!

Scholarship goes on. We plow the ground again, looking for more potshards.

I wish that I could hand this book to my mother.

Dac Crossley
12/12/2011

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.” – Garrison Keillor.

Guerrilla Marketing

I heard Chris Matthews on NPR ask the question: "Why does Coca-Cola advertise? Everyone knows what they are."

And the answer is: You gotta keep reminding people.

So it is with us writers. We must continue promoting our books. You gotta keep talking about them. So, I offer -- GUERRILLA MARKETING!

Here's the Escape from the Alamo golf cart --

A gift to the University of Georgia's Marine Science Institute on Sapelo Island. Where visiting scientists are not allowed to drive State of Georgia vehicles. A golf cart is not a vehicle. The Escape golf cart will help the scientists get around and the message get out. Note the steer horns on the front of the cart. Covers of my books will be displayed on the sides.

And for the final home football game of the season - the Escape from the Alamo Porta-Potty:

So much for the Autumn days. It's Holiday Season now, bright lights, music, and best of all, gift-giving. What better gift than a good old western novel, personalized by the author? I'm your huckleberry.

Happy Holidays to all,

Dac Crossley
December 1, 2011

"Boldness is a mask for fear, however great." - John Dryden.

The Virtual Bookshelf

I remember that last Spring I raised the question, what books reside in a permanent place of honor on your bookshelf? You know, those books that you re-read time and again. That special bookshelf. On my own shelf I reported several, including:

The Great Plains, by Walter Prescott Webb.
The Eternal Frontier, by Tim Flannery.
Wicked, by Gregory Maguire.

And those three are still there, with a few others. And some poetry.

But times they are achangin’. I am now building a virtual bookshelf of e-books. Works I’ve found to be, from my perspective, unusually good. Things I'll read over and over. So far, I've found two:

Here on Earth, by Tim Flannery. Yes, another Flannery. His description of a holistic concept of the earth, in contrast to the reductionist views of Darwin or Dawkins, is just excellent. Deserves visiting again and again.

The Social Animal. The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, by David Brooks. I know hims from the Brooks and Shields segment on PBS. Yes, he’s a Conservative and that’s not quite my style, but he writes a thought-provoking book.

So, now both of these reside on my virtual bookshelf in the cloud, wherever that may be, and I can call them up on my iPad when I want to refer to them.

Is this the future?

The poetry I'd rather hold in my hand.

Dac Crossley
November 20,2011

“The tragedy of life is not that the beautiful things die young; it is that they grow old and mean.” – Raymond Chandler.

Texas History for Children

I'm referring to Anna J. Hardwicke Pennybacker’s textbook, A History of Texas for Schools. I have the copy used by my grandmother, Ida May DeRyee. In a blog earlier this month, I gave the impression that Mrs. Pennybacker was actually my grandmother. Not so. Please forgive my error.

Anna Pennybacker wrote her history of Texas with the enthusiasm of a teacher who enjoys her topic and wants you to experience the excitement of the clash of events in our past. My mother, Eugenia Baird Crossley was a historian and a storyteller as well. Perhaps all good history teachers are really tellers of tales. One hundred years later, Pennybacker's style is a bit stiff, yet she brings the history of Texas to life. I wonder what she would write about recent years. Miriam Ferguson? Ann Richards? George Bush? Or Rick Perry?

Melba G. reminds me that Anna Pennybacker had a career that extended far beyond her textbook. She was the third president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the only Texan (so far) to hold that position. Melba tells me that Dorothy Kemp from the Kingsville/Corpus Christi area (and president of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs from 1994-96) had a little old-fashioned outfit - including shoes - from the 1900 era. Dressed in this get-up, Ms. Kemp gave programs all over the state of Texas, performing as Mrs. Anna Pennybacker. So there is indeed a close connection with Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, Texas history, and South Texas.

Anna embraced such causes as women’s suffrage, child welfare and immigration status. A pacifist, she became a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and urged the United States to renounce war as an instrument of national policy. She passed away in 1938. A biography, “Call Her a Citizen” by Kelley M. King, was published in 2010 (thanks, Paige).

Dac Crossley
November 16, 2011

“I feel with all the strength of my woman’s being that war is a relic of barbarism.”- Anna J. H. Pennybacker