January 1990

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Features

The 1990 Bum Steer Awards

A year of antagonistic attorneys, beleaguered Bushes, costumed cacti, dead dogs, espied Elvises, falling Fledermause, garbled grapes, hemline histrionics, imprudent impeachings, journalistic judges, kinky kindling, legislative largesse, mock McMurtrys, novelist’s nooks, overrated Odessas, phantom pharaohs, qualified quail, Ruby’s revolvers, spurious spies, tardy transcribers, U-charistic Uthanasians, vandalized vans, weird wienersm X-onerated X-ecutives, yapping Yankees, and zippered zoos.

A Case of Black and White

It wasn’t nostalgia that brought me back to my hometown. It was a black man’s violent death in a jail cell.

by Jan Jarboe Russell

The Bucks Stop Here

The troubled Parks and Wildlife Department is supposed to protect the state’s natural resources. Instead, it protects its friends and, above all, itself.

by Peter Elkind

The Call of the Wildman

To find their true masculine selves, wildmen dance and sweat, bond and meditate, renounce their mothers and grunt, “Ho!” I thought, “Hmmm.”

by Skip Hollandsworth

Texas Primer: The Windmill

But for this ever-so-practical invention, Texas history as we know it would be gone with the wind.

by Anne Dingus

Swamp Thing

Snapping turtles are cantankerous, grotesque, and savage. And those are just a few of the reasons I like them.

by Stephen Harrigan

Columns

Books

A Child’s Garden of Texas

The young—and even the not-so-young-can travel back through the state’s glorious past simply by opening up any one of these fourteen children’s classics.

by Anne Dingus