Wore Stories
For her history of Texas fashion (see “The Way We Wore”), senior editor Anne Dingus began with—who else?—Sam Houston. “He’s always a good place to start,” she says, “and he distinguished himself by being sartorially flamboyant.” Then, drawing on library research and her personal archive of vintage postcards, ads, magazines, and other ephemera, she built a time line. “It was pretty challenging to make sure I didn’t overlook any section of Texas history,” she says. “Every time I thought of something—say, gimme caps—I’d go digging.” Since joining Texas Monthly in 1978, the 43-year-old Pampa native has become our resident Texana expert; the December 1994 issue, containing her compendium of Texas sayings, is one of the magazine’s most popular. “As a kid, I had lots of relatives in small Texas towns who had barns and attics full of great old material,” says Dingus, whose fourth book, a trivia quiz tentatively titled Texas 101, will be published next year. “My siblings and I would park ourselves someplace and just go through magazines, calendars, whatever we could find. And I still collect that stuff. Sometimes I think I must have the only job in Texas where I can find a use for it all.”
My Library
