Personal Best
Favorite moments in the 30 years of Texas Monthly.
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"Pecos Bill" (April 1999). For several years I wrote a column called "Texas Primer," which was a mini-bio of a famous Texan. The subjects ranged from Alvin Ailey, the dancer and choreographer, to Abraham Zapruder, whose amateur video of John F. Kennedy's assassination is now part of the National Archives. One year, as an April Fool's joke, I decided to focus on Pecos Bill, the Paul Bunyan of Texas, but instead of rehashing all the well-known legends associated with him, I just made up a lot of new stuff. I figured, since he was a wholly folkloric character, what the heck. My article claimed that, among other things, he was born during the siege of the Alamo, cross-bred a jackrabbit and an antelope to create the jackalope, and earned the nickname "Longhorn" from his girlfriend. It was the kind of assignment where I find myself thinking, "And I get paid for this!"
"Wish We Were There" (April 1992). I loved working on this feature, which starred Texas-related items from my vast collection of vintage postcards. I started amassing old postcards in college (some thirty years ago), and today I have five thousand or so, from sappy, flowery Valentines to famous outlaw portraits in black and white. My "research" for this story was conducted at home in shorts and T-shirt and consisted of sorting through the thousand or so Texas cards I store in shoeboxes in an old oak filing cabinet. With the help of the art department, I winnowed my first cull of a couple of hundred down to a final thirty, which included pictures of turn-of-the-century swimmers in Galveston, the forties-era singing-cowboy star Gene Autry, and a curly-haired toddler picking grapefruit in the Rio Grande Valley. Nostalgia is contagious—readers loved this piece and a lot wrote in to say so. In fact, many wanted to know where to get a copy of the postcard called "A Texan's Map of the United States," which shows the Lone Star State taking up half the nation. It's a hoary old joke, but it's a classic too. Back then I could only suggest that they try searching antique stores; now, thanks to eBay and other online auction sites, these nostalgic old postcards are much easier to find. Not cheaper, of course—but easier to find.
Steve Harrigan
1974-present, Contributing Editor
When I first started writing for Texas Monthly, I had no training as a reporter and, to be honest, only a polite interest in journalism itself. By temperament, if not yet by accomplishment, I was a novelist, and as I look wincingly back on my early attempts at magazine writing I can see a number of potentially good stories that were sabotaged by my showboating prose. It took a number of years for me to get the balance of style and content right, to locate subjects that were expansive enough to interest my novelist's soul and at the same time to recognize when it was time to climb down off my literary high horse and just get the information across to the reader. The best of my Texas Monthly stuff has been collected in two books of essays, A Natural State and Comanche Midnight, but I think the pieces in the latter are where I really hit my stride. I changed some of their titles for the book, but when they first appeared in the magazine they were called The Lost Tribe" (February 1989), "The Temple of Destiny" (July 1989), "Vigil at Treaty Oak" (October 1989), "Highway One" (January 1981), "Worked to Death"(October 1988), and "On the Set of Lonesome Dove" (June 1988).
Joe Nick Patoski
1974-present, Senior Editor
My favorite Texas Monthly stories? All the less-than-obvious music stories, for starters. No offense to the stars and celebs. I've enjoyed every minute on Willie's bus, hanging on the Letterman set with ZZ, watching Natalie Maines prepping for a photo shoot, and being mesmerized by Selena backstage. But it's the obscure stories that have stuck with me: the homage to my hometown blues hero Robert Ealey and the New Bluebird Nite Club (my first Texas Monthly music story, published in 1974), the Joe Ely Band when they were still a local band in Lubbock, the Thibodaux family of Cajun musicians who ruled the Rodair Club near Nederland, chasing Clifton Chenier and Lightnin Hopkins across the Sabine to a roadhouse where music and cockfights were the feature attractions, doing the Saturday night Zydeco dance circuit in Houston Catholic church parish halls, watching Sleepy Johnson die on stage on the last song of a Texas Playboys concert at Bob Wills Day in Turkey, meeting the president of Mexico with Little Joe, hearing how Jose Morante, one of the last corridistas, chose his subject matter, watching Mingo Saldivar blow away Flaco Jimenez at an accordion shootout at the Rockin' M in Lockhart, sitting in the home of Narciso Martinez, the greatest accordeonista of all time, and saying goodbye to my old friend Sir Doug Sahm. They're all folks who made and make music for the sheer joy of it all rather than the money, underscoring the too-rarely-recognized role music plays in defining Texas culture as the finest of the fine arts that Texas has to offer.
Copper Canyon: the hardest thing I've ever physically done. The reward was seeing one of the most beautiful places on earth as few people have, and getting up close and personal with the Tarahumara Indians, a people who have managed to survive and thrive while modern Western civilization creeps ever closer at bay, a battle I'm afraid they're finally losing. And only a four hour drive over the state line.
Over the years I've driven the entire coast, the Hill Country, the Valley, the mountains, River Road, the South Plains, the Panhandle, the Big Country, the Cross Timbers, the Piney Woods, the Arklatex, the Golden Triangle, and every border town across the Rio Grande in service to this magazine, racking up close to a half million miles. The first time I completed my favorite drive of all, Pinto Canyon Road from Marfa to Chinati Hot Springs near the Rio Grande, I thought I'd found a place that is as remote and isolated as Texas can be, especially after the last thirty miles of bad gravel. But within ten minutes, I saw a white Suburban crawling through the rocks. Squinting through the desert sun, I saw the vehicle had a Texas Monthly logo on the door. It was my colleague Dick J. Reavis, logging miles for his tour of every known road in Texas. My immediate reaction was, "It's a small world for such a big state." Since then I've realized two humbling truths: While I've seen a whole lot of Texas, I still haven't seen it all. Dick has. And that in the long run, there's not much of our great state that's escaped the eyes of our writers.
The Davis Mountains story about land use in the most gorgeous part of Texas: Identifying conflict comes naturally to a writer. Finding a solution is a trickier proposition. But I managed to do both in the Davis range where ranchers and the Texas Nature Conservancy are working together to keep wide open spaces wide open through a tool called a conservation easement, which encourages landowners to doing what they've been doing for generations—preserving and enhancing land through stewardship while keeping big ranches from being broken up or developed. Three years after the fact, the story's still playing out, as Davis Mountains Organic Beef is about to hit the grocery shelves of H-E-Bs statewide.
Water stories: From the "Ten Best Swimming Holes in Texas" to "The Wild Coast" to "Boone Pickens Wants to Sell You His Water" to the fight for the soul of Caddo Lake, I've been drawn to water stories, especially now that the Legislature has made laws that effectively made water into a commodity to be sold and marketed for profit like oil. In the coming years water availability will be the driving factor that not only determines how Texas grows but what kind of place it will grow to be. Don't mess with Texas water.
Katy Vine
1997-present, Assistant Editor
"Family Circus" (August 2002). I had a great time hanging out with the Fearless Flores family. They're proud and thoughtful and totally determined to continue an anachronistic tradition, and as a subject, they implicitly brought modern American customs into sharp relief. Oh, the anecdotes I had to cut from this story...
"Wichita Falls to Brownsville on U.S. 281" (May 2002). I think 281 is one of the more interesting highways in the state. It offers many different versions of Texas, from the dairy farms of German Catholics on the north side to the bustling shopping district near the Texas-Mexico bridge in Brownsville. As a personal project, I also sampled many of 281's pies.
"Love and War in Cyberspace" (February 2001). The week that I spent at Walden, an apartment complex in Houston aimed at introverted high-tech workers, most residents told me that their complex had turned into a social experiment, and that their community was falling apart. I knew I had a great story on my hands when a couple who had met online told me they were getting divorced, giving me a dramatic but manageably sized mirror for the Walden group.
"Check Mates" (August 2001). This piece about chess's young grand master Yuri Shulman and the UT-Dallas chess team was very short, but Yuri remains one of my favorite subjects. When I interviewed him, he had recently beaten Viktor Korchnoi and told his teammates in a thick Belarusian accent, "Sometimes you need some special feelings to crush somebody..."
"Jandek and Me" (August 1999). During the interview for this story, the subject, a prolific Houston musician named Jandek, refused to confirm that he was in fact the man who made the music. (This, despite the fact that he looked like the blond on the covers and knew everything about the music.) So we discussed Jandek in the third person. The absurdity of the interview was appropriate for the profile, and I think the subject's secrecy made the story more interesting.
Bill Broyles
1973-1982, Editor
My favorite story is in the Best of Texas Monthly when Mike Levy steps into the swimming pool. I also loved the time Billy Lee Brammer couldn't find his hands late at night back when we only had one IBM selectric and all the writers had to share it, the time Giles Tippette smashed his fist into my wall and left blood on the sheetrock, the time Gary Cartwright and I had to crash with Pete Gent in Dallas, the trip Richard West and I made to Mexico to find an old homesteader, the way we'd have to get the magazine on the bus every month to get it published, the way we'd rearrange the copies on the newsstand so TM would be in front, the way we had to explain who we were in the old days: well, it's a magazine, and it's about Texas and it comes out once a month... and so on.
Evan Smith
1992-present, Editor
My favorite Texas Monthly story of all time is Mimi's (Swartz) piece on Bill Moyers (November 1989). Here's a guy you thought you knew all about, and the story just kept peeling the onion. It solidified for me what journalism should be. I was working at a small magazine at the time that wasn't doing that kind of journalism and thought that's the kind of journalism we should be doing.
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