Fair Park Coliseum, Lubbock 126–150
From Buzz Bissinger arriving in Odessa—with a notepad—to Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen writing songs in College Station
126 | Buzz Bissinger arrives in Odessa—with notepad
4700 Golder Avenue, Odessa | July 15, 1988
In the summer of 1988, a Philadelphia Inquirer Writer named H. G. “Buzz” Bissinger moved from the Pennsylvania suburbs to live full-time in Odessa and report on the upcoming football season. The book that resulted, Friday Night Lights, was an instant sports classic that launched a movie and a television show. During the ’88 season, when Bissinger wasn’t on the sidelines, you could find him with his family at Dos Amigos on Sundays. “It’s the ultimate Texas bar,” he says. “The lights are low, the music is on, and there’s real bull riding in the back. As a Yankee Jew, I got a little nervous when I first went in, but everyone was great.” Bissinger would find Odessa much the same today, including the fact that Gary Gaines, the coach of the Panthers at the time, has returned. “I went back with my son Zach twenty years after the book came out,” Bissinger says. “And the first thing Zach said was ‘Let’s go to Dos Amigos.’ ” —BDS
127 | T.S. Hogan builds Petroleum Building
214 West Texas Avenue, Midland | July 4, 1929
The builder was T. S. Hogan, a Montana attorney who had come to West Texas to search for oil in the newly discovered fields of the Permian Basin. Hogan correctly guessed that Midland, which just a few years earlier was nothing more than a railroad depot, would soon become the region’s leading city. His twelve-story office tower, complete with ornate Gothic spires soaring into the sky, became known as the Petroleum Building, as dozens of oilmen moved in to make their fortunes. Today the great Midland tycoons work in modern skyscrapers that dwarf the Petroleum Building, which is leased mostly to small, independent oilmen still searching for their first gushers. But every now and then, you can hear a “yeehaw” coming out of one of those ancient offices. —S. HOLLANDSWORTH
128 | Buddy Holly opens for Elvis
1012 Avenue A, Lubbock | February 13, 1955
The ads that circulated around town proclaimed “The Be-Bop Western Star of the Louisiana Hayride Returns to Lubbock.” Elvis, just twenty years old and eleven months away from superstardom, would be paid $75 for a four o’clock performance at the Fair Park Coliseum, which had opened just the year before. But the rest of the bill was not to be overlooked, including a senior at Lubbock High School named Buddy Holly, who performed with his friend Bob Montgomery. They had played at parties and church events and on local radio, but this show was different. With the crowds and the venue and the stage, it had the feel of the big time. Indeed, Holly would open for Elvis twice more that year at the coliseum, which still hosts events. These performances would lead to a meeting with Eddie Crandall, the manager of Marty Robbins, who would introduce Holly to the execs at Decca Records. —BDS
129 | Flying Queens begin their historic winning streak
1900 West Seventh, Plainview | November 7, 1953
Today the sports world celebrates the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, which set a major conference record earlier this year by winning its ninetieth consecutive game. But even the Huskies didn’t come close to the accomplishments of the Wayland Lassies, the women’s hoops squad from Wayland Baptist College, a tiny school in the heart of the Panhandle. Wayland’s streak began with a 51—31 win over the Dowell’s Dolls, a team from Amarillo, and continued, incredibly, for the next five years—131 consecutive games in all, including four national Amateur Athletic Union championships. During their remarkable run, the Lassies barnstormed around the country in a private airplane funded by a local alum, which earned them the nickname “the Flying Queens.” Before games, the girls carefully did their hair and makeup in the locker room, and then they hit the hardwood, performing dazzling pregame dribbling and passing drills that they learned from the Harlem Globe-trotters. The streak finally ended in 1958, at the hands of Nashville Business College, but it could very well be the most durable record in all of sport. The original gymnasium where it began has been turned into the Nunn School of Business, but at almost every Wayland home game, you can still find one of the two coaches from that era. —S. HOLLANDSWORTH
130 | First suspects rounded up in fraudulent drug sting
136 East Broadway Avenue, Tulia | July 23, 1999
They started bringing them to the old red-brick Swisher County Jail on the courthouse square at first light, making sure the local TV news had a chance to film the defendants in their bedclothes, with their uncombed hair. By the time it was over, the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force had arrested 47 people on the scantest of evidence—including 10 percent of Tulia’s black population—for dealing cocaine. The case ignited a scandal that would keep this small farming town in the national news for years. The fall from grace for Tom Coleman, the itinerant narc who made the cases, was breathtaking: from Officer of the Year in 1999 to convicted perjurer in 2005. Governor Perry pardoned almost all of Coleman’s victims, but the damage to the statewide drug task force program—and the hundreds of narcs it employed—could not be repaired. By 2006, it was dead. —NB
131 | Hunters kill Bison the old-fashioned way
Texas Highway 207, outside Silverton | c. 7500 BC
Aboriginal hunters armed with state-of-the-art weapons (chipped-stone spears) lie in wait for dinner (and lunch and clothing and shelter) as a herd of giant bison grazes near the mouth of a canyon that is now submerged beneath Lake Mackenzie. The hunters patiently wait for the right moment and then, with a prehistoric racket, they move in for the kill. Scientists are still unclear how they disabled the massive beasts, but man triumphs over nature. As they butcher and skin the carcasses, some hunters discard broken spear points, worn out from use. They carry off the meat and the hides, leaving the bones and weapons for a much later generation of Texans to discover at the Rex Rodgers archaeological site. —HWB
132 | Charles Goodnight starts ranching
Palo Duro Canyon | 1876
Cattleman Charles Goodnight arrived in the Palo Duro Canyon by way of the Comanche Trail in 1876. “Grass and water were found there in abundance and the cattle ran at their own sweet will,” he later wrote. That’s where he established the Panhandle’s first ranch with the help of Irishman John Adair, who provided the capital—and his initials—for what they called the JA Ranch. Their venture became one of the largest cattle enterprises in the world. What began with 12,000 acres grew to comprise no less than 1.3 million acres that sprawled across six counties. A small portion of the JA ranch is still in private hands, but the upper division—where the purebred JJ herd, made up of Goodnight’s best cattle, was once raised—is now Palo Duro Canyon State Park. —PC
133 | Coronado gets lost
Somewhere on the Llano Estacado | October 1541
After Cabeza de Vaca’s reports of vast riches in the north of New Spain set Mexico City buzzing, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado was dispatched into the unmapped territory with an army of one thousand men. Coronado spent months seeking Quivira, a city or region that the indigenous people he met swore was filled with such riches as to make all the hardships of his journey worthwhile. In time he learned that the locals were simply trying to get him and his army to keep moving farther down the road and that the hunt for gold might well be a wild goose chase (he wrote of “plains so vast that I did not find their limit anywhere I went”). His wanderings took him through what is now New Mexico, back and forth across the Panhandle, passing near Palo Duro Canyon, and up into Kansas, where, exhausted and angry, he decided to call a small village of Wichita Indians “Quivira” and be done with it. The “discovery” helped justify his expensive expedition, but it led later historians on their own wild chases across the High Plains in search of a city that never existed. —HWB
134 | Stanley Marsh 3 buries Cadillacs
Interstate 40 frontage road west of Amarillo, between Exits 60 and 62 | May 28, 1974
The most peculiar piece of public art in Texas was created in 1974 when the Ant Farm, an art collective, teamed up with Amarillo artist and prankster Stanley Marsh 3 to halfway bury ten Cadillacs nose-first at a particular angle, corresponding to that of Egypt’s Great Pyramid, in a wheat field on Marsh’s property. What does it mean? Well, some visitors have speculated that it’s intended to address the rise and fall of the automobile or the tail fin (the Cadillacs are all from 1949 to 1963), but co-creator Doug Michels had something else in mind. “To me, it was a dolphin idea,” he told texas monthly in 1994. “Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and I were standing in a wheat field off Route 66 in the rain. And you know how the wheat waves and ripples in the wind? Well, suddenly we imagined a dolphin tail fin sticking up out of the wheat.” Marsh relocated the cars in 1997, because the town’s growth was encroaching on the site. To reach the original location, where Michels, Lord, and Marquez gazed out over a field and imagined a dolphin fin that became a Cadillac, head two miles east of the current location, which is between Exits 60 and 62 on the frontage road of Interstate 40. —KV
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