William Broyles is a native of Baytown and was the founding editor of Texas Monthly. He then went on to create the television show, China Beach, and to write scripts for a number of films, including Cast Away, The Polar Express, Jarhead, Unfaithful, and Apollo 13, which he co-wrote with Texas Monthly writer Al Reinert. Broyles graduated from Rice University and has an M.A. from Oxford University. He also served with the Marines in Vietnam, was the editor in chief of Newsweek magazine, and is the author of Brothers in Arms. He lives in New Mexico.
We first published John Graves in Texas Monthly in 1974. It was a selection from Hardscrabble, his book about his life on the place he and his wife Jane and his daughters Sally and Helen carved out of, and into, the limestone and scrub brush of the Upper Brazos country.
Forty years (and more) of the exuberant, eclectic neighborhood where I was born, grew as a writer, and found inspiration for the early pages of this magazine.
Along the Houston Ship Channel the water is eight feet high and risin’.
The King Ranch saga: how one family conquered, tamed, loved, toiled on, and fought over a great piece of Texas.
TALK OF CHANGE AND REFORM has been in the air since the Sharpstown scandals more than perhaps at any time in our state’s history. Such talk is welcome, and, as most of us apparently felt in the last elections, mandatory. One imagines that talk of reform came as uncomfortably, but…
At the core of the King Ranch is the vaquero tradition, the centuries-old culture of horsemen and cattle that began on the central plateau of Spain. Richard saw how that culture could transform the Great Plains, and in the 1850s he made a recruiting trip to Mexico. The families he…
Robert E. Lee advised his friend Richard King to build his permanent home at the highest point on the surrounding prairie, a little rise on the banks of Santa Gertrudis Creek. The first building was a tiny adobe jacal built of mud and sticks. The one-story house that replaced it…
Ranching ultimately comes down to managing land and water. The King Ranch is blessed with much of the former and almost none of the latter. Before it was divided among Richard and Henrietta King’s five children in 1935, the King Ranch was bigger than Delaware. Now it’s only bigger than…
Bob Kleberg had a problem. Brahman cattle from India were tough enough to survive in the South Texas climate, but they were too tough to eat. And fat English cattle like Herefords and Shorthorns suffered the traditional fate of the English in the tropics: they degenerated into a stupor and…
Hey, undecided voters: Time’s up. As unenthusiastic as you may be, you gotta go with one of these guys. Fortunately, we’re here to help you make up your mind.
The mission of Houston minister Bill Lawson extends far beyond his church—and isn’t just about race.
The Baytown of my youth was a thriving refinery town. Today it’s a city struggling to reinvent itself.
A Britisher forty years my senior made me see myself, and Texas, anew.
The son’s ultimate selfishness is to see his father only as his father—not as a man. But on our first fishing trip in 25 years, I began to see my father—and myself—as the grown men we’d become.
In 1969 a young man from Baytown decided, after a struggle, to fight in Vietnam.
The present against the past: what the New World can learn from the Old, and vice versa.
None of the old clichés about voluntarism are true except this one: it works.
None of the old clichés about voluntarism are true except this one: it works.
Forgetting free trade, scrapping our factories, and other modest solutions to our economic troubles.
Two questions about school desegregation: Is busing the only way? Are integrated schools inferior?
Like most wrong ideas, the concept of the sunbelt didn’t matter until people started putting it into practice.
