First Light
Texas’ morning glory by thirteen photographers.
Texas’ morning glory by thirteen photographers.
You may have played on one when you were a kid, but it’s no fun for cows.
It wasn’t the classiest place in Pharr to grow up, but it had tough truckers, sassy waitresses, and some of the best fry cooks in the Valley.
If it wasn’t for the song, no one would remember Emily Morgan, but she launched a nation by diverting Santa Anna at San Jacinto.
There’s no point in grousing about Texas’ minor shortcomings. Why not just roll up our sleeves and make it perfect once and for all?
In the sixties a small company in Medina produced a wooden box decorated with rhinestones. It became a Texas tradition.
Yes, Virginia Sue, Texas really does have its own holiday traditions.
December 1941 in Clarksville was a time to celebrate peace on earth amid the rumblings of war.
They are the quirky enterprises that offer two things under one roof—like shrimp and guns, steaks and loans, or eggrolls and gasoline.
Texans are sometimes driven to drink.
These days it seems every five-acre ranchette flaunts a gate worthy of the XIT.
Life is tough all over, but especially for Juniors.
Kids, house, husband—these are the natural enemies of a well-ordered day.
Wearing one won’t make you a real live cowboy, but it sure will brand you as a modern Texan.
Sure it means water. It also means pride.
Most of the time you’re a nice, ordinary businessman. But for one brief, shining moment you were King Antonio, monarch of San Antonio’s Fiesta and semi-beloved ruler of the one Texas city that still loves a good king.
The last best way to see the real Texas.
West Texas was a desert when this little irrigation device came along. Now it’s a desert that produces more cotton than anywhere else in the country.
Can you picture Lbj in a Datsun?
It’s Houston's driveway, a twenty-mile kaleidoscope of bankers, punkers, strippers, surgeons, students, grackles, and cars.
Out of Texas’ ragbag history came the patchwork quilt, the product of cold winters, isolated homesteads, empty pocketbooks, and fertile minds.
The life and times of the cowboy-millionaire hero of a thousand postcards.
Sunny in the morning, sunny in the evening, freezing by suppertime.
Houston’s black elite have come a very long way to live in MacGregor Way, the swankiest black neighborhood in Texas, but they still don’t feel safe.
Between watching girls and getting a great tan, lifeguards occasionally have to save lives.
It looks fragile with its lacy leaves and fragrant flowers. Looks can be deceptive.
It symbolizes either the American dream or the American nightmare—one or the other of which is enveloping Texas.
God created Texas, and then He created people who would love it.
And other great country stores of Texas.
The lost hopes of places like Belle Plain haunt Texas’ prairies.
Every parent with a teenage kid knows the fears: drinking, drugs, and rebellion. For the Cartwrights, those fears all came true.
Welcome—well, sort of—to San Antonio’s dowager bastion.
The air is muggy, the sky turns an eerie green, then you hear a sound like a fleet of freight trains. Beware, Texas, it’s that time of year again.
It’s only a humble weed, but just try to imagine West Texas without it.
When liquor by the drink went into effect in 1971, Texas changed forever.
Hugh Roy Cullen found the oil and made one of Houston’s great fortunes; now his grandson is spending his inheritance like there is no tomorrow, and suing for more.
People still think of cotton as a Dixieland crop, but the heart of the nation’s production is on the dry, flat, and windswept High Plains of Texas.
This clunky piece of machinery made Howard Hughes very rich. It is the first in our series of things that every Texan should know.
Supplicants in the Valley worship at the shrine of faith healer Don Pedrito Jaramillo, more powerful in death than he was in life.
They used to be virtuous and wooden and they were good. Now they’re commercial and plastic and they’re great.
He’s the man with the Word, and the Word is for you.
When it comes to flops and fiascos, Texans can outdo anyone.
Thousands of people from the North, broke and out of work, are streaming into the state. This is the true story of two of them who abandoned Detroit for Houston, learned about cockroaches, tacos, and freeways, and finally discovered happiness in broken air conditioners.
Before Six Flags, before Astroworld, there was Playland.
Texas cities are full of people who grew up in the country—and want everybody they meet to know it.
Archbishop Patrick Flores acts like a country priest, but he has a tough job: he is the most powerful Catholic clergyman in Texas, and perhaps the most powerful Mexican American as well.
It IS whether you win. And these eight Texans are winners.
Evangelist James Robison is using the pulpit, prime time television, and Cullen Davis to try to save the world.
Here’s how to achieve inner peace, perfect serenity, spiritual calm, and a nice, neat lawn.
Pedro Martínez, with only his Mexican heritage, a determination to work hard, and a desire for a better life, brought his family across the Rio Grande to fine a home in a new land.