The Gods of Padre Island
Between watching girls and getting a great tan, lifeguards occasionally have to save lives.
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.
The art of romantic osculation barely survived the jaded seventies. Now it’s time to rediscover the private delights and civic benefits of real kissing.
You learn one clear and not so very grim lesson by looking death in the face.
My friend, you have come to the right place.
Once Texas was a land of fabulous, ornate county courthouses. It still is, but today they’re flamboyant relics in our streamlined urban landscapes.
Talk to coaches and team owners about AstroTurf and you’ll hear all its advantages. Talk to the players and you’ll hear a different story.
“In the League, you’ll run into a little tradition, some noblesse oblige, and a lot of talk about diets, dyslexia, designer dresses, and divorce.”
You can always spot a smoker. He fiddles with matches, his shirt pocket bulges in a tiny rectangle, and fumes emerge from his mouth and nose. But what should we do about him?
Who turned off the melting pot? Vietnamese and Texans fight on the coast.
Although Texans make good friends, they make even better enemies.
Trash collectors are not necessarily garbage men.
Whether you drink champagne or beer, wear diamonds or rhinestones, one thing about Fiesta San Antonio is the same for everyone: it’s fun.
An album of female kinship.
The riddle of the French explorer lies buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico, but what is it, where is it, and why, oh why, are we looking for it?
At the Fort Worth stockyards, cattlemen buy and sell amid the last vestiges of the Old West.
Perhaps, after all, girls should go with boys who chew.
Confessions of a bridge nut.
Miles from their nearest neighbors, beset by drought, debt, insects, and government, Panhandle farmers gamble everything to keep alive a tradition they can’t abandon.
When another farmer goes broke his neighbors thank God it wasn’t them; then they wonder when their turn is coming.
Modern nuns have left the convent and entered the world. If they don’t like what they find, can they go home again?
Give us your tired and freezing Yankees, your studious Arabs, your ambitious young hustlers just blown into town, and we will rent them one bedroom and a bath for $215.
When this young man decided to go West, he made it as far as a dude ranch in Bandera.
It was Memorial Day weekend and the pickings were slim. Most of the ships that normally would have been in port lay anchored in Galveston Bay so they wouldn’t have to pay time and a half to longshoremen. The old longshoreman they called Goat made his rounds, cadging drinks and looking
Behind the pine curtain of deep East Texas is a world trapped in the past and hidden from the future: lush woods, poor whites, the descendants of slaves, and an aristocracy still breathing the rarefied air of the Old South.
How a towheaded kid from North Carolina became God’s best salesman.