906 ParkviewDallas, TexasDec. 1 – 1963Mrs Jacqueline KennedyFirst Lady in our hearts.I live in Dallas, a city bowed in sorrow, and shame. I am 76 years old and live on a social security checkI must pour out my heart to you if my feeble hands will hold out to scribble
P.O. Box 9652El Paso, Texas 79986Dec. 8, 1963Mrs. J.F. KennedyWashington, D.C.Dear Mrs. Kennedy:I am but a humble postman and I realize the many letters you have received, which is but deserving to you, throughout this wide world. We at our house have continued to mourn the great loss to all
MRS JOHN F KENNEDYWASHDCMAY I ADD MY SYMPATHY TO THAT OF PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD.MY PERSONAL LOSS IN THIS GREAT TRAGEDY PREPARES ME TO SYMPATHIZE MORE DEEPLY WITH YOU.MRS. J D TIPPIT DALLAS TEX(34).Read another letter to the first lady here.
Mrs. John F. KennedyWhite HouseWashington, D.C. Dear Mrs. Kennedy,You and President Kenney were in my office a week ago yesterday.I am secretary to General Bedwell at Brooks Air Force Base, and I will forever be haunted by how handsome and healthy and happy you two looked – and how gracious you
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:I know the grief you bear. I bear that same grief. I am a Dallasite. I saw you yesterday. I hope to see you again. I saw Mr. Kennedy yesterday. I’ll never see him again. I’m very disturbed because I saw him a mere 2 minutes
Dec. 6, 1963Houston, TexasDear Mrs. Kennedy,I am ten years old. When I saw them moving President Kennedy’s rocking chairs out of the White House, a great sadness entered my heart.You made such a beautiful collection of treasures from other Presidents of the United States. Do you think you could find
5509 Dalwood DriveAustin, Texas 78723November 25, 1963Dear Mrs. Kennedy,There are no words in any language to express truly our grief and the sympathy we wish to extend to you and your family on the death of your husband, the President – our President. We Texans pride ourselves in our state,
After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, scores of Americans wrote letters to the first lady to express their grief. The most heartbreaking were those with a Texas return address.
In November 1973, Texas Monthly, which was still in its first year of existence, marked the tenth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy with a profile of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite; the cover, however, went to Tom Landry. Two years later, in November 1975, the
Sifting through old Texas newspapers, I found the first mention of commercial smoked meat from the Brenham Weekly Banner, which announced that a Bastrop butcher "keeps on hand at his stall a ready stock of barbecued meats and cooked sausages."
At the Fort Griffin Fandangle, Texas’s oldest outdoor musical, an all-amateur local cast reenacts its own bloody history.
When the local vernacular dies, what goes with it?
The city held a special place in Lyndon Baines Johnson’s heart, and a number of the places significant in his life there are still around.
“I get to see things other people don’t get to see.”
For the first time since it was penned by commander William Barret Travis 177 years ago.
The Texas actor pays tribute to a fellow Hill Country native.
Leadership is lacking in Texas. O Houston, where art thou?
For decades, the state’s big urban newspapers helped bind together the inhabitants of our major cities. Now those papers are threatened by a rapidly evolving (some might say collapsing) business model. Is there hope for daily journalism in Texas?
Big Tex will be back. Sadly, we cannot the say same of Larry Hagman, Darrell Royal, Amarillo Slim, Leslie, and the many other Texans we lost in 2012.
Most guitars don’t have names. This one has a voice and a personality, and bears a striking resemblance to his owner.
I was never certain how to explain the importance of the state to my three daughters. Now that I have two grandsons—named Mason and Travis, no less—I’ve realized something that I should have known all along.
Bad as the current drought is, it has yet to match the most arid spell in Texas history. Nearly two dozen survivors of the fifties drought remember the time it never rained.
Long before Walter Cronkite was the voice of the news, he was just a kid from Houston at the University of Texas, chasing girls, acting in school plays, and drinking cheap beer. Yet Douglas Brinkley, whose new biography of Cronkite will be released this month, argues that it was in
The senior editor on following the paper trail of Texas history, learning about Jack Johnson sparring with “Chrysanthemum Joe” Choynski, and researching his own family roots.
Houston attorney Bill Kroger and state Supreme Court chief justice Wallace Jefferson are on a mission to rescue thousands of crumbling, fading, and fascinating legal documents from district and county clerks’ offices all over the state. Can they save Texas history before it’s too late?
The senior editor on attending a Civil War reenactment, preserving history, and standing inside the Globe of Death.
The Civil War may be 150 years old, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still stir up a fuss (Confederate license plate, anyone?). Just ask one of the hundreds of very accurately uniformed reenactors who descend on Jefferson every year to die for the cause.
On November 18, 1999, at 2:42 a.m., the most passionately observed collegiate tradition in Texas—if not the world—came crashing down. Nearly sixty people were on top of the Texas A&M Bonfire when the million-pound structure collapsed, killing twelve, wounding dozens more, and eventually leading to the suspension of the ninety-year-old
It’s not just another roadside attraction—here’s to a lasting monument of Texas kitsch.
It spelled the end of the open range and the beginning of modern Texas.
Fifty years ago LBJ won—some say stole—a U.S. Senate runoff. What happened to the South Texas ballot box that saved his career?
On March 18, 1937, the residents of New London, southeast of Tyler, endured the worst small-town tragedy in U.S. history: an explosion at the combined junior-senior high school that killed some three hundred students and teachers.
How much did Life pay Abraham Zapruder for the rights to his assassination film?
I saw my first historical marker as a Cub Scout in Pack 291. Nearly thirty years later, I’m still hooked on the story of Texas.
He was one of the most influential cultural figures in Texas—a generous godfather to a generation of rappers, an entrepreneur of Houston's mean streets, the master of a scene fueled by codeine cough syrup and hip-hop beats. When he overdosed in November at the age of 29, it was easy
From 3500 BC, when indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America began cultivating chiles, to 2010, when the Culinary Institute of America opened an expanded campus in San Antonio.
Want to see the Texas of Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mance Lipscomb, and other pioneering musicians of the twentieth century? Your trip through time begins near Washington-on-the-Brazos.
Besieged on all sides, will the Daughters of the Republic of Texas finally lose control of the Alamo? Not if they can help it.
The very spot where William Barrett Travis wrote his famous “victory or death” letter is a Ripley’s Haunted Adventures. And other ways gross commercialization has desecrated the Alamo’s sacred battleground site.
Working on his memoir one day in 1969, LBJ spoke more frankly into a tape recorder about the Kennedys, Vietnam, and other subjects than he ever had before. The transcript of that tape has never been published—until now. Michael Beschloss explains its historical significance.
Who deserves credit for Lyndon Johnson's newly burnished reputation? Harry Middleton, the director of the LBJ presidential library, who made hours and hours of White House audiotapes public—and in doing so, remade history.
Who came first—Indiana Jones of Hollywood or Vendyl Jones of Arlington, the archaeologist who has spent years trying to dig up the fabled Ark of the Covenant?
At the port of entry in El Paso, I always tell the agents, “American,” but what I really want to say is “fronterizo”—I’m from both sides.
Searching for the legendary past—and the cosmic future—in my old river city, San Antonio de Béjar.
The thirty Texans with the most iconic, unforgettable, eye-popping looks, from Davy Crockett to Beyoncé.
Yes, we should remember the battle at the center of the Texas Revolution. But we should forget everything we think we know about it.
What’s so important about a stack of wood? Every Aggie knows that the answer is tradition—which is why, after a catastrophe that took the lives of twelve young men and women, the decision of whether to continue, change, or call a halt to the bonfire looms so large at Texas
History makes no mention of what was one of the most popular all-female country acts ever. Yet the story of the Goree Girls-inmates who banded together in the forties at Texas' sole penitentiary for women—is worth a listen.
