The ingredients: a criminal with soiled cash, an ambitious banker, a savvy go-between. The result: an almighty mess for Houston’s Allied Bank.
October 1980

Features
South Texas went into a frenzy preparing for Hurrican Allen, then the guest of honor never showed up.
Hurricane Allen proved that everyone talks about the weather but nobody knows much about it its’least of all the National Weather Service.

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…

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…

Richard King and his wife, Henrietta, founded the King Ranch. Their daughter Alice and her husband, Robert Kleberg — shown with their children in the turn-of-the-century photograph at the right — founded the family that sustained it. When Henrietta King died in 1925, the ranch’s 1.2 million acres were divided…

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…

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…

The King Ranch saga: how one family conquered, tamed, loved, toiled on, and fought over a great piece of Texas.
Miscellany
The days of 40-cent gas are back again; the Astros’ midlife crisis; the state budget is gone with the wind; Baytown’s all washed up.
Columns
Arnold Shoenberg is the century’s most maligned composer, but to know him is to love him.
Joe “King” Carrasco and the Crowns rock New Wave with a Tex-Mex rhythm.
The present against the past: what the New World can learn from the Old, and vice versa.
Three Texas poets word their way into print; two new novels trace the adventures of Neanderthals and knights-errant.
Although Don Albert’s music was a mainstay of the forties, his obstinate stand against racism put him years ahead of his time.
Leon Box is a retarded artist whose work underscores the beauty and absurdity of a world he has seen very little of.
Reporter
Where have all the boat people gone?; money makes UT go round; Dallas blacks lambaste the co ps; Texas lowriders get down.