A Dem View

In regard to your article “Why Democrats Are Losing Tejanos” [October 2021], I applaud you for writing what we Tejanos have known all along: the Democrats take us for granted. In the past decade, the oil boom created an increase in pay among the Tejanos and Hispanics in the state. A high number of Tejanos have moved into a class that I refer to as “roughneck upper blue-collar.” It’s no secret that Democrats want to abolish fossil fuels and drilling in the coming decades. Why would I want to give my support to the political party that I feel wants to heavily tax my money and do away with my job at the same time? 
Jose Elizondo, Lubbock 

Book Case

Michael Agresta’s review of Gertrude Beasley’s My First Thirty Years [“A Silenced Voice of Texas Literature Is Finally Heard Again,” October 2021] is a good account of a very controversial book. Indeed, shortly after its 1925 publication, copies of the memoir, one after another, mysteriously disappeared from the shelves of the University of Texas library. They had been acquired by my father, the unnamed book dealer referred to in the article. Old-timers blamed the disappearance of nearly all the original copies on the behind-the-scenes efforts of a high-placed Texas politician whose spouse’s family is mentioned in the book. The controversy became one of the worst-kept secrets in Texas political and literary circles in the Depression era. 
Dudley R. Dobie Jr., Austin 

Mustard Courage

I read the article on the Fletcher family in your October issue [“Sticking Power”]. My entire family and I have a deep affection for the company, but in 2017, it only deepened, and Fletcher’s has become part of our family lore. My husband, my 84-year-old mother, and I were at the state fair on the Saturday of the Oklahoma-Texas game. It was hot. We were in line at the Fletcher’s right by Big Tex. We stood in line for 45 minutes, and just as we were stepping up to order, my mother fainted. My husband scooped her up, and everyone at Fletcher’s jumped to our aid.  

They told us to bring her inside. Imagine! Inside the Fletcher’s corny dog stand! The inner sanctum! The nerve center of batter-fried weenies! We got my mother to a chair, and the Fletcher’s crew offered her lemonade and water. Before the fair’s first aid staff whisked away my mother and me in their little golf cart, the Fletcher’s staff asked us, “What was your order?” 

“Three corny dogs, water, and a beer,” we said. They gave it all to us at no charge. 

We got my mother to the first aid station. After about an hour, she was given enough fluids and cooled off, and she would not hear of going home and missing the game!

After we returned to Fort Worth, my mother told my dad about her fainting. At the conclusion of her story she said, in one of the saddest voices I have ever heard, “I had to eat my corny dog without mustard. And it was cold.”
Debra Million, Fort Worth