KUT & KUTX Studios -- Podcasts
KUT and KUTX news and music podcasts for Austin, Texas and beyond
American history sometimes snuggles up close with what might be better termed American mythology. Take that story about a young George Washington chopping down a cherry tree.
But other bits of history based quite a bit more in fact are less well known — though just as extraordinary.
Texas Standard commentator WF Strong offers up one such story.
May 4, 2016
Three Secrets of Life From My 101-Year-Old Mother
My mom lived to be 101 and five months. She said once you reached 99, you started counting your age like a newborn – in months: 99 and six months, 99 and nine months. She used to advise that if you wanted to live to be a hundred, you should live to be 99 and […]
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April 20, 2016
The Airline That Started With A Cocktail Napkin
This story starts off like many good stories do: two men walked into a bar. Now, we have to expand it a little, two men walked into a bar in San Antonio fifty years ago. Okay, it was actually a restaurant & bar. They ordered drinks, and perhaps hors d’oeuvres. One grabbed a cocktail napkin, […]
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April 6, 2016
Listen: 12 More Words Texans Mispronounce
There are three kinds of Texans: those with an accent, those without an accent, and those who don’t think they have an accent, but do. About a year ago, I made a list of the 12 most commonly mispronounced words in Texas. Well, they weren’t absolutely unique to Texas – some were Southernisms, but they […]
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March 23, 2016
In the Land of Pickups, Texas is King
To paraphrase Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, “I love the sound of a diesel engine in the morning.” Could be a pickup, or a tractor, or an 18 wheeler. But I love the sound, because it sounds like adventure. It is the sound that says we’re off on a road trip, or going fishing, hunting, […]
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March 9, 2016
There are three classic Texas ad campaigns that would be shortlisted in the Texas Advertising Hall of Fame, if we had such a thing. They are: Blue Bell Ice Cream’s “We eat all we can and we sell the rest,” “Don’t mess with Texas” – arguably the most brilliant public service campaign ever created, and […]
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February 24, 2016
Think There’s No Poetry In Texas? Think Again
A New Yorker told me that he never uses the words Texas and poetry in the same sentence. He thinks Texas poetry is an oxymoron because he doesn’t see how such a refined art form could be produced in a macho culture. But he is wrong. Cowboys and vaqueros were reciting poetry in the warm […]
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February 10, 2016
Before We Had Social Media, We Had Dairy Queen
Texas has 600 Dairy Queens. About 20 percent of all Dairy Queens in the U.S. are in Texas. That’s a lot of Belt-Busters, y’all. The oldest Dairy Queen in Texas is in Henderson. It opened in 1950. Texas Monthly reported in 1979 that McDonald’s couldn’t get a foothold in small town Texas because DQ’s were […]
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January 27, 2016
The great Texas meteorologist Isaac Klein reportedly said back in the ’30s that Texas is a land of eternal drought, interrupted occasionally by biblical floods. Here is the way one writer describe one of these twenty-year droughts: “It crept up out of Mexico touching first along the brackish Pecos River, and spreading then in all […]
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