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Texas Standard: May 6, 2022

Sandals, shorts, and fingers crossed as summer makes an early appearance, putting a big strain on the Texas power grid. As Texans prepare for a heat wave with temps climbing toward the triple digits, how vulnerable is the state’s power grid? Matt Largey of KUT Austin has been looking into that. Also, what if they held an election and no challengers came? With election day tomorrow, and some big decisions on the ballot, some Texas counties grappling with just such a prospect. And an effort to turn a spotlight on everyday volunteers who put their lives on the line for abortion access. Those stories, the week in politics with the Texas Tribune and more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: March 7, 2022

The first big test of new changes to voting rules and restrictions in Texas. What did the primaries tell us about SB1? We’ll take a closer look. Other stories we’re tracking: a Texas challenge to a federal law designed to keep indigenous kids removed from parental custody with their families and tribes. We’ll hear the story behind the story. And the war in Ukraine already hitting the home front with Texans paying more for gasoline, and pump prices could reach record levels within days. We’ll have the latest. Also the search for the anonymous person paying tribute to Sam Houston with an annual offering at his gravesite. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: February 11, 2022

The Texas attorney general files a legal challenge against the Biden administration’s plans for a minimum wage hike. Also, why are witnesses being instructed not to talk about race as they come before a Dallas grand jury to testify about police actions in the George Floyd protests? Those stories and much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: February 9, 2022

As more teachers quit, those who remain are taking on more students and more responsibilities; a survey suggests a new Texas public school crisis in the making. Also, efforts to ban certain books from school libraries and how what’s been happening in Hood County may be a harbinger of what’s ahead. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: July 20, 2021

Increasing concerns among doctors and other frontline health workers in Texas as COVID-19 cases rise once again. In some places in Texas, the COVID-19 risk level has again returned to historic highs as the Covid Delta variant takes hold. We’ll talk with two Texas health experts about what the trends are signaling. Also the FDA’s approval of an Alzheimer’s drug, and why some doctors are refusing to prescribe the drug, and lawmakers are asking questions. And an historic liftoff in west Texas. Plus the end of an era for Texas’ oldest licensed radio station? Those stories and much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: June 8, 2021

More than 40-thousand Texas immigrants have Temporary Protected Status. A unanimous Supreme Court ruling affects some of them, we’ll have details. Also, in the first legislative session since mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa. We look at what lawmakers did on the issue of guns. And houses across Texas are flying off the real estate market sometimes more than $100k above asking. What’s the perspective from real estate agents? And what’s the Internet infrastructure look like to serve Texans moving further from the city centers? Plus, a new book challenges the myth behind one of Texas’ most prominent symbols. The argument that we should forget the Alamo. Those stories and much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: November 16, 2020

Texas’ top law enforcement official Ken Paxton faces more legal hot water, this time from some of his own former top aides. We’ll have the latest. Also, a city’s convention center transformed into a field hospital as COVID-19 cases soar in El Paso. We’ll have more. And lessons for the lockdown era: a book to help kids cope with the Coronavirus. Also the twists and turns of Texas elections without straight ticket voting. And we’ll take a closer look at what drove so many young latinos and latinas to the polls. Plus the re-release of a mid-century classic offers a critical re-examination of Texas small town life. Those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: August 14, 2020

A new bill coming before Texas lawmakers next year addresses police action and accountability. It’s called the George Floyd Act, we’ll have the latest. Also, a Texas federal prison has more COVID-19 positive inmates than any other facility in the country. What’s being done about it. And what are you still wondering about the Coronavirus? We put your questions to a doctor. Plus, what Kamala Harris said about Texas in this election season before she became the VP nominee. And 50 years later… why it’s still worth remembering a long-gone Austin music venue. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: January 10, 2019

Here’s the good news Texas: an 8% bigger budget. But the state’s top money cruncher has a warning. Even as economic growth means more money for Texas coffers, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar’s raising a yellow flag for state lawmakers, we’ll hear why. Also, President Trump Takes his border wall fight to south Texas today, but will it make a difference? We’ll take a look. And on a lighter note: Done with your resolutions for 2019? Clay Smith and the team at Kirkus reviews weigh in on some trends at the bookstore they’d like to see disappear in the New Year. All that and then some today on the Texas Standard:

Time-Traveling With Frederick Law Olmsted

If I could have any wish I would choose to be a time-traveler. Some say time travel will be possible one day, and some say it is the stuff of fairy tales. So, I guess until Elon Musk invents that mythical machine, books will have to do.

Books give us the next best thing. They can help us understand how people lived and thought and talked long ago, especially when the books were written by people who consciously sought to catalog such things in the time they lived. Frederick Law Olmsted left us such a book about his travels through Texas in the 1850s. It’s called “A Journey Through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier.” With his brother, he traveled several thousand miles around Texas, on horseback, chronicling his experiences for The New York Times – today, we’d call him a blogger. His book is a gem, an absolute treasure, a priceless time-sensitive ethnography. It is more than a snapshot; it is an intricate mural of Texas and Texans a decade after becoming a state, while the entire country headed toward civil war.

Before I share a few of his observations, let me tell you who he was. He was a farmer and eventually he became the most famous landscape architect in America. He designed Central Park in New York and Niagara Falls State Park, as well as the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. A contemporary said of Olmsted, “He paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountainsides and ocean views.” These achievements would come later but they give us an idea of his rare aesthetic sense and farmer practicality when he came to Texas.

He arrived in Nacogdoches in January of 1853 and then meandered on horseback all over Texas. He explored the Piney Woods, the Hill Country, the Coastal Plains, Southwest Texas and even rode a ways into Mexico.

Frederick Law Olmsted wrote often of the famous Texas northers because he was several times caught out in open country with sudden fierce winds and rapid drops in temperature. He wrote that a norther hit them on the prairie west of the Brazos. The wind kicked up mightily and the temperature dropped 12 degrees in 12 minutes, from 67 to 55. He wrote, “In five minutes, we had all got our overcoats on and were bending against [the wind] in our saddles.” By 6 p.m. that evening it was 40 degrees; the next morning it was 25. Olmsted said he couldn’t get his horse shoed that day because the blacksmith said he wouldn’t work as long as the “damned norther lasted.” The Bastrop paper wasn’t published that day either because, the editor explained, the “printing office was on the north side of the house.” Seems reasonable.

When he arrived in Austin, population 3,000, Olmsted stayed at what was supposed to be the best hotel, but found it dirty and the food inedible. He was also dismayed that there was not one bookstore in town. Nice to see that 170 years later those shortcomings have been impressively remedied.

He loved Neu-Branfels – loved with a capital L. The German communities and natural magnificence of the lands along the Guadalupe River were so impressive to him that he almost stayed in Texas. He was enchanted by the springtime wildflowers in the Hill Country and he fully embraced the German saying that “the sky is nearer in Texas.”

Riding out west to Eagle Pass, he killed an enormous six-foot rattlesnake. A man came by and told him he had just killed an even bigger one up the road a ways. Olmsted worried in the daytime that his horse would get bit, and at night he worried that a rattler would snuggle up with him in his bedroll. On this part of his journey he saw his first horny toads and so loved the little creatures that he shipped some back home to New York where he kept them as exotic pets for a couple of years.

In San Antonio, it was the river he fell in love with. “We are so struck by its beauty,” he wrote. “It is of a rich blue and pure as crystal, flowing rapidly but noiselessly over pebbles and between reedy banks.” But it was still the Wild West. He wrote of the near weekly gunfights in the plaza. “As the actors are under … excitement, their aim is not apt to be of the most careful and sure; consequently, it is, not seldom, the passers-by who suffer.”

Though Olmsted didn’t arrive in the south as a staunch abolitionist, he saw the contrast between slave-based economies and those that relied on paid labor, and found the latter far more successful. He said that a monopoly on cotton and devotion to a one-crop economy left no room for the progress that only economic diversity could bring. He objected to slavery on moral grounds as well, but found that pro-slavery advocates responded best to arguments based on pragmatics rather than righteousness.

Take a horseback ride through Texas with Olmsted. It’s the best option in time-traveling now available.

Texas Standard: September 27, 2018

A new phase in the fight over the Kavanaugh nomination gets underway, raising questions of what due process means in the Me Too era. The latest on the confirmation of President Trump’s high court nominee and placing the proceedings in a different sort of historical context. Also, the 5G revolution: experts tell us it will change our lives. But as local officials look at regulation, the Feds now say hands off. Tech guru Omar Gallaga with what’s at stake. All of those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: September 7, 2018

The Trump Administration wants changes to a long-held agreement affecting young immigrants held in detention. We’ll take a look at what that would mean here in Texas. Also, it’s been quite a week in Brazil. An attack on a political candidate, a major fire, and now it’s Independence Day. We’ll talk to a Brazilian with a Texas perspective. And do you know what a gun is? It’s actually a lot more complicated than you might think. Why the question may be more important than the debate over 3D printing weapons. Plus we’ll question some of the common narratives about Texas history. And we’ll take a little escape to the movies. All that, politics, the Typewriter Rodeo and so much more on today’s Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: May 1, 2018

A Foster care system so dangerous to kids, its been ruled unconstitutional. Should the Feds be permitted to order a fix for Texas? We’ll have the latest. Also, after parkland everyone seems to have an opinion on whether there should be tighter controls on guns. But some Texans with a personal stake in the matter say they don’t have a seat at the table, and they’re demanding a hearing. We’ll hear why. Also, Sprint and T-Mobile want to get married. If anyone has reasons why these two should not be wed, it might be Texas-based AT&T who’s fighting its own anti-trust battle at the moment. We’ll hear why that might matter to you. Plus a surprise endorsement in the Governor’s race and so much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: December 29, 2017

An ongoing election recount issue in Virginia has a Texas tie. Why the state thought they had a fool-proof way of counting ballots in the wake of Bush v. Gore. Plus, thinking of changing careers in the New Year? Or taking steps to do so? We’ll lay out which industries across the state are likely to have the biggest needs. And we’ll introduce you to a new group of superheroes and, later, the candidates for Texas Agriculture Commissioner. We’ll also get a call from the future -sort of- thanks to a former Texan whose back “home” in Australia. And Fridays mean the Typewriter Rodeo and a wrap of the biggest stories in Texas politics, today on the Standard:

McMurtry And Twain

Larry McMurtry is, by many standards, Texas’ best writer.

He wrote “Horseman, Pass By” to wide acclaim when he was just 25, which became the movie “HUD,” starring Paul Newman. When he was thirty, he published “The Last Picture Show,” which won him even greater critical praise and the movie that followed launched Cybil Shepard’s career.

“Terms of Endearment” is another of his great novels. The film that followed pumped sales of the book when Jack Nicholson and Shirley McClain took the lead roles. McMurtry’s best book is his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove.” That became, to most Texans anyway, the best television miniseries of all time.

McMurtry grew up on a ranch in Archer County, Texas, where there’s about five people per square mile. It is interesting that another famous American writer owned land in Archer County. That was Mark Twain. He didn’t live there, but he did own land there, as an investment. This 320 acre plot is still known locally as “the Twain property.”

So these two great writers, Twain as perhaps America’s best and McMurtry as perhaps Texas’ best, both owned land in Archer County, Texas. Small world. Both were Southerners. Both grew up in small, rural, agrarian towns. Both wrote classic books about the American West and about the cowboys and pioneers that inhabited those vast, rugged, haunting landscapes.

Now let me stop here to tell you an interesting story about Twain and the land he owned in Archer County. One day he received a letter from the County Clerk of Archer County saying that his land was in danger of being repossessed due to unpaid taxes. Twain had a man in Texas who was supposed to pay those taxes but he had failed to do so. So, Twain immediately paid the back taxes and saved the land. He was quite angry about the whole affair. He explained in a now somewhat famous letter to his friend William Dean Howells that he had had a man in Texas who was supposed to take care of those taxes, but that man had taken the money and run, so to speak. He wrote that if he ever caught up with him he would suffer on a Biblical scale. Twain said that “he shall beg for brimstone, he will beg in vain.” Now there’s beautifully worded threat even the mafia could be proud of.

Many years ago I sent a copy of the Twain letter to McMurtry. I had stumbled across it in the Twain papers at Vassar University. I told him that he might be pleased to know that he wasn’t the only famous author to have owned land in Archer County. He wrote back in his straightforward, modest style. He said
that he didn’t know about that, but he was glad to know and that he would check into it to see if maybe they had owned some of the same land. I guess they didn’t. I never heard any more about it. But the day I received that letter from the great man himself – that was a mighty fine day.

As a teenager, I used to lie awake at night reading McMurtry. I felt a special connection with him because we lived on the same road, U.S. 281. Six hundred miles apart, it is true, but on the same road. He lived a mile off of U.S. 281 in north Texas and I lived a mile off of U.S. 281 in south Texas. He could hear the trains where he was and I could hear them where I was.

He and I were both lovers of books and of Texas. We both grew up in ranch country. He played the trombone. I played the trombone. And as the years passed, the similarities continued. He went to North Texas State and so did I. He wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and I… I read it. He now lives in Tucson, where I went to doctoral school, and wrote my thesis – on Mark Twain.

McMurtry is now in his 80s. Given the parallel nature of our lives,
I’m praying he has many beautiful years ahead of him.

Texas Standard: June 2, 2017

Climate agreement fallout. How Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement could affect Texas. Plus a deadly shootout in broad daylight at a North Texas car dealership, innocent people just feet away from two bounty hunters and their target. We’ll break down the role of the “fugitive recovery agent.” And it’s been more than 60 years since Brown versus Board of Education. Why the south is now seeing wide re-segregation of schools. Plus we’ve got the inside scoop on some books that will likely be topping must-read lists. Those stories and a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard :

Texas Standard: March 13, 2017

Did Texas Republicans draw up districts intentionally to dilute minority voting strength? A federal court says yes: now what? It used to be known as the spinach capitol of the world. These days, it’s famous as the city where nearly every top official was charged with corruption. Crystal City: one year later. Also: it’s part of the lure of Texas: affordable homes. Maybe not so much anymore? A new warning from the Dallas Fed. Plus the top ten places for bibliophiles? A Texas road map for readers…all that and a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: January 2, 2017

A federal judge in Texas issues a nationwide injunction seen as another blow to transgender rights and the Obama administration, we’ll explore today. Also, we’ve heard the warnings from the mayor himself: Dallas could be forced into bankruptcy because of a pension fund meltdown. Now, the mayor’s asking the Texas Rangers to step in. Plus, it’s black Monday for pro football. Why this matters to you, even if you’ve never so much as touched a pigskin. And what do you call a fish found all across Texas that doesn’t swim? Our resident expert calls it a pest. What you can do if you find yourself on the hook. All that and much more coming up on today’s Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: December 28, 2016

Social media is getting the blame for a rash of fights at malls across the country, including Texas. How’s that possible? We’ll ask on today’s Texas Standard. Also, predicting the global dynamics of 2017. What’s next for the European Union? For oil? For the U.S. under Trump? Plus the business of space travel in Midland, and turning a greenhouse gas into a commodity. And book recommendations for each month of the year, chock full of lessons tailor-made for Texans. Also how the desegregation of Texas sports is connected to the Harlem Globetrotters and so much more, its Texas Standard time!:

Texas Standard: December 2, 2016

Another teenage suicide in Texas blamed on Cyberbullying. Now attention turns to David’s law. A conversation with David’s father today. Plus a second surge at the border: a catholic nun providing emergency relief there gets an audience today with Senator Cruz. We’ll hear her message to Washington. And after the protests, what then? As environmental activists calculate action in a trump era, they might want to take a tip from Texas. We’ll explain. And a new multimillion dollar stadium, a new professional baseball team, but no name until now. We’ll hear about the name from the man who came up with it. That plus the week in politics and much more…no matter where you are, its Texas Standard time: