An excruciating inside look at what happened during a critical 70+ minutes inside Robb Elementary on that May 24th, 2022 in Uvalde. Though officials have been reluctant to release video evidence from the mass shooting in Uvalde, Terri Langford of the Texas Tribune has seen critical footage from inside the school. She shares with us what she’s discovered. Also Brian Chasnoff of the San Antonio express reports that classroom doors may not have been locked, contrary to one of the key claims made by law enforcement. We’ll have details. Also a very public transitioning for a Texas small town celebrity. And an update on what’s left for the Supreme Court. All of that and more today on the Texas Standard:
Rio Grande Valley
Texas Standard: May 23, 2022
Plans to lift Title 42 at the border today are now on hold. We’ll look at what this means for the future of immigration and deportations. Other stories we’re tracking: how the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York is resonating in El Paso, the site of a racist shooting at a Wal Mart three years ago. Also what a political runoff in South Texas tells us about an intra-party ideological battle among Texas Democrats. And more than a year ago, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality announced a social justice initiative. So what’s happened since, and what hasn’t? And a new film that puts a more human face on a larger than life Texas baseball legend. All that and more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: May 17, 2022
There’s an election going on and all week we’re profiling the races. Today it’s the Democratic runoff for Land Commissioner. We’ll have details. Also, Sweden and Finland want to join NATO after decades or even centuries of military nonalignment. A look at the road ahead for the alliance. And comparing the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade to a brief submitted by the architect of some of Texas’ abortion restriction laws. And not a leak, SCOTUS released a final opinion on a case involving campaign finance yesterday. The plaintiff was U.S. Senator from Texas Ted Cruz. Plus we’ll slow things down in a conversation focused on the legacy of Houston’s DJ Screw. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: November 2, 2021
SB8, the state’s new abortion law, is in the crosshairs of the U.S. Supreme Court. On the day after oral arguments, where does the law stand? What clues can be drawn about the future of abortion restrictions after yesterday’s high court questioning in two cases challenging SB8? We’ll explore. Other stories we’re tracking: a new poll shows a tight race between Governor Greg Abbott and a certain democrat yet to officially announce his intentions. We’ll have details. Also, you’ve heard about winterization to avoid a repeat of last winters massive blackouts…but what does that actually entail? Those stories and a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: October 14, 2021
It is a legislative season that at times has seemed like it might never end. Today Bob Garrett of the Dallas Morning News and Taylor Goldenstein of the Houston Chronicle get us up to speed on what the lege has left to finish, and what’s been done up to this point. Also the launch of a lawsuit over public beach closures near the SpaceX facility. And a military plane crash brings home the dangers of housing developments near bases, quite literally. Those stories and a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard:
Long Before Elon Musk, A Different Man Had A Plan To Develop Boca Chica
One hundred years ago, Col. Sam Robertson stood on the same Boca Chica Beach in South Texas that Elon Musk owns today and dreamed a different dream. Instead of Musk’s spaceport, Robertson dreamed of seaports and an oceanside highway.
Robertson owned 800 acres at Boca Chica, about 20 miles northeast of Brownsville and it was likely some of the same thousand acres now managed by Musk’s companies. Back then, Robertson built the railroad that connected the Rio Grande Valley to the wider world. He had founded the town of San Benito, serving as sheriff and helping to run the Ku Klux Klan out of the region.
He had repurposed the old channels known as resacas to irrigate the lower valley. In 1926, he gathered RGV leaders in Brownsville’s El Jardin Hotel to make his pitch for an oceanside highway that would run from Boca Chica all the way up Padre Island to Corpus Christi. It would become, in his words, “the most beautiful 150 miles of highway in the world.”
Robertson laid out his vision before the Rio Grande Valley Commercial Club. “I have traveled somewhat extensively in this world,” he said, “and have never seen any scenery wilder or more beautiful than this stretch of beach.”
Robertson was not only an entrepreneur; he was a decorated soldier and noted engineer. In 1915, he served as a scout for General Jack Pershing in the pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico. During World War I, he served in Europe as a commander of the 22nd Engineers, building railroads and bridges for Allied troops in France. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for bravery under fire.
The business leaders of the Valley trusted his vision because they believed his claims. He wasn’t pitching a blacktop road.
“The beach is as smooth as a billiard table,” Robertson said. “No road can be constructed by man as good for autoing as the beach, and the Gulf of Mexico maintains it.” All you would need is maintenance crews to move driftwood out of the way, he said, telling those assembled that he had explored the beach from Corpus Christi to the mouth of the Rio Grande River and that a highway was quite possible and would bring in enormous numbers of tourists. Just “throw across” some bay bridges at either end, he suggested, and you’d be open for business.
Such a development would be good for the Rio Grande Valley, too, he argued. With good roads to Boca Chica Beach, Valleyites could have a Sunday lunch at home, then drive to the beach for a Sunday afternoon swim at the beach and still be home by 10 p.m.
Robertson’s oceanside highway was never developed. But looking at South Padre and North Padre today, just north of Boca Chica with their causeway bridges, carefully maintained beaches, opulent hotels and verdant landscaping, you can see that his dream for the island has been partially realized.
Robertson opened his Del Mar Resort on Boca Chica Beach in 1931, but the resort was virtually wiped out by a hurricane two years later. He rebuilt within six months and constructed an asphalt road from Brownsville to Boca Chica Beach because his personal mantra was: “Civilization follows transportation.”
Musk would like that, too.
Texas Standard: June 2, 2021
The walkout at the capitol over voting restrictions sparks one kind of response from the governor, but a different tone from the GOP House speaker. As governor Abbott threatens to withhold legislative pay over the house’s failure to pass a restrictive voting bill, the GOP speaker of the House defends the democratic walkout that scuttled the bill. Also in parts of Texas hardest hit by COVID-19, vaccination rates now surpass those of the rest of the state. We’ll hear why. And the real death toll from the winter freeze and power outages, a new report claims a massive undercount.Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:
Watermelon Season
It’s June. Watermelon season. All my life, June has meant watermelon season and I don’t mean it’s just the time of year to eat them. As a kid, it also meant a time to work, and work hard, from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, for no more than a little over a dollar an hour to get the melons out of the fields. So every June, I can’t help but drive by the fields and nostalgically marvel at the stamina we once enjoyed. Now in our sixties, my friends from those days often hypothetically wonder how long we think we could last in those fields today. The general belief is about thirty minutes… providing the ambulance got there on time.
In my little town, as was true for many ag towns across Texas, we thought of watermelons as our fourth sport. The fall started with football and then we had basketball and baseball, and then, watermelons. We thought we should have been able to letter in watermelons. For those who played football, pitching melons half the summer was ideal conditioning. There were three kinds – grays, stripes and black diamonds. The grays were kind of like footballs – a little heavier of course. The stripes were enormous – and averaged 35 pounds or more. The black diamonds were the most despised because they were heavy and round like a medicine ball. Hard to pitch and hard to catch. The best thing about watermelon season was being able, when tired, to cut open a beautiful melon in the field and to eat just the cool, sweet heart of it, and move on. Nature’s Gatorade.
There was a hierarchy in the fields. You’d start out as a pitcher, making a dollar, twenty-five an hour, at least that was the going rate in the late 1960s. You would work with a crew of four or five and take a large trailer, generally pulled by a tractor, out into the fields to load with melons. The crew would fan out and then, like a bucket brigade, toss the cut melons in their path to the next guy in line and he’d pitch it to the next guy who’d throw it up to the man in the trailer. You didn’t want to be the man working by the trailer because you had to handle every melon and lift it up over your head for the guy in the trailer to set it down with reasonable care so as not to break it open. The best job was to be either the man in the trailer or the outside man who handled the least number of melons, only those in his path. Yet it didn’t matter which job was yours, it was still brutal work. You worked in the giant sauna of the Texas summer, often in 100 degrees with no wind and stifling humidity. But it was about the only work you could get at 13 or 14, so you gladly did it and when you got your 80 dollars at the end of the week, you felt rich if not sunburnt and tired. And you longed for the day you could move up to cutter or stacker. Being a cutter was a good job because you didn’t pitch anymore. You went down the rows and identified, by sight, the melons that were ripe and ready to harvest and the proper weight for the store wanting them (H-E-B for instance – grays 18-to-24 pounds). You would cut them from the vine and stand on them on end for the pitchers to come along later and get them. The only downside was you were the first to come upon the rare rattler hidden in the vines. For this job you made $3.00 an hour. Double the pay. Knowledge is power.
The final and best job in the field was stacker. You might get to be stacker by your third or fourth season, when you are 17 or so. You’d work inside the big 18-wheeler trailers and stack the melons “to ride.” The little trailers, or pickup trucks would come in from the fields and the line would form to pitch the melons to you inside the trailer. Stacking was an art form. Taking into account the weight and shape of the melons you’d stack them into tiers about 8 or 9 rows high, nice and tight, so they wouldn’t shift and break on the long ride north.
The best stackers would start the season in the Rio Grande Valley and follow harvest north all the way up into the Panhandle where there would be a late summer and fall harvest. They’d make 25 dollars per 18 wheeler. Serious money, then.
The greatest thing about those years and that work, at least for many men (and some women) who worked in those fields, is that they say it taught them a work ethic that has never deserted them.
Texas Standard: May 12, 2021
A 15 billion windfall for Texas, relief funds much larger than the pandemic’s projected economic impact here. Where will the money go? Todd Gilman of the Dallas Morning News with more on how federal pandemic relief money could lead to raises for firefighters, infrastructure changes, and more. Also, the boom in the hispanic population in Texas. Does it equal political gains for the GOP? Arelis Hernandez of the Washington Post on how the numbers add up. And FDA approval for kids as young as 12 to to get vaccinated against COVID-19. How soon will shots be ready for Texas adolescents? Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: March 25, 2021
Once again, Texas in the spotlight as the nations attention turns to immigration and the thousands of undocumented minors coming across the southern border. Where to house them for how long and under what conditions? We’ll hear the latest from Dallas where a convention center has been converted into makeshift housing. Also, voter fraud prosecutions in Texas and a pattern of targeting people of color at disproportionate rates. And a major gulf coast energy project being shelved after much fanfare. All of those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:
In Praise Of Vultures
I go for walks in the country often this time of year here in the Rio Grande Valley. This is our Goldilocks season. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right.
We have a perfectly warming sun in the crisp, cool air of winter mornings. I like to walk along a dirt road that has freshly plowed farmland on one side and a deep motte of mesquite and huisache trees on the other. A committee of vultures watches me from atop the tallest of these trees, far away from civilization. That’s the official name for a group of vultures. A Committee. Sometimes they are also called a venue of vultures. I like that. Based on what I’ve seen of committees and their venues I can see the salience of the metaphor.
In Texas, these birds are often mistakenly called buzzards. This is common but it’s technically wrong because buzzards are completely different birds. We don’t have buzzards in Texas, though I will admit to calling them that myself growing up. I don’t recall referring to groups of birds by their correct labels, either – such as murder of crows or covey of quail or flamboyance of flamingos. I still don’t. I tend more toward my brother “redneck Dave’s” lexicon which is pretty much reduced to the word “bunch.” He says, “You got a bunch of ducks in your yard.” And if there’s more than that he says, “You got a whole bunch of ducks in your yard.” More still are covered by, “You got a mighty big bunch of ducks in your yard.”
Back to the vultures. This committee of vultures – turkey vultures in this case, are perched high up in the trees, like undertakers – eyeing me – sometimes stretching out their wings to display their impressive six-foot span. But mostly I’m a curiosity, not a disturbance. They don’t fly away. I’m sure I would be much more interesting to them if I were dead.
Turkey Vultures don’t have a lot of fans. Many people see them as disgusting birds that eat disgusting things. They have red heads. They’re mostly bald, with faces that only a mother could love – a mother vulture, that is. On the ground picking through road kill, they look ungraceful and ragged and ungainly. But in the air, they are, to me, transformed into graceful, heart-stirring masters of the wind. On the ground they are called committees, but in they air they are called kettles of vultures because in their swirling ride upward on the thermals, they look like bubbles rising in heated water. Ornithologists, bird experts, tell us that it is by riding high on the thermals that they hunt for carrion, or dead things. But they don’t do it by sight. They do it by smell. The smell of the decaying animals is carried up by the thermals and the birds track that smell to the source. Tests have shown that they always arrive on the upwind side of corpus delicti and that’s how experts know that smell is dominant.
Yes, the process is gross to us, but if you consider the scientific name for the turkey vulture – Cathartes Aura – they sound noble. It means cleansing breeze. They swoop in on the wind and clean the earth. And they are disinfectors too, consuming anthrax and cholera bacteria and safely removing it. In this sense they are hazmat teams. But my admiration of these magnificent creatures is fully realized watching them in flight. I can sit in my backyard and watch hundreds of them ride high up in the sky like an avian tornado. They’re having fun up there. They’re not all about carrion, I’m convinced. They’re windsurfers fully elated by this vulture sport they collectively love. The winds do not conquer them. They ride them high into the vaulted blue, cloudless skies. Some, pilots tell us, go as high as 20,000 feet and they rarely have to flap their wings. They just soar and glide, at one with the wind.
You can find them all across Texas, along with their slightly smaller cousins, the black vultures, which prefer the eastern part of the state. Together they are our cleaners, our sanitizers, the avian, last line of defense for our most famous slogan: “Don’t mess with Texas.”
Texas Standard: December 21, 2020
We have a winner in a hotly contested state senate election. Can it tell us anything about the Texas Republican party? We’ll explore. Also, some health care providers across Texas have now received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Next up should be nursing home patients and staff. We’ll look at how one provider is feeling about it all. And UT-Austin is changing the way it determines who gets into a certain program. How an algorithm can show bias. Also Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit too overturn some election results was a failure, on all but one front. We’ll explain. Those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: November 26, 2020
It’s Thanksgiving Day and we’re re-broadcasting a special show for you. Overlooked No More: How Asian Texans shape the state. Today we’ll talk about How the Asian American community has changed since 1870, the first time the U.S. census counted people from China to today. Also, we’ll meet a group called the “Pershing Chinese” – a story of Chinese immigration through Mexico. Then we’ll travel to the border where a vibrant Filipino community settled. And is it time to re-evaluate the holidays we officially recognize in Texas? All of those stories and more on today’s special edition of the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: November 3, 2020
It’s the final countdown to what some fear may not be a final countdown tonight. As Texans go to the polls, we’ll tell you the latest and what to watch for. With a presidential race that appears to be more competitive in Texas than it has been for decades, and 8 million voters having already cast a ballot in Texas, and more in line as we speak, Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post and Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune join us live to talk about the issues on this election day. Also a closer look at how the vote counting process will play out across the Lone Star State, professor Steven Vladeck with the legal issues at play and much more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: August 5, 2020
After first asking for an extension to complete the census count, a sudden u-turn. The impact on Texas could last for a decade or more, we’ll have details. Also, more women are unemployed now than at any time since the late 1940’s, and women of color are among the hardest hit. What some are calling America’s first female recession, and what’s behind it. And residents along the gulf coast finding more effective ways to deal with an active hurricane season amid a pandemic. Plus a claim that 1 in 3 texans can’t access health insurance. A Politifact check and more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: July 29, 2020
To apply or not to apply? Is DACA on or is it off? Wait, didn’t the Supreme Court say it was on? We’ll have the answers. And speaking about the Supreme Court, a refresher on voting by mail. Also the story of two survivors of the Walmart killings in El Paso and their reunion almost a year to the day. And did you hear commissioners in Harris County are thinking about suing the state of Texas? Plus did you know the census and healthcare outcomes could be interconnected? All of that and more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: July 28, 2020
COVID-19 cases are plateauing in the Lone Star State. But that’s not the end of the story, we’ll have the latest. Also, how Texas A&M is strategically positioned to mass produce a COVID-19 vaccine. And how racism also occurs within communities of color. Plus Disaster declarations after Hanna and what the governor is doing to restore the Valley. And neighbors trying to remain neighborly. How the U.S. and Mexico share the waters of the Rio Grande River. Those stories and much more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: July 27, 2020
A weakened hurricane is still a monster and despite it being the weekend, Hanna hit Texas hard. We’ll have details. Also, on a different kind of storm, this one in the Republican Party. Why are some county republican parties censuring the governor? Plus, you’re about to hear one of the strangest stories in San Antonio’s recent history. And speaking of strange, why were asylum seeking children recently being held in a hotel? Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: July 16, 2020
A New York Times reporter covering the impact of COVID-19 returns to the Rio Grande Valley and finds himself part of the story. We’ll have a conversation about his experience. Also, new record numbers of COVID-19 cases reported in Texas. And how should teachers prepare for their own safety if they have to return to campus in the fall? Dr.Fred Campbell of UT Health San Antonio takes up that and more listener questions about COIVD-19. Also how facilities dedicated to health care for Veterans are coping. And challenges faced by contact tracers in Lubbock. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:
Texas Standard: July 7, 2020
10 out of 12 hospitals reach capacity in the Rio Grande Valley, and the top health official in Hidalgo county tests positive for COVID-19. We’ll have more on the effects of the pandemic and the strain on health care resources in Texas. Also, a new survey on conflicting attitudes about the Coronavirus in Texas and the role of politics in opinion. Plus, on the eve of the first face to face meeting between the president of the US and the president of Mexico, a look at how the crisis is playing out south of the border. Those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard: