WEST TEXAS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION ACCOLADES FOR LOU



At the WTHA meeting with the East Texas Association several members remembered Lou to me. In her Presidential address at the closing lunch today Tiffany Fink remembered Lou as one of the West Texas women authors along with Jane Rushing and Scarbrough. Her talk was entitled West Texas Women, a subject she ascribed to Lou's influence, and she described women including the native American Comanche and Kiowa to the pioneer women and listed women in politics and other areas of endeavours.

This is Tiffany being complimented after her talk.



Two new Fellows were named to join Lou and the ones elected at the last meeting in Lubbock last year. This year Drs. Garry Nall and Ken Davis joined the elite.

The meeting had a lot of informative papers and presentations. I enjoyed the documentary video of the New Deal communities that were funded by locating people on their own farms and helping them with bookkeeping and advice on farming to assist them in making enough money to purchase their farms. One community was Ropesville, west of Lubbock that was very successful in raising enough cotton on 120 acres to pay off. The video had photos for the black duster storms that I remember in 1949 in Levelland. One afternoon we drove thru Ropesville to Lubbock for a highschool dance that Lou was sponsoring. A black duster came through just as we turned east on the highway and it was so dark I could hardly see Lou in the car. I could barely see the yellow center stripe, but we drove about 15 miles an hour taking 2 hours to get to the hotel but ate and danced while we wiped the dust from our glasses. Ropesville is where Judith Keeling and her husband raise cotton now and I wonder if his parents were a part of the New Deal experience. I heard from Judith who asked for bio info on Lou. She is recovering from having her back broken in four places due to an auto accident during the Christmas snow storm in Lubbock. She is back at work but didn't travel to FW with the TT Press display.

Many of the history presentations were from the New Deal era and the depression with accolades for President Roosevelt. Another video showed the East Texas community of Sabine that was a development for black farmers that allotted them 40 acres, a house, barn and mule. They wanted to use 40 acre allotments at Ropesville but wiser heads explained that you needed a lot more acres where it doesn't rain to make a living. It worked in East Texas where they had adequate rain.

I got in late on the paper on Quanah Parker and the argument whether he was a major player in the siege of Adobe Walls. That story was well told in Mike Blakely's book. The author of the paper gave an interesting story of her interview with Parker who switched his story as he talked to go back and forth from his Anglo and Comanche persona as he talked to her.

Joe Specht gave a good presentation on oil field themes in the music of early black singers illustrated as he does so well playing parts of the songs. He explained how the songs used sexual conotations from the oil field like pumping jacks, male and female pipe connections being joined, oil slicks, etc. There were several papers on Buddy Holly and other Lubbock singers with one really funny clip about The Legendary Stardust Cowboy who appeared on the Rowan TV show. The paper on Holly explained how his Crickets went to London and was the inspiration for the Beatles who hadn't thought about that kind of music until they heard him and followed his lead. I enjoyed the Saturday meal because they had sopapillas with honey plus a two layer chocolate cake for dessert. The fajitas were good also.

MEET AUTHOR EDWARDS

Last night our author at the Library MEET THE AUTHOR event was Murray Edwards from Clyde. Connie Kirkham insisted on hosting the dinner honoring the author and the Library directors because her mother, Alice Roby, served as the ranch manager for the Edwards Ranch at Spur owned by Murray's father Weldon Edwards. They are shown in the snapshot.

During dinner Murray told us that his wife has been a hospice volunteer for years and has gone back to Brite divinity school in FW to become better educated in that work. This summer she will volunteer for Sloan-Kettering hospital in NYC. They are looking forward to the experience and Murray should come back with some great short stories to add to those he regaled us with at the Library. We had a good crowd and he is a great speaker. He is also a great author. His book SEARCHING FOR LUCY GILLIGAN and Other Stories is 17 short stories that he has written. It is well worth the $20 he gets for the book. It is illustrated with B&W photos that he took in Abilene and Fort Worth and other places. I haven't read all of the stories, but the ones that he shared were fascinating, some humorous and some poignant. Glenn Dromgoole named his book one of his best 10 last year.

LITERARY COMMENT

I finished Michael Crichton's STATE OF FEAR that I got for Christmas. It is a long book but an excellent comment on the damage created by environmental activists. The final chapter has an appropriate ending for one of the obnoxious Hollywood stars who spouted environmental messages that he knew nothing about. Reminded me of the ending of similar characters in one of Clancey's novels.

Crichton uses a lot of references to answer the myths about global warming to show that the temperature is not related to carbon dioxide production. CO2 has been increasing for years but the temperature varies within limits and has changed very little in history. He also makes excellent cases for the cost of environmental excesses like the ban of DDT that has caused over 50 million deaths due to malaria that was being well controlled before the ban. The use of more dangerous pesticides in place of DDT caused cancer deaths in crop workers. He tells of the millions of dollars in law suits going to lawyers over breast implants and quotes studies that show no damage to women from the implants. He didn't tell the story that I heard that the problems with breast implants was the use of talc on the rubber gloves used at that time that caused the problems.

The book title comes from his argument that the government, media and lawyers need an enemy to keep them going. Until the fall of Russia's communism the US had the fear of Russia launching a nuclear attack. After the Berlin wall fell, we needed some other Fear to replace it. In the media the terms crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague and disaster appeared after 1989. There was heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger uncertainty and panic. Social control by the government is best managed through fear. We have let the media and government control us and by onerous regulations have made a huge number of lawyers very wealthy by lawsuits.

One thing I appreciated was the way he bashes the use of complicated computer programs to create panic about what might happen in the highly complex area of weather prediction when the models are unable to predict anything accurately but are used to produce scary scenarios to fit the current crisis needed to provide funding for the researchers making the predictions. He says we should publish every computer simulation with the caveat that the results are computer generated and may be inaccurate. He would like to not use any simulation that can't predict temperatures accurately for a period of 10 or 20 years.

This is a must read book by everyone who cares about what our government, media and lawyers are doing to society. Global warming is just the current example of the state of fear.