WEST TEXAS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION ACCOLADES FOR LOUAt 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.
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