Texas Highways Magazine February 2022

The devil may be in the details, but in magazine publishing, that’s also where the magic lies. Our resident magician, Art Director Ashley Burch, is passionate about the details. Whether it’s styling dishes for a food story, baking multiple pies to create the perfect scene for a cover photo, or finding the ideal font to reflect the emotion of a piece of writing, her keen eye ensures every element is precise and contributes to a more beautiful whole. For this month’s cover story, Ashley wrangled her German shorthaired pointer, Lady Bird, for a pet product photo shoot (see Page 42). “I’m always looking for ways to be on set and get out from behind my computer screen,” she says. “And I think with anything we do, the more people you get…

While on assignment to capture all the ways pets can enjoy traveling the state with their owners, some of the seven photographers who shot “The Ultimate Guide to Traveling With Pets in Texas” (Page 32) focused on their own dogs as subjects. Kenny Braun said his assistant’s dog, Wiley, who appears on the cover, enjoyed Monahans Sandhills State Park the most. “When it was time to go, he walked off and laid down in the cool sand and refused to leave,” Braun said. “It really is a special place.” Tom McCarthy Jr.’s dogs were more judgmental during their shoot. “My dogs were pretty confused about why I was outside the car in the drizzling rain trying to get them to stick their heads out the window,” he said. For Theresa…

Hook’Em Horns I have worked in the oil fields of Texas since 1975, and in the old days I would see numerous horned lizards when working near Midland, Llano, and all the way east to Abilene [“Our Lovable Lizards,” January]. Now it is very rare that I see them darting across an oil field lease road. Also missing are the harvester ants and their large circular mounds that used to be so frequent in the mesquite, tall grass prairie, and sagebrush grasslands of Central and West Texas. My best of luck to the zoo in Fort Worth and the landowners who are assisting with the recovery program. My two sons and my grandsons have never watched a horned lizard run and then freeze to blend with its background. The horned lizard…

Photographer Tom McCarthy Jr. and his wife, Shawneen McCarthy, love traveling with their longtime companion, Chuy, a Chihuahua mix, and recent addition, Ranger, a black Lab mix. While shooting on an overcast November day for the cover story (Page 32), McCarthy came across a vibrant scene on Market Street, near its intersection with 28th Street, in Galveston. “The rainbow colors painted on the fence and sidewalk immediately caught my eye,” McCarthy says. “Then it was just a matter of composing and letting the trio walk across the rainbow.” The nearby Galveston’s Own Farmers Market, McCarthy notes, opens on Sundays and is “very pet friendly.”…

Veronica Harris lives not far from Willie Melton Boulevard, the Kendleton road named in honor of her late grandfather. Melton, a farmer born in 1900, led a legal effort in the early 1950s to end Fort Bend County Democrats’ informal whites-only primary elections. Melton’s lawsuit went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Melton’s favor. The story is memorialized on a historical marker at the Kendleton Post Office and exemplifies the town’s rich African American history. Freed slaves founded Kendleton in the 1860s after buying land from a plantation owner named William Kendall. Kendleton grew as a farming community, and a railroad came through in 1882, linking the town to Rosenberg and Victoria. Harris has lived most of her life in her hometown even as the agricultural economy waned…

My parents raised my sister and me in a small town about 40 miles outside of Houston. But to say that I grew up in a small town isn’t exactly accurate. My childhood home was in the country, on 10 acres of trees and pastures without another house in sight. I loved that land. I loved the Brazos River, the constant noise of it whenever we opened one of the doors to our house. I loved the sound of the gravel road under my sneakers, the fences and trees eaten up by mustang grapevines. Though 15 minutes away from our home, Sealy was where I went to school from kindergarten through high school. It was where my family picked up our mail, where we went to the library, and where…