Texas Highways Magazine January 2015

A dusting of snow creates a dreamy scene at Daingerfield State Park. From Daingerfield, take Texas 49 about two miles southeast and turn south onto Park Road 17. Follow the park road as it winds toward the fishing pier and interpretive center. From the swing set at the playground, visitors gain a picturesque view of the picnic area and lake. On January 1, rangers will lead a two-mile hike around the lake as part of the “First Day Hikes” program. For more information about Daingerfield State Park, visitwww.tpwd.state.tx.us/state parks/daingerfield.…

OUR FAVORITE SOCIAL MEDIA OF THE MONTH... On Collins’ donation of Alamo artifacts: Thank you Phil Collins! That’s a Class Act! I think I can say: The State of Texas thanks you too! Bob Severance, San Antonio Getting a full-page image published in Texas Highways Jan. 2015 “Rear View”: Everybody go buy one! #cherryonthetop @timtime [Tim Burdick Photo Follow us on Facebook and Twitter With These Hands In the story about Aermotor Windmills [November], the pictured hands are those of a working man. There aren’t too many windmill repairmen left. If the windmill was broken, we had to haul water to the cattle. My dad always said, “Every rancher needs a windmill and an Angus bull.” If you’re not getting the bull out of the neighbor’s pasture, you’re fixing the windmill. JACKIE KOCUREK, Danbury Love for Luckenbach When…

FOR THE BIRDS Texas artist Tom Sale’s untitled piece from his Florence Nightingale series makes use of taxidermy and silverware.\ IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE TWO PEOPLE IN THE whole state who have more fun in their work than Julie and Bruce Lee Webb of Waxahachie. That sense of fun is apparent even before you enter their art gallery in a 1902 building just o. the town square. Whimsical exhibits in the front-display window alone include intricate toothpick sculptures of a Ferris wheel, the Eiffel Tower, and other sculptures made by the late Venzil Zastoupil, a self-taught artist in Dallas known as the “Toothpick King.” Inside, colorful creations swirl like a crazy quilt of quirky Americana. The Webb Gallery shows work by unique individuals described as “outsider” or “self-taught” artists. “We like handmade things…

I’VE ALWAYS CONSIDERED MYSELF A PRET ty brave guy. I’ve gone hang gliding, swum with stingrays, and even eaten face-melting ghost chiles. However, standing in the damp coolness of an underground nuclear missile silo, contemplating scuba diving into the black waters below me, I was overcome by an unexpected feeling: gutwrenching fear. I had driven for hours to the middle of a rolling prairie about 20 miles south of Abilene for a chance to dive the Valhalla Missile Silo, one of 12 Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile sites that the U.S. military built in Texas in the 1960s to brace for nuclear war. Mark Henning, who owns the silo with his wife, Linda, met our group on the surface to escort us into the bunker below. The smell of rusted metal was as…

AUSTIN MUSICIAN KEVIN RUSSELL LIKES TO RE_ count a conversation he had with the late Doug Sahm, a sort of musical godfather to Russell, in which Sir Doug postulated about the great singers of Texas. “He was like, ‘You’ve either goad have that West Texas dust or that East Texas rust,’” recalls Russell, front man of the band Shiny ribs. “And he said, ‘You’ve got both of those.’” You can hear that geographical span in the mash of country and soul that Shiny ribs performs across Texas and beyond, upwards of 150 nights a year. With idiosyncratic songs that conjure subjects from a lovable Sour Lake freeloader to the flies of Limpia Creek, Shinyribs draws on the roots of American music to create a sound that’s at once singular and familiar.…

CLEARLY I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE who yearns to bring a bit of Spain back to Texas. For the first half of my 30s, I lived in Madrid less than 600 meters from the Muse Prado, the holy ground of Spanish art that holds within its hallowed walls the masterpieces of Velázquez, Goya, and El Greco. These treasures of light, shadow, allegory, and humor became a regular part of my Madrid life. It would seem that the late Alger Meadows, the CEO of Dallas-based General American Oil Company, fell into a similar rhythm when he frequented Madrid in the 1950s searching for Spanish oil. The oil never materialized, but something more precious did—a passion for Spanish art. He, too, would walk over to the Prado on a regular basis, and…