Texas Monthly February 2022

The San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo is set to come back stronger, bigger and better than ever February 10-27, 2022. Cody Davenport, Executive Director and CEO, stated; “That our mission as an organization is to help educate the youth of Texas and this event along with the strength of over 6,000 volunteers will help us accomplish that goal.” The San Antonio Stock show & Rodeo is celebrating its 73rd annual event in 2022 that has grown to the largest event in South Texas with over 1.5 million patrons. The event, like many others this past few years has really taken a look at how they can improve as an organization and how to make things better for all those involved. “We have made changes to the festival grounds that will include all…

THE WOMEN BEHIND THE DALLAS COW-BOYS CHEERLEADERS For fifty years, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have been a global phenomenon, endlessly photographed, televised, and commercialized. The squad began as an experiment and became America’s sweethearts, a very Texas hybrid of pageant beauty, good-girl etiquette, and come-hither slink. But their voices have always been missing from the story—until now. In America’s Girls, the latest podcast from Texas Monthly, best-selling author Sarah Hepola hosts a journey through the wild and glamorous saga of a sideline spectacle that changed sports, fashion, entertainment, and countless childhoods, including her own. THE TEXAN WHO SAVED THE BEATLES In 1969, as the Beatles were on the brink of collapse, the band members decided to record an album and document the process in an attempt to repair their relationships. The Beatles: Get…

I’d been trying for months to meet Bob and Kelli Phillips, the hosts and owners of Texas Country Reporter, a TV program beloved by Texans for nearly half a century. But they’re busy folks, traveling the state’s blue highways in search of fascinating characters, from barbecue pitmasters to makers of hand-tooled saddles. We finally got together last May to discuss the golden anniversary they have coming up in October 2022. At one point, I asked, “So what’s next for y’all? Are you going to stay with the show for another fifty years?” Bob smiled and explained that they had received offers from potential buyers with lots of money but little commitment to quality storytelling. “We’re looking for somebody to take good care of our baby,” he said, “and we think Texas…

“They say there’s a checklist of ten items to be included for a truly lurid tale. This story achieved nine of them in rather rapid fashion, but I was becoming disappointed that the tenth box had gone unchecked. Then, finally: penile implants!” You May All Go to Hell, and I Will Go to … Wisconsin? I read your story about “the newest Texans” [“The New Golden State,” December 2021], and I guess you could say I’ve gone the other way. My wife and I left Texas this past year, after the previous forty in residence. Nothing would bring us back. If that makes us outliers, isn’t that a very Texan thing to be? As longtime Austinites, we had enough of the faux–Los Angeles or faux–Bay Area status. Cost of housing? Cost of…

If our readers have ever finished the daily paper or the sixo’ clock news and felt there was more than what they were told, then they know why we started Texas Monthly. We designed it as an intelligent, entertaining and useful publication for Texans whose culture, sophistication and interests are largely unrecognized and unserved by existing media. All of Texas will be our province, but our major focus will be on the metropolitan triangle of Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio. Our only banner is one of integrity, fairness and quality writing. We serve no vested interests, protect no sacred cow and measure each subject by the same high standards. While we are not a magazine of politics we will not ignore the rich political life of our state.…

By their own admission, the journalists who founded Texas Monthly pretty much created the magazine on the fly. “We figured we’d do this for a few months and then find real jobs,” says Bill Broyles. “We made it all up.” So it’s all the more impressive that in his editor’s letter in the debut issue, Broyles got so much right about the TM DNA that survives to this day. The emphasis on food, outdoor activities, and the rich stories that lie beneath a daily newspaper’s bare-bones reporting continue to distinguish the magazine. But reading that letter nearly half a century later, we can, inevitably, spot places where his vision was a little blurry. Though Broyles suggested that politics wouldn’t be a major focus of the magazine, it became part of TM’s core…