A Trip Down Memory Lane of Texas
DALLAS - It all started on the grassy knoll, and I've got the cellphone picture to prove it.
On that warm February day, Conspiracy nuts with notebooks full of pictures sank a big yellow and black GRASSY KNOLL banner into the actual grass embankment in downtown Dallas near the spot where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shot that killed President Kennedy on Nov. 23, 1963, as the president's motorcade coursed through Dealey Plaza.
They meant it to cast doubt, but it had the opposite effect on me. I jumped behind the banner, arms outstretched, and bid my brother to shoot the picture, quick. Visiting high school cheerleaders shooed us away so they could mark the occasion when they, too, became JFK assassination enthusiasts.
Ironically, nascent life is what brought me to the Lone Star State for the first time, in 2012. I learned I was about to be an uncle for the first time. My sister-in-law was with child. The plan was to visit her and my brother Andrew in Dallas before they got bogged down with all things “Little Lott.”
(It was a girl, born in June. They named her Laney Grace Lott, and she is cuter than all of your nieces put together.)
That family visit almost accidentally got stretched out into a 500-mile week-long Texas road trip whose historical road markers are stained blood red.
After the weekend with the in-laws, I drove south to deliver a lecture at Baylor University at the invitation of the Institute for Studies of Religion.
While there, I asked an office manager where in Waco one goes to see the remains of the Branch Davidian compound. On that spot 21 years ago, 76 hyped-up Seventh Day Adventists, including 24 British nationals, 20 children and two pregnant women, met their fiery end after a 50-day stand-off with the feds.
This is a touchy subject with the good people of Waco. They insist the siege took place not in their city but in a nearby place called Elk, nine miles distant as the bullet flies. Waco was the closest large spot on the map to the conflagration, so it gets remembered as the place where it all went down.
There are plenty of other good reasons to remember their city, they insist. Take Baylor, a historically Baptist college with ambition. Former federal judge and independent counsel Ken Starr is its current president, it has an architecturally stunning library devoted to Robert and Elizabeth Browning, it runs several distinguished programs of this and that - and has actual bears on campus.
That's right, real live black bears. In 1914, Baylor students voted to make the bear the school's official mascot and, this being Texas, they took it literally.
The university has been home to about 50 actual bears since, though not all at once. Current mascots are sisters Joy and Lady, who live on a large enclosure right smack in the middle of campus. Signs warn visitors not to disturb the girls, lest they lose limb or life.
I drove to Elk the next day. Some landmarks listed on the directions are no longer standing, so I got lost several times. By the time the rented Chevy Aveo inched down the badly maintained road to the property, I had constructed an alternate history.
Imagine if the feds took too many wrong turns on the way to serve the search warrant and give up. What then? No violent standoff in the first place and no retaliation by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The Davidian compound is completely gone now. In its place are a church and a small memorial: two low marble walls with the names of the dead etched on them around a platform. Several tourists, a family I think, crowded the memorial as my car kicked up dust.
I killed the engine, gave them a minute, then mumbled some words about wanting to see this. “It’s a lot to take in,” the man said. The lump in his throat told me any more questions would be like talking too loudly in church.
My next stop, the Alamo, actually used to be a church but there was very little hushed about it when I visited. Modern San Antonio has been built up around the tourist magnet. A Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum is across the street on one side, the Crockett Hotel on the other.
Much of the fort where almost 200 Texans died in a siege by Santa Anna’s forces has been pulled down. That makes sense when you consider the fort took 12 days of heavy fire from a much larger army.
In its place is a gaudy statuary, a library, gardens and a gift shop with prop muskets, comic books and “Remember the Alamo” T-shirts. Originally the cry for independence was “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!” after a similar massacre on a fort near the gulf.
In Corpus Christi, natives with a good sense for these things told me that Goliad is a much more authentic experience. I made a note to storm it on my next Texas trip to the past.
