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Friday, December 26, 1997

Texas author sifts through more Lone Star facts, fiction, foibles

"On the day of battle I am glad to have Texas soldiers with me for they are brave and gallant, but I never want to see them before or after, because they are too hard to control." - Gen. Zachary Taylor, 1846, as quoted in "More Texas Siftings."

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"A Texas compass has six directions. North to the Panhandle. South to the Rio Grande. East to East Texas. West to West of the Pecos. Down to oil. Up to the Texas moon." - John Randolph, Texas Brags, 1951.

--- By MIKE COCHRAN Associated Press Writer

GRANBURY, Texas (AP) - Need a recipe for Flat Snake Chili, Prickly Pear Jelly or Fried Armadillo?

Want the definition of Fencelifters, Frogstranglers and Ol Slick Legs?

Curious about killer Texas chickens, a deadly shootout over sauerkraut, legendary badman Bill Longley's famous last words or the lowdown on William "Billy the Kid" Bonney?

Pick up a copy of Jerry Flemmons' "More Texas Siftings ... Another Bold and Uncommon Celebration of the Lone Star State."

Once again we're talking Texas, the good, bad, ugly, outrageous, historic and hilarious, as assembled by author-journalist Flemmons, currently a writer in residence at Tarleton State University in Stephenville.

As the title suggests, Siftings is a sequel to an earlier collection of "little smidgens of Texas history and lore" that grew into columns in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The newspaper's longtime travel editor, Flemmons still writes a Sunday column but now makes his home in Granbury, a quaint lakeside hamlet between Fort Worth and Stephenville.

Published by Texas Christian University Press, "More Texas Siftings" is a natural extension of the popular 1995 original softcover and just as spicy.

Anyone who's met Flemmons knows he's smitten with Texas, but that's not to say the wonderfully irascible writer is less than merciless in selecting his siftings.

He quotes an early rancher who claims the water in the Pecos River is so sour it "would give a killdee that flew over it diarrhea?"

And a man describing the blowing sand and wind upon arriving in the Texas Panhandle town of Dalhart just before sundown: "Pebbles as big as the end of my thumb ... struck me in the face, and the wind blew for three days and nights. I had to shovel my way to bed at night."

According to Flemmons and the San Antonio Express of May 20, 1868, a hailstorm struck the city just before nightfall: "Chunks of ice fell as large as a good-sized water pitcher, one weighing two and one-half pounds by actual weight."

In a smidgen about the first Texas Christmas, Flemmons quotes the Beaumont Enterprise on the legendary Sam Houston:

"The hero of San Jacinto knew the virtue of sobriety, although in his sometimes turbulent and always picturesque career, he frequently forgot to practice it."

More recently comes this from Molly Ivins, writing in The Atlantic in March 1975:

"The Texas Legislature consists of 181 people who meet for 140 days every two years. This catastrophe has now occurred sixty-three times. The Legislature is ... the finest entertainment in Texas. It beats the zoo any day of the week."

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Scattered throughout the book are vivid period pieces on topics ranging from outraged mobs stealing outhouses in 1857 to a bloody, ill-fated train robbery between San Antonio and El Paso in 1912.

A classic tale was the wounding of actor Maurice Barrymore, father of Ethel, Lionel and John, as he awaited a midnight train out of Marshall in 1878.

Jim Currie was "inflamed by liquor" when he insulted actress May Cummings and shot the protesting Barrymore, reports the Frontier Times.

"The room was partly filled with the fumes of black powder as Currie put up his gun, and taking hold of Miss Cummings, jollied her around with a drunken air of braggardism."

Currie went to jail and Barrymore and Miss Cummings, "in due time," went home to New York.

Flemmons also quotes a journalist's account in the Frontier Times of a regiment of Texas Rangers arriving in Mexico City during the war with Mexico:

"The Mexicans believe them to be a sort of semi-civilized, half man, half devil, with a slight mixture of lion and the snapping turtle, and have a more holy horror of them than they have of the evil saint himself."

And this from Miss Kitty King, in a letter from Fort Worth, circa 1860:

"I am not married yet and no prospects for it, for I should be afraid to select a man in Texas to marry unless I had known all about him before he came here, for I should be sure he had done something and been run off."

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There are off-the-wall Texas jokes, poems, recipes, yarns, myths and some truly poignant stories. As pointed out in an earlier review, Siftings, like Texas, as a whole exceeds the sum of its parts.

The title comes from an eight-page Austin magazine founded in 1881 by Alexander Edwin Sweet. Flemmons says it became America's most successful humor publication because of Sweet's sardonic writing style and because Texas always interested outsiders.

Of his own books, Flemmons says in an introduction he thought "Texas Siftings" was not so much organized as only a collection of interrelated excerpts from old writings.

"But after reading through the assembled manuscript," he says, "I can see a pure plot line of renewal and survival and hope in a rough, often unforgiving country, a story told with humor and bravado and bombast."

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