This is the story of Victor Rodriguez, star track athlete and San Antonio educator. From his earliest days in South Texas in the 1940s he broke many barriers. As a football player and track star he set records and won trophies at Edna High School, at Victoria College, and at North Texas State College. At each stage of his education, he often found himself the only Mexican American in his group. He developed his sports prowess from nine years of early morning running to the church in Edna, to ring the bell before Mass. He earned the first Hispanic scholarships as an athlete at both Victoria Junior College and North Texas State College. After graduating in 1955, he began a career in the San Antonio School District, ultimately retiring in 1994 after twelve years as Superintendent of the District. As a pioneer Mexican American educator in San Antonio, he brought dignity and respect to the people of the Westside, where he remains a role model today.

In TFS Extra Book #28, Beatrice Upshaw shares her memories of growing up in County Line. A Biscuit for Your Shoe captures the lore of a community which began as a freedom colony west of Nacogdoches in East Texas. The book is a memoir, but it shares more than merely family memories of significant events. It tells of beliefs, home remedies, folk games, and customs, as well as the importance of religion and education to a community of like-minded people. The narrative is a rich source of colloquial language and proverbial sayings that help define a group of people and their strong sense of place. Richard Orton was first introduced to County Line by F. E. “Ab” Abernethy, the Secretary-Editor of the TFS for nearly four decades. Richard eventually did a photographic book on the people of the community, The Upshaws of County Line: An American Family, but he believed that Beatrice’s memoir should be developed into a separate work that could be shared with an audience larger than just family and friends. Richard’s introduction explains the value of the stories Beatrice Upshaw presents in A Biscuit for Your Shoe; they are personal, but the overall narrative speaks collectively about …

Collection of Tex-Mex folklore and related essays, including papers presented at Texas Folklore Society meetings. The book is organized into four topical categories: I. Remembering Our Ancestors, II. Texas-Mexican Folklore, III. Miscellaneous Memorabilia, and IV. The Family Saga (Cont'd).

Assigned as the senior medical advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in I Corps, an area close to the DMZ, James G. Van Straten traveled extensively and interacted with military officers and non-commissioned officers, peasant-class farmers, Buddhist bonzes, shopkeepers, scribes, physicians, nurses, the mentally ill, and even political operatives. He sent his wife daily letters from July 1966 through June 1967, describing in impressive detail his experiences, and those letters became the primary source for his memoir. The author is grateful that his wife retained all the letters he wrote to her and their children during the year they were apart. The author describes with great clarity and poignancy the anguish among the survivors when an American cargo plane in bad weather lands short of the Da Nang Air Base runway on Christmas Eve and crashes into a Vietnamese coastal village, killing more than 100 people and destroying their village; the heart-wrenching pleadings of a teenage girl that her shrapnel-ravaged leg not be amputated; and the anger of an American helicopter pilot who made repeated trips into a hot landing zone to evacuate the wounded, only to have the Vietnamese insist that the dead be given a …

When Ella Szabó fled her homeland during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, she never dreamed that someday she would become a member of the US Olympic swimming team, an accomplished baker in America, and the author of a cookbook about Hungarian desserts. But a chance encounter with a fellow Hungarian in Connecticut led to Ella’s becoming the custodian of a collection of heirloom recipes that form the core of this book. You’ll learn from more than fifty recipes how to bake Hungarian tortes, cookies, pastries, and cakes, from elegant old-world pastry-shop classics like Linzer Torte and Esterhazy Torte to easy homestyle desserts, many of them from recipes that have never been published before. Try your hand at delicate nut-flour tortes made from walnuts, almonds, and hazelnuts: Almond Meringue Torte with Coffee-Cream Filling, Walnut Wedding Torte with Hazelnut Filling, and Chocolate Roulade with Hazelnut Cream. Enjoy easy-to-make Hungarian Almond Biscotti, Orange Kugelhopf, and Cherry Sponge Cake. And delight in devouring Walnut-Apricot-Lemon Bars, traditional Hungarian Cheese Biscuits, and Beigli, a Hungarian pastry roll filled with walnuts or poppy seeds, always eaten at Christmas. You’ll also find a complete section on ingredients, equipment, and techniques, as well as several historical and contemporary photographs. …

A History of Fort Worth in Black & White fills a long-empty niche on the Fort Worth bookshelf: a scholarly history of the city's black community that starts at the beginning with Ripley Arnold and the early settlers, and comes down to today with our current battles over education, housing, and representation in city affairs. The book's sidebars on some noted and some not-so-noted African Americans make it appealing as a school text as well as a book for the general reader. Using a wealth of primary sources, Richard Selcer dispels several enduring myths, for instance the mistaken belief that Camp Bowie trained only white soldiers, and the spurious claim that Fort Worth managed to avoid the racial violence that plagued other American cities in the twentieth century. Selcer arrives at some surprisingly frank conclusions that will challenge current politically correct notions. "Selcer does a great job of exploring little-known history about the military, education, sports and even some social life and organizations."--Bob Ray Sanders, author of Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White.

Houston Blue offers the first comprehensive history of one of the nation’s largest police forces, the Houston Police Department. Through extensive archival research and more than one hundred interviews with prominent Houston police figures, politicians, news reporters, attorneys, and others, authors Mitchel P. Roth and Tom Kennedy chronicle the development of policing in the Bayou City from its days as a grimy trading post in the 1830s to its current status as the nation’s fourth largest city. Prominent historical figures who have brushed shoulders with Houston’s Finest over the past 175 years include Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, O. Henry, former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, hatchet wielding temperance leader Carrie Nation, the Hilton Siamese Twins, blues musician Leadbelly, oilman Silver Dollar Jim West, and many others. The Houston Police Department was one of the first cities in the South to adopt fingerprinting as an identification system and use the polygraph test, and under the leadership of its first African American police chief, Lee Brown, put the theory of neighborhood oriented policing into practice in the 1980s. The force has been embroiled in controversy and high profile criminal cases as well. Among the cases chronicled in the book are …

"The Byrd Williams Collection at the University of North Texas contains more than 10,000 prints and 300,000 negatives, accumulated by four generations of Texas photographers, all named Byrd Moore Williams. Beginning in the 1880s in Gainesville, the four Byrds photographed customers in their studios, urban landscapes, crime scenes, Pancho Villa's soldiers, televangelists, and whatever aroused their unpredictable and wide-ranging curiosity. When Byrd IV sat down to choose a selection from this dizzying array, he came face to face with the nature of mortality and memory, his own and his family's. In some cases these photos are the only evidence remaining that someone lived and breathed on this earth"--Amazon. The contents include: Foreword : One bright thread / Roy Flukinger -- Photographs : The family album -- Landscape -- Postcard -- The Great Depression -- Studio -- People -- Non-people -- Violence and religion in Texas -- Night -- Afterword : Palimpsest / Anne Wilkes Tucker.

The nine stories in Mike Alberti’s debut collection shine a sharp light on small-town American life —not the Arcadian small towns of yesteryear, but the old mill towns hanging on after the mill has stopped running, the deserted agricultural communities in the middle of vast industrial farms, places where bad luck has become part of the weather. But even in these blighted, neglected landscapes, the possibility of renewal always presents itself: there is hope for these places and the characters who inhabit them. In these fresh, innovative stories, some people let you down, but some people don’t.

The Hayden Controversy was one of the most bitter feuds in Baptist history. In the nineteenth century, Protestant denominations in Texas endured difficult transitions from a loosely organized frontier people to a more cooperative and organized body capable of meeting the needs of growing denominations. The Methodists, Churches of Christ, and Baptists all endured major splits before their survival was certain. Of all the Protestant bodies, however, the Hayden Controversy was the fiercest and most widespread, with repercussions that continue to affect current Baptist life. Joseph E. Early, Jr., tells the story of how one man, Samuel Augustus Hayden, almost destroyed the newly organized Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) before it could take root. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Hayden caused such unrest among Texas Baptists that after a failed attempt to take over the BGCT, he was expelled from the state body. In turn, he created a rival organization, the Baptist Missionary Association (BMA), which continued to fight perceived oppression by the BGCT. While trying to take over the BGCT, Hayden, through his newspaper, accused his enemies of embezzlement, heresy, arson, and strong-arm tactics. Haydens high-profile opponents included some of the most powerful and well-known …

The eight stories of speculative fiction in There Is Only Us explore themes of loneliness, connectedness, and selfhood. Each one is an act of intimacy—an altered world shown through the lens of a close relationship. Brothers, sisters, lovers, mothers, and daughters come together in myriad constellations, often so that one character can make a body-altering choice of extreme proportions. In a variety of forms—from a satirical retelling of Noah’s Ark to a sister drama revolving around naked mole rats—There Is Only Us presents a series of escalating scenarios, intimate and yet absurd, that ask, how much can you change and still be you? Ballering’s stories bring to speculative fiction a new lightness and absurdity and a commitment to contemporary experiences of loneliness, especially among Millennials: loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, ecological loneliness (the sense that, by the end of our lives, the earth will be barren), and the unsolvable loneliness that so many experience despite carrying around a tiny device that claims it can connect them to any human anywhere on earth.

Music has long played a role in American presidential campaigns as a mode of both expressing candidates’ messages and criticizing the opposition. The 2016 campaign was no exception and was a game changer similar to the development of music in the 1840 campaign, when “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” helped sing William Harrison into the White House. The ten chapters in this collection place music use in 2016 in historical perspective before examining musical messaging, strategy, and parody. The book ultimately explores causality: how do music and musicians affect presidential elections, and how do politicians and campaigns affect music and musicians? The authors explain this interaction from various perspectives, with methodological approaches from several fields, including political science, legal studies, musicology, cultural studies, rhetorical studies, and communications and journalism. These chapters will help the reader understand music in the 2016 election to realize how music will be relevant in 2020 and beyond.