On Apr. 23, 1926, Bessie Coleman made the last payment on her new airplane and arranged for the second-hand Jenny to be flown to Jacksonville, Florida, site of her next air show. “Brave Bessie” was born in 1893 less than a dozen miles from the Arkansas border in the northeast Texas community of Atla...

A Franciscan priest, who made the long and dangerous trip from the New World in search of the mysterious “Lady in Blue,” arrived at a Spanish abbey on Apr. 21, 1631. The padre was determined to find out for himself if the mother superior really was the phantom visitor that brought biblical teachings...

A 23 year old pianist from Kilgore gave sagging morale back home a much needed boost by winning first prize at the International Tschaikowsky competition on Apr. 12, 1958. Van Cliburn was just what the doctor ordered for a country still down in the dumps over the Soviets’ Sputnik space spectacular s...

With the way the war was going, the news from Houston on Apr. 6, 1865 was enough to make a grown man cry.  Another well-known name had been added to the Confederate casualty list, but this time the fatal bullet had not been fired by a Yankee. The victim was the last of a prominent line.  His father ...

President Franklin Roosevelt secretly signed an executive order in early April 1942 that allowed American aviators to join Claire Chennault’s volunteers in China. With the United States still eight months away from entering the escalating worldwide conflict, support for the “Flying Tigers” had to be...

On Mar. 22, 1877, Guy M. Bryan wrote the new President of the United States, who happened to be an old college classmate, to recommend a relative for the Supreme Court. William Pitt Ballinger had no idea why the caretaker governor summoned him in the middle of May 1865.  He was relieved to learn tha...

Breaking their habit of working strictly at night, a bandit band of brothers robbed the bank at New Braunfels in broad daylight on Mar. 12, 1922. If Willis Newton can be believed, and that is a big “if,” the Newton Boys were the most successful bank and train robbers of alltime. Their total take fro...

On Mar. 12, 1836, six days after the fall of the Alamo, Gen. Sam Houston sent an urgent message to Goliad ordering Philip Dimmit to meet him at Gonzales. Few Anglo-Americans came to Texas earlier than the young Kentuckian, who arrived at San Antonio in 1823, the same year Stephen F. Austin got the f...

Twenty anxious defendants waited in a Dallas courtroom on Feb. 26, 1935 for a federal jury to come to a verdict in the “harboring” trial of Bonnie and Clyde’s closest kin and staunchest friends. Following the fatal ambush of the  most-wanted fugitives in May 1934, everyone struggled to get on with t...

After almost a century of standing watch on the border, Fort Clark was deactivated on Feb. 9, 1946 and turned into, of all things, a dude ranch.  Hellbent-for-leather horse soldiers must have turned over in their graves. Sam Maverick, a renowned signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, drove...