From Germany on Jun. 19, 1945, Lt. Joe Tom Meador wrote to the folks back home in Whitewright, Texas to ask “if my packages are getting home.” Two months earlier almost to the day, the 87th Armored Field Artillery occupied the medieval town of Quedlinburg 100 miles southwest of Berlin in the last we...

The nation hardly noticed when Bobby Baker, the poster boy for political corruption, got out of prison on Jun. 2, 1972. The Washington insider the press nicknamed “Lyndon’s boy” did not hail from Texas, as many misinformed Americans presumed, but from South Carolina.  Sent to Capitol Hill as a senat...

Playing in his first full season for the Chicago Cubs, a skinny shortstop from Texas drove in the winning run with an 11th inning double on May 23, 1954 to beat the Dodgers. Halfway through the twentieth century baseball had yet to live up to its national pastime boast.  There was not a single major...

On May 15, 1970 Misty Fincher finally got her first good night’s sleep since a tornado tore through Lubbock four days earlier Moda Fincher, the little girl who grew up to be the first female radio announcer in the Lone Star State and, some say, the whole country, spent her early years in a tiny sett...

“Hippo” Vaughn cursed his rotten luck on May 2, 1917, after losing the only double no-hitter in major league history. James Leslie Vaughn grew up in Weatherford, the Texas town west of Fort Worth where he was born in 1888.  And did he ever grow!  To a height of six-feet five inches -- unusually tall...

Martin Dies, fire-breathing founder of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), came out of retirement on Apr. 26, 1952 to run for Texas’ new at-large congressional seat. After graduating from law school in 1922, Dies joined the family law firm in Orange.  During two recent terms as an Eas...

Learning his commander-in-chief had decided to stand and fight, an insubordinate captain rejoined the Texas Army on Apr. 17, 1836 in time for the Battle of San Jacinto. When Travis’ final appeal reached the convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos on Mar. 5, 1836, Sam Houston immediately excused himse...

The only F5 tornado ever to touch down in the northernmost part of the Lone Star State tore through the Texas Panhandle on Apr. 9, 1947 leaving death and destruction in its 100-mile-long wake. Seventy-seven years ago, “tornado” was not a word weather predictors used in their forecasts.  The thinking...

“Was the late secretary of war removed in consequence of his attempt fraudulently to give to Gov. Houston the contract for the Indian rations?” an Ohio congressman asked on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on Mar. 31, 1832. Three years had come and gone since Sam Houston resigned as go...

Frank Buck, the celebrated adventurer who brought exotic wildlife “back alive,” took his last breath not in a faraway jungle but in a Houston hospital bed on Mar. 25, 1950. The Texan that grew up to be one of the most recognizable Americans of the 1930s was born in 1884 in Gainesville and raised in ...