By Bartee Halie Sympathetic Georgians rallied at Macon on Nov. 12, 1835 to show their support for the struggle for Texas independence.   At the end of the emotional evening, 32 volunteers stepped forward to form the nucleus of the famed and ill-fated Georgia Battalion. Despite the crude communicatio...

By Bartee Haile Fearing for their lives after the murder of the Mexican political boss, the Anglo residents of El Paso sent for the commander of the Texas Rangers Frontier Battalion on Oct. 24, 1877. At first glance the killing of Luis Cardis looked like nothing more than the violent climax of a par...

By Bartee Halie Two year old Alberta Yvonne Howell, the only child of a couple in Haskell,   died on Oct. 15, 1937 after taking a poisonous but perfectly legal drug, prescribed by doctors and sold over-the-counter by pharmacists, that was blamed for ten deaths in Texas and another 97 in 14 more stat...

By Bartee Halie A well-traveled catcher from the Lome Star State smacked a three-run double to put the Detroit Tigers ahead of the Chicago Cubs in Game 7 of the World Series on Oct. 10, 1945. Paul Rapier Richards was born in 1908 at Waxahachie, a baseball hotbed in those days where several big-leagu...

By Bartee Haile In what was becoming an all too common occurrence in the Central Texas boom town, a constable was shot to death in the streets of Mexia on Sep. 23, 1921. Just one month earlier, the Limestone County community was the peaceful home of 3,500.   That serenity was shattered on a quiet Su...

By Bartee Haile After 13 months on the run, a former small-town police chief wanted for murder and armed robbery was captured in Tennessee on Sep. 20, 1929. Had Tom Shook always been a crooked cop concealing his crimes behind a badge? If that was true, he sure had fooled a bunch of people during his...

By Bartee Halie NBC gave Roger Miller, the hottest solo act in show business, an hour a week of prime-time television on Sep. 12, 1966. The Depression baby was still in diapers, when his father died in his twenties from spinal meningitis.   Unable to care for her three sons, Roger’s desperate mother...

by Bartee Haile On Aug. 28, 1959 a book reviewer had nothing but the highest praise for a newspaperman’s first novel:   “It may be a long time before a better one comes along.” Allen Stuart Drury was born in Houston during the First World War and grew up in a small California town.   After earning a...

By Bartee Halie After spending a week trying to convince the sponsor and contestants to call off a perilous California-to-Hawaii air race, federal aviation officials threw up their hands on Aug. 21, 1927 and reluctantly gave permission for the daredevils to take off. On the heels of Charles Lindberg...

By Bartee Haile Col. Anthony Butler walked out of the White House on Aug. 13, 1829 with a seven-figure line of credit and secret lnstructions to make the Mexicans an offer they could not refuse. Andrew Jackson considered the Rio Grande realm as “lost” territory, a legitimate part of the Louisiana Pu...