Much to my surprise I found that people in Texas actually do
say this. I’d believed it was some sort of TV or movie myth but nope – they say
that too, by the way – not so.
I’d also forgotten just how big Texas is.
When you look at the map and see Dallas right next to Fort
Worth even though it’s larger than all of Western Europe, you immediately think
“pretty close, can get a taxi”.
I’d booked a really funky hotel called ALOFT in Downtown
Dallas (see website
here) and had this notion of staying there 3 nights getting
a taxi back and forth to Fort Worth.
It took all of 5 minutes in the taxi from the airport
looking at the enormous earth works called freeways in Texas before I realized
that ‘right nearby’ means somewhere in the next county.
Or maybe the one after that.
This meant a radical rethink of operations.
We therefore decided to curtail our stay in Dallas by 1 day
and find a hotel in Fort Worth near to the Stockyards where we intended to
spend the day watching rodeos and the like.
Amazingly I found the Stockyards Hotel (see website
here) right in the
Stockyards and was lucky enough to book the last room for the night.
So in cheery mood we headed out to where the hotel staff had
suggested was downtown only to find there actually wasn’t really one as most
lived on the outskirts or in other neighbourhoods. We did find a nice steakhouse where the
waiter recommended we redirect our efforts in a different direction.
 |
| Red eye on Main Street, Dallas |
So we found the Red Museum (see website
here) in a historic part of town which
was all about Dallas. Skirting oil and
JR, Dallas is actually not about any of that at all. Oil wasn’t discovered here – it was
further south and east. Actually there is no reason for Dallas to be here. It was a Mr. Bryan, a
British eccentric no doubt, who found in the 1830’s a ford over the Trinity
River and thought that maybe a township on a nearby bluff and ferry service
would be a good thing and attract people to the area – he then laid out a city
in his mind and bought the land for 1 cent per acre.
 |
| The Red Museum with one of the many downtown car parks in the foreground. This is Dallas 'downtown'! |
He was right. Sad to say Mr. Bryan ended his days in an
insane asylum in Austin and is buried in an unmarked grave, curious to me as
Texans love memorials and there are none of him suggesting that maybe there was
a darker side to Mr. Bryan that the museum didn’t share.
Next step forward was the railroad. Somehow the Dallas leaders managed to
persuade both the east-west and north-south lines to intersect at Dallas. An amazing feat and one which sealed the success
of Dallas becoming the most important city in the south west, a position it
attained by the 1870’s, less than one lifetime since Mr. Bryan’s amazing
vision.
We also toured the 6
th Floor Museum at the Texas
Book Repository (see website
here), a museum based on the assassination of President Kennedy in
1963.
 |
| The window through which the shots were fired |
Fascinating to go back through all
this. On reflection JFK and Winston
Churchill (who also died around this time) were probably my earliest memories
of politicians with JFK undoubtedly being one of the few Americans. My memory of the incident was when the TV
interrupted my favourite programme of the week to make the announcement in
England. Solemn music followed for hours
with occasional news updates. One of the
panels in the museum said Walter Kronkite interrupted his programme within an
hour of the event taking place in the US.
This was probably one of the first real world events
reported in almost real time.
Looking back on his brief presidential reign, it was
certainly not without blemishes -- the Bay of Pigs fiasco standing front and centre.
But it had its high
points too – averting nuclear war with the Soviets of course being the
highest.
However I think more than anything
else it left the thoughts of what might have been.
These were all played out in his inaugural
address (see
here) and subsequent speeches – the moon, computers and technology, racial
integration, volunteering via the Peace Corps, medicare, you name it, he said
it.
Had he not died it is questionable
whether so many of these would actually have come into being as his majority
was wafer slim at the time of his election.
I’d never given President Johnson much credit, after all it was JFK and
he that escalated Vietnam into all out conflict, but it was LBJ's political
ability to get things passed and of course the unfortunate timing that enabled him to have
passed most of JFK’s initiatives which shaped much of how the US conducted
itself for the remainder of the century.
 |
| "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country". |
The remainder of the day was rediscovering the joys of
public transport. Dallas has the D-Line
free shuttle that circles the city so we did until we found somewhere that
seemed to have a bit of life, a part called Uptown. An old tram ran up the street that houses
Uptown so we took that to the end and strolled back.
This is undoubtedly the chic, young, urban part of town and
if I was a chic, young and urban Texan living in Dallas is where I would want
to live. Bars, restaurants, clubs and
lots of activity made it an attractive location indeed.
We found a bar called Standard Pour which served amongst
other things Dark n’Stormies made the correct way and tequila from a barrel
marked ‘Aqua Vida’.
Not a bad way to end a busy day!
