175 Years of Heat - An Interview with Texas Monthly Deputy Editor Brian Sweany (Part Two)

Image from Texas Monthly

Note: see Part 1 of our interview here.

Which brings up an interesting point. In your column you talk about going to see what was once a marker for a battle that’s not there anymore...

Yeah, yeah, you read that? Oh, Adam, you made my day, man, you've absolutely made my day.

...and instead of a lot of archival photos [in the issue] there are, like you said, photos of the PetSmart and things. I'm wondering what the idea was of showing where these things used to be, when someone else might've just been like “Oh, let's put in all these old photos.”

I think you're asking all the questions that we really wrestled with in this process. Our editor Jake Silverstein deserves all of the credit for this issue, and it must've been in the summer of last year that we first talked about this idea. We had our first serious conversations about it in September in terms of soliciting ideas from the staff. So we've been working on it for at least that long. With the imagery I think we came to the conclusion that many places that have real historical value to Texans have been torn down, or papered over, or lost to anonymity. And yet they still resonate, and they still have meaning.

Image of Freddy Fender\’s Microphone

I've already mentioned the San Jacinto monument - you can look at that and see that gorgeous photograph of that unbelievable monument and just sort of know that you're in a spot that really matters. And then you can drive past an anonymous PetSmart and have no idea that - even if the invention of the frozen margarita machine doesn't seem like a major thing - it does, in fact, have a great story behind it. It does really matter. I think it shows how history evolves and how our state has evolved, and some of the things we're able to preserve and some of the things not.

Hopefully my “Behind the Lines” column was in step with the idea that history is fluid and it does matter who is telling it, and it does matter what that person's perspective and background is in terms of what they talk about. I think that's why you want to have many voices in an issue like this, and why you want to have lots of different perspectives.

In the issue you show us a photo of Freddy Fender's microphone and note that it was also used for recording “Bootylicious” by Destiny's Child. Are there any other events where you see historic things coinciding in the same location?

That one was discovered as we were going on through the process and wasn't part of the original write-up. When we sent our photographers out to the studio, that's what they had told us and I thought, “Man, that's just great.” That turned out to be one of my favorite photographs because you really do get a sense of that person. In this case it’s Freddy Fender, whom I greatly admire, standing in that spot and essentially singing the song that revived his career. I'm not sure, I don't know that I'm answering your question exactly right, but I'll take two examples from the list and then we'll see.

Okay.

There's one sequence towards the back of the story where you start in Glen Rose and you make your way kind of vaguely clockwise across the state in this sort of crazy pattern and you end up in Austin. The first item is dinosaurs along the Paluxy River 113 million years ago, but the last item is on the south steps of the capital with Rick Perry's historic inauguration.

And you have, on March 15th of 1861 Sam Houston - the great hero of the Revolution, the President of the Republic, Governor of the state of Texas once it's in the Union - pacing the upstairs hallway of the governor's mansion all those years ago deciding whether or not he will go along with secession. Of course he didn't, and he essentially gave up his post and left office because he didn't agree with Texas' entry into the Confederacy and ultimately the Civil War. If you turn the page, the very next item is the governor's mansion at 1010 Colorado, and now we're in the year 2008 and somebody throws a Molotov cocktail over the fence and torches the mansion. I think that's a really interesting notion, that you have completely different events - high and low - happening at the same place. The same thing, quite frankly, happens with San Jacinto where you have Sam Houston's army routing Santa Ana. One year later one of the earliest recorded baseball games in Texas is played on that very spot. I get a big kick out of that, but of course I'm a nerd.

Image of Dinosaur Stomping Grounds

What was the biggest surprise or what pleased you the most in your discovery of all these different places? Is there one event that you got a huge kick out of more than anything else?

That's such a great question because all of them truly are of some interest to me, just from a historical perspective. I'm sort of scanning the list here to see. I thought the notion of George H.W. Bush and James Baker meeting and cementing their friendship in the '50s in Houston while playing doubles at the Houston country club was pretty great because, again, on one hand that may seem like a trifle, but we know what that ultimately became, and how the friendship formed there ended up having global implications. And then to boot, we have this really great picture of the two of them together in their tennis uniforms on the court.

I like the story of Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen writing songs on a porch while they were students at College Station, and that's another one where I think it's great that not only did John Spong get a really cool story about that - about their friendship and what they were doing at that age in 1976 - but we also have the exact location of the house which still stands at 302 Church Street. And we have a great picture of the two of them back in the day. When I think of two of my favorite Texas singer-songwriters, it's kind of cool to get a sense of their roots and their background.