Eight Feet Deep

Beaumont has had its own racial tensions as shown by this telegram to Gov. Coke Stevenson concerning a race riot.

A town hall meeting on CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now” will be held this evening in Beaumont, Texas, to discuss the issue of race. The meeting stems from a report on past racial problems in nearby Vidor.

Vidor city officials have chosen not to attend the meeting as they feel they are being picked on just because of the city’s racist past.

It is unfortunate that Vidor officials are too defeatist or for whatever reasons to attend the forum. They would have the chance to make their case a positive one before a national audience.

Beaumont seems like a good place for the forum as the town has had its problems with race over time (of course what city hasn’t?) The telegram above was sent to then Gov. Coke Stevenson about the Beaumont race riot in 1943. Attempts to find out exactly what the role was of the person sending the telegram were not successful. One reference found Baker, at one time, being chairman of the now-defunct Texas State Board of Control which was responsible for state buildings and supplies. Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much, eh?

After extensive (a couple of minutes) research it was determined that Coke Stevenson was not named for Coca Cola or cocaine. According to Wikipedia, he was named for a Methodist bishop. Stevenson’s larger claim to fame was his loss by a margin of 87 votes to Lyndon B. Johnson for the U.S. Senate in the 1948 election in which Johnson carried the deceased vote.

As for Beaumont, it isn’t perfect but they no longer have race riots there and this writer kind of misses the place.

The Zahn town hall meeting will air at 7 p.m. Central time this evening.

This Vidor, Texas, billboard pictures one of the town’s eight African Americans.

A big hubbub that could turn into a brouhaha or perhaps even a schiamazzo has been taking place in Southeast Texas over a CNN report that some residents watched while others were unable to view it.

The “Paula Zahn Now” show had been doing special reports on race in America and one of the towns featured was Vidor, Texas. Vidor, only 10 miles or so from where I lived before moving to North Central Texas a few months ago (Beaumont), is infamous for its past history as a so-called “sundown” town and Ku Klux Klan haven. Sundown as in African Americans once were told they should be out of Vidor by sundown, or else.

CNN Reporter Keith Oppenheim visited Vidor and found that townsfolk continued to struggle to live down the city’s racist past. It seemed like a pretty balanced report to me. However, the final person Oppenheim interviewed was every chamber of commerce’s nightmare.

Betty Fruge, sitting in a Vidor cafe, told Oppenheim that blacks would be welcome to her neighborhood although:

” … as far as mingling and eating with them, all that kind of stuff, that’s where I draw the line.”

Many in Vidor feared the report which aired last week on Zahn’s show would cast the city, once again in a negative light. One can certainly understand when you have a city with such a notorious past and still have less than a dozen blacks living in a town of more than 11,000. So Vidorians sat around in their trailer homes (okay, I know that’s a cheap shot, sorry)on the night of the broadcast waiting to see how they were going to be pummeled on national television. Only, most in the Vidor area did not get to see the broadcast because 13 seconds into the show all that could be seen was a blue screen for the next six minutes. By that time the picture returned to normal the segment was over.

Time Warner Cable (Yes, the same Time Warner that owns CNN) said the interruption had been a goof by one of their engineers in their area office in Nederland. The blackout (or blue out) was big news the next day in the Beaumont area, which is the largest city near Vidor. Some told CNN that they thought Time Warner was involved in a conspiracy because they were afraid some customers in Vidor would take offense.

A Time Warner spokesman said an engineer inadvertently unplugged the equipment connected to the CNN feed while trying to fix the QVC shopping channel signal. The timing was all a coincidence.

On the surface, the timing did seem suspect and the reasoning for the blackout somewhat heavy on the flimsy side. But having been a customer of that particular Time Warner system I think things could fly either way because of the combination existing there of ineptness and arrogance. That isn’t to say all Time Warner employees working out of Nederland are like that. It’s just the ones who were responsible for my Roadrunner Internet service to continually crap out. You all know who you are!

A televised town hall meeting is being planned in Beaumont with Zahn and some other notables as the Rev. Jesse Jackson in attendance. That should be a good time for all.

“I guess you wonder why I called you all here today.”

BARNEY: I’ll take a few questions now.

Q: Mr. First Dog, Rex from Dog World. First off, I would like to know your thoughts looking back on the incident in which you allegedly urinated on Tony Blair’s leg? Was there anything you would have done differently? Also, are you worried that an English dog might urinate on Mr. Bush’s leg in retaliation?

BARNEY: I can’t think of a thing I would do different. As for some dog ever trying to pee on the president’s leg, all I can say is bring ’em on.

Q: Mr. First Dog, Fido from Caninipolitan. What do you have to say to your critics who say you shouldn’t lick yourself in public?

BARNEY: Well, let me ask you this Fido. Do you think it’s improper for you as a dog to lick yourself in public?

Q: With all due respect, sir, I’m not the First Dog. And I am the one asking the question. So it’s not about me. It’s about you.

BARNEY: Okay, so it’s all about me. Hit me in the head with a newspaper! I think that because I am the First Dog, that it gives me the power to lick wherever or whatever I want.

Q: What if you licked a frozen light pole?

BARNEY: (inaudible)

WHITE HOUSE: That’s it. Thank you all for coming.

This is not The Range. I don’t know who these guys are.
I just needed a photo and I found this one.

Last year when I was a bludding bogger, er make that, blodding bugger … Oh hell, you know what I am trying to say. When I started this blog last year I was living temporarily where I am again staying, which is in Allen, a suburb just north of Dallas. One of several positive aspects of returning to North Central Texas is the chance to enjoy once more, a very good radio station that I first wrote about in May 2005. That station is KHYI-FM 95.3 (The Range.) So good is The Range that I have added it to the select company of radio stations listed on my blogroll links, to the right.

The station, which calls home Howe/Plano/Dallas-Fort Worth, bills itself as “hard country” but is also often identified as an Americana station. I admit to being a fan of both. As Joshua Jones, sales vice president for the station, says on the KHYI Web site:

“The Country Music Industry had alienated so many fans by the “Great Garth Cloning Experiment of the 90’s,” that The Range seemed like a breath of fresh air. KHYI brought many listeners back to Country Radio.”

Amen to that and then some.

Actually, country music had taken some wrong turns way before and way after the 90s. So much of what I hear on mainstream C & W stations these days is what I consider pure, unadulterated crap. I thus have long preferred the older country and western performers of the Hank Williams/George Jones/Merle Haggard/Johnny Cash/Marty Robbins and so forth ilk.

Certain musicians in recent years often teetered on the edge of being country but might have been closer to being folk than country. John Prine (“Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore/They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war.”)comes to mind. Thus when I was sleeping one night, I woke up and there was a new genre known as Americana.

The Range mixes both hard country and Americana very effectively. Sometimes they may even throw in a little blues, or God forbid, rock and roll. And I happen to like all such types of music. I have also discovered some new (new to me) artists that I would probably never heard otherwise were it not for The Range. This is not to say that I like everything they play. They sometimes spin some crappy records of all kinds but I have yet to see a radio station that does not play some music that I dislike. Just to display an idea of the station’s diverse music, consider The Range’s Top Ten this week:

10. Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Page: Rock n’ Roll

9. Johnny Cash: Loves Been Good to Me

8. Chip Taylor: Bippity Boo

7. Lost Immigrants: Judgement Day

6. Trent Summar: Horseshoes and Handgrenades

5. Corb Lund: Trouble in the Country

4. Ray Wylie Hubbard: Rabbit

3. Solomon Burke: Aint Got You

2. Todd Snider: Looking For a Job

AND THE #1 SONG IS………………………………………………………………..

1. Chris Knight: Enough Rope

I would call that eclectic.

The deejays at The Range sound like those of the smaller towns whom I have always found to be one of the more charming aspects of commercial radio. The production is not slick and polished. It makes you think that these people playing the discs are really people and not a machine playing a recording from some high-rise in Manhattan. Why their discs even skip from time-to-time. While that is annoying, it also better than listening to the absurdity of radio detritus such as Walton and Johnson.

Apparently, The Range seems to do well attracting Internet listeners as well as those from the Metromess area. Hopefully more will listen both to the radio and the Internet. I also hope that, for however long I have to stay in this area, that The Range will continue playing its great mix of music that I like.

Awhile back, I promised — to no particular person — that I would look up the origin of “the willies.” I thought it might be interesting to sit down sometime and find out what led the first person to say: “That _____ gives me the willies.” Well, interesting as that might be, I never found out who was the first person to utter those words. But I did unearth a few tidbits.

Before any discussion as to the etymology of “the willies,” one must first define what “it” is. Bill Clinton led the discussion last time and I don’t think we arrived at an answer. But the meaning of the “willies” is, according to “The American Heritage Dictionary:”

PLURAL NOUN: Slang Feelings of uneasiness. Often used with the: The dark, dank cave gave me the willies.

Me too. Dank, in and of itself, gives me the willies just writing it.

The sources I checked out, all one of them, were pretty unanimous in their contention that the origin of “the willies” is not known. However, “The Word Detective” said one dictionary traces “the willies” to:

” … the slang expression “willie-boy,” meaning “sissy” — presumably the sort who would be prone to the “willies.”

Hmm, from obscure to abstruse to downright enigmatic.

The passage went on to say:

“The ‘willies’ in the ballet (‘Giselle’) take their name from the Serbo-Croatian word ‘vila’ (in English, ‘wili’ or ‘willi’) meaning a wood-nymph or fairy, usually the spirit of a betrothed girl who died after being jilted by her lover.”

Thus, the writer deduced that spirit “willi” became the “willies,” or feeling that something weird is happening.

That certainly sounds logical to me. I thought that it might have something to do with Willie Nelson, but I don’t know for certain whether he’s ever been to the Balkans. So, case closed.