Fortunatus S. Marchbanks' Quotidian Minutiae

Friday morning’s plans changed when Chris discovered that the privately-owned and restored lighthouse he’d wanted to see was closed to the public, and “seeing” it meant taking a commercial tour boat for a drive-by.  That didn’t seem like much fun to anyone but L, who’s always willing to go on anything larger than a Criss-Craft, so instead we drove the ninety miles to to Corpus Christi to see either the USS Lexington (CV-16), which is permanently moored and turned into a museum, or the Texas State Aquarium, a block away from it.  M said she didn’t like aquariums and would rather see the Lex, and I was more interested in the ship than the fish as well.  Mother and Chris didn’t have much preference and L would have liked the aquarium first, but it was only half past noon and we thought there’d be enough time to do both if we liked, so we all went aboard.

I hope the Fourth weekend had more visitors to the ship than usual, because if she’s as crowded during the whole season as it was Friday, it must be a perpetual mob scene, covered up with families.  (I’m tempted to try going again sometime, but in October or so.)  The ship has five self-guided tours; I chose the below-decks one, which led us down from the hangar deck through the crew quarters, the mess, the chapel, sick bay, one of the munitions storage areas, and one of the engine rooms before it turned around and started back upward. Every ladder on board was cramped and steep, as you’d expect, and ’watch your head – low clearance” warnings were plastered all over.

The ladders and climbing took it out of Mother and Chris, so once we reached the hangar deck again they elected to sit on a bench and wait while L, M, and I toured the flight deck.  The deck is showing the effects of years of sea air and a lack of several hundred sailors to help with “preservation of metallic surfaces.”  It’s pitted and bubbled with corrosion.  We took a walk around the deck, and then climbed the island to see the bridge.  Unfortunately, there were too many other people on the observation island for me to stop and see anything very well; I would have liked to look at the radar setup more closely.  The wheel room and chart room were less cramped, but M seemed uninterested at things you couldn’t interact with (the engine-room telegraph and controls were all bolted down and immovable), so we climbed back down.

The Lexington’s flight deck, abaft the bridge and looking forward

We got drinks to cool us a little after all the climbing around, then found Mother and Chris again and decided that everyone but L was starting to wear out, and the aquarium might be a better idea for another day.   We went back to the car, parked three blocks away—very close by tourist-attraction standards— and found, when we started to leave the lot, that I’d forgotten to pick up the parking token you need to exit the gate.  I parked the car, left everyone else there with the engine running and the A/C on, and hiked the three blocks back to the ship to get the token, and then three blocks more back to the car, all at power-walking speed.  I started to leave again, and just as we got to the exit gate, a City meter man showed up from nowhere and started working the gate manually to let people through without needing the tokens.

When we got back to our room, we all lay down and had a couple of hours’ nap to recover, and I had a shower to wash off the heat and stickiness.  I got everyone up after seven on the ground that if we didn’t, all the restaurants would close and we’d have no supper.  Chris said earlier that he wanted to go to a seafood restaurant at least once, so we managed to find him one, run by a Viet family and full of several large parties of the parboiled, all straight off the beach and acting like themselves—i.e., noisy holiday-makers.  None of us could really have a conversation, since most of us are too deaf to hear over the competing noise.  The food was good enough by small-town restaurant standards, although Mother, who rarely eats anything deep-fried any more and doesn’t eat much at any meal, didn’t care for her fried prawns.

We’d heard the city would be putting on a municipal fireworks display as part of the celebrations for the Fourth and the centennial, but our enthusiasm for doing anything else was low, so we went straight back to the hotel and to bed, where we could still hear the fireworks display if not see it.

Getting to Palacios from Austin involves running down US Highway 183, which goes through a lot of nowhere-in-particular, a succession of small and smaller towns, ranging from vanished communities to wide spots in the road to middle-sized county seats of thirty and forty thousand.

The first piece of nowhere is only “nowhere” if you don’t know anything about Texas beef barbecue.  Lockhart, the county seat of Caldwell County, is home to two fine barbecue joints, both the result of a family squabble.  The Kreuz family started a meat market in 1900 and later branched out into smoking the meat, which led to people wanting to eat at the market, which led to a very old-fashioned restaurant, where your meal was served on sheets of pink butcher’s paper and eating with your fingers was (mostly) good manners.

The market/restaurant, Kreuz Market, operated in the same building, a block off the courthouse square, for ninety years or so, and ownership eventually came down to two brothers and a sister; the sister owned the building, the brothers the business.  They couldn’t agree on how much rent the business should pay for the building, and eventually it turned into a lawsuit over who got rights to the business name and who the location.  Finally, a court split the sheets, so to speak, and decided the brothers could keep the name but not the building, so they built a new location on the edge of town, with a grand re-opening where coals from the pit fire, which hadn’t been allowed to go out in eons, were ceremoniously carried at the head of a parade to Kreuz’s new location and used to light the new pit, while the old location renamed itself Smitty’s and kept the fires burning, so to speak.  We ate at Smitty’s, where the beef was really as fine as their reputation has it, and the (soupy) frijoles tasted good at least.  In the confusion (it was lunchtime, and the place was busy) the potato salad I ordered got lost, but it wasn’t really missed.

Before lunch, we stopped for a few minutes to see the  Dr. Eugene V. Clark Memorial Library, built in 1899 and in continuous operation since then.  The original library building is a Palladian rotunda, reminiscent of Monticello without the wings, and beautifully restored inside and out.  The east wall has an enormous, almost Methodist-looking stained-glass window given in memory of Dr. Clark, the floors are original hardwood polished to a satin shine, and two cast-iron spiral staircases lead to the meeting rooms on the second floor.  Tall windows with folding shutters were closed against the sun, and the building made a dim, cool refuge against the heat outside.  Some years back, the library ran out of space, so it took over a commercial storefront next door in the first floor of the Masonic Lodge, and connected the two with a closed-in walkway.

Lockhart also has an utterly gorgeous courthouse, restored to nearly original condition a few years ago with a grant from the Texas Historical Commission, and we stood and admired it for a few minutes before we left, which turned out to set the theme for the day.  183 runs through several county seats, almost all of which have Victorian courthouses worth admiring, and we stopped to look at each one.

Lockhart’s courthouse was built in the Second Empire style, as was its twin-sister in Goliad (more later on Goliad).   Both were designed by Henry Guidon, one of a whole fistful of architects who specialized in courthouses and other public buildings, and who had excellent grasp of the style and what it could be, and both were built by Martin, Byrne and Johnston of Comanche (yes, the same Comanche where I grew up).  The buildings have turrets and ox-eye windows and a clock tower with chimes, and clocks that tell everyone the time just as well as they did a hundred and twenty years ago.

Goliad County Courthouse, west exterior

While we didn’t go inside the courthouse at Lockhart, we did at Goliad, and it was a delight.  The restoration brought back the original polychrome stonework, interior tilework, and paint, so even with dark beaded wainscoting, the hallways and offices don’t feel oppressive.   We climbed the cast-iron staircase to the second floor, and I pointed out the place on the landing where a hundred years of people’s shoes, turning the corner to go up the next flight, had worn a small circular smooth place in the diamond-grid surface, as well as the carved newel posts.

Tilework where the first-floor hallways cross

First-floor hallway, looking north

Newel post (note carved pears)

The district courtroom, which occupies half the second floor, was even more wonderful.  The restoration had put back the original park-bench type seating, floored the room with a harlequin stained-concrete design in red and gray, refurbished the ornate bronze door handles, and restored the two box galleries at the rear corners.

Courtroom benches

Courtroom door handle and fingerplate

One of the courtroom galleries

After we’d seen all the courthouse anyone cared to see, we made a short detour out to La Bahia presidio and mission, site of the “Goliad Massacre,” where Captain James Fannin and 342 men, all prisoners of war, were executed during the Texas Revolution.

Although it looks like a state monument at first glance, La Bahia is owned and operated by the Catholic Church.  The exhibits had a lot of interesting material, but are horribly dated (to my eye, somewhere between 1950 and 1960) and badly need an overhaul.  A sign at the entrance said the displays were gradually being brought up to date and that some items were not on display, but I have a feeling it’s one of those projects that only goes by fits and starts and keeps running out of money, so visitors may have to look at exhibit “labels” typed with a manual typewriter on three-by-five notecards for some years to come.

The fort’s parade ground and wall are intact or rebuilt to period, with raised gun platforms and embrasures at each major corner, loopholes for infantrymen to fire through, and a guardhouse on the one corner without a gun platform.  L explained to M about the parade-ground well and how it was worked, then we hiked her up to the platform and I explained why embrasures and loopholes are funnel-shaped (gives a wider field of fire, while making it harder for attackers to hit the gun crew).  We went back through the enlisted men’s barracks and got to the chapel just in time to dodge a thundershower that had been chasing us for a while and finally caught up.

The Loreto chapel and part of the presidio’s wall

Ramp up to the northeast gun platform

Northwest guardhouse

L explains the well to M

Services are still held in the chapel, and the number of votive candles lit before pictures of the Madonna and Child made it clear this was a functioning church.   The altar wall is dominated by a huge 1950s fresco of the Annunciation, while a side chapel holds national, state, and city flags representing the origins of every Texan soldier who died at Goliad.

Loreto chapel

Because we’d stayed a while at La Bahia, we didn’t reach Victoria until after 5:00, and their courthouse was already locked up for the holiday weekend.  We could only admire the outside, which was certainly worth admiring.  It’s yet another of the big fistful of polychrome Richardson Romanesque courthouse structures, recently restored with Historical Commission money, and was remarkable for the stone the original architect specified—a combination of white limestone and a blue-gray sandstone called “blue Muldoon,” after the quarry where it’s found.  A historical marker told us the original architect, J. Riely Gordon, was “removed from the project because of his other commitments,” probably meaning he’d taken on too many jobs at once and was never onsite when you wanted him, and the project handed over to Eugene Heiner, another well-known architect of nineteenth-century courthouses, to finish.

The Victoria County courthouse

Unlike most courthouse “squares” in Texas, where the courthouse is in the center and the commercial district ranged around it, Victoria’s courthouse sits on a half-block lot with a public plaza in front of it, a survival of Mexican city planning concepts.

From Victoria south and east you get to the coastal prairie, a completely flat and uninteresting landscape, unless you’re a connoisseur of grain sorghum fields, and there were a lot of sorghum fields to see.  Eventually we turned north to run across the head of Matagorda (“kills-fat”) Bay, and reached Palacios and our hotel by late afternoon.

My brother has this fascination with old hotels; he likes to hunt them out and stay at, or at least visit, them as often as he can manage.  Sometimes this is all right, as at last Thanksgiving, when he arranged for us to stay at the Blackstone Hotel in Fort Worth.  That one was a 1920s luxury hotel that had almost been torn down but was saved at the last minute, restored to a fare-thee-well, and turned into a boutique hotel by Marriott, courtesy of a ten-year bed-tax forgiveness by the City of Fort Worth to get Marriott to agree to do the project.

Then there are the ones like the Luther Hotel.

The Luther is a huge, ramshackle beachfront hotel in Palacios, Texas, on Matagorda Bay.  It’s an old-time summer resort hotel, built in 1902 and has survived many storms and one bodily relocation more or less intact.   What hasn’t happened to it is any kind of modernization.   The general decor seems to be frozen somewhere around 1940, with some more recent furniture in the common areas, but nothing later than 1970.   The second-floor hallway—three stories, no elevators—has balding, orange nearly-shag carpeting.  It’s something like staying at your grandparents’ house, which hasn’t been redecorated since your parents were kids, and that your grandparents can’t see well enough to realize everything in the house is threadbare and moth-eaten.  Travel writers kindly call the hotel “unchanged” (isn’t THAT the truth!) and “quaint;” with the injection of two or three million dollars’ worth of remodeling and infrastructure updates it might aspire to quaint.  My own impressions range from “dilapidated” to “shabby” to “firetrap.”

The outside, in best seaside tradition, needs painting and has needed it for years.  People in coastal communities seem to have a love/hate relationship with paint; the love (and the paint) goes onto their boats and stuff that has to go in the water, and everything else gets left.  The hotel has thirty-eight rooms and suites; there’s also a row of eight stuccoed motor-courts on the edge of the property, but they’ve been allowed to go down so far that they’re now beyond repair, and the managers, an elderly couple who’ve run the place for years, say they’ll have to be torn down soon—although I think “soon” is probably being expressed in geological terms, and they’ll actually fall down first, the way things in small towns do.

We have what passes for a “suite,” and I suppose it is, by fishing resort standards.  It has one minuscule and one reasonable-sized bedroom, two airliner-size bathrooms that were carved out of the bedrooms, which is why our bedroom is tiny, nearly full-size kitchen (with non-working range but working fridge), and a common entryway/“sitting room.”  Our room does have a period ceiling fan—“period” meaning it has one speed, high.  I don’t think there’s a stick of furniture in the bedroom that dates later than World War II, the 1970s velveteen loveseat in the sitting area has an enormous rip in one arm that someone tried (and failed) to conceal with strategically placed pillows, and our bedstead is so wobbly that I go in hourly fear of it collapsing.  (I may yet get to re-tell James Thurber’s “The Night the Bed Fell” at first hand.)   Air conditioning is courtesy of window units which do, for a mercy, cool efficiently.

Our shower may be the damnedest piece of the whole experience.  Besides the hot and cold taps, there’s an ordinary gate valve spliced into the pipe just behind the (leaky) shower head, and that is what controls the water flow.  It’s handyman engineering—while it may do the job, it’s not elegant and certainly not the best solution.

Despite all this, the hotel is full for the weekend, and it seems to be one of those places people keep coming back to, perhaps for sentimental reasons.  Guests actually talk to one another in the lobby and on the front porch—the hotel does have a two-story-tall front portico, complete with white-painted slat-back rocking chairs.  The Luther must have some appeal that I’m missing, though; I can’t see how anyone could possibly be staying here for the creature comforts.

To cap the experience, there are no room phones, sure as hell no Net access, and I can’t even find a coffee shop with a hot spot in a town of five thousand people, it’s so far off the backbone, so posting this will have to wait until I return to civilization Sunday.

The hotel, from the municipal boardwalk

The motor courts

Motor court wall damage