Notes of an unusual day

L, T, and M left for Maryland at eight this morning, about when L had intended.  They’re stopping at Brownsville, Tennessee tonight, and will make Danville, Virginia tomorrow evening.  They only had one hitch—in the commotion of leaving, they forgot to pack the playsuit set that L made as a present for her niece, whose birthday is next Saturday.  I’ll have to send it off by priority mail Tuesday so it gets there in time.

My mother was also visiting this weekend, so after the others left she and I took out to spend the day doing things we enjoy that no one else would be greatly interested in doing.  We spent an hour or so at the Texas State Cemetery, burial place for state officials, notables (writers, important academics, benefactors) and Revolutionary and Civil War veterans.  I took pictures of the gravestones for Dr. Walter Prescott Webb (The Great Plains, The Great Frontier), buried next to Fred Gipson (Old Yeller, Savage Sam), but forgot to take J. Frank Dobie, buried in the next row.  I got Jim and Miriam Ferguson, the first husband-and-wife governor team; they have a fine Art Deco stone that is totally wasted on a worthless old buzzard like Farmer Jim.  I tried for a photo of General Sid Johnston’s marble effigy, sculpted by Elisabet Ney, but because of the poor angle I’m not sure I came away with anything.  I did rather better with Pompeo Coppini’s bronze statue of Stephen F. Austin, which I caught with the sun in just the right place, and also took pictures of several typey Victorian stones of people whom almost nobody would now recognize.  We wound up directing someone else to John Connally’s grave, just down the hill from Radical Republican governor Ed Davis, whose obelisk is the tallest monument in the entire cemetery as well as being at its highest point.

I was very pleased with the restoration of the State Cemetery, accomplished because of the late Lt. Governor Bob Bullock, who took it on as one of his particular projects from shame over how badly the place had been allowed to run down.  It’s now a wonderful place to stroll, pleasantly and peacefully landscaped and very well kept.

From there, we went to Oakwood Cemetery, the main cemetery for the City of Austin.  The old section has been allowed to fall into neglect, with many stones knocked over and broken by vandals, others pushed up by tree roots, and many stones eaten up with weathering and lichen.  It needs someone of Governor Bullock’s stature locally to take it on as a pet project, but I don’t see that coming anytime soon.  Again, Mother and I took pictures of nice, typey stone examples and some examples of stones that were crumbling from weather and neglect; some of the limestone examples are completely illegible and fallen into a heap of gravel from weather-caused spalling.

After that, we had a nice brunch at the East Side Cafe, and then went down to the Bullock Texas History Museum (another of his pet projects), to see the exhibition on David Crockett.  I was less pleased with it than I’d hoped, because a lot of the exhibits seemed to concentrate on his legend instead of on his historical fact, on the “Davy Crockett” craze of the 1950s and not on the 19th century origins.  I was perfectly outraged at egregious mistakes I found on some of the exhibition labels; I think the worst was when I read the caption over a holograph letter of Crockett’s that began with something like, “Your letter of the 14th was recd today . . . .” and so help me, the label claimed the abbreviation for “received” was ILLEGIBLE!  Illegible, my Aunt Fanny; the problem was that whoever did the captions wasn’t educated enough to know a standard and conventional nineteenth-century letter-writer’s abbreviation when he saw it.  Both Mother and I read it at once when we looked at the original letter; even had it not been legible (and it was; Crockett wrote a good hand although spelling wasn’t his strong suit), the word could have been inferred from the context of the sentence.  It was nothing but sloppy, careless work.  And that was merely the worst example; it wasn’t at all the only one.  I’m composing a strong letter in my head to the exhibition’s curator; that kind of screwup should not go unremarked.