Monday Meanderings - 2.4.2019

The Juarez Pizza Palace

Many, many years ago, back when I worked for Sweet Publishing Company, Barb and I - along with John Allen and Sue Chalk - were sent out to conduct a one-night teacher's workshop. Let me be clear. John Allen, Sue and Barb were the teachers. I was sent along to haul water.

Our host was a church in Killeen, Texas, a community about an hour north of Austin, home to one of the largest military bases in the world, Fort Hood.

We completed the workshop, packed up and started home, thinking that we should be able to find any number of places to grab a late supper on the way home. What we did not know was that at that time, Killeen rolled up the sidewalks about 9 PM on weekday nights, actively discouraging late-night visitation by any of the more than 150,000 soldiers stationed on the base.

So we circled a few blocks, looking for any establishment that looked like it might serve food, and came across a dump with a sign that read "Juarez Pizza Palace." There were no cars, and we weren't positive it was actually open, so John Allen hopped out to go in and check. In a minute, he motioned us to come on in and the 4 of us were soon seated inside with the owner, Morty Shapiro and his elderly mother.

We looked over a menu that listed every possible combination of pizza toppings known to be edible - some that I had never heard of - decided on some, and told Morty what we wanted and that we would share a couple of large pizzas.

"You can't eat 2 large pizzas," Morty said.

"We're pretty hungry," John Allen said.

"Doesn't matter. I'll fix you 2 medium pizzas, and you can take what you don't eat home," said Marty.

Morty was right. We didn't finish the 2 mediums. But part of that was because Marty kept bringing us samples of more exotic varieties. More about that in a minute.

While the pizzas were baking, Morty, an affable fellow, sat down with us to chat. Mama sat too, but she didn't have much to say. I'm pretty sure she was from "the old country" and probably didn't speak much English. We were the only people in the place, so it was only natural for all of us gather round the table.

We asked Morty about the name of the place - "Juarez Pizza Palace" - and he said that was the name when he bought it, and he couldn't afford a new sign, so he just left it. He said the previous owner was a Mexican, and the name probably reminded him of home.

He said he had owned several pizza places in Austin, where he heavily promoted himself as "Morty the Pizza King," but there were too many pizza places in Austin, so he moved north, thinking it to be greener pastures.

"Had it been," we asked?

"Nah, but I won't go hungry, so it's okay."

We asked about the endless list of toppings, and he said he wasn't sure there wasn't anything you couldn't put on a pizza. At least he didn't think so. He said once some guy said "You should try peanut butter," so he added it to the menu. Somebody else had said, "Ever put sauerkraut on a pizza?"

We all went "Ewww," but he hopped up and said, "You gotta try it. It's really interesting!" and he went back to the kitchen to fix a sampler sauerkraut pizza..

He was right. It was really... interesting. And no, that's not a picture I snapped back in the late '70's. Turns out, if you Google "sauerkraut pizza" you find that it's really pretty popular. Can't help but wonder if we were in on the beginning, at the Juarez Pizza Palace in Killeen, Texas.

And for the record, the July 1976 Texas Monthly "Best of Texas" column had the following entry:

Best Pizza
Morty’s Pizza King Number Three, Austin. The all-cheese (four cheeses with garlic-filled tomato sauce) pizza is Texas’ best. No kidding. For the de­mented, there are madcap flavors including peanut butter and lox.

And, I might add, sauerkraut.

Monday Meanderings - 1.28.2018

Car Wars

For the most part, our neighborhood is quiet and peaceful. There's the occasional Next Door report of lost or found pets,  and there's the Friday night garage band rehearsal from somewhere down the block, but by-and-large, nothing much out of the ordinary happens around here. Until recently.

It is not uncommon to see news items about neighbor's spats escalating to unfortunate - even deadly - levels, but you generally don't expect to see those play out on your block. However, we are watching just such an escalation, and it's just across the street.

The neighbor of interest - we'll call him FT - has an old junker pickup parked on the street just below his driveway that sits partially on FT's side of the lot line and extends onto his neighbor CB's side of the line.

CB asked FT to move his pickup, as it makes trimming the adjacent grass difficult. FT responded by saying that the pickup is inoperable and actually belongs to a family member who has not been able to haul it off.

CB's response was to begin parking his car in front of FT's house. This seems rather spiteful to us, and inconvenient, since CB has to carefully avoid parking in front of FT's sidewalk - which is a City code violation - but at the same time avoid encroaching on the property of the up-street neighbor, MM. Then CB has to walk down the block to his house.

FT escalated the situation by putting his garbage and recycling bins in CB's designated landing zone. CB has simply moved them aside. FT-0, CB-1.

Next, FT put a large tree limb in the way. CB manhandled it onto FT's lawn. FT-0, CB-2.

FT got a friend to come and park his pickup in the contested space for a time. FT-1, CB-2.

The friend eventually had to take his vehicle home, and since then it has been a steady succession of CB parking his car in front of FT's house - 3:30pm to 5:00am and on weekends.

Were it not for the fact that CB's car ends up parked directly across from our driveway, and we must remember it's there so as not to back into it - something we did to FT's car the 1st week we lived here - it would be laughable.

That and the fact that these neighbor spats often end up on the nightly news.

I'll keep you posted.

Monday Meandering - 1.14.2019

Camp FCI La Tuna

I don't know what jogged it loose, but an odd memory came to my mind the other evening and proved that after more than 57 years, I still have stories that my wife has never heard.

In my early years, my family camped all over the Western United States. We started out with a home-made tent - an enormous sleep-six thing that ultimately did in my mother's sewing machine in the making thereof. She wanted, and got, a new one anyway. Pieced together from heavy canvas and coated with some kind of vile-smelling solution that almost waterproofed it, the thing took up much of the trunk and weighed as much as I did at the time.

I don't remember what our ultimate destination was on that trip. I just remember that we were headed west - my parents, my grandmother Anderson and me. And the tent. And if you head west from North Central Texas, it takes a long time to get out of the State of Texas.

I don't know if it was because of a late start, or if it was intended, but nightfall found us just beyond El Paso, looking for a place to unroll and erect our ginormous tent for the night. There was not, back then - nor is there now, a nice State Park or National Forest adjacent to El Paso, so Pops found an isolated area a short distance off the highway, and we dry camped our first night out.

I now call your attention to the satellite photo at the beginning of this post. The highway on the right side of the image is Highway 180 (and now, IH-10). It's pointed north and south in the photo, but it eventually heads west. And X marks the approximate position of the campsite. We're a few hundred yards off the highway (but close enough to hear traffic through the night) backed up against a fence.

You can see the fence, sectioning off the upper-left quarter of the photo. And you can see a cluster of buildings in that quadrant. Those buildings, dear reader, compose part of Federal Correction Institute La Tuna. A federal penitentiary. Over the years, the La Tuna population has varied between really bad guys in a maximum-security environment and not-that-bad guys (like Billie Sol Estes, for example) in a minimum security environment. 

To be sure, I don't know what the degree of security was at the time we visited the area, but I do know that the morning sun revealed a honkin' tall fence beside our campground - and a couple of prison guards sitting on the other, or operative, side of the fence.

They were polite, and assured us that they had checked on us often throughout the night as they patrolled the outer perimeter of the compound, but they pointedly suggested that we might want to break camp and head out on the highway as soon as possible.

And that is the long-forgotten story of Camp FCI La Tuna.

Monday Meanderings - 1.7.2019

Wait! What? In my home town?

I came across a startling fact the other day.

I have known the story of bigger-than-life characters Wyatt Earp and his buddy Doc Holliday since I was a boy. It is probable that Pansy Pace, the Breckenridge librarian, who went to great lengths to nurture my life-long love of reading, probably introduced me to these men and the Gunfight at OK Corral. Well, maybe. Neither one of them was exactly a role-model, but that aspect of their lives is often covered over with the blanket of revisionist legend.

While Wyatt Earp more or less overcame his outlaw persona (did you know he and his wife went to Alaska and built and managed the preeminent saloon in Nome, Alaska around 1900, "mining the gold miners"?), his running mate, Doc Holliday was bad to his consumptive core.

And he lived in Breckenridge Texas for a brief period.

Doc was evidently a pretty good dentist in his younger days (he died at age 36) and was in a successful practice with another dentist in Dallas, Texas around 1875. However, his tubercular cough sort put a serious crimp in his dental practice, and he turned to gambling as his sole means of support. The Dallas authorities ran him out of town for cheating at cards (and his habit of shooting at his fellow players), so he headed West, where the law was not so strictly enfo0rced.

As expected, he moved around a lot - Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming - and then, one step ahead of the authorities,  retraced his steps and came back to Texas. And ended up in Breckenridge, Texas. My home town.

He set up shop in an unknown saloon and it wasn't too long before he shot another player. But he only wounded him, and the injured party hunted Doc down later and seriously wounded him. Feeling unwelcome, Doc somehow made his way a few miles west to Fort Griffin (near Albany) and was nursed back to health by Mary Katherine Horony, a woman of un-questioned ill-repute who went by the sobriquet "Big Nose Nell," who became his "partner" for his remaining years.

For good reason, Doc never returned to Breckenridge, and  Fort Griffin deserves a blog entry all its own. Suffice it to say, to say the Fort Griffin Fandangle paints a more PG-rated picture than does actual history.

Monday Meanderings - 12.31.2018

New Year's Eve.

Traditionally, folks who write blogs and post items on social media and publish news articles and the such, reflect on the year coming to a close. The good, the bad and the ugly.

I'm not real big on reflection; never been much on omphaloskepsis.  I'll save you the effort of looking it up. "Contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation." Didn't believe me, did you? You just had to check.

But it has been an interesting year. 

We started it standing on the beach near Monterrey Bay, watching the sun set in the Pacific. In early May, we proudly watched Jericho graduate from Lipscomb, prepared to go out and change the world. We're confident he will.

In April, the local Learning Ally studio transitioned to a "Virtual Community," and I no longer made the twice-weekly trek to the studio (much to Barb's dismay). However, I was spending a lot of time shut up in my "recording studio."

In late May, we went to Lubbock, by way of Abilene. Abilene holds no interest to us these days; we normally skirt around it coming and going to Lubbock. This trip, we spent the night there going, and passed by the ACU campus on the way back - on our way to Breckenridge and the Lake Cabin. Last time we were in Breck was in the Fall of 2009 for my 50th High School Reunion. Like us, the town is aging.

In June, my first "serious" audioboook - about the Battle of Vicksburg - went to retail on Audible.com

In July, Barb lost her brother. And the day after the funeral, we set sail on a long-ago-booked cruise to Alaska that included a train trip to the interior and Denali National Park. Lows and Highs. Literally.

In September, we went to the Lake for Labor day, resuming a long-standing tradition that was rudely interrupted the previous year by hurricane Harvey.

In November, my "most ambitious" audioboook - about the Alaskan Inner Passage - went to retail on Audible.com


Watched Grace play in a tennis tournament at the Newcombe Tennis Ranch in Mew Braunfels, and the following week gathered the clan for Thanksgiving. Our house runneth over.

Strewn liberally throughout the calendar, bracketing these major events, were days filled - and I do mean filled - with doctor appointments, ESL and Citizenship lessons, sound system events and the mundane notations of things to do and places to be. 

Phew!

Planning a quiet (neighbors permitting) New Year's Eve.  Alexa! Wake me up when it's 2019!

Happy New Year.