San Fernando Cemeteries No. 1 & No. 2

Posted on October 31, 2023 by admin

Halloween snow today. Flurries on and off through much of the day, presaging a cold outing for those trolling for candy.

I doubt that the kids mind. Their adult companions trailing behind, on the other hand, might be a mite annoyed. Glad that part of being a parent is well behind me.

Early on Saturday morning I made my way to what I believe is the oldest Catholic cemetery in San Antonio, San Fernando No. 1, which is in a modest neighborhood just west of the King William district. Cementerio de San Fernando, to go by the entrance.

Overnight rain had left puddles and mud. I was the only living person among the old stones in soggy ground that morning.

The elements continue to wear away even the larger memorials.

Some Ursuline Sisters rest in the cemetery.

Some signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and a SA mayor or two are reportedly buried in the cemetery as well, but this was the only memorial of note that I saw.

“Placido Olivarri is most famous for his service as a scout and guide for the Texas Revolutionary Army under Sam Houston,” the Texas State Historical Association reports. “His proficiency as a scout was so great that Gen. Martín Perfecto de Cos of the Mexican Army offered a substantial bounty for Olivarri’s capture, dead or alive… Following the Texas Revolution, Olivarri became a landowner and wagon train manager in San Antonio.”

San Fernando No. 1 reportedly started taking burials in 1840 – during the brief period of the Republic, that is. The newer San Fernando No. 2 (opened in 1921) is considerably west of the first one, but not hard to find, and still an active cemetery. There is a No. 3, but I didn’t make it out that way this time.

I arrived at No. 2 in the afternoon, once the skies had cleared. It too was muddy.

Deep in the cemetery is a section for clergy.

Some stones suggest 20th-century prosperity in San Antonio. Or at least, money for more impressive memorials.

In the newer sections, more color.

After all, the Day of the Dead is coming soon.

Ruby City

Posted on October 30, 2023 by admin

I didn’t take many pictures in Austin this time around. But after dinner one night, Tom had to answer a call, and I had a few moments to document a minor example of Austin neon. It’s a good town for neon.

That was the restaurant entrance. The full name of the place is Wu Chow. Good chow, as it happens.

In San Antonio, I was much more attuned to image-making, at least on Saturday, when I was footloose and out to see new things. Such as Ruby City.

Ruby City is a new art museum west of downtown on the not-so-mighty San Pedro Creek. Which is wider at this point than much of the San Antonio River.

“The story of Ruby City — the landmark museum designed by world-renowned architect Sir David Adjaye… — begins with the lucid dream of a dying woman,” Texas Monthly reported just before the museum opened in 2019.

“In the spring of 2007, Linda Pace, at age 62 a legendary patron of contemporary art in San Antonio, understood that her breast cancer, diagnosed a few months earlier, was likely terminal. All the money in the world could not keep the woman born into both the Pearl beer and Pace Foods families alive long enough to see through her final project, a permanent home for her art collection.”

Ideas for the building design came to her in a dream, the magazine reported, and – having skill in drawing and materials ready at her bedside – she drew sketches and provided them to the architect. About a decade after her death, the building was realized. How much the final structure hewed to the dream-images is impossible to know, at least for those of us standing at the base of the concrete walls years later.

I arrived just as the museum opened at 10 in the morning. I’d been encouraged to make an online “appointment” before coming, so I did. Would crowding be an issue at this free museum? Well, no. During my first few minutes there, I was the only visitor. Everyone else worked there, and there weren’t that many of them. It was a little weird being in a gallery in which the employee’s (or volunteer’s) only job is to watch you, except pretend they aren’t really watching you.

Never mind, the entrance asks one and all to “be amazing.” I made a self-portrait.

Be amazing. That’s a tall order. Better to be “interesting” or maybe “remarkable” on a really good day. Much of the artwork inside is at least interesting. A few pieces I’d say were even remarkable, but nothing amazed me much. Maybe I’m jaded.

Actually, this rectangle o’ river rubbish was mildly amazing.

“Riverbank” (2006), by Luz Maria Sanchez of Mexico City. Made from clothing, bags, bottles etc. found in the Rio Grande. Behind it is “Mobile Home II” (2006) by Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese artist living in London. Its items are connected to laundry lines slowly pulled back and forth by small electric motors.

This one I found remarkable. “Ultimate Joy” (2001) by American artist Jim Hodges. A light bulb artist, at least for this work.

“View of Gorge” (1999) by Anne Chu, an American artist (d. 2016).

Outside is a sculpture garden with three pieces – one of which seemed to be removed for now. No matter, one of the remaining ones is an impressive pile: “5000 lbs. of Sonny’s Airplane Parts, Linda’s Place, and 550 lbs. of Tire-Wire” (1997) by Nancy Rubins.

A final comment on the building itself. Maybe not the color I’d have chosen, though it’s an interesting one. Why aren’t more concrete structures one color or another? Is it too expensive compared with plain dirty white? Imagine how many ugly concrete structures would be a little less ugly with a dash of color.

South Texas ’23: Kerrville & Bandera

Posted on October 29, 2023 by admin

Last Tuesday, my brother Jay and I drove from San Antonio to Kerrville, Texas (pop. 24,200) to visit an old friend of his, who has a separate small building in his back yard to house an extensive model train that he’s building. We got a detailed tour. Cool.

That was part of a larger trip that took me to Austin and San Antonio to visit friends and family. I flew to Austin on October 18 and returned from San Antonio today.

Rather than take I-10 west from San Antonio to Kerrville (though we returned that way), we drove Texas 16, which is mostly a two-lane highway that winds from exurban San Antonio and then into the Hill Country. Always good to drive the Hill Country, even on a rainy day. It was a rainy week in South Texas on the whole, but still quite warm for October. Had a few sweaty walks in San Antonio last week as well, more about which later.

Besides visiting Bob and his wife Nancy and his HO model train construction, we also stopped by the Glen Rest Cemetery in Kerrville (my idea). The recent rains had made it a muddy cemetery. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but also mud to muddy?

A curious figure. At least for a cemetery.

Glen Rest – which is incorrectly noted as Glen Rose on Google Maps – dates from 1892, according to the Texas Historical Commission plaque on site. “Glen Rest Cemetery is the final resting place for many pioneer and historic families of Kerrville and the surrounding Hill Country,” it says.

En route to Kerrville on highway Texas 16 is the much smaller burg of Bandera, pop. 829 and seat of Bandera County. That means a courthouse, and we stopped to take a look.

The courthouse itself isn’t unusual, but it is positioned unusually. Instead of being the focus of a square, it’s simply facing the highway. So are a handful of memorials. This one honors “All Cowboys” because Bandera is “Cowboy Capital of the World.”

This stone oddity honors a Bandera pioneer named Amasa Clark, giving his birth and death dates as 1825-1927.

More about him is at Frontier Times magazine, which annoyingly doesn’t say when the text was written, who wrote it or where it was published. Internal evidence, along with the style of writing, puts it in the early 1920s, probably in a local newspaper. Clark came to the site of Bandera in 1852, not long after serving in the war with Mexico, and stayed until his death in 1927 as a very old man.

Also along the highway in Bandera is a strip center including a store the likes of which I’d never seen before. Neither had Jay.

We had to take a look inside.

I should have asked to woman behind the counter how long the store has been in business, or whether the man himself gets a cut, or some other questions, but I was in vacation mode, not interview mode. So all I know is what I saw, which was enough. For the record, and this is no surprise, Trump overwhelmingly carried Bandera County — 79.1% to 19.7% for Biden — in the 2020 election.

Not Yet, I Haven’t

Posted on October 12, 2023 by admin

Not long ago I came across the blog of a fellow – Everywhereman.me — who aspired to visit everywhere mentioned in the U.S. version of the song “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He then did just that, mostly by motorcycle. I don’t think I’ll do that exactly, but that’s the kind of meshuga I like, since I’m a bit touched myself.

Though others have recorded it, including Johnny Cash no less, I associate the U.S. version with Hank Snow. As well I should.

The original version was Australian, written by Geoff Mack and a hit for Lucky Starr. I have to give it its due. Australia is full of lots of weird and gorgeous place names, after all.

You need a written list to keep up with Lucky, as posted in Wiki. Or a very detailed knowledge of Australia.

Other versions for other places exist. None other than Stompin’ Tom Connors starts off in the United States, but naturally gravitates to Canada, with an entire verse about the Maritimes.

Canada’s fine, but Texas place names are just as good.

By one Brian Burns, who managed to work in some of my favorites, ever since my days of poring over Texas road maps: Pflugerville, Dime Box, and Cut and Shoot.

Remember the Alamo. In This Case, As It Was In 2018

Posted on October 1, 2023 by admin

A summerish weekend to kick off October, and we were out and about in the warmth. Soon temps will be more in line with the usual Octobers of northern Illinois.

Some trees are changing, but most still are holding their green. That too is bound to change soon.

Five years ago in October, I spent some time in San Antonio after the passing of my mother. That included a walk around downtown. I was persuaded that my mother wouldn’t have wanted me to mope around the house, but rather do what I would have done anyway. That is, go out and see things.

Even in very familiar places.

San Antonio tends toward pleasant weather that time of the year, and so it was that day. A lot of people were visiting the Alamo, taking in some of the demonstrations on the grounds. Such as the firing of period firearms.

Not, I think, using actual ammunition. But everything else seemed authentic, especially the loud bang!

Downtown Dallas Sculpture, 2013

Posted on September 17, 2023 by admin

Wee rain in the wee hours, which makes waking up to go to the bathroom a pleasure, at least once you settle back into bed. The light rain continued after daybreak, and made a pleasant backdrop for staying in bed to read. I expect the grass to respond by re-greening and unkempt-ing.

Ten years ago this month I was in Texas, including downtown Dallas. I visited the Nasher Sculpture Center then, which has the best sculpture real estate developer Raymond Nasher (d. 2007) could buy, and lots of it. Such as a bug-eyed Picasso (“Tête de femme,” 1931).

“La Nuit” (ca. 1902-09) by Aristide Maillol.

And something a little newer, “Quantum Cloud XX (tornado)” (2000) by Sir Antony Gromley.

The Nasher isn’t the only place in downtown Dallas to spot sculpture. Not far away is “Colts in Motion” (1980) by Anna Debska.

As well as “Bear Mountain Red-A Texas Landscape” (1982) by Alice Maynadier Bateman.

It’s a whopper that has outlasted its original corporate patron. A nearby sign says the work was carved on site from a 12.5-ton block quarried near Fredericksburg, Texas, for the building, then known as the Diamond Shamrock Tower (717 North Harwood St.). The company had moved to Dallas from Cleveland not long before – companies moving to Texas isn’t a new thing – but was eventually swallowed by Valero Energy, which is based in San Antonio.

Big Bend Camera Failure

Posted on April 30, 2023 by admin

Though I grew up in Texas, I never got around to visiting Big Bend NP until five years ago in April. Didn’t give it much thought while I schemed to go other places. The distance to the park is more psychological than geographic, I think. From San Antonio, for example, it’s a full-ish day’s drive to the park (six hours), but since when have Texans ever said, That’s too far to drive?

I had two cameras with me on the trip. One, my sturdy Olympus, model number I can’t remember, a standard and not especially expensive digital camera I acquired in 2012 so I could take pictures at events for a new freelance job. It took good pictures, better than I expected. The other digital image-maker at Big Bend was my camera phone. It was newer than the Olympus, since I got it to go to Mexico City a few months earlier. Even so, it only intermittently produced good pictures.

I started capturing the Big Bend scenery with the Olympus, as usual. It started taking vastly overexposed images, often the second or third of the same scene.

A thing that made me go hm.

Still, I got some decent images with the Olympus. It’s hard to go wrong in Big Bend.

By the time I got to Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande, the Olympus had quit taking anything but overexposures. So I resorted to using the camera phone, producing lower-quality pictures that were sometimes OK.

The Olympus revived to create some good images later in the trip, but was increasingly unreliable. That was its last trip. Later I checked its settings, tried different settings, tried different data storage cards, and poked around online for some reason for it taking overexposures, to inconclusive results.

Once upon a time, you’d have taken your broken camera to a shop for examination and possible repair, but now? I figured I’d gotten my money’s worth out of the Olympus, and soon acquired just as good camera — better in some ways — in the form of a used iPhone that was no longer a communication device.

The failure of my camera on a trip was a kind of inconvenience, though barely even that. Back when Ann went to Washington, D.C., with a junior high group, some camera error or other meant she returned with few images. This upset her. I told her I was sorry she lost the images. But as worthwhile as capturing images can be, or sharing them, seeing a place yourself is the important thing.

The Sunken Gardens, 2013

Posted on March 5, 2023 by admin

I’m not sure I realized it during my visit in March 2013, but the Sunken Gardens in Brackenridge Park in San Antonio had been restored only about 10 years earlier, by a public-private partnership. Nice work.

The Sunken Gardens is another one of those places I’ve visited across the decades with a shifting array of companions: my grandmother, first of all, but also every one of my immediate family, cousins, high school friends, visiting girlfriends, other out-of-town visitors, my fiancé-then-wife, my children. It’s a personal favorite of a place.

It isn’t authentic in the sense that Japanese garden designers created it. Rather, the city parks department created it from an abandoned quarry in the 1910s, probably after consulting photographs and maybe other sources on Japanese gardens, but I don’t know that. Maybe the department just winged it.

It is authentic San Antonio: an interpretation of a Japanese garden that whatever the inspiration, is inspired.

The main pavilion, an impressive bit of rock laying.

And of woodwork.

Ah, Texas in March. Spring green, ahead of summer brown.

Youth.

Been 10 years. I ought to go back if I can, but I’ve accumulated a lot of personal favorite places over the years.

McNay Art Museum, 2015

Posted on February 26, 2023 by admin

Remarkable how the 2010s are receding so quickly. How is that possible? The tumults of the early 2020s, with the prospect of more to come? A kind of red-shifting of past years that gets more pronounced as old age sets in?

After all, the more moments you’ve had, the less any particular one might count, even relatively recent ones. Or does it work that way? No doubt there are TEDx talks about the plasticity of memory, all erudite and maybe even persuasive — until some future decade, when they’ll be considered wrongheaded if they’re ever watched, which they won’t be.

These thoughts occurred as I was looking through my picture files for February 2015, when I spent some high-quality time in south Texas. One evening during that visit, I popped over the the McNay Art Museum, one of San Antonio’s lesser-known treasures.

I’d been visiting the museum for years. Decades. We went there on field trips in elementary school in the early ’70s. It helps that it’s conveniently located near my mother’s house and the school I went to — no more than a mile away.

“Ohio-born heiress Marion Koogler first visited San Antonio in 1918, shortly after her marriage to Sergeant Don Denton McNay, who was called to active duty in Laredo, Texas. Later that year Don McNay died from the Spanish flu,” the museum says.

“In 1926, Marion moved to San Antonio, where she met and married prominent ophthalmologist Donald T. Atkinson. The following year, she purchased her first modern oil painting, Diego Rivera’s ‘Delfina Flores,’ and the Atkinsons commissioned San Antonio architects Atlee and Robert Ayres to design a 24-room Spanish Colonial-Revival house that would one day become the core of the McNay Art Museum [which opened in 1954]”

There was a later addition (2008) to the house to expand the museum, which now has about 22,000 works, mostly 19th- to 21st century, many regional, but not all.

I’m especially taken with the gorgeous courtyard. I’ll bet more than one proposal of marriage has happened there.

The courtyard features a few works from the collection, such a Renoir, “The Washerwoman” (1917).

The heart-wrenching “War Mother” (1939) by Charles Umlauf (1911-94), a sculptor originally from Michigan, but living in Chicago and working for the WPA when he created it.

The work is credited with helping him get a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin in the early ’40s, which he held to 40 years.

Another Umlauf: “Cruxifix” (1946).

A remarkable talent. One of these days, I want to visit the Umlauf museum, which is in Austin. And of course, I want to go back to the McNay again.

The National Shrine of St. Thérèse

Posted on January 8, 2023 by admin

Well over a decade ago, during a summertime visit to San Antonio, I drove to the west side of the city to see the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower, which I’d never seen or even heard of before, despite growing up in that city. It was very hot that day, as it tends to be that time of the year, so I didn’t linger outside to take many pictures, though I snapped a few marginal ones.

This is a better image. I’m not sure at what point I realized that the basilica in San Antonio and the National Shrine of St. Thérèse in Darien, Illinois, were dedicated to the same person, Thérèse de Lisieux, but I know now. And whatever else I know about St. Thérèse, I also have some sense of her immense popularity as a saint, inspiring edifices around the world in her honor.

We arrived at the Darien shrine just before noon on December 29, an overcast but not especially cold day. Above freezing, anyway. There it is, I told Yuriko.

So we went in. A few minutes passed before I realized that we not in the shrine, but in the nearby museum building, which I believe was the shrine before a new one was completed a few years ago. The sign on this building makes me think that. If so, there needs to be a signage update.

This is the current shrine.

In effect, this is the fourth shrine to her that has existed in the Chicago area. The first two were in the city, a larger one succeeding the original as her popularity grew in the 1920s.

The church that housed the second shrine burned down nearly 50 years ago, but by the 1980s the Carmelites were able to find the scratch the build a third shrine out in the suburbs. The demographics were going that way anyway.

The Carmelites tasked Charles Vincent George Architects, based in nearby Naperville, to design the fourth and latest shrine, which was completed in 2018.

Behind the altar is St. Thérèse in glass.

“The architectural solution pays homage to St. Therese throughout, from the main building’s shape, inspired by the unfolding petals of a flower, a nod to St. Therese’s nickname ‘Little Flower,’ to key structures, such as the plaza clock tower, reminding us of her clockmaker father, and the 24-column colonnade, serving as a symbol of St. Therese’s 24 years of life,” CVG notes.

“As St. Therese had humble beginnings, special attention was taken to provide simple building materials using stone, brick and the limited use of wood for construction materials. The entire building layout focuses on the center altar and image of St. Therese etched in the chancel glass wall, through which there are views of her statue built out into the lake behind the chapel.”

In December, St. Thérèse is the star of Christmas trees in the shrine.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tree decorated with prayers before, but there it was. All of them to the saint.

The museum included some seasonal features as well, such as a nativity under a more permanent woodwork depicting the saint.

Just in case anyone is uncertain, labels come with the nativity scene. Guess that’s helpful for kids who have just learned to read, but I as far as can remember as a kid, the figures were something that everyone knew. Essential Christmas lore, even for public school children. Maybe that’s not true anymore.

Modern stained glass. Some nice abstractions plus holy figures.

What would a saint’s shrine complex be without some relics?

I didn’t know dust could count as a relic, but I’m not up on what can and can not constitute a relic. The museum also has a few relics of Thérèse’s parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, who happen to be saints as well.

“Louis had tried to become a monk, but was rejected because he could not master Latin,” a sign in the museum says. “Zélie Guérin tried to become a Sister of Charity, but was rejected due to poor health.”

They couldn’t take vows, but apparently did the next best thing: produce five daughters (the survivors of nine children), all of whom became nuns.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: Texas