THIS WEEK IN TEXAS HISTORY
Frank Buck, the celebrated adventurer who brought exotic wildlife “back alive,” took his last breath not in a faraway jungle but in a Houston hospital bed on Mar. 25, 1950.
Speaking in public for the last time on Mar. 18, 1863, Sam Houston told the citizens of the town that bore his name, “The welfare and glory of Texas will be the uppermost thought while the spark of life remains in this breast.”
Eighty-eight thousand paying customers packed the Astrodome on Mar. 3, 1974 for Elvis Presley’s two sold-out performances, his last at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Jeff: McLemore, a feisty freshman congressman from Texas, butted heads with Woodrow Wilson on Feb. 17, 1916 over the president’s about-face toward the European war. Though surprised by the violent eruption of ancient antagonisms in 1914, most Americans took only a passing interest in the distant conflict. Above all, they wanted no part of the foreign feud, a consensus that produced the presidential pronouncement the United States “must be neutral in fact as well as name.”
Following a weeklong engagement at the Majestic Theater, a cheering crowd saw Harry Houdini, escape artist extraordinaire, off at the Dallas train station on Jan. 24, 1916.
Minutes after the armed robbery of the downtown post office on Jan. 14, 1921, Dallas police and irate citizens led by the city’s “Boy Mayor” chased down and captured the perpetrators.
Davy Crockett spent Christmas Day 1835 at Nacogdoches waiting for Ben McCulloch, but when the younger Tennessean was a no-show, his hero went on without him to San Antonio.
Two weeks after the amputation of most of his right leg, Monty Stratton was released from the hospital on Dec. 13, 1938.
THISWEEK IN TEXAS HISTORY
