THISWEEK IN TEXAS HISTORY
On May 15, 1970 Misty Fincher finally got her first good night’s sleep since a tornado tore through Lubbock four days earlier Moda Fincher, the little girl who grew up to be the first female radio announcer in the Lone Star State and, some say, the whole country, spent her early years in a tiny settlement called Bronte. The original inhabitants wanted to call their new home in the wide-open spaces of West Texas “Bronco,” but the postal authorities said that name was taken. So the town founder, who doubled as the doctor, came up with “Bronte” in honor of his favorite novelist – Emily Bronte. His neighbors, however, had the last word choosing to pronounce it “brahnt.”
Martin Dies, fire-breathing founder of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), came out of retirement on Apr. 26, 1952 to run for Texas’ new at-large congressional seat.
The only F5 tornado ever to touch down in the northernmost part of the Lone Star State tore through the Texas Panhandle on Apr.
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.”
