The CBS television network broadcast “Silent Victory: The Story of Kitty O’Neil” on the evening of Jun. 17, 1979. Kitty Linn O’Neil was born in Corpus Christi, Texas on Mar. 24, 1946. She was still in diapers when simultaneously stricken with measles, mumps and what may have been smallpox. Her mothe...

The instant Robert Ervin Howard learned his comatose mother was not long for this world, the fantasy writer decided Jun. 11, 1936 would be his last day on earth. Bob Howard was born in 1906 at Peaster but left the wide-spot-in-the-road while still in diapers. His father, a footloose country doctor, ...

The daughter of a long dead and all but forgotten hero of the Texas Revolution unveiled a statue of her tragic father at a Galveston intersection on Oct. 20, 1938. San Jacinto should have ensured him success and immortality, but Sidney Sherman knew only pain and disappointment. The most powerful pol...

An ax-swinging fiend that had terrorized the Texas capital for weeks struck again on the night of May 5, 1885 leaving a mother’s dead body for her young children to find. The rampage started with a slaying in Austin’s most affluent neighborhood on the day before New Year’s Eve 1884. The victim was M...

On April 22, 1935, West Texans were still feeling the effects of the “black blizzard” that struck without warning the previous week blotting out the sun and causing every living creature to gasp for breath. Drought, overgrazing and outdated farming methods stripped much of the Great Plains of the gr...

“Deacon Jim” Miller, the prime suspect in the ambush of Pat Garrett and many other murders-forhire, was lynched in Ada, Oklahoma on Apr. 19, 1909. A diabolical genius who never depended upon mere luck, Jim Miller was not just another fast gun. Besides being a professional killer, perhaps the first o...

“Was the late secretary of war removed in consequence of his attempt fraudulently to give to Gov. Houston the contract for the Indian rations?” an Ohio congressman asked on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on March 24, 1832. Three years had come and gone since Sam Houston resigned as g...

T he Borden County courthouse was the site of an anything-goes wrestling match on Feb. 27, 1904, with cowboys and sodbusters battling over dirt-cheap real estate in a once-in-a-lifetime sale. A favorite subject of motion pictures and television has long been the “range war,” violent clashes between ...

Jimmy Demaret trailed Dr. Cary Middlecoff by one stroke with five holes to go in the fourth and final round of the Thunderbird tournament at Palm Springs on Jan. 22, 1956. Jimmie Newton Demaret was born the fourth of ten children in 1910 in Houston.   He was bitten by the golf bug at an early age, w...

O utraged by the General’s defense of the Cherokees, Col. Sam Jordan grabbed an ax handle and took a swing at Sam Houston on Dec. 11, 1840, but Adolphus Sterne blocked the blow, saving the intended victim from serious bodily harm. Wherever he went in his illustrious life, Sam Houston made fast frien...