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The Texas Transportation Corridor
Conventional wisdom holds that the elderly, especially the very elderly, are reactionary in their contemplation of new developments and projects and opposed to them because they are not like the memories of their youth which they cherish. Perhaps this is so but with respect to the proposed Texas Transportation Corridor I cannot believe that it is just sentimental hogwash. Might there not be a bit of reason and considered judgment involved in my opposition to the proposed Texas Transportation Corridor?
The current thinking envisions a multi-lane toll road from south to north, from Mexico to Oklahoma across Texas which will provide for increased speed limits (perhaps the elimination of speed limits) and the segregation of commercial truck traffic and automobile passenger traffic. It is further proposed that this be a toll road and current thinking is that a Spanish Company be awarded a contract to build the TTC and in payment therefore that this Spanish company be allowed to collect and keep the tolls for a period of sixty years in order to recoup their expense and make a profit I once made my living negotiating with Spanish companies on construction contracts, and I would be willing to bet that if this agreement comes to pass that there will be many safeguards in the way of tax rebates, right to re-negotiate term of contract if revenue estimates were not met, favorable laws to be passed by the Texas Legislature, etc ad infinitum.
When I go to the Big Bend National Park or drive down to Austin to see my daughter do you think that I take Interstate I30 west or I35 south to these destinations. Never! Not even when I am in a hurry. In the spirit of William Least Heat Moon I drive the blue highways through the Cross Timbers and Edwards Plateau country if going south or through the rolling plains and West Texas semi-desert if heading west. Life is too short to limit the scenery to the ads on the back of eighteen-wheelers or to wonder if the Porsche coming up behind you really knows you are there. I travel through Texas for the scenery. I like to see the wild turkeys, the raptors sitting on fence posts, and if it is the right time of day the many deer and antelope that this state has as a treasure. I like to drive through the small towns that still have architecture dating back to the 19th century and courthouses that look like gothic castles. Don’t look for sights like that along the Interstate highways or along the proposed TTC either.
State and local taxes in my state have skyrocketed in the last four years as a result of un-funded Federal mandates and the necessity of health care for a throng of illegal immigrants as well as increased police and court costs related to this immigration. If we now take over 2 million acres of Texas land out of the tax base the remaining land will per force be more heavily taxed.
Let’s take a look at the "benefits" that will be provided by the building and operation of the TTC:
1. It will require the purchase or condemnation under provisions of eminent domain of more than 2 million acres of mostly rural Texas farm and ranch land. There is a factor involved here that I am almost sure that the planners of the TTC do not take into consideration. There will be a cultural shift for thousands of people involved. One of the greatest assets of my little farm is that it is peaceful and quiet and restful and removed from the strident call of the city and its throngs. People out here wave at you when they meet you on the country road, and they do so whether they know you or not. In one grass fire several years ago my neighbors prevented my house from being consumed (I was away at the time) and took care of my livestock until I got back. The Lazy Bend of the Brazos is a sleepy, friendly, bucolic area, and that is just what I wanted after forty years of nerve-jangling, elbow-rubbing, commercial negotiation. Those who are displaced by the TTC or forced to live alongside it will lose most of the benefits that they moved to the country to gain. Then too my next door neighbor=s great grandparents moved into the Bend in 1851 and fought the Comanche here. Think how they must feel after that history. The right of eminent domain does not take those cultural benefits of the property into consideration. And even if it did there is no way you could compensate my neighbor, or even me, for moving us off this land.
2. It will destroy wildlife habitat and migration patterns wholesale. That area south of San Antonio toward Laredo is prime deer, javelina and turkey and quail and dove country. All along the proposed route of the TTC there will be deadly harm done to the habitat of wildlife, no matter how careful the constructors are. The TTC will cross the Rio Grande (three times), the Nueces, the Frio, the Leona, the San Antonio, The Colorado, the Guadalupe, the Brazos and the Trinity and the Red Rivers as a minimum, probably more depending on final route. The wildlife habitat and historic site destruction that will be caused by the massive right of way envisioned for the TTC will be almost indeterminate.
3. Quarrying of concrete aggregate and road base and the manufacturing of asphalt for paving will cause further heavy stress on the environment in an area already tearing up many pristine wildlife habitats. It will take acres of gravel pits and quarries to build a mile of roadway and all of the bridges and service roads. I have often said that I keep house like this was a gravel pit but I hate to see the State of Texas or the Federal Government embark upon any program that will increase the number of eyesores which this amount of gravel, sand and limestone will call for. Asphalt manufacture is already a contributor to air pollution in the state, and this will increase that problem.
4. The hauling of aggregate, asphalt and road construction materials is notoriously dangerous and a contributor to many accidents as well as undue wear and tear on the existing transportation infrastructure. Transportation death rates and repair costs of existing roadways and bridges will experience an increase when this program is in process.
5. There will be major delays in traffic for years due to interference of TTC construction at intersection points with the existing interstate and state highway system. Many farm-to-market roads and county roads will be closed off altogether because of the expense of permitting safe intersection by overpasses or underpasses to the TTC.
6. The smuggling of illegal contraband and illegal immigrants from Mexico will be assisted and aided by this project. Under the guise of “Americans don’t want these jobs” thousands of immigrants will actually be recruited to work on this major construction project, and they won’t go home.
7. Current planning envisions the letting of a contract to a Spanish company to build and operate the toll road. This in effect is bolstering the technology base and managerial acumen of the Spanish company and creating a sure competitor for US companies in future international business. It is ironic that the U.S. assures the success of its overseas competitors. After World War II there was a “Japanese Marshall Plan” in which we rebuilt Japanese industry to some extent. When I was seeking a source for very large waveguide for the Very Large Array antenna farm in Socorro New Mexico I found that equipment to manufacture 28 miles of this large precision waveguide were available in only one place C Japan. And we gave it to them under the “Japanese Marshall Plan”. Why do we want to make a Spanish company the number one road building company in the world?
8. It is almost a surety that the Texas Legislature will be asked to pass a law to the effect that all commercial truck traffic on the current I35 be forced to use the TTC and thus pay the resultant toll. Another case where the government messes in private business and determines their profit and loss by regulation or law. This action will almost surely result in increased freight rates because the trucking companies are already burdened with very heavy fuel costs and license fees and taxes. The truckers will have to be forced to use the toll road and I can envision several deceptive practices they may adopt to avoid doing so. And if a north south toll road built by a Spanish company is a good deal what about an east-west Texarkana to El Paso TTC for the convenience of the two coasts? Surely we can find a Japanese or Chinese company to build and operate that.
9. Our judicial system is now stretched to its very limit by vacant judgeships and frivolous tort suits. How can it support hundreds if not thousands of eminent domain suits and appeals? I would also expect some of the more active environmental organizations to file a number of suits even though I notice that
proponents of the TTC have already issued an environmental study showing that no harm will be done.
10. The program will create jobs and boost local economy. It is true that it will take a lot of jobs to build this toll road both on the road construction itself and on the supporting industries such as bridge beams and girders, sign fabrication, asphalt fabrication and aggregate quarrying and hauling I think this is a viable advantage that the proponents of the program have. There is no denying that the project will increase jobs and that some of them such as heavy machine earth moving equipment operators will be top notch jobs. I don=t believe that the temporary increase in jobs during the construction phase will be worth the nine negative factors which precede it.
Theoretically the TTC will make it faster to get from the northern Texas terminus of the toll road to Brownsville, Laredo and Del Rio more quickly than use of I-35 or other existing roads. I haven’t seen an estimate of how much quicker but the question that comes to me is, "Who cares?" The people who will be hurt by this project are the thousands of people displaced to acquire the right-of-way and the many more thousands of people forced to live by the side of a bustling, honking, dusty, unsightly TTC. And of those people who will be hurt how many of them will go to Laredo three times in their lifetime or give a hoot that it took them an extra hour or less to get there. Must we become like another California with government regulation concerning every possible act and taxes on every conceivable thing to pay for it? There are many things that money could be better spent for. It hurts me to see it spent even if I am wrong about the items above. We just don't need it. And since it is a government project it will most likely exceed estimate in its cost by a factor of three C just look at the minor project in Boston. And all we are really providing is three more routes for the drug smugglers, the immigrant "coyotes", and al Qaeda to come join us.
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Doc
His real name was John Alfred Arrington Turrentine but almost no one called him by any one of those name. He was my father’s younger brother. His mother even called him “Doc” except for the times she was scolding him. The origin of the nickname goes back to the time that he was about 12 years old and a gypsy carnival came to the small town of Lancaster near where he lived. Both John Alfred and his brother Frank managed to scrape together the few cents necessary to attend that carnival and the additional few cents necessary to have their fortunes told by an old gypsy woman. She predicted a great career for John Alfred as a noted physician and an equally notable life as a minister of the gospel for his brother who was my father. The prediction was not accurate but from that day on John Alfred was known in Lancaster as “Doc” and my dad was called “Preach.”. The name stuck on into adulthood with Doc but didn’t follow my father that long.
As I have explained in other correspondence the father of Doc and Frank disappeared without trace in 1912 while enroute to the Panama Canal to work there as an engineer. The ship that he was ticketed on from New Orleans burned and sank at sea but his name was not on the passenger list. This loss of their father caused Doc and Frank to become very close and they remained very close all of their lives.
Doc was a confirmed bachelor during the years that I was a child. He didn’t marry until he was in his late forties. He lived with his mother and stepfather on a rented farm near Lancaster and was a well known figure in the small north Texas town. He served at one time on the school board. He was an active Freemason and attained the 32 Degree by both the York and the Scottish Rites. Mostly he worked on the farm operated by his stepfather but also took other jobs in the winter when farm work was not so pressing. He worked at a lumber yard, He was a conductor for several years on the inter-urban train between Dallas and Waco. His formal education was limited to high school graduation but he read voraciously and expressed himself almost eloquently.
He had a very lively sense of humor and was not above practical jokes. But he liked board games such as checkers and Monopoly and we used to play many boisterous games before the fireplace on cold winter evenings. He was the typical Nietzsche image of “der blonde bestie” and yet he was very stern with himself in his moral code. He was almost without fear. He once told me apropos of nothing “When you go into a rough bar and begin to wonder if you are going to get out alive just keep your mouth shut, no one but you knows that you are not the toughest one in the bar.”
It would be inaccurate to say that Doc was gregarious but he was very sociable. He was polite and conmsiderate in his language and he was usually abreast of local, national and world news as well as all of the local gossip. But Doc had a tendancy to draw people out in conversation and succeed in getting them, into an intolerable and inaccurate position.; He did this so adroitly that few people recognized that he was doing it or even that he had done it when they found themselves in that position. He was also one of the lucky people who could laugh at themselves and if he did something stupid he would tell it about as readily as though someone else had been at fault.
Doc was a master dog trainer and yet he never seemed to devote any time or effort to training. He had one German shepherd named Carlo that seemed to understand every word he said. Doc would be reading the newspaper on the front porch and without looking at Carlo would say in a conversational tone "Carlo, I wish you would go get the cows". Carlo woul;d bound off toward the pasture and soon return with the family's cattle for milking
Doc was very fond of me yet he kidded me unmercifully about being overweight and referred to me as "Tubbles". He was always ready to sit and devote his complete attention to me and any problem I had. He talked to me as equal to equal and never pulled any punches about what was right or wrong. I once discovered that a boy named Jack Lemon had stolen a pocket knife of mine. He was considerably bigger than I and I was a bit scared about confronting him with the crime. I asked Doc if I should tell the school principal about it. Doc told me that unless I confronted Jack with the theft and demanded that he return the knife that I would always wonder why I did not. It was good advice. I did confront him and he did admit the theft and returned the knife and my crisis was over. There were many crises like that which Doc helped me solve and from which I learned to respect his advice.
He had a tremendous respect for work as a developer of character and cared little for those people that did not work and earned their living by guile. Doc said that the pleasure of making things with their hands was a God given gift to men. In his later years he left the farm and moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and was a turret lathe operator for Ling Temco Vought Corp at the same time that I was employed by that company.
Doc was a teetotaler. I never knew him to drink anything alcoholic. Although Doc never said it I got the impression that his avoidance of alcohol was because my father was alcoholic. He smoked cigarettes and died of lung cancer in his early seventies.
He was a good man and I miss him.
Preach (L) and Doc (R)
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Notable Relatives
For some time I have intended to write a series of biographical sketches about relatives of us all or close family friends that I knew perhaps better then you did because you are so much younger than these relatives. I will frankly admit that none of these people are famous nor are they so unusual that they would stand out in a crowd. They were rather plain people but in them I found a wealth of love and care and concern that made me happy that they were there and I want to perpetuate if I can their lives so that you may see a glimpse of the people that they were. All of the people that I write about here are now dead. Many of them you will never have heard of or had any desire to know; skip those if you like.
Very few of us have the originality and creative thought of a Galileo or a Descartes. Instead of thinking out our view of the world we mostly develop it cafeteria style from those with whom we associate. We become products of all the people around us and especially those for whom we have a great respect. I think that those people that I have outlined are in large measure the source of my world view. I learned a little in emulation of all the people I have listed below.
Weldon Hamilton
Weldon was my mother’s younger brother. He was the only son in a family of four daughters. His parents were Walter Thomas Hamilton and Mary Ellen Dennis Hamilton who I called “Mama” and “Grandad” all my life. As I have explained in other writings I used to spend the summers of my childhood at my Grandad’s farm so that family came to be my second family as I grew up. ,During the summers that I spent there both Weldon and his younger sister Rowena were still living at home and had not yet married. Weldon was born in 1914 on May 14 so he was only thirteen when I was born and by the time I was old enough to have memories of him he was in his last teen years and was approaching young adulthood.. He was one of my heroes and all of my life I longed to be like him in many ways.
He was an unusually talented , gifted and gentle man. He was a master craftsman and I have often said of him that given the tools and the time he could build a Swiss watch and if necessary he could make his own tools. In later life he became a general supervisor of aircraft assemblers at North American Aviation during World War II and after the war he was a Superintendent of Manufacturing for successively Temco Aircraft Corp, , Ling-Temco-Vought Corp, and finally for Chance Vought Aircraft Corp. In addition to being an artisan he was a skilled and effective leader and manager and won significant recognition in the industry as a manager. Since I worked in the same companies that he did I knew many of the people who worked under his direction. Since our names were different very few people at that company knew that we were related and I received many candid and honest appraisals of Weldon’s character as boss; they were all favorable and laudatory.
I came to know Weldon best though as a helper to his father in running the 160 acre tenant farm in Hale County Texas near Plainview. It was an irrigated farm supplied with water from the wonderful Ogallala aquifer which underlies a great part of the high plains of the Texas Panhandle. The water was lifted to field level at the rate of twelve hundred gallons per minute by a huge single cylinder diesel engine of British Manufacture that had a most unusual method of starting up. On top of the single cylinder was a round knob about the size of a softball which was heated red hot with a blow torch. When this had been accomplished Weldon would run to the side of the engine which had a huge six foot diameter flywheel with five spokes and would walk the spokes of the wheel turning it backward to compress the fuel mixture in the cylinder until it would explode and suddenly kick forward with enough force to carry it into the next combustion cycle. When Weldon would feel the compression tightening up his walk on the spokes he would jump off the flywheel just before the ignition of the first cycle of the engine. He was only thrown through the tin top of the pumphouse once that I knew about.
My Grandfather was a very traditional man and for many years did not want a tractor. He used as a justification of this position the theory that a tractor tended to pack the ground in the field.. He preferred to continue to operate the farm with a four horse team. Weldon finally prevailed on him however and they bought a tractor which was his pride and joy. He loved all things mechanical. Weldon had a an unusual trait which a few master craftsmen have. He could disassemble that tractor or an automobile down to the bare frame and put it together again wearing a white shirt and never get a mark on his clothes. He was the cleanest worker I have ever known and the tools in his tool chest were immaculate and orderly.
Weldon also had the capability of assuming, in jest, a facial expression that scared small children almost beyond measure. When tried on my cousins and I who were about nine years old by this time it did not work and merely amused us but the smaller children would be petrified. Weldon had a good sense of humor. He played the harmonica well and the Jew’s Harp and frequently entertained we younger children with concerts. He was aware of some of our major sins and never betrayed us to the adult world.
He was not without health problems. He had frequent tonsilitis and had his tonsils removed when a young adult and the operation was not without complications. He had severe indigestion as a teen-ager which my grandfather blamed on his eating bakery bread and prepared cereals rather than biscuits and oatmeal.
Weldon married in 1938 to Leona MacElroy that I thought was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Weldon came to Dallas and went through a training program to become an Aircraft Assembler on the P51 Fighter line at Grand Prairie. In an incredibly short time he was a supervisor and remained in management with that company and its corporate successors for thirty years or so until he retired.
All of his life Weldon loved cars. When he would get a car new to him he would park it in his driveway on a white sheet to check for drips of hydraulic oil or lubricatiuon grease or engine oiul from a loose fitting. He would systemetically torque all oif the frame bolts and every threaded device he could reach from benjeath the car to assure that there was no loose hardware under there. As a general rule the interior of his car was always neat and clean no matter what its age
There is no doubt that smoking was a contributor to Weldon’s ultimate death. He was a heavy smoker for many years and he died of respiratory complications.
He was my mentor in more ways than most people knew. His advice was quietly and kindly given and I never knew it to be in error. He died in 1998 and I have since sorely missed him.
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