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Texas Sketchbook
by Mike Cox | |
A
lot of parents these days are worried about whether their children are spending
too much time on their computers or texting inappropriately.
Advertising
for everything--wholesome and unwholesome--is everywhere on the internet, and
predators prowl social networking sites looking for gullible victims. The new
media has become as freewheeling as the Old West.
So maybe we should take
a break and remember a simpler time, an era when corporate America or openly shady
sorts could influence vulnerable-to-suggestion youngsters with words and images
printed on paper.
A public relations effort by one powerful Texas-based
corporation certainly helped shape my life back in the late 1950s -- in a positive
way. Like most Baby Boomers, I learned about smoking and drinking from the people
we used to credit with having the power to mold children -- adults, not clever
advertisers. But it was an oil company that helped fuel my interest in Texas
history. |
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I
was nodding off in the easy chair in front of the TV one night in 1996 when Austin
writer and historian Ken Ragsdale called shortly before 10 o'clock.
"Didn't
wake you up, did I?" asked Ragsdale, then an active man in his 70s. "I just got
back from my four mile walk and wanted to let you know I've got some stuff I want
to give you. Been cleaning out my office. You can have it or throw it away."
The
next day, Ragsdale helped me load several large shopping bags in my Baby Boomer
Buggy, a sports utility vehicle.
That night, I began digging into the
bags. Ragsdale had given me some nice things for my Texana collection, including
something in a white envelope that caused me to pause. The arrival of a similar
envelope more than four decades ago had been as exiting as the happy day a few
years earlier when my small gray plastic, baking soda-powdered U.S.S. Nautilus
from Kellogg's had finally shown up in the mail.
On the left side of the
envelope, the distinctive lettering read: "Your Copy of Texas Sketchbook." Below
that was a drawing of the famous Rose Window at Mission San Jose in San
Antonio. Beneath that it said, "Humble Oil & Refining Company."
The
envelope held a pristine copy of the "Texas Sketchbook: A Collection of Historical
Stories from the Humble Way." The 102-page softcover book, first published
in 1955, was illustrated by the late artist E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz. (The oil company
revised and reprinted the book in 1958 and again in 1962.)
Humble, a Texas
oil company created in 1911 which in the 1970s became Exxon and in the 1980s had
bad luck in Alaska with an oil tanker named the Valdez, published thousands of
copies of the “Texas Sketchbook” and distributed them for free to anyone who wanted
one, including school kids. |
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I
used to sit and read this book in a gray Naugahyde chair with jet black iron arms
and legs, a classic piece of 1950s furniture my grandparents had. It was not comfortable,
but it took spilled Welch's grape juice in stride. Schiwetz's drawings portraying
various aspects of Texas history were a high octane additive for my young imagination,
forming impressions that lasted a lot longer than that funky chair.
The
somewhat cynical man holding the book looked at it differently than the chubby
10-year-old in that chair had years before. Where was the powerful, insidious
corporate message in this publication? No giant business would publish and freely
distribute a book without some angle. Let's see. The Fifties. An anti-Communist
message? No. Anti-regulatory message? No. Buy gas from us? No.
Nope, nothing
like that. The anonymous corporate PR type who wrote the short foreword said only
that the stories in the book, which ranged from a piece on old Spanish missions
to an article on the history of the Texas Navy, had been published previously
in the company's every-other-month magazine, the Humble Way. They were being printed
in one volume because of "interest and inquiries from readers."
The stories,
the author continued, "are not tall tales of Texans who speak perhaps too pridefully
of their state, but simple stories of pioneers and pioneer places. Each was checked
and approved by the Texas State Historical Association."
I looked at the
foreword one more time. Surely I was missing something here. Then I found it.
The last paragraph: "May all who read (the Sketchbook) find it a fitting memorial
to the past, an inspiration to the present, and a hope for the future."
With
that clever 1950s corporate propaganda in mind, I've saved this copy of "Texas
Sketchbook" for my daughter Hallie, hoping that someday she'll find it more interesting
than manga anime “novels” or Hanna Montana and her friends.
Author’s
note: This column is adapted from an essay by the author first published on
Sept. 20, 1996.
© Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" March
26, 2009 column
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