Galveston Texas Quotes

In 1924, Nikola Tesla was asked why he never married? His answer was this: "I had always thought of woman as possessing those delicate qualities of mind and soul that made her in her respects far superior to man. I had put her on a lofty pedestal, figuratively speaking, and ranked her in certain important attributes considerably higher than man. I worshipped at the feet of the creature I had raised to this height, and, like every true worshiper, I felt myself unworthy of the object of my worship. But all this was in the past. Now the soft voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished. In her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies on making herself as much as possible like man - in dress, voice, and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind. The world has experience many tragedies, but to my mind the greatest tragedy of all is the present economic condition wherein women strive against men, and in many cases actually succeed in usurping their places in the professions and in industry. This growing tendency of women to overshadow the masculine is a sign of a deteriorating civilization. Practically all the great achievements of man until now have been inspired by his love and devotion to woman. Man has aspired to great things because some woman believed in him, because he wished to command her admiration and respect. For these reasons he has fought for her and risked his life and his all for her time and time again. Perhaps the male in society is useless. I am frank to admit that I don't know. If women are beginning to feel this way about it - and there is striking evidence at hand that they do - then we are entering upon the cruelest period of the world's history. Our civilization will sink to a state like that which is found among the bees, ants, and other insects - a state wherein the male is ruthlessly killed off. In this matriarchal empire which will be established, the female rules. As the female predominates, the males are at her mercy. The male is considered important only as a factor in the general scheme of the continuity of life. The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me." Galveston Daily News, Galveston, Texas, page 23. August 10, 1924.

In a way, for women, marriage was like an extended babysitting gig. The woman was committing herself to coddling and watching over a grown man for the rest of her life.

Before these laws could be put into effect, a new wave of white settlers swept westward and formed the territories of Wisconsin and Iowa. This made it necessary for the policy makers in Washington to shift the “permanent Indian frontier” from the Mississippi River to the 95th meridian. (This line ran from Lake of the Woods on what is now the Minnesota-Canada border, slicing southward through what are now the states of Minnesota and Iowa, and then along the western borders of Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, to Galveston Bay, Texas.) To keep the Indians beyond the 95th meridian and to prevent unauthorized white men from crossing it, soldiers were garrisoned in a series of military posts that ran southward from Fort Snelling on the Mississippi River to forts Atkinson and Leavenworth on the Missouri, forts Gibson and Smith on the Arkansas, Fort Towson on the Red, and Fort Jesup in Louisiana.

On November 2, 1899, eight members of the United States Navy were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism and service beyond the call of duty. On the night of June 2, 1898, they had volunteered to scuttle the collier USS Merrimac, with the intention of blocking the entry channel to Santiago de Cuba. On orders of Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, who was in command, their intention was to trap Spanish Admiral Cervera’s fleet in the harbor. Getting the USS Merrimac underway, the eight men navigated the ship towards a predetermined location where sinking her would seal the port. Their course knowingly took them within the range of the Spanish ships and the shore batteries. The sailors were well aware of the danger this put them into, however they put their mission first. Once the Spanish gunners saw what was happening, they realized what the Americans were up to and started firing their heavy artillery from an extremely close range. The channel leading into Santiago is narrow, preventing the ship from taking any evasive action. The American sailors were like fish in a barrel and the Spanish gunners were relentless. In short order, the heavy shelling from the Spanish shore batteries disabled the rudder of the Merrimac and caused the ship to sink prematurely. The USS Merrimac went down without achieving its objective of obstructing navigation and sealing the port. ‎Fête du Canada or Canada Day is the anniversary of the July 1, 1867, enactment of the Canadian Constitution Act. This weekend Americans also celebrate the United States’, July 4, 1776 birthday, making this time perfect to celebrate George Fredrick Phillips heroic action. Phillips was one of the men mentioned in the story above of the USS Merrimac. He was born on March 8, 1862, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada and joined the United States Navy in March 1898 in Galveston, Texas. Phillips became a Machinist First Class and displayed extraordinary heroism throughout the Spanish bombardment during their operation. He was discharged from the Navy in August 1903, and died a year later at the age of 42 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His body was returned to Canada where he was interred with honors at the Fernhill Cemetery in his hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick.

The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went. Even now, with barbecues and red soda pop, they celebrate June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers rode into Galveston, announced that the Civil War was over, and released the quarter-million slaves in Texas who, not knowing they had been freed, had toiled for two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

When Texas seceded from the Union, the German preacher, Peter Moeling, wrote from Galveston: “I shall die a true patriot and a soldier of the Cross, the gun in hand and Christ within my heart.

Her story about an Ohio storm that split open one tree and burned down a carriage house was nothing, not to me. I didn’t know where Ohio sat but I figured it didn’t have water on all sides. Galveston was my home and you won’t catch me saying one bad word against it. But I remembered from my schoolgoing days the map of the United States. It was pinned up on the wall by the chalkboard. Texas was big, like it deserved to be. It outshined every other state by a mile. But a person had to look hard to find Galveston. It was off to the side of Texas, just a sliver of land in the Gulf of Mexico.

Clear of the cities, Texas turned into a green desert meant to hammer you with vastness, a mortar filled with sky.

managed to snag the last available table and all three ordered the special with sweet tea to drink. “It’s like Thanksgiving,” Shiloh said. “Not for me. Thanksgiving was working an extra shift so the folks with kids could be home for the day. Christmas was the same,” Bonnie said. Abby shrugged. “The army served turkey and dressing on the holidays. It wasn’t what Mama made, but it tasted pretty damn good.” Since it was a special and only had to be dipped up and served, they weren’t long getting their meal. Abby shut her eyes on the first bite and made appreciative noises. “This is so good. I may eat here every Sunday.” “And break Cooper’s heart?” Bonnie asked. “Hey, now! One night of drinking together does not make us all bosom buddies or BFFs or whatever the hell it’s called these days.” Abby waved at the waitress, who came right over. “I want this plate all over again,” she said. “Did you remember that we do have pie for dessert?” the waitress asked. “Yes, I’ll have two pieces, whipped cream on both. What about you, Shiloh?” She blushed. “I shouldn’t, but . . . yes, and go away before I change my mind.” “Bonnie?” Abby asked. Bonnie shook her head. “Just an extra piece of pie will do me.” “So that’s two more specials and five pieces of pie, right?” the waitress asked. “You got it,” Abby said. “I’m having ice cream when we finish with hair and nails. You two are going to be moaning and groaning about still being too full,” Bonnie said. “Not me. By the middle of the afternoon I’ll be ready for ice cream,” Abby said. “My God, how do you stay so small?” Shiloh asked. “Damn fine genes. Mama wasn’t a big person.” “Well, my granny was as wide as she was tall and every bite of food I eat goes straight to my thighs and butt,” Shiloh said. “But after that wicked, evil stuff last night, I’m starving.” “It burned all the calories right out of your body,” Abby said. “Anything you eat today doesn’t even count.” “You are full of crap,” Shiloh leaned forward and whispered. The waitress returned with more plates of food and slices of pumpkin pie with whipped cream, taking the dirty dishes back away with her. Bonnie picked up the clean fork on the pie plate and cut a bite-size piece off. “Oh. My. God! This is delicious. Y’all can eat Cooper’s cookin’. I’m not the one kissin’ on him, so I don’t give a shit if I hurt his little feelin’s or not. I’m comin’ here for pumpkin pie next Sunday if I have to walk.” “If Cooper doesn’t want to cook, maybe we can all come back here with him and Rusty next Sunday,” Abby said. “And if he does?” Shiloh asked. “Then I’m eating a steak and you can borrow my truck, Bonnie. I’d hate to see you walk that far. You’d be too tired to take care of the milkin’ the next day,” Abby said. “And you don’t know how to milk a cow, do you?” Bonnie’s blue eyes danced when she joked. Abby took a deep breath and told the truth. “No, I don’t, and I don’t like chickens.” “Well, I hate hogs,” Shiloh admitted. “And I can’t milk a cow, either.” “Looks like it might take all three of us to run that ranch after all.” Bonnie grinned. The waitress refilled their tea glasses. “Y’all must be the Malloy sisters. I heard you’d come to the canyon. Ezra used to come in here pretty often for our Sunday special and he always took an extra order home with him. Y’all sound like him when you talk. You all from Texas?” “Galveston,” Abby said. “Arkansas, but I lived in Texas until I graduated high school,” Shiloh said. The waitress looked at Bonnie. “Kentucky after leavin’ Texas.” “I knew I heard the good old Texas drawl in your voices,” the waitress said as she walked away. “Wonder how much she won on that pot?” Abby whispered. Shiloh had been studying her ragged nails but she looked up.

Gen. P. H. Sheridan took the occasion of a visit to Galveston to issue one of the most infamous geographical slanders of all time. “If I owned Texas and hell,” he said, “I’d rent out Texas and live in hell.

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He fled, not from his past, but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn you cannot escape either of them....He had been a Kansas wheat-hand, he had herded sheep in New Mexico, he was again with a construction gang in Arizona and west Texas and then a longshoreman on the Galveston docks; if he were still fleeing, he did not know it because it had been years now since he had even remembered that he had forgotten the face. And when he proved that at least you cannot escape either past or future with nothing better than geography, he did not know that. (Geography: that paucity of invention, that fatuous faith in distance of man, who can invent no better means than geography for escaping; himself of all, to whom, so he believed he believed, geography had never been merely something to walk upon but was the very medium which the fetterless to- and fro-going required to breathe in.)

Only eleven days after Truman signed the bill authorizing the Marshall Plan, the victory ship John H. Quick, named after a marine who won the Medal of Honor at Guantánamo Bay in the Spanish-American War, set sail from Galveston, Texas, loaded with grain. The Quick was the first in a fleet of five American ships owned by the Luckenbach Steamship Company to carry fifty-four thousand tons of grain, fertilizer, and a variety of other Marshall Plan necessities across the

the area became very crowded, so Schiff arranged the logistics for letting ships continue to Galveston, Texas, where there was more space for the Jewish immigrants to settle.

Shipbuilding stalled postwar—the Great Depression came early to the shipbuilding industry—but welding advanced, finding a major new application in pipeline construction. In 1925 the Magnolia Petroleum Company of Galveston, Texas, rebuilt a leaky two-hundred-mile bolted natural-gas pipeline with acetylene lap-welded pipe. After five more years of development—other companies followed Magnolia—electric welding replaced acetylene, eliminating overlapping, using less pipe, and cutting welding time in half. Alloy steels were also important to pipeline improvement, as were improved ditching machines and gas compressors. By 1931, pipeline workers were laying the first thousand-mile natural-gas pipeline from the Texas Panhandle to Chicago.

A block south of the Strand, on Water Street (also called Port Industrial Boulevard), is the port of Galveston. Unlike Houston or most other ports I’ve visited, you can walk or drive along the bayfront and see the ships up close. There are usually three or four in port, from the USSR or Norway or Germany or some distant and exotic locale. From the 1870s until World War II, this was one of the busiest ports in the world. Today it’s not even one of the busiest in Texas.

The cannibalistic Karankawa Indians occupied the Island at least as far back as 1400. Cabeza de Vaca, La Salle, and Jean Lafitte all visited it before Texas was a republic. The Battle of Galveston wasn’t the greatest sea battle of the Civil War, but it was one of the most poignant.

You can still see the old Balinese Room extending out over the Gulf. Though no gambling has gone on for years, the B-Room hosted the biggest names in show business, and highest-rolling gamblers. It was almost impossible to raid because the casino area, where the illegal activity took place, was situated on the T-head of the long narrow pier. When raiding parties of Texas Rangers appeared, someone up front pushed a button, the band struck up “The Eyes of Texas,” and the gambling paraphernalia folded into the walls like Murphy beds.

THE ISLAND’S first residents were a remarkably antisocial tribe known as the Karankawas. The Karankawas patrolled a 350-mile stretch of coastline from the Rio Grande to Galveston Bay, but they lived about half the year on the Island. Except when they were raiding other villages, stealing maidens to marry and children to eat, the Karankawas went out of their way to avoid contact with other tribes. They were one of the few coastal tribes that refused to take part in the Truce of the Tunas, an annual spring mingling of otherwise hostile tribes in South Texas. When the sweet purple fruit of the prickly pear cactus—the “tunas”—ripened each May, Indians from all along the coast declared a truce. They put away their tools and their weapons of war and migrated to the scrubby cactus and mesquite country near the present town of Alice. There they gorged themselves on the succulent fruit, danced, frolicked, and generally conducted themselves like fools rather than warriors for as long as the fruit lasted.

Angeline Dickinson Galveston’s first well-known madam rose to Texas fame in the 1860s. They called her the “Babe of the Alamo,” because she and her mother were the only white persons to survive the San Antonio slaughter in 1836.

All the famous pirates operated in the Gulf of Mexico—Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Edward (Blackbeard) Teach. Hundreds of Spanish treasure ships passed along the Texas coast in the seventeenth century, bound for Cuba and Spain, and legend has it that pirates sometimes tied lanterns to the backs of burros and led them along the beach, hoping seamen would mistake them for passing ships and pile up on the reefs.

Galveston had the first gaslight, the first electric light, the first telephone, the first hospital, the first law firm, the first trade union, the first golf course—name any business or institution or invention and Galveston probably had the first in Texas.

DURING WHAT came to be known as the Texas Revolution, Galveston Island was the capital, and nearly the final retreat for General Sam Houston and his ragtag army. Except for a decisive battle across the bay, on the banks of the San Jacinto River, Galveston might have gone down in history as the second Alamo, and Texas might be part of Mexico.

As governor of Tennessee, Houston had been the focus of a marvelous scandal when his bride of a few months suddenly ran home to her parents. Houston offered no public explanation, and threatened to kill any man indelicate enough to stain his wife’s honor with speculation. He resigned his office in disgrace, and for years lived among the Cherokees, who knew him as “Big Drunk.” Like many other outcasts of his generation, Houston ended up in Texas. He was exactly the sort of man to rally an army of rowdies and misfits, and settlers rushed to join up.

There was much talk at the time about the United States annexing Texas, Williams reminded his visitor. Merging the Republic of Texas with the United States was not Williams’ idea of good business, a notion with which the British government heartily agreed. One way to stop annexation, Williams pointed out, was for England to recognize Texas as an independent republic, and then lean on Mexico to do likewise. Recognition would have the added benefit of striking a blow against the hated Southern planter, who was counting on Texas statehood to increase the slave vote in Washington. The British diplomat apparently was convinced by Williams’ arguments. In 1842 Great Britian officially recognized the Republic of Texas. In a short time brigs were sailing regularly and directly from Liverpool to the wharves of Galveston, delivering manufactured goods and sailing home to England with their holds loaded with cotton, grain, sugar, and other products of mainland Texas. International trade was a boon to all the merchants in Galveston, but to none more than the firm of McKinney & Williams.

Disappointed, Kleberg returned to the mainland with his family and the two Mexican prisoners. It is interesting to speculate how the course of Texas history might have been altered if the Klebergs had stayed at Galveston and developed a ranch. Instead, Kleberg’s son later married the youngest daughter of Richard King, who was in the process of buying 1.5 million acres of ranchland in deep South Texas, near the Rio Grande. Since 1886 the descendents of Robert and Rosalie Von Roeder Kleberg have controlled the King Ranch, the most famous ranch in America.

Free blacks had never had it easy in Texas, and in the antebellum mood of the 1850s their position became untenable. State law prohibited blacks from immigrating to Texas, and required those who were already there to get special legislative permission to stay. Deeds of freedom were meaningless, and blacks were frequently kidnapped off the streets of Galveston and sold. Captain Thomas Chubb, a Galveston shipmaster who would later command the Confederate steamer Royal Yacht during the Civil War, hired crews of free blacks in Boston and sold them as slaves when they reached Galveston.

Most of the dead were buried in the cemetery at 43rd and Broadway. Young Sidney Sherman, whose father had helped Texas win its war of independence with Mexico, was put to rest not far from the graves of two Yankees—Lieutenant Commander Edward Lea, who had died in his father’s arms, and Captain Jonathan Wainwright, whose grandson and namesake became a famous American general in World War II and hero of the Bataan Death March.

The largest enterprise on the Island was Texas Star Flour Mill, owned by Morris Lasker. As industrialists went, Morris Lasker was fairly progressive. A Jew from East Prussia, Lasker had studied the classics, and thought of himself as a liberal and an intellectual. His Texas Star Flour Mill was the first industry in Texas to install an eight-hour workday, for which Lasker was labeled “a traitor to his class.

In his spare time, Lasker organized a boxing club and began promoting fights. For most of the nineteenth century, prizefighting was legal in Texas, as was dogfighting, bullfighting, and bearbaiting. But in 1891 the law was changed to make boxing a felony, punishable by prison terms of two to five years.

Underfed and poorly trained, Li’l Artha’ Johnson made a fight of it for five rounds and then quit. At that exact moment, five Texas Rangers raided the arena and hauled away both boxers, though not the promoter, and certainly not the well-connected spectators.

The Denver construction company of J. M. O’Rourke built the seawall in sixty-foot sections, using massive and sophisticated equipment and techniques never seen before in Texas. Giant four-foot-square blocks of granite and carloads of gravel came by rail from Granite Mountain west of Austin. Forty-two-foot pilings were shipped from the forests of East Texas. Four-horse wagons delivered the materials to the Little Susie line at 15th and Avenue N, and from there they were hauled on specially constructed tracks to the excavation along the beach where the wall would eventually sit. Steam-powered pile drivers that looked like oil derricks hammered the pilings down into the clay stratum, and work crews covered the pilings with foot-thick planking that became the base for the wall. Once the materials started

A wildcatter named Patillo Higgins leased a thousand acres along an inconspicuous hill called Spindletop, near Beaumont, but ran out of money before he completed drilling. Looking for investors, Higgins first contacted John D. Rockefeller at Standard Oil, but Rockefeller wasn’t interested. Finally, he found a backer named Joseph Cullinan, a Pennsylvanian who had set up a refinery in North Texas, at Corsicana, and who had experience in raising seed money for drilling operations. Cullinan had heard of the Moodys of Galveston and decided to visit the Island and offer them a chance to invest. The story of that meeting is one of the Island’s enduring legends. During the negotiations, the story goes, Cullinan happened to mention that he had recently paid $10,000 for a painting by a well-known New England artist. The look that passed between Colonel Moody and his son would have fried a ship’s anchor—ten grand for a single picture! The Moodys decided that anyone that gullible wasn’t worth additional conversation, and they dismissed Cullinan as quickly as possible. Cullinan and Higgins eventually hooked up with a gambler and speculator named John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates, who had hung around Texas in the late 1890s trying to peddle barbed wire, and in his dealings had acquired ownership of the Kansas City & Southern Railroad. Gates’ railroad connections were an invaluable asset for a field as isolated as Spindletop, and he agreed to take 46 percent of the action. On January 10, 1901, Spindletop blew in with such force that it shattered the derrick and spit drills and equipment hundreds of feet in the air. The raging spout of oil measured a steady 160 feet—it was nine days (and a loss of half a million barrels) before they got it capped and controlled. So prodigious was the strike that at the time it was estimated that Spindletop could supply one-sixth of the world’s oil. The company in which the Moodys declined to invest became known as Texaco.

In the months and years that followed, the Maceos expanded their empire until it included dozens of casinos, nightclubs, and betting parlors, not only on the Island but in such small mainland towns as Texas City, Kemah, La Marque, and Dickinson. Motorists driving south on the highway from Houston spoke of crossing the Maceo-Dickinson Line. With their unabashed attitude toward sin and corruption, the Maceos brought prominence, notoriety, and an enduring nickname to the Island. For the next three decades it was known as the Free State of Galveston.