Posted: Sun, 10 May 2009 08:35 AM - 8,484 Readers
By: Ed Crowell
To leave behind 32 years of newspapering in a place as dynamic and, yes, as weird as Austin without committing a few more words to print would seem downright unjournalistic. Not to mention unappreciative of my adopted hometown.
Growing up and working in Florida beach towns, I had dismissed Texas as the long, boring middle part of Interstate 10 between coasts, enlivened only by a stop at the Alamo to ponder why Davy Crockett thought it worth the battle. Then in 1977, I was invited by Ray Mariotti to check out this town where he had recently landed as editor of the American-Statesman.
Instead of a desert, I found sparkling lakes and rivers cut into green hills, sometimes topped with a stunning violet crown at sunset. My wife and I decided to give Austin a try.
But what makes this town so easy to fall for as a dance partner for life are the people who live here, and I was fortunate to share the sawdust with some of the more interesting ones. In those days the city was like one big dance floor where boundaries fell away and everyone could rub shoulders.
That was evident at the Back Door, a joint on Chicon Street where I walked in one afternoon and saw just two other customers enjoying beers at a tiny table: the legendary Longhorns coach Darrell Royal and the not-quite-a-legend-yet Willie Nelson. Their friendship and the music they both love has far outlasted the Back Door.
Liberty Lunch, a former lumberyard a block from where the City Council met, gave Shannon Sedwick a place to sell muffulettas before perfecting her comedy routines and creating Esther's Follies, now a Sixth Street institution.
From the dingy offices of the old American-Statesman building at West Third and Guadalupe streets, Austin's first big growth spurt was hard to see at first. Downtown had some tall bank buildings, a few clothing stores on Congress and not much more. But beyond downtown, parades of moving vans were arriving with people buzzing about the "quality of life" to be found here. They wanted new houses, so land was subdivided and flipped and built on at blinding speed.
We soon put a photo of a big yellow bulldozer moving dirt on the front page one Sunday and began a 30-day series of stories about the city's growth issues. The prettiest, most sensitive land was where the developers wanted to be and where the environmentalists didn't want them. Austin's Thirty Year War had begun.
Inside the City Council chambers on Second Street, politicians tried to brake the onslaught by developers in pressed jeans and starched white shirts. The environmentalists, guided by Barton Springs swimmer and plebeian attorney Bill Bunch, didn't gather a critical mass until late in the game.
By the time the council passed the Save Our Springs ordinance after an all-nighter public hearing in 1990, Austin's growth rate was gusher high. Many more subdivisions would get built throughout Travis County and into every county touching it.
Around the big domed building at the north end of Congress Avenue, colorful lawmakers and lobbyists (and the unforgettable Bob Bullock) made far better copy than boring governors. Here's about all I remember of the first Republican governor since Reconstruction: Bill Clements liked the hamburgers at the original Waterloo Ice House on Congress and would often walk the few blocks from his Capitol office to get them.
The annals of Texas' legislative high jinks include not one but two swarms of "Killer Bees" who made headlines with their plots to hide out to avoid quorum calls and votes they would lose. The first group, 12 state senators in 1979, was found after five days living in a secluded West Austin garage apartment. We ran a telling photo of their quarters strewn with dirty clothes and food wrappers. The second set of Bees, more than 50 House Democrats, fled in 2003 to Oklahoma, where reporters easily followed them.
I watched Austin stake its claim as a Silicon Valley wannabe via a confident pitchman, attorney Pike Powers, who helped bring us the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. and Sematech in the 1980s. With his prescience for important business junctures, Powers now wants to make Austin one of the superbattery development capitals of the world.
Michael Dell's business plan, hatched in his University of Texas dorm room, was simple: Put built-to-order computers directly into customers' hands. After he became a billionaire, I chatted with him about our kids at a soiree where he gave the Austin Children's Museum new quarters and more money. Then he bankrolled the Dell Children's Medical Center. My guess is we haven't seen the last of his philanthropy directed at the city's next generation.
Eventually, I traded news editing for the lighter side of life and helped create our weekly XL entertainment section (now Austin360). It was a perfect gig for me; I had seen so many musicians develop here.
I remember Stevie Ray Vaughan playing to a sparse Rome Inn audience one minute, and seemingly the next, collecting an armful of Austin Music Awards with a feather boa around his neck. Just as suddenly, a helicopter crash silenced his guitar in 1990. It was hard not to cry at an Austin City Limits show as Bonnie Raitt and Eric Clapton played in tribute to him.
There were fun times, too. I got to dodge Richard Linklater's cameras as he filmed a "Newton Boys" scene in the Capitol late one night and later heard the moviemaker talk excitedly about his explorations into lucid dreaming. The subject became part of his animated film "Waking Life."
Different roads kept leading back to Willie and his traveling Fourth of July picnics. I trampled his Lake Travis golf course with tens of thousands of fans at one picnic, and couldn't resist asking him to sign my cap backstage at another, a 100-degree scorcher in Luckenbach.
Now I enjoy reading the newspaper and its Web site without being in a rush, without knowing all the difficulties involved in getting each and every story. The view may not be so close up, but I'll never stop being fascinated by the creative souls and quirky characters and big thinkers
who share one of our planet's finest cities.
Tales of the City
This is a continuing series of personal essays with an Austin connection. Submit your own
tale of the city (1,000 words or less) to
tales@statesman.com for consideration by our editors.
