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Texas Tales

published: February 5th 2010
by: MIke Cox

Happy belated Jackson Day!
    Congress never formalized it as a federal holiday, but once upon a time, Texans and the rest of the nation celebrated January 8 as Jackson Day. It was something of a winter-time Fourth of July, with plenty of flag waving and patriotic speechifying but no fireworks.
    January 8 became Jackson Day because that’s the month and day in 1815 that Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans. That’s a military engagement that many older Baby Boomers remember only because of Johnny Horton’s 1959 hit song, “The Battle of New Orleans.”
    Though the battle happened some 240 miles from what was then the eastern border of the Spanish province of Texas, future Texans would have good reason to celebrate the American victory. For one thing, a win at New Orleans likely would have given Great Britain control of the Mississippi and a shot at settling the Southwest.
    Also, if the British had captured and hanged Jackson, he would not have been around to serve as an inspiration for the younger Sam Houston. Nor would Old Hickory have been able in the spring of 1836 to order U.S. troops to the Louisiana-Texas border as Santa Anna and his army chased independence-minded Texans in that direction following the Alamo.
    The American victory at New Orleans against a numerically superior foe galvanized the young nation. Recognition of January 8 as a day to celebrate must have begun early on and gathered momentum after Jackson’s presidency.
    “All good Democrats remembered that yesterday was Andrew Jackson’s Day,” the New York Times told its readers on Jan. 9, 1896 -- 81 years after the battle.
    Jackson’s lopsided victory over the British had come a little more than two months before his March 15 birthday. For years, in addition to observing Jackson Day on January 8, Tennessee was the only state that took March 15 off in honor of Jackson’s birth.
Alas, somewhere along the way, a day originally intended to honor one of this nation’s most impressive military triumphs and important presidents morphed into a holiday for Democrats only.
    “Thousands of Texans made ready to join the democrats of the nation in observance of Jackson day with dinners this evening,” the Austin American-Statesman reported in a page-one story on Jan. 8, 1936. “The traditional functions honoring the memory of the great democrat, Andrew Jackson, was planned in Texas largely by party organizations, and, in line with the rest of the nation, most of the proceeds will go into the party treasury.”
    Eight hundred people were expected for a roof-top party at Austin’s Stephen F. Austin Hotel. Other Jackson Day parties were on tap that night in Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Wichita Falls, Waco, Corpus Christi and surely other Texas cities. The Amarillo party had to be cancelled because of a snow storm.
    The speaker for the Austin Jackson Day event was Gov. Paul V. McNutt of Indiana. Texas Gov. James V. Allred would have been the logical choice to address Texas Democrats, but he already had accepted an invitation to speak at a Jackson Day gathering in Nashville.
    After the local festivities, celebrants returned to their radios to listen to President Franklin Roosevelt deliver a Jackson Day oration that included his formal announcement that he would be seeking another four years in the White House.   
    Back then, just about everyone in the Lone Star State who could drop a ballot in a box was a Democrat.
    Why most people today have never heard of Jackson Day is easy enough to guess. Since the day was considered a special day by Democrats, as the strength of the Republican Party grew, interest in whooping it up on Jackson Day waned. Even www.google.com is devoid of any straight-forward history of Jackson Day.
    The tension between political elephants and donkeys was evident even in the 1936 Jackson Day newspaper coverage. When Judge J.R. Sutherland, the Nueces County Democratic chairman, invited U.S. Dist. Judge T. M. Kennerly of Houston to speak at the Corpus Christi Jackson Day event, to Judge Sutherland’s great surprise, the federal jurist declined.
    Turned out Kennerly was a Republican and didn’t feel like participating in a Democratic blow out.
    “I didn’t know there were any Republicans left in Texas,” the Corpus Christi Democrat told the press.
***
    Granddad could always tell when a man packed a concealed pistol. That ability, acquired as a youth in the early 1900s when his father was a deputy sheriff and jailer in Runnels County, served him well as a newspaperman back when Texas was a lot less tame than today.
    His name was L.A. Wilke. 
    In the spring of 1915, Granddad was a 17-year-old reporter on the old San Angelo Sun. He wrote the newspaper’s “Personal” column, the more names the better. That meant meeting the passenger trains when they rolled in and hanging around hotel lobbies.
    Granddad was checking the guest register at the Landon Hotel when he noticed a nice-looking man wearing a broad brim, flat-topped hat and boots strolling across the lobby.
    “I could tell he was wearing a gun,” Granddad later wrote, “so I tied into him.   He told me his name was Henry Japson and he was sheriff of Reagan County. We sat there in the lobby quite a while. He asked me why I didn’t go to Big Lake and start a paper. Said there was a lot of legal printing…which would pay a paper out in a few months.”
    Since the Sun was so far behind in its pay that it was giving Granddad fountain pens in lieu of a salary, the proposition of being a newspaper publisher in a county seat town sounded pretty appealing. Especial-ly if you could make some money at it.
    When Granddad told the sheriff he didn’t have the cash to buy a printing press and type, Japson said his son was a banker in Big Lake and might loan him the money. As soon as he could, Granddad rode the Orient to Big Lake and got a $500 loan. Then he went to Dallas, bought the equipment he would need, and had it shipped to Big Lake.
    In November 1915, Granddad came out with the first issue of the Big Lake News, a weekly. (The News was the third paper founded in Reagan County, preceded by the Stiles Journal and the Big Lake Crony.)
    Granddad’s biggest scoop in Big Lake wasn’t taken seriously for eight years.
    At some point, dutifully checking the passengers who arrived at the Orient depot and registered at the hotel owned by the Nairn brothers, Granddad learned that a geologist had come to town. When Granddad approached him to see what brought him to Reagan County, the visitor said that someday Big Lake would be in the middle of a vast oilfield. They talked long enough for Granddad to get enough information for a page-one story.
    Back then, West Texas was cattle country. If you wanted oil, you drilled up around Wichita Falls or down on the coast where the giant Spindletop well had come in 14 years earlier. No one believed the geologist’s prediction, assuming anyone even remembered it, until the Santa Rita No. 1 blew in on May 27, 1923.
    Of course, by that time, Granddad had long since given up on making any money as a newspaper owner in Big Lake and had sold the News, which was absorbed by the Big Lake Wildcat when it was founded in 1925. If Granddad had only hung in as publisher of the News for another eight years, he might have gotten rich when the oil boom his newspaper had predicted in 1915 finally came.
    Alas, Granddad even got a second chance at wealth in Big Lake.
    In 1924, by this time editor of a newspaper in Fort Worth called The Texas Oil World, he returned to booming Big Lake.
    “I camped out with Fletcher Holt, the well driller,” Granddad wrote. “I was covering the oil fields and the paper’s publisher was drilling an oil well there. He gave me stock in lieu of money, but I sold the stock to buy groceries and then the well came in and made some people rich.”
    Granddad stayed in the newspaper business until the late 1930s, finally moving into chamber of commerce work and later, full-time freelance writing. He wrote me a long letter about his Big Lake experiences in 1967 when I was just starting out as a reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times.
    By then, the days of a person making a fortune in the oil business without any startup capital were pretty much a thing of the past. Still, I got a pretty good inheritance --a wealth of good stories from my Granddad.