Being A Geezer Can Be Very Taxing

Oh, yes. The tax freeze referendum in Georgetown, TX is producing tension. The proponents are largely found in Sun City. The opponents are largely found in Georgetown proper. Complaining about taxes is as American as apple pie. Demagogues from Samuel Adams to Howard Jarvis to George W. Bush have ridden tax protest to enormous success (and mischief, in many cases). Samuel Adams was a neer-do-well who attained status beyond his feverish dreams in the streets of Boston before 1776. Howard Jarvis was a consumer rights activist who led a campaign in California in 1978 for "Proposition 13" which cut property taxes by 57 percent. California has become a fiscal disaster since Prop 13. George W. Bush has pushed tax cuts through which will provide my grandchildren with crushing debt in 25 years. So, the sucessful use of tax cuts or tax freezes—while enormously popular now—will be disastrously costly in the future. Jacques Barzun (longtime provost of Columbia University and wiser than any tax protester in Sun City, TX) wrote that Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. If the City of Georgetown de-annexes Sun City, the tax protesters will find the price of fire and police protection is onerous indeed. If this is (fair & balanced) dissent, so be it.


[x Texas Monthly]
Up and Away

What happens when a small town becomes a big town, when its population grows and its economy takes off? Much is gained—but much is lost.

by Paul Burka

EVERY TEXAN HAS A FAVORITE small town. I would be hard-pressed to choose among Hunt, near Kerrville, where the forks of the Guadalupe join and I spent three summers as a camper and a counselor; Hallettsville, halfway between Houston and San Antonio on a forgotten highway, with its grand courthouse and square; and Fort Davis, which still manages to be quaint in the face of creeping chicness. But if I could take some liberties with the definition of "small," I would choose Georgetown, thirty miles north of Austin on Interstate 35, for the nobility of its struggle to remain a small town in the face of the economic and social trends of our time.

In 1890 Georgetown had around 2,400 people. It grew almost imperceptibly, taking six decades to double in population, to around 4,900, and another three decades to double again. Since that benchmark of 1980, though, its population has more than trebled, to an estimated 37,000, as the great metropolis that begins more than a hundred miles to the south in San Antonio has enfolded it.

What difference does the "small town" designation make? A big one, actually. The numerical battle between country and city was long ago decided in favor of the city: In 1900 more than 80 percent of Texans lived in or near small towns, but today more than 80 percent live in metropolitan areas, either in the city itself or close enough to fall under its influence. But the emotional battle still hangs in the balance. The farmer and the rancher moved to the city and the suburb, but they did not cease to be country folk. They still wear jeans and boots, still drive pickups, still prefer country music, still pine for the wide-open spaces when stuck in traffic—and so do their urban cousins who have never set foot on a farm or a ranch. Longtime readers of this magazine will recognize these as familiar themes, as fresh as last month's cover story on the pickup as the new national car of Texas. The state may be urban, but its soul remains rural.

This issue of Texas Monthly pays homage to that rural soul. Every article is set in a small town or touts the amenities offered by small towns—"small" being defined as a population of fewer than 15,000. So Georgetown doesn't qualify. But don't tell that to Georgetown, for nothing is so important to its residents as their desire that it remain a small town in its values.

This too is a familiar theme: The hold of the countryside on the Texas mind has more to do with roots than boots. It survives due to the persistence of the notion that the country way of life is better than the city way of life—and that something has been irretrievably lost in the process of urbanization. But moving away is only half of what has happened to small towns; the other half is moving to. As the countryside emptied out and the cities filled up, small towns on the urban fringe—which were once just dots on the map, no different from the places featured in this issue—became big towns. Places like Georgetown can tell us what was lost in the transition from country to city, from little to big.

From the highway, it has that could-be-anywhere-on-Interstate-America look. But if you venture into the old town site that was all there was of Georgetown until new subdivisions vaulted across the interstate in the seventies, the town's charm becomes apparent. It is a county seat, with a black-domed courthouse dating from the days when such buildings were designed to impress and a lively town square with a number of well-preserved nineteenth-century buildings. It's a college town too (home to Southwestern University, an upwardly mobile liberal arts school), though locals lament that it is less of a college town than it used to be. Two forks of the San Gabriel River run through Georgetown, their tree-lined channels crossing under the interstate. North of town, the metropolis comes to a surprising and sudden end, and you reenter rural Texas.

Virtually all of the growth has occurred west of the interstate, most notably in Sun City, a subdivision for seniors, where kids are allowed to visit but not move in. Around five thousand people live there, in one-story homes on ample lots that front gently curving streets. My wife's aunt and uncle, Elsie and Pat, moved there a year ago, and we drove up to meet them at a restaurant on the square.

"Georgetown is really a small town for us," Pat said. "Everybody is so nice. In Houston, the so-called help at the stores was so abusive. The last time I got my driver's license renewed, my photograph was the worst-looking thing I ever saw. I couldn't get it changed. The woman absolutely refused. Here, the lady told me, 'Smile. You want to look good on your driver's license.' Then she let me come behind the counter to be sure I liked the one she had taken."

The thing they like best about Georgetown is the square. After lunch, Elsie ushered us down the street to The Escape, a gift shop where almost everything in the store is made locally, and then to the Hill Country Bookstore. She mentioned the new mall, the town's first, that was recently approved by the city, to be located just west of the interstate near one of the east-west crossroads. "We're concerned about its impact on the square," Pat said. "We don't want to see these businesses disadvantaged."

The seniors contribute to the town. Elsie and Pat support the Palace Theatre, which long ago stopped showing movies regularly but puts on plays and concerts, and they plan to join the Symphony Society, which brings in the orchestra from Temple, 35 miles to the north, for concerts. And everybody in town talks about the Georgettes, an organization of Sun City women who were twirlers in their youth and strut their remaining stuff at high school football games. But there is also tension. A recent state law gives cities the power to freeze the property taxes of seniors, and a group of Sun City residents asked the city council to do just that. But the council resisted; seniors own 27 percent of the city's taxable property, which means that the people who own the remaining 73 percent would probably face a tax increase. The seniors organized a petition drive and forced an upcoming vote on the issue.

Sun City isn't the only reason that politics is a lot more intense than it used to be. Growth brings conflict. New schools create fights over boundary changes; as small as Georgetown is, nobody likes sending their kids across the interstate to school, in either direction. Different factions offer competing ideas about what Georgetown should be: a bedroom community for Austin? A competitor of nearby Round Rock, where Dell is based, for industry? A place that preserves its small-town feeling? Recent battles have been waged over a proposal for a large Walgreen's (it was defeated), a bond issue for a new library (likewise), and a restrictive design code (it passed, but only after the mayor, who irritated townspeople with her outspoken advocacy of the code, had been ousted by a recall vote).

"Everybody here used to have a sense of joint ownership of the town," Clark Thurmond, the publisher of the twice-weekly Williamson County Sun, told me, explaining the recall fight. "You could walk up to any city council member and say, 'Fix my street,' and it would get done. You'd know them and they'd know you. Your voice was heard. That tends to go away when a town gets big, but people here still expect it." Clark is married to Linda Scarbrough, whose family has owned the Sun since 1948 and whom I have known since we were at the University of Texas in the sixties. When I asked her what she missed from the Georgetown she knew when she was growing up, she mentioned two things: the river and the university.

"We've lost the river," she said. "It used to be easy to get to low-water crossings. We would throw rocks, collect fossils, wade, and fish. Traffic demands have just about shut off access. There are still parks and hiking trails, but the openness of the landscape is lost."

The other thing she misses is the involvement of the university in the town. On the way to dinner at a new restaurant called Wildfire—one of the advantages of size is that residents who want to go out for a good meal no longer have to go to Round Rock—we detoured by a public-housing project called Stonehaven that dates from the sixties. As Linda related the story, the city was going to build a typical low-budget project until a Southwestern professor named Bob Lancaster got involved, backed by Linda's father and the Sun. Almost forty years later, the attractive stone-and-wood units still look more like apartments than a housing project.

Linda remembers when most professors lived in Georgetown and sometimes served on the school board and the city council. But as the university has gotten more ambitious academically, town and gown have gone their separate ways. One of the complaints at Southwestern is that Georgetown is dry, so there is nowhere for the students to go in the evenings except Austin. "Southwestern has pulled themselves out of this community," a friend from Georgetown who works in Austin told me. He mentioned a now-departed president who "would have built walls and a moat around the school if he could."

Walls and a moat: Georgetown would love to do the same. It would love to keep out the metropolis (but keep the proximity to high-paying jobs), keep out the traffic (but keep the interstate), keep out the seniors, at least on Election Day (but keep their tax dollars), keep out the competition for the businesses on the square (but keep the convenience of the mall). The paradox of growth is that something is lost, but something is gained, and as much as people feel the loss, most are unwilling to sacrifice the gain. This is why small towns in the path of the metropolis ultimately become big towns. To Georgetown's great credit, that hasn't happened yet.

Paul Burka joined the staff of TEXAS MONTHLY one year after the magazine's founding. A lifelong Texan, he was born in Galveston, graduated from Rice University with a B.A. in history, and received a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law.

Burka is a member of the State Bar of Texas and spent five years as an attorney with the Texas Legislature, where he served as counsel to the Senate Natural Resources Committee.

Burka won a National Magazine award for reporting excellence in 1985 and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a frequent guest discussing politics on national news programs on MSNBC, Fox, NBC, and CNN.

Copyright © 2004 Texas Monthly Magazine

The Next Governor Of Texas Will Hail From Medina!

Medina, TX is at the intersection of State Highway 16 and Farm Road 337, twelve miles northwest of Bandera in central Bandera County. It is home to Richard (Kinky) Friedman, next governor of Texas. The Kinkster's meditation is in keeping with the magazine's September theme of small towns in Texas. If this is (fair & balanced) pastoralism, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
Man About Town
by Richard (Kinky) Friedman

Why do I like living "in the middle of nowhere"? The dry cleaning's cheaper, I hear stories about snakes, I meet the most colorful characters on the planet, and I never get the urge to shoot the bird. (Well . . .)

IN 1985, AFTER THE DEATH of my mother, I left New York for good to seek shelter in the small towns that lay scattered about the Hill Country as if they were peppered by the hand of God onto the gravy of a chicken-fried steak. In New York people believe that nothing of importance ever happens outside the city, that if it doesn't occur inside their own office, it hasn't occurred at all. My friends told me that I would be a quitter if I gave up whatever the hell I was doing in New York and went back home. One of the things I was doing was large quantities of Peruvian marching powder, and I now believe that leaving may have saved my life.

I'd had, it seemed, seven years of bad luck. One of my two great loves, Kacey Cohen, had kissed a windshield at 95 miles per hour in her Ferrari. My other great love, of course, was me. My best friend, Tom Baker, troublemaker, had overdosed in New York. I'd come back to Austin just in time to spend a few months with my mother before she died. My dear Minnie, from whom much of my soul springs, left me with three cats, a typewriter, and a talking car. She wanted me to be in good company, to write, and to have somebody to talk to. The car's name was Dusty. She was a 1983 Chrysler LeBaron convertible with a large vocabulary, including the phrase "A door is ajar" (at this time of my life, one definitely was). My mother had always believed in me. Now, it seemed, it was time for me to believe in myself.

After New York, you'd think Austin would be a pleasant relief, but to my jangled mind there still seemed to be too many people. So I corralled Cuddles, Dr. Skat, and Lady into Dusty and together we drifted up to the Hill Country, where the people talk slow, the hills embrace you, and the small towns flash by like bright stations reflecting on the windows of a train at night. As Bob Dylan once wrote, "It takes a train to cry." As I once wrote, "Anything worth cryin' can be smiled."

What is it about small towns that always seems to be oddly comforting? Jesus was born in one. James Dean ran away from one. While visiting Italy, my father once said, "If you've seen one Sistine Chapel, you've seen them all." This is true of small towns as well, except they're not particularly good places to get postcards from. "Why would anyone want to live here?" somebody always says. "It's out in the middle of nowhere. It's so far away." And the gypsy answers, "From where?"

There is a fundamental difference between big-city and country folks. In the city you can honk at the traffic, shout epithets, and shoot the bird at anybody you like. You know you'll probably never see those people again. In a small town, however, you're responsible for your behavior. Instead of spouting off, you have to simply smile and shake your head. You know you're going to see the same people again in church, or maybe at a cross burning. (Just kidding.)

Another positive aspect of living in or near small towns is that they're breeding grounds for some of the most colorful characters on the planet. They're also good places to hear stories about snakes. Dry cleaning's cheaper than it is in the big city, and life itself perhaps is a bit more precious, always allowing for inflation. There is, of course, no dry cleaner's in Medina. You have to go to Bandera. And if you want to rent a good video, you probably should go to Kerrville. I say this because the Bandera video store has Kiss of the Spider Woman racked in the section with Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Arguably Agatha Christie's greatest creation, Miss Marple, hailed from the small English town of St. Mary Mead. In a lifetime of fictional crime detection, the sage Miss Marple contended that the true character of people anywhere in the world could be easily divined by casting her mind back to the people she'd grown up with. For instance, the shy Peeping Tom in London reminded her keenly of the butcher's son in St. Mary Mead, who'd been slightly off-kilter but would never have harmed a flea. In such manner she determined that he was not the murderer of the fifth Duchess of Phlegm-on-Rye. In other words, the small town, like the small child, often dictates the emotional heritage of the human race. Unfortunately, because of shifting populations, even this great measure of mankind seems to be changing. When Tonto gets off his horse these days and puts his ear to the ground, he says to the Lone Ranger, "Kemosabe, thousands of yuppies are coming!"

So maybe there's not that much difference between small-town life and life in the big city. When I lived in New York, like most New Yorkers, I rarely ventured outside my own little neighborhood in the Village. I bought newspapers at the same stand every morning, frequented the same cigar shop near Sheridan Square, and hung out at a bar right across the avenue called the Monkey's Paw. Like most Manhattanites, I never went to Brooklyn, never visited the Statue of Liberty, never ascended to the top of the Empire State Building, and never took a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. That was all for the tourists, most of whom, ironically, were from small towns.

My old departed friend Earl Buckelew, the unofficial mayor of Medina, always used to say, "Everything comes out in the wash if you use enough Tide." Yet there are tides that run deep in small towns, deep as the sea of humanity, deep as the winding, muddy river of life. There once were two lovers who lived in Medina: Earl's youngest son, John, and his true love, the beautiful Janis. Though still in their teens, it is very possible that they shared a love many of us have forfeited, forgotten, or never known. A love of this kind can sometimes be incandescent in its innocence, reaching far beyond the time and geography of the small town into the secret history of the ages.

In June of 1969, at a country dance under the stars, John and Janis quarreled, as true lovers sometimes will. They drove home separately, and on the same night Judy Garland died, Janis was killed in a car wreck. John mourned for her that summer, and in September, he took poison on her grave, joining her in eternity. John and Janis were much like another pair of star-crossed young lovers, the subjects of one of that summer's biggest films. The town was too small for a movie theater, but that year, many believe, Romeo and Juliet played in Medina.

Copyright © 2004 Texas Monthly Magazine

For A Rant, Press 1. For A Rave, Press 2.

One of the joys of modern life is calling a toll-free number and listening to a menu read by a mechanical, but cheerful voice. The menu always changes frequently (according to the voice), so careful listening is essential. Evan Eisenberg has written the funniest parody of automated call system menus yet to see the light of day. If this is (fair & balanced) Luddism, so be it.

[x Slate]
Our Options Have Changed: To continue in jargon, press 1.
By Evan Eisenberg

Thank you for calling. To continue in jargon, press 1. Jos haluat jatkaa suomeksi, ole hyva ja paina 2.

Please listen closely to the following menus, as our options have changed. For technical support, press 1. For financial support, press 2. For support of the fleshy parts that jiggle during exercise, press 3. For emotional support, please hang up and call 888 HOT-LIVE.

Please note that we are currently experiencing temporary, localized service interruptions in Nome, Alaska*; Phoenix, Ariz.; Tijuana, Mexico; and all of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. If you live in one of these regions, please hang up and do not call back until we tell you. We appreciate your patience while our technicians ignore the problem.

If your appliance is less than 1 year old, press 1. If you are unmarried or are not sure, press 2.

In order to serve you better, it will be helpful for us to know which order you belong to. For Primates, press 1. For Cetacea and Proboscidea, press 2. For Jesuit or Dominican, press 3. For Knights Templar or Hospitaler, Knights of Pythias or Columbus, as well as Masons, Elks, and Kiwanis, or if you are unsure, press 4. If you are a Franciscan and have a rotary phone, please stay on the line.

Please key in the model and serial number of the product you are calling about. The model number is the series of 12 letters and digits that is visible when you push the unit away from the wall, work your head into the gap using a crowbar and No. 10 machine oil, and train a beam of ultraviolet light on the lower three centimeters of the right-hand rear surface of the appliance. If the model number is obscured by dust or cockroach detritus, wipe it with a soft, lint-free cloth soaked in a solution of ordinary rubbing alcohol, Kirschwasser, and formaldehyde. The serial number is the 37-digit number inscribed by means of laser nanotechnology on the underside of the unit and is not visible to the naked eye. When you have entered both numbers, press the pound key.

Note that at any point you may return to the previous menu by hanging up, calling again, and repeating the process until you reach the point just before the point you are at right now.

Please listen carefully to the following choices and select the one that best describes the problem you are calling about: If water is condensing on inner surfaces or leaking from under the door, press 1. If you are having trouble sending or receiving e-mail, press 2. If you are experiencing sharp, shooting pains in the left shoulder or a feeling of constriction in the chest, press 3. If you have lost your faith in a Supreme Being or any intelligible order in the universe and feel a desperate need for human contact, press 4. If you smell gas, press 5. To repeat this menu, press 6. To return to the previous menu or to a state of infantile bliss, press 7.

Please note that while you were listening to the previous menu, our options changed yet again. For Option 1, press 4. For Option 7, press 3. For Option 6, press 7. For Options 2 through 4, press 0 or hang up and call our Consumer Relations Department at (427) 555-9221. Long-distance charges may apply.

Most common problems can be resolved at home by following a simple sequence of diagnostic tests and procedures. We will now guide you through such a sequence. If you wish to skip this section, press 1, 3, and 9 simultaneously while restarting your telephone. Please note: If, while answering these questions, you see smoke or flames or if your chest is warm to the touch, hang up and call 911.

OK, let's get started.

Is the unit plugged in? If yes, press 1. If no, press 2.

Is the power switch set to "on"? If yes, press 1. If no, press 2.

Touch the condensation on the interior of the unit with your finger, then smell it. Does it smell like a dog that has been left out in the rain? If yes, press 1. If no, press 2.

Unplug your modem, power down your computer, and mix yourself a stiff drink. Drink it. Now restart your computer and plug the modem back in. Did this resolve the problem? If yes, press 1. If no, press 2.

While holding down the control and option keys, crouch on the floor, making chugging and whistling sounds. Say, "I think I can, I think I can." Continue in this manner for five minutes. Did this resolve the problem? If yes, press 1. If no, press 2.

Do you attend a church, synagogue, mosque, tabernacle, or other house of worship regularly (that is, three times a month or more)? If yes, press 1. If no, better press 1 anyway.

While remaining on this phone, use your cellular phone to call an old friend whom you haven't seen in years. Tell him or her that you've really missed him or her, and that if he or she has a problem he or she needs to talk about, you will be happy to lend a sympathetic ear. Did this resolve the problem? If yes, press 1. If no, press 2.

The diagnostic and self-help procedure is now complete. If the problem has been resolved, press 1. If the problem has been cleared up, press 2. If the problem no longer seems worth bothering with, press 3.

Thank you for calling. Goodbye.

Evan Eisenberg is the author of The Ecology of Eden and The Recording Angel, which will be reissued next spring in an expanded edition.

Another Dead-Easy To-Do List

The Seven Eight Labors of the United States of America:

1. Crush Al Qaeda.


2. Pacify Iraq.


3. Block Iran's nuclear ambitions.


4. Stabilize Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.


5. Restart the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis.


6. Maintain the security of the world's oil supply.


7. Push Arab leaders to reform without leaving them vulnerable to power grabs by terrorist fanatics.


8. And do all this while making more friends for the United States in a region where most people dislike or even hate us.

Walter Russell Mead—Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (Knopf)—offered this to-do list in a review of the 9/11 Commission Report in the Boston Globe (August 29, 2004). These eight items should be the substance of the foreign policy debate between W and John Kerry. Give 'em the list in advance. Let 'em prepare. Then, hold 'em to this list of eight tasks as they tell us how they would lead this country to accomplish this foreign policy agenda. No more blather. No more flip-flopping on the so-called war on terror. I am afraid that neither W nor John Kerry could summon up a cogent plan for even one of the items, let alone all eight. We are—in the words of Bush 41—in deep doo-doo. If this is (fair & balanced) punditry, so be it.