For a child growing up in the 1920s, El Paso seemed to be full of off-beat characters and warm personalities: from a diverse group of servicemen and their families stationed at Fort Bliss to tuberculosis patients attracted by the dry desert climate. Mary Rodge's father, a dye man in the cotton-mill industry, moved the family to El Paso in 1924 when he was offered a job there.
Rodge's memoir begins with her family's hazardous road trip across the desert from Redlands, California, to Texas. In the following pages, she explores the lives of its citizens and narrates her experiences over the...

In 1936 as Texas prepared to celebrate its centennial--100 years after the Battle of San Jacinto--Dallas was chosen as the site of the official exhibition. Plans were under way for a modest Frontier Days Celebration in Fort Worth--until Star-Telegram publisher and civic booster Amon G. Carter stepped in. Carter considered the naming of Dallas as the official site a gross miscarriage of justice and was determined to get even by mounting a show that would directly rival the official event--and pull tourist dollars into Fort Worth. To put his celebration together Carter hired flamboyant Broadway...

In the 1950s, West Texas suffered the longest drought in the memory of most men then living. By that time, Charlie Flagg, the central character of this novel, was one of a dying breed of men who wrested their living from the harsh land of West Texas. The struggle made them fiercely independent, a trait personified in Charlie s persistence throughout the seven dry years, his refusal to accept defeat, his opposition to federal aid programs and their inevitable bureaucratic regulations, his determination to stay on the land he loves and respects even as he suffers with that land. Charlie is by...