Emma jumped into labor union activism as soon as she got out of high school, and was in charge of organizing women in the newly-formed Confederation of Mexican and Mexican-American Laborers here just two years later. A few months after that the San Antonio Light noted that Emma had proclaimed herself the leader of a group she called the Unemployed Council of San Antonio and had received a promise from mayor C.K. Quin to hire more people to hand out food to the unemployed. On that day, Emma got her nickname. "Terming Miss Tenayuca 'a troublemaker,' Mrs. Hugman [of the local welfare bureau] said the 19-year old had told people...they would have to join her organization if they wanted to get attention."

But this was Emma going easy on the powers that be. In February of 1937 Emma first became front-page news under the headline "Throng Again Besieges Quin." Now Emma had a hundred followers in a group called the Workers' Alliance of America. It was heady stuff for someone just barely an adult, and Emma was just getting started. Later that month she came back to Mayor Quin's office with more demands, then led a group into the local federal building (the downtown post office) demanding that two border patrolmen be disciplined for beating several members of her group. The next month she brought an estimated 500 workers to back her up as she tried to pressure Mayor Quin into more relief just before the city election. "The only apparent result of their wrangling," the San Antonio Light noted, "was that Mayor Quin was a half hour late for lunch." It was clear whose side the newspaper was on from the headline: "Jobless Parade Under Red Signs." In those days all troublemakers were assumed to be communists, or Reds. It was several paragraphs in the story that the writer noted the "red" signs were simply red paint.

In late April she and her troops took over Mayor Quin's office, demanding a parade permit for a demonstration. It was denied. On April 27th the group was ushered out of city hall by local police, the story big enough that it outranked news of the completion that day of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Emma had wanted to hold a big May Day parade to honor world labor, but the move identified her a bit too much with communists, then a worrisome factor for politicians and the public.

Although Mayor Quin tried to be polite in public, it was clear the Anglo establishment was getting tired of Emma. They'd throw her a bone or two but she kept showing up and making trouble. On June 29th, she tried the sit-in routine at the local offices of the WPA, a Depression-era make-work group that built the Riverwalk and Alamo Stadium, among other things. That irked the local WPA director Edward Arneson (yes, the one the river theater is named for), who called police. Not only did officers march the protestors out of the building, they arrested Emma and two others, then went to the Workers' Alliance offices on Travis Street and broke a few windows and furnishings to make a point. Now Emma was in the position of being the bad guy and facing charges, just where the exasperated politicians wanted her. The next day the police commissioner forgave police for damaging the workers' headquarters, and added "Miss Emma Tenayuca for the last several months has caused the police department any amount of unnecessary trouble," adding that Emma deserved "what she got." Two weeks later, Emma was on trial for unlawful assembly and disturbing the peace. It was front page news. The jury found her not guilty two days later. That was on page three next to a photo of Anglo labor leaders signing a pledge to organize peacefully. It was clear local bosses had had enough of Emma.

She felt otherwise. Emma not only continued organizing, she married Homer Brooks, who'd been the Communist Party candidate for governor of Texas (getting 248 votes statewide). She started organizing pecan shellers, striking at what was then a huge industry here. With passage of a federal minimum wage law in late 1938, Emma thought she had succeeded in improving the lives of her workers. The new minimum was 25¢ an hour, up from the nickel or less being paid. Instead of obeying federal law, pecan businesses shut down altogether and started installing shelling machines. Emma's reaction was to have her workers walk out and call it a strike, but no real progress occurred.

Emma's downfall came after what should have been her biggest boost. Maury Maverick was elected mayor in 1939 after serving in Congress. In Washington, Maverick had given many speeches (and accepted many fees) for defending the rights of radicals to speak, assemble and organize workers. So in the summer of 1939 Emma asked for the use of the Municipal Auditorium for a protest meeting by local Communists. The American Legion went nuts at the idea of an auditorium that honored fallen soldiers being used by Reds. So did the local Catholic Church, the Ku Klux Klan, and most everybody but the Communists.

But Maverick was backed into a corner by his own prior statements. He had to grant a permit for the meeting. Disaster ensued. On August 25, several thousand protestors charged the Auditorium during the meeting of a few dozen Communists. Police were under orders not to shoot or club anyone, so they used fire hoses, but plenty of damage was done to the auditorium. The mayor was burned in effigy. Emma was whisked away by plainclothesmen and she promised another meeting, but something got in the way. A day before the riot the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a nonaggression pact dividing up Poland, putting the lie to Communist claims that they were as anti-Nazi as anyone else. The next week World War Two began and the Soviet Union did nothing. Communists were no longer harmless kooks but likely enemies. Maury Maverick's reputation was shot (he faced trial in a poll-tax scandal later that year), and Emma no longer got positive press. She left for California and a quieter life as a teacher.

But that doesn't mean Emma Tenayuca failed. She may have made mistakes - and who doesn't at the age of 19? - but she made it clear that both Hispanics and women were no longer to be ignored in politics. It's easy to see a connection between Emma Tenayuca's protests and most of the political and social gains made by minorities since those days.

(In 2001, Chris was inspired enough by Emma's story to write a musical about her entitled "Troublemaker," with music composed by local educator Suzanne Becht. Images from the San Antonio Light, April 26, 1937 and August 25 and 26, 1939. Courtesy newspaperarchive.com)

It may be instructive to look at the kind of people Americans used to be, especially when looking at the future. We once had boundless confidence in our ability to solve problems and to improve life for our citizens, so much so that we called it the American Way. The only thing that has changed is that nowadays, believing in ourselves is considered selfish.

In March of 1931, an article in the San Antonio Express looked forward to that distant year of 2000, seeing not utopia - it said the idea of people living in rows of 100-story buildings was silly - but reality that we now deny. "The further development of electrical power and the expansion
of territories served by natural gas," it noted, "will make it possible for our cities in the future to be smokeless, and free from dirt and soot...I believe that our future cities will use this fuel for factory and heating purposes, and that the consequent elimination of smoke and soot will make cities veritable garden spots, and that their buildings will glisten in far purer air than we have ever known." And guess what - that's exactly what happened. Of course, few people alive today remember just how sooty and polluted our cities were by coal and wood fires, so all we do nowadays is complain about the tiny amount of pollution that remains. New cars, for example, emit 95% less pollution than those manufactured in 1970, yet all we hear is more end-of-the-world caterwauling.

The start of the year 1950 was a good one for looking ahead. A January 3, 1950 Associated Press article on the year 2000 claimed "you'll live far longer than before. Cancer is controlled, the common cold licked, and diseases like polio are on the run." Not bad for a fifty-year guess. Polio disappeared, and cancer is much more treatable now than then. What they didn't know was that the "common cold" is a package of over 100 different rhinoviruses we can be exposed to - not so easy to knock out. The same article says "you'll have a wrist-watch radio and carry a television set in your pocket." Sounds to me a lot like an IPhone or other modern cell phone. The chairman of RCA (a once-huge communications company) claimed live TV would link "New York, London or Shanghai," and that "mail will be whizzed around the world by radio," a pretty good description of CNN and e-mail. The chairman of the National Bureau of Standards claimed atomic energy would be developed as a power source, and aircraft and industrial processes would be controlled "through 'semi-thinking' electronic devices." Movie producer Cecil B. De Mille claimed in the year 2000, "100 million Americans would be looking at films every day." With Blockbuster, downloads and hundreds of cable channels, he actually guessed a bit low.

On the first of January, 1951, the Associated Press did it again (remember those people who claimed the new century didn't begin until 2001? This was for their parents). "Man Made Star May Circle Earth by End of This Century," was one headline. Of course, a satellite was in orbit just seven years later. Another called for "Foolproof Flying" by 2000, with commercial air transportation safer "than in any of today's travel methods." A wild-eyed article on farming claimed "U.S. to Be Able to Feed 300 Million in 50 Years," thanks to progress. In 2009, the U.S. can easily feed its own 300 million and hundreds of millions more. Another prediction was that farmers, who were 40% of the population in 1900 and 20% in 1950, would be fewer than 10% by 2000. Reality ran right past that - today less than 2% of Americans are full-time agriculturists.

An article in September of 1949 described a get-together of UN scientists who talked over the distant future. They correctly claimed giant windmills would be producing electricity, that atomic-powered ships would cross the oceans, and that "tremendous acreages in the former jungles of Africa and Latin America...will be pouring their products into man's breadbasket" (of course nowadays Americans protest the right of Brazilians to use their own land, but this came true anyway). The same article predicted that the humans of 2000 "will not have cracked the secret of the universe and the creation of life, nor will [they] have found the fountain of everlasting youth." True, but they'd be amazed at how close we're coming on all fronts.

The real problem with these predictions? They weren't crazy enough. None of the ones I saw predicted the internet, Google, GPS, DNA, biotechnology, birth control pills or personal computers. Certainly the people of 1950 would be shocked by our pessimism when surrounded by such progress. As one article noted, "We've feared the worst, while hoping for the best, ever since we have been a nation. We've come through wars and depressions. And we've come through - free."

So cheer up. I predict things will be getting better no matter how much we complain.

(Articles from the San Antonio Express, March 15, 1931; Lubbock Avalanche, January 3, 1950; the Paris (Texas) News, January 1, 1951; and the Galveston News, September 11, 1949. All from newspaperarchive.com)

During World War II a huge number of soldiers and airmen came through San Antonio, many of them training at Lackland, Kelly and Randolph Field (as air bases were called then). So many were here that famed songwriter Cole Porter set his musical "Something for the Boys" outside Kelly Field. And even before the war, Randolph had received the nickname "West Point of the Air" because of its pilot training (a not-very-good movie was made with that name starring Wallace Beery).

So after the war, when Congress created a separate Air Force from the Army Air Corps, local congressman Paul Kilday figured that the new service should have its own academy and that it should be located here. Now, lots of congressmen say lots of things about how their districts deserve government projects, but Kilday had some serious backing. In June of 1948, the new Air Force's Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg was being questioned by congressmen trying to come up with an Air Force budget. Carl Vinson asked Vandenberg if he thought the Air Force would need its own academy, as the Army had at West Point, New York and the Navy had at Annapolis, Maryland. Vandenberg replied yes. The San Antonio Express noted what followed in its June 3, 1948 edition:

"[Congressman Carl] Vinson then asked the chief of staff where the academy could best be located. 'Randolph Field, Texas,' Vandenberg said. Vandenberg pointed out that the climate was one of the foremost considerations not only for flying but because of the economy in constructing buildings and houses in the warm climate of San Antonio."

And Vandenberg wasn't even the first big shot to recommend the city. Previously Secretary for Air Stuart Symington had said the same thing about the proposed academy and its location. The next year the country's first Defense Secretary (it had been Secretary of War before) James Forrestal supported an air academy, saying it was impossible for the two existing academies to produce enough officers for three services. So what happened? Certainly Congressman Kilday never dropped the ball. In the San Antonio Light for March 6, 1949, Kilday said "I still insist that congress should set up the Air Academy at Randolph, and I am not a bit worried." And why should he have been? Kilday's bill to name Randolph now had the backing of the Air Force Secretary, House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, and Senator Lyndon Johnson.

So what happened? Politics, perhaps with a little corruption thrown in. On June 22, 1951, the San Antonio Light headlined "SURPRISE BILL MAY SNARL AF SCHOOL," pointing out that House Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Vinson had introduced a bill to allow $20 million for the new air academy, but would give the Air Force authority to pick a site. Vinson, either innocent or lying outright, was reported to have said "the air force contemplates establishing the academy at some existing air force installation or at a civilian institution that could be leased at a minimum of expense." That sounded nice to a nation that had just finished paying $200 billion for a war and was in another, but a commission had already chosen seven locations for the new academy, and Randolph was one of just two that met those specifications (the others were near Grapevine and in Grayson County, Texas; Madison, Indiana; Charlotte, North Carolina; Camp Beale, California, and, guess what--Colorado Springs. The next day the San Antonio Express editorialized "Why could not the Air Force solve its problem permanently by locating the academy at Randolph-- that possesses not only the physical plant, but also a 25-year service record as the West Point of the Air? In that event the A.F. would not need all the 10 million dollars for land purchase which the Vinson Bill would appropriate."

But why save money when you've got the taxpayers' cash to throw around? Vinson's bill didn't pass, but three years later one did, and it was obvious the fix was in. Congressman Kilday announced in mid-June of 1954 that he had dropped his push for Randolph "for the welfare of the Air Force and the country." Translation: it was time to move out of the way or get squashed like a bug. Ten days later the Air Force proudly announced that it had decided on Colorado Springs, for its "all-year temperate climate" and other reasons. Yeah, it was temperate, Kilday replied - "for an Eskimo." The news report went on to say the unimproved site was near the North American Air Defense Command, "and a favorite spot for many Air Force generals." Puh-leeze. Even fifty years later, far more current and former Air Force generals live in San Antonio than in pokey, icebound Colorado Springs.

And so went $150 million of government money, to build an Air Force Academy where no man had been stupid enough to go before. In order to justify that location, the Air Force had to give up the idea of training officers to fly at its own academy. Suddenly, flying an airplane was not a key factor in educating Air Force officers. It was as if the Navy had never put midshipmen on boats or West Point had never put cadets on bivouac. And saving money by setting up somewhere already established and proven for Air Force education? How would that look at the Joint Chiefs of Staff barbecues?

At the center of it all was Carl Vinson, who spent more than 50 years in the House of Representatives and was in charge of military spending for almost 20. Vinson did help prepare the country for World War II by ramping up ship building, but he also was the key in making $500 hammers possible for the Department of Defense by backing every bloated spending bill that came his way. We'll never know what Vinson accepted or traded to put the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, but his existence for half a century in Congress was a clear argument for term limits. Today, a medical center, institute of government and a nuclear aircraft carrier are named for Vinson. How appropriate, since all of them were paid for with somebody else's money.

Prices have changed, thanks to inflation. Gulf-Mart (a discount store in the Wal-Mart tradition) was advertising Christmas turkeys for 65¢ a pound, bacon for 99¢ a pound, and T-Bone steaks for $1.69. HEB, a much smaller retailer in those days, sold navel oranges for 19¢ a pound and apples for 29¢. You could get an air-conditioned 1974 Ford Torino (but not Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino) for $3,635 from Gillespie Ford on Broadway.

Gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon - when you could get it. The San Antonio Light had a page-one headline noting "No Gas at Many Stations" while the Express-News wrote "Standby Rationing Idea Eyed." The lack of gas was due more to federal attempts to control prices than to the Arab oil embargo. When Ronald Reagan lifted price controls in 1981, gasoline went up slightly, the supply stabilized - and then prices plunged.

U.S. soldiers were involved in an unpopular war overseas, but the location was South Vietnam. "Blast kills 17 in Saigon" was one headline. In slightly more than ten years of war there, almost 60,000 Americans were killed, versus about 4,000 lost in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. We may have lost that war but we won the battle - there were many references in the papers to tension with the Soviet Union, a nation that no longer exists thanks to our opposition to worldwide Communism.

Late Express-News columnist and Eyewitness News sports anchor Dan Cook had a headline reading "Cowboys Ready" for their big game against the Los Angeles Rams (remember when L.A. had a team?). They were ready, winning the game that afternoon, 27-16, but they lost the NFC championship game the next week to Minnesota, 27-10. To give you an idea of how bloated the NFL season has become, that year's Super Bowl VIII was played at Rice Stadium in Houston on January 13, 1974, three weeks before today's average Super Bowl date. Miami won that, 24-7.

Movie ads were full of familiar names and titles - "Willie Wonka" was playing, as was "American Graffiti" ("Where were you in '62?" was its tagline) and "The Way We Were," starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Redford also starred with Paul Newman in "The Sting," which opened in two days and would dominate the Oscars in '74. But who remembers "Papillon," the bloated big-budget flick starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman? Or Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda in "Ash Wednesday"? How about another big-budget movie, "Marco," based on the life of Marco Polo and starring - wait for it - Desi Arnaz, Junior? And we should all at least try to forget "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," a movie based on a hippy-dippy book of cornpone philosophy about, yes, a seagull that was a huge bestseller in the early 1970s, with syrupy soundtrack by Neil Diamond.

The Express-News had a feature story about a McKinney, Texas woman who would be celebrating Christmas that year in her two-room house - at the age of 112! That brings up one thing that hasn't changed in the past 36 - or 360 - years. While the average human's lifespan has increased greatly, most of that is due to the defeat of childhood diseases. The maximum lifespan of a human, a little bit over 110 years, hasn't changed at all. When we learn to affect that number, things will really get interesting for the human race.

One headline referred to a much-anticipated event that soon became a synonym for hyped expectations and dashed hopes. Astronauts orbiting in Skylab were observing Comet Kohoutek. The comet had been spotted past the orbit of Jupiter earlier that year, and its brightness that far from the Sun led many respected scientists to predict it would be one of the brightest comets of modern times, perhaps even visible in daylight. It turned out Kohoutek was an okay comet, as such things go, but the sensational buildup to the big letdown turned Comet Kohoutek into a punch line for all of 1974 and beyond.

Finally, my friend and coworker Paul Thompson, front-page columnist for the San Antonio News (and how many front-page columnists have you ever seen?) had a squib about TV news ratings in his Sunday column that day. Paul noted that the November 1973 ratings had just come out, and "regardless of what you may hear in the way of house ads and self-adoring blurbs on any other channel, Eyewitness News remains the solid late-night No. 1 of both professional ratings services."

Some things in life change and some things don't.

The observance of Labor Day this week brings to mind one of the most famous labor leaders of all time, Samuel Gompers. Gompers started the modern labor movement by founding the American Federation of Labor in the late 1800s, then serving as its leader for more than 40 years. In December of 1924 Gompers was at a two nation labor get-together in Mexico City, but the altitude aggravated an already-existing heart problem. In those days, the fastest travel was by train and the nearest big U.S. hospitals were in San Antonio, so he was brought here where he died of heart failure on December 13. Gompers, hardly known today, was involved in the creation of a lot of what we take for granted - an eight-hour workday, the U.S. Department of Labor, and even the Labor Day Holiday. Although he is buried in New York State, there's a statue of him - supported by laborers - downtown on Market Street. The statue itself became the center of controversy when it was dedicated two decades ago, with critics saying it didn't look like Gompers, and besides, it was simply ugly. Mr. Gompers was unavailable for comment.

Richard Avedon, on the other hand, focused on beauty. Avedon (pronounced avva-DON) was one of the top fashion photographers of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s - you get the idea. More than any other photographer, he introduced the idea of movement and emotion to fashion photography, which before him had been static and predictable. He was so revolutionary that Fred Astaire played a version of him (as "Dick Avery") in the 1957 movie "Funny Face," though it's unlikely Richard could dance that well. Avedon was not a one-trick pony; he also was a journalistic photographer, and it was a project for the New Yorker magazine that brought him to San Antonio in September of 2004, photographing wounded soldiers at Brooke Army Medical Center. It was there that Avedon, then 81, suffered a brain hemorrhage. He was hospitalized immediately and given the best treatment, but died here October 1, 2004.

San Antonio has had its share of movie stars - Tommy Lee Jones has a home in Terrell Hills, "E.T." star Henry Thomas, Carol Burnett and Joan Crawford were born here - but I can only confirm the death of one movie star here, and that one takes a lot of remembering. Pola Negri was born in Poland in the 1890s, but World War One sent her to the U.S. where she became one of the queens of silent pictures, playing the bad girl - the "vamp" - in many movies. However, the advent of sound revealed her thick foreign accent, limiting her roles. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951 and retired to San Antonio where she lived (I was told) in a Spanish-style mansion on Devine Road until her death at age 93 on August 1, 1987.

Finally, the big one, and claiming his death in San Antonio involves a technicality. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a native of the Hill Country who became the 36th president of the United States. After his five years in that office, he retired to his ranch in Stonewall, between Johnson City (named for an ancestor) and Fredericksburg. LBJ's public image took a pounding due to the Vietnam War and that may have played a role in his suffering several heart attacks. The third heart attack, on January 22, 1973, was the last, and as the San Antonio Light noted, he "was flown to Brooke General Hospital in San Antonio where he was pronounced dead on arrival by Doctor George McGranahan." It was likely that Johnson actually died before getting here, but since an M.D. is usually needed to pronounce someone dead, we can technically say that he died in San Antonio. Johnson passed away a few weeks after former President Harry Truman died, which left the country with no living ex-presidents from January of 1973 until Richard Nixon resigned in August of 1974.

No doubt there are other famous or infamous people who died in San Antonio in the past 291 years; I'll be happy to hear about them from you.

Image of Samuel Gompers from San Antonio Express, December 14, 1924. Pola Negri ad from Logansport (IN) Press, May 13, 1923. Lyndon Johnson on the front page of the San Antonio Light, January 23, 1973. Note the flag at half-staff on the paper's banner.

You probably haven't gotten swine flu yet, but you're likely already sick--sick of hearing about it. A few hundred people have died of the disease in our part of the world and the Centers for Disease Control is asking everyone to accept vaccinations against the disease in hopes of heading off a major epidemic. Still, hearing too much about an epidemic is a lot better than hearing nothing.When we went through the worst flu epidemic the country has ever seen, people were dying of flu right and left but almost nothing was said about it.

World War I was the first war that America took part in simply to help others. The Germans and their allies didn't want the U.S. in the war and did what they could to keep us out, but once we got into it in April of 1917, the federal government basically took over the country, telling us what to do, what to eat and what to think. The world's first public relations effort was formed to keep Americans in a fighting mood whatever the situation, and newspapers (the only news source of the time) were told to stay in line with what Uncle Sam wanted, and that included a raging flu epidemic made worse by young soldiers being kept in overcrowded conditions. By the time it ran its course, the influenza epidemic of 1918 had killed between 21 and 50 million people worldwide, more than were killed by the war, but a look at the newspapers of the day would make one think it was a minor problem that was always somehow declining in urgency.

For years the disease was incorrectly called the Spanish Influenza, and sure enough, in June of 1918, the San Antonio Light made an offhand comment about the appearance of the disease in Spain. A month later the newspaper noted that the flu had broken out behind German lines. "Why the disease did not appear in Allied armies may be explained by the maintenance of sanitary conditions..." the article added. The truth was that the disease had likely started in American army camps, with the origination in western Kansas that spring. But such matters were not to be considered - at least until the existence of the flu in the United States could no longer be ignored.

Like the swine flu, the 1918 flu began in the spring and returned in the fall. It struck Camp Devens, outside Boston, with 1000 cases reported in the Light on September 16. The truth, as John Barry reported in his book Influenza, was that more than six thousand young men jammed the camp hospital, and 70 of 200 nurses had fallen ill. At least 500 young men died at Camp Devens, but military authorities underreported everything for fear of heartening the Germans.

In San Antonio, Barry noted, more than half the city's population was ill with influenza that fall, but the newspaper said on October 6 that crowded conditions at Camp Travis were "rapidly being relieved," and "it is believed that there is no occasion for alarm." The next day the paper said the illness "took a new turn - 30 nurses are stricken." The day after that, the Light said the "epidemic is now under control in southern [army] camps," but on the 11th the News admitted almost 200,000 soldiers had the disease, and 830 of them had died just the day before. Still, the local headline was "Influenza in the city shows a falling off, with only (!) 143 new cases reported, but "quite a large number of them [were] merely bad colds..."

On October 12, the Light reported the "epidemic is now declining in [the] Army," while right below it noted that "Philadelphia needs grave diggers" because of the huge toll there. Somehow this was an epidemic that was killing tens of thousands of Americans but was constantly declining. On the 16th, the Light quoted a military official saying "there is influenza in the country, but there is no epidemic of influenza so serious as to cause alarm." In the same day's paper was a headline that "Influenza reaches epidemic stage in almost every state," and a note that Fort Worth had ordered all "churches, public schools, theaters and picture shows closed until further notice."

It was on the 16th that all public places in San Antonio were closed "as a precaution," and schools were closed indefinitely, with the city's health officer announcing "this is simply a precautionary measure and should not cause undue alarm." In fact, the News reported, "influenza was [again] decreasing in army circles," and one general "indicated the disease is now under control in the army," although figures would be announced later. The next day the News headlined "Influenza is on decrease in city," although it listed 110 new cases at Fort Sam Houston alone.

On the nineteenth, the News's editorial page had a list of what to do to avoid the disease. Most of it was common-sense suggestions such as avoiding crowds and not spitting in public, but number ten was "Don't worry and keep your feet warm." The constantly-decreasing epidemic still had plenty of kick - restrictions were placed on Camp Travis from December 7-26 to keep the flu from spreading. Finally, on December 19, the war won, the Light was able to report that "only 69 new cases of disease are reported for Wednesday." Sixty-nine cases of such a contagious disease should normally terrify medical authorities; the low-key note makes it clear just how bad the unreported epidemic had been. On December 22, local theaters finally reopened, featuring a vaudeville animal act with an "intellectual bulldog" and a play that promised "A Laugh a Second - A Shout a Minute." It was unlikely any of the jokes were about the epidemic.

Perhaps the swine flu will mutate this fall and cause far more illness than expected, but what worries me while reading about the deadly epidemic of 1918 is how easy it is for the news media to ignore a big story if they believe there is a "higher goal." In that case, it was the "war to end all wars." In recent years the media have set global warming, spotted owls, homelessness and other plights above their responsibility to report objectively. It doesn't work. This country can survive bad leadership - it has many times over the years - but it can't survive bad reporting.

San Antonio News front page from October 10, 1918. Note the tiny story in the right-hand column about 200,000 cases of influenza in the army. Theater page from the San Antonio Light, December 21, 1918, with ad noting "Goodby Flu, We Are Through With You."

"He is a landmark," Speedy told me. "People call about a car and we just tell them, 'you know, where the big Indian is.'" Speedy (named Pedro, but he goes by Speedy), went to work for Red McCombs back during Hemisfair days in the late 1960s. Back then Red sold Fords and the Chief worked for a local family named the Halffs on Broadway downtown at Superior Pontiac. Sadly, the Chief had enemies in those days--almost any time you looked up at his reddish-tan chest you'd see an arrow or two protruding from it. Even after he first moved to Loop 410 almost thirty years ago the unwarranted attacks continued, but that has finally come to a halt. "Four-ten is so busy, police would see you if you pulled over and stopped to shoot an arrow," Speedy pointed out. So The Chief's enemies have returned to their wigwams for now.

He also isn't quite as, well, Indian as he used to be - "when he was brown," Speedy said, "people would call and complain about discrimination, so about seven years ago a sales manager decided to paint him pink." So today The Chief's racial identity is a bit ambiguous. Perhaps, an onlooker might think, an Anglo simply dressed up as an Indian and posed for the sculpture, except even the most pale-faced of Anglos would have gotten pretty tan by now, standing bare-chested in the sun every day for thirty years.

My curiosity about The Chief was rekindled by the recent bankruptcy of General Motors and the announcement that the Pontiac line of cars would be discontinued. With no Pontiacs, was it possible that Chief Pontiac would be coming down soon at Superior? "Our Indian is going to be there," Speedy Gonzalez assured me. "A lot of dealerships have to use flagpoles or balloons to get people's attention, but The Chief is a landmark - you can't get a better landmark than that." As the receptionist told me when I first called Superior, "It won't go away unless Red [McCombs] says it goes away." And why should it? The original Chief Pontiac, as I mentioned, was a member of the Ojibwe tribe, whose people lived on the shores of, yep, Lake Superior. So even without the Pontiac nameplate, Superior and The Chief have a deep connection.

And Speedy will stick around, too. He's 66 years old now but has no plans to retire. After all, that makes him 323 years younger than the original Chief Pontiac, who gained fame by attacking the British troops at Detroit in 1763. "Gotta keep going, brother," Speedy says. "I need to pass down the wisdom. These younger troops are always coming in wanting to reinvent the wheel." Even if the wheel is no longer attached to a Pontiac, Speedy and The Chief will remain.

One last thing--a subject too delicate even to talk to Speedy about. From a certain angle, it appears The Chief's buckskin breeches have broken open and--well, it was an object of much hilarity in the days when The Chief was downtown more than thirty years ago. But let's hope we're all more mature now. And if not, you just have to stand on Manitou drive at sunset and look up...

"There are large, modern nuclear power plants with reliability records that match the top records of plants burning gas, oil or coal," one newspaper editorial has urged. "Nuclear power is no experiment...power companies all over the United States have realized that nuclear power must be used to generate electricity," it continued. That is from an editorial in the San Antonio Express on June 21 - of 1973. At the time they were telling the San Antonio City Council to man up and vote for nukes. Four days later, the editorial was headlined "Council Energy Hearings: What Are the Options?" which was answered as nuclear and nothing. That week the San Antonio Light ran an above-the-fold story on the Sunday front page pointing out, for about the five millionth time, that nuclear reactors cannot explode like atom bombs and that, even for people with irrational fears like that, our reactor would be 165 miles away in Bay City, not downtown.

City council did vote for nuclear power on June 27 of 1973, after a tumultuous 9-hour public hearing the night before where all the old myths were brought up. The next day, the Express editorial said the plant's building would begin at the start of 1976, would cost $900 million dollars, and would produce only 6 pounds of nuclear waste a day, the weight of what a coal-fired plant produces as ash in a minute. The vote didn't end it, of course - opponents of nuclear power continued to complain - but the concrete was poured in early 1976. Power didn't flow from the plant until August of 1988, but it's been fairly constant for the past 21 years, although the cost of the plant zoomed due to inflation and alleged mismanagement by the contractor. Still, the cost of nuclear power seems cheap today. And how many people has it killed in 21 years?

Now the mayor, thinking more like a politician than a chief executive, is waffling on the CPS nuclear issue. Maybe we'll buy less than 50% of the new reactors, maybe we won't. Perhaps he should look at a few old newspapers from the 1970s - the world was about to end, gasoline was going to be $10 a gallon, nuclear power would kill us all, Vietnam, Watergate - and yet we built the South Texas Project and have benefited from it. I'll put it this way - in fifteen years would you rather this city have extra power to sell to other cities - or have us beg for power? Which one of those situations is going to lead to more jobs and a richer community?

What the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should have done years ago, of course, is to approve nuclear plants of a certain size built by certain companies to certain specifications, so utilities could simply pick what they need and build it, saving billions But the government seems to really enjoy reinventing the wheel every month or so, so we pay the higher price of being regulated.

The earlier vote for nuclear power came in the midst of one of this country's worst times . Here we go again, with a weak economy, high energy prices, etc. But if San Antonio doesn't keep up with its energy demands (even organic granola-types with notebook computers use a lot of power), we'll end up like California, with blackouts, no jobs and high taxes - and considering this summer, we can't even brag about the good weather.

Prosecutors were so nervous about Fred Carrasco's ability to kill or escape, he was rushed to prison in Huntsville just 24 hours after he pleaded guilty to murder in Corpus Christi. Other charges against him, and the assault on a police officer charge against his wife were to be dropped, but not until it was too late for Carrasco to appeal his own guilty verdict. After all the shootouts and searches, the guilty plea seemed anticlimactic; a candidate for DA in the 1974 elections charged the incumbent, Ted Butler, with "copping out" on the case. In his defense, Butler said about Carrasco, "it will be a cold day in hell if he ever gets out." He came very close to eating those words a few months later.

The spring of 1974 was a quiet one for Fred. The Patty Hearst kidnapping was getting most of the news hole on TV and in papers; Carrasco popped up with an appearance in federal court here on April 15th to be arraigned on charges of drug trafficking. Bail was set at $1 million and the legal community started breathing again when Fred was back in Huntsville. He had escaped before, and no one would bet that he wouldn't try again.

He did, in late July of '74, making an escape attempt that received worldwide headlines (although in that turbulent year, it took second place to the Nixon impeachment hearings). It started in the usually-quiet library at the old Walls Unit in Huntsville, when Carrasco and two other inmates, Ignacio Cuevas and Rudolfo Dominguez, produced guns and took fourteen hostages. Nobody knew where the guns came from, since corrections guards weren't allowed to carry guns for precisely the reason that prisoners might end up with them (it was later established that a trusty at the prison did it after being threatened, bringing in one of the guns inside a hollowed-out ham). The first reports were that the four inmates taken hostage were also in on the deal; until that was cleared up observers were left to wonder why San Antonian Henry Escamilla, a man serving five years for shoplifting, would take part in such a dangerous and violent gamble.

Carrasco negotiated with Texas Department of Corrections officials. He wanted walkie-talkies, bulletproof vests and helmets, more weapons and an armored truck to make a getaway. He got a surprising amount of it, although TDC officials did everything as slowly as they could without putting the hostages in further danger. Carrasco, in his own way, returned the favor, treating the hostages well, releasing two who had health problems and making sure the inmates left the female librarians alone. One interesting request was for suits for Carrasco and his partners - they got them, with Carrasco receiving a Hart Schaffner and Marx suit and Nunn-Bush shoes. Then things settled into a sort of routine for ten days, punctuated only by shoplifter Henry Escamilla's dive through a plate glass library door on the fifth day. He escaped but needed two hundred stitches to close the cuts he received.

In considering his possible escape, Carrasco's problem was that the library at the Walls Unit wasn't a simple brick building; it was actually on the third floor of a large building in the open courtyard of the prison, and to get in or out required traversing four connected ramps that twisted and turned on one another. This kept guards from making a mass assault on him, but left him with a problem. How was he going to make his way down the long concrete ramp and survive? His answer was to build a mobile armored vehicle out of two chalkboards, covered by dozens of law books taped to the outside for makeshift armor. Inside it, each of the three convicts would walk out, handcuffed to a female hostage while the other hostages walked on the outside, held in place by more handcuffs. Carrasco had warned that if TDC officers tried anything, the inmates would shoot the women who were with them.

TDC director W.J. Estelle had actually allowed an armored truck to be pulled up in front of the library, and it was ready to roll, since he knew one of the inmates would be sent down to examine it. He also knew TDC could not allow a successful escape, since that would likely result in hundreds of more attempts from the tens of thousands of prisoners in the Department as well as the deaths of the hostages. When the chalkboard escape pod, dubbed the Trojan Taco, started its way down the zigzag ramp, officers turned on several high-pressure fire hoses meant to knock it down and allow them to rescue the hostages. It didn't work. Carrasco, Cuevas and Dominguez started blazing away with their pistols and officers shot back, aiming at tiny gun ports in the crude fortress. When the vehicle got stuck on the first turnaround in the ramp, Carrasco and Dominguez realized the attempt was over. Both shot the women with them and a priest (Father O'Brien, as luck would have it) who had volunteered to act as a go-between. O'Brien survived; both Yvonne Beseda and Judy Standley died. Carrasco then shot himself in the head. When the officers rushed the soaked mass of wreckage, Dominguez seemed to make a move and was shot dead. After eleven days of waiting and twenty minutes of terror, the most complex and deadly breakout attempt in the history of the Texas Department of Corrections was over.

It took seventeen years and three trials before the surviving conspirator, Ignacio Cuevas, was executed for his part in the siege. Like all Texas executions, it occurred at the Walls Unit just a few dozen yards from the library. Twenty-five years after the August 3, 1974 shootout, the newly-remodeled library was named the Beseda-Standley Building to honor the two women who'd been murdered.

Fred Carrasco and the prison siege aren't remembered by many today because of the environment in which the siege occurred. Not only was it overshadowed by Watergate (Richard Nixon resigned less than a week after the siege ended), but TV technology in those days was just short of the videotape and live-shot technology that allow us to relive almost everything that has happened in the 35 years since. In a way, that's too bad. Fred Carrasco was nobody's hero, but he should be remembered just as deadly natural disasters are remembered - so that we can be better prepared for the next one.

How did Michael do in the traditional media compared to other celebrities? As the music people say, he made it into the top ten, but didn't reach number one. That may be a function more of when Michael died than a reflection of his popularity, though. The traditional media, newspapers and broadcast media, are still big but the Internet is huge; the reaction to Jackson's death last week on the Internet was so big that for a while Google thought it was being attacked by hackers and people in charge of the actual backbone of the Internet itself noticed the increase in traffic. Considering two billion people now use the Internet, noticing an increase over the death of one person is amazing. So whether or not the King of Pop was king of the headlines is almost beside the point.

That being said, let's return to a time when being a "star" was a brand-new thing, and no famous person had yet lived long enough to die of natural causes. An unexpected death in those days would be huge news, and it was. His name was Rudolfo Guglielmo Valentino. He had become a star in silent pictures thanks to the desires of young women across the nation who considered him exotic, but not so masculine he would scare them off. Rudy had plopped into Hollywood just after World War One and had done okay in the silent movie biz, but in 1921 he was cast as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in a pot-boiler that featured him doing a steamy (for that time) tango. From then on it was Valentino-mania. No one had ever seen such a thing before, for the simple fact that not many people had appeared before the public across the nation as a character twenty feet high on a movie screen. Valentino was rushed from one exotic starring role to another for the next five years. In the summer of 1926 he was in New York on a promotional tour and fell ill. Doctors diagnosed a perforated ulcer and operated immediately, taking care of that problem; but this was in a day before antibiotics, and a post-surgery infection set in.

To say his death was front-page news was underrating it - headlines of his death were set in a type size that hadn't been used since the recent war. Thousands upon thousands lined up to view his casket, and at one point fellow silent movie star Pola Negri (who later retired to San Antonio) threw herself on the casket in a show of grief, though some said it was only to get herself some of the attention.

It was forty years before it happened again, and once again it was a "first of his kind" sort of star. Rock-n-roll's first superstar was Elvis Presley, and his death was huge news in 1977, so much so that, in a pre-Internet, pre-cell phone world, calls to Memphis just to ask about his death crashed a telephone exchange there. Thousands of people crowded around Elvis's estate of Graceland, and that was in the days when it was simply his home and not a tourist attraction. Elvis not only got headlines, he got the banner headlines (above the newspaper logo, or banner) too. People who hadn't been around for the death of Valentino thought it was unprecedented. It almost was, but not quite.

What about the other icons of early death, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe? Dean's iconic image actually grew up after his death; at the time he died (September 30, 1955) he had only starred in three movies, and almost no one knew was a Porsche sports car was in those days (he died in a collision involving his Porsche and a car driven by a man whose name was pronounced turnip-seed). Dean got only a first-column headline on the front page of the San Antonio Light the next day. Marilyn Monroe was a victim of the weekend news cycle and her West Coast location; she was found dead at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night in her California home, too late for the Sunday editions in the Eastern and Central time zones. By the time the papers could print the story it was more than 24 hours old and had spread by radio and TV; although her death got plenty of play on Monday morning, it wasn't the same as if she had been found at, say, 5 PM on Sunday.

Thinking about the deaths of the famous reminded me of a journalism lesson I received once from Dan Cook, my coworker for many years. Like most of his lessons, it came one night during a commercial break. Dan had been a young sportswriter for the Houston Post in the late 1940s and had spent a day following baseball legend Babe Ruth around Houston; a year later the Babe died of cancer in New York City. The next day, Dan said, "every hack in the business tried to make his name by writing Babe's obituary with every cheap phrase they could come up with - 'his name will be repeated by the children of our grandchildren, it will echo down through the ages,' all of it malarkey" (except Dan, being Dan, didn't say malarkey). "Only one writer really knew how to do it. He started out, 'Babe Ruth is dead.' period, new paragraph, and then went on to fill in the emotion and such. Never write an obit without telling people who died first. Yeah, most everybody knew that the Babe was dead by the time they picked up the paper, but what if they didn't? Never assume nothin'." In fact, Dan once told me that the first three rules of journalism were variations of "Never assume nothin'," and the fourth and last rule was "get the name right."

It wasn't until the Internet and the archiving of almost every newspaper ever published that I was able to go back and see what he was talking about. Sure enough, the AP's Milton Richman just couldn't keep from overplaying it. His story began, "Dusk was descending outside Memorial Hospital, and inside it was the twilight of a great career. On the ninth floor of the hospital, 53 year old Babe Ruth, who had endeared himself to millions by his feats on the baseball field, was dying." But Richman waits until the tenth paragraph of the story to tell us the Babe had actually died! An INS report did somewhat better, beginning with "George Herman (Babe) Ruth, the greatest slugger in baseball history and the idol of fans from shoe shine boys to presidents, dies peacefully in his sleep tonight."

But it was the straightforward reporting of the AP's M.L. Stephenson that Dan recalled so well. It started off "Babe Ruth is dead. [New paragraph.] "The one-time Yankee slugger, wasted by two years' illness and almost constant pain, died of cancer of the throat at 7:01 pm last night. He was 53." Adding the dateline of the story, which stated (New York) before the copy began, note the many facts relevant to the story Stephenson got into his first few lines. Babe's age, cause of death, time of death, location of death and the situation surrounding his death - all there for a person with only time to glance at the story. Neither M.L. Stephenson nor Dan Cook ever won a Pulitzer, but if you're ever famous and die suddenly, you'd be lucky to have the story written by someone like them.

And speaking again of sudden deaths of famous people, Valentino, Elvis, Marilyn and Babe Ruth all died in the month of August. Makes you think Michael Jackson died a couple of months early.

(Images from the San Antonio Light for August 23, 1926 and August 17, 1977. Image from the San Antonio Express for August 6, 1962. From newspaperarchive.com)