Archie P. McDonald

Red River Radio, an affiliate of National Public Radio, headquartered in Shreveport, Louisiana, supplements their broadcast of the Morning Edition for five minutes each Friday at 7:35 a.m. for "The comments of our own Dr. Archie McDonald." Broadcast to large portions of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and East Texas, McDonald's comments are memories of growing up in the South of the 1940s and 1950s, his collegiate and grad school activities during the 1960s, and other miscellaneous adventures that have ushered him into the 21st Century. But, a broadcast takes a few minutes and then disappears. The printed page - McDonald's natural habitat - lasts longer. So here we are with a bit of permanence, Back Then Again: More Simple Pleasures and Everyday Heroes.

Texas ""a whole other country"" - a slogan that promotes tourism as much within the Lone Star State as elsewhere - is familiar to native Texans and those adopted sons and daughters who ""got here just as quickly as they could."" Texas is as varied as East Texas timberland, hundreds of miles of seashore, prairies of the Central and High Plains, and the dry desert of far West Texas. When traveling abroad and asked, ""Where are you from?"" residents of forty-nine of the United States usually respond, ""the USA."" Nearly every citizen of the Lone Star State will answer ""Texas!"" The world encourages such chauvinism. Mass media celebrates and exploits Texas and Texans in television and motion pictures about the Alamo, Texas Rangers, the oil industry, and athletics, to name only a few genre. Texans' pride in their distinctiveness increases when their state is paraded - or satired - and they consciously ""pass it on"" to succeeding generations. But what does it mean to be a Texan? How did Texas come to be as it is? ""Texas: A Compact History"" provides answers to such questions about Texans and Texas. It tells the story of Texas history and provides thoughtful interpretations about the state's development, all with the general reader in mind - in a brief, easily read narrative.

These stories by a noted Texas historian recall a time when a kid could go to the picture show with fifteen cents in his pocket, purchase admission for nine cents, and have money left over for popcorn. Those times were not necessarily better - ""It was simply my time,"" says the author. In ""Back Then"", McDonald draws on his reservoir of experiences to write about shoe shines and men's hats, corner drug stores and neighborhood groceries, first cars and full-service gas stations, favorite hymns and Vacation Bible School, house calls and hometown heroes, John Wayne and the Big Bopper, war rationing and spinster aunts. He tells about presidents and teachers he has known, music and books he has enjoyed, his first garden and his first time to eat in an integrated restaurant. Admitting to being ""older than dirt,"" McDonald remembers Butch wax, Howdy Doody, Studebakers, Packards, mimeograph paper, and other icons of days gone by. ""What seems to emerge,"" he says, ""is a kind of report of what it was like to live in Texas, or the South, a half century ago.

One of the least known but most important battles of the Texas Revolution occurred not with arms but with words, not in Texas but in New Orleans. In 1835, Creole mercantile houses backed the forces against Santa Anna. As a result, New Orleans capital, USD250,000 in loans, and New Orleans men and arms - two companies known as the New Orleans Greys - were sent to support the upstart Texians in their battle for independence. Edward L. Miller reconstructs this chain of events, confirming other historians in arguing that Texian leaders recognized the importance of securing financial and popular support from New Orleans. But he has gone beyond others to explore the organizing efforts there and the motives of the pro-Texian forces. On October 13, 1835, a powerful group of financiers and businessmen met at Banks Arcade and formed the Committee on Texas Affairs. Miller mines the long-ignored documentation of this meeting and examines the military efforts based in New Orleans, from the disastrous Tampico Expedition to the formation of the New Orleans Greys and their tragic fate at the Alamo and Goliad. Whatever their motives, Miller argues, Texas' history changed forever because of that crucial meeting at Banks Arcade.