Texas Far & Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburgs Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales

By E.R. Bills

"Fascinating information…little-known facts about remarkable Texans and events across the state.”—North Dallas Gazette
 
Texas is renowned for its legendary and colorful history—but even the state’s famous storytellers don’t know it all. Ever hear about the escaped ape in the Big Thicket? Or the "Interplanetary Capital of the Universe" that sat on the Gulf Coast? Does the cowboy hat that warmed U.S.-China relations ring a bell? 
 
From the Staked Plain Quakers to the Kaiser Burnout, E.R. Bills delves into some of the most fascinating chapters of overlooked Texas lore.
 
Includes photos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781439663059

E.R. Bills

E.R. Bills is an award-winning author and freelance journalist. His nonfiction works include Texas Obscurities: Stories of the Peculiar, Exceptional and Nefarious (2013); The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas (2014); Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror (2015); Texas Far and Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburg's Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales (The History Press 2017); The San Marcos 10: An Anti-War Protest in Texas (2019); Texas Oblivion: Mysterious Disappearances, Escapes and Cover-Ups (2021); Fear and Loathing in the Lone Star State (2021); and 100 Things to Do in Texas Before You Die .

Book preview

1

ESCAPED APE CAPER

In 1936, terror gripped Leon County, particularly around the town of Jewett.

A gorilla bound for a Houston zoo had broken out of its cage on the transporting train and escaped into the forests of the Big Thicket in Polk County. After marauding through that area, it fled northwesterly.

Tracks were soon reported in Leon County.

Over the next several weeks, reports of the escaped gorilla appeared in the weekly Jewett Messenger, which recorded the sightings of the creature. It was rumored to be creeping around the counties south and southeast of Leon, and then it was reported in Limestone County, just north, luckily having passed through without incident. But then it was reported back in Leon County, roaming the jungles of Marquez country (just west of Jewett), scaring folks along the Navasota River bottoms (Leon County’s western boundary) and making its winter quarters on Buffalo Creek, just northwest of Jewett.

Several readers of the Jewett Messenger had seen King Kong at local flickershows a few years earlier, and the thought of an escaped ape in their stretch of the east Texas piney woods terrified them. But the Messenger’s legendary editor, Jack S. Robinson, was a picture of calm. He simply sat at his desk and chuckled.

To say that Robinson was an old-school journalist was a profound understatement. A power line was strung across poles outside his office, but he refused to install electricity. Put lights in here and the first thing you know I’ll be working at night, he said. If I can’t make a living working in the daytime, I’ll try something else.

Robinson used a gasoline engine to turn his hand-set press and a wood stove for heat in the winter. He was also a proponent of the time-honored country weekly editorial philosophy that a rural newspaper’s mission was to amuse as well as inform. So when the news hit an extended slow period in the midst of the Great Depression, Robinson concocted the escaped primate to entertain his readership. The prowling gorilla was a tongue-in-cheek fabrication—an elaborate hoax.

I tried to make it sound as logical as I could, Robinson later said. The story went over like a million dollars. Folks generally believe everything they read in the papers, anyway, and lots of ’em were scared plumb out of their wits.

For several months I let my imagination run wild, Robinson continued, and finally when I got the gorilla up as far as Leon County, things really began to pop!

But the pop became alarming.

Not long after the stories started running, folks began coming into Robinson’s office with reports of sightings. The accounts became wilder and wilder; soon, out-of-towners traveling through the area were reporting runins with the fantastical beast.

Witnesses spotted the escaped ape along deserted backcountry roads. Local mothers, whose kids often walked to school, began keeping their children home. Area farmers began claiming that the gorilla had killed livestock; soon, they were having problems getting their help to go to work in the fields.

One day, a hysterical hunter burst into Robinson’s office and claimed he had spotted the gorilla robbing a bee-tree and fired on the creature six times.

He was dreadfully earnest about it, Robinson later observed. I almost believed him.

And that’s when Robinson began to sense that things had gotten out of hand.

Finally the general air of uneasiness began to make me jittery, Robinson said. Of course I knew what it was all about, but just the same I found myself jumping every now and then at strange noises.…I wrote so many bloodcurdling accounts I got to believing them myself. So I decided for the good of everyone concerned I’d let the yarn die a natural death. I just quit running the stories but never did tell my readers the story wasn’t real.

Undated image of Jack Robinson with his son, Jack Jr., in the production shop of the Jewett Messenger, which the elder Robinson published for fifty-six years. Courtesy of Carolyn Pettey.

Things returned to normal in Leon County after a few months.

Eventually, the fame of Robinson’s gorilla spread. First, it was republished in part in Time magazine. Then, We, the People, a New York–based, nationally syndicated radio show, began calling and trying to get Robinson to appear in studio to discuss the story.

Robinson declined. He was no fan of flying, cold weather or the Big Apple. He stayed put in Jewett and kept publishing the Messenger until his death on January 11, 1941.

There’s no record of Robinson ever again attempting to amuse his country weekly readership in the pages of the Messenger in such a harrowing manner. But, two years later, radio and Hollywood legend Orson Welles would capitalize on a similar (if not derivative) prank when he aired his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast in a CBS studio on October 30, 1938.

Welles’s hoax, however, relied on H.G. Wells’s book of the same name for a script. Robinson’s escaped ape caper was a Texas original.

2

TEENAGE AVIATRIX

In February 1915, the British War Office asked the government of Canada to find volunteers to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps. A short time later, the British Admiralty requested enlistees for the Royal Navy Air Service. The complicating hitch, however, was that interested parties had to already have a pilot’s certificate.

Before the formal British declaration of war in World War I, only eight Canadians (all male) had their flying certificates, and the Curtiss School in Toronto was the only legitimate training facility in the Great White North. With a large number of applicants and limited space at the Curtiss School, aspiring aeronauts looked south.

It would be a while before the United States entered World War I, but the nation already had three established flying academies: the Wright School in Dayton, Ohio; the Curtiss School in Newport News, Virginia; and the Stinson School of Flying in San Antonio. The Stinson School, which was new but well respected, was run by siblings Katherine, Marjorie and Eddie Stinson. On July 24, 1912, Katherine, twenty-one, became the fourth woman in America to earn her pilot’s certificate. She was also the first woman to perform a midair loop the loop.

When Marjorie Stinson originally approached her older sister, Katherine, about teaching her to fly, Katherine refused. Of the elder Stinson’s three pioneering female predecessors, two, Julia Clark and Harriet Quimby, had died in plane crashes. The third, Matilde Moisant, had retired after surviving a plane crash in Wichita Falls on April 14, 1912.

Teenage aviatrix Marjorie Stinson was the first woman to earn a pilot license certification from both the army and navy aeronautics committees, but she was denied the opportunity to fly combat missions in World War I. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.

Ignoring her sister’s concern, Marjorie enrolled at the Wright School in Ohio.

Still a teenager, Marjorie was the youngest pupil in the Wright academy, which included navy officer Kenneth Whiting. Whiting would later go on to become a pioneering naval aviator, commanding the First Naval Air Unit—the first American military force to arrive in Europe for combat. After World War I, Whiting was instrumental in developing the first series of aircraft carriers for the U.S. military.

When Marjorie completed flight instruction in just six weeks on August 8, 1914, she was the youngest female pilot in America and joined her sister Katherine on the airshow circuit almost immediately. She had her debut in Kansas City, Missouri. Three weeks after receiving her license, she flew at a suffragette event in Chicago, helping to raise $50,000 for campaigns to secure voting rights for women in six states. Then, in October, she made her first Texas appearance in Brownwood.

In a matter of months, Marjorie became the first female member of the United States Aviation Reserve Corps and began training men to fly in the war. Her first classes at the Stinson School of Flying were filled with Canadians who had come to San Antonio from Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Prince George, Regina and Toronto. The Stinson School had a reputation for daring but also for meticulous preparation and responsible flight. Marjorie sometimes spent four to six hours a day in the air, instructing student after student. Nicknamed Baby Aviatrix, Girl Aeroplanist and the Flying Schoolmarm, she also continued to appear at local and regional airshows in Nashville, San Antonio, San Marcos and other cities.

When America entered World War I in 1917, the U.S. military took over flight-training curriculums; the Stinson School of Flying was shuttered. As their aviation experience and flight skills were well established, both Katherine and Marjorie attempted to join the war effort as pilots, but their applications were rejected. They had trained hundreds of their American and Canadian male counterparts to take part in military aviation, but they were deemed unfit to join them.

After the Stinson School of Flying closed, Marjorie continued performing in airshows until the late 1920s. She later became the first female airmail pilot and then worked for the Department of the Navy, retiring in 1945.

In 1997, the National Aviation Club (now part of the National Aeronautic Association) created the Stinson Trophy in memory of Marjorie and Katherine to recognize individuals for significant contributions to the role of women in the fields of aviation, aeronautics, space and/or related sciences.

The Stinson Municipal Airport, the second-oldest general aviation airport in the United States, sits on the site of the Stinson School of Flying’s original airfield. It was used as a training site for the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II and today is home to the Texas Air Museum.

3

LOST LEGEND OF TROUP

It’s no secret that Texas towns have borne and bred their share of American sports legends, in many cases complete unknowns or long shots whose ability and work ethic took them to the NFL, the WNBA or the Olympics. Babe Didrikson of Port Arthur and Bobby Morrow of San Benito come to mind. Sheryl Swoopes of Brownfield and LaDainian Tomlinson of Rosebud rose from places so small you’d be hard-pressed to find them on a map.

In early 1980, Troup, Texas, just southeast of Tyler, was probably on its way to becoming another Rosebud, Brownfield or San Benito. A sixteen-year-old boxer named Byron Payton was on a forty-bout winning streak and was