Parks for Texas by James Wright Steely

Author:James Wright Steely [Steely, James Wright]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 1999-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

1 A side camp from Co. 3804 at Cleburne State Park worked at Mother Neff early in the twelfth period.

Parks board appeals earlier in the year for the NPS to maintain the Texas CCC camp allotment apparently showed results as the winter period commenced. Pat Neff even secured a side camp from Cleburne for a few final details at Mother Neff State Park. The park service approved no new assignments, but all sixteen CCC companies from the summer period continued development into winter at their state, metropolitan, and county park projects. Likewise the Agriculture Department in the fall of 1938 maintained in Texas a consistent allotment of thirteen forest camps and twenty-seven soil conservation units.

Pass the Biscuits, Pappy!

While state park development proceeded smoothly through the most recent work-period transitions, this election year’s campaign for governor threw the course of Texas politics for a confounding loop. Earlier in the year no fewer than thirteen candidates announced intentions for the Governor’s Mansion, describes historian Seth McKay, and three experienced hopefuls rose quickly to the top: four-time runner Tom Hunter, who proposed to “abolish duplicating and overlapping departments of the state government”; Attorney General William McCraw, who had favored the State Parks Board in 1935 when Governor Allred attempted to appoint its chairman; and Ernest Thompson, now a member of the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, who included soil conservation as part of his platform for his drought-ravaged Panhandle home and all of Texas.

Then a fourth candidate from outside the Texas Democratic Party, Fort Worth flour merchant Wilbert Lee O’Daniel, began an unorthodox campaign through his own promotional radio program. Like his fellow candidates, O’Daniel had nothing to say about recreation or parks and declined to join debates on the New Deal, state agencies, or natural resource conservation. But he quickly bewildered traditional opponents with his small- and large-town automobile rallies (a technique perfected by Neff in 1920) combined with the mass appeal of radio (the enormously successful medium of Franklin Roosevelt) and his evangelistic rhetoric (the proven wavelength used in 1934 by Jimmie Allred). In the July primary, O’Daniel defeated all other candidates with a new record of votes cast at 1,114,885.

On 1 November, O’Daniel easily defeated his Republican opponent, San Antonio oil executive Alexander Boynton, and promised to fulfill his campaign pledge of a $30 per month old-age pension. Coke Robert Stevenson, rancher and state legislator from Kimble County since 1928 and House Speaker since 1933—the first to hold that office in two successive sessions—won the election for lieutenant governor. Most Texas congressmen reappeared in Washington after the election, with the notable exception of Maury Maverick, who returned to his San Antonio home and immediately won its election for mayor.55

In strategic preparation for the coming legislative session, the December 1938 issue of one-year-old Texas Geographic Magazine featured a lengthy article on state parks by Bill Lawson. The State Parks Board executive secretary presented a detailed summary of the system, based primarily on figures gathered in the preceding summer. “The most popular feature

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