Day 27: Lubbock, Texas

Saturday 19 October – Despite my harbinger-ing of winter, A. and R. have decided to do Lubbock up right for me.  First, though, we must relax with the five cats (it’s really just four as one is decidedly unsociable with strangers, and has gone under a bed) and gaze in awe at A.T.’s display of Hallowe’en decorations, which adorn every wall and most surfaces of every room, including the master bathroom.  There are also collections of paperback romances, hockey memorabilia and ‘’Twas the Night Before Christmas” books.  Trying to discern a theme...  failing...  failing...

She also loves native son Buddy Holly (born Holley, misspelled on an early contract, adopted misspelling as easier for all concerned except perhaps his family), and we went first to the Buddy Holly Center.  The center features artifacts from his brief career, a soundtrack of his own plus tribute recordings, and the house where his drummer, friend and songwriting partner, Jerry Allison, grew up – and where he and Buddy wrote “That’ll Be the Day” together.

Visiting Buddy Holly

A.T. made sure I spotted the contact lens, which is about as thick as a dime and slightly larger in diameter.  Later a tour guide gave some back-story:  apparently Buddy Holly had 20-800 vision, hence the thick, black-framed glasses now incorporated in the Buddy Holly Center’s logo.  Of course some promoter or record company rep thought they’d prove unpopular, and urged him to switch to contact lenses.  Given his appalling bad sight and lens technology of the time, he got some kind of torture device instead of a seeing aid, and quickly abandoned contacts as they were painful, unwieldy and kept falling out.

The Allison house is a living time capsule of the late 1950s.  Most of the furnishings and decoration were recreated from photographs – just snapshots friends and family took in the house.  I hope several people had a great time collecting the things they needed.  It’s actually a project that would have been perfect for A.T.

The music lives.

I never really listened to much Buddy Holly music, or knew much about him beyond “Peggy Sue” and “The Day the Music Died.”  But I’m going to get some of his catalogue – his sadly truncated catalogue – because I loved the Center soundtrack, and they claim there that he was a great innovator in pop music composition and recording techniques.

We drove over to his gravesite next; the stone is engraved “BUDDY HOLLEY.”  Nickname; proper last name.  He was born Charles Hardin Holley, a West Texas kid with okay grades, blue-collar parents, glasses and a guitar.  He was one of the first rock stars, when no one knew how to be a rock star, before he was twenty.  He met his future wife when he was 21, proposed on their first date even though she was Puerto Rican and Roman Catholic and neither of those went down well in Lubbock in 1958, married two months later and died five months after that.  What an extraordinary, short life.

Another famous son of Lubbock

Remember Laura Ingalls lived in a dug-out house?
This is a half-dug-out.

He grew up in a time when his town wasn’t too far from its pioneer roots.  We went to the Ranching Heritage Center to look at homes of several decades, brought from various locations in West Texas and rebuilt on a single site in Lubbock.  Growing up in eastern Massachusetts, I always had this sense of the secret history of my area – there’s not a lot preserved from the indigenous tribes living in the area when the Pilgrims landed, so I mostly just wondered.  But we were stuffed with the post-European history:  Plimoth Rock, the Massachusetts Compact, the Salem witch trials, Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party, Emerson and Thoreau.  So textbook history was 17^th and 18^th-century stuff, with some 19^th-century.  With an Anglophone mother and a liberal education, I was well aware that these were practically modern times to our friends across the Atlantic, and that my parents’ 18^th-century farmhouse, one of the oldest dwellings in our town, was a recent build to Europeans.

I doubt I am hardy enough to build a home from cactus.

In Lubbock, 1920 is history.  The art gallery was closed as staff readied the place for a dinner honoring ranchers of the year or something, but we were able to tour the historical park, which contains the houses.  The oldest were from the mid-19^th century, although “evidence dating from around 1783 suggests that Los Corralitos may be the earliest rancho with standing structures in the state of Texas.”   Los Corralitos, a seriously fortified home – i.e., no windows – originally stood in Zapata County, and was owned by Don José Fernando Vidaurri.  It makes the anti-Spanish language and anti-Latin American immigrant movement seem a bit weird.

Next on the tour was dinner at Chuy’s, which is actually an outpost of an Austin-founded restaurant.  A.T. was surprised (she’s been here how many times?) to discover that the Lubbock branch had a room with a hubcap ceiling, too – I was face down in a chile relleno, though, and cared neither about hubcaps nor the Elvis shrine.  Excellent grits.

Crowded, but very civil.

There were lots of cats;
this one especially good.

And after sunset, we stepped up the street to the Parks and Recreation Department’s Fifth Annual Pumpkin Trail.  I’d never seen one of these before, and was enchanted.  People in Lubbock donated about 2,000 Jack-o-lanterns, and the city laid them out along a park pathway, and lit them up.  There were hundreds of visitors the night we were there, shuffling along and pointing out another Texas Tech logo, the ones that used stencils, the classic three-triangles-and-a-grin model, the fancy one with an elaborate cat face, etc. etc.  It was wonderful.  You should start one in your town.  A.T. is trying to come up with a really original idea for a pumpkin for next year.

Get it?!!?