|
Sunday, November 04, 2007
By J.B. Smith
Tribune-Herald staff writer
HUNTSVILLE — Sam Houston was big here, even before his 67-foot likeness went up along the freeway.
The larger-than-life Texas hero lived and died in Huntsville and even tried to make it the state capital. His work brought the Texas criminal justice system headquarters here. The state university bears his name, and a large museum preserves his memory.
But when a Huntsville-native sculptor proposed a concrete colossus of Houston on Interstate 45 — similar to the one he is now considering of a Texas Ranger in Waco — not everyone was thrilled.
“A lot of people thought it was the stupidest thing ever,” recalls Robert Wade, a guitar repairman at One Music Square, a downtown guitar and motorcycle shop on Sam Houston Avenue. “Some people thought it was way too much, though some thought it was great.”
But since it was finished in 1994, Wade said locals have embraced “Big Sam” as a town icon. For him, the lighted white statue, visible for six miles, is a welcoming sight when he’s driving home from a late night in Houston.
MORE
What do you think? Click here to comment
More: Giant Ranger statue divides Waco business leaders
J.B. Smith/Waco Tribune-Herald
Gene Pipes, former Huntsville city manager, looks at a photo of the construction of the Sam Houston statue, which he oversaw. On the corner of his desk is a bust of Houston.
J.B. Smith/Waco Tribune-Herald
The family of Irving Duquesne checks out the plaque at the Sam Houston statue. A California native, he had never heard of the Texas hero.
J.B. Smith/Waco Tribune-Herald
Gene Addison (right), shown at the Cafe Texan in downtown Huntsville, said he'd travel to Waco to see a Texas Ranger statue.
J.B. Smith/Waco Tribune-Herald
The 67-foot Sam Houston in Huntsville has become an icon for the town.
Community leaders say the statue by David Adickes has changed the image of this town known as the headquarters of the Texas prison system and the home of Texas death row.
“Sam Houston is our brand,” said Kim Thomas, Huntsville Convention and Visitors Bureau vice president. “It has had a tremendous economic impact.”
Attracting visitors
The visitors center next to statue has drawn 670,000 visits in the last 13 years from 106 different countries. In the last fiscal year, the statue drew more than 52,540 visitors, Thomas said. In front of the statue are sandy patches in the grass, worn down by visitors who have stopped to snap photos.
Some visitors come to revere Houston and the key role he played in Texas’ independence and statehood. Others are just attracted by the sheer size.
“I’m not sure who Sam Houston is, but he must be pretty important,” said Irving Duquesne, a California man who pulled off I-45 with his family of six to investigate the statue on Monday. “We were driving up from Houston. This is the only thing I’ve seen that grabbed my attention.”
Officials at the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame and Museum hope Adickes can work the same magic in Waco. The Ranger statue they are proposing would stand next to the museum on Interstate 35, overlooking the Brazos River. They plan to fund the $650,000 statue with private donations. The city council has given the group encouragement but hasn’t yet voted whether to allow the statue on city land.
At Adickes’ insistence, the statue would be smaller than the 67-foot Houston, but the exact size has not been determined, said Ranger museum board chairman Bill Warren.
Huntsville’s experience with Big Sam has some lessons for Waco, though in many ways the situations differ.
“It would be hard for me to say there would be a transference to Waco,” said Gene Pipes, who was Huntsville city manager when Big Sam went up. “It’s a different dynamic. I can’t tell you whether you should or shouldn’t build it. All we can really tell you is what worked for Huntsville.”
Changing image
Like Waco, which has entered the vernacular as a synonym for the 1993 Branch Davidian debacle, Huntsville has long endured negative publicity. Most national news stories out of Huntsville involve lethal injections.
Big Sam, whose official name is “Courage,” was an attempt to change the image of the town. Adickes himself proposed it for the 1993 bicentennial of Houston’s birth, Pipes said.
“The change of image was so necessary and undeniable,” Pipes said. “We had to let people know Huntsville had a lot more going for it than the Texas prison system.”
The Ranger statue backers are also trying to create a positive icon for Waco.
But they say their statue will be even more successful in boosting tourism than Big Sam in Huntsville.
“I think the potential that can be realized is much greater than in Huntsville, because it’s much easier to get to,” Warren said. “I think we will see a multimillion-dollar impact as a result of that statue.”
The Houston statue is situated in pine woods several miles southeast of the center of Huntsville, and leaders there acknowledge it is difficult to access. Waco’s statue would be in one of the most visible sites in Waco, nestled between downtown and Baylor University. Plus I-35 is a much busier highway than I-45.
Instead of a visitors center like Huntsville’s, Waco would have a highly regarded Ranger history museum next door, with natural history, art and sports museums within walking distance.
The Ranger museum already attracts more than 60,000 people a year.
The Waco proposal has generated controversy because of the Ranger’s size, location and gun-toting pose. The Sam Houston statue also had its early critics.
“There were questions at the time,” Pipes said. “Like, ‘Do we think he’s going to do something in good taste? Is it really going to look like Houston? If you put it up and you can’t take it down, what do you do with it?’
“The unknown is the most frightening thing,” he said. “Is it going to be nice or is it going to be garish? You have to know David for a while before you know that he’s really an amazing artist.”
Frustrated by slow fundraising, Adickes came to the Huntsville City Council in early 1994 and offered a deal: He would donate the statue if the city would pay to put it up.
Jim Carter, then a councilman, opposed taking it on as a city project.
“My opposition was not to the statue but more the way it was going to be done,” said Carter, a political science professor at SHSU. “I had no problems with David Adickes or his art — it might not be to my taste, but I thought it was a pretty good idea.”
Carter said he thought the site was too remote and that the council wasn’t getting a full accounting on the cost of building both the statue and the visitors center.
He said the city staff, which did much of the work, didn’t include their own time in the cost.
“I still believe it cost a million dollars to do that project out there,” he said. Pipes said he thinks the cost was significantly less, but he didn’t have a solid estimate. He said he used his vacation time to supervise the project.
Carter said statue backers at the time estimated it would bring in 400,000 visitors a year, which he said was unrealistic.
“I think they oversold the benefits,” he said. “I don’t believe anyone has come to Huntsville to spend the night because of the statue. But I’m also sure it’s a fairly significant landmark between Dallas and Houston.”
Business boost?
Several merchants interviewed Monday afternoon on Huntsville’s modest but pleasant courthouse square near the university agreed that the statue helps Huntsville’s image but doesn’t bring them additional business.
“I thought it was a good idea . . . but it didn’t help downtown,” said Chip Looney, owner of One Music Square.
A couple of doors down, a few regulars were gathering at the Cafe Texan, a 71-year-old institution whose chalkboard menu includes “mash taters, freedom fries, blackeyed peas, mixed greens and cheezy potatoes.”
Gene Addison, 59, a retired prison guard and Vietnam veteran, sat down with a pitcher of iced tea and chatted with the cook, Malcom Corby.
Addison is a fan of Big Sam and was excited to hear about the proposed Ranger statue in Waco.
“It would be a good thing for the city,” he said. “With the Texas Ranger museum — they’re made for each other. I’ve been to Waco to see the Ranger museum and spent the night. If they get this done, I’d do that again.”
Bob Brock, 63, a SHSU softball coach who used to coach at Baylor, said he also hopes Waco builds the statue.
“I put the Texas Rangers up there with Sam Houston,” he said. “I think it’s a great idea.”
Different subjects
Another difference between the Huntsville and Waco projects is the subjects themselves.
The Texas Rangers had a short-lived fort in Waco before the Texas Revolution, and today their Company F headquarters is here. Waco has been the official home of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum since the 1960s.
But it’s hard to deny that Sam Houston is more central to Huntsville’s historic identity than the Rangers in Waco. He lived in the town from 1847 to 1863.
Today, more than half of Huntsville’s 35,000 residents attend the university dedicated in his name. A quarter of the population is incarcerated in the state prison, which is also Houston’s legacy. One of Huntsville’s big annual events is a folk festival in Sam Houston’s honor, supporting the Sam Houston museum.
Pipes, now a curator at the Sam Houston museum, notes the historical irony that the town that today reveres Houston as its patron saint once had little use for him.
Of course, Houston had an impressive resume: war hero at age 19, self-schooled attorney, one-time ambassador of the Cherokee Indians, governor of Tennessee at age 34, Texas Revolutionary general who won the decisive war at San Jacinto, first elected president of the Republic of Texas, powerful U.S. senator and Texas governor.
But he was also a Unionist. When Houston died in Huntsville at age 70 in 1863, it was the height of the Civil War. He had been stripped of his governorship of Texas because of his outspoken opposition to joining the Confederacy.
“Nobody attended his funeral except family and a few Masons who had to attend,” Pipes said.
But by 1879, Houston’s reputation had rebounded, and Huntsville welcomed a new teacher’s college named for him. The college is now Sam Houston State University.
By the Texas centennial in 1936, Huntsville was ready for a museum devoted to Houston’s life.
“By 1936, everybody realized he was right,” Pipes said. “There was no denying everything Houston stood for was correct. There was no reason for him not to be better treated.”
Pipes said another benefit of the Sam Houston statue is that it piques the interest of new generations in a fascinating figure of Texas history.
Late Monday afternoon the giant Sam Houston — swaybacked and fiesty, leaning on a giant concrete cane — glared across I-45 into the western sun.
Joe Avelar, a Salvadoran immigrant who works on a mushroom farm north of Huntsville, brought his 10-year-old daughter and extended family along to enjoy the statue and the little forested park around it. He said he wanted his daughter to have an appreciation of history.
“I know he’s an important person,” he said in Spanish.
jbsmith@wacotrib.com
This article was in today's Waco paper. I responded with a letter to the editor.
Mr. Editor,
It never seems to amaze me what people are capable of when trying to reach a said objective. Tuesday's ( 10-30-2007) paper did a good job of bringing to light the pros and cons associated with the proposed monument that could greet future visitors to our area. Staff writer Monica Ortiz Uribe wrote the story well and I commend her in her attempt to present all sides of the issue.
Let me just say that as a Mexican-American or Chicano as it was more well known in the 70's when I began to understand who I was and where my predecessors had been before me that this idea of a 70 foot "Uncle John" appalls me. Just the sheer ignorance of people who don't have as Rev. Joe Carbajal put it occasion to question whether they were opposed to Latinos such as Gilbert Montemayor and Baylor professor Sijefredo Loa on the discriminatory past that this monument represents. Carbajal might as well been giving his opinion on nuclear reactors or quantum physics. In other words there was no reason for him to give an opinion. In Sunday's (11-4-2007) edition of the Waco Tribune Herald Alice Flores stated that, "The Texas Rangers have a lot of bad history with Hispanics, but that's history, and there is nothing I can do about it....." I bet she also wishes she could forget about the history of her husband's trouble with the law. The truth of the matter is she was put in place to represent Hispanics but when it comes to issues which are actually pertinent she falters.
We should stick to the subject and get opinions from people who are informed on the subject and understand the history of which we speak. Understand that these atrocities did not happen thousands of years ago but only a little over a century ago and that actual accounts could be heard as late as the 1960's. In a society where nooses turn the stomachs of young and old alike and where our children are dying by the thousands for responding to terrorism and suppression we are contemplating erecting a monument that evokes thoughts and memories of some of the most murderous butchering racists that ever had the pleasure of terrorizing the state of Texas.
Artist David Adickes says he based his preliminary design on the Rangers depicted in the 1882 picture that appeared on Tuesday's front page taking particular note of the only Hispanic shown at bottom right. How convenient is that? Mr Adickes, why not depict him with a huge sombrero with two bandoliers across his chest and a 30/30 rifle in his hands? Too much like the "Frito Bandito" character which the National Mexican-American Anti-Defamation Committee forced Frito-Lay to abandon in 1971.
Understand that I mean no disrespect to the all the men and the one woman who currently represent the Texas Rangers of today but if a statue is to be erected why can't it dictate who they are today and not the Ranger of the 1800's which depicts to many nothing more than a hate monger with a badge. Come to think of it why do we need a museum and hall of fame for civil servants who are paid to do a job?
Byron Johnson, director of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum stated in Tuesday's story that no city funds were going into the construction of the statue. Well if the KKK comes up with the money to erect a 100 ft. burning cross at the southern entrance to Waco I guess that would be fine to. How about Al-Qaeda I hear that they are very well funded.
Thank you,
Tony Gonzales
McGregor, TX.
|