In "And Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest", the essay 
which opens this compelling collection, Jerry Flemmons displays 
an uncommon sense of both history and fun. When it was announced 
that angels would adorn the facade of the magnificent hall to 
be built in Fort Worth for the performing arts, the columnist,
intrigued by the incongruity of angels in Cowtown, demanded, 
"Where in the hell did those angels come from?" He finally 
solved the dilemma by deciding they were the fallen angels of 
Hell's Half Acre, "Irish Kate. . . on the right, and Big Birdie 
. . . on the left."

 
With strong affection for almost all things Texan, Flemmons 
writes of the ordinary with an extraordinary sophistication 
and cleverness. His Texas is sometimes a place of sadness, 
even tragedy, sometimes a place of high jinks and great jokes, 
but most often, it's a place of vanishing traditions and long-
ago days. It's all here in this collection . . . and it's Flemmons 
at his best.


He was a pallbearer the day they buried Lee Harvey Oswald in Rose 
Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth. There was no one around at the brief
ceremony to carry the coffin, so newspapermen performed the chore.
Thereafter Marguerite Oswald, or Mama Oswald as the reporters 
called her, telephoned Flemmons and others with histrionic demands 
and telephone tirades and "official" announcements on the progress 
of her "case." Flemmon's essay, "Mama Oswald," is a compassionate 
and complex picture of this tormented and tragic woman.

 
He was there, too, when they found sniper Charles Whitman on the
observation deck of the famed Tower at the University of Texas. 
He wrote of the slight breeze that blew that day, the play of 
light and shadow on the deck-and on Whitman's body-and the stunned
reaction of those who found bodies on various levels of the Tower.    


But Flemmons also tells lighter stories with ease, such as the one
about the late Amon Carter commissioning a statue of Will Rogers on
horseback, then keeping it hidden in planked boxes for eight years
while World War II ran itself out. Carter couldn't have a proper
unveiling with the war going on, so he waited. But those planks were 
an awful temptation to local boys.


It may be that Flemmons writes best of the small and common bits 
of Texas. There are essays on hunkering, that fundamental resting
position for rural men, and the importance of front porches, the
nostalgia of a good courthouse clock with a bell, the etiquette of 
the two-step, the vanishing tradition of the game "42," and the
inadequacy of pork barbecue.

 
Once he found his own private Brigadoon, a small East Texas town 
with a Gothic courthouse in the center of a square faced with 
old wooden storefronts. Old men pitched horseshoes, played dominoes 
or sat quietly on the worn benches on the lawn around the courthouse.
Children played on the lawn and begged hard candies from the man 
behind the grocery store counter. Flemmons ate lunch at the café 
and a dish of ice cream at the drugstore that still boasted a 
counter and stools. "To this day, I cannot remember the town's 
name, though I can recall everything about it. I have driven many 
miles in East Texas, searching for it, have found other towns 
with other courthouses and other old men, but never my town, my
Brigadoon."

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Lifelong journalist JERRY FLEMMONS retired as travel editor 
of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the late 1990s but 
continued to contribute occasional columns on his favorite 
subject Texas. The author of  Jerry Flemmons' Texas Siftings, 
More Texas Siftings, Amon!, Plowboys, Cowboys and Slanted Pigs, 
the one-man play O Dammit!, a coffee table book on Texas, 
and Fodor's Guide to the Caribbean, he was writer-in-residence
for Tarleton State University and made his home in Granbury, Texas.