Word: angelo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...office wall. Vaughan, a 6-ft. 6-in. Tennessean with a voice that sounds like an intellectual version of the old Gunsmoke deputy, Chester, speaks with a sort of loving surprise about the fort. A skilled stonemason and carpenter, as well as historian, Vaughan came to San Angelo from Alabama last year. He wants to build a reproduction of the Fort Concho hospital and install the elementary school there, tearing down the school that now stands in the middle of the old parade ground. The old fort buildings will be occupied by a fine arts museum, by civic groups...
...including disparate points of view in the restored fort-perhaps inviting Indians down from Oklahoma to help prepare exhibits. But most of the Indians were either extinguished or driven onto reservations generations ago. The blacks who served at Fort Concho were transients there and mostly illiterate. Even in San Angelo they have left few traces...
...case, whatever voice history uses in San Angelo must be rich, many layered and full of irony. If every great fortune, as Balzac said, is founded on a crime, a lot of good American towns, especially in the West, were built on nothing more dignified-or sinister, for that matter-than whisky and whorehouses. San Angelo, which now envelops the fort, got its start that way. Its economy in the first days grew robust upon soldiers' payday recreations and the gamy appetites of buffalo hunters. Susan Miles, 89, daughter of one of the earlier settlers, manages to sound both...
...Angelo (population about 75,000) has had to wait some years to forget a certain distaste for its fort and even its origins. But like most Texans, San Angeloans have an almost tactile relationship with the past-their own history at least. West Texans have not vanished into the anonymity of cities. When Joe Mertz and Willard Johnson, two of the biggest ranchers in San Angelo, get together for a great barbecue or a more elegant dinner at, say, the River Club, someone will probably tell an outsider how Johnson's grandfather spoke so eloquently about West Texas that...
...fields to the east-some of it, at least-would revive and make it to market after all. The sparse grama and buffalo grass that sheep and cattle had been browsing, almost a blade at a time, would, by West Texas standards, flourish. No wonder that Tom Randall, San Angelo's Cadillac dealer, tripled his sales in the days after the rain...