Growing Up in the Lone Star State: Notable Texans Remember Their Childhood. Gaylon Finklea Hecker and Marianne Odom, authors.
Good book. Took the two authors some forty years to compile. Gaylon Heckler and Marianne Odom interviewed forty-seven ‘Notable Texans’ who remember their childhood. Bought book. Reading. Recommend.
Personally acquainted with nine of the notable Texans. The late Dan Jenkins, author, was my late wife Betty’s cousin. Growing up 1936, the young cousins got in trouble trying to crawl under the tent and see Sally Rand wiggle her fans. Not in the book.
Notable Rex Tillerson, who served as Secretary of State, was a classmate I never met. He was a freshman in the University of Texas Longhorn Band when I was a graduate student and teaching assistant.
Our links are both Scouting and Peru. I read his Dad was a professional leadership trainer. I volunteered training. Rex and I are both Eagle Scouts.
We also both know how to raise our hands, spread our fingers and signal ‘Hook ‘Em Horns.’ The year after I co-chaired a symposium with Peruvian media visitors, Rex marched in Lima. And he was cautioned:
Don’t show the ‘Hook ‘em Horns’ gesture. In foreign countries the sign also means ‘You’re Horned.’
Infidelity news a husband doesn’t want to hear.
But the Longhorn Band hadn’t received the caution the year before. Back when I co-chaired a media symposium with Senor Delgado Parker, then a Peruvian television owner.
When the planeload of Peruvian media professionals landed at the Austin airport, the Longhorn Band greeted them, played to the Peruvians and raised the ‘Hook ‘Em’ salute.
Senor Delgado Parker told me the next day that the man from the state department explained ‘Hook ‘Em Horns.’
But I must admit, when we landed and the band was playing and waving their hands, we thought maybe we better fly immediately back to Peru.
