Hello fellow Texans and friends of Texas. Today is Friday, March 14, 2014. • • • • • • =+ -+ -+-+= Fannin received new orders to retreat to Victoria< On March 14, 1836, Col. James Fannin received Sam Houstons order to retreat to Victoria, which rescinded a previous order to relieve the Alamo. Waiting for the forces under Amon B. King and William Ward to return from Refugio, Fannin delayed retreating until he heard of their capture after battling Mexican forces under Gen. José de Urrea. The 28 men under Capt. King, sent on a mission to Refugio on March 11 to remove several noncombatant families out of the path of Urreas army, found themselves trapped by as many as 300 in the Mexican army. King led his men in an escape attempt. They were overtaken shortly and surrendered for lack of munitions. Captain King and all but one man were soon executed. Meanwhile, on a retreat that would lead to victory at San Jacinto, troops under Gen. Houston continued his retreat, moving eastward in a zigzagging pattern. Many residents of Texas battled rain-swolled creeks and rivers in the Runaway Scrape. • • • • • • =+ -+ -+-+= Oscar winning play writer born in Wharton in 1916< On March 14, 1916, Horton Foote, Jr., Oscar winning writer of plays, was born in Wharton. Foote had dreams of being an actor, so he moved to California and enrolled in acting school at Pasadena Playhouse in 1933. After completing acting school, Foote lived in New York City as a struggling thespian while taking acting classes from Tamara Daykarhanova, Andrius Jilinsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Vera Soloviova. He began writing plays, the first of which was a one-act entitled Wharton Dance. His first three-act play was Texas Town. Only the Heart was Foote’s first play on Broadway at the Bijou Theatre in 1944. In 1949, he was hired as a television writer for the children’s program The Quaker Oats Show, which debuted in 1950. After 54 episodes, Foote focused on writing television plays. The Trip to Bountiful aired in 1953 on Goodyear Television Playhouse and was so well-received that it moved to Broadway and has been the most produced play of Horton Foote’s work. Twenty-four television plays written by Horton Foote aired between 1951 and 1964. In 1955, Foote’s first screenwriting credit was the Cornel Wilde film, Storm Fear. The Chase, Foote’s only novel, was published in 1956 and was based on an earlier play. Foote wrote the screenplay for the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The film was released a year later, and Foote won an Oscar for the screenplay. Baby the Rain Must Fall, starring Steve McQueen and Lee Remick, premiered in 1965 and was filmed entirely in Columbia and Wharton. He won the Independent Spirit Award for The Trip to Bountiful (1986); and the Writers Guild of America awards for To Kill a Mockingbird (1963) and another oscar winner, Tender Mercies (1984). Foote was also a member of the Theatre Hall of Fame, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2000 by President Bill Clinton. In 1992, DeGolyer Library at SMU acquired Horton Foote’s extensive personal papers. The library held an exhibition on Foote’s career during the 2011 Horton Foote Festival in Dallas, which presented 17 works by Horton Foote. • • • • • • =+ -+ -+-+= Ruby convicted in Oswalds murder in 1964< On March 14, 1964, Dallas night club owner Jack Ruby was convicted for the Nov. 24, 1963 murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas city jail -- a crime witnessed by millions on national television. Oswald was being transferred to the Dallas County jail when Ruby, then proprietor of the downtown Carousel Club, shot and killed the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy. As Oswald came into the room, Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver. Ruby, who was immediately detained, claimed he was distraught over the presidents assassination. Some called him a hero, but he was nonetheless charged with first-degree murder. Ruby was defended by Melvin Belli on the grounds that psychomotor epilepsy caused him to black out consciously while functioning physically. Ruby was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to die in the electric chair. It was the first courtroom verdict to be televised in U.S. history. In January 1967, while awaiting a new trial to be held in Wichita Falls, Ruby died of lung cancer in a Dallas hospital. • • • • • • =+ -+ -+-+= Also on March 14 in Texas: In 1874, Haymon Krupp, merchant and oil wildcatter, was born in Lithuania. In 1890, he immigrated to El Paso, where he worked in a dry goods store and soon opened his own mens clothing store. Krupp entered the oil business when he joined Frank Pickrell, also of El Paso, to buy a lease option to drill for oil on University of Texas lands in the Permian Basin. In 1919, Krupp and Pickrell organized the Texon Oil and Land Company, with Krupp as president and Pickrell as vice president. They capitalized Texon by purchasing three producing wells in Burkburnett and selling 685 certificates of interest in New York. On May 28, 1923, their first well, the Santa Rita No. 1, came in on their leased university-owned lands in West Texas. • In 1908, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was chartered by the State of Texas. It grew out of Baylor Universitys Theological Department. The department was established in 1901. B. H. Carroll, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Waco, was dean. By 1905, the department had become the Baylor Theological Seminary. In 1910, Southwestern was moved from Waco to Fort Worth. • In 1917, Professor William Leonidas Mayo, founder and first president of East Texas Normal College, received the good news in Commerce that the House of Representatives had passed the bill that appropriated funds for the purchase of the school. While walking back to the college from the telegraph office, he suffered a heart attack. He was taken to the administration building, where he died a few minutes later. What started as Mayo College became East Texas State University and is now Texas A&M-Commerce. • In 1940, the American Quarter Horse Association was formed in a series of meetings led to a charter, by-laws, and election of officers of an organization to “collect, record and preserve the pedigrees of Quarter Horses in America.” Among those in attendance were rancher and quarter horse breeder Anne Burnett Hall and King Ranch president Robert J. Kleberg. • In 1963, John Alexander Norris, a leader in the development of civil engineering in Texas, died in Austin. Norris was influential in beginning development of Texas water resources. He was appointed to the Texas State Board of Water Engineers (now the Texas Water Commission) in 1918 and served with that agency until 1936. He worked for passage of the Texas Engineering Registration Act in 1937. • • • • • • Texas History Day-by-Day is compiled by retired newspaper journalist Bob Sonderegger (anglebob61@yahoo). A primary source of information is Handbook of Texas Online. Your comments or additions are welcome.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:06:47 +0000
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