Publisher's Notebook
Tonight the Central City Opera comes to Montrose at the Magic Circle Theatre. The program: “Smooth Operator.”
The curtain is at 7 p.m., and tickets are $15 at the door.
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Sponsors for tonight’s show are the Montrose Arts Council, Rotary International, Montrose Altrusa International.
The Notebook keeps up on-line with the “goings on” of Caddo Lake near Marshall, where I grew up reading the newspaper my father once published, the News Messenger. Caddo is the only freshwater lake in Texas, created by the New Madrid (Missouri) earthquake of 1812. Caddo is filled with a lush, verdant beauty of water, cypress trees and diverse wildlife. While my father was publisher, he teamed with then-U.S. Rep. Wright Patman to develop “boat roads” in Caddo, some of that federal “pork” money. It was one of the things my father taught me about how a newspaper and a community can work together for the public good and for economic development; this time for tourism and the attraction of sportsmen.
The water in Caddo is crystal clear, calm because the trees protect it from wind, and it has one unusual fact: Its average depth is only 8 to 10 feet. One of my childhood pals, Henry Bradbury, works as an environmental engineer for Caddo Lake interests and for Don Henley, the Eagle musician/drummer/songwriter who also grew up on the lake.
I was reading last week how a new record bass was pulled from Caddo. Keith Burns of nearby Linden, Texas, caught a 16 pound, 17 ounce lunker in about 5 feet of water after a 10-minute fight. The bass was 26.5 inches long and had a girth of 24 inches. It’s the 11th heaviest bass ever in Texas and the biggest since 1999.
Burns named the fish “Meaty” and donated it to the Texas Lunker Program, where it will spawn with other bass for three years before it’s released back into Caddo.
Caddo Lake is near Uncertain, Texas. Paul Harvey, the late broadcaster, did a few news items from the small town, pop. 149, closing one broadcast by saying, “That’s all of the Uncertain news for today.”
Recommended reading ...
One of the niftiest and most interesting histories I’ve read lately is “All the Tea in China “ How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History.” The author is Sarah Rose.
In the middle of the 19th century, China and the East Indian Tea Co. had held a world monopoly for two centuries, but China was threatening to cut Britain off. So the mission was to steal the best tea plants and transform them to India, where the wet, misty foothills of the Himalayas would provide an ideal growing environment. Robert Fortune, a family man of modest means from Scotland, became Britain’s 007, going undercover, often in disguise. Fortune was a botanist, gardener and horticulturist. Trading plants in the mid 19th century was a big deal, and Fortune pulled it off, leaving China behind and Britain richer for it.
A quote from the book, since it’s gardening season hereabouts:
“He was at heart a gardener and a gardener is an artist; His canvas is land; his medium, plants. A gardener works in a three-dimensional world, taking into account the relative heights of trees and depths of (garden) borders; the slope of the hillside, and the views to be ‘borrowed’ or enhanced. But he (the gardener) also works in a fourth dimension: time. A gardener plans for seasons - His arts spans years.”
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