Texas Reads>> archiveGlenn Dromgoole

11.25.2018  Book touts treasured small to medium U.S. cities

Treasured Places: Celebrating the Richness of America’s Cities & Towns by former Abilene Mayor Gary McCaleb and former executive director of the National League of Cities Don Borut focuses on more than five dozen cities that represent something unique about the quality and variety of their community experiences ($18.95 paperback).

The authors deliberately chose medium to small cities, the largest being Charleston, S.C., ranked about 200th in the nation in population. Each community is covered in a two or three page essay.

They included two Texas cities — Abilene and Fredericksburg. A few other examples: Holland, Mich.; Cooperstown, N.Y.; Asheville, N.C.; Williamsburg, Va.; Athens, Ga.; Rochester, Minn.; Iowa City, Iowa; Sturgis, S.D.; Helena, Mont.; and Winslow, Ariz.

Either McCaleb or Borut, or in some cases both of them, have visited every city on the list, and they offer some other brief examples of noteworthy places.

Their idea in putting together the book was to provide some suggested sites for families to visit on vacation, but also to call attention to some of the qualities that make these cities “treasured places.”

McCaleb said four common themes seemed to emerge from the cities’ stories: celebration of their history; tenacity in spite of challenges and difficult times; problems solved through community cooperation; and uniqueness and originality.

Big Bend legend: Texas author Bill Wright has written his ninth book, with the intriguing title of The Whole Damn Cheese: Maggie Smith, Border Legend ($24 paperback).

Published by TCU Press, the book tells the story of a remarkable figure in the Big Bend area. Wright was featured at the West Texas Book Festival last month, where he regaled the audience with tales from Smith’s extraordinary life.

For more than twenty-five years, Maggie Smith was a dominant presence in Hot Springs and other Big Bend locations, where she developed a reputation “as a healer, midwife, banker, postmistress, wax trader, and general minister to the needs of the largely Hispanic population in the area,” on both sides of the border from the mid-1940s until her death in 1965 at age 69.

Smith, Wright points out, “engaged in some nefarious activities. She stretched existing laws. She challenged authorities . . . . She was a border legend who refused to suffer fools, and as she herself said, on the Big Bend’s Rio Grande Border, she was ‘the whole damn cheese.’

“Maggie’s death marked the close of an era that will not be seen again,” Wright concludes.

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Glenn Dromgoole’s most recent book is The Book Guy. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.