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 Texas : Features : Columns : "Texas Tales"
ODDITIES
by Mike Cox

Mike Cox
The Internet already has its ghost sites, Web pages still workable but no longer maintained. The same could be said for old magazines – still workable (if you can find them) but no longer published.

A good example is Naylor’s Epic-Century: The Illustrated All-Texas Magazine. First published by San Antonio book publisher Joe Naylor in 1933, the magazine survived into the 1950s.

The December 1938 issue offered some items of Texas trivia just as interesting today as they were then. To paraphrase a few samples:
Billy’s story is one of those anecdotes that give hunters a bad name.

Back in the 1930s, a farmer living near Weimar in Colorado County had a pet deer named Billy. He had found the deer when it was a fawn, lingering near the body of its dead mother. Billy grew to be a fine buck, every year sporting a nice set of horns. But owner Oscar Kohleffel did not keep Billy around just to look at his antlers. Somehow, Kohleffel had Billy trained to travel from the family farm house to meet the rural mail carrier when he made his daily rounds.

The mail carrier would attach the Kohleffel mail to Billy’s collar, from which a bell hung, and the deer would return the farmer’s letters, bills and other mail to Kohleffel’s house.

But in the fall of 1939, the story came to an unhappy ending. Someone who valued Billy’s back strap more than his mail-carrying skills shot and killed Kohleffel’s pet deer. next page
 
© Mike Cox - "Texas Tales" - August 1, 2005 column
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