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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already has its ghost sites, Web pages still workable but no longer maintained.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
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