In spite of the widely popular beer festival going on in Exposition park …
(Story here)
My daughter wanted to stop at Schilo’s Delicatessen for lunch – and this was the first time we have ever been downtown where it wasn’t packed to the point of an hour wait for a table. So we got to Alamo Plaza after the participants had pretty well scattered. But there were a lot of them still, sprinkled here and there, among the tourists, AF Basic graduates, and beer enthusiasts.
(Those words look familiar?)
And then there were other sorts of open carry …
Just for the younger set … this is Texas, after all…
And after lunch and all that … we went and explored the Riverwalk as it runs through Southtown and King William, just a stones’ throw from Downtown but feeling like it was a world away.
Celia, I just finally looked at my e-mail from my web site and saw some messages from you. I don’t know if we talked since then. If not, I apologize.
When I was in AF Basic Training (1959), I’m afraid San Antonio was not the pretty place it seems to be now. I haven’t been back. Sort of like Marines visiting Parris Island on vacation.
Hi, Mike – I was trying to get some specific medical information about a 19th century operation on a depressed skull fracture for the latest book. I worked around it from other sources, since I was on a deadline.
When I was on town leave in January of 1977 – from what I remember, it didn’t look all that much better. The bits of the Riverwalk that I did see were dank and cheerless and smelt of drains. And then my escort ditched me in Joske’s, and I couldn’t go around by myself, so I had to ask the first guy with a military haircut to walk me back to the USO and the bus back to Lackland.
It’s much improved now!
Nice photos. I’ll bet there were no crimes in that area during the event. “Come and take it.”
Mike
It was amazingly safe – although we did wonder about the confluence of the beer festival with the open carry demo. I mean, weapons and beer? What COULD go wrong? (I keed, I keed.)
There was a crime in our neighborhood sometime last night, though. Someone ditched a very good mountain-bike on the creek-bank where we walk the dogs. No one around, and it’s a nice bike. We reported it to the cops, a patrolman came and took the serial number off it, suggested that we would probably have better luck finding the owner ourselves, since we are pretty tapped-in to the neighborhood.
We have made the most amazing finds, walking the dogs… I rather think that if no one has reported it, and we can’t locate the owner, one of us will have a new bike…
Nice photos but even me would be a biut hesitant seeing a guy with an M16 locked and loaded walking around in public
MikeK – I would not compare San Antonio to Perris Island ;-)
sand fleas or fire ants. Personally I’m waiting for a hurricane to come along and obliterate Parris Island and those daemon-spawned sand fleas.
I can’t tell if it is “locked and loaded”. There is a magazine inserted, but I don’t see any clues that there is a round in the chamber and the hammer cocked. On the other hand if it was a concealed FN FiveseveN would one actually be in any different position, other than not knowing who is armed. Maybe it is having lived in a community where long guns were occasionally seen in pickup rear window racks and currently where concealed carry is common, as well as being issued weapons during my professional life and personally owning them from youth. It really doesn’t make me uncomfortable unless the bearer is someone whose actions would concern me even if I didn’t see a weapon. It is a mental adjustment. We trust teenagers driving two-ton vehicles while texting. That does concern me. It is currently illegal to openly carry in Texas, but there are states where the conduct shown in the photo is legal. I figure carry is a positive externality.
Mike
From the article, Mike – and from other posts and articles about the protest, they were very carefully going about with the long arms ostentatiously unloaded. They even had volunteers to check on this. Yeah, it would blow the whole event out of water if someone accidently had a live round and mistakenly fired it.
BTW, there was also a counter-demo to this … in Southtown, about a mile or two away. Moms Against Those Big Nasty GUNs, or something of that ilk. I think there were all of about twenty people there, when we went past, looking for a parking place.
There was also an anti-fracking demo in front of the SA River Authority HQ, in Southtown/King William. About another twenty of the same ilk, with signs – showing off their virtue to each other. Yeah, I guess they LOOOOOVE walking or biking everywhere, and they liked that all those little towns to the south of San Antonio were decaying into tumbledown and jobless poverty five years ago.
I’ve got a gig at the Christmas on the Square in Goliad again this year – this time I’ll take pictures and show y’all what the shale oil boom means in concrete terms. (Y’all … oh, god, I have the fancy cowboy boots, now I have truly been assimilated…)
What Mike (Death 6) said.