Sgt. Mom – Page 103 – Chicago Boyz

Friday Fun – A (Brief) History of Luna City

September 18, 2015 by Sgt. Mom

(This is the background, or essential Wikipedia-style info-dump relating to the history of Luna City, Texas. This will be one of my books for this fall, as soon as I dash off another hundred pages or so, of the doings of a little town where eccentricity is on tap, day and night.

A serious post to follow; I have several different projects on the boil, besides the Luna City one. Sorry. Real life, bills, Tiny Publishing Bidness and all that …)

Luna City is an incorporated township, located in Karnes County, Texas, at approximately 28 °57”²29”³N 97 °53”²50”³W, a point where Texas Rte 123 crosses the San Antonio River. The population of Luna City and environs in the 2010 Census was 2,453. The nearest large town is Karnesville, the county seat, approximately ten miles south of Luna City. Those residents of Luna City not employed in their own small businesses commute to Karnesville for work, or to nearby enterprises such as the entertainment/spa/commercial venue of Mills Farm, the Lazy W exotic game ranch, or in various oil-production ventures associated with the Eagle Ford shale oil formation. Notable people from Luna City include the prima ballerina Johanna Gonzales Garcia, international financier Collin Wyler, noted historian Douglas McAllister, Korean War jet-fighter ace Hernando “Nando” Gonzalez, and the legendary bootlegger Charles “Old Charley” Mills.

Texas Road Trip – Giddings

September 12, 2015 by Sgt. Mom

(Explanation here.) We spent Thursday afternoon and all of Friday in the town of Giddings, Texas, for the 10th Annual Word Wrangler Festival. The organizers gathered together more than thirty writers, for a community bash at the library/community center, followed by bringing in busloads of school children to the library to meet the lot of us, talk about our books, and to encourage them to explore books … it was a lovely way to spend the day. And we were faintly boggled on the drive up to discover that yes, there is actually some deep pinewood forest in this part of Texas. (The woods on the opposite side of the highway were relatively un-scorched by the fire.

And we brought home take-out BBQ brisket, pork and chicken from the Giddings City Meat Market, which is supposed to be one of the top best BBQ places in the state,

115 Years Later – The Great Galveston Hurricane

September 7, 2015September 7, 2015 by Sgt. Mom

To further the current work in progress, I am re-reading Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm a gripping and almost novelistic account of the hurricane which struck the Texas Gulf coast city of Galveston on Saturday, September 8, 1900. The Isaac of the title is Isaac Cline, the resident meteorologist in Galveston for the U.S. Weather Bureau who paid a devastating price the loss of his heavily pregnant wife when his house was swept away at the height of the storm for miscalculations made; miscalculations made both by himself and by the Weather Bureau headquarters policies in far-distant Washington DC.

That 1900 storm still stands as the single deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States, with a death toll equal of all later storms combined; at least 6,000 in Galveston alone a quarter of the population at the time and along the Texas coast. The storm surge went for miles inland, and may have carried away another 2,000, whose bodies were never found and never reported missing, as there was no one left to do so. Galveston Island a coastal sand-bar, little more than eight feet above sea level at its highest point was a busy and strategic port. At the turn of the last century, it was the largest city in Texas; a center of commerce, transportation hub and port of entry for immigrants coming into the Southwest by sea. Galveston was connected to the mainland across a normally placid lagoon by three railway trestles.

Although the rival port city of Indianola, farther west along the Gulf Coast had been wiped out by a pair of hurricanes fifteen and twenty-five years before, generally the citizens of Galveston were complacent, comfortable in the belief that any storm and they had easily weathered many of them was readily survivable. And after all this was a new century, one marked by unparalleled technologic and scientific advances! So a sea-wall proposed by certain concerned citizens was never built; indeed, Isaac Cline had written an article for the local newspaper in 1891, arguing that such a wall was not necessary; it was impossible for a storm of sufficient destructive intensity to strike Galveston. And he, of course, was an expert.

Tales of Luna City: The Gonzalez/Gonzales Families

August 28, 2015 by Sgt. Mom

(A diversion, in the form of an excerpt explaining the background and history of Luna City, especially one of the most prominent and long-established local extended family. This is forming up to be one of my next books, hopefully finished by the end of the year.)

The main farm-to-market county road, which skims past Luna City does not actually go into the heart of Luna, per se. The old McAllister house is there, of course, set back from the roadside in a lavish and well-tended garden set out in Victorian design a lady tastefully withdrawing her immaculate skirt from the dirt of vulgar commerce and transportation. The house itself is set at a slight but perceptible angle from the roadway itself, which the cognoscenti know is proof that the house predates the road by any number of years. Miss Letty McAllister, whose family home this is is now in her mid 90s, the oldest living inhabitant of Luna City, and the living repository of civic memory, public and private. It has been at least twenty years since Miss Letty has seen to maintaining the garden; one of the myriad Gonzalez-with-an-z family enterprises sees to that.

The sprawling and interrelated clans of Gonzales-with-an-s and the Gonzalez-with-a-z are acknowledged freely by all Luna-ites to be the oldest family in the area their shifting residency within five or six miles of the place where the road between San Antonio and the coast crosses the river where Luna City would come to be predates the founding by at least a hundred and twenty years and possibly more. There are supposed to be records in the colonial archives in Madrid, Spain, of a royal grant to a Don Diego Manuel Hernando Ruiz y Gonzalez or Gonzales of a league and a labor of land in the area. In 1968, there was a careful archeological excavation made of the foundations of a small adobe brick building not far from the present-day main gate to the Wyler Lazy-W Ranch. The results were included in A Brief History of Luna City, since Dr. McAllister was privy to the reports of findings. It was judged to be a residence by the eminent archeologist from San Antonio who oversaw the dig but a relatively comfortless and primitive one: two thick-walled rooms, sheltering humans in one and draft animals and goats in the other.

On the Outside of the Hugos, Looking In

September 7, 2015August 25, 2015 by Sgt. Mom

The 2015 Hugo awards were given out over last weekend, at Worldcon in Spokane, and the meltdown is ongoing. The commentary on this at the follow-up post at According to Hoyt has gone over 1,000 comments, a record that I haven’t seen on a blog since the heyday of a certain blog that is not mentioned any more (but whose name referenced small verdantly-colored prolate spheroids). I’ll admit, right from the get-go, that as a writer and blogger I have no real dog in this fight over the Hugo awards not even the smallest of timid and depressed of puppies, but I did feel enough of an interest in it to post about it a couple of times. I merely observe with sympathy as an interested internet ‘friend’ and fan of some of those who are deeply involved, rather than a directly-involved author. I love Connie Willis’s books and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, used to love Marion Zimmer Bradley alas, my collection of her books is now boxed and moldering away in the garage . My science fiction and ‘con’ activity extends only as far as having an entire run of Blakes’ 7 taped on VHS from when it was broadcast on KUED in Salt Lake City in the 1990s, having gone to the Salt Lake City ‘con several times, and once to the Albuquerque ‘con’ when it happened to be on a weekend at the time I was TDY to Kirtland AFB for a senior NCO leadership class. I had a marvelous time, on all those occasions … but my personal writing concentration is on historical fiction, and to a lesser extent, socio/political blogging.