Inside the Moon
Puppy Party A2 Issue 662
Ugly Sweater Party A6
Lion King A2
More La Posada A7
The
Island Moon The voice of The Island since 1996
December 22, 2016
Around The Island
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A little Island history
White Island Christmas!
By Dale Rankin As you read this the Winter Solstice has come and gone. Wednesday was the shortest day of the year judged by the amount of daylight. From here on out the days will be getting longer on our little sandbar and friends, that’s a good thing. One of the advantages of Christmas falling on Sunday this year is our OTB relatives will have to be back at work on Monday or Tuesday at the latest so stretching a two-day stay into a weeklong holiday/fishing trip with a free place to stay won’t happen. Fish and relatives…three days…you know the story.
Elephant in the room The elephant in The Island room this week has to be the water outage that left the city high and dry from late Wednesday night until Sunday. We’ve become accustomed to water boil orders hereabouts as there have been several in the past eighteen months due to fecal chloroform in the city’s aging water system but this one was different. When we hear that Indoline and Hydrochloric Acid have been introduced into the water supply that gets our attention. We’ll leave the detailed coverage of the event to the Big Daily and the television types since it changes day to day. The Corpus Christi City Council on Tuesday took steps to register each of the industrial users around the city which have back-flow devices like the one which apparently failed and caused this problem, a move that probably should have been done long ago. We want to commend the new and current city council which in only its second week on the job had this gem dropped into their collective lap. Welcome to the briar patch guys. But the council dealt with it with directness, solidarity, and thoughtfulness that made the best of a bad situation. The new mayor didn’t run from the problem and his measured but straightforward approach, with the council literally behind him, was well received and appreciated by the citizens. From the looks of things this one wasn’t on the city, the source of the chemicals was a private entity which, according to the facts currently on the table, reported the problem to the proper authorities in a timely fashion. Now the challenge is to see that it doesn’t happen again.
By Dale Rankin Once upon a time in an Island not so far away on the night before Christmas as Island kids began to settle in for a long winter’s night a magical thing happened. A check that only Charles Dickens could have written and Mother Nature could have cashed found its way to the bank, the snowbank…on The Island. Our Island was covered with snow. A beautiful, soft blanket of pristine snow descended on our Island on Christmas Eve 2004 and stayed around long enough that more than a decade later we still remember where we were when we first saw it.
As the number of visitors to The Island continues to increase this problem is only going to get worse without vigilant enforcement. If you see someone driving in the dune call
Around continued on A4
It was not long after dark that the first flakes began to stick and word went Around The Island that it was snowing outside. Even the kids put down their phones and ran outside it was so unbelievable, inconceivable that right here, on our little bar of sand in the Gulf of Mexico that we could have a White Christmas. If any Island kids were able to sleep that night at all, they awoke the next morning to a beautiful blanket of three inches of white covering their Island. It was something even the old folks had never seen before - a White Christmas on The Island! Some rushed to the beach and built fires so they could stay warm outside
while they watched The Island slowly become engulfed in snow, others like Island Moon founder Mike Ellis made snow angels. Only providence knows what thoughts were racing through the minds of Island dogs as for the first time in their dog lives they could run unbounded through Island parks without fear of sticker burs. It was a rarity described by the Weather Wonks as “a combination of the very low- latitude upper-level trough, and the deep cold air mass.” That is to say…snow. A coffee table book of photographs of the event has sold more than 70,000 books in seven printings since its release in October 2005. It was a dozen years ago, but any Island who lived through it still has stories to tell. Yes, Virginia, there was once a White Christmas on The Island.
How Did Santa Clause Get to be His Jolly Old Cherubic Self? And why he wears the Coca Cola colors
The story of Santa Clause, or someone like him, has been around for eons. But the jolly old red-clad fellow we see around today isn’t all that old. The Santa Clause we have today did not spring fully formed from a single Santa origin; the Santa we have today is a hybrid creation was shaped by many people from diverse places and times. The tale of Santa Claus, the mystery gift-giver, reaches back centuries. In
Dummies in the Dunes
As you can see from the Letter to the Editor in this issue from Islander David Pierce we continue to have a problem with knuckleheads driving in the dunes. Why anyone would think it is okay to drive a vehicle over grass-covered dunes is beyond our imagination but there seems to be a lot of Island visitors who feel that way. We say visitors because most Island residents, if not all, know that is simply not done. David had been fighting this battle for over a year now and is making some headway but there is still work to be done. The area south of Bob Hall Pier we all call The Bowl which began decades ago with a blowout in the dunes continues to spread out as four-wheelers keep the vegetation tramped down.
On the Rocks A11
previous incarnations, Santa didn’t have a red suit. His varied cultural roots included the fourth-century bishop of Asia Minor; a Scandinavian dwarf or goat; the white-robed Kolyada, a pre-revolutionary Russian girl who arrived atop a sleigh with accompanying carolers; and the many religious gift-bearers associated with the Magi. In each of these Old World depictions of Santa, his costume bears no sign of red. Here in the United States, the Dutch were primarily responsible for spreading the idea of Sante Klaas, who was based on one of their revered bishops. Sante Klaas gave form to the current myth of Santa and fleshed out his reputation as a gift-giver. However, the visual image was not honed until much later, when Coca-Cola created needed a way to boost lagging sales in the shadow of the Depression. At that time not only did Old St. Nick not always were a red suit, he didn’t even always have whiskers, must less white ones. Those additions sprung from the mind of an illustrator
hired by the Coca-Cola company, who cannily promoted a version of Santa garbed in their redand-white corporate colors. The relatively new Coca-Cola Company at the time needed to increase sales and turned to a fellow named Haddon Sundblom, of Sweden, who churned out a series of drawings showing the red and white, garbed Santa Clause who just happened to be drinking a Coke. But Sondblom’s drawing were based on what had already been accepted as the image of Santa. Drawings of a full-bearded Santas (and his predecessors), showing figures clothed in red suits (and hats) with white fur trimming, held together with broad black belts, were also common long before Coca-Cola's first Santa Claus advertisement appeared, as far back as 1906. But once Sondbom’s drawing, backed by the advertising budget of CocaCola, caught on in just a few years the image became accepted as The Santa Clause. And the rest they say, is Santa History. Dale Rankin
Packery Pointe Developers Get Extension Delay in work on Aquarius/SPID traffic light cited By Dale Rankin The developers of the Packery Point development which was the impetus for the installation of the new traffic light at the Aquarius/SPID intersection were granted a six-month extension this week on platting for their development which includes retails sites on the east side of the roadway. According to documents filed with the Corpus Christi Planning Commission last week the developers, Turner-Busby Development based in San Antonio, plan to create six commercial and one non-commercial lot at the intersection but final platting has been stalled due to delays in completing work there by crews
contracted by the City of Corpus Christi to reconfigure the intersection and install the traffic light. According to the documents filed this week with the city’s Planning Commission the latest completion date was set for December 15 but that date was not met.
passed without the work being done Turner-Busby began requesting and receiving extensions of the platting with the latest extension coming last
According to the documents the developers signed the original development agreement with the city in August, 2015, and paid money for their share of the project, $420,000, by September, 2015 and a completion date was set for October Work continues at the Aquarius intersection 2016. When that deadline Packary cont. on A4
Island by the numbers
Snowfalls in the Coastal Bend
It had been 86 years since The Island had a White Christmas; in 1918 one inch of snow fell on Christmas Day. But in 2004 three inches fell and stayed around long enough for us to take a lifetime’s worth of photographs. Snow covered the Coastal Bend from Galveston, to Brownsville and as far inland as Goliad and Victoria. The snowfall got heavier as it moved north dropping 1.5 inches in Brownsville and 10-12 inches in Victoria. For a little historical perspective, the last time Corpus Christi or the Coastal Bend received similar 24 hour snowfall totals was in February 1895 when a snow event the snow totals were nearly double (10-20 inches) those of the 2004; but it was not on Christmas Eve. Here is a history of snowfalls in the Coastal Bend, and it is a short one. Year
Date
1888
Jan. 15
Amount 1.0
1888
Jan.16
0.2
1895
Feb. 14
4.3
1897
Jan. 25
1.0
1897
Jan. 28
2.0
1897
Jan. 29
3.0
1906
Feb. 7
0.1
1912
Jan.12
0.1
1914
Feb. 25
0.5
1918
Jan. 11
0.4
1918
Dec. 25
0.1
1924
Dec. 20
0.1
1924
Dec. 21
0.2
1926
Jan. 23
1.5
1932
Mar. 10
0.2
1940
Jan. 19
1.6
1940
Jan. 21
0.1
1949
Jan. 29
0.2
1958
Feb.12
0.5
1967
Jan. 9
0.1
1973
Jan. 11
0.2
1973
Feb. 8
1.0
1973
Feb. 9
0.1
2004
Dec. 24
2.3
2004
Dec. 25
2.1