The
Issue 572
Island Moon
The voice of The Island since 1996
April 2, 2015
Around The Island By Dale Rankin
editor@islandmoon.com The mosquito season has yet to show itself so far, but the good news is that the city is getting ahead of the problem and has begun spraying on The Island. The mosquito man hits the streets when it is not raining and the wind is not blowing too hard. But in some ways spraying for mosquitos is like holding back the tide with a broom. The fogging only kills the little buggers when they are in flight and come into direct contact with the spray. You might say it is something like the Buffalo Theory; it picks off the slowest and least attentive of the herd while the fast movers go looking for prey. Even so it is estimated that it does get about one-third of the mosquito population so we do have that going for us. But get ready everybody, with all the standing water we have on The Island these days it won’t be long before the air is abuzz. Our friend Guitar Player Sidney says he believes the buzz is a D-Flat, and he says the slapping as people do the Skeeter Dance is the drumbeat. Guitar Player Sidney is a glass half-full guy.
Barefoot Mardi Gras The Barefoot Mardi Gras organization will present a $10,000 check next Wednesday, April 8, to the Big Brothers and Big Sisters. The ceremony will take place at the Veranda at Schlitterbahn at 10 a.m. and the public is invited. The Padre Island Business Association helped with the event for the first time this year and the party and parade were both a great success. We look forward to next year and for another excuse to wear our Mardi Gras beads to the ceremony on Wednesday.
Easter Weekend Get ready to break out the white pants everybody, it’s Easter weekend and time for a seasonal wardrobe change. The Kiwanis Easter Egg Hunt is Saturday and Billish Park will be full of kids of all ages. There are several sunrise church services on area beaches, and up Port A way the Sandy Bottom Boys are going to bust loose with some old fashioned gospel music. It’s the sweet spot of the Island calendar so get out there and enjoy the outdoors; and say hello if you see us Around The Island.
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Photo by Brent Rourk
Local Vietnam Veteran Helicopter Pilot Receives Award Broken Wing Award Pin Arrives 45 Years Late By Brent Rourk
Canadian Rowers Come to The Island to Train for National and World Competition
It finally reached North Padre Island resident Jim Weatherill three weeks ago from Fort Rucker, Alabama. It was missing from the original envelope 45 years earlier. The original envelope that originally contained a small pewter-colored lapel pin and an official certificate was received by Weatherill on March 9th, 1970, but the envelope had been sliced open on its way to Weatherill. The certificate was there, but the pin, symbolizing the Army Aviation Broken Wing Award that was given to him for extraordinary skill, judgment, and technique, was missing.
A Slashed Envelope Arrived Weatherill, remembering when the envelope arrived in 1970 despite the fact that it happened many years ago, recently recounted, “So there I was in college, in our apartment screaming at the national news on the tv when my lady hands me an envelope from the Army that came in the day’s mail. The TV news went to a commercial and I stopped yelling long enough to open the envelope. Inside was a citation for a medal, and quite frankly I nodded my head between the TV and the envelope and moved my mouth around like a cow chewing its cud. ‘Ain’t this the $%&@!,’ I think I said.”
Jim Weatherill in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot December 1967 Like so many Vietnam War veterans, Jim was trying to adjust to life back home, a challenging proposition for most veterans. Jim continued, “I wanted a Scotch but we were so poor that I only dreamed it. The news came back on and I yelled again at
Pilot continued on A6
By Dale Rankin If you have been around the canal between Cabana North and Jackfish lately you saw a group of energetic young people, and a few not so young, in racing kayaks paddling their way around floating markers while a coach hovers with his stopwatch.
SMA Students Prosper at State Science Fair
Easter Bunny Spotted Hopping Students Qualify for Possible Advancement To North Padre to the National Stage Island By Brent Rourk Lots of Fun for the Family Planned for Saturday By Brent Rourk The 18th Annual Island Easter Egg Hunt, co-sponsored by the Padre Island Kiwanis Club and Keller Williams Realty, will take place at Don and Sandy Billish Park this Saturday, April 4th starting at 11:00. The actual ‘Egg Hunt’ will take place at noon, however, there will be many activities for families to enjoy as well as food, drinks, and treats.
Easter continued on A2
Four Seashore Middle Academy (SMA) students prepared for last weekend’s Texas State Science and Engineering Fair in San Antonio, knowing that competition would be tough. Over 1200 other accomplished science students from Texas were also hoping that they would earn top prizes. The SMA students performed extremely well. SMA 8th grade student Elizabeth Clark qualified for advancement consideration to the Broadcom National Junior Science Fair. Her project in the Animal Science study
Seashore continued on A5
They are a group of Canadians from Winnipeg training for the 2015 Canadian National Canoekayak Championships in Ottawa in August, and the Junior World Championships in Czechoslovakia, National Championships in two years with the ultimate goal of making the Canadian Olympic Team.
Rowers continued on A2
Inside the Moon
New ISAC Members Sworn in A2
Tatiana Ortiz stands in front of her winning project Photo by Melanie Ortiz
Girl Scouts A4
A little Island history
“Where Texas Meets the Sea” Chronicles How Corpus Christi Lost Control of its Own Destiny
By Dale Rankin When you pick up most history books about Corpus Christi they tend to end with the closing of the Texas Frontier, the end of the Indian tribes, or the arrival of the railroads. The colorful portion of local history involves tales of Spanish treasure, Texas Rangers, raiders from Mexico, and the fight over the Nueces Strip in the middle of the 1800s. Those people and events set the groundwork for our area but the history that most effects the daily lives of Coastal Bend residents today happened well after that; the modern history of the region really begins after the opening of the Port of Corpus Christi, the first Port Commission was seated in 1923, and went through radical change in the decade from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. This relatively recent era of our history is documented in a book just published by the University of Texas Press entitled Where Texas Meets the Sea by historian Alan Lessoff who taught at A&M Corpus Christi for several years, beginning in 1992, and is now a Professor of History at Illinois State University. He drew much of his information for the book from the special collections library at the University and worked closely with Thomas Kreneck who was the former director of the department.
Loss of local control The books’ title comes from a slogan created by boosters of the new port in the years immediately after the dredging was complete. The book traces the rapid growth of the city from 1920 to 1960. Up through the mid-1950s Corpus Christi was on course to become one of the leading metropolitan areas of Texas, but by the end of the 1970s that promise had dissolved as the city fell into secondtier status as it was overshadowed, and eventually marginalized, by the other metropolitan areas of the state. Lessoff electively describes how Corpus Christi went from “the fastest growing city on the coast, by far the most versatile, the most progressive, and the most promising” of the Texas Gulf Coast cities outside of Houston to a city that by the mid-1980s had lost control of its own destiny. The loss of local control is highlighted by the shift in ownership of area refineries which were historically locally owned but passed into the hands of out of town corporate owners by the mid-1980s. The port also stagnated during this period as Lessoff quotes Ruben Bonilla, Jr, who was Chairman of the Port Commission for three terms, “We decided we were going to be a community with no growth, we just sat on petroleum while everybody else was building container terminals.” The loss of local control of the refineries, the main economic driver,
History continued on A4
Meet the chefs A6
Sports A8
Learn to Surf A11
Live Music A16