Only in Texas
Here are a few things that can only be appreciated in Texas! If you have seen any fun and/or unusual things in the Great State of Texas, let us know. We will try to get a picture and include it on our website.
You can email pictures to sherrera@txinslaw.com. Submissions will be reviewed and used at the discretion of firm.
Horny Toad Not Courthouse’s Only Claim To Fame
Texas Lawyer
March 26, 2007
Article by John Council
One in a series of articles entitled “This Old Courthouse"
If catching a glimpse of a horny toad that has been dead for nearly 80 years was the only reason to visit the Eastland County Courthouse there would be no little reason to go inside.
The spiky reptile known as Old Rip lies in state in a velvet-lined casket encased in a glass box near a front window of the courthouse, where curious onlookers can gawk at the toad 24/7 without ever setting foot in the five-story building.
The tale of Old Rip – a hibernating horny toad entombed for 31 years inside a cornerstone of the courthouse only to emerge alive in 1928 – is one of many interesting stories associated with the courthouse. And missing out on the interior of the Art Deco structure, which features terrazzo floors, marble walls and a fantastic appellate courtroom, would be a huge mistake.
Visitors can view the district courtroom where a man representing himself in a chicken-theft case beat the rap with a simple but persuasive argument; a bullet-marred hallway where a fatal shooting occurred in the early 1970s; and a room that once housed the smallest court of appeals courtroom in the state.
Scott Bailey, a retired Eastland County judge, knows the courthouse’s legends better than anyone, as he served inside the building for 36 years. He recalls decades’ worth of trials, shootings and weddings inside the courthouse as if they happened yesterday.
“Those are just things that happen in a public building,” Bailey says as he stands in the courthouse lobby greeting people with a friendly hello. “There are some good things and some bad things.”
But the courthouse’s No. 1 legend involves Old Rip, Bailey says.
In July 1897, the townspeople of Eastland gathered to commemorate the construction of a new courthouse by laying its cornerstone. Officials placed various mementos in the hallowed out piece of marble when Eastland County Clerk Ernest Wood dropped in the toad that his son Will had brought to the event, according to the book “Weird Texas.”
More than three decades later, when an oil boom had cause the county’s coffers and population to swell, officials decided to build a new, larger courthouse. When the old courthouse was torn down, thousands of people gathered at the town square to see what had become of the toad placed in the cornerstone. As a county official held up the dusty reptile, his leg twitched, and then his whole body came alive. The toad – named Old Rip after Rip Van Winkle – toured the country and even visited the White House, according to the book.
“They said he got a smile out of silent Calvin Coolidge,” Bailey says of the tight-lipped 30th president of the United States.
About a year after being pulled from the cornerstone, Old Rip’s owners mistakenly left him in a cage on their front porch when a cold front came through town. The reptile caught pneumonia and died, Bailey says.
But the enduring legend of Old Rip had been born. The architects who designed the 1928 courthouse even had plaster friezes featuring images of horny toads installed as a wall border in a third-floor courtroom.
Deputy Shot
George Brown must have thought his criminal case was so simple that he didn’t need a lawyer – and he was right. In April 1939, Brown prevailed in the Eastland County district courtroom during a jury trial in which he stood accused of stealing a chicken.
According to an Associated Press article about the case, the purloined chicken had a colored band around its foot, but witness testimony conflicted as to the band’s exact color.
“Gentlemen, you heard one witness say the chicken had a red band on its foot and another says it was blue,” Brown argued to the jury. “Now, you can’t send me to the penitentiary on that.”
The jury agreed with Brown and acquitted him. The Associated Press headline declared that Brown had done a “classy job” defending himself in the trial. Twelve years later, in 1951, an Eastland County grand jury indicted Dallas tax attorney Horace Walker for theft after he allegedly stole delinquent tax money he was collecting for the county. When sheriff’s deputies went to arrest Walker in his University Park home, he locked himself in a closet for several minutes before the officers persuaded him to come out, according to an article in The Dallas Morning News.
At his trial, Walker argued that he intended to repay the $900 he was accused of embezzling, according to another article in the Morning News. Later that year, an Eastland County jury found Walker not guilty of embezzlement.
While Walker got off, the county commissioners who hired him weren’t as fortunate in the next election cycle, Bailey says.
“It was a big scandal,” he says. “It caused almost all of the commissioners to get beat.”
In the 1970s, Bailey says he was present in the courthouse during two shootings. The first occurred in the early part of the decade when an angry woman confronted her stepfather, who was on trial for shooting her husband, in the courthouse. Instead of shooting her stepfather, who was sitting in the sheriff’s office during a break in the trial, she accidentally shot Eastland County sheriff’s deputy Bill Hunter.
Hunter survived, and the woman was charged with misdemeanor assault, a plea Bailey presided over. Bailey’s position as a constitutional county judge allowed him to hear such cases. The woman pleaded guilty and received probation – a sentence Hunter agreed with, Bailey says. After the hearing, the woman gave Hunter the gun she shot him with “as a token and to show she didn’t hold any hard feelings.”
Around 1975, a disgruntled ex-husband who lost half his finances in a divorce waited in a courtroom hallway in the Eastland County Courthouse with a pistol as his ex-wife was about to enter the district clerk’s office where she worked. The ex-husband fatally shot her and then tried to turn the gun on himself, but the gun misfired, Bailey says. The man was convicted of murder and sent to prison. A bullet hole in the hallway ceiling still marks the spot where the shooting occurred.
The 11th Court
The historic courthouse in unusual, because it’s one of the only county building of its era designed to house an appellate court.
Originally, the 11th Court of Appeals was housed entirely on the top floor of the building and included the appellate court clerk’s office, a law library, the three justices’ chambers, and an unusual windowless loft where the staff and briefing attorneys worked.
The left little room for the 11th Court’s courtroom, which measured approximately 10 feet by 40 feet.
“That’s all we knew, we didn’t know any different,” says Bud Arnot, a former chief justice of the 11th Court of the cramped courtroom. The close quarters created situations where lawyers got a little too close to the justices after argument, says Arnot, now a partner in the Houston office of Winstead.
“In the old days, you certainly could hear everything between the doors, and the judges – one in particular – liked to give his vote after leaving the bench,” says Arnot, who served on the 11th Court for 20 years. “And we liked to say, ‘Let’s at least [let the lawyers] get to the elevator before we discuss the case.’ But I think the smallness added to the collegiality of the court.”
Around 2001, Arnot moved the 11th Court courtroom from the fifth floor to the third floor, where the justices had a much larger space. The third-floor courtroom had once been home to the 88th district Court, which moved to Southeast Texas in the 1940s because of redistricting done by the Texas Legislature when Eastland county’s population shrank form 60,000 to 20,000 people, Bailey says.
Arnot shepherded the county’s restoration of the neglected courtroom, which included fixing or replacing low-hanging electrical ceiling fans, laying new carpet, retrofitting the bench so it could accommodate three justices instead of one, and installing central air conditioning and heat. Arnot says the restoration cost only $89,000, a sum that came out of the court’s annual operating budget provided by the state.
Arnot admits he wanted to restore and then hold court in the third-floor courtroom for another reason – the courtroom was decorated with horny toad friezes on the walls that commemorated Old Rip.
When Arnot used to swear in the briefing clerks who worked for the 11th Court, he added an additional oath along with their promises to uphold the Constitution and preserve the sanctity of the 11th Court.
“I made them take an oath based on their allegiance to their college that they would always uphold and perpetuate the myth of Old Rip,” Arnot says.
Asked if the believes in the myth, Arnot says, “Absolutely. It’s true.”
Funny Laws
Borger-It is against the law to throw confetti, rubber balls, feather dusters, whips or quirts (riding crop), and explosive firecrackers of any kind.
Galveston-Bicycles must be
operated at a "reasonable speed".
It is illegal to drive a motor car down Broadway before noon on Sundays.
One needs permission from the director of parks and recreation before getting
drunk in any city park.
Houston- It is illegal to
sell Limburger cheese on Sunday.
Beer may not be purchased after midnight on a Sunday, but it may be purchased on
Monday.
LeFors- It is illegal to take more than three swallows of beer while standing.
Lubbock County-It is illegal to drive within an arm's length of alcohol - including alcohol in someone else's blood stream.
Mesquite-It is illegal for children to have unusual haircuts.
Texarkana-Owners of horses may not ride them at night without tail lights.
A recently passed anticrime law requires criminals to give their victims 24 hours notice, either orally or in writing, and to explain the nature of the crime to be committed.
The entire Encyclopedia Britannica is banned in Texas because it contains a formula for making beer at home.
It is illegal to drive without windshield wipers. You don't need a windshield, but you must have the wipers.
It is illegal for one to shoot a buffalo from the second story of a hotel.
It is illegal to milk another person's cow.
We couldn't make this stuff up.
Only in Texas.
Sunset Cafe
"Steer in for Steaks"
Popeye
Crystal City, Texas
(They grow a lot of spinach in Crystal City)
"Vote No To The Cloud Tax! Cloud Seeding Don't work! Cloud Seeding Don't Make It Rain!"
King's Highway Baptist Church
Fort Worth, Texas
"Open Sundays For Your Convenience"
Hargrave Insurance Agency and
Beauty Salon
Cisco, Texas
Jubilee Christian Center
Religious Free & Biker Friendly
The Fellowship of the Unashamed
Caldwell, Texas
East Texas Funeral Home
Longview, Texas
S&M Radiator and Muffler
Fairfield, Texas