I graduated from high school in Wichita Falls, TX, in 1977. The local radio station, KTRN, did this thing where randomly, at the end of a popular song, they’d play “KTRN flash….back!” and then play the song again. I remember driving to my job at Treasure City one afternoon, listening to the Captain and Tennille singing Love Will Keep Us Together on the radio, and as the song neared the last few notes, I said out loud the KTRN flashback deal, and then that’s what happened. I was so thrilled by my anticipation, mostly because boy did I love that song.

The day after I graduated, I moved to Austin (which is really the only place to be, in Texas, if you’re a thinking person). I’d lived there a number of times before, and loved the hippie vibe, the weirdness of Austin – immortalized for the last many years in t-shirts saying “Keep Austin Weird” – and the strange characters like Leslie, the cross-dressing homeless guy who looked damn good in his bikini and high heels (from the back, anyway). When I’d lived there three years earlier at age 14, my dad would take me to the Armadillo (Armadillo World Headquarters, if you weren’t a regular) where we heard live music by Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, Willie Nelson (duh), and Linda Ronstadt. When I’d lived there even earlier, around age 9, my mother would take me to The Broken Spoke with her, a dive-y saloon where Janis Joplin got her start. Armadillo is gone, but the Broken Spoke is still there, and it still looks like the same dive-y saloon.

So this morning, when I saw this idea to search flickr for a particular year and post my favorite photo, of course I immediately thought of 1977 and Austin. I can feel it on my skin and in my bones, I can smell it, I hear it in my mind’s ear as clearly as the traffic below on Madison Ave. I couldn’t limit myself to one favorite photo, I found two that captured a couple ways of being a Texan.

This one is from a chili cookoff in San Marcos, a small town just south of Austin (now, it’s more like a far-flung suburb). What’s more Texas than a chili cook-off! This one isn’t at all self-conscious, like the fancy ones in Terlingua. The cowboy hats, those make my heart race. The very un-PC (now) “Indians,” what were they about and what did they have to do with chili? Whatever. I know just how it felt to be there, even though I wasn’t there. Thanks, Don Hudson, for sharing.

chili cook-offs should all be like this

And these, from Austin in the summer of 1977. Every year since 1963, there has been a party celebrating Eeyore’s birthday, on the last Saturday of April. It’s something of a free-for-all, a big costume party, a day to eat and drink and play silly games like sack races and egg toss (adults attend, by the way, it’s not an event for kids brought by their parents). There is a photo set on flickr of the 1977 party, courtesy of digitalmovie. I went to the party that year, but didn’t see myself.

What year would you pick?