Took visiting Israeli friends to San Antonio on Friday to see the Alamo and was surprised to find the city has removed the parking meters on the side streets since the last time I was there. Now you’re at the mercy of the high-price lots—five to ten bucks to park.
Much as I like the place—a tiny island of history almost smothered by modern urban commercialism—I came away irritated. Years ago, they kept the trinket-sales in the back of the chapel. Now that they’ve been removed to a special gift-shop building, ersatz dignity is the rule.
One of the red-vest docents asked me to remove my hat in the chapel. Without the trinket cases, see, it’s a shrine to the dead heroes. No such thing in the adjacent Long Barracks museum, however, where far more of the defenders actually died than did in the chapel.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 