‘Fandangle’ celebration embarks on 79th year
ALBANY — Oilman Jon Rex Jones, an Albany native, has a theory about why this little Shackelford County town northeast of Abilene nurtures an enviable sense of community. Jones traces it to the mortal danger early settlers experienced when Union soldiers withdrew from the Texas frontier during the Civil War.
“Since the soldiers were gone, those people had to fort up to protect themselves,” Jones told me over lunch Thursday at a downtown restaurant called Vintage Vanilla. “Otherwise, they would have been slaughtered. That community spirit has never disappeared.”
For the 79th time this weekend and next, Albany, population about 2,000, celebrates that heritage with the Fort Griffin Fandangle, the oldest outdoor musical in Texas. For two nights each weekend, an audience of some 700 gathers in an acre-sized amphitheater and watches locals, nearly 300 of them, put on a highspirited reenactment of their Texas-sized story.
John Ayers told me he was 4 when he made his debut, as a prairie dog; he’s in his 50th show this year, not as a prairie dog but an Indian chief. This year’s youngest participant is 3 months. The oldest, John Matthews, is 98. The rancher from a pioneer family — the classic “Interwoven,” by Sallie Reynolds Matthews, tells the family story — made his first appearance in 1937; this year he plays “the old-timer.”
With longhorns, horses, a stage coach, buckboards, a steam calliope, cancan girls, soldiers, Indians and cowboys, Fandangle is just short of hokie, but it’s impressive, nevertheless. It’s a huge production, and Albany folks young and old take an obvious pride in putting on a great all-local show.
Even more impressive are the everyday expressions of community in this little town, expressions that result in good schools, the state’s most impressive small-town art museum and a busy downtown with no empty buildings on Main Street. A commitment to historic preservation combined with foresight — the past and the future, in other words — are key to the town’s
character.
It takes money, preferably old money. Shackelford County has long been ranching country, big ranches, and several of the pioneer families — Nail, Matthews, Green — are still giving back. Family members may be living elsewhere, but their heart belongs to Albany.
Those ranches already were in existence when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1881, opening up the area to broader markets. Four decades later, area cattlemen discovered that their rugged pastures sat atop what was then the largest shallow-well oil field in the world.
“The oil business never supplanted ranching, but it sure helped,” said Jones, 81, chairman of the Houstonbased energy company EnerVest. (Jones still has an Albanybased company as well.)
The University of Oklahoma grad came back home in 1957 to work for his dad’s company and has spent his life serving on local boards and commissions, raising money for good causes, “keeping Albany pristine and making it a good place to live.”
Town investments
The town takes pride in its willingness to invest in itself, whether it’s an expanded landing strip for larger planes or scholarship money for high-school graduates. Legendary rancher Watt Matthews owned the local bank and was invariably willing to invest in Albany’s future.
“You’d go to Watt first and see what he was willing to give,” Jones said, “and then you’d go to the oilies and see what they were willing to give, and then you were able to raise funds without a bond issue.”
The late Reilly Nail is one of those who left and then came home. Mention his name, and those who knew him inevitably smile and tell a Reilly story. “He was a character,” chamber of commerce president Diana Nail said. His tell-all family memoir, “Per Stirpes,” attests to that fact.
Reilly Nail went off to Princeton — as have several generations of Albany young people — and then became a TV producer in New York, with “Gunsmoke” and “The Ed Sullivan Show” among his credits. In 1968, he inherited Albany’s old jailhouse and a decade later decided to refurbish the sturdy stone building as an art museum. Featuring much of his personal collection — it began with a $10 acquisition in high school — combined with the collection of his cousin Bill Bomar and the collections of their mothers, the Old Jail Art Center opened in 1980. Thanks to their artistic acumen, Albany is the only small town in Texas to have a Modigliani, a Renoir, a Toulouse-Lautrec, several Picassos, a Klee and a superb collection of ancient Chinese and pre-Columbian art.
“Our success is based on the fact that we’re not a local museum,” says Patrick Kelly, who’s been with the museum for 20 years and who became director last year. “Our competition is the Amon Carter and the Menil. We have high expectations.”
Diana Nail maintains that the wealthy aren’t the only ones who give back. She told me about three young mothers who took it upon themselves a couple of years ago to refurbish the community park. The women raised more than $1 million. A sparkling new swimming pool and a refurbished baseball field are testament to their efforts.
“I hate to quote Hillary, but it takes a village,” Nail said.
“It’s the people,” said Linda Heatly, who disagrees mightily with her longtime friend Diana’s politics but talks to her by phone every morning. Heatly taught first grade in Albany for 42 years and for the past 15 years has run KitchenWorks, a cookware shop that rivals Sur la Table, attracting customers from Abilene, Graham, Breckenridge and beyond. “The people that have moved in, they tell me they just want to be a part of it,” she said.
‘They care’
Tamara and Justin Trail and their three daughters moved in from Dallas in 2011, having discovered the area on hunting trips. Justin doesn’t have to be in Dallas full-time to run his insurance business, so a historic house on the town square is where they choose to live and raise their girls.
“We wanted our children connected to the land,” Tamara said. “We wanted them to know where their food comes from, to be conversant with natural resources.”
Idyllic is probably too strong a word for Albany, despite its Mayberry-like qualities. Some of its residents struggle to get by. It’s a small town, so everybody knows your business whether you want them to or not. Folks squabble and disagree, just like everywhere else.
What makes this place special, Winifred Waller will tell you, is that people care about the place. Waller, 86, taught highschool English for more than 40 years and is still remembered for the old timers’ oral histories her students recorded and published.
“They care about the arts, music, education. They care about the history of the area,” she said. “They care about each other.”