visions

The Hood County Courthouse


I used to work in that town. Baking bread at the Nut Shell, on the south-east corner of the square. Crocket and Pearl. A formidable old building, still sturdy after all these years, thanks in part to the native lime-stone walls: still sturdy after more than a hundred years. A nightmare to keep the plumging and electricity in good shape. Barbara and Kay have kept it a lively part of the town scene longer than any other business enterprise around this famous square. They took over in 1980, about the time I ended up here to work on the nuke plant.

The beautiful center of the square, of the town itself, really, is this formidable Court House structure, in its symetrical, graceful architectual units, narrow windows, mansart roof, clock tower that used to have red-painted, cheerful casements for its louvers, and a clock that had to be wound by a crank. I know that, because my friend, Hugh Raupe, was the clock-winder for many years. The winding was done by a crank turning a spindle that pulled a 10 pound weight attached to a long rope, up about 15 feet. (Huge rigged it to use an electric drill, with a socket bit...) When released, the weight, thanks to the law of gravity, would power the clicking mechanism for a week, before the weight reached the length the rope would allow. The chimes were a sometime thing, usually not keeping time with the clock hands... and sometimes you got a different time from each face of the thing anyway. Einstein's famous theory about the relativity of time was true in this case, then.

Hugh had a shop just behind the square on Lambert Street, set up to repare everything from clocks, vacuums, bicycles, a shop filled with all manner of clocks, photos and good advice and an ever ready sourse of history and knowledge of the town of Granbury he grew up in and loved to his dying day. He could patiently repair any small motor device that was reparable at all. Then get on his 10 speed bike, strap on the helmet, and ride to Austin!!!! He died on the steps of that shop in 1993.

When the courthouse was renovated, in 2000, if I remember right, the clock was removed and replaced by a modern, electric machine, with recorded chimes, which do not work now either. Maybe just not used! The fine old Seth Thomas clock was last scene in a pile on the Court House lawn. Alas. Also those red sashes and casement frames for the louvred fenestation, which was striped down to a more basic frame underneath, and the surface cover, with zink-coated fish-scale shingles, dull grey, quite un-impressive. Kenny Burns, the architect, told us to wait, it would look better when the weathering of the metal took place. Well, we had to wait, but in the mean-time we forgot the folk art look of the red and bright baige tower, and have gotten used to the blue-grey look of the tower today. Dull but stately still, proclaiming that justice for all is not always housed in showy design.... or something like that.....

Then they built City Hall, a tribute to the grand old style, with local Cretaceous limestone, from the old seas and shores where the great dinosaurs roamed...90 million years ago.

Time and the river rolls on. Man's efforts to make things go there way, will not outlast the motions of creation which is ever evolving and is obliged by forces ordained and maintained by a deeper, more powerful drive... Call it God. Call it Nature. Call it what you will, but it operates by its own laws. Laws which man can only exist with. Or work around.