Monday, February 23, 2009. NAPSG Banquet.

MS. LEE: Good evening. I hate to stop our lively conversation, but I'd love to have your attention. First of all, I want to tell you that Ted and Katie Flato are here. Lake/Flato has made possible all your imbibing and a whole lot of fun for us all this weekend, so please, would you welcome them and thank them?

Those of us who went on the architectural tour today had a truly special treat, and we saw one of the most interesting schools I have seen in years. It's an inner city school for at-risk children, and I have to tell you that the head of the school said, "One of the reasons that we are successful is because of the architecture of this school."

I have often felt that way in the schools that I have run, and so I urge you all to look at the projects that Lake/Flato has done. I live in Dallas in competition with one of the most wonderful schools, Greenhill, that you have ever seen, and it was because Lake/Flato had done the architecture there. So thank you, Ted, and we're grateful to have you here.

Now, I'm here because I persuaded Evan Smith to introduce you to Texas. You know, I came to Texas 19 years ago, and there's a bumper sticker that says, "I'm not from Texas, but I came as soon as I could." And I feel that way. And I hope that you all have read your Texas Monthly, because somebody gave us a subscription to Texas Monthly when they knew we were coming to this land, to this strange country that sort of hangs off the southern edge of the US, and it really was the best introduction to the culture that I could possibly have had. We've spent a lot of time in these two days talking about culture, and it was a wonderful introduction.

I'm a little disappointed that this month's issue, which each of you has, is devoted to fashion, because we are probably the most unfashionable group in the United States. And I'm sorry about that, but you know, I want you to read this issue, because it will give you a new appreciation of fashion, and I'm going shopping at Nieman Marcus as soon as I get back to Dallas.

Now, let me tell you about Evan Smith and why I wanted him to be here. He is the president and editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly. And there is not anyone in Texas who doesn't know Evan, but the interesting thing is that there isn't anyone in Texas that Evan doesn't know.

I am now the interim head of the school that his children go to, and I thought that my stock was pretty high as the head of Hockaday, but you know, the truth of the matter is that running the school that Evan Smith's children go to and the school on whose board Evan Smith sits, and having been chosen by this search committee that Evan Smith headed, has really been much better for my reputation than anything I have ever done.

Evan joined the staff of Texas Monthly as a senior editor in January of 1992. In February of 1993 he was promoted to deputy editor, and in July of 2000 he was promoted to editor. In May 2002 he added the title of executive vice president, and in September 2008 he was promoted to president and editor-in-chief.

Since he took over as editor, Texas Monthly has been nominated for 14 national magazine awards, the magazine's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. In April of 2003 Texas Monthly was awarded the National Magazine Award for general excellence for the third time in its history.

Now, it's interesting. Evan is a New York native. You know, he cites Queens as the place he came from, which, of course, thrills me as a Manhattanite. He has a bachelor's degree in public policy from Hamilton College and a master's degree in journalism from Medill at Northwestern. He previously held editorial positions at a number of national magazines, most recently at The New Republic, where he was deputy editor, and he's written for GQ; O, the Oprah magazine; and all sorts of other national magazines.

He hosts a weekly interview program, "Texas Monthly Talks," that airs on PBS stations, and he is an occasional guest on numerous other TV and radio shows. So sometimes when you're driving along, all of a sudden, Evan's right there in your car with you.

Evan is currently the president of the board of the Austin Film Society, and sits on numerous boards, the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin; at my school, Trinity Episcopal; the Medill School of Journalism, the Headliners Club. He's also the founding co-chair of the Texas Film Hall of Fame. He served for five years on the board of the American Society of Magazine Editors, most recently, as its vice president. And he served for six years on the board of the Austin public television station, KLRU. In Texas, our public radio and television stations are really lone voices in what's basically a very conservative world.

In 2005, in recognition of his contributions to Austin and Texas, Evan was named Austinite of the Year under 40 by the Young Men's Business League and Young Women's Business League. In 2006, he was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism Hall of Achievement.

Now, this young man would ordinarily make me feel very old, but he really has made me feel as though we're colleagues, that we're in the education enterprise together. And I'm delighted that he agreed to talk to you a little bit about Texas tonight. I have to tell you before I turn it over to him that the week before the election, I went to a lunch meeting where he spoke on how he thought the election would turn out, and with the exception of two states, he nailed it perfectly. So I'm

turning you over to a man who not only knows Texas, but really knows our country very, very well.

Evan, it's all yours.

MR. SMITH: I'm going to dine out on that introduction for about two months, I think, my dear Liza.

You all have known Liza probably for many years in her capacity as the former head of Hockaday, and as a larger-than-life personality and presence in the independent school world. I certainly have been blessed to know Liza as the interim head, as she indicated, at the school in which my children are enrolled, and as my friend. And so it's an honor to be asked to be here by Liza and Bruce. Thank you very much for having me, as well, to all of you. And Liza, thank you for that extremely kind introduction.

It is strange to be from Queens, New York and to be identified as the person who knows more about Texas than anybody else. There are about 24 million Texans who might challenge that statement. But I'm happy to at least be an authority, if not the authority, on this wonderful state, and the state welcomes you.

This is really a mini stimulus package for us to have your conference in Texas. Frankly, these days, we take what we can get, and any conference that comes to Texas and brings money into the state is okay with me and okay with us.

Something that Liza did not mention -- in fact, two things I'll tell you that Liza did not put in her very kind remarks about my background. The first is that when I graduated from college but before I went to graduate school -- and I believe that Ed Shanahan is not here, although he's listed in the program -- the very first job I actually had a as a citizen who earned a paycheck was teaching summer school history at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. I was absolutely enchanted by the school and I thought, I have got two courses I can pursue. One is to go to graduate school and become a journalist, but the other is to teach in a boarding school. And so I sent any number of applications out for jobs all over the country and was turned down by every single school I applied to. And I got accepted to graduate school and I thought, Well, there's a message here, go to graduate school. So but for having been dinged by Woodbury Forest and this school and that school, I would be here with you out there, absolutely.

The other thing, with regard to my dear friends Ted and Katie Flato, is it is literally true that but for Katie Flato, I would not be here. Texas Monthly for so many years had a reputation as kind of the Fort Knox of magazine mastheads. You could not possibly get in. People arrived and came to work there and remained, and never, ever, ever left. It's less the case today, hopefully not because the magazine is not as much fun, but because the world's a little bit more transient than it was back then. But in any case, Katie has been there in an exalted role and had just, I believe, given birth to their eldest daughter, and was commuting from San Antonio to Austin which, although it's only about an hour and 20 minutes, and those of us who live here don't think anything at all of driving from San Antonio to Austin or Austin to San Antonio, the fact is, Katie decided at a certain point she no longer wanted to make that commute, was going to remain in San Antonio and be a mom, and do all the many wonderful things she's done for this community.

And so there was suddenly a job. And it happened to be the job that I took. (There's my daughter, right there, my own daughter.) It is actually because of Katie Flato that I am at Texas Monthly. So I say "Thank you" to Katie because but for that I would not be here.

Let me tell you what I'm going to talk about. I was asked to welcome you to Texas. And I can do it really in any number of ways. And I have only got, from Bruce and Liza's instructions, about 15 or 20 minutes so I have decided that rather than give you the long version of Texas and welcome you to the state and give you all the nuance and all the intricacies and everything else, that I would give you really a cook's tour, a very shorthand understanding of this absolutely singular place, Texas, which those of us who are blessed enough to live in Texas know to be unlike anyplace else in the world.

I'm going to go through a series of things to give you a kind of shorthand understanding of the state, and maybe if we have a moment or two at the end before Bruce kicks me off and I race back up the interstate to my own house, you can ask me some questions. But these are my observations about Texas, all the things that I would want all my new friends here from around the country to know as you contemplate this state.

First, of course, as always in my life, if not in yours, is politics. You need to know a little bit about the politics of the state. In shorthand, what I'll tell you is that for a very, very, very long number of years

-- in fact, up until 2003 -- Texas was regarded as a solidly Democratic state. It is true that in 1986 the state elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction; that then Ann Richards won back the governorship in 1990, but in 1994 Ann Richards, despite being an extraordinarily popular politician, in Texas and out, and a very loyal Democrat with a very progressive circle of people around her running this state, Ann Richards was defeated for office by George W. Bush, whose own father Ann Richards has been unkind to, W. Bush believed, in the 1988 Democratic convention saying, among other things, that, "Poor George, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth."

It is believed that W. Bush decided to run for governor purely to avenge the slight that Ann Richards delivered upon his father, and in 1994, despite the fact that Ann Richards was very popular, Texas elected its second Republican governor since Reconstruction. So somehow, the state of Texas went from Ann Richards to Karl Rove and George Bush and their like. And in 2003, less than ten years later, Texas finally became a Republican state fully and formally by electing its first Republican Speaker of the House and a solidly Republican legislature in the House and Senate.

Now, that has changed not at all in the last six years, although -- and I'll talk about it in a second

-- Texas may be slightly less Republican than it was, but as you well know, in 2000, at that moment the most famous Texan to the rest of the country, George W. Bush, was indeed elected president. And the first four years of the Bush presidency, the state of Texas thought about this guy it had sent to Washington, who was a moderate, who governed here as a moderate, who was very friendly and kind and collaborative, friendly and kind to Democrats, collaborative with Democrats, and seemed like the kind of person that the state would want to represent it and carry its name in Washington -- and they found themselves asking, "Wait a minute. What happened to the guy we sent?"

Even in Texas, there was a sense that when George W. Bush went to Washington, something was different. Now, certainly the experience of being president is different than the experience of being governor, and so that was different. But the people around President Bush were different and the circumstances, of course, following 9/11 were different. And so by 2004, even Texas Monthly institutionally, who had been kind to, if not supportive of, Governor Bush, found itself questioning whether or not President Bush should be reelected against John Kerry. This was the cover that we did early in 2004 for which we received an extraordinary amount of criticism in Texas, how disloyal we were to this guy who we had all as a state sent up to Washington.

Well, four years later, we know about the legacy of George W. Bush in office. On Election Day of 2008, the rest of the country had a 27 percent favorability rating for President Bush. In Texas it was slightly higher, 41 percent, but still remarkable that more than half of this state on Election Day of 2008 had decided they were effectively done with George W. Bush.

This is an illustration of President Bush that we ran in the magazine in connection with a story about his legacy, in which you see illustrated on his face all the many things that people will talk about, historians and others, for years, from Iraq to Katrina. And I suppose we could now add the economic crisis. In 2001 we had 9/11. In 2008 we had 9/15. We had September 15, which was really an economic 9/11. I think all of us in our own lives and our own ways feel the effects of this extraordinary economic crisis which people will be debating about for years: Was this on his watch and did he in some way cause this?

So in 2008 we found ourselves effectively as a state but as a country more so done with George W. Bush.

This was the result of the 2008 election in Texas. Now, if you came from another planet and were shown this map, would you have any idea that Barack Obama not only won the presidency in this country but won it overwhelmingly? This was the result in Texas. Obviously, the blue areas are the Obama areas. There are 254 counties in the state of Texas, and Brack Obama won 28 counties. Now, for the first time since LBJ, a Democratic candidate for president pulled off a hat trick, winning Dallas County, Dallas; Harris County, Houston; and Bexar County, San Antonio. The first time since LBJ that happened. But nonetheless, John McCain won the state of Texas by 11 points.
I point this out by way of saying that even in a year in which the country resoundingly elected a Democratic president, Texas was still solidly Republican, solidly conservative. A little bit less so probably than in 2004, a little bit less so than in 2000, but less red is still red. And so as you contemplate the politics of the state, what you should know is this is still, in 2009 and for the foreseeable future, a Republican state.

Now, I alluded to what happened in the legislature recently as a bit of a change. The Republicans still control the House and the Republicans still control the Senate, but my Democratic friends take some comfort in the knowledge that the rabidly Republican Speaker of the Texas House was ousted in favor of a moderate Republican this last couple of weeks; in fact, a Republican speaker, the very first Republican speaker ever from San Antonio, a nice man named Joe Straus, whom I would describe to people around the state as a Nantucket Yacht Club kind of Republican. The kind of Republican whose wife is a long-time donor to Planned Parenthood, that kind of Republican. There used to be those kinds of Republicans in Texas. In fact, George H.W. Bush, before he was president was that kind of Republican; in fact, a big supporter of Planned Parenthood. Something happened in his case, too, when he went to Washington. But our new moderate Republican Speaker of the House is, in fact, that kind of Republican. So for Democrats maybe a little bit of hope for the future, but still a Republican state and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

We have a governor's race coming up in 2010, and this is the other ray of hope that perhaps my Democratic friends in Texas take. There is no credible Democratic candidate for governor in 2010, so the Republican primary is effectively the general election. And the Republican primary will be between the incumbent governor Rick Perry, who is already the longest-serving governor in the history of the state, and it's fair to say fairly right wing, and US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who has been in office since 1993, is nominally pro choice, and is generally believed to be more of a moderate Republican. She describes herself as a moderate conservative, which sounds to me like jumbo shrimp, a little oxymoronic. But in any case, she's a moderate conservative. Rick Perry is simply a conservative. And so the Republican primary will be the battlefield on which the Republican Party's issues are litigated. Just as the national Republican Party is debating the whole moderate versus conservative thing here in Texas, we're about to have a similar deal. And those of us in the press who are, let's be honest, really fight promoters at heart -- we can't wait for this. This is truly the primary we have all been waiting for.

So what we have coming up on our political horizon is not the likely or even plausible election of a Democrat, but at least an intraparty fight by the Republicans in the primary, and four years or eight years hence, who knows, we may even get competition and two-party parity once again, but not any time soon.

The next big issue I would point out to you in order to understand Texas is, it's really all about demographics. In 2005, Texas became, faster than the state demographer and anybody else in the know predicted, a minority/majority state, meaning that the percentage of the population of Texas that is Anglo fell below 50 percent for the first time. We are not quite a Hispanic majority, but we're getting there. The prediction now is that by 2020 -- maybe a little sooner, in fact -- Texas will be a Hispanic majority.

Now, what does that mean? Well, it means any number of things for this state, which is probably, psychologically, the institution of the state, not prepared to deal with the coming change, culturally, politically, and just simply in terms of the social services needs that this emerging Hispanic majority will demand appropriately of the state. While the Hispanic population of Texas is growing astronomically, the Anglo population is declining. The African-American and Asian populations, a distant third and fourth, are flat going across the years.

The allocation of dollars by the state and even the allocation of dollars by social services nonprofits is effectively one-to-one to one-to-one. So the funding of the primary needs of this emerging Hispanic majority are totally out of whack with the trend lines in the change of population. That is one of many ways in which the coming Hispanic majority is going to present a host of challenges, education, health care, and the like. And the state is, at least as of today, not yet equipped to deal with the change that is inevitable.

Three of the ten largest cities in the country are here in Texas. They are Houston at number 4, San Antonio at number 8, I guess, Ted, still; is that right? And Dallas at number 9. We also have two of the fastest-growing cities in the country in Laredo and McAllen, and not surprisingly, that growth is being fueled by the emerging Hispanic majority in the state. The Hispanic population in those cities is growing at a really remarkable clip. And so Texas has to deal with not only growth in the Hispanic community but just basically growth generally.

Today Texas claims a little over 24 million citizens. By 2030, the census-takers predict that Texas will see an increase in its population of 60 percent, up to more than 33 million. Now, the state's pretty big, but it's not going to get any bigger between now and 2030. And so that growth that perhaps some of you saw coming from the airport or coming along 1604 from Interstate 35, where you see development, high-end strip mall, development, high-end strip mall -- only Ted Flato could design all this stuff and make it look better. But the reality is that sprawl is here, sprawl is going to be

a fact of all of our lives if the population grows over the next number of years.

And I should say, by the way, this is State Representative Rafael Anchia, from Dallas, whom we predicted last year around this time would be the first Hispanic governor of Texas. There are many people who quibble with the particular choice, but nobody quibbles with the fact that if not in the next election, then the election after that, or the election after that, Texas will very shortly have its first Hispanic governor and, in fact, the entire power structure of this state may well be much more Hispanic than it is today, in acknowledgment of the changes coming to the state.

Let's talk about sports. Yes, we have Lance Armstrong. And yes, we have Yao Ming. But honestly, there are only two sports in Texas: Football and not football. The reality is that if you know anything at all about Texas, you known that there really is only one official sport for this state, and that is football, and it comes in three different varieties: Pro, college, and high school.

In the pro variety, at least, the only team that really matters is the Dallas Cowboys. If you are from Houston, or if you dare root for the Houston Texans, you will be ostracized all over the state. Even when the Cowboys are bad -- and let me tell you what, right now, after this last season, the Cowboys stink -- the only play, if you're a football fan in Texas, is to root for the Dallas Cowboys. The Dallas Cowboys are it.

In college, it's a similar deal. Yes, we had two Texas college football teams near the very top of the BCS rankings at the end of the season: The University of Texas and Texas Tech. But are you really going to root for Texas Tech? Of course not. You're only going to root for the University of Texas.

I ran into the president of the University of Texas outside a Starbucks late in the season, and I said to him, "What are you guys going to do here at the end? You know, the BCS rankings are up in the air. It's you and it's Oklahoma and Texas Tech. What's going to happen?"

And he said, "Well, I really can't bring myself to root for Oklahoma. But if it comes down to Oklahoma and Texas Tech, I'm going to have to root for Oklahoma. Because there's a club. We're in the club. Oklahoma is in the club. Texas A&M's in the club. Texas Tech cannot be in the club."

So there's a certain amount of feeling in this state, not just loyalists for the University of Texas, but Texas Tech is not just on the same plain as Texas. If you're a college football fan in Texas, the last couple of years you have been rewarded by a great performance; not as great as we might have liked, in the end, by the University of Texas. Of course, the thing to do is to blame the BCS, which we will now do during the entire off-season and will be complaining about at the beginning of the next season, I'm sure.

Come to high school, we know that high school football is, of course, also a rabid phenomenon in Texas. And you know, whether it's the conventional variety of football or in the small towns what we call six-man football, where they field the only size team that their student population can afford to field, we know that high school football is indeed a huge deal here, and so is cheerleading.

Even our cheerleaders at football games -- and of course, here are the world-famous Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders -- even our cheerleaders are part of the whole conversation. So football is the thing, if you care about sports in Texas, is pretty much the only thing you're allowed to care about.

Food. Food in Texas comes in three and only three varieties. Barbecue. And if this were a Saturday morning, I could direct you to the best barbecue restaurant in Texas, which is, in fact, a trailer on blocks in the town of Lexington, only open 8:00 to 11:00 on Saturday mornings. I would direct you there. But barbecue is a staple of the Texas diet, as is Mexican food.

This was a story that we did a number of years ago, "The 63 Tacos You Must Eat Before You Die." I don't know if you'll have time to sneak away from this conference, but I know Ted and Katie would probably join me in directing you to El Mirador or Torres Taco Haven in San Antonio, two among many wonderful restaurants in San Antonio where you can eat the actual, honest-to-goodness, real thing.

If you don't live in Texas, and you don't live in California, what they call Tex-Mex or what they call Mexican food, I'm sorry, it's a pale imitation. But if you're here in Texas, you need to get out, get out of this hotel and go at least one time to eat Mexican food in Texas.

And then, of course, the third staple in the Texas diet is chicken fried something, whether it's chicken fried steak, or chicken fried chicken, or on the left, chicken fried bacon, or on the right, chicken blah-blah, both of which are available to be purchased. You don't have to lose a bet or run a red light to be made to eat this stuff. You can actually do it voluntarily. There are restaurants around Texas that will more or less chicken fry everything. What I did not do, because

my stomach frankly wouldn't permit me to show it on the screen, Iπd have to look at it and think about it all night, is the chicken fried Twinkie that one restaurant in Texas has on the menu.

So if you wonder about the health of Texans, it may be better just to move on down the road and not talk about that. But barbecue, Mexican food, and anything chicken fried -- these are staple cuisines of Texas.

Scandals. You know, we have scandals in Texas occasionally. Let's begin with crime. We have our share of crime in Texas. This is an example of the kind of crime that those of us at Texas Monthly or, frankly, in the media in Texas read about and think, Thank you, God, for delivering the story to us.

This was a horrible story of a Baptist preacher whose wife ended up dead and he was suspected of having done it. It becomes a magazine story, and then, you know, Dateline NBC does it or 48 Hours, I think, in this case, does an entire show on it.

We have our share of essentially anonymous crimes, crimes committed by people you have never heard of on people you have never heard of.

We then have somewhat less anonymous crimes, even more horrific here, but one of the many big-name things that I think history and the annals of history will record the details of, the cover we did on the anniversary of Charles Whitman's shooting spree at the University of Texas August 1, 1966, which, until the Virginia Tech massacre, was actually the largest instance of murder in a public setting ever. Virginia Tech actually superseded that in its numbers. Horrible that this was a record that we held, and horrible that we no longer hold it.

But occasionally we have one, even though it's a crime, that we can find a way to laugh. Yes, in the "Thank you, God" category was the story of Lisa Nowak, the NASA astronaut who was shacking up with a fellow astronaut who then decided to step out on her with yet another astronaut who was flying into the Orlando airport, and so Lisa Nowak -- the details of this are now being challenged by her lawyers -- either did or did not put on the industrial-strength astronaut diapers and get in her car and drive with a ball-peen hammer and a hack saw and a can of pepper spray to Orlando to meet the flight of her boyfriend's girlfriend with the intention of killing her. It is truly the reason that we all went into this business: To have not only the opportunity to tell the story, but to have the sheer pleasure of telling the story. Yeah, this is why I went to journalism school, for sure.

In addition to crime, though, we have our share of scandal of a corporate nature. In the 1980s we had the S&L crisis. Much of the activity in the S&L crisis was, of course, headquartered here in Texas. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we had the pleasure of watching the Enron scandal unfold right before us.

Oh, I've actually skipped back past Ken Lay. Forgive me.

And now we have the spectacle of Alan Stanford, in Houston, who is threatening to out-Madoff Bernie-Madoff. In terms of the sheer enormity and stupidity and the content and the avarice, the extraordinary behavior of this man is really rivaling what Madoff is said to have done in New York, and so we are just all over that story, if anybody in Texas would be, and we think to ourselves, why did these people end up in Texas? Why did this happen here? But we certainly seem to have our share, or more, of people associated with corporate fraud.

Now, we also have our celebrity scandals. Anna Nicole Smith, some people said, was too easy to make fun of. I thought of her during her life as the gift that kept on giving. We had Anna Nicole Smith on the cover of our magazine three or four times -- I can't remember -–

and you know, she was a constant source of material for us.

But she was not the only one. Roger Clemens, of late, whom we described as our bum steroid of the year. This was only back in January, in those halcyon days before Alex Rodriguez. Really, now, the only consolation for us is that Alex Rodriguez took the steroids, played not for the New York Yankees, but, of course, for the Texas Rangers.

But of course, as celebrity scandals go, as scandals perpetrated on the world by famous people go, really there's no bigger one than this. Some of you may remember the old National Lampoon cover from 1973. "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Shoot This Dog." Remember that cover?

I remember in February of 2006, standing in my kitchen with a television on, I was doing dishes and the TV was on, and CNN was on, and the crawl was going across the bottom. Remember back when CNN was just in the early days of doing the crawl? And I remember seeing in the crawl, "Vice President Dick Cheney," so I thought, Oh, what's this? All right. "Shot." That got my attention. "A friend, Harry Whittington."

Now, as it turns out, Katie may have known Harry Whittington when she was living in Austin. Harry Whittington is the kind of downtown businessman who owns a bunch of parking garages and real estate in Austin. All of us know Harry Whittington. So I thought, That Harry Whittington? Really? I sort of stood up straight, and then I saw "in the face." Hold on. Wait a minute. "On a ranch outside of Corpus Christi."

And I thought, this is a "Thank you, God" moment. Really. I wasn't exactly this unsympathetic to Harry Whittington, of course. There was probably a few seconds

where I thought, I hope he's not dead. Okay. He's just a little hurt. That's fine. Okay. Now I can actually --

So we do this bum steer issue every year, have since the very beginning of the magazine, going back to its founding back in 1973, the bum steer of the year, and we always wait during the year to see which famous person does the thing that is most bum-steer-of-the-year worthy. That issue was published in January, and this happened in February of 2006. And I thought to myself, Please, no one do anything worse than this, because this is the bum steer cover that we've all been waiting for. And I always wanted us to do that National Lampoon type cover, and so it just sort of set up perfectly.

I'm proud to say Time Magazine named this cover at the end of 2007 the single best magazine cover of the year by any magazine. I was very proud that we had the opportunity to do this, and I will tell you, it is yet another reason why it is absolutely great to be the editor of, say, Texas Monthly as opposed to Iowa Monthly or Oregon Monthly, because where else would you have this sort of fortuitous confluence of things? It's really wonderful.

Let me talk about Texas pride for a second. Texans like to brag about all the things they're number one in. But I think they kind of have it wrong, we have it wrong, because it's not always something to be proud of, you know. The list of things that Texas is currently number one in will really curl or uncurl your hair. I just pulled out a list of some of the things that we're number one in currently. We are number one in the percentage of the population -- this is number one among all states -- the percentage of our population 25 and older without a high school diploma.

We're number one in the percentage of uninsured children. In fact, this is a story we did several years ago when the state decided that the way to balance its budget was to throw nearly a million children off the state health insurance rolls. And in the years since, the state has gradually begun to reinstate many of the children thrown off the rolls onto the rolls, but there are still hundreds of thousands of children in Texas who are now uninsured as a consequence of that act back in 2001.

We are number one in the percentage of our population that's uninsured. We're number one in the percentage of our nonelderly who are uninsured.

We're number one in our teenage birth rate among all states. We're number one in air pollution emissions. We're number one in carbon dioxide emissions. We're number one in the amount of cancer-causing carcinogens released into the area. We're number one among all states in gun shows. We're number one among all states in machine gun ownership. We're number one among all states in executions. In fact, there are some people that think every Texan, when they buy a new house, comes with a button that directly goes to death row.

And we're number one -- maybe this is actually good news -- in exonerations of people on death row as a result of DNA testing. This is a new phenomenon, and one that I think all of us in Texas can be proud of. For a long time Texas did not collect and keep DNA evidence at crime scenes, and so you'd have the spectacle of people arrested for a crime, charged, convicted, sent away, all the while protesting their innocence, and there was no mechanism for their claims of innocence to be measured against evidence in the case. Often they were convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony or some other set of evidence that was not scientific. Texas has now exonerated since 2001 39 men who have served -- I think at the time that we did the story, it was 37 who had spent a total of 525 years behind bars. We gathered 22 of the 37 exonerees and took a group photograph of them

in Dallas last fall. And we did profiles of all 37 at the time, men who'd been exonerated.

Now, the fundamental question one asks in a situation like this is: Where do these men go to get their lives back? Right? Where do they go to get their lives back? It's all well and good to be a law-and-order state, which Texas most assuredly is. It's all well and good to have a death penalty. There are a lot of people in Texas who believe in the death penalty and believe in the system of law and order that is prevalent here.

But then you have this. So the question is: How do you square that with this? So when I say, we're number one, we're number one in a lot of good things. But I think one of the things that Texans need to be, and quite frankly are, is self-aware about the things that we're not good in and that we need to make better. And all of us have work to do in our states, and I don't want you to think I'm standing up here at as a booster for this state without a clear eye to the things that we need to do better, because that's something that we need to tell people about, as well.

Let's talk about the western myth. First you need to know that Texas is not a southern state. It is maybe a southwestern state. But more accurately, it self-identifies as a western state. The western myth as opposed to the southern myth has predominated here for all time, which means ranching -- real ranching, not windshield ranching. Real cattle ranching, and not just an 880,000-acre mythic spread like King Ranch in Kingsville, but ranches big and small, ranches institutional and family, weekday and weekend, primary residence and get-away residence, all across the state. It means cattle. It means cattle-raising, it means cattle auctions, it means the entire culture of that cowboy life, down to things like you saw the issue in your rooms of Texas Monthly, cowboy hats and boots and

jeans and all that goes along with that. No one's playing dress-up. This is actually serious business.

Now, there's a backlash against that western myth and against that cowboy myth that partly, I will tell you, has to do with the last eight years. I was overseas in 2004 and my wife and I would be asked by people, "Where are you from?" And we would say, "Texas," and they would say, "Oh."

And it's because the idea of the cowboy had become pejorative. "Cowboy," the term, or the word "cowboy" had become pejorative. The cowboy mentality. It was, "Shoot first, ask questions later." Go it alone. Arrogant. Think about all the attributes that have been associated with the word "cowboy."

We did a cover that was essentially trying to put a spin on this, using Kinky Friedman, the great country singer and novelist and columnist in our magazine, as a representation of this. ≥Texas Versus the World.≤ Really it was the world versus Texas. Eventually, four years later, we did an entire cover story in which the great western writer Elmer Kelton officially took back the word "cowboy" from those who sought to make it a pejorative.

We take this stuff very seriously in Texas. There is great honor in the cowboy life. There is great honor in the cowboy myth and in the western myth. Real cowboys are incredibly hardworking and honorable and independent people, and if you want to understand something about Texas, it begins with understanding what it really means to be a cowboy; not the pejorative, but the actual definition of the term and the actual articulation of the lifestyle.

Everything in Texas is bigger. How long have you heard that? How often have you heard that just in the time you have been in Texas so far? And I could show you 100 examples of ways in which Texas proudly self-defines as "the biggest this" or "the biggest that."

I'll simply show you four random examples. We have the biggest steaks. We do. Any Texans in the room know that there's a steak house in Amarillo with a 72-ounce steak. And if you eat it and you finish it, it's free. Now, I would invite any of you to make the trip to Amarillo and see if you can tame the mythic steak. But the fact is, we like our meat, generally speaking, bigger than they do in other places.

We like our land, our great outdoors, to be bigger than other places. This is a famous shot, one of many angles of a famous part of Big Bend National Park in far west Texas, which I must tell you, as a non-Texan, one of the very first things that I felt helped me understand this state was making the trek out from Austin, seven hours, to Big Bend Natural Park and to the surrounding land. It is truly the most magnificent place I have ever been in my life, and it is big as all get-out. And no other national park that you have ever been to, no other areas of the country you have ever been to, is quite as big, big in terms of the land, big in terms of the sky, big in terms of the mythic nature of the place, as Big Bend National Park.

Our hair is bigger. The concept of big hair may not have originated in Texas, but there's no question that Texas considers the hair of its people to be big, and considers big hair to be part of the Texas character.

And so, I'm afraid, we consider another part of the anatomy. Texas is among the many things that proudly claims to be the breast implant capital of the country, and specifically Houston. There are more doctors who perform breast implants, there are more women who have breast implants, and there are more lawsuits over breast implants litigated in Houston than in any other city in

the country. So in the ways specific and general, in ways deliberate and random, bigness is part of Texas.

So is religion. I have often described to my friends not from Texas this state as being in the rodeo buckle of the Bible Belt. You cannot understand or appreciate Texas without understanding the extent to which one's faith is a contributing factor in one's character, in one's view of the world, and in one's view of one's own Texans.

Now, Liza mentioned my children are enrolled in an Episcopal school in Austin, and you would think among the parochial schools or the schools in which faith is a relevant part, the Episcopal schools will tend to be the most progressive, and in Austin, Texas, you would expect, of all places, for the issue of faith not to be one that divides people. But I will tell you that the fight in the Episcopal Church over the ordaining of homosexual clergy has ripped apart the Episcopal community in Austin as much as it has the Episcopal community elsewhere in Texas and around the country. I believe that the Fort Worth diocese has now officially seceded over this issue. And it is but one example recently of how faith matters in Texas. It is something people care deeply about. It is something people argue passionately about. And if you want to understand this state, you have to understand that we come from a culture in which religion matters, in which the tennis courts are empty on Sunday morning because everybody's at church. And if you're not part of that community, you may think a little oddly of it, but the fact is, people care, they are sincere about it, and it's a diverse community.

We come also from a preacher culture, from a more kind of evangelist culture like the Robert Schullers and the Benny Hinns of the world to what we now understand to be a mega church culture, whether it's T.D. Jakes at the Potter's House in Dallas who preaches every weekend to tens of thousands of people, or to the person I consider to be an absolute phenomenon, Joel Osteen, who five years ago was operating the camera during the televised service at the church that his father was the pastor at, in a little church north of Loop 610 in Houston. And in the last five years, he has grown that church as the pastor himself, with no experience behind him, no experience as a pastor himself. When his father passed away, he took over the church. The church two years ago took over the Compaq Center in Houston, where the Houston Rockets played. He's now preaching every weekend to 45,000 and 50,000 people. It's actually a nondenominational church, so it's people of all faiths and backgrounds who attend Lakewood Church in Houston and listen to Joel Osteen preach. But the fact is the mega church piece of Texas is absolutely significant and important to understanding who Texans are and what Texans believe.

And then finally, I would just back out and say that the culture of the state is quite remarkable, and it is easy, as it is in any area of life in Texas, to stereotype us, that we are a vast wasteland intellectually, politically, and culturally.

If you're not from here and you read about Texas in the national press, you could be forgiven for thinking that Texas is a vast wasteland. But culturally, we have an enormous amount going on. And it extends from the totally weird but unbelievably compelling movie like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," that's kind of low-end, to anything that Tommy Lee Jones does. And we are so proud to have Tommy Lee Jones represent Texas on screen in all the films he acts in, and in Hollywood. If there is one person in Hollywood associated with Texas, thank God, it's not Matthew McConaughey but Tommy Lee Jones. So our film runs from low to high, and I think it's every bit as vibrant as film coming from someplace else.

On television, you can go back to J.R. Ewing and you can go forward to Hank Hill. And I think you can extend that to include the cast of ≥Friday Night Lights.≤ And I think they represent Texas honorably and successfully on television.

And then, of course, you can go from Roy Orbison to Buddy Holly, from Roky Erickson to Daniel Johnston, from Townes Van Zandt to George Strait, from Selena to Byonce, to the person who probably embodies what I consider to be the values of Texas better than anybody in any area, Willie Nelson. This was the cover we did last year on Willie's 75th birthday, the only cover that Texas Monthly has ever done in 36 years with no title, because you don't need type when you have a photograph like this. And you don't need type when the subject is Willie.

There are three sure things in life: Death, taxes, and Willie Nelson sells Texas Monthlys. He's been on the cover of this magazine more than anybody, any single individual, over our 36 years and every time, he does extraordinarily well, and the reason is because everybody loves him. Black, white, and brown, city and country, Democrat or Republican, whether you love country music or you have never listened to a note of "Whiskey River," you like Willie, because Willie's personality, his personal attributes, are likeable. Willie represents in the way he carries himself what I would like people to see as the very best of Texas.

So that is my short cook's store. It is an honor, as always, to talk about Texas, and especially before this wonderful group. And with that, I say, "Thank you very much."

If Liza, Bruce, I haven't overextended my welcome, I'd be happy to answer a question or two before I head out of here.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Where did you go to high school?

MR. SMITH: I went to high school in the suburbs of New York in Rockland County, a place called Spring Valley, and have now been in Texas longer than I have lived anyplace in my life. I'm very proud to have done that.

Well, I thank you very much. I hope you enjoy Texas, enjoy this conference. Thank you very much.

MS. LEE: You know, if you're smart, you'll grab your issue of Texas Monthly and fill out that little card in it and subscribe. Because if you really want to know the truth, Texas is the navel of the United States. And if you want to know about the future of our country, you need to know about Texas. So run out and subscribe to Texas Monthly.

And with that, I turn it over to Bruce, because I think we have music coming. We can do the Texas Two-Step or whatever. Oh, sorry, I'm turning it over to Arnie and his band.

MR. COHEN: It's my band, that's right, and I'll be the lead singer. Hi, I'm Arnie Cohen. I'm from the Lamplighter School in Dallas, and I'm going to keep it brief. As you know, all of our schools profit from the time, talent, and treasure of the parents who are part of our parent body who give back so much to independent schools.

Tonight I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to introduce to you Darren Kozelsky and Darren's band. Darren and Amy are wonderful parents of the Lamplighter School, who have already committed their treasure to us by sending their two wonderful sons to Lamplighter, and they have been wonderful in giving back to the community in so many ways.

But that's not why we really asked them here tonight. I have to say that when I asked Darren if he would come, he said, "Just tell me when, just tell me where." They have donated their time and their talent tonight to us.

I'm going to do an introduction that he's probably never had before, but Darren is actually -- some people wonder, where do country stars come from? And this one came to us actually, he was a graduate of Angelo State, which is a state college here in Texas, actually a dean's list student at Angelo State.

He is a poet and a song writer. He played with a number of bands and other artists, but now he is his own writer. I'm going to use words that he didn't know I knew. The style of music that he performs in is called red dirt music, which I think refers to the Texas clay. His first album was called one of the best debuted albums of any artist in this scene, and he is noted for his powerful voice and his remarkable character, and I can certainly attest to that.

He has appeared at Billy Bob's and other clubs in the Fort Worth and Dallas area. He's going to be performing in Fort Worth on February 26th, and at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo on March 13.

He's just completed an album in Nashville, and his first European tour. By the way, everyone, I did promise him he'd get a great review in all your school publications, so make sure you write about him.