Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 12/14/17> I’ve talked turkey before… today it’s Gobblers

Awhile back at
Thanksgiving we talked turkey, today we are talking Gobbler, as in Cuero Texas, and the home of the Fighting Gobblers. Smack dab right in the heart of the Eagle Ford shale play, which is one of the largest oil and gas fields in Texas, is the small town of Cuero.

I have been traveling through Cuero for over ten years, and when I say through I mean through it, seldom do I ever stop in Cuero. The main road from Victoria to San Antonio is US Highway 87, it goes right through Cuero. There have only been two places I would stop at, the McDonalds hamburger joint and Smolik’s BBQ, and the first of the two was mainly to use the restroom. That all changed on Wednesday as I decided that Smolik’s would be this month’s “Will Eat BBQ for U” BBQ place that I would review. Look for that review on 12/15/17 in my daily dose.

Those of you who were with me for Volume 1 of the bbq review will remember that I took on a little tour of the town, to give you a feel of the area; well I did that as well for Cuero. I didn’t expect to find such a trove of treasurers as I did on Wednesday. Cuero can easily take three daily doses and wouldn’t even scratch the surface of this town, the fact is I ran out of time, so in the future I will be back in Cuero looking at things I learned about on this trip through town but didn’t have time for investigating.

A couple blocks south of Hwy 87 sets the county courthouse, it is visible from Hwy 87 as it stands about five stories tall when you consider the clock tower in the height. As I was navigating my way down the side street to get to the court house I came across another large building that had the distinct look of an old post office. The sign at the corner however didn’t say U.S. Post Office; it read Cuero Heritage Museum, what better place to learn about Cuero than a heritage museum? So here we go, heritage museum it is.

As I walked up the steps to the front entrance there were two signs on the door, one had the days and hours the museum was open and I was there within the parameters of their open for business schedule. The second sign said, “Out to Lunch”, I’ve learned over the course of my life that signs can be wrong, so I tried the door and it opened. I walked inside and a nice woman that I would guess to be a few years younger than me heard the door open and came out from a room off the main entrance area.

She politely told me that the staff was having their Christmas luncheon and that they would be closed for a couple hours. I think she could read the disappointment on my face, I didn’t have a couple hours to hang around in Cuero, and I really wanted to check the place out. She then asked me if there was anything she could help me with, one thing I know how to do is sell, so this lady didn’t stand a chance at turning me away.

I explained to her I was passing through town and that I write a daily blog on the internet. I told her that my main reason for stopping in Cuero was Smolik’s BBQ but I always try to highlight the town as well, unique features and points of interest etc. “Your museum probably has everything I need to tell the story of Cuero, TX. but I don’t have two hours to wait, I guess I’ll be on my way Mam.”, I told her. Throwing in the “Mam” is always a good idea when talking with Texas women; they eat it up when you are handsome and polite.

She promptly offered me a guided tour; the only requirement was to sign the guest book. “No, no, I don’t want to interrupt your luncheon” I told her. Josie insisted that I take her tour and guided me to the guest book to sign. I knew she wouldn’t let me leave without seeing the place, and she also said Smolik’s is the best BBQ within a hundred miles of there, but I already knew that.

The museum has quite a collection of history on display inside of it. The town came to life back in the 1860’s and is set in an area of rolling hills and quite a few creeks that feed into the Guadalupe river that runs past the town over on the western edge of town. Wild turkeys love that type of terrain and were very prevalent back in the early 1900’s, so much that the ranchers started catching the turkeys and breeding them to use as a food source.

Turkeys became big business for the ranchers, and in 1912 Cuero decided to celebrate the birds with what the town called a “turkey trot” where they paraded the turkeys through the main street in town. That took place on Nov. 26, 1912, there were 8,115 gobblers that made their way down main street that day.

The “turkey trot “ tradition was started and continues to this day, it doesn’t feature the turkeys any longer , but it serves as the kick off to the holiday season now. In order to have some resemblance of a trot they hold a 5 kilometer run and a shorter fun run for kids.

Josie said that back in the early years a business man from back east suggested that the town should “adopt” the country of Turkey as part of their festivities so the town decided to play along and started dressing up a man and woman each year as the “sultan” and “sultana” in Turkish garb. Several of the costumes are on display in the museum from the 20’s and 30’s.

Another interesting feature of the museum is the “war room”, it turns out that Cuero was the home of the Brayton Flying Services, an Air Corps Training Detachment for World War II. There are several uniforms and pictures from back in the day, and stories of local heroes from the Cuero area who fought in the war.

Another feature of the museum is the Coca Cola room, Cuero had a local bottling plant that made the drink right there in town. City hall is located in the old offices of the bottling company, the Coca Cola script logo is embedded in the wall of the building above the current city hall sign. The Coke room has several old vending machines and the history of how “soda water “and soft drinks came of age. There is plenty of original advertising that dates way back, the family that owned the bottling plant was kind enough to donate all the items on display.

Speaking of donations, one family that had an obsession with fresh squeezed orange juice from their orange trees donated 2,300 juice reamers that they had collected over the years. I only looked at one cabinet of them down on the first floor of the museum; Josie said the entire second floor of the museum is all the rest of the juicers. This may in fact be the largest collection of juicers in one location in the world; research is ongoing now to determine if it is.

Cuero High School is home of the Fighting Gobblers, and football, high school football in particular, is part of what makes a small Texas town come together. The first Gobbler team took the field in 1911, and the history of high school football is well documented inside this little museum. What I did learn was that there were in fact two high schools back in the middle of the last century, from 1942 to 1964. The second high school was Daule High School, home of the “Black Gobblers”, that’s right; the all Negro high school was designated as “black”. The nick name was changed from Black Gobblers to Rams in the late 1950’s and with desegregation in the mid 1960’s a large high school was built and the two former schools closed up and merged into one. Josie said it was a good thing, the desegregation, because the white high school would always get their butts kicked by the black high school in football, basketball, and track. The only sport the whites could ever win against the blacks was baseball.

Cuero is also the hometown of an Olympic Gold Medalist from the 1964 summer Olympics. A young man who won the pole vault competition that year was from there, I believe his name was Hanson, I didn’t write it down and I am too lazy to research it for his first name, but he has one display case in the museum documenting his athletic prowess as well.

There were other athletes that hailed from Cuero who played at the collegiate and professional levels but I didn’t want to take too much of Josie’s time up by stopping to write the names down, she was nice enough to take time away from her luncheon and that was greatly appreciated by me. Before I left she did tell me about two other museums in town, the Chisholm Trail Cowboy Museum and the pharmacy museum. Both sounded really interesting but those will be for another time when I am passing through. I had burned up the allotted free time and I had to head for Smolik’s and she had lunch waiting as well.
Until next time,
@sultnpapper
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