Texas regularly enjoys a ranking (which shifts as states jock- ey annually for position) among tourism’s Big Three U.S. destinations, alongside vacation paradises California and Florida. The Lone Star State’s vaunted Western mythos, wide open spaces, Sunbelt climate and miles of welcom- ing waterfront undoubtedly play a role. So do the cultural vibes of cities like Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso and others. But it wasn’t always so.
In the late 1950s, when Americans were being lured to leisure destinations in droves, Gov. Price Daniel was saddled with a constitutional holdover from the 19th century, the so-called “carpetbagger clause” of 1876 that prohibited expenditures of state dollars to attract “immigrants.” That, perversely, was construed to include travelers and their pocketbooks.
The clause was overturned, at last, in 1959, with the backing of Gov. Daniel and vigorous lobbying by the American Advertising Federation 10th District, paving the way for Texas to capitalize on its tourism assets. But without an appropriation of funds to accompany the law, the long-deferred goal would have to wait another few years — for another governor.
FLORESVILLE FARM TO GOVERNOR’S MANSION
John Bowden Connally Jr. was born into a tenant- farming family south of San Antonio in 1917. His 19th-century forebears had fled the Irish potato famine; he’d become one of the few graduates of his small-town high school to go to college.
Young John learned a few things about Texas highways and back roads during the years of his father’s hardscrabble enterprise in the 1920s and ’30s: the long drive from Corpus Christi to San Antonio in a makeshift seven-passenger bus; the early-morning milk run before the advent of farm-to-market roads; working cattle on horseback in the brush country. And he gained a deep appreciation for the land, as he related in a memoir, In History’s Shadow, published the year of his death in 1993.
He also got a taste of politics when his father — with the Connally brood as campaign team — ran for county clerk in 1936 and won. By then John Jr. was a junior at the University of Texas, having enrolled at age 16. Tall and lean, with an aim to finish the acceler- ated program and go straight into law school, Connally fell in with a lucky bunch who har- bored aspirations, like his, to law, leadership and government. He also joined two thespian societies, the Wesley Players and the Curtain Club. The Curtain Club introduced Connally to two other influential classmates: Walter Cronkite, who served on the publicity com- mittee, and the popular and beautiful Idanell “Nellie” Brill, who was cast as understudy for an acting role. Cronkite, nearly three decades later as anchor for the CBS Evening News, would inform the world of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, while Nellie, who married Connally in 1940, would help save her husband’s life on that terrible day, when he was gravely injured by one of the perpetrator’s bullets.
CONNECTIONS IN THE CAPITAL
Connally had forged other influential relation- ships during his stints as an undergraduate, in law school at UT, in the Navy and in a law practice in Fort Worth after World War II. In every case his Texas ties paved the way for great responsibility and, eventually, visibility in the political sphere. Lyndon Johnson, in his role with the National Youth Administration in the mid-1930s, had seen to it that a deserving university student from his district benefited from a campus job at UT; when Johnson later needed an aide to help with his state Senate campaign, he tapped Connally. Johnson in due time became vice president of the United States under JFK and, in 1961, Connally was appointed Secretary of the Navy in the Kennedy administration.
Stepping down from that post after less than a year to challenge incumbent Price Daniel for the governorship of Texas, Connally succeeded in his first run for public office, in 1962. He credited his network of college friends for launching him on that path and driving votes for him.
TAPPING THE TRAVEL MARKET
Returning to Texas, Connally inherited a state behind the curve in the burgeoning tourism industry. Gov. Daniel had stumped for the Texas Tourism Foundation, a privately funded statewide initiative, in 1962, and had supported creation the Trail of Six Flags, a regional initiative of several South Texas counties that same year. The Texas Highway Department continued fulfilling its charge, since 1936, to produce travel literature and staff visitor information centers at several state entry points.
But those efforts weren’t enough in an era of increasingly sophisticated marketing tools and advertising campaigns. California, Florida and Virginia outpaced Texas in visitor spending, one important measure of tourism’s benefits to a state’s economy. “Industry follows brainpower,” Connally had said to an audience of business leaders while on the campaign trail. As governor, he intended to bring modern research and top minds to every industry, including tourism.
In spring 1963, during Connally’s first session in Austin, the legislature passed its first budget allocation for tourism promotion and took the key step of establishing an office to administer it. The new Texas Tourism Development Agency (TTDA) hired Frank Hildebrand, a young reporter for the Baytown Sun, as its first director, and one of Hildebrand’s first tasks was to select an advertising agency. Top shops were hungry for Texas’ business; by November of that year a full-scale review of six contenders was announced for the following January.
At the same time Connally took steps to upgrade the state park system, commissioning an independent study to provide research and recommendations. Consultant Elo J. Urbanovsky, head of the new Department of Parks Administration at Texas Technological College, got right to work on the project.
Of course, a new governor with aspirations to higher office had a great deal more on his mind than just the promotion of leisure travel in his state.
“I had definite ideas about where Texas should be headed and how to get there,” Connally wrote years later. Higher education ranked high on his list, as did plans for water management and the Railroad Commission — and the mutual benefit of a goodwill visit by the president of the United States.
As 1964 dawned, the nation was still in shock over the events of the previous Nov. 22, when Kennedy had been killed and Connally shot in a Dallas motorcade. Connally was still recovering from his physical and psychological wounds when the review of advertising agencies took place, but Hildebrand kept him thoroughly apprised of progress. McCann-Erickson’s Houston office was selected, and within a few weeks had scheduled an initial strategy session in Austin.
Texas had moved into a new era of tourism a year after Connally’s inauguration.
A TEXAS STATE PARKWAY?
Following the implementation of the Parks Study, when the 1965 legislature merged two separate agencies to establish the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, Connally commissioned another research project from Urbanovsky.
Perhaps inspired by the appeal of scenic and historic byways such as the New Deal-era Natchez Trace and Blue Ridge Parkway — or perhaps casting an eye toward the highway tax revenues a series of “heritage trails” backed by the petroleum industry were generating — Connally charged Urbanovsky’s team with examining the feasibility of creating a Texas State Parkway.
Urbanovsky and his graduate students would determine how an automobile route might bring travelers out into the remote historic locales of Texas to stay longer and spend more.
The governor, meanwhile, talked up tour- ism at events such as the Outdoor Writers Association of America meeting in McAllen in summer 1964, and called a first-ever statewide Tourist Development Conference in October of that year.
Under the Texas Tourist Development Agency, Texas soon became the first state to base its national advertising schedules on motivational research findings. A Dallas opinion polling firm was contracted to conduct visitor interviews, and a national Gallup Poll provided wider quantitative data.
When the Urbanovsky study was presented at the governor’s Tourism Development Conference in1967—by now an annual event — its recommendations focused not on a single parkway or byway but a series of driving trails designed to lure travelers out from city hubs into a vaster, and more varied, Texas experience.
“Governor Connally Wednesday will reveal a unique new plan for the development of a series of ‘Travel Trails of Texas,’” read a press memo on April 28, 1967, “which will route travelers ‘off the beaten path’ to scenic and historic attractions.” Unique it was: no other group had ever sought to launch ten such trails in a single state.
ONE MORE DAY IN TEXAS
When the governor unveiled the plan May 3 to the crowd at Austin’s Municipal Auditorium, he played up the personal value of recreation as well as the financial value of travelers coming to the state. It was a milestone year in Texas travel, generating a billion dollars in tourist spending.
Connally must have sensed he had his audience with him, as he asked them to consider one last point: that if those visitors had been persuaded to stay only one more day, it would have brought an additional $188 million to the state’s economy. This time, HemisFair ’68 was how Texas was going to get them there — and the Trails were how the state was going to keep them there. The Trails would debut in conjunction with the open- ing of HemisFair, the first international exposition ever slated for the southwestern United States, the following April.
With less than a year to map the driving routes, post road signs, design tourism literature and craft a promotional campaign, Connally’s appoint- ed five-member Texas Travel Trails Committee jumped on its marching orders. Truett Latimer of the Texas Historical Commission, state librar- ian Dorman H. Winfrey, Highway Department director Tom Taylor, Mark Gosdin of Texas Parks and Wildlife and Frank Hildebrand of the TTDA met and corresponded frequently. Connally kept a close hand in the process, right down to the color of the Texas Highway Department signage, as reported by the Longview News-Journal:
“Governor Connally has had a strong hand in developing the new tourist program, even to designating the color of the signs marking the trails. The color choice had been narrowed to blue or green, cool colors that psychologists said would take tourists’ minds off the hot summer weather. When asked what color he would suggest, the governor, seated at his desk, pointed to a picture of his wife and said, ‘I would like to see it the color of Nellie’s dress.’ And so the signs are Nellie’s Blue.”
Julian Read, whose firm advised Connally on numerous publicity matters in the 1960s, recalls the flurry of excitement. “I was a cheerleader for [the Trails concept],” Read says, “because I loved the travel industry — I was all for it.”
The resulting Texas Travel Trails ranged in individual length from 523 to 859 miles, totaling nearly 7,000 miles of state highways and farm- to-market roads — no route was to backtrack, and Interstates were avoided by design. The project came together on schedule, despite dust-ups with some communities that had been omitted from the routes and one — Connally’s hometown of Floresville — in which Judge Richard Voges of Wilson County initially refused to foot the $315 bill for signage.
Governor and Mrs.Connally officially launched the Trails by leading an automobile caravan March 27 and 28 along the entire Texas Mountain Trail route from Alpine west to El Paso and returning to Fort Davis, where the Davis Mountains State Park was dedicated. Throughout the spring and summer, other trails were similarly inaugurated. Half a million map brochures were distributed, bringing visitors to sites from Marshall to Marfa, Texarkana to Terlingua to Tascosa, and more.
A GOVERNOR’S LEGACY
It had been an exciting ride in 1968. By the time Connally’s third term as governor came to an end that year, the Texas Travel Trails were well established as a popular draw for travelers, and the TTDA (incorporated today into the Office of the Governor for Economic Development and Tourism) had formed a sound basis for market- ing Texas as a prime destination for travelers everywhere.
Connally, through his personal life and long career, would undergo challenges, twists and turns, but would always consider these two tourism programs among his signature achievements — and so did Nellie, who outlived her husband long enough to see the Texas Travel Trails reinvented as the Texas Heritage Trail Regions under the Texas Historical Commission in 1998.
Perhaps the most telling compliment to the longevity and effectiveness of any initiative at the half-century mark might be a nod to its creator. “John Connally would be pleased with what you’re doing,” says Julian Read of the trails initiative he’s watched since its inception. “That was one of his favorite programs.”
