Yes, former Speaker of the House. There is a museum and roads named after him in NE Texas but anyone who remembers knows Sam Rayburn.
Frustrated that it took so much time to get back to his House duties in our nation’s capital, he devised and had taxpayers fund a highway to Dallas, TX. It’s still there.
He was a visionary. Now Dallas is creeping, seeping, arrogantly claiming NE Texas as its own by taking over cow country and flooding bottom lands in order to build reservoirs to provide itself water. Our family is being kicked off of 500 acres of land that will be a reservoir, and not a pretty one where folks vacation, in a few years just so a Dallas “metroplex” family can get a glass of water.
Sam Rayburn opened the roads for his home town and its residents, and doomed them at the same time. The train stopped its route there because of the highway. Trucks stopped because of the Interstate highways. His home town has become more of a ghost town. But I’ll bet your bottom dollar he got the funds to build the VA Hospital there. Looks like the era. I know because my husband’s mother works there as a nurse.
Of course my husband’s family is there and we join a large group every year for Thanksgiving. Every once in a while, I drive by the Sam Rayburn Museum en route to DFW and think I’d like to visit one day.
My point of this tale is to say “pave your own path.” If it is golden bricks to the Emerald City, or creating a light bulb, do it. That’s what Sam Rayburn would have done. Cheers! Dee
Cooking with Dee 