Texas is the most surrealistic state in the Nation

Movement Folk Tales

Jim Franklin, the brilliant, legendary and iconic artist of the Vulcan Gas Company, Armadillo World Headquarters, and the RAG underground newspaper claimed that “Texas is the most surrealistic state in the Union” in an interview with PHIT back in 2014.  

And he should know.  Franklin lived and worked in the years of yesterday when the beatniks and hippies and activists battled the forces of insanity and unreason.  Erm..that time was the 60s and 70s for those who don’t remember or for those who might confuse it with the current era.

 Franklin, in case you didn’t know, was on the sane side of that battle.

Here at PHIT we collect stories and oral histories that might have been neglected in the history book.  We collected an oral history of Jim Franklin in 2014.  His is a story that is not told often enough.

In one of our earlier posts we talked about the Battle of Waller Creek.   That post was accompanied with a drawing of Frank Erwin that Jim Franklin published in the RAG in 1969.

Jim Franklin drew that picture, because, “if you are an artist and if you see a situation that is offensive, you feel compelled to draw it.  You can’t just ignore things and be satisfied with that..”   

Here is the way Franklin describes the situation that was offensive. 

“They were going to cut down some of these beautiful oak trees that were on the banks of Waller Creek.  The hipsters banded together to block it.  They loved those trees.  Frank Erwin, board of regents, big cheese in town, goes down personally and orders the bulldozers to plow on through.”

Jim Franklin considered it “The Tiananmen Square of Austin politics.”

He felt compelled to draw something…  “I did a drawing of Erwin, who considered himself a Mt. Rushmore figure.  I drew a portrait bust, large, made of plaster.  You can see that it is a fake monument.  A tree goes  under it, through the head  and cracks the head and one branch through the eye.”

Erwin didn’t much care for it. A few months later in 1969, he tried to kick all the non-students out of the Chuckwagon, the campus coffee house.  He called them “outside agitators.”  And that little incident precipitated the Chuckwagon Riot, another Movement Folk Tale which will be the subject of a later substack.

Franklin insists that he is a surrealist artist.  His art was different from the San Francisco artists, like Gilbert Shelton, who used a more psychedelic approach.

He explained that he liked to draw things as real, or rather, a little more than real, sort of surreal.

Which is what led to the armadillo being the state mascot of Texas.

Franklin’s drawings of the armadillo became a meme, although they didn’t use that word in those days.

Franklin had been fascinated by the armadillo.  He had run into an armadillo in the wild and couldn’t believe that the creature could manage to survive. Nearly blind, clueless, just trying to get by, doing their work, they somehow always managed to get run down by pickup trucks driven by rednecks. It was the perfect metaphor for the hipsters of Austin.

When he started drawing his realistic, well, surrealistic, armadillo, the first one was puffing away on a joint.  Austin hippies immediately took to it.  “They got it.”

The meme became so popular that the armadillo was proposed to the Texas legislature as the state animal.  Some of the elected officials didn’t think it was a good idea—after all, they dug up people’s yards—so someone suggested the armadillo could be the Texas state mascot.  And that was agreeable.

Totally surreal!

by Richard Croxdale