texas – Page 61 – Texas History Notebook

Presley Bazelle Land

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As we approach Memorial Day, we honor Presley Land of Alvord, Texas. United States Army Sergeant Presley Bazelle Land was killed on the island of Okinawa on June 17, 1945. He was the oldest son of Jessie Clarence and Sarah Isabelle Magers Land and was born in Alvord, Wise County, Texas on October 22, 1916. Jessie was a farmer and Isabelle was a housewife. Presley graduated from Alvord High School around 1933 and married the former Vera Katherine Richards on September 4, 1937. Presley had attended college for one year and was working as a clerk in Fort Worth for Convair, an aircraft manufacturer, at the time he enlisted in the service on May 24, 1943.

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Jim Beck

Not much can be found in newspaper archives about recording engineer Jim Beck, perhaps due to his shortened career and untimely death, but his name is well known in the music and recording industry.

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John J. Pershing

General John Joseph Pershing served in Texas immediately prior to the United States’ entry into World War I. His name might be familiar to some in Texas due to the raids into Mexico that were intended to catch the bandit Pancho Villa.

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Apollo Program: Missions 7, 8, 9 and 10

On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in Houston. His speech included these famous words, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” (1) This was a challenge that some felt could be achieved but NASA had been working to develop the building blocks to get there.

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Marcelino Serna

The headline in the El Paso Herald-Post on Veterans Day, November 11, 1970 read “Hero of World War I Rides in Parade” and went on to tell the amazing story of Marcelino Serna. Private Serna was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Purple Heart and Victory Medal (United States decorations) along with the French Medaille Militaire and two Croix de Guerre and the Italian Merito de Guerra. The article added that Private Serna spent his first Armistice Day in a hospital recovering from his wounds that he received about a week earlier on November 7, 1918 while participating in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.