12:54 pm CDT
Farewell, Old CNB



The old CNB building is gone.

I heard the news the other day from my friend Brian Roper in Fort Worth. The building was demolished, he said. It happened last month. (LINK)

The CNB building is gone. It is like hearing of the demise of someone you've known a long time. Takes a while to believe it.

CNB stood for Continental National Bank. But in later years the bank moved out and the building was renamed Landmark Tower. For me, though, it will always be the CNB building.

Construction on the building was begun in 1952 (the year I was born), then was stopped due to a downturn in the economy. In 1956-57, construction was resumed. I remember seeing it under construction. The girders were orange, I recall. From a distance they seemed like Tinkertoy sticks to my four-year-old eyes.



When the building was finished, it was crowned with a four-sided, 32-foot-tall rotating digital clock--the largest of its kind in the world. On two sides it gave the time in white floodlights, and on the other two sides were the letters "CNB" in green neon. (LINK)

At 30 stories and a total height (from base of building to top of clock) of 420 feet, the CNB was the tallest building in Fort Worth. The clock could be read from all over town.



This was the clock, in fact, that I was watching on New Year's Eve night in 1969.

I was at Trinity Park on the west side of downtown. Two friends and I had driven up from Cleburne, where I was living at the time, to visit the non-stop party and open-air drug market that was always in progress at the park. (The party finally came to an end a year later when the city imposed a curfew.)

So there we were, 200 or so people with long hair, beads, etc., in a vast cloud of marijuana smoke, watching the CNB clock rotate and change time.

When the clock read 12:00 everyone cheered. It was the end of the Sixties. Now we were living in the futuristic decade of the Seventies. The Age of Aquarius had dawned and everything would be better. There would be no more assassinations, no more wars, everyone would be equal, the entire world would share a Coke in perfect harmony, pot would be legalized in a few years, and by 1980 we would be booking vacations to Mars. Or so we thought.

But I digress.

On that night in 1969, the CNB building was still the tallest building in town, a Fort Worth icon. But, before the Seventies were over, it lost that status, as taller buildings began to be built. Then, in 1978, the clock stopped rotating; by 1991, it had stopped telling time.

The building still stood, however, and might have gone on standing for many more decades. But, right after the turn of the millennium, it was severely damaged by the terrible March 28, 2000, tornado that whipped through town. Over the next few years, various plans to restore it were explored, but in the end the owners decided to demolish it. (VIDEO)

Farewell, old CNB. We were born the same year, you and I. We grew up together, shared a few memories, and I was always happy to see you whenever I passed through town. And now you're gone. Poor old CNB ...



Is it just me, or does the above implosion resemble the collapse of the World Trade Center? Hmm ...


I mentioned Brian Roper earlier. He has written a new piece, "Where Am I?", that describes the massive changes that have occurred in Fort Worth. The old CNB is not the only building to be demolished recently; a lot of familiar old places are gone (the old 7th Street Theatre, for instance). And it's not just buildings that are changing. Brian also describes how the entire character of the city is changing, and not necessarily for the better. Read it HERE at File 23.

And while you're at File 23, check out Cranky the Clown's new column. He's got a few--well, uh, cranky things to say about the immigration issue. Read it HERE.


12:04 pm CDT
Homeland Security: "Who are those guys?"

A READER WRITES: I continue to check your site each day ... great stuff. I read with particular interest the story about the "Homeland Security Officers" who roughed up the school employee down in Florida. I'm not at all surprised by what I read, but I got to thinking about what a "Homeland Security Officer" is. I kept thinking the oft-repeated line from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: "Who are those guys?" I mean, are they card-carrying, badge and gun carrying Federal agents? I know all too well that we have been infected with agents from every so-called alphabet soup agency like the FBI, CIA, BATF, DEA, etc.--even those TSA cretins at the airport. But now do we have yet another set of thugs to contend with? While I'm aware, of course, of the existence of the Dept. of Homeland Security, I have never seen or heard of anyone (at least in my area) designated as a Homeland Security Officer, per se. Whoever they are, what right do they have to throw a man down and cuff him simply because he had the audacity to ask them to move their vehicle someplace else? I certainly hope all of America feels safer knowing that we have such brave Federal agents on the job, risking their necks and going up against desperados like this school teacher ... Hell, I sure do. By the way, they supposedly stated that they were parked at the school simply to read a map ... certainly not an adrenaline-pumping, dangerous Homeland Security priority mission that would require manhandling that poor teacher. But hey, isn't this just like what we see on ridiculous TV shows like " 24" all the time? Lastly, since they were pulled over reading a map, doesn't that imply that they were LOST? Why am I not surprised? ...


Good question. Who are those guys?

Here's the little I know ...

The Homeland Security officers who marched into the public library in Maryland a few months ago to see who was viewing pornography on the computers were security guards, with no law enforcement qualifications to speak of, who had been hired by the county under the auspices of Homeland Security to strut around in uniforms and gimme caps emblazoned with "Homeland Security" looking for suspicious activity in public places and checking for violations of various county rules and regulations. One of these regulations had to do with sexual harassment. Somehow these two Barney Fifes got it into their heads that people viewing "adult" material on library computers were engaging in sexual harassment.

I don't know the story behind those plainclothes Homeland Security officers who were blocking the school bus driveway in Florida. So far I've read nothing that describes who they were, what their job was, and so forth. All that is known about them is what Homeland Security said: they had pulled over to read a map. Strange place to pull over, though, especially with school letting out. Their behavior has the look, as Wayne Madsen suggested, of a pair of child molesters looking for victims.