BACKGROUND ON PHOTO:

In the early afternoon of 7 March 1965, I rented a Cessna 150 from the Longhorn Flying Club at the Austin Mueller Airport to fly around the local Coupland area and asked Kenny Gerschbeck, a good friend from high school days, if he wanted to ride along, which he did.

As I recall, when this photo was taken, we were flying in a westerly direction (note the Cessna 150’s high wing strut in the photo’s upper left hand corner) at around 1500 ft MSL when Kenny took the photo out of the right side window of the airplane. North is to the upper right corner of the photo. I do not recall what type of camera Kenny used but it was probably a Kodak Instamatic. The photo in this story is a scanned copy of that photo.

To help make sense of the photo and not clutter it up with notations, I have included (below) a hand drawn map of Coupland on that day. In 1965, the current “911” addresses had not yet been assigned; although no one used street names back then, those used below are from the original town plat and are the same as used today by 911.

COUPLAND, CIRCA 1965:

In that light, I’d like to call your attention to some of what you are looking at in the photo. Perhaps the first thing you may notice is that the west end of Hoxie St terminates at Austin St — no Stock Up, no Hoxie St access to TX 95, no Post Office building, etc. Also, Broad St “stops” at Elliot St — at that time, kids living less than (as I remember) 2 miles from the school were not entitled to bus service, so had to walk or be otherwise taken to school. You will notice a N-S path from the corner of Elliot and Broad to the school grounds that was maintained by the school board for the “town kids” use. Before TX 95 bypassed Coupland, Commerce and Herrin Streets were part of TX 95 and the footpath was used to keep the kids away from/off TX 95 and was kept in use after the bypass was completed. You will also notice that the current houses in that “Muery Addition” are non-existent. The house just north of the school was the school principal’s residence – at one time, the house was provided “in-kind” as part of the principal’s salary. I don’t recall when the school board sold the property.

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