Sigman Byrd: The last mule on Preston Avenue - Houston Chronicle

Note: This Sigman Byrd column was first published in the Houston Chronicle on March 21, 1957.

Your city-dwelling rural correspondent is still without transportation to the country, but I recall that Louis Mazoch told me the last time I was in Weimar that he had bought a mule a year ago, complete with harness, for $27. People on the highway still stop their cars to watch the black mule pulling a cotton roller, for Louis says his is the last hay-burning tractor in the vicinity.

Now, I have dwelt in this heavenly city almost long enough to qualify as a native Houstonian, although actually I was born in Brown County. And I can recollect when the equine industry was a thriving business here.

I particularly remember Bowser’s Horse and Mule Barn, at 415 Preston, and the herds of animals that used to fill corrals along the left bank of Buffalo Bayou just below the Preston Ave. bridge. There’s a big parking lot there now, I observed the other day on a visit to the Moers Seed Store.

Before Harvey Bowser went out of the mule business about 10 years ago, Preston was a colorful avenue, peopled with marvelous characters, few of whom are still around.

There was Jack Arnold, the aged boxing promoter who used to spar energetically with his boys at the age of 70. Jack had an ear chewed off by an antagonist in a water-front brawl. He used to invite me to swing on him, and then block me. I could never land a punch on the old man.

And Jefferson Banks, the Preston Ave. postman, who couldn’t be fingerprinted because he had no fingerprints. And Don Jesusito, who claimed he was so old that his grandfather was an officer in the Cortez Expedition. Question that, and he would show you a gold Spanish coin that his ancestor was supposed to have brought to the new world -- dated MCDXCII. That is 1492!

There was the Man with the Iron Head, and his wife the Rubber Girl, ex-showfolks who ran a tattoo pitch. In the carneys Iron Head used to have concrete blocks broken on his head with a sledge hammer, but one day a mule-drawn produce wagon hit him and knocked his head against a Preston Ave. curb. The curb didn’t break, but Iron Head’s head and the Rubber Girl’s heart did.

The day Harvey Bowser sold his last mule, he told me the tractor had been his ruination.

“A tractor,” he said, “is not only costly, but it’s balkier than the worst mule I ever sold. A good mule, if he’s not sick, is always ready to work. And if a farmer’s got sense enough to raise his own feed, his mules won’t cost him a cent for upkeep.”

The veteran mule trader sighed. “And furthermore,” he said, “a tractor just naturally don’t produce any fertilizer.”

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