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Lines in the sand: you won''t find Jack Jackson''s controversial illustrated history of the Alamo at the Alamo gift shop--but the Austin artist isn''t ready to surrender or retreat. (Texas).

Article Excerpt
THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS having mercifully expired, let me get something off my chest. Back in the sixties, when the great cultural wars were flaring up, I wrote for awhile under the nom de plume M. D. Shafter. It was away to confound the IRS, which had taken an inconvenient interest in about $1,000 in back taxes that I owed. This was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, which followed the JFK assassination and Vietnam and foretold the acceptance of alternative lifestyles. Texas Monthly, Southwest Airlines, and the Armadillo World Headquarters were just peeking over the horizon.

Many writers and artists whose names are now mainstream fixtures chose prudence over ego back then. It was away to survive while maintaining artistic integrity. I learned recently, for example, that the gifted illustrator and historian Jack Jackson adopted his trademark signature, Jaxon, as a method to avoid detection by his boss, Robert Calvert, who was the Texas comptroller of public accounts. Though his first love was history, Jackson had majored in accounting at Texas A&I (now Texas A&M-Kingsville) before moving to Austin and taking a grunt job in the Capitol basement. This may have been the only time in his life that he played it safe. "I wanted to be like Spinoza--grind lenses by day so I could do fun stuff at night," he told me recently. Fun stuff was drawing subversive cartoons for the Ranger, the University of Texas student magazine, and completing...

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