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Man about town: now that my friend Carlton Carl owns Martindale, once the cotton and cottonseed capital of Central Texas, people want him to do something with it. Gee, what did he expect?

Article Excerpt
My first thought on hearing that my friend Carlton Carl had bought the sleepy Central Texas hamlet of Martindale was that the dog stole one of our best ideas. Turns out he did--and he's welcome to it. Back in the seventies, we few founding fathers of Mad Dog Inc. tried several times to buy just such a town. We planned to rechristen it the Republic of Mad Dog, secede from Texas, write a constitution, and live happily ever after, details to be worked out on the fly. Predictably, each attempt was thwarted, possibly because nobody wanted to do business with an organization whose stated purpose was doing "indefinable services to mankind." It wasn't until I actually visited Martindale with Carlton on a blistering hot day last August, however, that I realized how close we'd come to making a dreadful mistake. Or how our long-dormant ambition had inspired his folly.

Driving east from San Marcos to Martindale on Texas Highway 80, Carlton told me that he began fantasizing about buying and re storing a failing town when he learned of Mad Dog's unfortunate experience with Sisterdale. That was years ago, when he was still a political operative in Austin, working for the likes of Preston Smith, Price Daniel Jr., Bob Bullock, and Ann Richards (a charter member of Mad Dog). On weekends, Carlton and his friends used to pile in someone's Volvo and meander around Central Texas, stopping at honky-tonks and barbecue joints, drinking beer and talking history with the locals. "I was troubled when they began building bypasses around towns like La Grange and Smithville," he said as we turned off the main highway and onto a narrow...

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