“Down and Out at Savannah State”
By: Paul Holm
Situated one mile from the coast, Savannah State’s Wright Stadium, salt-rusted and tattered, stands tall out of the sandy marsh it was built on. Like the city it was born from, it represents years of Southern culture and hospitality.
On the grills, pork ribs, barbecue shrimp, sausage links, and fresh-caught fish all cook together, prepared for any and all who came to share the amphibious feast. Plates buckled under the weight of food, passed from hand to hand as folks insisted the others were too skinny. Between bites came the stories, perhaps told for the hundredth time, of the “old” Savannah State Tigers, the ones who knew how to run the ball, the ones who weren’t scared of death or the devil so long as they crossed that end zone. The meat never stopped coming, and neither did the stories. Even as the game kicked off, the grills kept on smoking.
By dusk, the sunlight was fading and the moist air pressed in from all sides. It hadn’t rained all day, but everything was still wet. Water splashed off the grass as cleats tore through the turf, condensation rolling down helmets before dripping from facemasks.
The faithful fans, those still clinging to hope that the season was salvageable, sat few and far between, ducking lower and lower as the humidity pressed down on them.
Then the chants began. “Let’s go Tigers!” The call rose above the thud of the kickoff. The ball floated through the air, wobbling like a wounded duckling falling to its hunter.
It was a slow start for Savannah State. Young quarterback Fabian Walker struggled against the elusive Kentucky State secondary, throwing a brutal interception seemingly right into the hands of the defender.
The chants subsided as both teams battled for yardage. Helmets cracked without repercussion, profanity littered the air, jerseys tore, and cleats popped off. This was a different type of football than the average citizen was used to, one of desperation and swagger, as if each yard gained was worth double those at the Division I schools. It was organized chaos, chaos that bred huge, catastrophic, or monumental plays, backed by athletes not quite polished enough for the next level, but willing to risk it all in the moment.
Ten minutes into the first quarter, Kentucky State drew first blood with a 25-yard threaded pass from quarterback Torrence Bardells. For no reason except pride, the Thorobreds went for two and failed.
With that, the energy on the Savannah State sideline sagged into a hostile murmur and kept falling as the score swelled to 23–6 at halftime. For the entire first half, Kentucky State ate through Savannah’s defense, sparing no expense in piling up yards.
By nightfall, the few fans Savannah began with withered down to a meager cluster of orange and blue. Even the trumpets and drums of the halftime show struggled to pierce the thick cloud of disappointment and humidity hanging over the field.
Savannah State is no football powerhouse, but a house nonetheless, and its team, now trailing by 17, needed something to change, and fast.
That change came stitched into a bright blue jersey bearing the faded number five. Christin Burks, the six-foot junior quarterback, was subbed in during the third quarter and immediately demonstrated his veteran skill.
While not perfect by any means, his passes were sharp and accurate, and he carried himself like a man who genuinely cared about his teammates. He brought back a spark of hope.
Around him, his teammates carried that hope too. Gold teeth flashed beneath helmets, and excited yelps echoed along the sideline.
The new starter, Christin dragged Savannah State back into the game, but it wasn’t enough to stop Kentucky State’s electric offense. The final score was a decisive 37–20.
After the game, Burks stood somber yet focused. Sweat dripped from his forehead as he seemed to replay the night’s events in his head:
“We definitely can bounce back. We had slower starts than this and we picked it up mid-season,” he said. “Even though we lost this game, we still got a lot of energy and momentum to keep going.”
The team slumped back to the locker room, heads tilted in defeat, jerseys clinging heavy with sweat. The air hung wet and swollen, thick enough to chew. The band was quiet now, their trumpets drooping at their sides, their fluffy hats wet with condensation, the last note of music swallowed by the night. Savannah State was 2–3, and it felt like the whole season sagged with them, a long humid silence broken only by the shuffle of cleats on concrete.
“Forsyth’s Resident Artist Says, “It All Starts with a Story”
By: Paul Holm
If you’ve ever walked past the Forsyth fountain, you’ve likely seen Sheldon on his self-assigned bench, surrounded by his army of one-of-a-kind paintings.
Almost every day, the 61-year-old artist holds court beneath the dripping Spanish moss of the park’s live oaks. Sometimes he’s splattering paint onto discarded beer boxes, sometimes smoking a cigarette or sipping gin from an old water bottle. His paint-stained hands wave through the foot traffic, convincing tourists and locals alike that what they really need isn’t another copy of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil but a one-of-a-kind work from a true piece of Savannah’s soul.
His past isn’t entirely clear, even to himself. He’s a vagabond who’s crossed states, spent a night in a Biloxi jail, done a stint in Jackson Prison, and worked a month in the Louisiana sugar cane fields.
“I came here by way of Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and all the states in between. I’m kinda just a wanderer,” he said.
While Sheldon might seem like he was born from the very soil of Forsyth, or smuggled over on Oglethorpe’s ship, painting behind crates of indigo and sipping contraband gin, he’s relatively new to the city.
“About eight years ago I was feeding dogs for work in this small town in Mississippi. I wasn’t getting much money, so I thought, I’ll just keep going south. And here I am.”
He didn’t come to Savannah intending to sell art. “I came to join a mission, brought the paint with me. At first, I never thought about commerce. Then one day I put a painting out, someone bought it for 50 bucks, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can sell one tomorrow.’ Eight years later, my work’s in 20 countries, over 2,000 originals scattered around the globe.”
When he realized painting could be more than a hobby, he set his wobbly easel up in Forsyth Park and got to work. He painted through COVID, through the wet boiling summers and the rare Savannah snow.
When asked how he creates, Sheldon leaned back, took a long swig of gin, and said, “I just do it,” as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “Sometimes it starts with cardboard. You think, ‘What if I put paint on that?’ And then I do, and these beautiful works come out.”
His inspirations are obvious: Picasso, Monet, Matisse.
“Picasso said art is not truth, but it makes you realize truth,” Sheldon says. “That’s what I try to do. If it’s good enough to hang on the wall, fine. If not, fine too. But it’s real. Not a cat calendar from Kinko’s. Real paint. Real brushes.”
Sheldon finds pride in what he does: an artist fighting for something real, fighting for stories.
“It’s all just about the next one,” he says. “Can I get up tomorrow and feel validated? Can I get out into the world and say, you matter, even if you don’t make it, even if you went out and smoked crack last night? Can I still get up and feel okay in the world? I don’t know. I really try to.”
While he loves parting with his work, that’s not what he set out to do. More than the money, more than the art, it’s about the story.
“When I was thirteen, I bought my first painting. The price was $125. I said, ‘I’m 13. Can you do it for $113?’ He said, ‘Deal,’ and we went out and smoked a bowl. I could have bought the new Jordans, but I chose the painting. Not because it was perfect, but because of the story. The story it could tell, the story it could give.”
Like the shining white fountain at Forsyth, Sheldon has become a fixture of Savannah: a gin-soaked jewel in the Hostess City’s crown.
After a long drag on his unlit cigarette, he left me with parting words: “I am just a mirror of this city, sitting here drinking my gin. Art isn’t a cure-all, kid, but it sure helps.”
“Money Can’t Buy Resilience”
By: Paul Holm
Two hours from San Antonio and three from Austin, the land knows little of asphalt, and the stars still show themselves at night. Distance is measured in ballpark estimates, and dirt roads stretch endlessly somewhere between the Red River and the Rio Grande.
The Y.O. Ranch Headquarters sits nestled low in the soft folds of the Texas Hill Country, land larger than one can hold in their mind, practically buzzing with Texas history and prestige.
A warm April breeze carries the low hum of diesel engines and rolling four-by-fours. Trailers in tow, cowboys and cowgirls gather for the ranch’s 36th annual spring exotic game sale.
Under the sheet metal pavilion, his voice, like all auctioneers, falls from his mouth in rolling snaps as it stumbles over itself.
“31, 31, 31 bid, whoa now, watch it,” he says as the juvenile bison, pure snow white in color, runs its growing horns into the steel bars of the tall auction cage.
“Sold!”
One door behind the cage opens, and the bison runs out toward its future life.
Another door opens and an axis deer, one male, enters. Thin, pristine, its spotted hide causes buyers’ hands to twitch in anticipation as they dream of filling their trailers and ranches with its dramatic set of antlers.
Buyers shift in their chairs, wiping dust from their glossy foreheads, jotting quick notes in pocketbooks as they scan the quiet crowd slouched beneath the heat, searching for competition.
The deer steps forward, nudged gently by a cowboy, hesitating, perhaps confused by the hundreds of waiting eyes hidden under straw hat brims.
The auctioneer doesn’t pause. His voice comes fast, numbers folding into each other as they slowly climb higher and higher. It is something less like speech and more like a stumbling song.
A man leaning in the shade, his shirt soaked through, raises his hand, not daring to step into the sun.
Another nod.
The prices climb.
No one explains what is happening, and they don’t have to. This is a language learned over time, part of a subculture of the Texas Hill Country that has been thriving since the early 1960s.
Roland “Tooter” Tress, a Texas Tech alumnus and auctioneer for 33 years, raises his gavel. “Sold,” he calls. The axis disappears, replaced by one almost identical, and again Tooter slips right back into his expert song. “20, 20, do I hear 21?”
This auction is pure Texas resilience in action, a refusal to die. Just as Travis and Bowie refused to give up the Alamo, the Y.O. Ranch refuses to fade into the jagged limestone hills as so many historic ranches have. Unwilling to be subtracted, subdivided, or chopped apart into little particles until what made the land special only exists in crooked photographs hanging on the walls of those forced away from it.
Of course, gone are the days of cattle drives, when men like Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, as imagined by Larry McMurtry, could push a herd from South Texas all the way to Nebraska. Ranches like the Y.O. can no longer survive in the ever-changing corporatization of the beef industry. No longer can ranches survive on beef alone. Instead, ranches like the Y.O. Headquarters have adapted, changed, and found ways to survive in a world where the horseback cowboy mostly exists on screens and in the fading memories of older Texans whose spurs have long since lost their chime.
The story of the Y.O. Ranch begins, as most Texas stories do, with land and movement.
In the years after the Civil War, Charles Schreiner built his fortune driving more than 300,000 head of longhorn cattle north to Dodge City. With that, he bought land, hundreds of thousands of acres, and began assembling something that would outlast him.
He divided it among his children in 1914.
The Y.O. became one piece of that inheritance. Not the largest, but enough. Enough to carry the name.
For decades, it held to the familiar pattern: cattle, weather, and the long negotiation between land and survival. Through war, through boom, through collapse, it persisted.
Then, in 1943, something shifted.
Myrtle Schreiner signed a lease. Not for oil, but for hunting.
It was, at the time, an unusual decision. Land, until then, had been valued for what could be taken from it, cattle, minerals, something tangible. Hunting reframed it. Turned presence itself into value.
The lease was small. Three thousand five hundred dollars.
But it changed things.
It introduced the idea that survival might not come from holding to tradition, but from adjusting it.
Charles Schreiner IV, the great-grandson of the Y.O. ‘s founder, Captain Charles Schreiner, is an old man now, whose years can be found tucked just below the brim of his felt cowboy hat in eyes that are as Texan as Texan eyes can get.
During the exotic game sale, Charles IV relaxed in a leather chair perhaps older than the Texas State Capitol. He reminisced as if he himself had been there when his great-grandfather arrived in San Antonio from France in 1857. He talked about his grandmother Myrtle and her groundbreaking idea of establishing hunting leases, the very thing that helped the ranch survive. He spoke of his father, Charles III, and his struggle to help save the great Texas longhorn from extinction, and of his idea to bring exotics to Texas.
“After that seven-year drought (1950–1957), every ranch was hurting,” Charles IV says. “You had to find another way to survive.”
The way, here, was not to leave.
It was to change.
“We moved from whitetail and turkey into exotics—animals from all over the world,” he says. “And they thrived here.”
Charlie Schreiner III began bringing in animals that did not belong to this landscape—blackbuck antelope, sika deer, fallow deer, axis. Some came from zoos, others from private collections. The original intention was conservation, a way to preserve species disappearing elsewhere.
They adapted quickly.
Perhaps more quickly than expected.
Within a few years, there were too many. Enough to sell. Enough to send elsewhere. Enough to build something new from them.
Somewhere along the way, preservation became commerce. No one seemed particularly troubled by the distinction.
What began as conservation slowly blurred into something harder to define. Animals brought here to survive elsewhere became commodities, auctioned beneath tin roofs to buyers calculating breeding value and trophy potential. No one at the Y.O. seemed interested in debating whether that transformation was right or wrong. Out here, survival has always mattered more than purity.
People started calling it “Africa in Texas.”
The name stuck. That resilience, that uniquely Texan ability to adapt, saved the Y.O. Ranch from extinction, carrying it all the way to 2026 where it still sells exotic animals to hunt and breed, an economy that puts thousands to work.
People like Angle, an old cowboy whose back hunches forward from years of wrangling what doesn’t want to be wrangled. Every knuckle running up and down each finger is swollen to the size of a large marble, and he proudly displays them, saying, “These here are working hands,” to anyone who asks.
He is a Texan whose life is built on exotic game farms, collecting animals by hanging out the side of helicopters and shooting prancing game with large net guns.
“I had a woman tell me one time, there ain’t no zebras in Texas, and I said, ‘Ma’am, I got four in my truck right now.’” Angle said as he stuffed water bottles into his sagging, dirt-stained Levi’s, getting ready to load the exotics sold to the many ranchers who came in for the day.
“It’s just what I do. I’ve been doing it all my life. Y.O. is a great place for it,” he said.
The cage kept rattling as animal after animal walked in, strutted, was sold, and then walked out. Exotic game ranching in Texas isn’t new. It’s an industry built on adaptation, animals that can handle drought better than cattle, species that bring higher returns, a landscape quietly reshaped over time.
The pace picks up as the night wears on and the heat sags lower in the auction barn, unaware of the gentle protest from buyers fanning themselves with brochures and pressing cold drinks against their heads. In the corner, a group of cowboys silently discuss the hundreds of thousands spent and what could possibly be made in the future.
Out past the pens, past the large thousand pond turtles and towering camels, the land stretches on, green and shaggy from recent rains. It is the kind of place that demands action for survival. Those who sit and wait will be lost to time. It is the kind of land that is uniquely Texan, not because of the boulders and mesquite trees, but because of what it demands from those trying to keep it: grit and resilience. Texas builds toughness; it does not give it away.
The animals here have been brought in because they can adapt.
Perhaps that is the uncomfortable logic beneath it all: if something survives, people stop asking whether it belongs there in the first place.
They survive where others might not. They endure heat, scarcity, and long stretches without much change.
The same language gets used for the people.
No one points out the similarity.
But it lingers in the missing eyes, broken fingers and feet, sun-crisped necks, and arthritic elbows. It lingers in the stories passed down from rancher to rancher, in the long summer days with no rain, in rope-burned palms and boots with their soles hanging loose, in chipped cowboy hat brims and the eyes of Texans who rely on the land every day.
By late afternoon, as the sun slips slowly behind the hills, the crowd thins. The last few animals move through the pen, the excitement dies, and the money drops as minds drift toward long car rides home and the coming work. The show is over.
There is a way people talk about the land out here, as if it is the main protagonist in the story of the Y.O., and in a lot of ways it is, taking and giving as it sees fit, rewarding only what is truly Texan: resilience. The ability to fight on when droughts come, when the price of beef drops, and when the Texas longhorn nearly disappears from the face of the earth. The Y.O. Ranch has pushed through it all, and for that reason it remains truly resilient, truly Texan.
The gate closes, its hinges squeaking in protest. The numbers stop, and Tooter places his gavel back into its case, adjusts his felt hat, and leaves, certain the ranch will still be here when he returns
Paul Holm 