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Road trip: Tiny Texas town exerts a big pull on old-timers, newcomers alike

Text by Bill Glauber / Photos by Melanie Stetson Freeman

Posted: 06.10.2009 / 8:54 AM PDT

Vega, Texas – Every small town needs someone like Imogene Galbraith.

Civic booster and amateur historian, Ms. Galbraith knows just about everyone and has done just about everything in this town of 936 residents on the Texas Panhandle.

She has the run of the place, with keys to the library, the Methodist Church, the funeral home, and a restored gas station that sits on Main Street, part of old Route 66, the highway of America’s western dreams. (Above, she shows off a model of the gas station she was instrumental in restoring.)

She also delivers flowers for a local shop, popping in and out of homes, dropping off big bouquets for special occasions like Mother’s Day.

“I got here as soon as I could in 1934,” Galbraith says. “I’m fixing to have my 75th birthday Sunday. My mother came here when she was a baby in 1907. My daddy’s parents came and built a home in 1903.’’

It’s Tuesday. Galbraith sits on a park bench, visiting with two tourists who have wandered into Vega off Interstate 40. Vega is the county seat of Oldham County, designated in Patchwork Nation as a “Boom Town.

The land is flat, and wind rides herd on the small town.

It’s quiet here, the gas stations and a hardware store drawing traffic off the interstate, a bank and the Oldham County Courthouse anchoring the old downtown.

Jack of all trades

“I farmed,” Galbraith says as she ticks off all the work she has done through her life. “We hauled bales of hay. Drove the truck, drove the tractor. Then I worked in the school cafeteria eight years, I had the newspaper 13 years. I drove the city trash truck on occasion. I work at the flower shop.’’

Galbraith says she didn’t know how to type when she took over the Vega Enterprise back in the 1980s. She kept it running with a mix of school news and obituaries.

The mixture hasn’t changed much now that the paper is run by Quincy Taylor, who also serves as a county commissioner.

“I pay for it for months if I write something controversial,” Ms. Taylor says, as she sits in the newspaper office, a laptop computer propped on a desk, stacks of old newspapers scattered on the floor.

For love of a cowboy

On Tuesday afternoon, Taylor is visiting with Rory Schepisi, owner of the Boot Hill Saloon and Grill.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Ms. Schepisi came to town five years ago as a contestant in a reality TV show called “Popularity Contest.” (You really can’t make this stuff up.) The show brought 10 big-city personalities to a small town. The contestant judged most popular won the top prize.

Schepisi didn’t win. But she fell in love with a local cowboy named Klay Waters and stayed.

“I thought cowboys were only in the movies,” Schepisi says.

Schepisi, who was also a contestant on “The Next Food Network Star” on the Food Network channel, says she misses the East and wonders if she’ll ever fit in here. She’s brassy, and the long-time residents are taciturn. She’s still a big-city personality in a very small town.

Taylor says she understands how Schepisi might feel like an outsider and feel a little constricted in a small town.

“I left thinking I’d never come back,” Taylor says, recalling how she left Vega for college.

“Five years in Dallas was enough for me,” Taylor says. “It’s just home here.”

Previous stops on the road trip:

Oklahoma City memorial puts hard times in a different perspective
Here a tractor, there a tractor, everywhere are old tractors
A garden grows, alongside civic spirit, in an Ohio town
Sunny side up in America’s ‘coolest small town’
In small-town New York, tough people for tough times
Gloomy economy rains on the parade in Plymouth, Mass.