Remembering the Alamo

This is Night Shift Trevor. It was 7:50 in the morning and he had ten minutes left before he could call it a day.

I’d wandered down to the Alamo before breakfast to get a few snaps before the crowds arrived.

Trev asked where I was from and when I said I was visiting from London he told me that Phil Collins had the biggest collection of Alamo memorabilia in the world.

Not only that, Phil had donated most of it to the museum out back.

Trev said Phil used to watch the old TV show about Davy Crockett when he was a kid and became convinced he was a direct descendant of the American frontiersman.

When I commented on how few tall buildings there were around the Alamo, Trev told me there was a city ordinance that no building in San Antonio was allowed to cast a shadow upon it.

It seemed everyone was up for a chat around the Alamo that morning. 

When I mentioned how green the grass was to the ground maintenance manager, he told me it was because they’d sown it with winter grass six weeks before.

I had to shout over the noise of one of his team strimming the edges to say that I’d thought it was because of the torrential rain that had fallen the day before. He shook his head with slight disappointment.

I returned later in the week and did a tour. I even got the chance to amuse myself by saying “I don’t remember that” when the guide related an interesting fact about the Alamo and the battle that had been fought there.

But it’s the snippets of trivia that I got from Night Shift Trev that I treasure the most.