Sunday, May 27, 2012

Phil Collins Remembers the Alamo with a New Book


Wait. What? Phil Collins?! Yup.

From a story in the New Yorker...

Skip ahead a little more: it’s 2004, and Collins is in San Antonio again, this time on his farewell tour before retiring from music. (An operation to fix some dislocated vertebrae made it hard to play the drums.) Now a seasoned collector, he visits the Alamo for what he thinks is his last time, and stops in at The History Shop, a store about fifty yards from the mission. There he meets the proprietor, Jim Guimarin, who offers to scout for artifacts for him. The two become friends, and Guimarin points out that no one has ever dug beneath the shop itself. By 2007, he and Collins are digging beneath the floorboards. “There were cannon handles and a flattened cannonball, lots of musket balls, personal effects of soldiers,” Collins said. They also found the remains of three fire pits, which may have been the site of the group that cleaned up after the battle, led by General Andrade.

Besides the artifacts from The History Shop, Collins’s collection, which he keeps in the basement of his house in Switzerland, includes Davy Crocket’s musket-ball pouch (complete with five musket balls), a knife belonging to James Bowie (Texan folk hero—no relation to that other British rocker), and a sword belonging to the Mexican leader Antonio López de Santa Anna.






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