Typo on highway sign temporarily renames Shafter
Shafter
I didn’t notice it for quite some time—several trips into my little home ghost town coming north on Highway 67 from Presidio. But finally, I took a closer look at the brand new highway sign for this beloved place tucked against the Cienega Mountains: “Shatfner.”
Meh. An “n.” Leave it. Might as well confuse tourists or let them post about their visit to social media with the error.
I’m unsure how many people in the little town of Shafter—population 25, 40 miles south of Marfa—noticed the typo. One resident, former Presidio County Judge Monroe Elms, says he also passed it several times without notice until his 10-year-old son, William, pointed it out. “He told me about it, but I just kept driving.”
Lauren Macias-Cervantes, a TxDOT spokesperson in El Paso, quelled the anxiety that this snafu might have caused for the Big Bend by telling me a new sign with the correct spelling was installed on Monday, March 23. Macias-Cervantes, by the way, has always been patient with me, even when tensions could have boiled over when TxDOT said the cost of the blinking stop signs installed in Marfa last year were exempt from being public information. Here was the highlight of my career as an investigative reporter being stifled by a highway bureaucrat, but she was right, according to federal law.
Jeffrey Roberts, a Presidio resident who does occasional work in Shafter, might have had the best explanation for the error. “It wouldn’t be the first time TxDOT or a contractor had a ‘fat finger’ moment on a green sign,” he posted on Facebook. “We’ve seen ‘Coriscana’ instead of ‘Corsicana’ and ‘Gaudalupe River’ instead of ‘Guadalupe’ in the past. It ain’t on the good guys who work very hard at TxDOT to ensure that our roadways are safe … blame Otto Korecht in Austin for the error.”
I recall riding my bike in Austin one day long ago and passing a street sign heading toward Lady Bird Lake. “Burt Reynolds DR.” “Whoa,” I thought. “I never knew he had a street named after him here.” He had just died, so I thought it might be a memorial gesture. I turned around to approach it again and saw that someone had expertly fashioned white tape to make the change from “B.R. Reynolds.” Well, maybe “expertly” was a little much, as the construction was obvious with a closer look.
If TxDOT had lost the “f” with the “n” typo, we could have been Shatner, as in William—Captain Kirk. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? We could lose the traditional wave to our neighbors and replace it with a fingers-spread Vulcan salute and a: “Hey, y’all. Live long and prosper.” And we could opine on current affairs with Kirk’s wise words: “Conquest is easy. Control is not.”