A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from July 04, 2009
Texlahoma (Tex-La-Homa)

“Texlahoma” can mean the areas of the states of Texas and Oklahoma. The term is often written as “Tex-La-Homa,” meaning the areas of the states of Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma.
 
“Texlahoma” (“Tex-La-Homa”) was the name of an oil company that incorporated in 1919. In the 1930s, people living in the panhandle regions of Texas and Oklahoma spoke of a forty-ninth state to be called ‘Texlahoma.”
 
Douglas Coupland’s novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), contained characters who spoke of a place called “Texlahoma”—an asteroid that’s a mythic world, a sad everyplace forever suspended in the year 1974.
 
‘Tex-La-Homa” could also be a name for the food of this region (see the 2009 citation below)—similar to Tex-Mex—but the term hasn’t yet been used this way.
 
 
Tex La Homa
UK based singer/composer/producer Matt Shaw records, in one of his guises, as Tex La Homa, a name lifted from Canadian author Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel “Generation X.”
 
2 February 1919, Gazette-Telegraph (CO), pg. 22:
The Texlahoma Oil corporation has been chartered at Dover, Del., with a capital of $45,000,000, to drill and produce oil, gas and similar products. The incorporators are Wilmington men, C. D. Rimlinger, H. B. Drew and M. M. Clancy.
 
8 April 1919, Fort Worth (TX) Star-Telegram, “$2,000,000 Oil Deal Is Closed at Shreveport,” pg. 15:
SHREVEPORT, La., April 8.—A deal involving approximately $2,000,000, the largest sale recorded here in several years, has just been consummated, whereby the Tex-La-Homa Oil Company, an Oklahoma corporation, has acquired from the Mohawk Oil Company certain interests in the oil, gas and mineral leases on twenty-three tracts of land located in the proven oil fields of Caddo Parish.
     
Google Books
1933 (v. 28-29),

, pg. 51:   
They would take 46 counties in the Texas Panhandle and make it a state which they would call Texlahoma — a good sounding name.
 
Google Books
1935 (vol. 36), The American Mercury, pg. 477:
... dreamers want to take twenty-three counties in western Oklahoma and forty-six counties from northern Texas and form a new state to be called Texlahoma.
 
Google Books
Our Southwest
By Ema Fergusson
New York, NY: A. A. Knopf
1940
Pg. 322:
Amarillo, metropolis of the Panhandle, with fifty-five thousand inhabitants, is also the center of a trade area that might suggest the limits of a forty-ninth state. Those limits approximate a state of mind as well as a geographical and economic division. Oklahoma’s Panhandle would certainly be included; its folks are similarly disgruntled, remote from the center, bound to Texas’ Panhandle by every social and economic interest. The name Texlahoma has even been proposed, but that hardly seems inclusive enough, as it leaves out New Mexico’s high plains country.
 
Google Books
Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture
By Douglas Coupland
New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press
1991
Pg. 39: 
“It’s a Texlahoma story,” she says, much to our pleasure, for Texlahoma is a mythic world we created in which to set many of our stories. It’s a sad Everyplace, where citizens are always getting fired from their jobs at 7-Eleven and where the kids do drugs…
 
Google Books
High-Speed Society:
Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity

By hartmut Rosa and William E. Scheuerman
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press
2009
Pg. 101:
German philosopher Klaus-Michael Kodalle has tried to explain this phenomenon philosophically, while Douglas Coupland’s Generation X illustrates it metaphorically in the stories of “Texlahoma,” a place in which time is eternally frozen in the year 1974—making for a nice contrast with the book’s subtitle: “Tales for an Accelerated Culture.”
 
Houston (TX) Press
Creole Rabbit
The “Tex-La” food at Sabine River Cafe isn’t innovative, but it sure is tasty.

By Robb Walsh
Published on June 30, 2009 at 12:01pm
(...)
Explaining the restaurant’s name, Kraut­hamer pointed out that the Sabine River is the border between Texas and Louisiana. “I am creating a new category I call ‘Tex-La,’” he said. “Louisiana food with a Texas twist.”
 
I really like Sabine River Cafe despite the clichéd concept. But I have to wonder: Is Krauthamer clueless, or does he think his customers are?
 
Brennan’s of Houston has published two cookbooks full of recipes for Louisiana food with a Texas twist, one by Carl Walker and one by Randy Evans. And Brennan’s of Houston’s name for the style, Texas Creole, is a lot better than “Tex-La,” which is easily confused with another compound state name, “Texlahoma.”

Posted by Barry Popik
Texas (Lone Star State Dictionary) • Saturday, July 04, 2009 • Permalink


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