Black Gold and Red Lights

Some towns are born casual and calm-like. Borger had a streetwalker for a midwife and an oil boom for a birth announcement. Oil, blood, and money flowed freely when this Texas Panhandle town burst upon the scene in the 1920s like a stampede of rawhide Texas Longhorns hell-bent for water. Author Jerry Sinise, noted Amarillo author and travel writer, interviewed "survivors" of the High Plains boomtown and dug through musty police records and old newspaper files to write this Texas saga. Borger - better known to 1920 and '30 contemporaries as "Booger Town" - sowed its wild oats and reaped a wild harvest of death and destruction before Texas Rangers joined local officers to expel the criminal element and bring law and order. Today Borger is a progressive agricultural and industrial city with no hint of its riotous beginnings. Few want to talk about the past of "Black Gold and Red Lights."