Decatur, Texas
Texas
Craps players calling for an eight have been shouting the name of this town for generations.
Roll dice long enough and you may hear someone yell for an eighter from Decatur. It is craps slang, a call for the number eight. Bob Wills, the Western Swing bandleader, made it the title of a song, dropping the e from eighter along the way. Decatur itself is a county seat in Wise County, and in nineteen forty-nine the mayor decided the town should own the phrase. Syl Hardwick had it added to two signs welcoming tourists in. The town almost had a different name entirely. It started as Taylorsville, after Zachary Taylor. An early settler and state legislator named Absalom Bishop objected to honoring a Whig. In eighteen fifty-eight he arranged to change it to Decatur, after the naval hero Stephen Decatur. So a gambler's chant carries the name of a sea captain, by way of one man's political grudge.
This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
"Eighter from Decatur" is a slang phrase used by craps shooters who want to roll an eight, as well as the title of a song (minus the "e" in eighter) by Western Swing legend Bob Wills. In 1949, Decatur mayor Syl Hardwick added the phrase to two signs welcoming tourists to the town.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Grapevine, Texas 35.2 mi For decades a sign outside town called Grapevine the Cantaloupe Capital of the World.
- Grapevine Lake 35.3 mi Four bones found beside this Texas reservoir belonged to a bird that lived ninety-six million years ago.
- Lewisville, Texas 35.9 mi Thirteen days after Woodstock, a small Texas town drew a hundred and fifty thousand people to hear Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin.
- Lewisville Lake 37.5 mi While building the dam here, Army engineers stumbled onto artifacts that seemed to say people lived in Texas thirty-six thousand years ago.
- Texas International Pop Festival 38.5 mi Two weeks after Woodstock, a field outside Lewisville drew a hundred and fifty thousand people to see Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and B.B. King.
- Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 39.6 mi Minutes before the crash, the crew joked about what to say on the cockpit recorder in case they crashed.