Tyler - Reed

Tyler: Images of America.  By Robert E. Reed, Jr. Charleston, SC.: Arcadia Publishing, 2008. 128 pages, 6 ½ x 9, many b&w photos. ISBN 0738548413  $19.99 http://www.arcadiapublishing.com/  http://www.smithcountyhistoricalsociety.org/    Robert Reed has lived in the Piney Woods of Tyler for a life-time and took his education at Tyler Junior College and UT-Tyler.  He had a large collection of local, historical images and memorabilia and is a member of the Cotton Belt Historical Society and the Smith County Historical Society which strongly added material to the volume.  Tyler, of course, is the "Rose Capital of America" and the city's history goes way back. This pictorial book with its keen captioning takes the reader's eye on a journey from the 1850's to the 1960's.  The cover shows a parade scene with a float of eight Tyler beauties and a U.S. marine marching along side, just in front of the Perry Brothers store.  Within you find the courthouse scenes, portraits of the famous and common, group scenes, front and interior domestic shots, store and restaurant scenes, wagons crowding the streets, church buildings and congregations congregated for the camera, school scenes, trains, soldiers and football players, a flow of historical buildings (standing and gone), and landscapes, including the dam site, cotton fields, fruit trees and roses.  A few images depict the African Tyler population, e.g., in the fields, in a library, and four fellows in their 1955 police uniforms.  The captions are instructive in their approximate 50 word limit.  Folks in Marshall just ought to envious and put together a volume of their own using the Arcadia formula.  A couple of dozen other cities and towns already have