By Bud Kennedy
bud@star-telegram.com
DeCordova is missing out.
The Hood County city is the home of (1) a famous Brazos River bend and (2) an Olympic swimming champion.
Yet everyone around the world thinks Dana Vollmer is from Granbury, the county seat, nine miles away.
"We know where she really belongs," City Secretary Sylvia Hickey said Thursday, saying the town of 3,000 residents hopes to welcome her home from her London heroics with its highest honor: a golf-cart parade.
DeCordova, a lakeside resort community, was incorporated as a city in 2000. Most residents still say they live "on Lake Granbury" or "in" Granbury because that's the high school.
Of all the salutes to Vollmer posted on Facebook or Twitter this week, I found only one waving the flag for her homies in the DeCordova Bend Estates subdivision.
"Knew you could do it!" neighbor Tori Vasquez wrote. "DeCordova and Granbury are so PROUD of the hometown girl!"
"She's a DeCordova girl and I mentioned it because that's our neighborhood," Vasquez said by phone Thursday from a Granbury real estate office.
"Our addresses say 'Granbury.' We live on Lake Granbury. Granbury's where we do our shopping. I guess people get used to just saying 'Granbury.'"
Granbury Mayor Rickie Pratt says his city is proud that residents in DeCordova, Acton and other nearby towns claim the county seat as home.
"We have a great sense of community here around the lake," he said.
"Everybody's proud to be from Granbury."
His city plans an elaborate welcome-home party as part of "Dana-Mania."
It's DeCordova's second miss at fame.
In the 1950s and '60s, when the lake was mapped and under construction on the Brazos River, state officials and river managers called it the De Cordova Bend Reservoir.
But it opened in 1969 as Lake Granbury.
Early Texas Republic land developer and mapmaker Jacob de Cordova (1808-1868) was from a family of Spanish settlers in Jamaica.
He and his wife, Rebecca, were among the new nation's early Jewish settlers.He's described as the "Land Merchant of Texas" or "The Man Who Put Texas on the Map."
Someday DeCordova will be on the map.
Bud Kennedy's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 817-390-7538,Twitter: @budkennedy
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