David Weston walked up as I wandered unaccompanied through the Franklin County Courthouse in Mt. Vernon last week, taking photographs of the final stages of the restoration of the 1912 building. Once I explained why I was taking photos, for a story in the paper, he enthusiastically conducted a top-to-bottom tour of this grand old building. Weston, 57, is the superintendent on the project, a man clearly in love with his work.
“People ask when I’m going to retire. When I die, that’s when,” he said. Weston is from Long Island, N.Y. and sports two gold earrings in each lobe and a scraggly...
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There’s only two things that money can’t buy, and that’s true love and home-grown tomatoes.
Guy Clark
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OK, technically you can buy homegrown tomatoes this time of year from vegetable stands alongside the highway. But unless one is utterly friendless or a hermit, right about now tomato-growing friends, acquaintances and kinfolk begin bombarding everybody they know with tomatoes. That is one of the few redeeming features of an East Texas summer, in my humble estimation. The weather usually is ridiculously humid and hot, and it generally stays that way until late September. But at least...
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I walk among the ghosts of newspapers past in the building we occupy at present. A newspaper office once required armies of people to produce the Daily Miracle — as it is often called by folks in the business because some days that is how getting out a paper feels — a minor miracle. Now, because of technology, physically producing a paper requires fewer people and even fewer tools. It still requires access to a printing press, of course, and other large pieces of equipment, but the front end of newspapering is largely done staring at computer screens.
When I started at the Longview Daily...
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Today is the Fourth of July, of course, when Americans celebrate their independence by barbecuing, drinking copious amounts of libations and getting sunburned. I spent much of the morning helping orchestrate the annual Daily Tribune Turtle Race, in which about 55 youngsters competed for cash prizes, certificates and bragging rights. Everybody got a T-shirt, and the weather out at Dellwood Park was perfect.
Roughly 150 folks in all were on hand to cheer on the turtles. The race, created by my predecessor, involves running several heats with a half-dozen turtles in each heat. The kids place the turtles,...
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