I stole an hour the other day and went to the library to look at microfilm of our paper from 1962. I’m working on a long-term research and reporting project. Some of the nation’s large newspapers — New York Times, Wall Street Journal — have been digitized and can be searched online. But if you want to look at issues of the Longview newspaper from 1962, that means slowly scrolling through microfilm a page at a time.
These trays of microfilm tell the story of this community nearly five decades ago, the rough draft of our history. I often wonder in what manner historians will access our paper...
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The Boys Scouts of America turned 100 years old a few weeks ago. My family’s involvement in scouting doesn’t go back quite that far, but it does go back more than 75 years. It continues to this day, thanks to my youngest brother’s volunteer efforts and that of his son, a third-generation Eagle Scout.
I don’t tell you all this to brag, being no great shakes as a Scout. I made it to the rank of Life, which is the one below Eagle, but I was nowhere close to reaching that rarified echelon when the lure of girls, earning money working at this newspaper to put gasoline in Suzuki motorcycle...
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First time I met Charlie Wilson was in 1978, inside the motor coach that served as his portable campaign office. I was a photographer for the Nacogdoches paper. He was running for re-election to Congress, something he did every two years from the time he was sent there in 1972 until he retired in 1996. Despite his well-earned reputation for drinking, partying, squiring around beautiful women and saying outrageous things, “Good Time Charlie” was handily re-elected every time by the voters of his district in Deep East Texas.
I covered Charlie’s return trips home for most of the next two decades,...
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“I can’t help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight.”
—Lynne Truss, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”
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I trust Ms. Truss is manning the barricades in her native Britain, where in Birmingham the city elders have decided to drop all apostrophes from street signs. An Associated Press story says officials concluded the pesky little tear-dropped symbol is “confusing and old-fashioned.” The phrase sparks the image of a slightly loopy aunt, perhaps too fond...
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