LONGVIEW, TEXAS — We came to remember Monk Willis on a cold January day, the First Presbyterian Church filled with friends and his extended family. Monk’s service was handled by four Presbyterian ministers and included eulogies from two federal judges who considered him a mentor. He planned the entire affair, I’m told, down to picking the hymns and coaching the distinguished jurists on what to say.
Achille Murat “Monk” Willis Jr. died at 94 on Jan. 14, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer in early August. Unlike most of those attending his funeral, we were friends for just a short...
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My mom turns 81 in a few days — a fact that when mentioned to her brought a look of incredulity.
“Damn, I’m getting old,” she said. My mom can be salty — a trait she passed down to her three sons, with considerable assistance from our late father. He was a sailor in his youth so had an excuse, at least to his way of thinking.
This conversation took place as she was holed up in the cardiac unit of Good Shepherd Medical Center in Longview on New Year’s day. My mom has a litany of medical problems, including a heart that is wearing out. She lives in a nursing home in Longview that...
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Not long after moving here I went to my Facebook page to change the name of the town where I hailed from Junction City, Kansas to Cedar Park. I am thrilled to be back in Texas and wanted my “friends” on Facebook to know of my return.
I’m not a heavy user of the social networking site, but it’s a great way to keep tabs on family and friends. I am fascinated by the amount of time some folks spend letting others know arcane details from their everyday lives, such as:
• Just went to Starbucks.
• Going to bed now. Long day.
• Had a great pizza for lunch.
• Just filed...
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I should have mentioned this earlier so that those interested could have made it to the photography exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center at UT. But I forgot about getting there myself until it nearly was too late, and now it is.
The HRC is one of my favorite haunts in Austin. I spent hours as a graduate student in photojournalism at UT three decades ago, doing grunt work in the bowels of this vast repository. As a teaching assistant, I helped catalogue photographs from the morgue of the New York Journal-American, a dead newspaper whose 3 million photographs are part of the HRC’s holdings. There...
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