Drinking a Toast to the Real Sam Malone

I drank a silent toast to Sam Malone on March 2, as I do every Texas Independence Day. Not the fellow on “Cheers” but the real Sam Malone — as we called him back in the day. Sam was the archetypal country newspaper editor with a bottle of cheap whiskey (Evan Williams preferred) in his desk drawer, a loaded shotgun in the corner of his office, and a foul-smelling cigar constantly clamped between his dentures. Sam was born on Texas Independence Day in 1920 and died in 2000 just a few weeks short of turning 80. He packed a lot of miles into those 79-plus years, all of it spent in newspapering...

Read more...