I wasn’t able to pay my last respects to Rayford Williams in person. We were out of town when he was laid to rest at 84 in his hometown of Henderson. I am sure he would have understood my absence. He was one of the most easy-going fellows I ever knew.
We met when I became publisher of the Nacogdoches paper and joined the Booster Club, which was comprised of the town’s perceived mover-and-shakers. The club had been formed to help promote the university back in the 1920s. By the time I joined in the early 1990s, its primary purpose was to enjoy a decent meal every Monday night at the Nacogdoches...
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SULPHUR SPRINGS, TEXAS — The first rule when attending an auction is not to make any sudden moves when the bidding is underway, so you don’t end up buying a hideous French provincial canopy bed by accident because you were scratching your nose. Or fanning yourself with the buyer card given when you register, because the ceiling fans aren’t doing much to quell the heat, and the auctioneer mistakes that move for a bid on a stuffed pheasant from Scotland.
My Beautiful Mystery Companion and I are at the Sulphur Springs Antique Auction and Gallery, a pair of amateurs sitting among a crowd of antique...
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Forty-five years ago this month, our family rolled into East Texas in a bluish-green 1964 Mercury Comet pulling a U-Haul trailer. It was the culmination of a 1,737-mile odyssey that began 10 days earlier when the moving van left our home in Allenstown, N.H. We followed suit a few hours later — Gone To Texas as the saying goes. My parents took their time driving southwest, stopping off at the Gettysburg battlefield, the Smoky Mountains, and other points of interest along the way. It was a wonderful road trip that took our minds off the fact that we three boys had been uprooted from the only lives...
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A recent (at least to me) episode of “Big Bang Theory” featured one of the characters using Morse Code. He was tapping out SOS on the wall in vain hopes of summoning his roommate, by tapping three short raps, three long raps, then three short raps. His roommate had no idea what he was doing or why. He had never heard of Morse Code. I suspect there are plenty of young folks who haven’t, or have at best a vague idea what it is.
I was a little nerd as a kid, with thick glasses, a bad haircut and a penchant for hanging around fellow nerds. Those of us growing up in Allenstown, N.H. liked to build...
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