Lately a recurring dream jolts me awake at least once a week in the early morning darkness. I am trying to get out a newspaper, usually in one of the shops in which I toiled over the past three decades. Sometimes the venue isn’t recognizable. Deadline is fast approaching. Everything is going awry. Reporters aren’t filing their stories where they can be found. Computers are crashing.
Unexpected and unwanted visitors — rodeo clowns, sheriff candidates, bill collectors to whom I don’t owe money — keep interrupting and sidetracking me as I try to lay out the pages of a newspaper. I feel...
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For the first time in more than two decades I sat in a pressbox under the stadium lights, covering a football game. The Kilgore College Rangers faced their archrivals, the Tyler Junior College Apaches. Two of my KC journalism students had never covered a football game before, so I sat between them, showing them how to record each play. The plan was, when the game ended, they would be able to write a comprehensive account of what happened.
A few days before the match, Longview News-Journal sports editor Jack Stallard kindly came to campus and gave my young charges a quick lesson on how to fill...
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Gary Q. Frields lived and breathed for art in its various mediums — visual, sculpture and performance especially. He was a legendary teacher as well and perhaps proudest of students that became teachers of art. At his memorial event recently in Lufkin, I talked to a young woman I knew well in a previous life. She was about to begin teaching art at a community college. To prepare, she was reviewing what she had learned in Frields’ classes at SFA, because now she is teaching what she learned from him. I am certain he is looking down with great satisfaction. Frields died at 67 of cancer on Aug....
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A thunderstorm rumbled through on a recent late Sunday afternoon, bringing much-needed rain to our parched area. It also knocked out the electricity with 20 minutes left in the last episode of “Broadchurch” on BBC-America. This brought an anguished cry from my Beautiful Mystery Companion who was trying to catch up on missed shows. We lose power inordinately in this cul-de-sac, even under a cloudless sky, though rarely for long. I have AEP’s outage number in my cell phone contacts and quickly went through the routine of reporting it to an automated voice.
We are frugal folks with a large...
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