A listener/reader of my commentaries on Red River Radio questioned my spelling of crape myrtle in a recent piece, in which I conducted my annual rant against the wanton desecration each winter of these lovely trees. The fellow agrees with my stance against those who foolishly, or out of ignorance, prune crape myrtles. But he pointed out that in the South the tree is usually spelled “crepe,” not “crape.” I based my spelling on the photo of the bumper sticker that accompanied the text version at redriverradio.org, since the bumper sticker creator owns a landscape company. As it turns out,...
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We met a decade ago this month. I had just moved to Longview to become the publisher of the Longview News-Journal, where I began my newspaper career as a paperboy in 1968. I wrote a column about unpacking a treasure trove of books, which surround me now in this office. My Beautiful Mystery Companion-to-be had just celebrated a milestone birthday. She emailed and asked if we could have coffee and get acquainted, as long as I was not married. I wasn’t, so I used Google to figure out she was a college professor and had a daughter. Maybe I will make a new friend, I thought. So did she.
A few days...
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I read Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff recently, and followed immediately by reading Kingfish, a biography of Huey P. Long, written by Richard D. White, Jr. This was intentional. I bought the former on Amazon as soon as it was released and recently picked up a lightly used copy of the latter at Gladewater Books, my new favorite used bookstore.
My first impression of Fire and Fury is that the copy editors at publisher Henry Holt and Company clearly were on holiday. The book is riddled with typos that made me cringe: “pubic” instead of “public,” “differed”...
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Fifteen years ago, on Feb. 1, 2003, on a cloudless, spring-like Saturday morning as I walked out of my door in Nacogdoches shortly before 8, a sonic boom rattled the windows. NPR had just reported the shuttle Columbia was headed to land in Florida. I figured the boom, followed by a series of rumbles, was the shuttle passing overhead. I had seen the shuttle pass over on past flights, a quick flash of orange streaking across the sky, but not this time.
As I have written before, minutes later, pieces of the shuttle began raining down over Nacogdoches and much of Deep East Texas. I rushed to work...
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