I noticed in our paper that the Chapel Hill school district is hosting a donkey basketball game this weekend. Teachers will ride on donkeys and attempt to score points against their students. I am a former donkey basketball player but have since hung up my riding sneakers. I was roped into doing this while running the San Augustine paper, despite my lack of qualifications to either play basketball (being vertically challenged) or ride a donkey successfully. The company provided both helmets and the animals, which were much better trained than their riders.
Riding a donkey bareback is hard on one’s...
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Sunshine Week starts Sunday. Newspapers, media organizations and good-government organizations will publish columns, editorials and other material to raise awareness of how we must be vigilant to protect the public’s right to know.
That right is constantly under attack, in Texas and on the federal level. Hillary Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state has caused a stink, as it should have. Fortunately, the negative publicity compelled the impending release of those emails, which should never have been on a private server. But that is a common practice. Former Gov. Rick Perry,...
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Sam Malone died 15 years ago, a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday, which was on March 2 — Texas Independence Day. That is also Sam Houston’s birthday, and Sam was proud to have been born on that day. He was my first newspaper mentor and a good friend. We rode the roads together for five years to dimly lit football stadiums in towns nestled deep behind the Pine Curtain — Newton, Hemphill and Shelbyville, to name a few.
Sam grew up in the country newspaper business out in Seminole, in West Texas. His dad, Big Sam Malone owned a weekly and taught young Sam how to put type back in the case...
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I finally got a snow day.
About this time last year I wrote about wanting to get a snow day like most everybody else. It never happened, although twice classes were delayed a few hours at Kilgore College, where I was teaching journalism at the time. Both my daughter and Beautiful Mystery Companion got snow days, which made me a bit envious.
When the first round of ice and snow hit town Monday, I had brought a suitcase and change of clothes with me, figuring the roads might be too treacherous to make the 55-mile drive home in the dark. They were, so I spent the night in a motel and was at work...
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CHIHUAHUA CITY, MEXICO — When I told folks I was going to spend a week in Mexico and Big Bend working on a magazine story, a few acted as if I had signed my death warrant. “Are you going to have any security?” one friend asked. No, we didn’t, though there was certainly safety in numbers with five of us working together — including a scientist who lives and works in the city. My brother Scott had the wisest perspective, noting that many millions of people live in Mexico, and the vast majority get through the day just fine. I liked my odds.
I was the first to arrive at the airport in this...
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The finish line of the finest adventure on which I have embarked in many years beckoned, at most 300 feet away. A group of us were descending a peak known locally as Big Hill just off the highway in Big Bend Ranch State Park. The peak overlooks the Rio Grande. On this final day of a seven-day voyage from Chihuahua City, Mexico to the Big Bend area, we got up at 4 a.m. to catch sunrise. It was worth the lost sleep. We arrived in the dark to give the two photographers time to set up their spectacular array of equipment. I was the writer on this trip so I took a short nap in the Suburban as they set up, one eye occasionally...
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From the New York Times: The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo have said.
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I didn’t do it. I have an airtight alibi.
Epoxy? Really? I would have used Gorilla Glue. Epoxy is a pain because you have to mix the two parts together. Invariably I get some on my fingers and then spend the next week peeling dried glue from my skin. Gorilla Glue definitely can be tricky, because it expands as it dries and tends...
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Let me stipulate from the get-go that I am a lifelong New England Patriots fan for geographical reasons and subsequent force of habit. I grew up in New Hampshire until I was nearly 13, just 60 miles or so from where the then-Boston Patriots played. My godmother’s son was the team physician in the early 1960s. He provided me with a few autographed photos of the players in those pre-Super Bowl days. Running back Jim Nance, quarterback Babe Parilli and place kicker and wide receiver Gino Cappelleti were the stars back then. Nance once came to the grand opening of a gas station nearby, and I got an autographed...
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My mother would have turned 85 Monday. My dad would be 83 this summer. Both are gone now, dying three years apart in a nursing home I pass by several times a week. Unlike their siblings, they did not live independently into their 80s or 90s. It just wasn’t meant to be. Instead both declined over years until death became a blessing.
It was an honor to be their primary caretaker in those final years. That journey began eight years ago this month. My father had long been disabled by a botched medical procedure, at the same age I am now. For 17 years my mother cared for him, but it had become...
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A harbinger of the New Year has unhappily but inevitably arrived. I was walking around the courthouse square the other day and spied my first glimpse of Crape Myrtle Mutilation. All those lovely trees had been whacked back nearly to the trunk in a January ritual that is as ugly as it is unnecessary.
It happens all over the South. Perched on stepladders and armed with lops, landscapers happily hack away at these lovely trees, cutting the past year’s growth back. What remains are ungainly torsos. Most people apparently continue to believe that, for this loveliest of Southern ornamentals to bloom...
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