PALO DURO CANYON -- The road to the “Grand Canyon of Texas” from nearby Canyon in the Texas Panhandle is straight as a yardstick while the terrain is so flat that the sky stretches for 180 degrees. It is windy on this late winter day as my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I make our way to the Palo Duro Canyon State Park. It is nearly always windy in the Panhandle, especially this time of year. We pay our $10 entrance fee, tape the receipt to the windshield and enter to discover, a few hundred feet down the road, a vastly different terrain.
We stop at the Interpretive Center, get out, and walk...
Read more...
AUSTIN — I spent the first day of Spring Break driving around a compound of at least a dozen massive warehouses, looking for my books, in an industrial park in North Austin. The sales manager left me a voicemail when I missed her call: “Just look for the Customer Pickup” sign.
I could not find that sign anywhere. Finally I found a glass entrance door with the name of the company stenciled upon it. I parked and went to the door. It was locked. What the heck? Did they take off for Spring Break? I called the main number, and after three tries (Welcome to America) a human answered. She was clearly...
Read more...
As we shivered our way into 2018, reveling in actual winter weather that is giving away to spring, I started thinking about all the items and services rendered obsolete in the past few years, at least for me. For example:
Phone books. Print versions of phone books are rapidly becoming obsolete. For years, I have chunked the ones plopped in our driveway straight into the recycling can. If I need to find an address or phone number for a business or any other public entity — a courthouse office, for example — I go to Google. As fewer folks have land lines in their homes, the phone book has become...
Read more...
We left Longview last week in a driving rainstorm, headed on a 500-mile trek to Canyon, home to West Texas A&M University. My Beautiful Mystery Companion was making a presentation at a literacy conference, and I was the designated driver. Not that she was imbibing, just that she designated me as her driver for this voyage. Canyon is 20 miles south of Amarillo.
I checked the weather app incessantly before leaving. Rain in Dallas, clear skies in Canyon. It looked like we would drive out of the rain, and we did — right into the aftermath of an ice storm, starting a few miles west of Denton....
Read more...
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,...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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”...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
My mom would have been 88 today. Mary Grace Adrian Bourque Borders was born on January 26, 1930 in Boston, and grew up in Concord, N.H. She studied in Boston at Massachusetts General Hospital and became a registered nurse. Mom met our dad in Boston, when his naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Norris was docked at the shipyard for repairs. They married in 1953. After my dad left the Navy, they moved back to N.H. and bought a small house in Allenstown, N.H., about five miles from Concord.
Everyone called her Mickey, a nickname she acquired in nursing school, though she was always vague on the details....
Read more...
Note: I was asked to recount my memories of Victor B. Fain, long-time editor and publisher of The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches. Mr. Fain was inducted into the Texas Press Association Hall of Fame at the mid-winter conference going on this weekend in Galveston. So I decided to expand those remarks into today’s offering.
I was working as a dogcatcher for the City of Nacogdoches in 1977 during my final semester at Stephen F. Austin State University, a depressing job I was desperate to escape when I spied the ad in the Sentinel’s classified pages: Part-time position as lithographer at The Daily...
Read more...
