We held an eighth-grade graduation party for our nephew, Connor, last weekend. He is about to enter high school, which boggles my mind. It seems it was just yesterday that I met him at an Easter egg hunt when he was 3. Connor is now slightly taller than me, which isn’t saying much, but there is still considerable growth potential. He and his dad, Jim, are two of my favorite people.
Connor and his buddy, Jacob, took a break from swimming in the pool, at which point Jim announced he would show all of us the age-old tradition of worm grunting. We headed outside to what most folks might call a mulch...
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As I mentioned last week, I am spending much of the summer going through the R.G. LeTourneau archives, placing the material in acid-free folders and categorizing it. I enjoy this type of work. I fully realize that, despite three of us working 29 hours a week on the project, we will barely make a dent in the mountain of material. But it moves the project a bit farther down the road, and it provides a glimpse in the famed Christian industrialist’s many activities – and the voluminous correspondence he received from around the world.
The material I am going through now is from 1959. Mr. R.G....
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The LeTourneau domes are a familiar landmark when driving into the heart of Longview from the south. The name of the industrial company has changed several times — it’s now Komatsu. Still, for long-time residents, the domes retain the name of the company founder, who left his mark on this city in many ways. R.G. LeTourneau founded the company that bore his name, invented massive earth-moving equipment and off-shore oil drilling platforms, held hundreds of patents and developed a private Christian technical institute after World War II that evolved into LeTourneau University.
Eventually that...
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A week after 90 mph straight-line winds whipped through North Longview — our neighborhood in particular — the cleanup is well underway. The near-unending hum and whine of chainsaws, leaf blowers, the rumble of diesel engines for clean-up trucks continues from just after sunrise until dusk.
We were without electricity for six days, as was nearly the entire neighborhood. The winds apparently took down many of the poles and wires bringing the power to our homes. Many of our neighbors decamped to their lake homes or hotels. We stayed put, relying on the trusty Honda generator to keep our refrigerators...
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The sound of chainsaws cutting up fallen trees, accompanied by the hum of generators, is the soundtrack of our neighborhood right now. The noise, and an absence of electricity, likely will continue for several days after a fierce storm blew through Wednesday afternoon. When it arrived, I was working in the university library while my Beautiful Mystery Companion was in her office across campus, preparing for the semester’s conclusion. The storm was not particularly scary on the south side of town, though we soon lost power. A small group of us hung out in the library and watched the trees sway...
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Growing up in the1960s in New Hampshire, I avidly followed three professional sports teams: the Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics — all of whose names back then were preceded by “Boston.” They remain today my favorite teams in those sports. If prodded, I would add hockey’s Bruins to the list, but I never was much of a hockey fan.
At the time, the Red Sox hovered in or near the cellar each season, back when the American and National leagues each had 10 teams, and there were no divisions. So the cellar meant finishing 10th. The Patriots fared somewhat better in the American Football League,...
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Tater stretched, yawned and meowed when I went outside, safe in his perch on top of our 1965 Ford F100 truck. I keep the truck covered when not in use, and Tater has decided it makes a nice spot for surveying his domain. There’s no doubt that our little piece of this cul-de-sac is his empire. The only cat that ever messes with him is his brother, Tot, and that usually doesn’t end well. Tater has a few pounds on his brother; his gut is close to dragging the floor. Since Tater and Tot have become adult cats, the intrusion of neighborhood cats seeking dominance has ended. Tater is fearless, ready...
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The other day, in the CrossFit gym where I willingly pay good money to be tortured on a regular basis, the workout started with 70 Burpees, followed by other cardio exercises in descending order — 60 sit-ups, 50 pull-ups, and so forth. I won’t go into detail about the workout. One of the standing jokes about CrossFit athletes goes like this. First rule of CrossFit: Always talk about CrossFit. Second rule of CrossFit: Always talk about CrossFit.
So I don’t want to do that. But Burpees are on my mind. Because after doing 70 Burpees the other day followed by all that other stuff, I wanted...
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Dave Dial was born to run.
Barring injury, about this time next year he will have logged 200,000 miles running. He started logging his miles at 15 while growing up in Groveton in Deep East Texas. Dial has logged 194,000 miles to date. That is roughly equivalent to running from Boston to San Diego more than 67 times. The mind boggles.
“Running is in my DNA,” Dial said in a phone interview recently. “When I was a little boy, when we came to town, I insisted on running home.” Dial recently increased his daily pace from 15 miles to 18 miles daily, broken up in two workouts — at 6 a.m....
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In 1982, I bought and devoured The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, by Robert A. Caro. It was the first volume of a planned trilogy profiling the large-than-life Texan who became the 36th president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Caro’s previous work was The Power Broker, an epic account of the life of Robert Moses, the New York titan of development. No one will ever accuse Caro of not being thorough. The original draft of The Power Broker weighed in at one million words and had to be cut by a third.
Eight years later, in 1990, the second volume of Caro’s trilogy was published:...
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