My Short Career as a Home Inspector

Several times a week, I get emails from the Texas Real Estate Inspectors Association offering various continuing education courses at convenient locations. I haven’t bothered to unsubscribe to these missives. Sometimes it’s just easier to hit the delete key. Besides, it serves as a reminder of my ill-fated attempt to change careers in late middle age, when it looked like this newspaper gig wasn’t panning out anymore. Two-and-a-half years ago, I was unemployed and loath to move from Longview, since my Beautiful Mystery Companion had a good job as a professor and our daughter was happy in school....

Covering Elections Changes With Technology

Another Election Day approaches. Voters who did not cast early ballots will go to the polls to decide a number of contested state and local races, as well as two important propositions concerning Northeast Texas Community College, a valuable regional resource. Once again, after a hiatus of a decade or so, I’ll be working to get out a paper once the polls close and the results are known. This will be fun. I covered my first election as a journalist — and not just as the photographer — down in San Augustine, which is deep Behind the Pine Curtain. I was 26 and fresh out of graduate school...

A Little Girl Grows Up

We met six-and-a-half years ago at Pizza King in Longview on a spring Saturday afternoon. She had a cheese pizza. Mine was veggie, extra jalapeños. Her blond hair and cherubic face with flawless skin captured my heart. As we sat down, she held one of the Harry Potter novels in her arms like a shield. She was 10 and eyed me warily. Who is this funny little man coming into my life, she no doubt wondered. Abbie is the daughter of the woman who would become my wife, aka My Beautiful Mystery Companion. Now she is my daughter as well, and I am blessed. On Saturday, Abbie turns 17, which seems...

Saga Of The Singing Courthouse

“You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it’s like. To love somebody, the way I love you.”—   The Bee Gees |———| I was taking a photograph of a city worker installing new banners along the light poles downtown the other day and humming along to this venerable Bee Gees song as the music wafted through the square. It was coming from the Titus County courthouse, of course, from the speakers installed along the roof. The sky was a brilliant shade of blue after the storm passed through, and it finally felt like autumn. I really wanted to just sit down on a bench,...

Harley Clark and Hook ’em Horns

Col I met Harley Clark in 2005 while attending a 50th anniversary celebration in Austin of the “Hook ’em Horns” sign that his buddy  invented one night while making shadow figures on the wall of a dorm room.  Clark, who was the University of Texas head cheerleader in 1955, introduced the sign to the world at a pep rally where he unilaterally proclaimed the symbol for the Longhorns was now the official hand signal of the university.  Sports Illustrated called it the best-known sports gesture in the world. Somehow I ended up walking in a parade down the Drag in front of campus the Friday...

I met Harley Clark in 2005 while attending a 50th anniversary celebration in Austin of the “Hook ’em Horns” sign that his buddy  invented one night while making shadow figures on the wall of a dorm room.  Clark, who was the University of Texas head cheerleader in 1955, introduced the sign to the world at a pep rally where he unilaterally proclaimed the symbol for the Longhorns was now the official hand signal of the university.  Sports Illustrated called it the best-known sports gesture in the world. Somehow I ended up walking in a parade down the Drag in front of campus the Friday...

Washing Chickens and Spiking Lambs

I wandered through the livestock arena at the Titus County Fair last week, looking for photographic subjects. Participants, mostly high school students, were grooming their steers, fluffing up their hair with industrial-strength blow dryers. It was warm and aromatic, a familiar smell of bovines and sawdust wafting through the Indian summer afternoon. As always, being at a livestock show evokes fond memories of my two older daughters — both now in their 30s — and their forays into animal husbandry as members of the local 4-H club. We never tried to raise steers or heifers. That is a tremendous...

Back On The Sidelines

High school football season is approaching the halfway mark, with a half-dozen games left on the regular-season schedule. If one of the teams we cover makes it into the playoffs — and I hope they all do — naturally we will continue covering football. And that means I will continue pacing the sidelines, trying to get an action shot in focus while not getting creamed by a player knocked out of bounds. Before this season commenced, the last time I shot football we photographers still used film instead of digital. As it happens I was running the Fort Stockton Pioneer for the same company I am again...

Adventures of a Word Nerd

I am a word nerd. Etymology fascinates me. I try not to use 50-cent words when a dime’s worth will do, but sometimes I can’t resist tossing in a word that might not be used in everyday conversation. I have learned the hard way to double-check anytime I venture into territory commonly occupied by the likes of George Will — the longtime conservative columnist who has the average reader reaching for a dictionary every few paragraphs. My trip to the literary woodshed came several years ago, when I confused “approbation” and “opprobrium” in a column. I used the latter, which means “a...

Customer Service: An Oxymoron?

I listened the other day to a phone conversation between a customer and a Comcast employee that has gone viral on YouTube. National Public Radio even did a short piece about it. A fellow is trying to cancel his service because he is switching providers. He recorded the last eight minutes of a 20-minute dialogue with the customer service rep. Comcast is the country’s largest cable and Internet provider, and it hopes to buy Time-Warner, the second-largest provider of those services. This would be a merger of two of the most-despised companies when it comes to customer service, according to an annual...