Climbing Up or Down

Salvage from a courthouse rebuilt somewhere near Abilene included an outdated, two-story spiral metal staircase.  Dad bought the staircase.  Figured he would find a place for the stairs someday. When we moved a small office building to Fort Phantom Hill Lake and turned the structure into a lake cabin, the spiral staircase led to the dry lake shore below. Sure that you know that when you climb, up or down, you go around in circles. 

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Deep Roots

The secret to growing tall pecan trees…. the Great Great Grandfather in Brady Texas told me…depends on the soil where you plant. Soil around the small Abilene house I was having built in the 1950s was packed hard.  But A.R. Elam Trucking Company employed a bulldozer that mostly dug drilling mud pits at drilling company well locations.  This time, Dad’s Caterpillar dug up the hard dirt outside the house foundation.  We filled the hole with

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Squirt-Gun Mob

Remembering that my first published fiction appeared in our school newspaper.  Spring 1945, Abilene High School newspaper The Battery, page three. I have English teacher Selma Bishop to thank for this author’s launching.  She assigned a personal experience essay.  I wrote about the incident: As I drove, Bill Williams leaned out the back window and sprayed water on people waiting for the bus. The victims took my car license plate number. Noon next day (my

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Sailing Becalmed

You would think a color photograph of two 18-foot sailboats, spinnakers flying, featured on the cover of every Southwestern Bell phonebook serving a city housing over 108,000 people would be an easy computer lookup.  Nope. Don Hutcheson took the picture.   Set up his camera on the east shore of small Lytle Lake east of Abilene. Instructed John Crutchfield’s crew and Dick Elam’s crew to sail our 18-foot Flying Scot sailboats downwind in front of houses

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Fist City

Dean’s 13-year-old brother Jack often took me to ‘fist city.’  When Jack didn’t have anything else to do, he came across the road and beat me up. Dean and I were 12-year-old friends who lived near the oilfield-supply lumber yard my Dad bossed in Hamlin, West Texas. Dad had hired the Morris boy who had won numerous Golden Glove’s fights.  Dad suggested maybe he could teach me something about boxing.  He did.  Taught me how

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Ask Sammy

We old, and new, sportswriters coin clichés, forecast future outcomes, and glorify gladiators. So when All-American, All National Football League quarterback ‘Slinging’ Sammy Baugh retired (1950s) from quarter-backing the Washington Redskins, moved to his ranch in the county west of Abilene, agreed to coach the Hardin-Simmons University Cowboys football team, and was going to speak at the Kiwanis Club luncheon, we couldn’t tell you the news in a short paragraph. But Sammy didn’t deliver a

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Goats

Headlines I read in the New York Times often get this old editing teacher’s goat.  Most recently, the Times headlined that goats would soon be turned loose to eat the rubbish in a city park. Nothing new about that story.  Nor the video I saw of a herd of goats turned loose in a forest near San Francisco.  The goats ate the weeds and underbrush that often furnish fuel for a forest fire. During the Depression years, New

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Distance

Distance never limited A. R. (Red) Elam, my Dad. He conquered distance with a telephone.  Alexander Graham Bell founded AT&T  in 1885, but Dad made them profitable with long-distance telephone calls. In the 1930s, he managed three lumber stores, Rotan and Avoca from his Hamlin telephone.  In the 1940s he moved to Abilene, but took calls from 30 of his truck drivers spread across the oil patch.  Dad also used the telephone to manage his

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Clean Speech

This day April 21, 2021, My Man–who sold me My Pillow–starts Frank,  his version of Twitter— the social media gripe box President Trump used to give New York Times political reporters something to write about. Mike Lindell says he wants ‘clean speech’ and ‘won’t allow foul language or threats of violence’ on Frank. If that had been all the rules you had to follow in my high school junior year, Bill Fraser and I might have

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March 15

On March 15…maybe the same day you read these modern words…Abilene in West Texas was born year 1881.   And as a one-time Abilene property owner, I am astounded at what you paid then to own property. This property research was inspired by my return to Texas from Indiana.  I looked over the bookshelf I left two years before and there was Abilene on Catclaw Creek.  The author was Katharyn Duff, my sophomore high school journalism

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