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No place like home I always say and for sure Allen is my home. I think mom felt that real strong for Allen on one “bad” day in 1938. The day we moved to Centrahoma. The old house dad had rented was in horrible shape. Our new landlord had stored hay in it and now he had rented it to my broke and, as mom put it, “gullible” dad. I remember the giant red-ant bed in the front yard. No drinking water. Had to haul it. The outdoor toilet was hiding out in a dangerous looking sticker patch. No respectable snake would venture out there. For a bit of respectability and as an odor chaser, Mom repapered both rooms (of the house) with Daily Oklahomans using flour and water for paste. After Gerald wept over it, she tore the news print off the walls and repapered with comic strips— cheering my unhappy brother up.
Read moreI was not going to write a story about Joe’s trip to Poland but well, maybe a little bit.
Read moreI first met my little sister Sue on a bright pretty September day in Centrahoma. The day was perfect and pretty. My mom surprised me that morning when she told me to go play with my best friend Letha Mae who lived just down the street. I thought it a sort of strange but happy day for me and then, after we had spent the day just playing, her mom told me something strange: “You can go home now and meet your new sister!” I knew of no sister but being four, I was used to strange events.
Read moreWhen speaking of democracy versus despotism, of course, I would say, “I choose Democracy.” After all, we all know democracy satisfi es best the human thirst for freedom. And isn’t freedom what we all seek? Yet, democracy being undisciplined, turbulent and luxury seeking, it fails time and time again when it faces austere, single-minded despotism. Despotism, in case you forget what that is the exercise of absolute power in a cruel and oppressive way.
Read moreWe dodged a big bullet last week. Our cold spell and near zero temperatures were mixed with days of high painful winds. But the real deep snow stayed away. Even as it was, we got several inches of the freezing mist, sleet and snow. But it was nothing like the series of ice storms and blizzards we suffered back in the 1970s. Made me remember one of the City of Allen’s faithful employees Les Rinehart. Or was it his twin brother Wes? But during one of these long-ago snowstorms, I remember him keeping the town grader in motion and going during our worse storm never letting our main streets get shut down by the drifts. I still appreciate this guy and all his hard work for the town of Allen.
Read moreSometimes you just can’t win. I remember long ago when I was in the Navy. We had just completed a port call in Yokosuka, Japan. Its duration was two weeks but the first day we pulled out I saw this real long line of sailors on the hanger deck. I learned that the USS Lexington crew (1,100 of them) was the worse infected crew in the 7 fleet. That long line of sailors were waiting for medical attention for their recently caught VD. I went up to my workstation and learned all about it. Not any of my guys were infected. In fact, it was all on the deck divisions and some of our so called “air dales” who had gone ashore and partaken of the shore delights they should have avoided.
Read moreFor the past two years this has been the question. Will this covid thing ever end? We can look back to the 1940s and 50s for guidance. Back then another viral infection was terrorizing the world. In a one-week period (1947) during the polio epidemic two children died in Stonewall. I knew them both and it certainly got my attention. One was a boy, my age who, healthy and riding his bike around Stonewall one day, died in his sleep that next night. Chocked to death by a paralyzing virus called polio. The next Sunday, a pretty teen girl went to Sunday School at the First Baptist Church with a sore throat.
Read moreYes, there are people who live on this earth who see to it. One such individual was a “faithful” customer of mine way back in the 1970s. He was a chronic complain-er who was forever being shorted on his medicine, by me. The city overcharged him on his water and the butcher over at Allen Food Center always weighed his meat orders heavy. He had a rough life. He had one prescription for 30 pills. Cheap. So cheap that I only charged him a buck a month for his 30 pills. But of course, he said I always cheated him anyway so I just made it a point to give him an extra pill or two. This gift was never acknowledged.
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