This essay, and the AI generated illustration I made for it, is a little different from my usual style. But I hope it gives some insight into how I think.

I write things down all the time, lines and observations about the things I find funny, obscure or intriguing. There’s no sequential or scientific process to this. I’m not keeping an ongoing diary.

Writing things down helps me process the world around me, and let’s face it, the current space we’re occupying is in the midst of a Godzilla-sized shitshow. Instead of writing my way out of it, I’ve spent much of the past several months trying to insulate myself. It’s felt like self-preservation.

It also feels unhealthy. We’re facing endless noise from the politicians, trolls and social media influencers constantly seeking to invade our brains. The repercussions of their actions and poor to immoral choices are digging holes for which there is not enough backfill.

That’s my opinion. Some would describe me as jaded or a smartass; others would think I’m naïve. At age 61, my assessment is that it’s a little of both.

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In many respects, I am blessed and privileged beyond my wildest dreams. In others, I’m still that lonely, insecure child who never thought he would amount to anything, a person who never reached his potential. It’s an internal push-pull that never seems to end.

Determined to kickstart my processing of the world again, I decided to embark on “The 5Ws Project” this week. It’s simple: You write down everything that comes to mind when answering five simple prompts — who, what, when, where, and why — in a stream of consciousness.

“The 5Ws Project” can be an inward look or observations on the world around you. Mostly, it’s word vomiting a mood check onto a page in a way that helps you reflect and, where necessary, recalibrate.

I’ve done this before at points in my life, but I’ve never published one. Maybe you can try this as well.

Who?

Everyone has a story.

I consume and tell stories — those of others, mostly, but each of them in some small way mine — all the time. You might say it’s been the calling of my life.

Most of my personal stories are about standing on the periphery, observing others at work and play, chronicling how they overcome personal and professional challenges and obstacles. For years, I did my best not to insert myself into others’ stories; I didn’t want my experience to feel invasive to the subject or the reader.

I wish I could say my motivation as a storyteller has been endless curiosity, but in the dark corners of the night, I realize that’s not quite it. If I’m being brutally honest, something that occurs often in those dark corners, accumulating and telling the stories of others has given me my own to tell.

I’m grateful that everyone has a story.

What?

“What?” is easy. For me, the harder question to answer is “So what?”

As we age, a growing sense of unease starts to permeate our brains, slowly at first but subject to rapid acceleration depending on events both within and outside our control. We worry about our physical health, our mental outlook, and question whether we can continuously tap into the energy well to support both. We fret over our place in life. We start thinking about legacies.

We question our relevance — if not in the moment, then in the future we try to hold at bay. Give me a reason to read this, I tell myself when I’m writing. And on a deeper level, I wonder if others care what I think.

And do I care if they care?

When?

If not now, then when?

The passage of time has a way of shaping memories. Some, for whatever reason, have stuck with me for decades, attached to my brain with industrial strength command strips. Others seem lost, only to emerge again via a random prompt or triggering event.

I have friends and family who keep the good memories and avoid or toss aside the bad. Others hold onto the bad like a medal or badge of honor, unable or unwilling to overcome the roadblocks and potholes they encountered at earlier times in their lives.

I learned a long time ago to listen to the “aha” moments that come to you in dreams and wish I had been smart enough to capture them all. I woke up in the middle of the night this week with a clear lede for another story I’m writing. Before I went back to sleep, I managed to convince myself that I didn’t need to write it down.

Wrong again. When will I learn?

Where?

I’m writing this at my desk in a co-working space in Alexandria, Va., surrounded by music, books, and clutter that needs to be tossed or filed away. Most of the books, a majority of them memoirs, are about music. Musicians and the hard lives most of them live fascinate me, even though I’m genetically predisposed not to sing or play an instrument.

A rectangular green box, filled with postcards and ephemera that my grandmother collected almost 100 years ago, sits to the right — an unfinished art project that I’m still trying to decide what to do with. The program from “Buena Vista Social Club,” the Broadway musical based on the Ry Cooder-produced album that we saw this past Christmas, is on top of it. Family photos — pictures my mom sent when she was working on a Storyworth project about her life — are stacked in the bottom desk drawer.

I’m not sure why I haven’t sent them back to her.

The clutter, to an extent, is comforting. The mix of things old and new, intermingled on and inside a single desk, are evidence of a life and my experiences. In some weird way, they serve as a sign that I was here.

Why?

It’s the eternal question. The first that comes to mind when something tragic, strange or unusual happens. It’s the question we ask — or avoid asking, usually to our detriment — when conflict arises.

I spent the first 40 years of life looking forward, blinders on, before life’s rearview mirror crept into my line of sight. Two years later, my father and the woman I refer to as my second mom died within six weeks of each other, and that rearview mirror moved into a permanent position in my brain.

The “why” questions began. I thought it was a short-term phenomenon; one in the laundry list of tasks you face when processing grief.

“At some point,” I said to myself while lost in the wilderness of my brain, “this will end.”

That was only partially true. Active grieving eventually passed, but the nagging “why” questions — about my childhood, about the decisions (good, poor, confused, and stupid) I made to that point — remained. As I’ve gotten older, a series of life events have gradually nudged and eventually forced me to confront them.

I’m still doing so to this day. My story remains unfinished.

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On Christmas Eve 1994, my father and I engaged in one of our favorite past times, watching a movie on the big screen.

The year before, my ex and I had moved to North Carolina with our son, Nicholas. My parents, both public school teachers, had flown in from Texas to visit. My marriage, I knew, was failing, and I needed some quality time with my dad.

Quality time in our relationship was different than you might expect. I can count the number of deep conversations we had on a single hand. Due to his illness, which started when I was a child, most of our bond came from sitting in front of a screen and then discussing what we had seen afterward.

We watched two movies that day — one an instant classic (Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”) and one that was mediocre at best (the Michael Douglas-Demi Moore potboiler “Disclosure”) — in Greensboro’s Janus Theater at Friendly Center. It was his idea to see a second movie, so we called the ex and my mom and received a begrudging OK.

During the previews before both films, we saw the trailer for a new Paul Newman movie — Robert Benton’s adaptation of the Richard Russo novel Nobody’s Fool. In those days, the trailer did not spell out everything that took place; having read Russo’s debut Mohawk in college, I made a note to pick up the book before the movie came out.

Several weeks later, on blustery cold Sunday afternoon in early February, I found myself sitting in the Janus watching Newman on the screen. By this point, my ex and I were separated — a decision I came to after a rare deep talk with my father on the ride back from Greensboro to Reidsville where we lived.

I saw Nobody’s Fool even though I had read less than half of Russo’s thick, layered novel. A loosely plotted, wryly humorous, shaggy character study, both book and movie are centered on Sully, a day laborer who ambles through his days in a series of comedic set pieces. He has kept the big issues of his past (his failed marriage and subsequent strained relationship with his son) at bay until he no longer can.

Newman, perfect as Sully, deservedly received his ninth Oscar nomination for the role. I left the theater struck by how much the actor, in his delivery and wit if not the Sully character, looked eerily like my dad.

Reaching the Finish Line

For several years, Nobody’s Fool sat on the shelf as I went through numerous transitions (new marriage, new house, new career, three kids born in a calendar year). A couple of times, on trips back to see my family in Texas, I threw it into my backpack with the hope of finishing it, but I never did.

Ironically, I tore through Russo’s next novel, 1997’s very funny Straight Man, in a couple of days. The story of a English professor who is having a terrible week, the book’s farcical tone and swipes at university life made for a quick read. It is Russo’s only novel to focus on academia instead of small-town American life.

And that, I later realized, was why I blew through it so quickly.

One evening soon after moving again, this time to Northern Virginia, I picked up Nobody’s Fool and was determined to finish it. It was the spring of 2001. A co-worker at my new job had the novel on her office bookshelf. We had talked about it and Russo, who by this point was working on what would become the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls.

I was staying with Jill’s cousin in Fredericksburg while she completed the school year in North Carolina, so I had time to read while riding the train back and forth to Alexandria. By this point, my father was the age — 60 — that Sully was in the novel.

The book’s setting, a deeply cold winter in a small fictional factory town in upstate New York, bore limited similarities to my (larger and considerably hotter) petrochemical hometown on the Texas Gulf Coast. But the town faced an environmental threat — something I definitely was familiar with — caused by the greed of big business.

Once I re-started the book, it didn’t take long to finish. Russo is a master of mixing humor and melancholy. I imagined the actors (Jessica Tandy, Dylan McDermott, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and a young Philip Seymour Hoffman) as the characters and realized how perfectly the film had been cast.

Each character, to a point, feels stuck in the shithole of the fictional North Bath and unhappy with their lot in life. They are trapped in the comfort of the familiar, and while some dream of leaving, they don’t how or where to go.

It was a feeling I knew all too well.

Stopping and Starting

Buoyed by finishing Nobody’s Fool, I quickly picked up Empire Falls. The same thing happened; I started it, greatly enjoyed what I was reading, and then put it down.

It felt, as Nobody’s Fool did in its way, too close to home.

I put Empire Falls in my suitcase when I went home to surprise my mom at her retirement party a couple of years later. An HBO miniseries based on the book, again featuring Newman, was coming out soon, and I wanted to finish the book this time before watching it.

By this point, a decade removed from Texas, I found myself becoming anxious each time I went home. Part of that was due to my dad’s illness, the defining moment of my childhood. Part was due to my ambivalent, yet evolving feelings about the town where I grew up.

Having “escaped” a place where I never felt like I belonged, a blue collar town where people have fond 40-year-old teenage memories of bombing unsuspecting people with water balloons and wrapping people’s houses in wads of toilet paper, I didn’t want to be sucked back in.

I had left Texas City not once, but twice between the ages of 18 and 28, and knew that if I returned for more than a few days that I’d face the pull and the guilt of making the same choice again.

Dad had retired the year before due to declining health; after 30 years of physical struggles, his toxic gene pool was in full bloom. My mother, still vital, was leaving teaching after 41 years to care for him.

When I arrived at my childhood home before the retirement ceremony, my father was asleep. I didn’t have a key to the house, and my bladder was full after a long flight and drive from Houston to Texas City.

I went to the back and knocked. No answer.

I knew wrestling him from an afternoon slumber — by this point, Dad had a PhD in napping — would take an act of Congress, so I peed in the bushes in the backyard and went on to my mom’s school.

By the time my plane arrived back at Reagan National Airport a couple of days later, I had finished Empire Falls, feeling like I had lived there and somehow escaped again.

Despite the presence of Newman, I never watched the miniseries.

Returning

Even though he won the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, the character Russo has returned to most is Sully. Nobody’s Fool became what is known as the North Bath Trilogy, with the sequel Everybody’s Fool following in 2016 and Somebody’s Fool concluding the saga in 2023.

In each instance, I snapped up the books when they were released and put them on the shelf, knowing I would get to them in due time and consume them in almost a single sitting. And that is what happened.

My father died in August 2007. The next month, Russo released his first novel since Empire Falls, a sprawling and unwieldly book named Bridge of Sighs.

Ostensibly a love triangle, the book is set in a dying upstate tannery town again in upstate New York. The protagonist is a nice man — unfortunately tagged with the nickname Lucy — who stayed and married his high school sweetheart. A boyhood friend, Bobby Marconi, escaped to Italy as soon as he finished high school and has become a famous painter, with several marriages and divorces. Lucy, who is writing a history of his hometown, and his wife Sarah are planning a trip to Italy, one that will include meeting Marconi in Venice.

I briefly met Russo after a book reading and signing for Bridge of Sighs two months after my dad died. I also asked him a question that landed on a National Public Radio podcast. The question, tellingly, was not about small towns, people who escaped, or sons and fathers.

It was about making movies.

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Forty years ago, on January 28, 1986, I was hurrying to my Tuesday morning political science class at College of the Mainland when I spotted the TV on in a nearby office and paused. The space shuttle Challenger was finally getting ready to lift off, two hours after its scheduled launch.

“We’re both running late,” I remember thinking as I stopped and decided to watch, class be damned.

The shuttle mission, the 25th for NASA, had been postponed three times since its first scheduled launch the previous July. The stakes were high in my personal circles and the area where I grew up, just 20 miles southeast of Johnson Space Center.

My second mom, Fran Waranius, was hopeful that the mission, featuring the first schoolteacher in space, would lead to more stable funding for NASA and the nonprofit Lunar and Planetary Institute, where she was the primary research librarian. She, like others, worried that the postponements would draw more unwanted publicity to NASA, which had seen its programs cut dramatically since the end of the Apollo program.

Five of the seven astronauts scheduled to fly still lived in the Houston area. Cheryl McNair, whose husband Ronald was one of three mission specialists, was teaching first grade with my mom at her elementary school.

But it was the teacher on the shuttle, Christa McAuliffe, who was the reason CNN was televising the launch live and in classrooms across the U.S. McAuliffe was the first civilian scheduled to go into orbit under the Teacher in Service Project, a NASA program designed to inspire students and honor educators while spurring interest in math, science and space exploration.

Watching the Tragedy

Eleven days earlier, I turned 21 and celebrated by working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift at the Texas City Sun, my hometown newspaper. The same month, I moved out of my parents’ house into an apartment close to our local community college, where I took the occasional class and lurched toward an eventual degree.

Standing in the hallway, I could see the political science professor looking at me as the class started. Several years before, he had been one of two professors at the college who had been labeled a “socialist” — something he didn’t deny — in a series of scathing editorials by my Commie-hating first boss at the Sun.

Even though the newspaper had changed owners and editors (and thankfully, political stances), I’m pretty sure the professor thought I was a narc working for the man in my blue collar, socially conservative hometown. What he didn’t know was I was just a grown-up kid who worked insanely long hours and, despite having no social life to speak of, rarely went to bed before 3 a.m.

At 11:38 a.m., the shuttle lifted off. Seventy-three seconds later, it disintegrated above the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven crew members as millions across the country watched live.

After the initial blanch, you could hear a pin drop. For my generation, it was an event similar to the assassination of John F. Kenndy, or the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11. You can never forget where you were when it happened.

Stunned by what so many collectively had just witnessed, I walked into my class and sat in the back. Minutes later, the class was cancelled and we left in a silent shuffle. I started interviewing classmates and others I could find for a story that would appear the next morning.

Going to the Service

When the Johnson Space Center ceremony honoring the Challenger crew was announced, I called the NASA press office seeking credentials and was told to send a copy of my driver’s license and Social Security card via fax. Because the Sun was considered “local” media and I had covered Vice President George Bush’s tour with Rajiv Gandi six months earlier, we were given access as long as I showed up by 7 a.m. for the 10 a.m. event.

Just after sunrise on January 31, I parked my rusted out 1978 Chevy Blazer in the visitor lot at Johnson Space Center and saw the security guards giving me the side eye. I’d bought the car used for $1,000 from the police chief in a nearby town and even though it ran like a dream, a design flaw left large sections of its body hollowed out by the Gulf Coast’s salty air. It looked like it could disintegrate at any moment.

On that chilly, breezy morning, I showed the guards my Texas Press Association credential and walked toward the area to be screened by the Secret Service. Bleary eyed from another late night at work and little sleep, I was worried, nervous, and convinced I was out of my league.

The Secret Service agent allowed me to carry my Pentax camera inside to the makeshift bleachers as long as I waited to take pictures when the ceremony began, but he took one look at my 35 mm fixed lens and said, “You’re not going to get anything with that.” (He was right.)

The ceremony had been hastily put together but was beautifully organized. President Reagan had cancelled his State of the Union address, scheduled the night of the shuttle launch, and had delivered a memorable speech about the astronauts that evening. Reagan then decided to hold the memorial ceremony at JSC because of its proximity to most of the victims’ families.

The agent handed me off to a colleague and I was escorted to my position on the makeshift bleachers to wait. Because I had arrived early for once, I was one of the first press members there — something my Diet Coke-filled bladder would soon regret.

“Do not move from this spot,” the agent said, the outline of an automatic weapon bulging under his suit, “or you will be asked to leave.”

Other print and radio reporters, photographers, and videographers — local, state, some national — started showing up. I scribbled observations in my notebook, most of which I typed up later but didn’t use in my story.

Directly behind me, on platforms at the top of the bleachers, were Tom Brokaw of NBC, Sam Donaldson of ABC, and Dan Rather of CBS, getting ready to go live before the ceremony began.

Reagan flew into Ellington Municipal Air Field on Air Force One that morning with his wife, Nancy, and at least 90 members of Congress, including House Speaker Tip O’Neill and Sen. Ted Kennedy. While the Reagans met privately with the families of six of the seven astronauts (Judith Resnick’s family did not attend), members of the White House Press Corps showed up to the bleachers.

A Press Corps photographer wormed his way into my spot and told me to move. Full bladder and all, I refused. When he tried to nudge me out of the way, I looked toward the Secret Service agent and told the photographer to take it up with him. The photographer looked at the agent, who silently shook his head, and backed away.

Lost and Found

After hours of waiting, the solemn, emotional ceremony itself was brief. Reagan spoke for less than 10 minutes, mourning the loss of “our seven Challenger heroes.”

“Sometimes when we reach for the stars, we fall short,” the president said in a quiet, somber tone. “But we must pick ourselves up again and press on despite the pain.”

As family members sobbed and many in the audience dabbed at their eyes, Reagan went on to speak about each crew member. “Words pale in the shadow of grief,” he said. “They seem insufficient even to measure the brave sacrifice of those you loved and we so admired. Their truest testimony will not be in the words we speak, but in the way they led their lives and in the way they lost their lives: with dedication, honor and an unquenchable desire to explore this mysterious and beautiful universe.”

When Reagan’s speech ended, the band from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio performed “America the Beautiful.” The crowd joined in, then sang again when the band played “God Bless America” as NASA’s T-38 jets flew overhead in the Missing Man formation.

Leaving, I met up with Tricia Wall, the Sun photographer who shot the event with a decent lens from the press pool, and we went to lunch. We both had a beer and picked at our food, drained by what had taken place. I kept my program and a copy of Reagan’s remarks, both of which I still have, along with one of Tricia’s photos. (Mine were from too far away and out of focus, as I recall, and I no longer have the negatives.)

I also can’t find the article I wrote that was in the next morning’s newspaper. Working on this essay, I called the Moore Memorial Public Library in Texas City in the hope they would have a microfilmed copy. (The Sun, like many small town newspapers, closed for good in 2004 and donated its archives to the library.)

Unfortunately, the reel that includes the February 1, 1986, edition is missing. Fortunately, my memory, and many of the notes I took from that tragic day and week, are still intact.

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Note: I first published this in November 2023, when “Our Reality Show” had far fewer subscribers. Things have changed quite a bit for our brood in just the past two years, so I wanted to provide a 2025 update while talking about my favorite holiday.

Growing up, Thanksgiving was THE holiday for me.

Our family traveled every year on Christmas Day to see my grandparents in East Texas, taking advantage of the break they had before returning to teach school. That meant we celebrated with our neighbors — Fran and Bill, aka my “second set of parents” — and opened our presents on Dec. 24. The next morning, my sister and I would awaken to bleary-eyed parents and Santa’s present and stocking before loading up and heading to Longview for a few days.

Thanksgiving, on the other hand, was a chance to relax, watch the parades and the football games, and eat together (again with Fran and Bill). Fran, who worked with NASA research scientists at Lunar and Planetary Institute, would invite all of her co-workers who had nowhere else to go to join us, which often spurred some interesting conversations.

That trend continued throughout my childhood, even as my grandparents came to the end of their lives. We lost all four — my dad’s parents and my mom’s father and stepmother — during the fall and winter months over an 11-year period. At one point, it seemed like every holiday was spent visiting someone in the hospital.

I will never forget an infamous Thanksgiving that occurred soon after my paternal grandfather passed away. We brought my grandmother, then in her late 70s, down to be with us, and she never stopped talking through the entire dinner. It was the first time I realized how lonely she was and how small her world — she never drove a car — had become.

We held steadfast to the Thanksgiving tradition even after I moved from Texas to North Carolina some 30 years ago. My parents — biological and Fran and Bill — were kind enough to travel to us during the period after Kate and the twins were born and we made it back — sans Nicholas — to Texas a couple of times when they were children.

Twenty years ago, in November 2003, my mom, dad, Fran and Bill came to Thanksgiving dinner at our house in Northern Virginia. Nicholas was there too — at the time his mother and I alternated Thanksgiving and Christmas each year — and the foursome and I made the first of many post-Thanksgiving dinner pilgrimages to see the Lincoln Memorial at night.

I didn’t realize at the time that it would be our last holiday with everyone together. Bill died the following April; in 2005, Jill’s mother Betty passed away. My dad and Fran were gone within six weeks of each other in 2007 and Jill’s father Bob died in the winter of 2013, just a few weeks after another family Thanksgiving dinner.

A Memorable Holiday

Over the past two decades, most Turkey Days have been spent with the McFarlands in some form or fashion, either in Chapel Hill or in Northern Virginia. When the kids were still in school, we annually had to make the mad dash home so one or more could perform in their dance studio’s holiday revue, which always kicked off on Black Friday. We also spent several Thanksgivings in New York when Ben was there performing in shows.

My favorite from those years was in 2011. Ben had just started touring with “Billy Elliot,” which conveniently stopped in Philadelphia. At that point, Ginno — one of our “adopteds” — was living in our one-bedroom New York apartment while the “Billy” run ended on Broadway. If we came back to New York for Thanksgiving, Ginno promised he would make us Thanksgiving dinner.

The six of us arrived late Wednesday night with Kim and Zach Manske, who was in training to be one of the Billys, with plans to see the parade on Thursday morning. The adults and Nicholas, who at this point was a freshman in college, embarked on a run to Characters, a much-beloved former neighborhood bar we frequented at the time. Nick joined us, which I agreed to as long as he found us a spot for the parade at 7 a.m. the next day.

At the time, Nick didn’t realize that bars in NYC don’t close until 4 a.m., so needless to say, it was a very short night. And Thanksgiving was a very long day.

Ginno, at this point in his early 20s, did his best Julia Childs as he scrambled throughout the day to prepare the holiday feast. And he pulled it off, making one of the most delicious turkeys we’ve ever had with a recipe he still uses to this day. Nine of us, crammed into a tiny New York City apartment, had a terrific meal together before we all scattered back to our respective places.

If that’s not what Thanksgiving is all about, I don’t know what is.

New Traditions

Today, all four adult children are in committed relationships — Nick, Kate, and Emma are married — and we have two grandchildren (Marley and Colin). Since COVID, we’ve spent Thanksgiving together with the McFarlands in Wintergreen, Va., and Nick and Kate have spent the Christmas holiday with their spouses’ families. For us, it makes sense to do it that way, at least for the foreseeable future.

What we do is blend the two holidays — I call it “Thanksmas” — and tip our caps to the birthdays that come in December. We have a small tree, a few decorations, a Thursday morning “Turkey Trot” (I provide tech support), and a Secret Santa exchange among the attendees.

In the two years since I first posted this essay, our family has seen and dealt with a number of changes — some wonderful, some melancholy, some tragic.

Last year at Thanksgiving, I was not feeling well. The week after we returned from home from the holiday, I was in the hospital dealing with a life-threatening case of pneumonia and sepsis and continuing a tradition of family members in the hospital for the holidays.

My wife and I turned 60 this year. In mid-June, Emma and Colby got married in New York City.

This fall, Kate’s father-in-law — Roy Crawford, pictured second from right in the photo at the top of this essay — died following a long battle with cancer. A few weeks after that, my last aunt passed away at age 87.

Keeping with the tradition of come one, come all, this year’s Thanksmas will include Kate’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law, along with an additional member of the extended McFarland family. Unfortunately, our son Ben is missing this year because he and Gaby are in the process of moving, something that Kate, Matt, and Marley face as soon as they return from the holiday.

Given the size of our family, these unexpected occurrences are to be expected, but I’m still looking forward to a hectic, chaotic, lovely, and ultimately peaceful holiday with the family.

After all, isn’t that what Thanksmas is all about?

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Two days before Thanksgiving in 2019, when Stephen F. Austin State defeated top-ranked Duke University in basketball, the first person I thought of was a teacher who had died more than two decades earlier.

I don’t know if John C. Martin was a basketball fan (or a fan of any sport, for that matter). But I know he loved his alma mater so much that he put his hand over his heart every time the name of the East Texas university was uttered.

As the SportsCenter reporter talked about the huge upset, noting this was the first time in 150 games that Duke had lost to a nonconference opponent at home, I looked up and did the same. The small tribute, triggered by memories long in my past, was a way to give thanks to a person who — with the exception of my parents — was the best teacher I ever had.

The hand over his heart was one of Mr. Martin’s many mannerisms, along with exaggerated handshakes and bad puns, that students saw during the 40-plus years he taught at Texas City High School. From the early 1950s until the 1990s, when he was hit by a series of increasingly severe strokes that led to his death at 70, Mr. Martin was the school’s speech and drama department. (The high school’s auditorium is named after him.)

In a rugged blue-collar city of 40,000 framed by petrochemical plants, Mr. Martin was an anomaly — a deeply religious, fey and flamboyant gentleman who knew and was known by seemingly everyone in my hometown. And yet, he always managed to make you feel like you were the most important person in the room.

Middle School Horrors

When I was in 6th grade, my class was the first test case for a new middle school model that the district was exploring. That meant I moved a year early from the relative comfort of my mom’s elementary school down the street to what had become Blocker Middle School.

It was, to put it bluntly, a miserable experience that coincided with the onset of puberty and the continuing realization that I was “different” from many of my classmates. Difference was not welcome in 1970s Texas City; my hometown welcomed epithets and homophobic rumors behind your back in almost every classroom and hallway.

My dad, having been out of work due to illness for 5 1/2 years, returned to teaching when I was in 8th grade, moving from Blocker to Fry, a rival middle school in another part of town. We weren’t out of the woods yet (if ever) with his health, because the neck problem he had suffered through had wreaked havoc on his spine.

Largely because of my father, I shared an equal love for sports and movies. During those middle school years, I spent much of my time at the Tradewinds Movie Theater, a two-screen cinema that occasionally showed first run movies.

My love of film, especially romantic comedies where the guy always got the girl (a fantasy I clung to in those pubescent days), was part of my “difference” and I regularly saw the movies on both screens each week. I also spent a lot of time in the upstairs office of Kay Thomas, the movie theater’s manager. She allowed me to go through the press kits and posters that were stuffed in the office’s closet, and when she retired, finally let me take many of them home.

Football was my other obsession. I played — not very well — in 7th and 8th grade and the first two years of high school. Slow and uncoordinated, that meant I served as the holder of the blocking dummies and was inserted into games only when the outcome was no longer in question.

My first coach at Blocker was David Green, who had played football at the University of Texas in the mid 1940s. Tough as nails but with a kind soul, Coach Green’s ability to convey disgust with my lack of ability showcased his quick wit. Once, when he was announcing the freshman football games, I somehow managed to make a tackle against an opponent and still remember Coach Green’s call over the tinny loudspeaker.

“Tackle made by …” Static, then voice goes up an octave. “… Cook?”

I had entered high school in the fall of 1979, a 14-year-old kid who straddled many worlds while feeling part of none. I desperately wanted to find my people and did not understand that doing so would take many, many more years of searching and fumbling on my part.

Enter, in the hall of the A wing, Mr. Martin.

Finding Acceptance

“Why hello Mr. Cook,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously as I started to enter his first period speech class. “I saw your father at in-service. He told me you would be taking my class and that you like movies. What have you seen recently?”

Caught off guard, I mentioned the Peter Falk/Alan Arkin comedy, “The In-Laws.”

“Haven’t seen it. Need to see it. Will let you know when I do,” he said as I walked into the class.

And he did.

Over the next four years, Mr. Martin’s class became a touchstone for me. He always took the time to talk about movies and once asked my parents for permission to take me to one in Houston that I wanted to see and knew the Tradewinds would never get. Our conversations were generally on the light side, although I talked about my hopes and dreams and my parents’ struggles with my father’s illness. He listened and encouraged, always positive while not sharing too much about himself.

Even though I was the child of two teachers, I learned a lot about teaching from Mr. Martin. After a student gave a speech or performed a scene in his class, Mr. Martin always praised the content and your bravery for putting yourself out there, no matter how poorly it went.

But he was also a stickler for language, passing out mimeographed sheets of paper with proper spellings and pronunciation. You were expected to study and incorporate them into your work, knowing that his post-mortem critiques — verbal and written — would list your mistakes. Here are a few Mr. Martin-isms, as I like to call them.

Forty plus years after performing a scene in his class, I still remember getting what he said was the best compliment you can give to an actor: “You were believable.”

Even though I have no talent for theater — my kids get it from their mom — I joined the Thespian Troupe 1354 that Mr. Martin had started and found one community. Later, I took up journalism and found another.

Forced by my coach to choose between football and “those other activities,” I told him politely to sit on his kicking tee.

Reunion With A Friend

Almost 10 years ago, when our son Ben was in “Tuck Everlasting” on Broadway, I got a random call from Coach Green’s daughter, Jacque. She and her son, Chris Ballard, had moved in across the street from us when she married Ossie Matthews, who ran a local tire company and gas station in Texas City. Jacque and Ossie, along with the rest of the Matthews’ family, always were kind to me when I was growing up.

“Chris and his wife are in New York, and they want to see your son’s show,” Jacque said.

We arranged house seats and Chris, four years younger than me, called afterward to say thanks. We stayed on the phone for over an hour, talking about family and growing up in Texas City, and have remained in regular contact since. That night was the first time he told me about Mr. Martin and the effect he had on his life.

I was somewhat surprised. Chris was the varsity quarterback in high school and had gone on to the University of Wisconsin, where he switched to wide receiver before injuries ended his career. He then stayed in football, working as a coach and scout at Texas A&I and for the Chicago Bears, before moving onto the Kansas City Chiefs and then to the Indianapolis Colts as the team’s general manager.

According to Ballard, his grandfather reached out to Mr. Martin and asked him to look out for his grandson, who had struggled with asthma as a child. “My grandfather really liked Mr. Martin. He saw that I had a little introvert and a lot of loner in me, so he asked Mr. Martin to look out for me and help bring me out of my shell.”

Ballard enrolled in Martin’s theater class and stayed for three years. He calls Martin “a brilliant, brilliant teacher.”

“I get nostalgic thinking about him and that theater room. I loved that theater room and all the plays we did in there,” he said last week. “I can still hear him saying, ‘Stand up straight, Chris. Stand up straight. Shoulders back. Look people in the eye. Hey, look up when you’re talking. Be direct.’ He would cringe at some of the words that come out of my mouth now in public, but he would accept them and say, ‘You’re being authentic and you.’ That’s just gold.”

Almost 40 years later, Ballard still has a letter Martin wrote on his behalf when he was nominated for an asthma athlete of the year award. “It was just incredible. It brought me to tears when I read it. He noticed way more than I thought he was noticing about me,” he said. “He had a great sense of people, and he knew how to make you believe in yourself, that you can really accomplish anything with integrity and by being kind to others.”

Legacy

The small-minded rumor mill always churned around Mr. Martin. It angered me — a victim of the same mill — and it angered Chris.

“Back then, in the 1980s, if you were gay — or even suspected of being gay — that was taboo, especially where we grew up,” Ballard said. “It was a time when our minds were definitely stifled and told to sit in the back of the room. You didn’t talk about it. I made sure others knew my relationship with him was close, and that I didn’t care what they thought.”

How Mr. Martin handled himself inspired both of us.

“In this world, in my mind, to lead in any capacity you have to have empathy for other people and what they’re going through in life. He showed me that,” Ballard said. “He opened my eyes to, one, being kind to people, and two, accepting people for who they are and not judging them based on rumors and what other people think. I don’t let anyone else form what I think about others, and Mr. Martin is a lightning rod in my mind.

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“He made such an impact on how I treat others and my respect for the differences in people. I don’t think a lot of people get that today. If you’re not built the same way, or the same color I am, or living the same lifestyle that I do, then you’re not accepted. He accepted everybody for who they were. And he saw strength in everybody. He was a remarkable man.”

Chris said Mr. Martin was “overjoyed” when he found out Ballard was going to the University of Wisconsin on a football scholarship, It turns out that Mr. Martin had also gone to Wisconsin for a year before transferring to his beloved Stephen F. Austin, which was close to his parents in Nacogdoches.

“He told me how happy he was that I was going so far away from my cocoon and our bubble of Texas City, which ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me,” Balllard said. “I was young enough where I was able to break out of the cycle, the closed mindset of others. I credit my mom for that, but Mr. Martin, too.”

The last time I talked to Mr. Martin was a couple of years before he died. I was leaving Texas for North Carolina; he was recovering from a stroke. The conversation was brief and the update he gave on his medical status was short, but he remained positive as always. At the end of the call, he wished me well and said I would “learn so much in this new adventure.”

“You have so many adventures ahead of you,” the teacher told the student.

If he only knew.

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“Well, we’re back in our situation again,” my Aunt Scooter said.

It was Christmas Day 2010 — her 72nd birthday — and she had spent it eating alone at an IHOP in Central Texas. Her husband of 42 years was in a psychiatric hospital, and sadly, this was not the first time.

For more than two decades, I could count on my hands the number of times I had spoken to my aunt — my father’s older sister. Days before my grandmother died in 1989, Uncle Dave and I had nearly come to blows over the handling of her last days. At that point, in part to preserve my own mental health, I pointedly walked away from two people who had a long-term influence on my childhood.

Due to my father’s illness, between ages 9 and 14 I spent most of the summers and school breaks in Longview, the East Texas town where my parents were raised. I didn’t have much of an extended family; my parents each had only one sibling, and I rarely saw my two first cousins on my mother’s side.

At the time, Scooter (a childhood nickname that stuck) and Dave lived about 10 miles from my dad’s parents on a large half-acre lot in Gregg County. I went back and forth between their two houses during my extended stays while my parents traveled to seek medical treatment for my father’s rare genetic illness. During that period, I spent all of my time with adults —no kids lived in either neighborhood — and my imagination.

Memories of that time flash by in sepia tones. I remember sitting in Dave’s boat, parked in their driveway, with my hands on the steering wheel and making sputtering sounds with my lips as I imagined being in a high-speed chase. I remember fending off the “dirt dobbers,” the flying bugs that nested in the homes they built in the ceiling corners of their carport.

I can see my grandfather working in the huge garden he set up in their backyard, his skin leathered and tan in the years before he became tethered to oxygen. I remember watching Dallas Cowboys games at their house and the party in 1980 for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration, my grandfather wheezing and whistling through his lips with COPD. He would be dead by the end of the following year.

Vividly, in living color, I also remember the confrontation with Dave.

Matter of Fact

When Scooter and I talked that Christmas night, my uncle’s physical “situation” — my aunt’s word to describe his state at any given time — was not good. He had life-threatening blood clots in his leg and lungs. And there was the mental illness, about which my aunt was relatively matter of fact.

“He gets on these kicks,” she said. “He gets revved up and he starts having fears and hallucinations. He gets paranoid. He can’t slow down. He can’t sleep. He’s all agitated and revved up, and then he starts being belligerent. I had to take him over there because I can’t handle him when he’s like this.

“So,” she said with the voice of someone who had been through this “situation” countless times, “we’ll get his meds straightened out and then everything will be OK for a while, or at least until he has another one of his episodes.”

My aunt and uncle married in 1968, three years after I was born, and never had children. On the precipice of 30, Scooter was two-plus years older than Dave, who grew up near Dallas. They lived in Grand Prairie for several years after they married, then moved back to Longview in the mid 1970s.

When my grandfather became ill, Scooter helped my grandmother, who never learned to drive. She also started bowling with Gladys, my mom’s stepmother and an eccentric in her own right.

After an Air Force stint and a job as a repo man for General Motors, Dave “retired” in 1981 — the same year my grandfather died — at age 40. No one knew or spoke of the exact reason, but he already was showing signs of erratic behavior. In retirement, he played the stock market, acting as an informal wealth manager for his relatives and taking a cut. He became obsessed with genealogy, filling giant three-ring binders with copies of birth certificates, property deeds, and other records from his relentless detective work.

Anxiety made him extremely demanding and overbearing, especially when it came to money. On that front, his actions weren’t necessarily criminal, but they definitely weren’t always ethical. You always had the feeling that he was trying to upsell you on a car that he planned to repossess.

The Confrontation

Over time, as Dave’s moods became more unpredictable, he often was unreasonable. Always working angles that would benefit him, he emotionally bullied Scooter and anyone who got in his way, except — notably — my mom. He tiptoed around her.

As I moved toward adulthood, I started to distance myself from my aunt and uncle. My childhood left me with no tolerance for bullies.

In July 1988, when I was 23, I took a job at the Tyler Morning Telegraph/Tyler Courier-Times largely because it was only 30 miles from my grandmother’s house. She was 83 and in declining health, and it was good for her to know I was close by.

By the following January, it became obvious she would not live much longer. After her final trip to the hospital, my father and I went over to Scooter and Dave’s to discuss next steps.

Dave tried to take control in his blustery, belligerent manner — the bully in midseason form. Standing in his living room, he started talking loudly about what my grandmother “had to do” and what we “had to do” to keep her alive, at least until the next Social Security check could arrive. He said he knew more than the doctors about her condition and that we didn’t know anything.

I felt myself ready to snap and moved toward him. My father had to step in between us.

I stopped and walked out to the car. We did not exchange words or pleasantries at the funeral.

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In 2000, Dave was formally diagnosed with bipolar and later with schizoaffective disorder. After my grandmother’s death, he and Scooter had sold their house and left Longview, moving first back to Grand Prairie and then to Pottsboro, a remote town on the Red River near the Oklahoma border.

As Dave fought mental illness, Scooter gradually became more isolated.

During this period, I kept in touch with my aunt and uncle through my parents, who served as intermediaries. We exchanged Christmas cards and occasionally at my parents’ behest, I called to check in, knowing Dave was silently listening on the other line while Scooter spoke.

On that Christmas night in 2010, my mom told me Scooter had to eat alone on her birthday because Dave — by then in the psychiatric ward — had refused to see her. At the time, our daughter had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and my wife Jill and I were struggling with it.

I called Scooter and we started talking; 15 minutes into what became a 90-minute conversation, I pulled out a notebook and began to write things down.

A Candid Conversation

“It’s the strangest mess,” my aunt said. “Everyone has so many different forms of this.”

She went on to describe how and what happened when my uncle’s “situation” became worse, how he had been on a decade-long series of cycles that start with emerging paranoia and isolation, followed by anger and depression, then hospitalization and renewal.

“I don’t know what causes this, but I know that when he becomes anxious about everything, he can’t do anything about it,” she said. “For a while, he just knows that he can do something better than everyone else, and he will drive that point into the ground if he has to, just to get his way.”

What I appreciated most was my aunt’s candor — a trait I had not realized she shared with my grandmother. What emerged from the conversation was her great strength in the face of mental illness. Near the end of the call, I asked why she didn’t leave.

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“He’s a very kind man when he’s not all caught up in this, and it’s not something he can help,” she said, referring to his “crazy episodes” as blackouts. “When you get to know him, you know he’s not like the person he is when he’s in one of those states. I’ve just learned that the meds only hold him for so long, which means when they don’t work that he’s going to have to go to the hospital and stay for a while.”

I told her about my conscious withdrawal from them, explained my reasons for staying away, and said how guilty I felt. “I do understand,” she said. “This is not an easy thing to deal with — for anybody.

“Fortunately, things are different now,” she said of the stigma around mental illness. “It used to be that people who went to a psychiatrist had a bad reputation, but now we know that they’re getting treatment for something they can’t help. It’s not something we expect to have in a child, or in a spouse, but they can’t help it. They just can’t.

“You can help them, though, and others, too, by being open about all this,” she said.

What Scooter didn’t know was how much she had helped me — on her birthday.

A New ‘Situation’

There were many more hospitalizations for Dave, who died in February 2017 at age 75. Scooter, worn by almost 50 years of tsunami-like ups, downs, and in betweens, sold her house and returned again to Longview. My son Nick, my mom, and I helped with the move.

In 2022, Scooter had a stroke and was unconscious for three days. She moved into an assisted living facility but periodically continued to have “episodes” that resulted in falls, broken bones, and hospitalizations.

When I’ve visited Texas, I’ve tried to get to Longview as often as I can. Our most recent visit was in April. We’ve never had a conversation as extensive as that Christmas night, but that day, using a walker, Scooter showed me around her assisted living facility. She refused to let me take her out to eat a meal.

“If I want to go out to dinner, I can go with my friends,” she said, pointing to a screen that noted a 3:30 p.m. boarding time for a group outing to Cracker Barrel.

Her memory remained intact as she told me short anecdotes about her parents, her grandparents, and my mom and dad. Dave did not enter the conversation.

Several weeks ago, Scooter fell again, resulting in another hospitalization. Her body had started shutting down, and when I called my mom to check on her, I asked how Scooter was doing.

“Well,” my mom said before telling me that my aunt was being moved to Hospice, “this is the situation…”

Scooter died yesterday at the age of 86.

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On many Sundays when I attended Paul’s Union Church as a teen, I found myself walking to the parking lot with Ed and Adelaide Chittick, a modest elderly couple who drove in from Dickinson, a small community several miles to the north.

Like our neighbors Fran and Bill, the Chitticks obviously were not from “around here.” At that time in their early 80s, they had moved from California to Texas to be near their son and grandchildren.

They moved slowly. Mrs. Chittick, rail thin with a mound of hair piled on top of her head, held tight to her husband of 60 years as we walked to their four-door Pontiac in the small church’s lot. Mr. Chittick still had the build of an athlete, and as we got to know each other, he told me his knees were shot after years of playing baseball.

One day, he mentioned in a casual way, “I almost went pro, but Comiskey was a cheap bastard and wouldn’t pay me anything, so I became an engineer instead.”

He smiled as my jaw dropped.

Comiskey, as Mr. Chittick referred to him, was Charles Comiskey, the Chicago White Sox owner who was notorious for underpaying his players, a key reason for the 1919 Black Sox scandal that inspired “Eight Men Out” and, to a certain extent, the fable “Field of Dreams.” Comiskey, who helped form the American League, also is the person the team’s stadium is named after.

A Surprising Life

In 1983, I worked at the Texas City Sun as a summer intern after graduating from high school. Hired to write features, I convinced Mr. Chittick — we were never on a first-name basis — to tell me his baseball story as we left church one day. He smiled as the three of us walked toward his car and agreed to meet me at his house, as long as I didn’t bring a camera or anyone else with me.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a big deal. The Chitticks were so low-key and private that only the pastor had been allowed to come over.

The house was not what I expected, if I knew what to expect in those days. It was large and nice — much nicer than I had imagined given their modest car and demeanor. The couple, by this point in their early 80s, greeted me at the door. Mrs. Chittick’s hair was down and hung almost to her hips.

When Mr. Chittick escorted me to his living room, I noticed two pictures: One of him shaking hands with President Johnson and one with President Nixon. In another room, he was in a picture with John F. Kennedy.

Chittick told me he had worked for the Richfield Oil Corporation as the “coordinator” for seven Western states, Canada, and Alaska. He entertained representatives from all over the world and said, “Some Russian oilmen wanted me to work for them desperately, but I wouldn’t.”

The pictures, he said, came from his work with the U.S. government on “special jobs.” His last job, in the 1970s, was as a coordinator for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which built the Alaskan Pipeline.

“Let’s not get into that,” he said of the decades-long project. “In the long run, it was really pretty boring.”

I didn’t think so, but he held firm. We had agreed to talk about baseball.

Scandal and Skinflint

It was obvious that Chittick still loved the game, and we talked about the fierce rivalry at the time between Nolan Ryan’s Astros and Fernando Valenzuela’s Dodgers. When I asked about his playing career, this soft-spoken man immediately turned back time more than 60 years.

Born in 1900 in Colorado, Chittick had joined a barnstorming team as a teenager while working for a coal camp based in Denver, Colo. A catcher, he was successful enough that the White Sox offered him a major league contract in 1921.

That was the year Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven other players were banned for life by Major League Baseball after they were accused of intentionally losing the 1919 World Series. The players — Jackson’s involvement has never been conclusively confirmed — took money from an organized crime figure to fix the Series in part to get back at Comiskey, who they saw as a skinflint, uncaring owner.

“In the 1920s, mining companies would hire baseball players during the off season. The companies had a league, and I played catcher,” Chittick said as he showed me two photos from that time. “A scout from Chicago begged me to sign with them. They even had the coach call me from Chicago. But Comiskey never learned his lesson about paying players.”

Chicago’s contract offer was for $175 a month. Chittick was making $240 a month at the coal camp, so he turned down a chance to join the White Sox. I asked if he had any regrets.

“I needed the money, but if I had only known then,” he said, laughing while looking around his house.

“I guess it all worked out.”

Staying in the Game

Chittick remained involved in baseball during his career in the oil industry, coaching several Little League and playing with semi-pro teams in California. In the mid 1930s, one of his players was a young Bob Lemon, who grew up in Long Beach.

“I had this one kid who played in the outfield who could never get the ball to third base,” Chittick said of Lemon. “He threw hard, so I put him in the infield. Everything he threw to our first baseman was low, so I made him a pitcher, but he hated it. He didn’t want to listen to me.”

Lemon persisted in his resistance seemed solid and he eventually made the majors as a utility infielder. But his career took off when he was finally converted to pitcher after returning from World War II. Lemon won more than 200 games as a player for the Cleveland Indians, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and won a World Series as the manager of the New York Yankees.

“Athletes can be hardheaded and stubborn,” Chittick said on that humid summer day more than 40 years ago. “I was. Bob was.”

At that point, I knew I had the lead to my story. Looking through my notes recently, which I carefully typed so I wouldn’t lose the quotes, I still remembered it decades later: “Even in the 1920s, baseball players were asking for higher wages.”

After the story ran, we spoke only a handful of times, mostly over the phone. I went to University of Houston that fall, and when I returned the next summer to work at the Sun full time, Paul’s Union had seen its congregation split in a dispute over its pastor leaving. Chittick died on Nov. 2, 1989, four months after his wife, Adelaide, passed away.

They were married almost 70 years.

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Harry Burch did not finish the fifth grade but was licensed as a bricklayer 10 days before he turned 18 in 1924. He used the money from that job to enroll in seminary, later became the pastor of an interdenominational church, and found himself leading a years-long “crusade” against illegal gambling and organized crime in Galveston County, Texas.

Ten days before I turned 18 in January 1983, I found myself sitting across from Burch in the living room of his home in La Marque. A cassette recorder, one I had used to tape radio songs and dialogue from movies on TV, was on the coffee table between me and the retired pastor of Paul’s Union Church.

At the time, as a high school senior, I was the co-editor of my student newspaper. I had gone to the church and met Harry and his second wife, Florence, better known as “Boots,” several times. When the Galveston Daily News held a countywide student writing contest, offering a $75 first prize to the countywide winner, I asked if I could interview Burch about his “crusade.”

Still active at 76, though no longer a full-time pastor, Burch agreed to sit down with me. At the time, a referendum to bring gambling back to Galveston County was being actively discussed, and he was eager to revisit the history.

“One of the main reasons that I fought the gamblers in the first place was that it was hurting my teaching on Sundays,” he said at the start of the interview. “Gambling had become a way of life. It went on seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The whole area was becoming polluted.”

Today, almost 42 years after Burch’s death and almost 70 years after his final crusade, most forms of gambling — including sports betting — still are illegal in Texas.

Assessing the Dangers

As a child, my conservative parents repeatedly told me of the “dangers” of living in Texas City, a midsize town on the edge of the Gulf Coast. Most took the form of social don’ts: Don’t go to the wrong side of town. Don’t go to the bars where the plant workers congregated with the unemployed after work. Don’t cruise Palmer Highway on Friday and Saturday nights.

Looming over this were two seemingly existential yet real and constant “dangers”: the threat of hurricanes and tropical storms, and the potential for devastation if something went wrong at the petrochemical plants that lined the edge of the mainland.

Across the causeway — first a two, then four-lane bridge, now four lanes in both directions — was Galveston. In 1900, a hurricane had destroyed much of the city, killing 12,000 people in the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

Ten years after the hurricane, brothers Sam and Rosario Maceo arrived on the island from Sicily via Louisiana and started their careers as barbers. When Prohibition took effect in January 1920, they stopped cutting hair and became full-time bootleggers. As Galveston reestablished itself as a tourist destination, becoming an “open city” where gambling and prostitution thrived in the backrooms of restaurants and night clubs, the Maceos were first in line for the action.

In 1926, the Maceos opened the Hollywood Dinner Club, which seated up to 500 diners and had a dance floor and gaming tables. At the height of their power, starting in the mid 1930s, the Maceos owned dozens of casinos, bookmaking joints, and speakeasies throughout Galveston County. The best known was the Balinese Room, a club on Seawall Boulevard with a gaming room sitting on pilings 75 yards into the Gulf of Mexico.

When Burch moved to the area in 1934, “everything in Galveston County was wide open.” In La Marque, then a tiny mainland town adjacent to Texas City where Paul’s Union Church is located, the junior-senior prom was being financed with proceeds from bingo games, he said.

"The gamblers had these games in very acceptable places where kids could get at them,” Burch said. “Kids were stopping on their way to school and wasting their hard-earned money on slots. Gambling had become a way of life; it ruined hundreds of people and their families.”

The First Crusade

Burch joined the Galveston Ministerial Alliance in 1935. He and several of the alliance’s younger pastors formed a Law and Order Committee. Its charge: Stop the slots.

“The older ministers said that it was pointless. They had tried to stop the gamblers before and failed,” said Burch, who chaired the committee. “We were young and ambitious though, and we decided to give it a try.”

Burch said the younger ministers were “babes in woods … totally naïve about how things worked.”

“We would go into a drugstore, and the slot machines would be lined up on a wall — 18 to 20 of them ranging from a dollar to a nickel. The gamblers had them everywhere — in the restaurants, on the streets, everywhere it seemed.”

Committee members tried to work with Sherriff Frank Biagnne, whose run for office had been supported by the Maceos, but were stonewalled. At one point, in April 1938, Burch thought the ministers were nearing a breakthrough after Gov. James Allred ordered the Texas Rangers — the state agency, not the baseball team — to go to Galveston to shut down the illegal gaming operation.

Biaggne, the local sheriff, took charge of the busts.

“He said he would help us, but he gave us the runaround,” Burch said. “He’d get the newsmen and the cameras out, bust up a couple of machines, and the next day go back to business as usual. He was getting national publicity — ‘Sheriff Breaks Up Gambling Ring’ — when he was not doing a thing except being paid off by the gamblers.”

In 1939, the ministers went to Austin to meet with W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a conservative who had succeeded the progressive Allred as governor. “We met and talked with him, but he too was being paid off by the gamblers, so we couldn't get any help there,” Burch said. "'We worked another year and ran out of steam. We didn't know what to do. We had gone all the way up to the governor and made no progress.”

Between the Crusades

Organized gambling and the Galveston County economy slowed greatly during World War II, as resources were shifted to support the war effort. Galveston’s municipal airport became a training hub for the Army; military vessels were built at the Todd Shipyard. Two forts on the island — Crockett and Travis, named after the Alamo heroes — served as POW camps for German prisoners as well as troop housing.

Meanwhile, on the mainland, Texas City’s refineries and petrochemical plants produced aviation fuel, styrene, and synthetic rubber for the military. To deal with wartime shortages, the federal government built the only tin smelter in the Western Hemisphere near the Texas City-La Marque line.

After the war ended, the county’s population — especially in Texas City and La Marque — continued to grow as the oil and gas industry boomed. But on April 16, 1947, a cargo ship in the Port of Texas City exploded, killing more than 580 and injuring 5,000 in the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history.

"That was the most shocking and traumatic experience in my 47 years here,” said Burch, noting the windows in his home 6 miles from the explosion site were shattered by the force of the blast. “I saw this enormous cloud of smoke and heard the sound later.”

This was the only point in the interview in which Burch paused.

"There were no hospitals on the mainland, and people had to be transported either by bus to Galveston or by plane to Houston or Dallas,” he said. “I took people up and down the rows of bodies in the Danforth gym looking for their relatives. I ended up burying eight people from Paul's Union in one day.”

The Second Crusade

The blast did not deter people seeking work from moving to the area, and the slot machines started to permeate local businesses again. In 1947, gambling receipts in La Marque alone topped $1 million and “that was when a dollar was worth a dollar,” Burch said.

“La Marque had gambling operations and organized crime moving in rapidly because of the petroleum plants,” Burch said. “We had 40 to 50 machines come into La Marque in 1947, and they weren’t always from a dollar to a nickel. The machines were mostly in the back barrooms of the cafes, and that was the only place where someone could cash a check.

"Anyone who gambled averaged 15 cents on the dollar. They made 15 cents off every dollar,” Burch said, shaking his head. “Women cried that their husbands would spend all of their money on slots and often come home drunk. As a result, they didn't have enough money to pay their bills or take care of the family.”

A community group — the Anti Vice League — formed in La Marque and petitioned the district attorney and Blaggne to rid the city of the slots.

"He said he would come and check it out, but a few days later, he stated to the newspaper that there were no slot machines in La Marque, which was an outright lie,” Burch said. “We ended up going to the grand jury."

Burch said a lawyer suggested the Anti Vice League should do its own raids. On September 1, 1949, with a witness and a reporter with him, he raided the first establishment.

More raids followed. In each, Burch and someone he brought with them would play the slots, document the time, file charges for “permitting gaming on the premises,” and notify the local media. The charges drew national publicity, and before long, Burch found himself face to face with Sam Maceo, aka “The Velvet Hammer.”

"Sam Maceo came to my office in La Marque,” Burch said. “He came alone and unarmed, although I'm sure someone was waiting outside for him. He was in very bad health when he asked me to put a stop to the campaign. I said no.

"To be perfectly honest, I was really enjoying myself. I was being offered money, women, cars, boats, and jewelry to stop this crusade, and each time I refused. One of the gamblers even offered me a 90-foot yacht to stop it," Burch said. “They couldn't harm me in any way. If they did, a stink would have really been raised, and the law would have pursued this even more.”

Burch said he convinced Maceo, who made donations to countless churches in the county, to say a prayer with him after the meeting. As he left, Maceo said he would let Burch know whether the slot machines would be pulled out of La Marque.

“His answer was the same as mine: No.”

No Dice

Maceo died a year later, of cancer, at age 57 in April 1951. His brother Rose died a few years later. Some say the Maceos saw the three-decade run in Galveston coming to an end and better opportunities in the Nevada desert; they were large investors in the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, which opened a week before Sam’s death.

Burch continued his raids and finally started to get some attention from the state, even as locals — including the Catholic priest in La Marque — continued to resist his efforts. In 1954, he supported James Simpson’s run for district attorney.

Simpson, a former FBI agent who moved to Galveston to start a law practice, had vowed to enforce laws against gambling, prostitution and organized crime, but after winning a plurality in the Democratic primary, he lost the runoff by 8 votes.

“Something about that wasn’t right,” Burch said. “But sadly, it wasn’t a surprise.”

Biaggne, the sheriff, lost his bid for re-election after 24 years in office in 1956, the same year Will Wilson ran for attorney general on a platform of shutting down illegal gambling for good. At Wilson’s request, Burch supported his campaign, doing radio spots for him.

Wilson won and appointed Simpson as a special assistant to build cases against local establishments. Undercover agents, a combination of civilians and Texas Rangers, infiltrated businesses in Galveston and across the county.

In June 1957, 47 businesses were raided, including the Balinese Room. Owners were charged with gambling, prostitution and liquor violations. Burch took part in the final raids, which forced the clubs — the Balinese Room later reopened without the gambling — out of business.

“I guess you could say I was in on it from the beginning to the end,” Burch said.

Postscript

The essay based on this interview won first place in the Galveston Daily News student writing contest. It solidified my plans to major in journalism and led to my first job at the Texas City Sun, a summer internship that started nine days after I graduated from high school.

I interviewed Burch again that summer for a story on the non-binding referendum to legalize gambling in Galveston. Sadly, he did not live long enough to see the referendum fail, dying after a brief illness on September 11, 1983 — the week I started classes at the University of Houston.

In a Houston Chronicle interview after Burch’s death, Wilson remembered him as “a forceful and active supporter of the anti-gambling cause.”

“It was because of people like him that we accomplished what we did,” Wilson said.

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A couple of years ago, I went through several boxes in our basement and found old clips and files I’d kept from my childhood and early years as a teenage reporter at my hometown newspaper. Looking through the stories, I thought some would be were worth revisiting here.

During a slow period earlier this year, I updated and republished a couple of those stories, including my first “interview” for a fifth-grade history day contest, and a behind-the-scenes look at photos I took of Muhammad Ali in 1985. Several more clips that I planned to revisit were filed away in a folder in the desk at my co-working space.

Then things got busy, and I promptly forgot about the folder.

My Boot Camp

I rarely visit the Meta-verse these days, checking in once or twice a week to see who has had a major life event that they (and the algorithm) chose to share in my feed. Last week, I saw the photo at the top of this post pop up.

Les Daughtry, my former publisher at the Texas City Sun, had reposted the photo and others taken for a 1984 newspaper promotion. Seeing my 19-year-old baby face and the ties we had to wear that day, much to our chagrin, I immediately started reliving the military boot camp experience I never had.

I wrote a lot in those early days — usually three, often four, or even five 350- to 700-word stories a day, plus an “enterprise” feature that appeared on weekends. Looking back through my old files again this week, I still can’t believe I wrote — and for that matter, kept — a story about a kid searching for a lost dog, then I realize I was probably proud that I filled a hole on deadline 41 years ago.

Looking back, it’s easy to be self-critical about some of those stories and yet nostalgic about that bygone era, when we had endless energy and embraced our underdog role in the saturated Greater Houston media market. A colleague described most of what we produced this way: “Working here, the Pulitzer committee won’t come knocking on your door, but at least your story will be in someone’s bird cage.”

I think often about the lessons learned in the Sun’s hyper local “meatball journalism” environment, writing frantically on deadline while waiting impatiently to drink cheap beer afterward with lively personalities, all of them 10 to 20 years older than me, who worked and played equally hard. They taught me lessons I’ve never forgotten; my time there was the most memorable, and perhaps the best, professional experience I’ve ever had.

What’s tough: Realizing the Sun met the fate of so many newspapers around this country and closed its doors in 2004.

Back to the Files

Over the next two weeks, I’m revisiting two stories from those early “Salad Days.” Neither is a blockbuster, but the interviews with two senior citizens greatly impacted my then-fledgling career as a storyteller.

As a high school sophomore, I started attending Paul’s Union Church in La Marque, the community that adjoins my hometown of Texas City. The city limits of the towns are separated by a railroad track and State Highway 3, which runs parallel to Interstate 45 from Texas City’s petrochemical plants to Hobby Airport in Houston.

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Paul’s Union had appeal for several reasons. First, it wasn’t in Texas City, where I felt like I would be judged because my parents didn’t go to church due to my father’s illness. Second, Paul’s Union had been founded in 1895 by two women — Laura Stewart and Julia Parr Munson — and it was interdenominational, meaning that it brought together people from various Protestant denominations rather than pledging to one or none. The pastor at the time was young and appeared to be at least moderate, a seeming anomaly in the working class, conservative Gulf Coast county where I grew up.

The church also had a small but active group of younger people, and in my own confused and complicated teenage way, I needed a sense of community. But, as always, I found myself gravitating toward members who could have been my grandparents. During this time, especially, I needed the nurturing of people who were like my beloved grandmother, even if it was only for a few minutes on Sunday mornings and the occasional Wednesday night.

Paul’s Union is where I met and interviewed the two retirees who, without realizing it, had a great effect on my future journalism career: Ed Chittick and the Rev. Harry Burch.

The Burch interview was conducted in January 1983 — my senior year in high school — for a countywide student writing contest sponsored by the Galveston Daily News, the oldest newspaper in Texas. I won first place — $75 was nothing to sneeze at in those days — and the prize helped me land a paid internship at the Sun the summer after graduation.

I interviewed Chittick for a feature during that internship and came up with the first newspaper lead I was proud of: “Even in the 1920s, baseball players were asking for higher wages.”

Look for those stories soon, and thanks for reading my memories.

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My father looked at me and said, “So, what have I missed?”

I choked out a response: “A lot.”

I couldn’t believe he was standing there, leaning into a cane, looking older but healthier than the last time I saw him — 18 years ago, the day before his death on July 29, 2007.

The dream, which happened last week, startled me. I’ve felt my father’s presence deeply at points since his passing, most notably on the anniversary five years ago when I saw his spirit in the eyes of our dog, Penny.

But in each instance when his spirit has invaded my sleep, the setting has been in the past instead of the present, something I was grateful for when I was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness last December. Seeing him then, leaning on a cane that had belonged to his grandfather, truly would have freaked me the (you know the word) out.

I guess I’m glad he waited until now to show up.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said with a sly grin, his sense of humor intact.

“Really, Dad? You couldn’t do any better than that.”

He grinned again and asked, “Heard any good music lately? Have any good stories to tell?”

Curiosity and creativity

Consuming music and inhaling information about those who create it are two of the constant threads — sometimes loose, occasionally frayed — of my life. But even after 40 years of writing and journalism, I still have difficulty articulating succinctly why songs burrow into my brain and refuse to leave for days, weeks, months, or even years.

Other than instrumental jazz or classical and the occasional groove or earworm, the overarching reason is that I’m drawn to the stories you find in song. I’m also endlessly curious about the process of songwriting, recording, and performing.

The Music Diaries

I go down rabbit holes to learn who plays what and with whom — God, how I miss liner notes — and read voraciously about groups getting together, breaking up, and reuniting. I constantly look for information on the artistic, logistic, and personal challenges that musicians face, and how that influences what they do.

If anything, this endless curiosity about the how and why is the reason I became a reporter in the first place. So even though I never pursued music journalism beyond the occasional profile or review — I’m no critic — the art form has served as the guidepost of my personal and professional life.

Music and Memories

I started writing this essay in April following two trips to Texas in an eight-day period. The first three days were spent at my mom’s house, where I worked with my nephew and my niece’s boyfriend for 12 hours on one day to clean out her garage, then spent a second selling my paternal grandmother’s coin collection.

I joked to my mom that dad’s ashes — in an urn in her bedroom waiting to be mixed with hers — were likely stirring because of our work. But he didn’t show up then, nor did he make an appearance when I went several days later to Longview, his hometown, to visit his first cousins and his sister, Scooter.

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The Texas trips bookended a visit to see our longtime friends Jim and Sharon, where Jill and I went with them to the final show from the “Boyz From Oklahoma” reunion of Cross Canadian Ragweed in Stillwater. Throughout the seven-hour show, I photographed Ragweed and the other four acts from the pit, which meant I was up against the stage when the group performed the anthem “17” with the song’s co-writer, Jason Boland.

I’ve always enjoyed Ragweed’s music, but my proximity to the band — standing literally between them and 48,000 people — and the song’s chorus (“You’re always 17 in your hometown…”) struck me in the solar plexus. It reminded me of how much I wanted to run away from everything as a child.

I returned to the essay in May after Jill and I saw another bucket list show — Pearl Jam in Raleigh, N.C. Ultimately I could not pull the threads together and decided the Mother’s Day concert, and the circumstances behind it, deserve its own essay.

Then, in June, Brian Wilson died the day after our 29th wedding anniversary.

Parallel Themes

I admired Wilson as much for his story as his musical genius. My father, always nostalgic for the music of his teens and 20s, adored Wilson. Reading his obituary that morning, I quickly jotted down two paragraphs:

“Dammit. You were one of the last living connections to my father, a man who played a song he loved over and over and over and … you get the idea. He loved your work, and he loved Jan and Dean. Perhaps because he knew all three of you were doomed despite the escapist nature of the hits, but more likely because he sought the same escape.

“Younger than my dad by two years, you could have been classmates, but your schools were thousands of miles apart. The things you loved were similar, at least according to the songs: Girls, sun, summers — an idealized life just outside your respective grasps.”

Magic and loss become parallel themes as we age. At some point, losing your childhood heroes — the ones we know well and those we admire without actually encountering them in person — becomes inevitable. But that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens.

Since Wilson’s death last month, many eloquent pieces have been written about his musical genius and his public yet personal struggles. That his passing occurred just two days after Sly Stone’s death felt almost cruel to a generation that grew up on their music.

Both artists had brief — relative to their life spans — periods in which their genius shined so bright that they became generational icons before falling into the grip of addiction and mental illness. It’s an all-too-common theme running through many forms of popular entertainment, with a lengthy list of casualties.

My father was in his early 30s when a genetic disorder started its rampage through his neck and spinal column. His response to the pain and suffering was a frenetic burst of creativity that spanned about 18 months — a pace that, burned out and in constant pain, he no longer was able to sustain.

Almost every story I read about Wilson, it seemed, referenced “Good Vibrations,” the classic Beach Boys song released the year after I was born. In “Love and Mercy,” the movie about Wilson’s life, a montage about the song’s creation and his maddening attempts to record what he heard in his head remains one of the best captured on film about the intersection of creativity and mental fragility.

Not a Traditional Parent

Wilson’s father was abusive. My paternal grandfather was a flawed man, disappointed by life’s missed opportunities. For years, the stories that leaked out after his death — from my grandmother and my parents — put a realistic tarnish on a person I had idealized as a child.

Fortunately, my father wasn’t an asshole. Thankfully, he was far from it. But his illness ensured he wasn’t a dad in the traditional day-to-day sense. It took me some time to recognize that, and the pressure it put my mom under, but I’m forever grateful that he was a kind human.

Fears and past traumas often lead to escape hatches; illegal substances are the bane of many a musician. My father was on prescribed substances for a long time, but all were due to a debilitating medical condition. Fortunately, his escapes were simple if not at all like Wilson’s songs: Television, sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette, wandering through flea markets and junkyards.

I spent much of my teenage years plotting my escape from my Texas hometown and most of my 20s trying to accomplish it. I did everything I could to avoid my fears and ghosts rather than confront them. It took me until the age of 30 — now half a lifetime ago — to start facing those fears head on. It has taken the last 30 years to understand what those fears are, what they mean, and learn how to address them.

Today, I have no desire to — paraphrasing the Barenaked Ladies — lie in bed like Brian Wilson did or spend as much time there as my father had to, given his condition. There’s too much to see and do, too much magic left to pursue.

In that respect, my father’s dream cameo came at a time when I didn’t realize how much I needed it. By showing up in the present instead of the past, it served as a visceral reminder that his spirit is still very much alive in his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

For that, I give nothing but thanks.

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Three years ago today, I published the tribute below on the 15th anniversary of my father’s death. Ironically, it also looks at dreaming, something I didn’t realize until I re-read it while finishing this.

Forty years ago this month, I took my first professional photo of a famous person, only to see it not run in the newspaper.

In June 1985, I was assigned to take photos and write a story about an appearance by Muhammad Ali at the Holiday Inn at the base of the Texas City Dike. Ali, who had retired four years earlier, was the guest of honor at Galveston’s Juneteenth celebration and squeezed in an appearance at the local NAACP banquet.

This was a big deal for me at the time. Ali, who died nine years ago Tuesday, was a legend in my sports-loving family. We watched every match of his that was televised.

Ali, who had been diagnosed the previous year with Parkinson’s, was starting to show signs of the disease that would rob him of his rapid-fire speech. But he shook hands, visited and listened to everyone who was there, all in awe of his aura and presence. He also kissed a few babies, including the one in the photo above, spoke briefly, and signed copies of “Prayer and Al-Islam.”

Running around taking pictures, not really knowing what I was doing with the camera and not wanting to embarrass myself, I didn’t think to get the infant’s name. I did say hello to Ali, who wasn’t taking questions, and shook the right hand that had felled generations of boxers before leaving to write a story and develop the film.

I was shocked by the result. Somehow in the midst of everything, I managed to get what I still think is a great shot.

I knew the officer’s name — Willie Mitchell — and figured that I wouldn’t need the baby’s, but I was wrong. My editor refused to run it, choosing instead what I still consider to be an inferior photo in an effort to teach me a lesson.

Like most lessons I got in that first job, and there were a lot, it has stuck with me to this day.

Several days later, I took a copy of the picture to Mitchell and told him I was sad that it hadn’t run. “I wish you’d called me,” he said. “I could have told you who it was. It’s Thomas Carter’s grandson.”

I felt stupid. Carter was one of the city’s first two Black commissioners and an English teacher at College of the Mainland. A tremendously kind and thoughtful man, the two of us had several long talks about East Texas, where he grew up, and about writing. I still remember the quote he gave me for a Father’s Day story written only a few days after I graduated from high school.

The story was a puff piece, asking community leaders about the best piece of advice they had gotten from their fathers. I spoke to Carter in his office, and he paused for a moment before giving me this gem:

“If you teach your children anything, teach them to dream, because for anything to be accomplished, it must first be imagined.”

Chastened that I had not realized the baby in the photo was of Carter’s grandson, Alexander, I took him a print when I went to a commissioners’ meeting later that year. At some point, I went by his office at COM and saw it framed on his desk.

In the end, I guess the photo went where it was supposed to go.

Here are a few additional photos I got at the event:

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In early 1976, I sat in an assistant principal’s office after school, asking about his childhood memories of the deadliest industrial disaster in U.S. history.

It was my first interview. I was in 5th grade.

The hour-long conversation with Jimmy Jimenez, who lost five family members in the Texas City Disaster on April 16, 1947, was captured on a cassette recorder and transcribed on my grandmother’s typewriter for a countywide Social Studies contest. Recently, while digging through some boxes, I found the light blue folder with the tape, the transcript (titled “Through the Eyes of a 6-Year-old: The 1947 Blast”), and my first “journalism” award — a red Second Place ribbon.

Seventy-eight years after the explosions killed more than 500 people and injured thousands more, I decided to look back at this interview, captured when Jimenez was in his early 30s. What I read and heard was a riveting, visceral, and tragic account of the defining moment in my hometown’s history.

This is Jiminez’s story. In preparing this, I’ve added context in italics to the oral account, which has been lightly condensed and edited.

‘There Was A Big Green Fire’

Texas City is a deepwater port on the southwest shoreline of Galveston Bay, located about 45 miles south of downtown Houston. It is one of the leading producers of petroleum and petrochemicals in the nation and its port is the eighth largest in the U.S.

In 1947, the town was home to two chemical plants, three oil refineries, the nation’s largest tin smelter, and six oil tank farms. Lured by high paying jobs post-World War II, Texas City’s population had grown from 5,687 residents to about 16,000. In the 1940s, the tiny row houses near the docks were largely occupied by minorities — segregated Blacks (“The Bottom”) and Hispanic families who had immigrated to the Gulf Coast town (El Barrio).

About 8 a.m. on April 16, ammonium nitrate fertilizer caught fire in the cargo hold of the French-owned SS Grandcamp, which also was carrying small-arms ammunition, machinery and bales of twine.

Jimenez and his brother, 7-year-old Hector, were morning students at Danforth Elementary because the fast-growing system was at capacity in its primary schools. Three of their six older siblings — two brothers and a sister — went to the school in the afternoon. The Jimenez family lived near the dock in El Barrio and the young boys noticed the fire.

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“We heard the fire engines going and looked across at it. I guess we lived a block or two from where the ship was docked. My daddy (Jesus Jiminez) had built something like a little farm there with cows and chickens and horses and pigs. At the time my grandfather, my mother's father, lived with us. He was a retired railroad man.

My daddy had gotten hurt the week before at work and had a broken collarbone, so he was at home sick. Behind the house there was a pathway cutting from left to right going towards the ship. Hector and I went out that way and followed the path down to where the ship was burning. There was a big green fire going way up above the ship. It looked like copper wire burning.

We saw one of my uncles (Jesus DeLeon). I held his left hand, and my brother held his right hand. We were about 3 to 5 yards from the ship. We stepped over the hoses and there were firemen all around. There were a great number of people there watching. Of course, they had fires down there all the time, so it was a very common practice just to go down and watch.

About that time someone tapped us on the shoulder. It was my Daddy. He told me and Hector to go and get our books because we were late for school.”

The Explosion

School started at 9 a.m. At 9:12 a.m., the Grandcamp exploded, destroying the entire dock area, Monsanto Chemical Company, grain warehouse, more than 1,000 buildings, and numerous other oil and chemical storage tanks. The concussion from the explosion produced a 15-foot tidal wave, shattered windows in Houston, was felt 250 miles away in Louisiana, and registered on a seismograph in Denver, Colorado.

“Hector and I had gone down the road toward school. We were fixing to cross Texas Avenue when the ship blew up. We didn’t know what happened. We thought the world was ending or something. We went ahead past Texas Avenue and walked about half a block, but we were scared to death.

There was a huge cloud — real, real dark — and you could see things flying in the air.

It was coming from the south and going north, almost blotting out the sky. It reminded us very much of a norther coming in. Hector and I kept on running toward Danforth.

We ran into our brother, Joe, who was in about the ninth grade. We were crying and I grabbed one leg, and Hector grabbed the other leg. We were scared to death.

The first thing he asked us was where were Mom and Dad. I looked back toward the blast area and pointed in that direction. Joe sald for us to go to Danforth, that they were picking up school children on buses, and he took off running toward the house.”

Jimenez said his father and grandfather were standing in their yard watching the fire when the ship exploded.

“My daddy was smoking a cigarette, and they were waiting for my mother to finish breakfast. My older sister Mary was asleep in one of the front bedrooms. When the explosion took place, flying glass from the window where my mother was standing cut her real, real bad.”

Jimenez said his injured mother tried to rush out of the house to check on another sibling, Ernestine, who was working at one of the petrochemical plants nearby. Mary managed to get her mother into an ambulance that would take her to a hospital in Galveston.

“My dad and grandfather had fallen down in the yard. My dad got up and looked at my grandfather. He had a piece of steel running from the top of his head to below his chin. He was dead. Daddy had his shirt and one shoe blown off.

Daddy took off running inside the house. We had a kerosene stove that had turned over and it was catching fire. There was a bucket of water nearby and he picked it up and put the fire out. He got a big blanket from the closet and took off to where my sister was working. He was one of the first guys there.

He noticed a lot of people dying or in the stages of dying, with limbs cut off. They were asking for help. It was like a nightmare. He went to where my sister Ernestine was working and the building had been leveled, He dug around looking for her and finally found her. She couldn't talk. She was in agony. She was about dead then. It was 10 days before her wedding. She was going to get married to a boy from Baytown.”

Jimenez’s older brother found his grandfather next to a pig stye. He put the body into a wheelbarrow and rolled it to the street where an ambulance picked it up. His grandfather was taken to a makeshift morgue in the old high school gym.

“Meanwhile, my dad was trying to lift (Ernestine). Because of his bad collarbone break and the big cast he couldn't. He saw a man running toward him and asked if he would help carry his daughter. The man said that was why he came. There wasn’t much more exchange of words. They rolled my sister in a blanket and ran a steel pipe through it. With the man's help, they got her to one of the first ambulances. She died on the way to Galveston.

After my father put my sister on the ambulance and my brother had taken care of my grandaddy, my brother found my daddy. They went to City Hall where there was a temporary Rod Cross Station. There were a lot of people coming from everywhere to help.

My dad and my brother spent the night there. They didn't know if we had been killed or not. They were asked to go into the plant area that night, but they decided not to. People were going in to get bodies out and look for people who were injured. They were digging out bodies and about 1 a.m. (on April 17) there was another explosion.”

The High Flyer, another cargo ship loaded with 2,000 tons of sulfur, had been released from its moorings by the force of the Grandcamp explosion. At least two people were killed in the second explosion, which wrecked a third cargo ship, destroyed several nearby grain elevators and what was left of the pier. Meanwhile, Jimmy and Hector were separated from their family.

‘We Just Kept Running’

“Hector and I proceeded toward Danforth like our brother asked us to. We ran into my sister, Josie, who was in the fourth or fifth grade. She grabbed us by the hands, and we ran northward until we got to Loop 197. Then we got on the right side of the loop and just kept running.

It seemed like we were trying to escape from the end of the world. We were so frightened.There were lots and lots of people. It reminded you of refugees leaving a war area. People were panicky, nervous, and crying. We just followed them out to Highway 146 and turned right, going (north). We ran all the way across the old wooden bridge at San Leon. On the other side were a lot of yellow railroad houses. We stayed there for an hour or two.

While we were there, a lady put us in her automobile and took us to Houston. We didn't know her name. We thought our parents were dead. We spent several nights at her place. She lived upstairs in an apartment. Downstairs there was a cafe, a bar or something. I remember the record player playing.

After we were there several days, she took us to Camp Wallace, a deactivated U.S. Army post (in Hitchcock, about 10 miles from Texas City). There were a lot of empty barracks, so the Red Cross set up a temporary station. They brought in food and clothing and while we were there we ran into uncles and aunts and some of our relatives.

We found out our parents were alive. For two weeks, we had not known. My mother had been in the hospital about a week or so. She didn't know who had died or anything. The reports being sent out included my dad’s name in the list of the dead, even though he wasn't. Relatives couldn't find out anything.

Several days passed and we found out my grandfather, my sister, and the uncle that we watched the fire with were killed. Two cousins who went to school in the afternoon were watching the fire and they were killed. All five of my relatives are buried side by side at the cemetery.”

The Aftermath

It is unknown how many people died in the explosions, with estimates ranging from 500 to 700. The ship’s anchor monument lists 576 deaths — 398 were identified and 178 were listed as missing.

Memorial services were held on April 19 at the high school football stadium and on May 30 at the fire station to honor the 28 firefighters who were killed in the first explosion. On June 22, an interdenominational funeral service was held for the victims whose remains could not be identified.

After the funeral they set up temporary housing near where Food Giant was. We stayed there until we could rent a place in Galveston, We went to school in Galveston, and then, after things were getting back to normal, we moved back to Texas City.

We didn't feel the impact as much as my father because we were so young. It was a nightmarish, scary, horrible thing. From being very calm to being chaotic — no home, no job — it really hurt him so much.

My daddy and mother were crushed. They cried a lot. It was a nightmare. The aftermath was like hopelessness. It took so long to accept the fact that so many relatives were killed.

The city slowly recovered, even though officials say the emotional effects of the blast is still felt by families today, almost 80 years later. In the immediate aftermath, fundraisers featuring celebrities Jack Benny and Frank Sinatra, among others, helped raise much needed money for the victims’ families. Monsanto rebuilt its refinery, as did other petroleum and petrochemical companies.

The Texas City Disaster is cited as the source for large scale disaster planning in the U.S. New standards were put in place for the storage, transportation, and dispersal of ammonium nitrate. In 1955, eight years after the blast, $17 million was allocated by the federal government to be distributed to 1,400 people.

In City on Fire, a fascinating and detailed history of the disaster and its aftermath, author Bill Minutaglio recounts Jesus Jiminez’s reaction to receiving a financial settlement for Ernestine’s death. “I just wanted to tell you that I have a check here for $25,000,” Jesus told his family. “It is very precious, but it is blood money and very sacred. We have to treat it as such.”

Jimenez and his brother, Hector, were teachers, coaches, and administrators in Texas City throughout my years in school. Hector died of a heart attack in 1995 at age 54; Jimmy, now in his 80s, still lives in Texas City.

To learn more about the Texas City Disaster, visit the Moore Memorial Public Library’s website here.

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March is always a transitional month. The climate gets into a wrestling match pitting winter against spring. Clocks move forward and screw us all up. The freelance work starts to emerge from months of hibernation.

In sports, football begrudgingly cedes most of the airwaves to baseball, hockey, and basketball — sports for which I have varying levels of interest. I love baseball, still don’t know how hockey works, and am not that interested in pro basketball.

College basketball, however, is a different story, especially in March. For three decades, I have been part of my wife’s college basketball loving family — one that bleeds UNC. When the Tar Heels are playing well, all is right with the world; when they’re not, Jill and my in-laws are in alternate states of denial, defeat, and disgust.

That is why, after decades in a hellscape when trying to rooting for my alma mater, I’ve been so surprised by the revival at the University of Houston, which advanced to its second Final Four in four years on Sunday. More than 40 years after the heyday of Phi Slama Jamma and 33 straight years without a NCAA tournament win, the Cougars have now reached the Sweet 16 six consecutive times — the longest current streak in college basketball.

UH’s ascent comes with a mix of hope trepidation and fatalism to a longtime fan. This is the team’s seventh Final Four appearance; Houston is the only program to make it that far that many times without winning it all.

The Agony of Defeat

In sports, I hold lifelong grudges. I still have one against the Pittsburgh Steelers more than four decades after they defeated the Houston Oilers in back-to-back AFC championships in the late 1970s. And I have a continued animus toward North Carolina State after Jim Valvano’s team defeated the UH in the NCAA championship in March 1984. The annual clip of Valvano running around, looking desperately for someone to hug, brings acid reflux with it every time.

The UH-N.C. State game, one of the biggest upsets in college basketball history, took place during my freshman year in college. It was the height of Phi Slama Jama, a term coined the previous year by Houston Post columnist Thomas Bock to describe a team that used its athleticism to dunk on anyone and everyone.

UH made it to the championship the following year, losing to Georgetown, and then began a three-decade slide into mediocrity. By the time I moved to North Carolina in 1993, I was years removed from paying attention, preferring to focus my limited attention span instead on the Houston Rockets, who were then were led by UH’s Hakeem Olajuwon.

Because my focus was on pro football, baseball, and basketball, I didn’t realize the depth of what I was getting into when I moved to North Carolina. At the time, NASCAR and the Charlotte Hornets were the only professional games in the state, and college sports — specifically basketball — were and still are kings.

The year I moved to Reidsville, UNC had just won its second national championship under legendary Coach Dean Smith. When Jill and I got together, she refused to go out with me during the ACC tournament unless we could find some place to watch the game.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, although I found myself facing a steep learning curve given my DNA was injected with football before I left the hospital. Some would claim the same happens with college basketball in North Carolina, which has four ACC teams — UNC, N.C. State, Duke, and Wake Forest — within two hours of each other.

The rivalries — especially Duke and UNC — run deep, so much so that they were parodied in this commercial that aired during March Madness games this year.

The End of an Era

I arrived at UH as a freshman in the fall of 1983, having finished the summer after high school graduation working at the Texas City Sun. My first front page byline appeared in The Daily Cougar on the first day of classes; by year’s end, I had spent so much time working for the campus newspaper that the university “gently encouraged” me to go to a community college.

My best friend from those days was Brian, a sportswriter and English lit major who came from an upper middle-class family and all of the stereotypical shitshow issues you can attach to that. Brian was five years older, a semi-reformed stoner and the only person I knew at the time who seemed determined to stretch a four-year degree program into a decade-long experiment.

Brian and I shared interests in music, books, and sports. He was also a girl magnet, and a mentor in that department for what to do (and, sadly, not to do). For more than two decades, he was the older brother I never had.

The night UH lost to N.C. State, the entire newsroom got loaded on cheap beer while filing on-campus reaction stories. Given we both were from the Houston area, we were used to our teams disappointing us. It was one reason Brian started rooting for the Dallas Cowboys — “I have to have at least one team that wins,” he said.

The following season, 1984-85, I was working in Texas City and Brian was logging time doing agate (the small type that used to be on the statistics and standings pages) compilations for the Post. After filing my stories, three or four times a week we would talk late at night using the Sun’s Houston line, which we had to avoid long-distance phone charges when we called any place north of the Texas City city limits.

After UH’s loss to Georgetown in 1985, Houston entered a dark era, not winning a single NCAA tournament game for 33 years. But the program has seen a resurgence under Coach Kelvin Sampson, ironically coming at a time when ACC programs — UNC included — have struggled to match past successes.

Finally, after several years of lobbying on my part and UNC’s early departure from the tournament, Jill has agreed to root for Houston this year. Sweetening the pot for us both: UH faces Duke — a heavy favorite to win it all — in the first Final Four game on Saturday.

Remembering a Friend

Over the years, Brian and I remained friends, moving from job to job and place to place through our personal ups and downs. We both married and had kids. We both left newspapers and went into communications. I moved out of Texas, got divorced, and remarried; he separated numerous times from his wife and stayed in Houston because he was afraid he would lose access to his sons.

Still close, we remained in touch, but the calls became less frequent. On occasion, we still would catch up on a late night, reminiscing and talking about the things we mutually loved, and we always chatted before the NFL season started to give our predictions. Given I lived in the D.C. area, Brian razzed me about Washington’s football team and the Cowboys’ ongoing superiority.

In the summer of 2005, Brian and his wife separated again. Although I reached out, we didn’t talk for several months, which felt strange because the Houston Astros were en route to their first World Series and we had been to so many baseball games together. I left several messages on his voicemail at work with no response, which came as a surprise because it meant there would be no NFL preview chat.

I figured we would talk before Washington played Dallas on Monday Night Football, the 15th such meeting between the two teams. After Washington won 14-13 against the heavily favored Cowboys in what was dubbed “The Monday Night Miracle,” I called his work and apartment and left messages without a response. A few days later, I left for a conference in Las Vegas.

While there, I got a phone call from Sandra Santos, a UH classmate and mutual friend who somehow tracked me down. Brian had died by suicide; it was his second attempt. He had been on medical leave from work and had died alone in his apartment.

Brian’s death, at 45, was soul crushing, in part because I had not realized the depths of his depression. It took me a long time to realize there was nothing I could have done, especially from 1,200 miles away.

Since then, I have made a conscious effort to reach out to those I care most about in this life, no matter how far flung from each other we are. I’m know how lucky I am to have a terrific extended family, a motley crew of folks biological and otherwise that I speak with regularly.

I think of Brian often, especially around this time of year. Almost 20 years after his death, I still ask all the questions one asks. As I get older, I think of other friends who have been lost along the way. It’s a reminder to take the time to seek out someone you haven’t thought of in a while.

Because you just never know.

Here’s to you, Brian. I hope this year, as I do every year, that UH can win it all.

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The summer before my freshman year in high school, our neighbor Fran hired me to do a job at her office — a 17,000-square-foot, two-story mansion located near NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

The position was offered on two conditions. First, Fran would pay me — minimum wage — out of her pocket. Second, I couldn’t talk about the task — color coding hundreds of thousands of photographs from space missions that Fran and a colleague had rescued from the NASA dumpsters.

Despite the secretive nature of the work, it was not sexy. But it is an interesting story.

Neighbors, NASA and Silver Dollar Jim

Ten years earlier, a month before Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, we had moved into our house on 22nd Avenue in Texas City. Then 4 and looking for other kids to play with, I walked across the street and rang the doorbell at the Waranius’ house. Fran and her husband, Bill, had no children, but they invited me in for a visit, starting a lifelong friendship.

Fran and Bill, who were 10 years older than many parents, had moved to Texas from Chicago after he was hired by Amoco Chemical (now BP), one of the many petrochemical plants in my hometown. In 1970, the year after we arrived in the neighborhood, Fran started her job at the Lunar Science Institute.

Now the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), the research institution had opened earlier that year at the former mansion of “Silver Dollar” Jim West, a lumber magnate and oil man.

West built the 45-room Italian Renaissance Revival home in 1930 to serve as the centerpiece of his 30,000-acre ranch, which stretched from the banks of what is now Clear Lake to Ellington Field. Known for carrying silver dollars in his pocket and throwing them to people he saw on the street, West sold most of his property to Humble Oil (later Exxon-Mobil) in 1939 but kept the mansion. After his death in 1941, his widow moved to Houston, leaving the house behind.

Humble Oil developed the Clear Lake community and donated 1,000 acres to the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center (now JSC) in 1961. The West mansion, which had been left to Rice University with the provision that it never be used as a residence, sat vacant for more than two decades until it was renovated and opened as the research institute.

Coming on the heels of NASA’s first successful Apollo mission, the institute was established for scientists and academics from around the world to study space and the solar system. Fran became the institute’s first librarian in July 1971, making the commute from Texas City to Clear Lake in her Plymouth Duster.

Fran catalogued the library’s first book and more than 11,000 others during her 23-year career, but her greatest contribution started with a near dumpster dive.

Rescue Mission

By the mid 1970s, NASA was struggling financially. Federal funding, which had been accelerated throughout the 1960s in an effort to land on the moon, was cut under President Nixon. The final moon landing, Apollo 17, took place in 1972. Skylab, the first U.S. space station, was occupied for 24 weeks between 1973 and 1974. It wasn’t until 1981 that the first space shuttle was launched.

At one point, NASA contractors were told to toss the records from previous space missions that were housed at JSC’s Research Data Facility. Fran, an organized packrat who “never refused a file cabinet,” heard of the plan and convinced a NASA colleague to put them into her Duster instead of the dumpster.

She moved photos and documents from the Ranger, Surveyor, Lunar Orbiter, and Apollo missions from NASA — most of them not digitized — into her house, where they stayed for six months. Eventually the lunar program materials were stashed in one of the multiple garages that West had built for his many automobiles.

"Sometimes it was rather clandestine. You kept what you had and kept quiet about it until you could convince people of the value of archiving it,” Fran said in an article that marked her retirement. “The collection of documentary materials. the early mission products — Surveyor, Ranger, Orbiter, even early Apollo — exist nowhere else.”

Fran had developed a color-coding system to tag the documents of each successful Apollo mission, which started with #7 in October 1968 and ended with #17 in December 1972. (The first Apollo crew — Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee — were killed in a flash fire during a simulation on the launch pad in Florida in January 1967.)

The problem: No one on staff had time to do the work.

Enter: Me.

Filing History

In the summer of 1979, I was 14 and in no man’s land when it came to possible employment. Already tired of mowing lawns in the smothering Texas humidity to get spending money, I was ineligible to work in a “real job” due to child labor laws that prevented businesses from hiring you until age 16.

I was born without a science gene, but Fran “hired” me to tag along with her to work, telling her supervisors that I was volunteering while she paid me under the table.

The task was organizing the photos, which had become jumbled in the various moves, into Fran’s very analog color-coding system. Armed with multiple reams of stickers, a cassette player, and six-packs of Tab, I took over an entire large garage for the project.

Countless boxes that held the photos were stashed in another garage, so I walked them over one by one to the room. I emptied each box, checked the serial numbers indicating which mission it was, added a sticker and built piles on two long tables.

For two months, five days a week, I looked at rock after rock, footprint after footprint, dusty surface after dusty surface. Occasionally, a classic image would appear out of nowhere and break up the monotony.

Out of order, I saw the history of our space program unfold.

The job had other benefits as well. On breaks, I wandered the hallways and grounds of the old West mansion. I spent valuable time in the car going back and forth from Texas City to Clear Lake with my “second mom.” Fran let me keep the duplicates of images I found and gave me additional NASA ephemera she had collected.

Afterward

Soon after my job was finished, LPI and NASA had a memorandum of understanding that established the institute as a repository for lunar program materials. Eventually, the archival materials Fran collected during her career filled 11 rooms in three buildings.

In 1992, LPI left the West mansion and moved to a more modern building near the University of Houston at Clear Lake. The following September, facing ongoing and worsening health problems from a lifelong battle with scleroderma, Fran retired.

She died in 2007, less than three years after her beloved husband.

The West mansion was sold multiple times over the next 25 years; the last owner was Hakeem Olajuwon, the Hall of Fame basketball player. Even though it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a Texas Historic Landmark, the mansion was demolished by bulldozers in 2019.

Unlike the photos and documents saved by a packrat librarian, the mansion is a piece of history lost forever.

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The images shown in this article are photographs of some NASA duplicates Fran allowed me to keep. Below are a few more:

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“Son, wake up.”

I had become used to this nighttime ritual by the middle of my fourth-grade year. Two or three times a week, my father would nudge me gently and ask me to get up several hours before breakfast, then make sure I was tucked back in just before my mom woke for the day.

I never was quite sure what he wanted, even though the pattern had become somewhat predictable. Maybe he needed me to sit in the carport on the rusty freezer, holding a piece of masonite in place as he tried to cut and bend it into a 3-D sculpture. Or perhaps, in those pre-cable/pre-VCR days, he wanted to watch an old movie on Channel 13, the ABC Houston affiliate that showed classic films at 2 a.m.

Not tonight. This time we were going on a little trip. And upping the ante was the fact my dad was going to drive.

Several months earlier — the timeline is a little fuzzy, especially looking back more than 50 years — he was diagnosed with spasmodic torticollis, a neurological disorder affecting the muscles of the neck. My dad’s head turned and locked in place, the spasm so strong I could not make it move.

In 1974, no one seemed to know what had caused it. Speculation at the time centered on a motorcycle accident he’d had several years earlier, although much later it was traced to a genetic defect (dysplasia). Even worse, no one knew how to treat it.

At this point, my dad was on a pharmacological cocktail that left him sleeping more often than not. Except, it seemed, in the middle of the night.

A ‘Simple’ Plan

“Dad, are you sure you can drive?”

“It’s not that far. Don’t worry about it.”

The plan, as my father explained it, was simple: Drive the car from our house to my mom’s school, go to her classroom, get the opaque projector, and find some way to put it in the trunk. After the drive home, he would load the projector with the mural he’d been working on and sketch it out on the living room wall.

It seemed so simple to him. It was not so simple for his 9-year-old sleep-deprived accomplice.

Mom’s school — Roosevelt-Wilson Elementary — was just over a mile from my parents’ house on 22nd Avenue. Given that my dad’s neck was twisted at just less than a 90-degree angle, I was more than a little concerned about him driving.

Fortunately for my father, not much happened at 2 a.m. on a school night in Texas City, the last place on the mainland before you cross over to Galveston Island. The skies were half lit by the petrochemical plants that lined its south side, a constant reminder that Texas City calls itself “the town that would not die” despite the worst industrial accident in U.S. history.

My parents moved there just before I was born, fresh out of college and determined to build a life together as a young family. Texas City’s appeal was largely economic; in the mid 1960s through the early 1970s, the town and neighboring La Marque paid the highest teacher salaries in the state.

Part of that, I’m sure, was considered hazard pay, especially considering my hometown’s traumatic history and vulnerability to hurricanes and violent industrial mayhem.

The Texas City Disaster took place on April 16, 1947, when a cargo hold containing ammonium nitrate fertilizer ignited and blew up on the SS Grandcamp, a French-owned ship. More than 500 people — no one has an exact count — were killed and 5,000 were injured. Entire blocks of homes were destroyed and people in Galveston — almost 15 miles from the site — were knocked to their knees by the explosion’s force.

Today, the blast is cited as the “foundation for disaster planning for the United States.” Remarkably, Texas City was rebuilt, and many of its residents stayed as the community continued to grow, thanks to the petrochemical refineries that continue to line the city’s south side. I remember them by the names Amoco Chemical, Amoco Oil, Marathon, Monsanto, and Union Carbide, although most have changed hands since.

My Hometown

Texas City is organized on a grid of streets and avenues. Bay Street was the easternmost point because it ran next to the waterline; a hurricane protection levee was added after Hurricane Carla flooded homes and businesses in 1961. The levee, of course, turned the city into a big bowl, so a pump station with gigantic screws was installed on the north side to suck out the water from the Gulf storms that roll into the city.

Imagine, if you will, water draining out of your bathtub. That’s what it’s like on the streets where I grew up after a big rain.

To the west was State Highway 3, the main road that connected Galveston to Houston until Interstate 45 was built. Highway 3, which runs parallel to railroad tracks that run back and forth between the two places, also was the dividing line between Texas City and La Marque, where many of the low-income survivors from the blast moved.

Prior to the blast, Texas Avenue was the dividing line between north and south. To the south were tract homes were either obliterated by the blast or have since been torn down in an effort to create green space between the industrial plants and residential areas.

The Matthews Tire Company, a family-owned business that is still in operation, is at the corner of Texas and Sixth Street. It serves as an informal crossroad between areas that were segregated — first largely by race, and then later by economics. Owned by neighbors who lived across the street from us, it was the place where everyone got their automotive work done. Today, much of its business comes from local industry still in need of tires that are larger than most middle school children.

When Texas Avenue’s stature as the city’s business hub declined, Sixth Street became the downtown business district, starting at the Food King on Third Avenue North and eventually extending all the way to what became Loop 197. It was a mix of mom-and-pop businesses — Mainland Pharmacy, Fork and Spoon, King’s Jewelers, Rocks, Simpson’s Shoes, the Showboat Theater — and chain department stores that still managed to have a down-home touch (J.C. Penney and Weiner’s).

The town’s grid accommodated other major cross streets that, because of a lack of zoning, attracted businesses as well — Ninth Street and 14th Street from north to south, and Fifth and Ninth Avenue east to west.

Sixth Street started its slow fade, like other downtowns across the nation, in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. Development — and the growth of franchised stores — moved westward toward I-45, which had become the gateway to Houston 35 miles to the north. A number of attempts have been made to revitalize the area to some success, but it is no longer the force it once was.

Ninth Avenue became, and remains, the primary entry point into the city, although for some reason — still mysterious to me all these years later — its name changes to Palmer Highway near the high school and the Emmett Lowry Expressway before you get to I-45.

Fourth Grade Struggles

Fourth grade sucked for any number of reasons. I was living a dual life of school during the day and excursions late at night with my pharmaceutically addled dad. My mom, with a 9-year-old and a 3-year-old, was trying to make ends meet amidst a never-ending stack of medical bills, not knowing whether her husband would ever be OK or what piece of strange art would greet her the next morning.

I didn’t understand what she faced at the time, or had faced throughout her life. My mom’s family — the majority of whom were in the tiny West Texas towns of Baird and Albany — were stuck in abstract poverty and were “poor as church mice.” Her parents married young, just out of high school, and my grandfather followed the oil boom to East Texas in the mid-1930s, building oil wells and refineries. My grandmother, a tiny woman, died at 29 — a week after giving birth to my mom on August 15, 1941.

After Pearl Harbor, my grieving grandfather left my infant mother and his 8 1/2 year old son in West Texas to join the Navy, where he worked as a Seabee in Okinawa. He returned to Baird with a new wife post war to pick up his son; Gladys, the new wife, insisted he take my mom with him. The seeming act of kindness was double edged, giving my mother a life that was more stable economically and bluntly distant emotionally.

My parents met at Kilgore College, married after my dad graduated from North Texas State University, and moved to Texas City. Then his illness struck, and they were stuck..

Fourth grade was the first time we switched classes during the school day, which meant that I had to go to Miss Givens’ math class. That proved to be the source of much consternation. Miss Givens, fresh out of college, was the subject of my first crush. I wasn’t sure whether it was due to the onset of puberty or just a terrible case of sleep deprivation, but I was swooning. All I knew is I sure as heck couldn’t talk to my parents or any of my teachers about it.

Further complicating matters was the fact my homeroom teacher was my mom’s best friend. Rita — or Mrs. Boykin as I had to call her while at school — made it a point to let me know she already knew most of my tricks.

This was the height of the Elmer’s Glue “second skin” phase that kids went through. You put glue on your hand, spread it as thin as you can, then peel it off. The result, if you do it right, looks like a snake that had lost a layer.

I loved doing this, but one day I forgot to close the glue, which meant the little white tip no longer sealed off the orange cap. Shoved sideways onto the top drawer of my turquoise-colored desk, the glue spilled and proceeded to become attached to the Roger Staubach Scholastic biography that Mrs. Boykin had loaned me from her reading library.

Terrified, I couldn’t figure out a way to get the book out of my desk without tearing it apart, so I told her I had lost it at home. So here I was, telling a fib about a 50-cent paperback and driving with my dad to steal an opaque projector. At 9, I was having an existential crisis, worried that I was beginning a life of crime.

The Long Short Drive

The two-door Cadillac rolled slowly out of the carport, and thankfully Mr. Matthews had kept his truck in their driveway. Our street was narrow, with curved curbs that you had to park on with two wheels to leave enough room for other cars to pass. I seriously doubt my father would have been able to get the Cadillac successfully out of the driveway if the truck had been parked in the street.

It was my dad’s lucky night. Glassy-eyed, he was brimming with confidence. “This shouldn’t take long,” he said.

Right shoulder turned facing the windshield, he took things slowly. After successfully maneuvering the driveway, we turned right onto Ninth Street, then left onto 19th Avenue, which for some reason I could never fathom was only one block from 22nd.

So far, so good. But as he executed the turn onto Sixth Street, another question crossed my sleep-deprived mind.

“How,” I asked, “are we going to get the projector from Mom’s classroom into the car?” Then, still not fully grasping the gravity of the situation, I added helpfully, “If the light bulb breaks, she’ll really be mad at you.”

Roosevelt-Wilson, at that time, spread across three city blocks — 14th to 16th Avenue. The Wilson building, on 14th Avenue, housed the second and third grade. The Roosevelt building, on 16th Avenue, was for the fifth and sixth grade. Both opened in the fall of 1947 — just after the blast — and were connected by a long, narrow sidewalk with several large breaks and buckles in the cement. It was not exactly what you needed for the smooth transport of a 50-pound, hulking opaque projector on a rickety cart in the middle of the night.

Two other buildings, built to accommodate the post-World War II population growth, sat between the classrooms named after the dead presidents. On the Roosevelt side was the gym, the dreaded fourth-grade classrooms that were the bane of my then-existence, and the library. On the Wilson side, and closest to a separate cafeteria, was a long 1954 building that accommodated kindergarten, first grade, and the school’s administrative office.

Four of the six classrooms in that building — Rooms 3 through 6 — were not enclosed, meaning they opened directly onto a covered porch and grassy area where the smaller kids could have recess. My mom’s classroom was Number 5, which was good news as my dad saw it.

“We’ll just hop the curb,” he said.

Making It Work

Thanks to its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, Texas City generally has three seasons: early summer, mid-summer, and late summer. We saw snow once during my childhood — in 1973, the year before the projector heist — but went to the beach as often as not at Christmas.

In addition to the bugs and the smell from the petrochemical plants (“That’s money,” my parents said, almost in unison), the persistent humidity always left dew on the grass in the middle of the night. Going outside in the morning, you inevitably would end up with wet feet and grass stains on your shoes.

To my 9-year-old brain, the dew presented another problem: When the 5,000-pound Cadillac hopped the curb and crossed over to my mom’s classroom, which was located where 15th Avenue should have been, it would smash down the grass and leave ruts. Wouldn’t that leave evidence in case the police tried to find us?

Again, my father wasn’t worried. He obviously had a master plan, which I could only surmise.

His solution: Drive slowly without headlights and hop the curb at the east end of the Wilson building. Dad took his foot off the accelerator and let the car idle along at 4-5 mph in drive. He also managed to do a reasonable job of parking near the front door to my mom’s classroom.

Loading the projector was tough, but we managed somehow to get it into the trunk of the Cadillac — itself big enough to house a family of four — without anything breaking. The only remaining issue, as my father saw it, was that he’d forgotten to bring rope to secure it in the back.

He asked: “Would you mind riding in the trunk and holding it?”

At this point, my existential crisis turned into elation. What 9-year-old child wouldn’t want to ride in an open car trunk at 2:30 a.m. on a school night, holding on to an opaque projector so it wouldn’t fall out and splatter across the street into a million pieces?

I was thrilled. In that moment, I had purpose. If not in life, then at least for the next few minutes.

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I’m not much of a risk taker, or I didn’t see myself as one for a long time.

As a child, I lived in the same house from age 4 until I graduated from high school. That stability was welcome but also confusing, because my sister and I lived with the uncertainty surrounding one chronically, often debilitatingly ill parent and another who was in a constant scramble to hold everything together. (Major props to my mom.)

I became afraid — terrified even — of making mistakes, which threatened to disrupt or topple the precarious ecosystem at home. My parents had enough on their plates between my dad’s illness and their own aging parents, all four of whom would die in a 10-year period starting when I was 16.

I looked for ways out. I became friends with adults much older than me and made choices that were both to my advantage and to my detriment. Nine days after graduation, I landed a journalism job as a summer “intern” at my hometown newspaper. That fall, 40 miles to the north, I walked into “The Daily Cougar” with my resume and clips on the first day of my freshman year at the University of Houston. I left that evening, hired as a staff writer for $75 a month after placing a front-page story in the next day’s issue.

At the time, the money didn’t matter. I was more interested in work than school, a fact made obvious by my GPA. The poor grades meant I had to go home, but I managed to land a full-time job at the newspaper at age 19.

I left my parents’ house for good at 21, hopping from apartment to apartment every 6 to 12 months. Always looking for the lowest rent and the best deals (free microwaves were big incentives in the late 1980s), I was determined to live on the pittance I made while working 60 to 70 hours a week and taking college classes on the side.

At 25, I married my now-ex and, in short order, finally graduated, moved into a newspaper management position, and had a child. Then, in 1993, a job opportunity came up in North Carolina, an unexpected twist for someone who’d rarely traveled far from home.

-30- TK

In journalism terms, -30- means “The End.” In the days before computers and desktop publishing, writers used the symbol to indicate the story was done before turning it into the editor.

These symbols — a form of shorthand — were all over the newsroom, misspelled or with extra characters on purpose so that you could catch them while proofreading. “Lede” stood for the lead-in to a story; “TK” meant more “to come.”

Given the dark humor of many of the writers and editors I worked with, it should come as no surprise that these symbols found their way into practical jokes, such as when my first boss knelt for the vows at his wedding. The groomsmen had painted -30- on his left shoe and “TK” on the right, leading to chuckles in the audience who read it as “The End to Come.”

When we moved to North Carolina, I recognized I was putting our marriage at risk. We were on seemingly opposite paths, our priorities not in sync, and I knew the relationship would either thrive or die once we were 1,200 miles from our families.

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By the fall of 1994, four years into our marriage and seven years into our relationship, the fissures were deep and seemingly irreparable. The final straw was when I developed strong feelings that I could not shake for another person.

Jill and I had become friends soon after I spoke at her middle school career day earlier that year. From our first conversation, it was obvious we had a number of things in common, and we had an uncomfortable chemistry that persisted even after I learned she was engaged to someone else.

In late November, Jill asked if I would consider being the photographer for her wedding, which was scheduled for Dec. 11, 1994. I agreed, believing the event would bring a finality to this strange chemistry I felt. What better way to process it than to literally chronicle what was taking place?

Seeing her just before the ceremony, I wanted to say something. (“Don’t do it!” and “He’s not right for you” topped the list.) But I didn't, worried that doing so was transferring my unhappiness onto her. At the same time, I somehow knew in my soul that we would be good together if we had the chance.

I knew I could “make” my marriage work, but the foundation it was built on felt cracked beyond repair.

The Second Third

As my 30th birthday neared, I asked all the existential questions about life and my marriage. I had seen family members and other couples suffer through miserable marriages filled with strife, affairs, and mental illness and vowed never to find myself in that situation. Yet I was miserable.

On Christmas Eve 1994, two weeks after Jill’s wedding, I talked with my father about his relationship with my mom. I knew what they had — a relationship that continued to deepen in both the best and darkest times — was the standard I wanted.

Leaving the marriage, however, meant I had to live with the ramifications. I knew many of my family, friends, and acquaintances would not understand. I had to accept that others — specifically my ex and my son — would feel betrayed and hurt.

At the same time, I had to overcome my lifelong fear of taking risks, be mature enough to admit my mistakes, and move forward if I hoped to have what my parents had. In January 1995, days after turning 30, I walked the plank and didn't look back. Jokingly, I called it my “one-third life crisis,” noting that I fully intend to live to age 90.

The divorce was ugly. My ex, who is Catholic, sought to annul the marriage; I agreed, even though we had a child together. Almost every interaction we’ve had since has been tense, and we’ve spoken only a handful of times over the past 17 years.

I tried never to drag our son into our disagreements, even though his childhood was bifurcated between two very different families. Although we have established a strong and loving adult relationship, I still deal with guilt over how my decision affected him.

Jill’s marriage didn’t last. That gut feeling I had before her wedding — that she and her ex were not right for each other — quickly bore itself out. By the end of 1995 we were together as a couple. By the end of 1997, we were married and had three children together. (Our twins were born on Dec. 11, 1997, a conscious coincidence.)

Today, I turn 60, closing the second third of my story.

It’s hard to believe all those things took place half a lifetime ago, or that these last 30 years have flown by so quickly. It’s difficult to imagine that all of our children are now adults and that we have two grandchildren.

The relationship between Jill and me isn’t perfect, but our foundation continues to deepen and grow even after all this time. We still have that unspeakable chemistry, and I can’t help but feel blessed and grateful for our family and the experiences we’ve had together.

Sometimes, no matter how dire it seems, taking a risk is worth it. The alternative is standing on the sidelines and watching life pass you by.

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The smoke filled the “breakfast room” on Saturday mornings when we visited my grandparents’ house in Longview. The room, just off the kitchen, was more of a nook. It contained a small table and a large radio that by this point had become a piece of furniture that no one felt the urge to move.

My father and grandfather sat and talked over breakfast while my grandmother worked in the kitchen. My mom was across town, visiting her father and stepmother, mercifully sparing her then only child the trip to visit the World War II veteran and the POW (piece of work) he had married and inflicted on all of us.

Even while eating, the cigarettes were lit and slowly burning in the half-full ashtrays, the air pungent with the nasal mix of tar, bacon grease, and coffee that my grandmother brewed on the stove.

On this day — I could not have been more than 4 or 5 — a visitor stopped by, adding to the conversation and to the cloud. I remember drawing in a deep breath, knowing even then that the cocktail of smells would stay with me forever. Later that day, when my grandfather drove my grandmother to the grocery store, I remember asking my her to buy me candy cigarettes, joint-like sticks of sugar that allowed me to be like them.

Flash forward 10 years: My grandfather is in the hospital. It’s one of many stays. He pauses when he speaks, whistling through his lips as he tries to catch his breath. He inhales oxygen with the same vigor he once did with a cigarette, the tubes coming out of his nose. COPD, the acronym that summed up his five-plus decades of smoking, is his eventual death sentence.

These memories, vivid and clear, invaded my brain in the middle of the night last week, broken only by the sound of the beeping machine. At some point, I had rolled over, and the line of IV fluids that were entering my arm had become crimped, hence the beeping.

Despite my best efforts to straighten things out, the beeping wouldn’t stop until the nurse came in and reset the machine. I settled back into a restless half-sleep, one that would be interrupted several more times throughout the night and the rest of my stay.

Ironic, isn’t it, that a hospital — where you go to recover from something bad enough that it put you there — is the worst place to get some good sleep?

From Work to Illness

“Drowning” is the best word I can use to describe the fall of 2024.

From a business standpoint, “hit and miss” is the kindest way I can describe the first nine months of the year. As I’ve mentioned, the freelance world has been unstable at best since the pandemic, and 2024 has been filled with ups and downs.

But starting in October and running through Thanksgiving, I was drowning in work, with more business in an eight-week period than in the previous four months combined. I photographed three multiple day conferences, shot more than 400 portraits of dancers in the “The Nutcracker” and a dance studio’s holiday showcase, and wrote three magazine stories. On top of that, I finished editing and laying out a 120-page book that my mother wrote for our family.

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By the time our family gathered in Wintergreen for Thanksgiving, I was ready for a break. Unfortunately, in the midst of all the work, I had not managed to escape the effects of the fall allergy season. A sudden shift in temperature left me with low energy and what seemed like a bad head cold.

Unfortunately, at some point over the holiday, some airborne strain met up with the cold. Taking advantage of my tired and likely compromised immune system, the two took out a sublet and proliferated all over my right lung. All I wanted to do was crawl in the bed and sleep.

As long as I can recall, I’ve never been a good sleeper. It dates back to the early days of my father’s illness, which started during the holiday season more than 50 years ago. Lonely and not wanting to disturb my mother, he used to wake me in the middle of the night, establishing a pattern of nap/wake up/nap/wake up that I’ve rarely deviated from since.

For four days, I stayed mostly in bed, hoping rest would cure what ailed me. But it didn’t work, and two days after that, I was in the hospital, dehydrated and feverish, with more than 90 percent of my right lung covered in pneumonia and sepsis trying to invade my major organs.

Like my grandfather, I was drowning from the inside out.

The Roommate

“I’m not getting them dog hairspray.”

It was close to midnight, and I had been moved from one semi-private room to another. In the first, I was with a young man with cerebral palsy who would go into surgery the next morning. His mother had left at the end of visiting hours, promising to return the next day. The man couldn’t speak, but he moaned in bursts that sounded disembodied. At one point, a Code Red was issued on the unit.

My nurse found me another room, where an affable gentleman with a deep Southern accent was talking to his wife on FaceTime. The two were looking for presents for one of his children and grandchildren on Amazon; by the time they finished, the purchases totaled almost $1,000.

Still fighting a fever, I tried to write down observations on my phone. One reads: “Time is a thief, the holder of all memories.” Another: A delay in the simple printing of a label takes moments to fix, but with patience on edge, it seems like hours. A third note: A bearded guy with tattoos and a man bun escorts an elderly woman on a 20-minute jog around the nurses’ station. “Don’t worry, I won’t push you,” he says, breaking into an 8-year-old’s giggle.

My roommate and I tell each other our stories in fits and starts. In the dark, he tells jokes even as he recounts a sobering story, one of traveling the world as a counterintelligence special agent. He doesn’t talk about politics but plays Fox News incessantly, and at levels where I can hear it, in the background.

I can deal with pneumonia. I can’t deal with an endless loop of white men talking about puberty blockers, illegal aliens, and mystery drones. Fortunately, by day three of my stay, the sound is muted.

Family Tradition

Sick as it may sound, being hospitalized during the holiday season feels I’m carrying on a family tradition. Every year, without fail from my teens until my 30s, I spent the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas visiting relatives in the hospital, waiting and wondering when the dreaded shoe was going to drop like an anvil on a member of my immediate family.

Over the second half of his life, my father often found himself in the hospital over the holidays. Looking back, I can only imagine how difficult that was on my parents, especially my mom. To her everlasting credit, she worked tirelessly to ensure my sister and I had a nice holiday season, even if that meant excavating me from my traditional sleeping spot under the tree late on Christmas Eve or putting our dog Frisky’s paw on a rubber stamp pad so the “reindeer” could sign Santa’s thank you note for the milk and cookies.

My parents did this while somehow putting food on the table, paying the bills on time, and getting us what we wanted (within reason), even if that meant recycling bows and wrapping paper from year to year and event to event. It also meant the largest Christmas present always came in "the bag," which was then folded and put away until the next year.

I didn't realize then how those small blessings, over time, could turn into large ones. One was my second set of “parents” — Fran and Bill, the childless neighbors from across the street who “adopted” us as theirs. Having them there always made the holidays a little easier.

While stuck in bed, many of those old memories played like a highlight reel in my fitful dreams. I saw my grandfather in the hospital days before he died — 43 years ago this week. I saw the family conversation after my Uncle Dave had a car radiator explode in his face just before Thanksgiving. (If there’s one thing I can safely say about my uncle, it’s that his failure to differentiate between a warm engine and a hot toddy made him the winner in the “Most Unique Reason to Spend the Holiday in a Hospital” category.)

And I remembered, again, a holiday conversation with my father that changed my life.

A Change in Life

Thirty years ago, during my parents’ Christmas visit to North Carolina, my dad and I went to see two movies on the same day. Movies were one way my father and I bonded, and it didn’t hurt that I managed to escape what was an increasingly untenable situation at home. My ex and I had been married for almost five years and things were tense. We had a child together, and I was lost.

On the way back to Reidsville from Greensboro, I asked my dad: “Why, given everything you’ve been through, are you and mom still together? How have you made it work?”

He paused for a long time, then said, “When I look at your mother, I see the same person I fell in love with. Of course, she has changed, physically, and so have I, but I still see the same person. And she sees me. She’s my best friend.”

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For me, there was — and is — no simpler definition of love. More than I realized at the time, the conversation sealed it. Within a month, I left my marriage, hoping for the chance to have what my father had. Within two years, I had divorced, remarried, changed jobs, and Jill and I bought a house.

Two days after Christmas, in 1996, Jill gave birth to Katharine. On December 11, 1997, 11½ months later, she gave birth to Ben and Emma. With Nicholas’ birthday on the 9th, I had four children born in December. Christmas had moved from a season of endings to a season of beginnings.

As this Christmas approaches, I’m a handful of days removed from the hospital and on the mend.

We’re not traveling to New York City this year, but there is some consolation. Ben and Emma will be here this weekend to help their dance studio celebrate its 25th anniversary and we’ll get together for brunch with Kate, Matthew, and Marley on Sunday.

My doctor says it will take several weeks to fully recover, and I have to say that not having an appetite during gorgefest season has been its own sort of blessing. As this crazy year — and especially this fall — nears the end, I’m happy to report that I’m still drowning, but it’s in the love and caring I’ve received from friends and family.

In the end, that’s the best gift of all.

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In his dry, slow bantering style, he asked how I turned out the way I did — i.e. progressive and liberal. I blamed it on Saturday night television and the shows we had watched together when I was a kid. My fate was sealed by sitting on the couch and absorbing All in the Family, Maude, M*A*S*H, The Jeffersons, The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times, and The Carol Burnett Show — all of which aired on Saturdays on CBS at one point or another in the 1970s.

Widespread exposure to the topics found in these shows — culture, class, race, war, and women’s rights — was not terribly common in Texas, a state that has given me political pause on more than one occasion.

Growing up, I did not understand how the state’s conservative nature equated with its voting record; Texas had a Democratic governor for more than 100 years from the end of Reconstruction until 1979, when Bill Clements was elected to the first of two non-consecutive terms.

At some point, I realized being a Democrat in Texas never meant you were liberal.

Learning on the Job

I’ve written quite a bit this year about my first journalism job — a summer internship with the Texas City Sun, my hometown newspaper — but not the origin story behind it. In 1983, the Sun was owned by Jefferson-Pilot Corp., the life insurance company that had invested in newspapers, radio, and television stations.

The managing editor, Leo Lambert, was a veteran newspaperman who had come under fire for labeling two local community college professors as “socialists,” something they didn’t bother to deny. The feud got many riled up but didn’t do much for the paper’s reputation. More than once, locals told me they had bought birds just so they could line their cages with Leo’s editorials.

That fall, I went off to the University of Houston and joined the student newspaper staff, ending my first day as a freshman with an article on The Daily Cougar’s front page. Classes quickly became secondary to reporting and writing on student government, and it became evident that college was something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

High school had been easy, academically if not socially. I didn’t open a book — at least none related to the subject I was supposed to be studying — and still finished in the top 10 percent of my class of 353. Journalism, speech, and drama were my areas of interest — not exactly subjects that put you with the cool crowd, no matter how many football statistics you knew on the side.

In the summer of 1984, I returned to work at the Sun and enrolled at College of the Mainland, where I took political science classes from one of the so-called socialists and realized quickly that he wasn’t as crazy as Leo made him appear.

By summer’s end, Leo and the publisher were out as Jefferson Pilot sold its newspaper interests. The Sun was purchased by Southern Newspapers Inc., a community newspaper chain that also owned our chief competitor — the Galveston Daily News — and installed new much younger leadership. Even though I was still only 19 and very much “the kid,” I felt like I was working with a group of peers.

Looking back, it was one of the favorite periods of my 30-year office career.

Watching Ann Richards

What I appreciated about the Sun was the relative freedom my boss (John Simsen) gave me to pursue different types of stories. I was working for peanuts — everyone who worked for small-town newspapers did — so he told me to go for it if I wanted to chase fun stories on what was essentially my own dime and gas money.

I interviewed musicians (Charles Brown and B.B. King), authors (Bette Midler, Chuck Jones), met Muhammad Ali and Nolan Ryan, reported on the Challenger Memorial service, and later followed George H.W. Bush and Rajiv Gandhi around NASA.

One night in 1989, I covered a fundraiser for Ann Richards, the Democratic candidate for governor. Known for her ribald, sarcastic sense of humor, Richards had sealed her legendary status with a series of one-liners at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.

At the Galveston fundraiser, she focused on her populist themes. Two quotes from that evening continue to resonate with me in today’s polarized times.

“Repeatedly I see people who get into public office and seem to thrive on feeding their own ego or their own pocketbook,” said Richards, who was elected to succeed Clements as governor in 1990 and served until 1994. “Very few of them have the attitude that the purpose of government is to bring the players together to solve the people’s problems.

“When you lose sight of the people and you lose sight of the individual who is going to be affected by what you do in government, then you’ve lost the purpose of government.”

Richards, who was defeated by George W. Bush, is the last Democrat to win the governor’s seat in Texas. She made a series of progressive moves, including reforming prisons and instituting the Texas Lottery, but her legacy was left mixed after she signed a revised — and heavily negotiated — penal code that maintained a sodomy ban. The ban, since ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, remains on the books.

The Legacy of Molly Ivins

During this same period, I was fortunate to briefly meet Molly Ivins and Linda Ellerbee, both of whom were Texas natives and journalists/authors. Although their politics were different from my family’s, all three women shared two things in common with my mom and grandmother: brass balls and wits to match.

Ellerbee is still alive at 81, while Ivins died in 2007, the year after Richards passed away. The 2019 documentary, “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins,” is an affectionate tribute to the late columnist who for years castigated politicians with much the same fervor that Richards did.

“Ann and Molly created a sense of intimacy with their humor—they brought you in on the joke,” Texas Monthly’s Mimi Swartz wrote. “No one particularly cared that the jokes were cover for a roiling anger—both women understood intuitively that their humor could be used to draw listeners in and (maybe) change a few minds.”

“Raise Hell” reminds us that Ivins is in some ways as relevant today as when she was alive. Just read on:

• “When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election and also a good way to wreck a country.”

• “What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.” 

• “Whenever you hear a politician carry on about what a mess the schools are, be aware that you are looking at the culprit.” 

• “How the American right managed to convince itself that the programs to alleviate poverty are responsible for the consequences of poverty will someday be studied as a notorious mass illusion.” 

• “Many a time freedom has been rolled back, and always for the same sorry reason — fear.”

You can find more wisdom by reading Ivins’ books or by catching reruns of those classic 1970s shows I watched on those Saturday nights. More than likely, they won’t change how you feel or what you think, but maybe they’ll make you ponder the state of the current world and laugh a little, too.

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This past Christmas, my wife and I gave my 81-year-old mother a present and a task: A program called StoryWorth.

Each week, my mom receives a prompt asking her to write about a certain aspect of her life. What she writes is typed and uploaded; the essays, with pictures she selects to accompany them, will be compiled into a book for the family.

Given my mom’s sharp mind and attention to detail, I have no doubt this will be an excellent read. (Always an A student, it’s no surprise that she takes the task very seriously.) And her life story, in many respects, will prove to be a true keepsake, especially given her hardscrabble beginnings.

Ten years ago this past December, I had a chance to learn more about those beginnings as my mom and I drove across Texas toward Albany, a small town of less than 2,000 people that is 35 miles northeast of Abilene. When I was a child, at least once a year we made the 400-mile trek to West Texas to see her beloved Aunt Frances, who helped raised my mom and her brother when my grandfather enlisted in World War II.

My mom and I took our time on this journey, which had started in Austin, where my son Ben was performing on the national tour of “Billy Elliot.” What was supposed to be a joyous occasion — Frances’ son, Kerry, was coming from Albany to see the Saturday night performance with my mom — turned into a tragedy.

Kerry was killed in a head-on collision while driving to the show. When the tour left Austin the next day, mom and I headed for Albany and the funeral.

The Cedar Chest

The cedar chest in the laundry room always was a mystery when I was growing up. I knew it was my mother’s, and that she had gotten it after her mother’s death. I knew it held things precious to my mom, including the purse that my grandmother had taken to the hospital, as well as photographs and memories from times long past and rarely discussed.

What I didn’t know was whether the cedar chest held family history that I needed to hear, so I could once and for all separate legend from fact. This wasn’t tough to do on my father’s side of the family, because the Cooks were pretty much an open book. My paternal grandmother kept a diary for years and every scrap of correspondence — or so it seems — that she received in her lifetime.

Growing up, I knew little about my mom’s childhood, except that it was extremely difficult and impoverished, especially when she lived with her aunt, uncle, and other family members while my grandfather was serving in World War II.

Several years ago, I cleaned out several boxes I had gotten after the death of my paternal grandparents and turned the items into a photo collage. I asked my mom if I could do the same with things from the cedar chest.

“It’s not a lot,” my mom said. “But we didn’t have a lot.”

I knew next to nothing about my maternal grandmother, who died of complications from my mom’s birth almost 82 years ago. My grandfather, having remarried six years later, never discussed his life with his high school sweetheart, even though just before his death he insisted on being buried next to her.

“Daddy never talked to me much,” my mom told me during our trip from Austin to Albany. “As I look back, I never had any real conversations with my father. We never talked about any of it. He’d ask about my grades and point out my one B and ask me about that.”

The Story of My Grandparents

As we drove through small town after small town, avoiding Interstate 20 as much as possible, mom told me what she knew about her mother, the former Mary Louise Burch, and her father, Allison “A.T.” Vestal.

I took notes, which I found last week tucked away with papers on another person I had interviewed — Frank McCourt, who told of his difficult childhood in the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes.

Louise, as she was known, was born Dec. 21, 1912, and grew up in Clyde, Texas. Her mother died when she was 6 in the flu epidemic of 1918 and her father soon remarried.

As a teenager, Louise met A.T., who grew up in Baird, and soon they were a couple. Just 5 feet tall and somewhat frail, Louise also became good friends with my grandfather’s sister, Frances, who was 2 years older and later told my mom these stories.

“Her daddy forced her to quit school because he was hellbent on her getting married,” my mom said of Louise. “At that time, he didn’t think she needed a job as long as she was married. Also, she had a stepmother now, and my grandfather said he needed her to go ahead and get moving and get out.”

In August 1931, the two were married; both were just 19. They moved around as my grandfather — whose skills were in high demand thanks to the oil boom — helped build refineries in Baird, Louisiana, Arkansas, and then Longview, Texas. He decided to stay in Longview, spending all but the war years working as the equivalent of a maintenance supervisor.

“I don’t know a lot about this time,” my mom said of the decade before she was born. “There are holes in my story because I was told all this by Frances. Daddy didn’t talk about it. I don’t know what happened to my mother. I don’t know where the other refineries were built. There are so many holes.”

Louise miscarried a baby boy before her first son, my Uncle Randy, was born in March 1933. He weighed 10 pounds and 10 ounces, and his delivery was so difficult that the Vestals were told they could not have more children.

Eight years later, on August 15, 1941, Olivia Ione Vestal was born by c-section at a hospital in Longview. A month early, the tiny and sickly baby spent a month in the hospital before she was released to a widower with two children.

On August 22, 1941, on her 10th wedding anniversary, Mary Louise Vestal died of complications from peritonitis. She was 28 years old.

Off to War and Marriage

Three and a half months later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. My grandfather tried to enlist in the Navy as soon as he could, partly out of duty, partly to move away from the grief.

‘They wouldn’t take him at first because he was then the sole parent of two would-be orphaned children,” my mom said. “He was young enough that he just wanted out of Dodge. He didn’t want to deal with children.”

By June 1942, the war in the Pacific had escalated, and my grandfather was allowed to enlist. A Seabee, he helped build runways, lodging, a hospital, and a base camp in the Pacific. My mother saw him three times in three years — once after boot camp, 10 months later when he was on leave before going to Okinawa, and 20 months after that when he returned from the war.

When he returned home, my grandfather came to Baird to pick up his son with his new wife Gladys in tow. He planned to leave his daughter — in many respects, the spitting image of his first wife — behind. Gladys refused to let him even though the relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter would prove to be fractious and strained over the years.

Gladys relationship with my Uncle Randy was no better; within three years, he had left home, also joining the Navy and marrying his teenage sweetheart. Randy’s relationship with his father remained strained for the rest of A.T.’s life.

“If you couldn’t deal with something you’d pivot away,” my mother told me as she drove toward Baird, which is 25 miles south of Albany. “That was always Daddy. If you have to deal with something you don’t.

“As for Gladys…,” she said with a sigh. (Disclosure: Everyone who mentioned Gladys’ name followed it up with a sigh.)

“She loved Daddy with her whole heart and was jealous of anyone who got his attention. Consequently, I didn’t get much.”

Opening the Chest

In Baird, my mom and I visited the graves of her family, including her father, who controversially announced days before his death in 1986 that he wanted to be buried next to Mary Louise. (Gladys is buried with her family in Waco.) We then drove to Albany for Kerry’s funeral; it is the last time I was there.

For the longest time, I wanted to explore what was in that cedar chest, to see the items that were in my grandmother’s purse and look through pictures and letters. In the grand scheme, it was a minor mystery with no great revelations or secrets, just a broader understanding of the various people whose lives intersected at different points and brought me to the place where I am today.

Inside, there are pictures of my grandparents together and seemingly happy, although most are of such poor quality that you can only make out my grandmother’s general features. (It turns out that our daughter, Emma, looks a lot like her.) Most of the pictures came from my grandmother’s scrapbook, but I also found some of my mom as a baby and little girl. Mom’s first-grade picture confirms that she was as frail as she has said over the years.

My grandmother’s childhood doll, now more than 100 years old, is there too, badly in need of repair. Clear plastic containers are small coin banks advertising Premier Ranger Motor Oil; my grandfather worked for the company for more than 40 years.

The real mystery for me, however, was what was in the purse. Placed in the cedar chest and never emptied, it remained it was when my grandmother went to the hospital to give birth.

I opened it and slowly emptied the contents. Most was what you would expect: Tissues, lipstick, a small mirror, Lady Esther face powder, an empty change purse, handkerchiefs, and a pair of burgundy gloves.

What was unexpected was the folded piece of paper with the list of names and addresses. I opened it and several small cards fell out. They were birth announcements my grandmother never had the chance to write.

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Exercise and I always have had a fickle relationship. Part of that comes from having little to no coordination. I’m also easily bored, and it could be said on the physical front, lazy. As a kid, I played football — mostly holding the practice dummies so my faster, stronger teammates could unload on me — and I did some long-distance bike riding and church softball as an adult. But that’s about it.

Even though I love the statistics and strategy in baseball and appreciate the athleticism found in other sports, football is my one-and-only sports crush. It’s a gene pool thing.

Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, I thought all babies born in Texas had been genetically infused with a strain of football before they could leave the hospital. After all, weekends — if not entire weeks — were devoted to the sport from early August through late January.

The neighborhood where I grew up, a series of single-story homes built in the mid 1950s, largely consisted of couples whose children were grown, much older, or not interested in playing football with a nerdy statistics quoting kid 12 months a year. So, starting when I was 9 or 10, I spent hours developing my arm by throwing at the trees on our street.

I was becoming proficient at 7-yard down-and-out routes until one of the neighbors got pissed for my throws clipping his oak tree. At this point, I started working on posts and go routes that would just land inside the cement curbs that lined our street in an effort to keep stormwater from flooding our yards.

Eventually, even though I couldn’t run, I became good at throwing a long pass, which leads to the story of my greatest athletic achievement.

Off to West Texas

Christmas was travel time in our family, except for a couple of years when my dad was in the hospital, because my teacher parents had the week off between the holiday and New Year’s. We celebrated Christmas Eve with Fran and Bill Waranius, the childless couple across the street who became my second set of parents, then hopped in the car to see my grandparents 250 or so miles to the north in Longview. Sometimes, we branched out to see other relatives in Waco or my cousins in the small town of Albany, close to Abilene.

Albany, population 2,000 give or take, was and is a one stoplight, often bone-dry town, distinguished by its beautiful 19th century courthouse and the annual Fort Griffin Fandangle, the oldest outdoor musical in Texas. Like everywhere else, I always felt out of place there, and was constantly ribbed (good naturedly) by my mom’s cousins after naively asking whether the town had any shopping centers, a then new and trendy term in the mid 1970s.

Aunt Frances, a pistol who lived into her late 90s, was a sweet woman with a fiery disposition who lived on or just above the abject poverty line. Her small, two-room house, a former oil field office, had the bathtub in the kitchen and a half-bath (toilet and sink) in a walled-off space in the living room. At the time, her youngest son, Kerry, lived in a trailer next door with his wife and their two sons.

Frances and my mom always had a soft spot for each other, and my great aunt always took great care of me while I was in Albany, even after I narrowly missed shooting her son in the balls. That, alas, was not my greatest athletic achievement. It was, however, one of two Albany memories I’d like to forget.

The Toss

The events happened on separate trips less than a year apart. More than 40 years later, I remember both as if they were yesterday.

My parents had given me a full-sized NFL replica football for Christmas, which I packed in the car for the Longview pilgrimage. I didn’t really have a place to throw it there, however, which meant I had to wait until we got to Albany.

Frances’ house was across the street from a field, and we were standing outside. Mom was talking to Frances and Kerry near his trailer. My sister Julie, then only 4 or 5, was picking flowers in the field. I was standing next to Dad with my football. Given his glassy, pharmaceutically enhanced eyes and 90-degree neck angle due to spasmodic torticollis, we were not playing catch.

I boldly stated: “I’ll bet you I can hit Julie on the head with this football.”

My dad angled his body, squinted, and looked. My sister’s back was turned some 40 yards away.

“Go for it,” he said, figuring I didn’t have a chance.

I launched the ball, which took off on a perfect arc in what years later seems like perpetual slow motion. My mom saw what was happening and started to run, alternately looking at my completely unaware sister and threatening me within an inch of my life.

Before Julie could look up, she was knocked down. Dad and I started walking toward her as I began to think of the various punishments my mom must have been mulling over.

“I’m in trouble, aren’t I,” I asked rhetorically.

“Yeah,” my father said, “but it was a nice shot.”

Not so nice was the next shot — the one and only experience I had with a gun as a child.

The Shot

Kerry and my dad went out one dry, arid day — it rarely if ever rains in Albany — for target practice. They took me along but said I had to sit in the truck while they shot at a bunch of bottles in a field. Without a book to read or football to throw, boredom set in quickly.

The handgun — I don’t remember the make — was in the front seat. I picked it up and started making those sounds you do when fake firing a gun (“Phew. Phew. Phew. Phew.”). I thought I was smart by not holding the gun up so Kerry and my dad would see it in my hand. Instead, I just pointed it at the truck’s floorboard.

I managed to occupy myself for a good 10-15 minutes and then, when I saw them walking toward the truck, made the huge mistake of pulling the trigger. The gun’s safety was off and it fired, the bullet ricocheting off the truck’s manifold and striking my bowlegged cousin in the jeans.

The sound reverberated through the truck bed. I couldn’t hear a thing, but I could read the lips of my stunned cousin. “He shot me in the balls! He shot my balls off,” Kerry was mouthing, cupping himself with one hand and pointing at me with the other.

That was not the case. The slug had grazed his thigh. Kerry was fine and laughed about it after the shock wore off, knowing he had something else to rib me about for years. After all, it wasn’t the first time I had left my mark in Albany, so to speak.

I knew I never would do something that stupid again. The next day, I spent the eight-hour drive home in a ringing version of silence, happy to get out of Albany alive and not in jail.

In 2012, my mom and I attended Kerry’s funeral. During the eulogy, the pastor mentioned my hard-living cousin had lived all nine of his lives and had “borrowed a few others.” I thought back to that day and wondered if I took one of them.

To this day, I am so grateful he was not hurt worse. It’s one reason I’ve never been able to stand guns.

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