Gate A-4
A Change of Pace
To my friends, family, and faithful readers, I have been wrestling with the clock, which insists on offering a mere twenty-four hours in each day. I have argued with that digital monster, determined that I could beat it, certain that I don’t need to sleep more than a few hours, sure that I can accomplish […]
Meet & Greet–Texas Book Festival Myra Hargrave McIlvain Author of Stein House Saturday, October 25 Writers’ League of Texas Booth 414-15 2-2:45 pm ___________________________________________________ Sunday, October 26 Texas Association of Authors Booth 604, 605, 610 1-3:00 pm _____________________________________________________ Harker Heights Public Library Local Author Fair 400 Indian Trail Harker Heights, TX 76548 Saturday, November 1 […]
Trickery and taxation
A load of hugs for highlighting the 2014 Fiction Award for Stein House.
Sam Houston’s Problems With the Ladies
Before he became the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto and the first president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston was the darling of all the ladies, except for one, Anna Raguet. The well-educated Miss Raguet was fourteen in 1833 when she moved with her father from Cincinnati to Nacogdoches, which was still […]
Dedication Built a Medical Complex
When the twenty-seven-year-old Dr. Arthur Edward Spohn arrived in Corpus Christi in 1872, he had already served as assistant professor of surgical anatomy at Long Island Hospital, New York, as the surgeon in charge of military quarantine at Galveston, and he had invented an elastic rubber-ring tourniquet for bloodless operations used by many armies around […]
Cold Turkey at Nine
Earl Russell pulls the reader in with the title of his book, Cold Turkey at Nine, The Memoir of a Problem Child, and he continues to stir interest with the prologue that hints of an unspeakable tragedy. Then, with the skill of a seasoned storyteller he moves through his beginnings on a poor Tennessee farm, […]
Butterfield Stage Across Texas
The famous Southern Overland Mail Route, better known as the Butterfield Stage in romantic Wild West movies, actually operated its twice-weekly mail and passenger service for less than three years from September 15, 1858 until March 1, 1861. Two trails from the east started from St. Louis and from Memphis, Tennessee. When the trails met […]
2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 4,600 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 8 years to get […]
LINDHEIMER: FATHER OF TEXAS BOTANY
If you have heard of the Texas prickly pear cactus, the Texas yellow star daisy, milkweed and loco weed, or the Texas rat snake, you may be surprised to know all five derive their scientific name from Ferdinand Jacob Lindheimer—a botanist who scoured the wilds of Texas in the 1830s and 40s to discover several […]