Category: Essays

Still trying to find a way to get on the District Attorney’s office, my short unhappy life as a defense attorney continued.   On a bleak Monday morning in November, the clerk of the Woodlake Justice Court called me at the law office where I was working.  She informed me that Judge Chris White had appointed me […]

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Farmersville Tales-Part 10  The Three Mile Road to Exeter High 1960 was a year of demarcation.  Farmersville officially became an incorporated city.  And we graduated from Farmersville schools. The next year, every morning, we were on a bus to high school in another town.  Depending on what side of Farmersville we lived on, we had a choice.  Some […]

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Farmersville Tales-Part Nine Of Women My uncle told us boys the story.  He saw it happen.   My mother and father had stopped at a filing station in Farmersville, owned and operated by a family widely known in the community.  The owner was known for careless talk, a “big mouth,” we used to call such men. That day, […]

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Farmersville Tales – Part 8 – Nickel’s (episode two) – The Line During my high school years there was a labor dispute at the store.  The store was union, but negotiations on a new contract between the union (Retail Clerks #1288) and the owners of the store chain floundered.  There was a strike.  It lasted for many months.   […]

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Farmersville Tales-Part Seven Nickel’s (episode one of two)  At age 11, I became employed.  Sweeping the parking lot of Nickel’s Pay-Less Food Market, was not my first job.  Like most kids from Farmersville, I had worked in the fields alongside my parents, grandparents, and siblings. Childcare in the modern sense didn’t exist. You went where your folks […]

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Church Farmersville had a reputation, in the early 1950s, of having the most bars for a town its size in the State.  And the most churches.  As the Sixties approached, Hollywood movies, TV, and popular novels often portrayed churches and people of faith, especially if from the South or Midwest, as stiff, uncompromising, puritan, imbued […]

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Baseball Farmersville had a professional baseball team before any of the surrounding communities.   The team’s baseball park originally stood on the west side of town, where the junior high is now. The team moved elsewhere and by the late fifties and early sixties, the park was increasingly falling into disrepair. The stands were splintered wood […]

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“Ain’t Talkin’ To No Law” The drunk was staggering around the parking lot of the old Frontier Club, yelling, cussing, waving a knife.  His outfit was dapper enough.  Saturday night “going to town” clothes.  Clean, almost new Levis, white shirt, open collar, clean shaven, hair pomaded and combed although right then it was sticking out on one side. […]

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Mrs. Beaver’s Store She was a tiny lady of indeterminate age, but to a kid of six or seven, she was an old lady. She was thin, stringy, her skin loose like the old dress that hung on her frame, its color like her complexion, washed away years ago. She was the proprietor of a […]

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