A Heterosexual Manifesto
Come with me, if you will, back to the 1958−59 school year in Dallas. I refer specifically to Edwin J. Kiest Elementary, on our city’s eastern border, 'neath the Texas sky. As a member of Mrs. Inez Smithey’s first-grade...
Removing the Halo from Che Guevara’s Head
At Seoul’s sprawling Dongdaemun Market, among the thousands of items on sale are T-shirts of Ernesto “Che” Guevara wearing a rakish black beret. Try however I might, I cannot understand why he inspires such fascination...
I Don’t Think I’ll Run the Pyongyang Marathon After All
After a stay of 18 months, Otto Warmbier has been allowed to leave North Korea. You may know the story. This University of Virginia student was on a five-day group visit to Pyongyang and surely got the standard, highly sanitized and carefully...
Thirty Years since Publication of My First Book
Of course, I knew it was audacious to say out loud that I was writing a book. What if the project fizzled or I never found a publisher? But barely a year after returning to UT to start a journalism/editing career, I was determined to give it a...
The Reading Habit…and Helen Keller
I wonder how many of my 4B classmates at Kiest Elementary School in Dallas in 1963 are still alive. And of those who are, do they remember SRA? The acronym stands for Science Research Associates. It was a pedagogically sound system of getting...
Teenage Hangers-on at Campisi’s Egyptian Lounge
Along with Lynn Atherton, Ronnie Bardwell and one or two other male students from Bryan Adams High School, I attended numerous basketball games at SMU’s Moody Coliseum in the 1969, 1970 and 1971 seasons. Slightly less than half of them...
The JBAKC: My Brush with Radical Politics at the University of Texas
Any list of the real hotbeds of far-left college activism in the United States in the mid- and late 1960s would have to include the University of California, the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin...
Reminiscing about the 1970 Bryan Adams Football Season
Football is big in Texas, I know. Probably too big, but what can we do? Since early in the 20th century, it has been integral to the state’s culture. Please permit me to wax nostalgic by thinking back to the team that represented my alma...
Basketball Referees Need to Put the Kibosh on All This Traveling
The greatest benefit of having a press-row seat at University of Texas basketball games in the 1996, 1997 and 1998 seasons was that I got an up-close view of how the game was played (by 10 athletes) and called (by 3 men in black-and-white...
Bill Bradley Was a True Student−Athlete
I’m trying to think what I was doing in 1988. I was living on Lafayette Street in east Austin, working as a proofreader at G&S Typesetters, writing a weekly column for the American-Statesman and preparing to run my first marathon. It...
Tom Swift
Rodney Elkins, Tony Sandow, David Twedell, Jeff Seacrest, Mickey Williamson, Sammy Ritter, David Posey, Jimmy Allen, Randy Patrick and Barry Payne were some of my male classmates in third and fourth grades at Edwin J. Kiest Elementary School...
And So My Campaign to Bring Jikji Back to Korea Comes to an End
[It’s a sad fact that my year-long effort to get Abner Haynes into the College Football Hall of Fame and my even longer drive to convince the French to put Jikji on a Seoul-bound airplane ended—unsuccessfully—within a couple...