The Boz
“Richard, are you going middle-age crazy on us?” That question was put to me by a friend named Debra Drueple at an Austin Runners Club picnic in the summer of 1989. She had good reason for asking because I was sporting a new and...
On the question of female superiority
The girlfriend—let’s call her Katie—and I were sitting in the restaurant at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in downtown Dallas one morning in 2001. I have to say that Katie was one of the sanest people I knew. She seldom made...
Mimizuka
When I think of the fortuitous events of late 2007 that brought me from Austin, Texas to Korea, I realize I could just as easily have gone to Japan. After all, I once had a colleague named John who left Austin and moved to a small Japanese...
Fighting the good fight in Korea
Yeong Yoon and I work in the Halla Classic Building—he on the 11th floor and I on the 4th. We meet for lunch once every two weeks, and he stubbornly refuses to let me buy. He pays every time. Mr. Yoon was born in Yesan in 1939...
UT loves Joe Jamail and his big bucks
They say that money talks and a certain bovine byproduct walks, and I know it’s true. A case in point is 87-year-old Joseph Dahr Jamail, Jr. Summarizing the life of Joe Jamail is not easy, but I will try. He is of Lebanese descent, the...
Deconstructing MacArthur
Just to the northwest of Dallas sits the suburb of Irving. One of its high schools is named after Douglas MacArthur. This is far from unique since many other American cities have schools and streets named in honor of the old general. He...
Say it ain’t so, Suzy
Tuesday Weld, Annette Funicello and Angela Cartwright. Most Americans of a certain baby-boom age remember the names of these young actresses in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The blonde-haired Weld (born in 1943) was in several television...
Detroit
Over the course of four weeks spanning December 2012 and January 2013, I read three books purchased on the cheap from Amazon.com. All of them pertained to the history of Detroit, the one-time “Paris of Southeastern Michigan.” Why...
Dr. Z and the greatest quarterback of them all
Living in Korea, I am not as attuned to big-time college and pro sports as I was before. This is probably good because I had become increasingly disaffected if not alienated by the sometimes sleazy, sometimes inane stuff that went on...
Oh, Dr. Kinsey!
Sex makes the world go around. It is a fact of which you need not try to convince me. And for that reason alone, the work done by Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey and his colleagues at Indiana University from the late 1930s until his death in 1956 merits...
Timothy Leary, the flim-flam man
I was an impressionable college student—that is my excuse for having scribbled “Free Timothy Leary” on the cover of my Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1974. People in their late teens or early 20s think they can judge and...
Hank Williams’ final show—Austin, TX, December 19, 1952
Way back in 1976, college diploma in hand, I was barely making a living by driving a delivery car in Austin. I saw and experienced a lot of the city I would not have otherwise, including an old honky-tonk called the Skyline Club on the north...