I was immersed in the Austin running scene from the summer of 1981 until my departure for Korea in November 2007. In fact, I remember rather wistfully competing in a 5K race in my final week there. Of the 600-plus races I have run in my life...
I will say one thing about my father (d. 2005). He sure kept a nice yard. Wherever he lived, in Texas or in Michigan, he devoted an inordinate amount of time and energy to fertilizing, watering, mowing and edging his front lawn. I never knew...
I lived in Denton, 35 miles north of my hometown of Dallas, for just over two years. During that time, I worked at a series of jobs I would not especially want to list on my résumé and was briefly a graduate student at North...
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a freshman at the University of Texas, “the Drag” seemed to be a magical place. A six-block stretch of Guadalupe Street on the western edge of the UT campus, it has long been where one...
Hyde Park is a neighborhood in Austin, a couple of miles north of the University of Texas campus. With turn-of-the-century architecture, home-grown businesses and tree-shaded streets, it is a cool place to live. On the first day of 1986, I...
I was not very fond of Ann Richards, mostly because she seemed so beholden to the PC crowd. I was especially irked by her comment that “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high...
DARRELL K. ROYAL–TEXAS MEMORIAL STADIUM. Darrell K. Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, formerly Texas Memorial Stadium, has been the home of University of Texas football and track teams since 1924. In that year Henry Jacob Lutcher...
In September 2001, I had taken a long-awaited trip to Niagara Falls. It was an exciting, unforgettable vacation. In the same way, I simply had to visit the Grand Canyon, regarded by some people as numero uno among the seven wonders of the...
After a painful breakup with a girlfriend named Lulu, I decided to get in my car and go. The car in this case was a light blue Ford Pinto, and my destination was Mississippi. That state is not generally considered a place for tourists. On the...
Nearing the end of my freshman year at the University of Texas, I was not sure what to do in June, July and August. If I had possessed wisdom, maturity and direction—which I most certainly did not in those days—I might have stayed in Austin to...
In the summer of 1963, the Pennington family (which did not yet include Paul) moved to a different neighborhood in east Dallas. One of the first friends I made was Randy Fisher. He was not athletically inclined and thus did not take part in...
In 2003, I Googled “international pen pals” because I thought that might be interesting. It led to various degrees of communication with people in China, England, Lebanon, Peru, Russia, the Philippines and Romania...
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