Stuck Key
In 1995 I moved from California back to Texas to become the managing editor of theBoerne Star, a twice-weekly newspaper for a town of about 6,000. Boerneânow literally a suburb of San Antonio to the northwest up I-10âwas still relatively small at the time and had deep roots in a farming/ranching lifestyle, along with a strong identity centered around Germans, which originally settled the area in the mid 1800s.
I was fresh out of San Francisco, and as usual liked to stir things up. I decided to write a weekly columnâprobably as a vent to spew out weirdness in a small townâand decided to call it âStuck U,â in reference to my writing on a 1935 Underwood typewriter, which had a âUâ key that stuck on each stroke. My publisher, who was more in tune to the sensibilities of his readers and advertisers, nixed that title. But he gave the go ahead to âStuck Key.â The columns were a mix of local reporting, remembrances of my experiences traveling, and thoughts on my life as a reporter. Iâll dig up the post on what this references, but hereâs a pretty typical reaction I got.
The older of the two old men next door dumped a can of beans on the lawn. It was just one of many dishes fed to four or five cats that hung around their house and lounged the day away sunning on their fuchsia wooden porch or yellow stone walkway. The men who lived there were strange. One was in his fifties, the son, the other in his seventies, the father. Both were widÂŹowed, both clothed eternally in plain white T-shirts that hugged their âŠ
Horatio Alger may have made it big with nothing but elbow grease, ingenuity and a few breaks. But behold! You can make it with nothing more than a dollar and a weird combination of numbers based on birthdays.
âHow come you donât take a lot of this stuff home,â I ask Frank Uhr. âI mean, the good stuff.â Frankâs the guy that works on Wednesdays at the Spanish Pass dumpâreally just a little trash drop-off run by the county.
âOh Iâm tempted to, sometimes,â he says. âA lot of this stuff is useful, still in good shape.â âBut only if you have use for it.â
What was that smell, the one that brought back more than memory, since exact pictures didnât form in my mind? The smell carried feeling. It must have been the pews, for they are one common denominator in all churchesâCatholic Churches at least.
…the Serbians on the train that day smoked more than any humanly possible, which may relate to why they were painted as unhuman and inhumane in their war against Muslims.
A couple years and a few killed animals later, I ended up as the managing editor of the newspaper in Boerne, Texas, a little town founded in the late 1800s by German immigrants, but well on its way to being just another San Antonio suburb. Like many of my other rural-oriented newspaper positions, I spent much of my time cruising through the countryside on narrow roads blaring music and every now and again, catching the eyes of cattleâŠ