Making Music - Shelby County Schools: Fill & Download for Free

I lived in Birmingham over 37 years and has things changed and stayed the same. It's always been over the mountain in the suburbs and Shelby county are the safe place to live, shop, go to school. The city is s different story it used to be divided up by notthside and southd de and both were not the safest place to be. Birmingham was broken up in small neiborhoods and projects. There is the worst collegville, tittsville, ensly, Roebuc, centerpoint to name a few not so nice places. But Birmingham has changed and it's due to the growth of UAB it has changed the city now there is construction everywhere with a new ball field where the barrons play in the heart of the city. Now you have uptown, midtown, and downtown and there still UAB which is in the southside area. There are retail buildings being built with townhouse right on top. There is now a move whete young people want to be around the city and live with all the restaurant, bars, music venues filling up the city making it quite nice. You still have over the mountain with mountain brook the 4th richest city in the United States. There are Vestavia, HOOVER, Honewood, and let's not forget Shelby county. The houses in Birmingham and the surrounding area are large and very well kept, the price ranges from $250k up to millions. There is something for everybody. Let's not forget we have 2 of the best college football teams in the country 60 and 90 miles away. National championship Alabama and their rival Auburn. Yes the summer are hot and the fall is full of excitemen. I would have to say Birmingham is one of the best cities to live in.from Butch Iqal BSEE and at one time owner of 4 different mediteranian trstsurants

Tennessee, once a political battleground, is no longer. It has become one of the most solidly Republican states in the country, with just a few pockets of blue in its biggest cities. And while Tennessee has long been home to an influential strain of moderate Republicanism, two of the tradition’s prime exemplars — Sen. Bob Corker and Gov. Bill Haslam — are now out of politics, succeeded in 2018 by harder-edge conservative Republicans. A third, Sen. Lamar Alexander, announced that he would retire, leaving another seat likely to be filled by a more ideological warrior. Tennessee is almost 500 miles across, closer in the east to Dover Delaware than to Memphis, and closer in the west to Dallas Texas than to Johnson City. It has had a fighting temperament since the days before the Revolutionary War, when the first settlers crossed the Appalachian ridges and headed for the rolling country in the watersheds of the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. Tennessee became a state in 1796, the third state after the original 13. Its first congressman was a 29-year-old lawyer who was the son of Scots-Irish immigrants: Andrew Jackson. Jackson, who killed two men in duels, was a general who led Tennessee volunteers — it’s still called the Volunteer State –to battle against the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 and against the British at New Orleans in 1815. He was the first president from an interior state, elected in 1828 and 1832, and was a founder of the Democratic Party, now the oldest political party in the world. Jackson was a strong advocate of the union, but 16 years to the day after his death, Tennessee voted to join the Confederacy. (Today, Jackson’s own party largely disowns him, while President Donald Trump made a pilgrimage to his gravesite and keeps his portrait in a prominent spot in the Oval Office.Tennessee is a state with a certain civility: Both Confederate and Union generals paid respectful calls on Sarah Polk, the widow of President James K. Polk who stayed carefully neutral, in her Nashville mansion. Yet it was better known as a cultural battleground for much of the 20th century. On one side were the Fugitives, writers like John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, who contributed to “I’ll Take My Stand,” a manifesto calling for retaining the South’s rural economy and heritage. (Today, the state ranks fourth in tobacco production and in the top five states for tomatoes and snap beans.) Tennessee is also known for the momentous 1925 trial in Dayton in which high school biology teacher John T. Scopes defied a state ban on teaching evolution in public schools.In 1960, John Lewis, a student at Nashville’s Fisk University, organized sit-in protests at segregated lunch counters at Kress, Woolworth and McClellan stores. The protests sparked confrontations, arrests and ultimately a bombing that destroyed the home of the defense attorney for the protesters. That prompted Nashville Mayor Ben West to make a public appeal calling for an end to discrimination in the city. Within a few weeks, stores began to integrate their lunch counters and Nashville later became the first major city in the South to desegregate public facilities. The campaign became a template for student-run civil rights efforts throughout the South that Lewis, who eventually became a Georgia congressman, would heroically lead. Against this backdrop were business leaders who created the first supermarket (Piggly Wiggly), Holiday Inn and Moon Pies, and who made FedEx a global leader. The New Deal-era creation of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority also provided the state with bountiful energy, from a mix of coal, nuclear and hydropower plants.Music is another strong Tennessee tradition. East Tennessee is one of the original homes of bluegrass music and mountain fiddling. Gospel music has long been centered in Nashville, which is also home to the Southern Baptist Convention and a center for religious publishing; justifiably, Nashville is known as the “buckle of the Bible Belt.” Country music got its commercial start in Nashville, with broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry from Ryman Auditorium in 1925, and it remains the capital of country music today. The Mississippi lowlands around Memphis, which is economically and culturally the metropolis of the Mississippi Delta, gave birth to the blues in the years from 1890 to 1920, and the blues were in turn the inspiration for Elvis Presley and countless other rock n’ roll musicians beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Presley’s Graceland mansion is now one of the country’s major tourist destinations.While Tennessee’s economy trailed the nation’s through much of the 20th century, its open climate for entrepreneurism enabled it to grow mightily in the 1980s and 1990s. The absence of strong unions made Tennessee attractive, as did the relative lack of bitter racial discord, with the obvious exception being the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968. Alexander, governor through most of the 1980s, was a deft salesman in his efforts to bring foreign auto plants to Middle Tennessee; Nissan opened a plant in Smyrna, south of Nashville, where the land was flat and the bedrock was strong. It has since built another and relocated its U.S. headquarters to Tennessee. Volkswagen built a $1 billion “green” plant for the Passat in Chattanooga that, after a $900 million investment, is now being used to build the Atlas, a new midsize crossover SUV. Among domestic producers, General Motors built the short-lived Saturn, a cult favorite, at Spring Hill; the plant is now producing the GMC Acadia SUV and the Cadillac XT6. All told, the state’s factories now produce a new car every 20 seconds, and the broader auto industry, including suppliers, employs 134,000 people at more than 900 establishments in 88 of the state’s 95 counties. Automotive exports totaled $5.8 billion in 2017, up 59 percent since 2010.The state’s population has grown 6.5 percent since 2010, with especially rapid expansion in the Nashville area. Davidson County grew by 10.7 percent, while suburban Rutherford and Williamson counties increased by 19.1 percent and 21.7 percent, respectively. In 2018, the economic-analysis firm POLICOM rated Nashville fourth among the nation’s metro areas in “economic strength,” up from 10th the previous two years. Meanwhile, the populations of Knox County (Knoxville) and Hamilton County (Chattanooga) grew by mid-to-high single digit percentages during the same span; among big counties, only Shelby County (Memphis) lagged with growth of 1.6 percent. Tennessee’s population is 17 percent black and 5 percent Hispanic; it has almost 327,000 immigrants, about 5 percent of the state population. Tennessee ranks among the bottom 10 states in median income and in the attainment of bachelor’s degrees, and the 2018 edition of America’s Health Rankings placed Tennessee 42nd in overall health status, due in part to high rates of obesity and smoking. In 2018, the liberal-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy rated Tennessee’s tax system the nation’s sixth most regressive, thanks in large part to its heavy reliance on the sales tax, which does not exempt food and clothing. Tennesseans seem to prefer it. In 2014, voters by an almost a 2-1 margin ratified a constitutional amendment banning the adoption of any state or local personal income or payroll tax.For more than a century, Tennessee’s political divisions were rooted in Civil War loyalties. In two referenda on secession (one that failed in February 1861 and one that embraced it in June after the attack on Fort Sumter) most East Tennessee counties voted heavily for the Union and have remained heavily Republican ever since. Pro-secession counties in Middle and West Tennessee long voted heavily Democratic. Reform-minded liberal Democrats Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. became national figures, with reliable enough backing from Tennessee’s yellow-dog Democratic majority to vote for civil rights bills. Gore was defeated in 1970, but he lived to see his son twice elected vice president before his death in 1998. As the Democrats’ cultural liberalism strained the ancestral loyalties of rural voters in West and Middle Tennessee, and as the surging growth in the ring of counties around Nashville created a new voting bloc that was conservative both economically and culturally, Republicans gained the upper hand. In 2004, as George W. Bush was handily carrying the state, Tennessee voters elected a Republican majority in the state Senate. By 2012, with President Barack Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket, Republicans won supermajorities in both chambers. In the space of a decade, Democrats went from controlling all three branches of state government to barely being relevant in the capital. Now, the American Conservative Union ranks the Tennessee legislature as the nation’s most conservative. The rump Democratic Party has become largely urban and more progressive as old-style conservative Democrats have died or become Republicans. The only significant base of power for Democrats at the moment is in mayoral offices, which they now hold in Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville. This political lineup was reinforced in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won by 26 pointsThe 2018 elections may have represented a death blow to a long tradition of pragmatic, technocratic Republicanism. On the strength of Republican support in rural and exurban areas, the GOP candidates for senator and governor-Rep. Marsha Blackburn and businessman Bill Lee-won their races by 11 and 21 points, respectively. The winning party label may not have changed, but the brand of Republicanism did. Both Blackburn and Lee, along with the incoming state House speaker, Glen Casada, hail from Williamson County in Middle Tennessee, and all of them articulate a more confrontational message than was typical of politicians in the East Tennessee mold, such as former Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker, former Sen. Bill Brock, Alexander, Corker and Haslam. Places like Williamson County are “white, affluent and in the past decade have been a breeding ground for Tea Party supporters,” wrote Tennessee political journalist Steve Cavendish. Just months into his speakership, Casada said he would step down in August amid controversy over lewd text messages.The other pattern that can be seen in the 2018 electoral returns is the widening divergence between Tennessee’s rural and urban areas. Even as moderate former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen was losing the Senate race to Blackburn by double digits, he performed strongly in the state’s most populous counties. Between the 2012 and 2018 Senate races, Bredesen not only flipped Davidson County, where he had served as mayor of Nashville, but he shifted the county’s margin of victory 46 percentage points in the Democrats’ direction. In strongly Democratic Shelby County, Bredesen shifted the Democratic margin of victory by 25 percentage points, and while Blackburn did manage to win both Hamilton and Knox counties, the former governor whittled the GOP margins of victory in those counties by 36 and 44 percentage points, respectively. Even in Williamson County, Blackburn’s home base, the GOP margin of victory fell from 59 points in the 2012 Senate race to 19 points in the 2018 race, with Bredesen jolting the Democratic vote total by 150 percent. Still, the outlook remains grim for Democrats. The performance of Karl Dean, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, lagged Bredesen’s, and even the gains notched in the Senate race by Bredesen — an unusually well-known and respected candidate — weren’t enough to come within single digits of Blackburn. Prior to the election, the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin framed the Senate race as “a test of whether Tennessee will remain politically distinct or become just one more reliably red bastion, like Mississippi to the south or Kentucky to the north.” For now, it looks like the latter.

I was born in 1949 in Dallas, so I can only answer this as it relates to my childhood in the 1950’s and time at the family ranch in Texas.The roads were lousy. There were no interstate highways, so a trip across county was on state and federal highways that meandered from town to town - like Route 66 - from one Texaco or Gulf station to the next. This was the heyday of billboards, including the sequential Burma Shave ads. It was a lot of fun to travel by car, bus or train - I rode passenger trains all over Texas and as far north as Milwaukee, including a Pullman sleeper car attended by courtly black porters - when I was 12.There were no fast food chains with the notable exception of Dairy Queen, which, late on a Saturday night, was often the only light on in town. How people socialized before Dairy Queens, I haven’t a clue. Most restaurants were Mexican cafes, cafeterias, one-meat-and-two-sides cafes, BBQ joints or simply glorified truck stops, like the Bluebonnet Cafe in Marble Falls. The finest restaurant in Texas was the Old Warsaw near downtown Dallas. The Cattleman’s Steak House was the place to go in Ft. Worth.No alcohol served at restaurants. You brought your own booze and bought a “set up” to pour it in. The way around this was to join a “club” which you could do for a fee at most restaurants. Or join a country club - most small towns had one, even Archer City (“The Last Picture Show” and “Hud”)Everyone went to church. If you could not get to church, you listened to the church service on the radio (there were only a few TVs and the programming day was limited.) You could still hear Lutheran services coming from New Braunfels and Fredericksburg (Texas German enclaves) in German. The best church services were the black churches - the singing, the preaching, the testifying. Funerals were a particular treat.Radio, not TV. You could listen to Mexican super-stations from hundreds miles away particularly if the cloud cover was right, even on a crystal set, which was all I had, tied into the bug screen to get a better signal. The music was primitive rock ’n roll, starting with Bill Haley and the Comets. The Caravan Show played Ray Charles and Lightnin’ Hopkins.We went to Mexico for vacations. From where I lived, the closest major international metropolis was Mexico City. So a trip to Mexico City by car was special. Both grandparents drove all the way to Acapulco on separate trips - well over 1000 miles on bad roads. Kids held up iguanas by the side of the road so that you could take their picture (for a price).Rural poverty could be positively medieval. Whether poor whites or blacks, some extremely poor people in the country lived the way people lived in the Middle Ages - no health care, no family services, sometimes no electricity. In tar paper shacks. One shantytown was called “Lolaville.” In rural Texas, I don’t just mean Dickensian poverty, I mean like Tara after Sherman had marched through. Poverty in America like only a Southerner can comprehend. Right out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.People were frugal. Nothing went to waste, not pennies, not nails, not even rubber bands. Everything was re-used and repaired until it disappeared. My mother made many of her own dresses and preserved fruits and tomatoes in Mason jars and Ball jars. We did not have toothpaste, we brushed with salt and baking soda.Everything was made in the United States. Everything. I can distinctly remember items that were not make in America - a Rolleiflex camera, Swiss watches, British lead soldiers, Jaguars, MGs and Triumphs, Scotch, German kitchen knives, Mexican sombreros, Italian switch-blades and chianti wine bottles in straw covers - and that was it. Anything made in Japan was considered ersatz.Everybody worked - the men until they dropped dead (my father went to the office every day until three months before he died at 98), housewives without help in the kitchen, did laundry, cleaning, if they had help, they did volunteer work via the garden club, Junior League, or church. Blind people re-caned chairs. I worked at a cafe, mowed lawns, my friends had paper routes.No video games ! We played checkers, chess, cards, board games - Monopoly, marbles, played cowboys (Hopalong Cassidy and Davy Crockett), tree houses, Christmas tree forts, rope swings, and made our own gunpowder (salt peter + sulphur + powdered charcoal) for bombs. Whoever invented the bottle rocket should be in the schoolboy hall of heroes.We ate a lot of canned food - vienna sausages, canned tuna made into casseroles, canned spinach, Wolf Brand chili and ranch style beans, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bologna sandwiches, frozen fish sticks - quality cuisine ! Plus fried chicken (scrawny flavorful chickens) and fried fish - preferably crappie (perch) breaded in corn meal. With ketchup, everything with ketchup. But not on homemade pecan pie, or homemade apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese on top.Hardly anyone was fat. Men tended to be thin, women slender, an older man might become “portly” an older women “plump” but nobody was morbidly obese - I only knew of one such woman and she was pretty much a recluse.Everyone had served in the war. My father had been a captain in the Army. my mother was a nurse, my future wife’s father had been an (gaijin) officer in the 442nd Infantry Regiment. The more combat you had been in, the less you talked about. Our pal Congressman Jim Collins had been an Army officer in the Battle of the Bulge and he didn’t talk about it at all - ever.Nicknames - everyone had one. Anglos had Spanish ones - Lupe Murchison, Pancho Sutherland, Paco Hunt, Quatro Tolsen and El Rey Mullen. Girls had guy’s names - Toni Jacoby, Toni Franke, Toni Trojack, Micki (aka Spic) McNamara, Kelly (my mother) but only one man had a “girl’s” name: Carrol Shelby, whose son’s Pat & Mike went to my high school. (And yes, they had the coolest cars). There was C.B. (Cigar Butt), Bubba Giant, Red Dog, Black Jack, Peachy, Patches, Bubbles, Sugar, Potly, Snake, Drifty, Shorty x3, Mullet, Odor and Nostril. I was Stretch.A Coke was a rare treat - bought from an ice chest at the corner store, pulled from a metal rack via a metal trap - Royal Crown Cola, Dr. Pepper, Nehi Root Beer, 7-Up - read the top and take your pick.Social events consisted of church picnics (horse shoes, three legged races, spoon races), softball games, barn dances, square dances - including Musical Chairs, the Cotton Eyed Joe and later, the Chicken Dance - bingo, birthdays outdoors, weddings outdoors, funerals in un-air-conditioned churches, first communions and the 4th of July parade, complete with patriotic floats pulled by trucks or tractors.We rode horses, my grandfather’s Tennessee Walker was called “Lucky Strike” - my mother’s walking horse was “Sally Foot.” A saddle was a prized possession. My great grandfather invented one of the modern western style saddles in 1890. My walker is named “Blevins,” after Jimmy Blevins in All The Pretty Horses.Peddlers would come down the road pushing a cart, the most common of which was an Italian who sharpened knives !Sonic booms - every time an Air Force jet broke the speed of sound, you’d hear a horrific boom that could shatter windows. This happened regularly without warning, at a time when we lived in constant low grade fear of a nuclear attack.Fallout shelters - people had fallout shelters built so that they could go hide in the event of nuclear attack and the resultant fallout of radiation. The McEntires had a real beauty of a shelter built in their backyard. Buildings had fallout shelter signs posted directing you to the basement.Trolley cars were being phased out to electric buses that hooked onto overhead electric lines via pantographs. Daredevils on bikes would hitch a ride hanging onto the side of the bus. Children rode the bus alone - even to another town - with a note pinned on them.Parades and Pageants - small towns amused themselves, told their story and attracted visitors by throwing annual festivals/fiestas, parades - like the Tyler Rose Parade, and pageants, such as the Fort Griffin Fandangle, (mocked in Waiting For Guffman) or plays, usually associated with the local high school or church. Kids would put on costume shows to amuse themselves and the neighbors, right out of The Little Rascals. Carnivals would go from town to town, but if you wanted to see the circus or the Ice Capades, you had to go to a city.State Fair - before Disneyland and other mega amusement parks, the state fairs were the main forms of mass entertainment - an annual pilgrimage to the Midway, the livestock shows, the Auto Building, Big Tex welcoming the crowd, the extravaganzas at the Cotton Bowl (Elvis in 1956), salt water taffy, cotton candy, candied apples. It was the best.Everyone smoked. We kids smoked dried grapevine. Men smoked hand rolled cigarettes, Lucky Strikes, Camels, Pall Mall and Chesterfields - no filters. Men smoked pipes and chewed tobacco loose out of a pouch - Red Man - or cut off of a “plug” of compressed tobacco - Bull of the Woods or Day’s Work. I rode my bike to the store and bought chewing tobacco for the yard man Shorty Robinson when I was ten years old. Totally Huck Finn. Women smoked filtered cigarettes like Kents.There was very little dope. The Mexicans may have had some marijuana, but I never got any until I was in high school and it was garbage -leaves, stems, the whole plant.Booze - I had my first beer when I was about 10. It tasted nasty. Beers were local, Pearl, Lone Star, Shiner, and the Wisconsin beers - Schlitz, Hamms, Miller. Men drank bourbon. Mexicans drank tequila or pulque. The only wine was Gallo and kosher - Mogen David (Mad Dog) 20/20, “Man, oh man, oh Manischewitz !” Later Lancers and Mateus from Portugal. Yum.Adults didn’t “exercise.” The notion that someone would go “jogging” down the road in shorts and T shirt would have defied comprehension. There was one local gym frequented by “body builders.” Kids rode bikes, grownups did calisthenics with Jack LaLanne on TV, played golf with caddies carrying their bags, or pulled a bag cart, or they played tennis in all white garb - with Wilson/ Jack Kramer, Dunlop or Imperial wooden rackets with “cat gut” strings.Football - we (boys) all played football, with the highlight to play “under the lights” when it was cooler at night. The social, athletic, ambience and gestalt of a school could revolve around football. No game with the regional rival was complete without a fight under the stands or on the field. The terror of all 4A teams statewide as Odessa Permian High School - MOJO - whose exploits were made into the movie “Friday Night Lights.”Hunting and fishing - We all hunted and fished. George Norsworthy and I would come home from school, get our BB guns and proceed to kill every bird we could find. My mother fished and when she caught a big bass, she would cut its head off and nail it up onto the side of the garage. I killed my first deer when I was 14. Buying a new Remington 700 BDL bolt action 30–06 was one of the biggest events of my life. I still have it. Dove season was the highpoint of the hunting year - they’d come in like drunken jets to the maize fields. Picking lead shot out of duck meat as you ate was a real culinary adventure.Driving tractors, jeeps and trucks before I got my farm hand “hardship” license at 16 was a blast. We had a tractor that ran on butane - the same fuel we cooked with. Whenever we filled it, flies would swarm around the filler cap thinking it was something else. Plowing a field in a tractor with a lot of low end torque and a tight turning radius is a treat only known to farm kids. Opening that rig up on a dirt road - with the rain flapper bobbing up on the smokestack - was solid glory at 30 mph. Cars had stick shifts - “4 on the floor” or “3 on the tree.” No AC, “bat-wing” swivel windows, roll down side windows, no seat belts !Wind mills - were common in pastures without power; a top hand was one who could keep them working; Chicago Aermotor was the Cadillac. The rhythmic flap of the vanes in a breeze was soothing. Even the squeak of the gears sounded good, sounded country.The aroma of new mown hay was wonderful. The crackling sound of the cicadas in the summer was magical. The pulsing glows of hundreds of lighting bugs along a creek was amazing. An in-coming thunderstorm was sublime, Wizard of Oz stuff. People had storm shelters. I remember many tornadoes - several near misses - and each one was thrilling.No air conditioning- except in movie theaters and banks. At night, you slept on a cot with no sheets on a screened-in “sleeping porch” sometimes under wet sheets. You had an evaporative cooler - a “swamp cooler” in the living room. After Sunday supper (lunch) the men would take a communal nap on the living room floor - where it was cooler. If you could, you got out of Texas in the summertime - to the Ozarks, New Mexico, Colorado or to the Sierra Madre of Mexican - Cuernavaca, Taxco (where I got Montezuma’s Revenge) or San Miguel de Allende.School - we rode bikes to elementary school, then took the bus to junior high and drove to high school. The ‘hoods’ road motorcycles. In addition to the 3 R’s (readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic) boys took wood shop and metal shop, girls took home economics. If we misbehaved, we were paddled with a board like a cricket bat. I was paddled more than most but it didn’t seem to register, probably because, to plagiarize Gertrude Stein, “there was no there there.” The largest “ethnic minority” in my school were Mexican Americans, followed by Native Americans, including Lois Matthews, who was gorgeous. There were no blacks due to segregation.We got into fights. In a street fight in high school, two guys squared off, Jay Neathery was smoking a cigarette, he cooly removed the cig and flicked it past the other guy into the crowd, Bryan Wildes turned to look at the flying cigarette and Neathery cold-cocked him. John Norsworthy was particularly adept at feigning being hurt - doubling over in mock pain, the other guy would stop and then John would gut punch him. What was important was speed, hand speed, which I didn’t have. I teased a guy, Keith Phillips, about having an older girlfriend. We went to the gym to fight it out with boxing gloves. I held my own. Keith killed himself a short time later by hanging himself. More going on there than I realized at the time, but clearly teasing him and fighting him was not particularly helpful.Larceny and mischief - we stole things: shifter nobs, hubcaps, we disconnected distributor wires, shoved potatoes up tail pipes. Randy Hancock and I would put our school books on top of Playboy magazines and walked out of the store - then sold them to other boys. Riding bikes down an alley pulling over trash cans was considered quality entertainment.UFOs - we made fairly convincing UFOs by taking plastic dry cleaning bags, sealing the openings with tape, then filling them with natural gas and fashioning a fuse of cotton lightly dipped in gasoline. We took these gas bombs out to a field in my truck (my first car was a truck) lit the fuse and released them - they would get a couple of hundred yards up before they exploded. We did this often enough to have these “UFOs” written up in the local paper.College - about half of my high school class went to Texas Tech. Almost no one went out of state except a football star that went to Yale. Until my senior year, I had no clue if I would go to college, then I applied to Brown and got in as a “geographic diversity/token hick” acceptance - along with some other generally clueless Texans. My best friend was an American Indian from Texas who was recruited to play football. My GPA 1st semester was 1.6. The only reason I didn’t drop out was because I had no particular beef with the Vietnamese.Drought - the 7 year drought in the ’50s in Texas was so bad, many people had to go get water from other people’s wells - and the other people shared their water; I remember this distinctly, the sharing.Politics - everyone was a Democrat in Texas in the ‘50’s. My parents made an exception for Eisenhower (who was born in Texas), and then went for Goldwater in 1964 - to the horror of their friends. Nixon’s “Southern strategy” kicked in and Texas flipped Republican. For awhile.Being a rancher or an oil man was all we aspired to. The first movie I remember was Giant. The bad guy wildcatter - Jett Rink - was played by James Dean. I wanted to be Jett Rink. All of my friends wanted to be Jett Rink. To this day, when we compliment a guy for being clever we say “He’s so Jett.” Dean paced off the boundary of his place “Little Riata” by goose-stepping the metes and bounds. I was 7 and I knew right then and there what I wanted to be in life -an oil man, preferably a wildcatter. When I walked out of the theater, I goose-stepped just like Jett Rink. I was on my way.All public places were segregated- in the county courthouse there was a “colored” water fountain.Black people did the most menial jobs. At the ice rink at the State Fair, old black men would lace up your skates for tips. When I went up North to military academy, I saw a white man pushing a lawn mower. My friend George and I had never seen a white hired-hand pushing a lawn mower before, so we assumed he was retarded. When we spoke to him we were astonished that he was normal !The domestic help - the maids, yardmen, etc. were black. Trudy Miles, the cook, Shorty Robinson, the yard man. They raised us white children - all of the kindest, friendliest faces of my childhood were black. They worked hard all their lives, never complained, treated us kids kindly, and never had half a chance.No one in my family ever used the “n” word. Never. No one. Honest. It’s not that we were so enlightened, it was just considered low class. We all said “colored man/ woman.” If I had said the “n” word, my mother would have washed my mouth out with soap - which she otherwise did, often.Our church -Holy Trinity - was not segregated. About half of the congregation were Mexicans and there were many black members, mainly Cajun creoles from Louisiana. When Kennedy was shot, we went to the McEvoy’s house and just sat their stunned watching pastoral American scenes loop on the TV. In Texas, Kennedy was our political redemption - a Catholic President.Everyone else was a Baptist or Methodist. When I told my friends that there were more Catholics in the world than Baptists, they did not believe me. They had to look it up in the World Book encyclopedia. There were very few jewish kids. I can remember only 4 and they were all my friends, including Louis Silver, who, when his father died, my mother baked them a cake and I delivered it. No one else was there, just Louis and his mother and me and the cake. It was the saddest thing. Jackie Schnel had a sad smile and was killed when her Trans Texas Airways flight crashed in a storm. Beth Eldridge, a super bright gal, was my dance partner at cotillion where we won the Fox Trot contest. Richard Goldman was a “spastic” who Glen Shepherd, the captain of the football team, befriended and made clear that picking on Richard - which had not been uncommon - was thereafter a one-way ticket to Fist City. I don’t think anyone ever picked on Richard again at our school. Richard died in a convalescent home recently. Glenn lives out on a ranch near Italy, Texas, pronounced IT -lee.Queers - One of my best friends growing up “turned out to be” gay. I didn’t know it growing up, I didn’t know anyone that was homosexual - that I knew of, but when I learned that Charles was gay, I was convinced of something profoundly: that being gay is not a whole lot different than being left handed. Because Charles was such a great kid - one of the best guys on our block - and if he was gay, then being gay must be OK. Years later, he asked me to accompany him to what turned out to be an ugly confrontation with gay bashers in Fort Worth. Accompany him I did, armed with a semi-automatic pistol tucked into my belt. No one bothered Charles that day.Mexican Americans were our friends. They were our priests and nuns - who were Sisters of Charity, aka Flying Nuns. My first ‘sort-of’ girlfriend was Olga Gonzalez, or that’s what she thought.The ranch hands were Mexicans - vaqueros. They would come wandering up the road asking “Tienes trabajo ?” - “Do you have work ?” I remember them fondly: Cruz, Moises, Luz. Vaya con Dios companeros.Cisco & Pancho. When we got a TV, my favorite show was “The Cisco Kid.” When he came to Dallas, my mother took me to Love Field to see him. His sidekick, Pancho, had a sign-off at the end of every show: “See you soon !” (Hasta la vista).To this day, I don’t say goodbye, I say “See you soon.” Just like Pancho.