The Big-Brained Menace from Moline: Bob Altenloh

Chicago to Moline and In-between: A Short Biography of Bob Altenloh

Robert Edouard Altenloh was born in Chicago on October 23, 1918, and grew up there. His parents, Henri Edouard Robert Altenloh (1869–1929), a physician, and his second wife, Mary [Maslowska] Schintz (1877–1950), both emigrated from Europe. Incidentally, Mary had previously been married to Theodore Schintz (1830–1910), who served as the acting mayor of Chicago in 1869.

Robert “Bob” attended Hyde Park High School in Chicago and worked afternoons in a flower shop. At twenty-one in 1940, he was working as an office boy at the WPA publicity department in Chicago. He also did some hustling as a pool shark during the Great Depression, taking the naive for a few bucks, and his family still shares stories about his many escapes through bathroom windows. Always open to novel business opportunities, he also sold wax mice at a traveling circus. His obituary reveals that he attended the University of Chicago and the Chicago Music College.

He married Alyce Batschauer (1919–2010) on January 6, 1940, but the marriage ended in divorce soon after. They had one son, Robert, who would later be adopted by Alyce’s new husband, Rudy Pawlik (1914–1991). On August 19, 1947, Robert married Shirley Smith (1924–1998). Bob and Shirley had three sons: Daniel, Scott, and William. By 1950, living in Chicago’s South Side, Bob was working as a railroad switchman. After a back injury that incapacitated him, he received a settlement from the railroad, which enabled a dramatic move.

Around 1957, clearly attracted to country life, Bob bought a dairy farm—about 80 acres—near Neillsville, Wisconsin, and moved his family there. The punishing winters and other factors quickly effected a move south to the Houston area in 1959. Bob had an old friend from Chicago living there; also, Bob and Shirley wanted better education opportunities for their sons.

Upon his arrival in Houston, a friend helped Bob get a job teaching piano for Brook Mays, which he did for several years before opening his own studio at his home and teaching there for the rest of his professional life. He also arranged music and prepared it for copyright registration. One of his clients was the children’s show Cadet Don. Bob had grown up in an artistic home: his mother played the piano, and this father painted. He taught himself how to play piano and even wrote music. He wrote in one column that his dad sent him abroad for music lessons. In another column, he wrote that he lived in an art colony located on Chicago’s South Side. “We painted, we sculptured, we poeted, we wrote music, we played music, we wrote prose, and all of us did it with a flair, a fire and a purpose.”

In the mid 1970s, Bob and Shirley sold their property in Houston, bought an RV, and started traveling around the country. On one trip, they discovered Moline and bought property across from the Moline Store. Shirley worked odd jobs in the area for a while before moving to Denton. Bob stayed in Moline and assimilated into the community by joining the Lion’s Club, trying to get elected as a Star I.S.D. Board trustee, and buying and selling curiosities. His neighbor Vernon Hurst recalls his big collection of lunch boxes. He spent a good deal of time taking care of (and writing about) his menagerie of animals. His son William Altenloh recalls that Bob practiced piano in the Baptist Church near his home in Moline. But mostly he read, observed, and thought a lot, the fruits of which appear in his The Moline Menace columns.

Alvis Lee, Bob’s mail carrier and friend, found Bob unconscious at his home in Moline in late April, 1991. He had suffered a stroke, and he later died at a Fort Worth hospital on April 20, 1991, at age 72. He was cremated. In his second published column, he wrote that he intended to be buried at Payne’s Gap.

The Moline Menace

Frank Bridges, publisher of The Goldthwaite Eagle, recalled how he met Bob. One day in 1978, Bob stumbled into the The Eagle office, mistaking it for the Wagon Wheel Cafe next door. With his distinctive long face, big nose, and a snaggletoothed grin—likely smoking a Lucky Strike—Bob quipped, “Where do I sign up for the beauty contest?” Frank handed Bob an Indian tablet and some crayolas and told him to do something constructive.

Bob quickly made it clear to Frank that he wanted to write. Earlier in his life, Bob had worked on radio scripts and written numerous unpublished short stories and plays. In 1953, an excerpt from a novel was published in the Chicago Review. Frank first gave Bob some reporting assignments, e.g. covering Mills County Commissioners Court meetings, but those were not a good fit. An erudite, Bob needed a platform to exercise his prodigious intellect. He proposed The Moline Menace, a weekly column that would allow him to draw from his smarts and deep store of knowledge. Frank obliged, and The Eagle published Bob’s first column on September 7, 1978. Bob also created the illustration for the column that shows him swatting at the relentless swarm of ideas buzzing around his head.

Bob identified as an intellectual, particularly a philosopher. He proved that a scholar can fit in just fine in rural Texas, especially one keen on country life. He never used his intellect to feel superior. In fact, he often challenged any intellectual snobbery that denigrated country folk, and he never hesitated to deflate the over-inflated. He celebrated experienced, practical workers over book-smart, yet impractical bosses. That was true while he was working for the railroad in Chicago: in one column, he tells the story of Stasch, an underling who possessed more know-how than his credentialed superiors.

He loved and respected the locals and often wove them into his columns. Frank Adams, Horace Brooks (Mills County Sheriff), John Clifton, Jack Davis, Vernon Hurst, Wallace Johnson (Mills County Judge), Alvis Lee, and Paul Lee were regulars. If a local met him, it made an indelible impression. Dale Duncan, the author’s dad, might have called him an “oddball,” a term he reserved for any eccentric. His Moline neighbor Vernon Hurst regarded him as a waggish cartoon character and remembers how Bob named Vernon’s kids after characters in the funnies. Marie Hurst, Vernon’s wife, cut his hair.

His work as the “menace” offers a valuable record of the time and people, and as a “move-in” he was able to observe with an outsider’s perspective. As he wrote, “You might indulge me as a kibitzer at a checker game. Sometimes the guy on the sidelines can see the better moves.” He frequented the cafes, gas stations, and feed stores where the locals traded stories. He was close to the cadre of domino players who hung out Saturday nights at the Moline Store. “There isn’t a finer bunch of men in the land, those devotees of tile flopping who take the thing with grave seriousness.” He often ventured out west and reported on Brownwood, the largest nearby town, where they had big-city problems like dealing with a confounding traffic circle.

Though he covered a lot of territory in his columns, there were a number of recurring subjects. He was proud of his genealogical connection to Charlemagne and identified with him. In one column he wrote, “Charlemagne had a great passion for music, astronomy, history and education. It was more to my liking to enjoy imagining that some of this might have leaked through the 1,100 years, for these are subjects I am most likely to write about.” He never demurred from the big questions, such as whether the development of civilization had really improved our lot and whether we are that much better off than a hippo.

A harmless gadfly, Bob not only poked at a bevy of problems facing civilization, big and small, his provocations were almost always matched with common sense remedies. Here’s an example, which offers ways to handle a jealous husband. But sometimes his solutions were wildly imaginative and even daffy, such as a scheme to dump green paint in the ocean to trick an enemy submarine to rise above water, allowing it to be shot down.

He exercised his knowledge of ancient history many times over. One of his usual constructions was to discuss a contemporary event then cite precedents in history—particularly ancient history—that illuminate understanding. In his columns, the echo of history continued to influence and inform the present, and he observed that society has not learned much from it.

Education was a paramount pursuit and one that he espoused to his readers. Over and over, he hammered that education is the answer to most problems, and he lamented its decline. He believed education is the only thing keeping us from devolving: “The only light in the darkness that is enshrouding more and more people with superstitions, ridiculous beliefs, non-real worlds, is the beam of education, particularly in basic science. If we don’t brighten them up soon we’ll regress to the ninth century.” He coined the term National Acceptance of Ignorance (NAI), identifying three factors that have eroded education: parents, television, and sports. As he wrote, “Turn off the TV set and instead read everything you can.” He lamented the loss of critical thinking skills. He regarded copyright as an impediment to the distribution of knowledge and offered a simple solution: get rid of it. Bob had a huge library to consult at his home in Moline. Daniel, Bob’s son, said the biggest burden of family moves was packing up Bob’s some 3,000 books. Bob was quick to help his kids write research papers: he would pull an assortment of bookmarked tomes from his library to help with assignments.

He wrote a number of columns that focused on psychology, sharing in one piece his deep understanding of adolescent vandalism and what to do about it. In fact, many columns address wayward youth and how parents can constructively respond. One column offers solid advice on how to perk up a kid who got outwitted by another kid. He observed, “Youth speaks of ‘finding itself’. It is the age of ‘me’ … At the same time youth seeks escape in various ways because of the abhorrence of the system, the vast bureaucratic machine geared to global war with its data centers, information input, communication networks, memory banks, files and even spies … Youth seeks to escape from the second vast system with its pressures to produce more wealth. GNP, and supply the first one. Certainly within these octupal machines an individual loses all possibilities of self expression becoming merely a number and a cog.” Another column describes Bob’s novel thinking about classroom cheating and that a logical outcome, surprisingly, is enhanced learning. He also wrote a deeply insightful column on why people join cults.

The media, i.e. television, was a common subject, and he was gravely concerned about how it was undermining our intellectual lives. Commercials really got his goat. He provided admonishment applicable to today’s hyper-connected, addictive, Internet society: “TELEVISION AS a culture bring us closer to all parts of the world, yet as an iron baby sitter, it is creating an intellectual desolation. We ARE degenerating because of it. I was shocked to observe a parent who appeared, who complained that his youngster watches TV 6 hours a day and seems to be ‘living’ in it. What shocked me was that the parent had to seek a councelor [sic] to learn how to decompress the submerged child. Have parents become this weak? Turn the thing off is the answer. Or, allow only an hour of it, whatever. The crushed nerd will soon develop his own resources and learn how to do other things. The poor thing will survive.” He wrote that television programs were becoming excessively violent and would naturally lead to crime: “WE CAN slow it down at once by cutting out the violence on television and in movies. We speak of the hardened criminal. What about the hardened television viewer? … There’s where your crime begins. He has no goals. He has no heroes …”

He was skeptical of bureaucracy, especially government bureaucracy. He was acutely aware of the world stage and thought our leaders did not have citizens’ best interests in mind. He wrote: “… But Congress goes on bathed in optimism, talking about locking the barn after the cows have gone. In their spare time they practice continued shafting of the public.” He delighted in skewering profligate government and lazy bureaucrats, and he repeats his suspicion that all government bureaucrats’ chief mission is to stay in office. Over and over, he cites useless government studies and wasteful bureaus and departments. In the January 20, 1983 column, he wrote, “The U. S. needs a Bureau of Swindles, called in short, the ‘BS’ bureau. When they are ready for this, I’ll apply for the directorship. I am sure that you will back me up.” He offered a simple way to manage government spending: “… The answer? A slight change in government. That is, all money to be spent should be listed on a referendum vote by the public.” He identified the venal nature of government lobbying: “THE SOLUTION is to end lobbying. How can that ever come about when the persons who enact laws are part of it? Congressmen within the House could move for it. Buy how many are that honest, and how many would end the fun and games of the job?”

Bob vehemently preached taking action to change government, even revealing that a cunning candidate is the most effective: “Don’t vote for the popularity chaps. Study your candidates, and above all nominate The Crafty, The Sly, and The Tricky … If you prefer living on, send more brains to Washington. Skip the grand speakers, and study your candidates for their intellects; i.e., adaptabilities. Vote for the schemers. They’ll scheme to save themselves, their holdings, and give us umbrage.” One of his best government-related columns provides a brilliant model for categorizing types of governments based on the “two-cow methodology.” He also presciently foresaw the double-edged sword of a surveillance state.

The nuclear arms race was a regular target. Numerous columns reveal his worry about the specter of nuclear annihilation. “WE CAN change the answer to the question of whether we shall have an all out war, from yes to no by acting on testing the minds of those who have the button available, or are responsible.” And once again, Bob offered a no-frills approach to solve the problem: “All that is needed is a collection of radio beaming homing devices that would allow a nuclear missile to home in on it perfectly on target. The devices would be placed on the White House, The Capitol, the Pentagon, the Senate Office Building, and all other major government facilities. The devices would also be placed on all official government buildings in the Kremlin, and in fact on all buildings of this kind in all other countries as well. We’d have a durable peace.” Another solution he offered was to build linear cities. In his August 12, 1982, column, he takes down lazy, “lifer” bureaucrats and their insidious, negligent involvement in the nuclear arms race in one decisive blow.

He delighted in playing around with language. His big imagination produced things like, “Woggle Bug on Neptune!” or this high-flying piece of alliteration: “Another one of this coterie is Bruce Sanders, more a rounded unfired missile type, also a prevaricator of propagating propaganda projecting protean pre-digested pre-fabricated preemptory plums plastered pointedly presaging parting puttering puffing peons.” He celebrated a good pun and dedicated a whole column to them. In another column, he parlayed a broken typewriter key into this (ph)unny: “The sixth letter on this typewriter is not working. I shall have to use “ph” phor the sound of it … PHLATTERY is the phood oph phools, yet ophten it is the tinsel that can beautiphy a phriendship.”

Sharing esoterica was his speciality. In one column, he wrote about the origin of the dog that appears on RCA advertisements and in another, that 1,425 people lost glass eyes in tornadoes last year [1980]. There seemed to be no limits to his ability to amass and recall similar statistics.

Bob’s raison d’être was as a fierce advocate for educating oneself as a tool for self-preservation. He entreated people to “sharpen up” and not get taken, either by government or a neighbor, and the key was getting educated. He believed that education is the one thing pushing civilization’s evolution forward. Once a a street-smart pool shark, he knew the game (yet he never shied from a harmless swindle when he had the chance). He even wrote that those sly types (like himself) ought to be elected to government office. “I think Americans are catching on. Government spokesmen and advertisers alike are realizing that the public is realizing what Lincoln said, ‘…you can fool some of the people some of the time, but …'” In other words, wise up and defend yourself with knowledge—don’t get bamboozled!

Bob wrote 271 Moline Menace columns and created twenty-five accompanying cartoons that were published in The Goldthwaite Eagle from September 7, 1978 through June 28, 1984. The column was also syndicated under a slightly different title “The Moline Menace with Bob Altenloh” with different column artwork and without the cartoons in the Brownwood Bulletin from October 19, 1978, through February 27, 1980.

This section gathers all of Bob’s columns and cartoons from The Goldthwaite Eagle and provides links to the digitized page in The Portal to Texas History where the article appears. The author has pulled his favorite quotes and/or indicated subject matter of each column. Some quotes have been corrected for punctuation and sometimes spelling.

1. September 7, 1978 – “The luckiest ranchers out here are those who have a wife and a cigarette lighter, and they both work.”
2. September 14, 1978 – “I have gone around the sun many times now and know that I have but to plan on being buried in Payne’s Gap, probably to begin to be forgotten within minutes after the last shovel is tamped on me. I plan on being planted high on a hill there. (I don’t want everyone else’s dribblings), but until then I shall try to pass on this enlightened encouragement. That I never accomplished anything doesn’t in the slightest leave me ‘shook up’ … The universe is a giant engine that will go on doing whatever it is doing as it did before me, and I am sure will go on doing so after me … And—You can always tell a Texan—but you can’t tell him much.”
3. September 21, 1978 – “I found that the people here take great pride in the history of the community. But history showing the year a man was born and the year he died is of such frugal meaning. The things you do, the things you have contributed with your thoughts—this is living history … It is this kind of thing that is living history, not dates. I am sure there are those who would decry, ‘What does an upstart and a newcomer know about our ancient community?’ In reply you might indulge me as a kibitzer at a checker game. Sometimes the guy on the sidelines can see the better moves … I firmly believe that all men are created equal. Of course some are more equal than others. Among these there are some who would ride high and trample us down. These we’ll slay, you and I, for we know the pen is mightier than the sword …”
4. September 28, 1978 – “First. I feel sorry for the man who marries for love then finds out his wife has no money … And … a husband is a man who can make his wife do anything she wants to.”
5. October 5, 1978 – “But I am always interested in education, and am moved in a feeling of great sacrifice to devote a column to the students at Goldthwaite, Star, Mullin and Priddy schools, and other plant life. I’d like to enlighten them all on the importance of learning English … Think of the old fellow who built huge building in a small town. Trucks were coming and going. Soon there were other buildings yet no one in the town knew what kind of business he was planning. As the work neared completion, he had a huge sign erected which read: ROMANCEMENT. The town’s women of the garden club were outraged. They held a meeting and one can imagine what they thought this enterprise was all about. They stormed out to his project armed with umbrellas. When they arrived en masse, he had taken his sign down and corrected it. It read: ROMAN CEMENT. On the other hand, if you are having difficulty with the subject of English, turn off the TV set and instead read everything you can.”
6. October 12, 1978 – “I can show the cause [of a child who has trouble handling the world outside the home] and at the same time lay a cornerstone upon which to build a program in the home. It requires only two words … weak parents … We are looking for intelligent life on other planets in outer space probably because we haven’t found any on this one.”
7. October 19, 1978 – [football] – “I don’t get much out of watching football. This is because I don’t seem to know what they are doing. The game consists of 11 Pithecanthropis erectii (prehisoric men) who are visited by a team of 11 Neanderthal tribe members. They engage a battle, the object of which seems to be the possession of a hog bladder. They appear in the most god-awful costumes, on a large field with lines drawn across it … The other night Grant Teaff [Tidwell] said, ‘We’re going to throw the ball more this season.’ I was so glad to hear this! I do wish they’d throw it somewhere. They haven’t been getting anywhere with the squat, squirt, and squash methodology.”
8. October 26, 1978 – [Halloween traditions] – “Bogies (from whence we get the term ‘Boogie-man’) were known to sit on just about all the fence posts. (Today they play dominoes) … During the years of the present times, the English have harmless fireside activities, cracking nuts, roasting them and ducking for apples in a tub. (No, Alvis, you don’t get IN the tub!)”
9. October 26, 1978 – “I married Shirley because I was short a bookcase, and she had one. I am happy with my little success, this column.”
10. November 2, 1978 – [Bob tries has hand as an advice columnist] – “You see, the answers should be pointed in these advice columns to match the heads of people who write in to them. Usually they just want to see the answers they have already decided themselves anyway.”
11. November 9, 1978 – [tall tales from his time as a cocktail pianist on a live bait barge on the Zambesi River in Africa] – “Do you believe all this? Hmmm?”
12. November 16, 1978 – [responding to the insanity of the news] – “The only way they’ll quit and approach us in a more truthful and practical fashion is when they find out that we are not knotheads, and that looks like it has about as much chance as a popsickle in a blast furnace (Unless of course they study this column).”
13. November 23, 1978 – [on UFOs] – “If something as shown or described in movies ever lands out here, you can rest assured that I shall immediately march out to it, knock on it and demand that they state their names and occupations. Maybe I’ll get inside and pass out copies of this column. I would of course address any beings in it (if there are any, with or without heads) in representative modern American language of the kind they must have listened to as it emanated from our earth, from our electronic media, those communication systems of radio and television. In fine tune with our illustrous [sic] era, our advanced society, I would begin by saying, ‘Hey baby, what’s comin’ down?'”
14. November 23, 1978 (supplemental) – [revealing the name of the dog in the RCA advertising campaign] – “The little dog’s name was SPIN! What is remarkable is that Spin had his very appropriate name before his adventure into fame!”
15. December 7, 1978 – “EMBARRASSING MOMENTS” – [the trickiness of employment references, etc.]
16. December 14, 1978 – “THE WESTERN HAT” – [regarding Lonzo O’Neal’s new hat and other observations] – “Living in downtown Moline I developed a keen interest in politics. I thought I might run for something. The neighbors suggested the border. I can’t run for anything in Goldthwaite since I live in Lampasas County. Sheriff Brooks pointed this out to me. In fact, he reminded me that if I come to Goldthwaite I should stop at his office and get a visa since living in Lampasas County makes me an alien, or a foreigner. Wait until he comes out here and finds the parking meters I have hidden around in the weeds for him. (I deliver this column to the Eagle at the rear door at odd hours. or when he’s at the other end of town.)”
17. December 21, 1978 – “THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT” – “When Christmas approaches I begin to feel that I not only don’t live here, but am an invisible Woggle Bug on Neptune, or some place. For me Christmas is getting to be like a mosquito bite on the bottom of the foot. The whole disaster begins when the discussion shapes up into what to get for whom.”
18. December 28, 1978 – “THE FRATERNITY BROTHERS”
19. January 4, 1979 – “THE DOCTORS” – “Here’s to the doctors whose mistakes may be found all tucked away neatly, under the ground. I hope the MDs don’t mind my little spoof.”
20. January 11, 1979 – “GOATS” – “If I were a to do a four reel comedy, all I would need for a cast would be Big John Clifton, three goats, and the bottom man on the Totem pole, myself. Laurel and Hardy would have been able to do wonders with this one … Before parting, your wart on the toad of knowledge would like to throw a couple of thought provoking custard pies. Man is the king of beasts. How, many kings has he?”
21. January 18, 1979 – “Television seems to be running out of material …”
22. January 25, 1979 – “THE BANK” – “The Moline Menace is here! Tie everything down! Put the world globe away before he hauls it out of here and sells it at a flea market! … Now I ask you. Where in the entire United States could a person be so cordially treated? Fantastic is the word for the folks in Goldthwaite. I often said for years that to get me out of Texas, they’d have to use bayonets fixed. To this, I have now added Moline.”
23. February 1, 1979 – “THE GARDEN” – “The garden did well that year. The next year we tried again under the presumption that it would rain sufficiently here. Only after a lengthy study of ancient history did I finally learn the truth about Moline. During the time of Noah and the Great Flood, Moline got only three inches! … The older a senior citizen in Goldthwaite gets, the farther he had to walk to school when he was a boy.”
24. February 8, 1979 – “MEDICAL HISTORY” [Bob observes a surgeon (Dr. Long) doing surgery on a Chevy at the Long Gulf Station] – “He then did something quite the opposite of what most medical practitioners do—he scrubbed AFTER the operation. He wrote a prescription of STP for the driver of the car, and I am sure Dr. Long was concerned about the car rejecting the carburetor. It was a model 290 (Two days on the road and ninety in the garage).”
25. February 15, 1979 – “MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER” [Clarence Darrow] – “In visiting with him he gave me many things I was to carry in my heart for the rest of my life. I remember vividly once when he quoted Horace and suggested that I pay attention to the line, ‘The source of justice is the fear of injustice.'”
26. February 22, 1979 – “THE BOOKLET” [a visit from an encyclopedia salesman to Bob’s farm in Wisconsin]
27. March 1, 1979 – “GREAT INVENTIONS” [a scheme to dump green paint in the ocean to trick an enemy submarine to rise above the water, allowing it to be shot down]
28. March 8, 1979 – “ANTS” [ideas for combatting fire ants] – “Why does a newspaper carry a column? The answer is that a columnist is an individual who spends his waking hours probing into the current events of the present day. He must give the readers entertaining ideas they can share with him. They follow his bouncing variety (the spice of life) and get to know him. If he has any spunk about him, there will be times when he’ll have to lash out in a fury at anything that might be of imminent danger to his friends who follow his entertaining writings. All systems go … target: fire ants … Why do we always wait until people are killed before we correct a serious hazard? While I think of it, we don’t need a hundred thousand dollar study on it either! I just gave you one at practically no cost. It came in your paper.”
29. March 15, 1979 – [Bob rants on advertising inundation] – “A visitor from outer space will ask his commander. ‘What happened to this planet’s civilization? Must have been a horrible neuclear [sic] war.’ Chief G7 will answer. ‘Nope. Ads.’ First Mate D. Flat Augmented Eleventh will notice the land below. ‘But look G7, down there! There are people alive. See! They have clothes on a line.’ Chief will reply. ‘Yes, those are the only ones left. They heard the word “save” just once too often, ran for it, lived in caves surviving the holocaust of the White Death.'”
30. March 22, 1979 – “BACKWOODS BACKUS”
31. March 29, 1979 – “THE COUNTRY CLUB” – “On a bright and sunny Spring morning I like to go out and sit on my rock by the chicken coop. The ram will come over and put his head on my lap, careful not bump me with his horns. The two ewes will come on the other side and nuzzle next to me. The Red Hen will show off her abilities to capture a bug. The old dog will stretch out in the sun like a pancake, wagging his tail once in while in approval. I call companions my innocents. I wouldn’t trade with the others (the wife won’t like this) for a million bucks. Because that’s my country club!”
32. April 5, 1979 – “One thing I never do is stretch things. Well … maybe the readers’ minds … just a little.”
33. April 19, 1979 – “THE TELEPHONE BOOK”
34. April 26, 1979 – “OH THOSE STUDENTS!” – “… Little Mike Gruber would leap out of the car and run all over the lawns. She would get out of the car and chase him all over the neighborhood! It was like an early silent movie comedy. She would capture him, then drag him in. She would invariably say, ‘I’lI leave him here. I have to shop.’ I fought desperately. ‘NOnonono,’ I said, ‘That would destroy every other student’s lesson until you returned. He’d run around the walls!’ I admired Mike, though. He pulled a clever con on me. I admired his ‘straight shootin’. He said, ‘Why don’t you tell my mother you quit teaching. The other students wouldn’t need to know. Then I could get out of these crummy piano lessons.’ I liked him because I must have seen in him a lot of myself. It takes one to know one.”
35. May 3, 1979 – “STATUS OH STATUS! WHERE IS THY STING?” – “I thought of business cards with my name on them, then the Moline Menace column, to be followed by other skills like Spiritual Advisor, Tea Leaves Read, Instructor at Scientific Pocket Billiards, Russian Gypsy Music by Appointment, Chicken Appraiser, Horse Cup Inspector, and so on. The card would have to be as big as a wall board.”
36. May 10, 1979 – “WAX MICE!” – “If you have a junior who comes home and they cleaned him at pool, dice, cards, or wheels, the only way to handle it is, firstly, don’t nag him. This is where old Dad can win the day. He should utter the two magic sentences, alone with Junior, then leave quickly, go into the kitchen to pretend to look for something, and let the words float in Junior’s brain until they sink to the bottom. The words, delivered with a SMILE are, ‘Hey! They gotcha last night didn’t they? Oh well…you’ll sharpen up.’ That’s it! You’ve won!”
37. May 17, 1979 – “WIN ONE, LOSE ONE” [the importance of a good title ] – “Some days later I played ‘In The Shadows’ again for the piano player who came by for a bull session. He asked if I would dash off a copy for him. Though it was a complex piece, all arranged, my hand flew across the pages as I worked on his copy. He took it home. Weeks later, I saw him again. ‘What do I do?’, he asked in a pleading wav, yet his look and attitude revealed a mixture of what was certainly most complimentary and quizzical. ‘I can’t stop playing your piece! It haunts me!’ I was astonished at this strange revelation for a moment, then answered ‘Must be the title.'”
38. May 31, 1979 – “THE HUNTING PARTY”
39. June 14, 1979 – “THE BLACK MONSTER … BRRRRRRR-ING!” – “I got an obscene caller once. I think I ruined the poor thing. I talked to him. He called again. I talked to him again. He didn’t get me alarmed and this began his confusion. I took his brain out and put it in backwards. If you see him on the street it will be easy to pick him out. He’s the one talking to himself and getting a busy signal. He’s lucky. I could have talked him to death. I told him my life story and didn’t even get to the eighth year before he completely abandoned me. I went to Europe that year and it would have gotten interesting. (My father wanted me to have a musical education so he sent me abroad. But I didn’t know what to do with her) … I don’t have a phone and never will have one as long as I live …”
40. July 5, 1979 – “JUST DAWGS” – “In closing, I’d like to leave a little something for your scrapbook. Many men have searched for God. Your dog has seen him … An appropriate parting gem for your scrapbook: The difference between unlawful and illegal is that ‘unlawful’ is something that is against the law; ‘illegal’ is a sick bird.”
41. July 12, 1979 – “I admire Tut’s personal possessions surely, but Amenhotep gave us something greater. There is a lesson in this bit of history. Not only was he the first in the world to state there is only one God, but when he had those statues made, he reached through thousands of years of time to tell us something. He was saying, ‘Tell it like it is!'”
42. July 19, 1979 – “OH THOSE MISTAKES!” – “Westerns give the greatest opportunity to find these boo-boos. Ever see a western with Indians riding up a hill against a blue sky, and a jet stream is moving along in it? There are scenes where the Indians are chasing the good guys. When you look at the ground in front of the charging red men, you often see the treads of knobby tires from the jeep on which the camera is carried.”
43. July 26, 1979 – “THE LONE STAR KID” – “After having been here for 25 years. I am now a Texan. ‘How so?’ a native-born asks. I reply, ‘I took my master’s in bull corn. Besides, I brag.'”
44. August 2, 1979 – “ZEN HO! DISQUIET IN THE FOREST OF PENCILS”
45. August 9, 1979 – “THE HIPPOPOTAMUS” – “We think we differ (are better) than they because we think. We may be just letting our brains go to our heads … Certainly we have singles bars and manufacture croquet balls, items of small interest to a hippopotamus. But we are akin to them with our own built-in programs of survival and reproduction. Our progeny go on with the thing. We have fingers and thumbs. We use tools to make things far beyond our needs, endless artifices we believe to be of value. In comparison, the hippopotamus does not seem to be doing as much in this line nor does he seem to be getting anywhere with doing his thing. But for all the noise we make with our automobile horns, we aren’t either. The more you think about it, the greater a mystery it becomes. If I ever solve it. I’ll write on it for you. The next time you visit a zoo with the youngsters take a long look at the hippopotamus. He was here before the pyramids. He was here before we were. He’ll be here after we are gone. The way we are going about things, gregariously cooperating with each other (a definition for civilization) we are seemingly headed for our own annihilation. We had better study the hippopotamus. And soon!”
46. August 16, 1979 – “OLD MOTHER HUBBARD” – [doubts about whether a neutron bomb exists; a good defense against the Russians might be the “suicide cannon”] – “I think the Soviet Union caught on. They claim they have one now. If the so-called secret plants of our nation were stolen by the Russians, they’d probably find a recipe for creamed spinach. If we stole their’s [sic], we’d find the floor plans for the men’s room in their subway.”
47. August 30, 1979 – “How To Succeed Without Banging Your Head” – “Remember P. T. Barnum? He said there’s one born every minute. In life you must employ some of these masterful methods if you are to succeed … Even today, every once in a while, I leave a bewildered individual in my wake, one who needs to be alone a while to think the thing out.”
48. September 6, 1979 – “ONE FLEW OVER”
49. September 13, 1979 – “THE CITY OF THE MAD” – “Those whom the gods shall destroy they first make mad. I can see Jupiter strolling with his friends on Mt. Olympus. They gaze down upon earth and Jupiter claps his hands. Lightening bolts fly from them. Then he speaks. ‘I know, Let’s give them freeways!’ And so it was.”
50. September 20, 1979 – “HOW DO I KNOW?” – “We are in a new and challenging age, the era of narcissism whereby so many are crying out for recognition as individuals, in reaction to the impersonal computerized and bureaucratic so-called ‘system’. Youth speaks of ‘finding itself’. It is the age of ‘me’ … At the same time youth seeks escape in various ways because of the abhorrence of the system, the vast bureaucratic machine geared to global war with its data centers, information input, communication networks, memory banks, files and even spies. Youth seeks to escape from the second vast system with its pressures to produce more wealth, GNP, and supply the first one. Certainly within these octupal [sic] machines an individual loses all possibilities of self expression becoming merely a number and a cog … What youth cannot seem to understand is that recognition, contact, [sex] experience, and security can be found in linens or meat. They need to pick one that suits them, then they can constantly reward themselves for having done well with it—taking pride in their meat or getting wrapped up in linens.”
51. September 27, 1979 – “THE WORD … AND THE WORD WAS Y’ALL” – “In real life drama I asked a young girl who had taken music before I signed her on, ‘Do you know chords?’ She replied. ‘Sure I do. Rummy, black jack, poker …’ After her lesson I bade her good afternoon and said. ‘Y’all come back, hear?'”
52. October 4, 1979 – “TEXAS SKETCHES … OR” – “Little tender and touching vignettes gathered from around the state by your observer …”
53. October 11, 1979 – “THE KNOW IT OWLS” – Once I asked, ‘What is the universe IN?’ Now you might as well go ahead ask what the original ball in the ‘big bang’ theory is IN. If they tell me ‘nothing’ in all directions I shall find this too terrifying to envision. Some day scientists will manage to peer out into the real outer reaches beyond the universe as we know it and probably will find particles of chocolate cake. For what they tell us now it, makes about much sense. I propose we are just too small to ever know what’s out there. We are smaller than bacteria a billiard ball and are trying to find out who runs pool room.”
54. October 18, 1979 – “WILLOW WEEP FOR ME” – “To write a column, is one of the saddest occupations in the world. The glory is quickly eclipsed by the horrible fate of all those little brain children. I enjoyed a particular one for instance the day it came out in your paper. I was to realize it had grown old and died the next day … never to be published again. Somewhere out there it was useful just once more—some woman wrapped her husband’s lunch with it. Somewhere else it may have served another emergency.”
55. October 25, 1979 – “FUN FOR YOUNG PEOLE AND OLD PEOPLE WHO ARE YOUNG PEOPLE” – “If you want to know about something nobody else has heard of, ask me. I’m full of it.”
56. November 15, 1979 – “MESSAGE FROM DOLPHIN” – [an alien observes human life]
57. November 22, 1979 – “THE .455 WEBLEY” – “Why did those British officers leap over so many places on the earth’s surface whipping out their Webleys? So they could talk about it afterwards at the Club, while sipping gin and tonics, and talk about it some more in their huge, moss colored leather easy chairs. The years rolled over them and the medals of the Queen’s Rifles, the ribbons, the trinkets all ended in flea markets, collections, or in grand but dusty repose in minor museums. The Kiplingesque Romance which influenced us is gone … Perhaps it is for the best. The philosophy of America of ‘I’ll get mine’ has overwhelmed the glory ego trip. The grandeur of those officers who whipped out their Webleys in great acts of self-sacrifice is tinged with doubt about its Gestalt in today’s scheme of things.”
58. December 6, 1979 – “THE WEDDING” – “THE MORAL: If a man gets into trouble, don’t send him to prison—turn him over to his wife. Save the taxpayer’s money— let HER rehabilitate him!”
59. December 13, 1979 -” THE PACKAGE”
60. December 20, 1979 – “A DUMMY AND A WITCH DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER” – “Although I am nearing retirement and pension age, I still haven’t any idea of what I’ll be when I grow up. With a little imagination life can be fun if you try. Come to think of it … I now have an interesting little caper in mind. Let’s see … I need two cantaloupes, a mouse and a beer glass, and …”
61. December 27, 1979 – “TO SMOKE OR NOT TO SMOKE”
62. January 24, 1980 – “BIG BUSINESS”
63. January 31, 1980 – “If P. T. Barnum were alive today he’d revise his words. ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’, to ‘..There’s two of them and they’re both entering contests.'”
64. February 7, 1980 – “OLD BOOKS” [fun facts about Amarillo, Santa Fe, and Oregon Territory]
65. February 21, 1980 – “THE FISHING DISEASE”
66. February 28, 1980 – “THE GOLF DISEASE” – “On the golf course, to him, the ball becomes a symbolic (hard) head, a skull in miniature. Note the tee-off. How violent it is! The ball is prosecuted relentlessly with manic vigor. When the ball lands in the rough, the stroke is less maniacal. On the green the ball is subdued at last, gently putted. The inevitable end is the ‘burial’ of the ball at its funeral; its complete subjugation. When the golfer ‘resurrects’ the ball out of the ground, his libidinal energies are charging up to wreak vengeance on it at the next tee. So intense is this savagry [sic] that when golfers have had a bad day, some throw their clubs in the lagoon. Here, the psychic energies have been directed into self destructive reverse and tunneled their way inward to form a raging conflict. When a golfer has a seizure and throws his clubs in the pond, he usually has to wade in, in his clothes, dig down in the muck, pull up the golf bag, hold it up, and unzip one of the pockets to retrieve his car keys before stomping off the course. The disease is incurable, however. He’ll return the next day.”
67. March 13, 1980 – “PUNS WITH YOUR COFFEE”
68. March 20, 1980 -“MOLINE SCIENCE BUREAU” – “But we go on believing, unchallenging and soon they’ll tell us that the universe is five minutes old and I’m not expected until Thursday.”
69. March 27, 1980 – “OH CANNONBALL! OH CANNONBALL!”
70. April 3, 1980 – “BROWNWOOD U.S.A.”
71. April 10, 1980 – “The Mystery of Maureen Waldren” – “She had one brown and one blue eye!”
72. April 17, 1980 – “THE WORLD TODAY” – “‘Imperialists!’ they call us in smaller countries around the globe.”
73. April 24, 1980 – “A PAIR OF SHOES” – “We often fail to notice the little things in life. With a little creativity an insignificant happening can be developed into a grand work of art.”
74. May 1, 1980 – “It is amazing how much we imagine—then believe it!”
75. May 8, 1980 – “IN A WORD” – [origins of] “Round Robin … Moonlighting …”
76. May 15, 1980 – “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WESTERNS?” – “What the modern film makers don’t understand is that the HERO is supposed to be impeccably dressed, and in a white hat. The baddie—and here is where they go wrong—was never a mess, but a superbly dressed, handsome, debonair fellow, a fallen hero.”
77. May 22, 1980 – “THE MONA LISA” – “Now I am a great measurer of things in pictures, from cannon balls to heiroglyphics [sic]. I studied a good print of the Mona Lisa, and found circles! The top of the head is a circle, under the nose another, still another under the chin, and the smile is the arc of another. Soon I was able to see what da [Vinci] did! He used a compass and began playing about overlapping circles before he constructed the [portrait]. The [portrait] is more a design than a semblance to a living person. Da [Vinci] used circles like tinkertoys to build it … It would never have occurred to them that she is smiling because the cake in the oven turned out like a picture in a woman’s home magazine. Or that da [Vinci] paid her in advance to pose. Or while readying his canvas he stuck his thumb with the compass.”
78. May 29, 1980 – “THE MIRACLE OF THE BANANA” – “If you teach piano nowadays, the competition of TV ind almost anything else must be difficult for you. If so, get a penknife, some India ink, a ball of Chinese silk ribbon and a bag of plastic bananas. It could keep you from going bananas!”
79. June 5, 1980 – “BE KIND TO A DUCK—IT MAY BE YOUR UNCLE” – [reincarnation]
80. June 12, 1980 – “TEXAS SKETCHES” – “MOLINE … A nearby rancher decided to move some cows and calves to another pasture about a ‘maal’ up the road. He moved the cows. It was getting dark and he decided to move the calves the following morning. The cows broke out during the night and returned to his place. According to the handbooks on cowology, he should have moved the calves first. The cows would have stayed home and asked each other, ‘Which way did they go?'”
81. June 19, 1980 – “Only four things are needed to foretell the future. A good set of volumes on World History, a copy of the ‘Theory of Population” by Malthus, your newspaper, and your head in a thinking attitude … You may find it bleak, but bear with me, it’s not totally hopeless. IN CONCLUSION: I did not create the world – I just observe it. If I had I would have prevented the mutation that produced man (if that be the case of our origin) and let man remain the monkey he wants to be anyway.”
82. June 26, 1980 – “PREZ AND BREZ” – “If you look on the brighter side of things, watching presidents can be fun. Especially if you observe the special effects that surround his presence … I am waiting for one with a green ticket that says, ‘Run daily. Prez signs bill abolishing income tax.’ Now that would rate a T-Shirt!”
83. July 3, 1980 – “In the wake of the news of St. Helen’s volcanic eruption in Washington, it might be of interest to pause a moment and reflect on the mightiest volcano of all time. This was the 10,000 foot Krakatoa, located in the Sunda Straits between Java and Sumatra.”
84. July 10, 1980 – “If you practice your skills on commercials and their stupidity begins to make you laugh, you are ready for bigger things. You might move along to Congressmen. And with an election year we have the promise of a whole circus of clowns trying to please all the self interest groups, contradicting themselves, waving their arms like windmills and pounding on their daises. We all know that after they get in office, Washington will settle down and once more become the amnesia capital of the world.”
85. July 17, 1980 – “True he had grown tomatoes the size of indoor baseballs, and all sorts of gigantic flowers and vegetables. I saw what it took to be a gardener. His fingers had crystallized and calcified permanently into the shapes of hands holding a shovel. I was glad to find early June peas on sale at 4 cans for a dollar at the Super market. Matching what is inside the vegetable can with the picture on the label is by far much easier than trying to start with a little dinky thing called a seed and a shovel and then trying to match what it is supposed to grow up to become with those pictures in the seed catalogs. That’s for sure!”
86. July 24, 1980 – “I began to realize that I was looking [for ghosts] in the wrong place, and that they exist in the human head. When someone throws an outdoor barbeque all over polite conversations on the subject usually begin with, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ No one ever asks, ‘Do you believe in Chevy Impalas?’ The very existence of the shades depends upon the dial in the machinery of the mind being turned on to belief. Nonbelievers don’t see ghosts and are usually kicked out of the club. What surprises me is that some enterprising fellow in England hasn’t created a tour for those with an open mind and wallet who want to see a real (live?) ghost. Let us imagine the itinerary …”
87. July 31, 1980 – “Instead of attempting to produce a super race of more members of society that can push buttons as well as the monkey, they should concentrate on developing humans that can round up sheep, bring in the morning paper and find their way home in the dark. We need more of these.”
88. August 7, 1980 – “TEXAS SKETCHES” – “News travels fast in a feed store. Dale Duncan, who is well known in Star and as many other places that will let him in, dropped a hint at Brown’s Feed Store in Lampasas that when he passes my place and sees my chickens and ducks he develops a real craving for some fried chicken and roast duck.Let it be known herewith and whereas that I don’t care if the party of the second part does use the old Arkansas Thumb-Up Grip, for which I heard that the aforementioned is famous, I have 4 trained guinea chickens that will wake me up any time of the night if they hear a set of slab feet approaching the coop … Moline is so dry these days it takes three acres to rust a nail … ‘Brooksie,’ [Horace Brooks, Mills County Sheriff], I said, ‘You take a twenty dollar bill to a pawn shop, you then tell the pawn broker that it was given to you by your mother and that you want to keep it for sentimental reasons. You pawn the 20 for 15 and sell the pawn ticket for 10. You make 5.'”
89. August 14, 1980 – “TEXAS SKETCHES” – “When a Texan is bright, he’s brilliant; but when you find a dumb one, there is only one thing that’s dumber and that’s two of them. A sheep rancher was getting ready for the shearers to arrive. His neighbor had only eight sheep, so he invited him to bring them, knowing the sheares wouldn’t set up their machines for such a small number. They discussed identifying the sheep and agreed that the neighbor would mark the backs of his with green chalk before putting them in with the larger herd. During the shearing the neighbor was able to put his fleese in the proper wool bag. But what about the sheep? Of course I cannot reveal the names of either of these characters, but we finally sorted out the sheep.”
90. August 21, 1980 – “MEXICAN SKETCHES” – “You see, all the cars in Mexico have brand new brakes. They never touch them. Instead they use the horn, never slowing down even for young or old.”
91. September 4, 1980 – [Science and Sanity; Language in Action; Language and Thought in Action; semantics] – “I was a philosopher, who always remained calm and collected no matter what happens to the other guy.”
92. September 11, 1980 – “FINALE: For a man to be saved from something or other he must be first, convinced he fell. Don’t let anyone ever convince you that you are old whatever your age. Instead think of yourself as ‘experienced’. Remember, and I write this with all sincerity, you have knowledge and wisdom we so desperately need in these very trying times. We juveniles are always eager to learn from you. TAMAM SHUD!”
93. September 18, 1980 – “MEXICAN SKETCHES”
94. September 25, 1980 – “TEXAS SKETCHES”
95. October 2, 1980 – “Freud claimed that we have two basic drives, sex and aggression. The latter is a destructive urge. These were his Eros and Thanatos concepts. I’m sorry about that, Sigmund, but there is a seldom noticed drive in man that borders on mania. It’s rocks.”
96. October 9, 1980 – “THE KORAN”
97. October 16, 1980 – “THE KORAN – PART II”
98. October 23, 1980 – “The hoax of Vladimir Larrovitch”
99. October 30, 1980 – “Thoughts entertained while reading a newspaper”
100. November 6, 1980 – [viruses]
101. November 13, 1980 – [bloopers]
102. November 20, 1980 – “SIAMESE SKETCHES”
103. November 27, 1980 – [lost mine and “No Road” near El Paso] – “The fun is in the looking, not the finding. To find a lost gold mine, one that had gold in it would be a downfall. Like piranhas claimants would come out of the woodwork. Landowners, the county, the state, the feds, all would descend upon the victim. There would be endless court litigations, and the finder would end his days broke and bent out of shape. I came away unscathed, my very soul was filled with passive contentment and peace, with the fossil, eleven golf balls and a plastic chicken. There’s moral here somewhere.”
104. December 4, 1980 – “TEXAS SCRAPBOOK” – “In downtown Moline, across from my chalet, there is a rock building, once the local general store. Today it comes to life only on Saturday nights. The clicking of dominoes can be heard floating across the meadows beyond it. There isn’t a finer bunch of men in the land, those devotees of tile flopping who take the thing with grave seriousness. No drinking nor gambling is allowed. No belligerence is permitted either. One who comes on strong, hard-nosed as a sorehead, is spoken to by the elders. One night I was relaxing with a book and heard a man scream. It was a horrifying blood curdling yell. I ran out, crossed the road in haste for I was sure that one of the newts had been injured. I plunged in the door and announced that I have the truck all gassed up and ready to go, adding, ‘I can get him to the hospital in Goldthwaite (22 miles) in about 12 minutes!’ Can you picture Sir Galahad with a red face? There was no injured man. Clary, who owns the grocery store and gas station in Star, won a game!”
105. December 11, 1980 – “CHINESE OPERA”
106. December 18, 1980 – “1980 WRAP-UP” – “CONCLUSION: What we thought was the good life is going out. Now we’ll have to stay home more, play checkers and tiddly winks with the kids, read more and think more. The kids will turn out better now that they’ll get to meet and become acquainted with their parents, while the taxes go on and on, grinding us into final dust.”
107. December 25, 1980 – “Do you remember years ago when you heard, ‘Oh numbers.’ Are we coming to this? Once we had pluralism, in those days of majority rule. Now we are fractionated in a kind of pluralism. Perhaps this is the spectre that has quietly suffocated us in its icey octupal grip. It’s a free country, we brag. Sex has gone quite free in the last few years. But we do not have intellectual freedom. I have one of the world’s most fabulous collections of rejection slips. Some for bum writing perhaps, but most for writing the truth … We must concentrate, and perhaps relearn the old statement, ‘I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it.’ And soon!!”
108. January 1, 1981 – [on profligate wealth and his modest life in Moline] – “Of course we all depend somewhat on civilization. I make as much as he does, but I am not in a big hurry about it. That sum just takes me ten years. I wouldn’t trade places with him. To live out here you need one requirement you must be mentally blessed or mentally nuts (choice of one). If you stop by, enter at your own risk. If you think of me as weird, oddball, hermit, bum, loafer or dreamer, I shall not be fearful. Always remember, there aren’t many of us left!”
109. January 8, 1981 – [taking umbrage at a restaurant review that elevates European cooking over American]
110. January 15, 1981 – “Amaze your friends! Throw a statistic at them! You don’t have to know anything. You can impress your peer group early in the evening long before they get crocked. If you don’t know a statistic, make one up. Try something sturdy like ‘Did you know that 90% of the people in America have Feeber’s Disease?’ … We have become like trained seals. Public relationists in business and government throw these rubber fish at us and we swallow them. Beware the statistic, Fred. Fred! Will you get off this Barbara thing? As I was about to say, statistics can be juggled about to lead us to believe what the jugglers want us to believe.”
111. January 29, 1981 – [explanation of racketeering, mafia, etc.]
112. February 12, 1981 – [Ronald Reagan]
113. February 19, 1981 – [uses for cassette recordings]
114. February 26, 1981 – [electronic games, pool, and checkers] – “It is the thinking we have abandoned. Computer games are for the lazy. It takes tremendous work and some years of practice to achieve skill in pool, chess and checkers. Another example of the [easy] way of doing things is the home organ. Now one can play almost immediately, with rhythm and effects sounding quite big-time, all without preparatory practice and work. Have you ever noticed persons on television in the news who, upon being interviewed as a disaster, an election, or other on-the-scene items inevitably say, ‘…I feel like.’ Not one today dares to say, ‘I think.’ We are losing the art.”
115. March 5, 1981 – [adolescent vandalism]
116. March 12, 1981 – [a new perspective on classroom cheating] – “WITH THESE excellent scholastic habits ingrained, perhaps they might find, by their evermore advanced readings of the great minds of literature and science that the wise have said the same things for centuries. They might soon learn with their deeper plunge into the heritage of great works that after all it was fun and easy to solve the test paper situation by cheating, but it is more to their newer taste and demands gleaned from having engulfed philosophies, to be honest, to do unto, others, to aspire toward a greater humanity, to want to contribute to a more peaceful, cooperative, loving, mankind. They dragged themselves from the mire of cheating on test papers to the temples of the great because they did learn! Now you have a new type of citizen, one who knows the ropes from both ends. He replaces the cheating congressman who in turn leaves to join the dinosaurs of the past. The slogan of educators would then become: ‘Let Them Cheat Their Way to Greater Knowledge and Wisdom.’
117. March 19, 1981 / cartoon – [metric system; solar power]
118. March 26, 1981 – “THE MYSTERY of the Turnip” [and cleverness of ducks] – “If anybody calls animals ‘dumb animals’, they surely don’t know what they are talking about, do they?”
119. April 2, 1981 – “BANKS AND OTHER CORNBALL SUBJECTS”
120. April 9, 1981 – “The point of all this, is that we all too readily accept what we read, what we hear, and what we are told without subjecting it to doubt, to closer analysis. Thinking is one of the greatest gifts you have. Using it before you sign something, for instance, might save your neck. Your neck is a stem that holds your head when you swing it from side to side to indicate ‘no’. Ooops! How did we get back on that subject? Thinking about it, of course!”
121. April 16, 1981 – [western garb fad, etc.]
122. April 23, 1981 – [chemical additives in food]
123. May 7, 1981 – “When you begin with a subject, Nature takes its course. One thing reminds you of another, and soon you create. Anyone who creates becomes free of depression … The average child and adult watches 26,000 commercials in a year, or 220 minutes of this bubble gum for the mind each week.”
124. May 14, 1981 – [trip to Pottsville and Hamilton, etc.] – “… I learned that all geographical locations including latitude and longitude are based on a single one-by-one foot Lone Star Gas sign. A place is designated as being three miles up the road to the left of it, or five miles down the main drag from it. Even a half mile this side of it requiring the driver to go first to square one-by-one … I had mentioned that we had come through Pottsville. Out here this kind of event has every bit of the magnitude of having returned from the [South] Pole. Mrs. Cuthbert broke me up, throwing a line, ‘Even if you were going slowly, how do you know you went through Pottsville?’ … Another one of this coterie is Bruce Sanders, more a rounded unfired missile type, also a prevaricator of propagating propaganda projecting protean pre-digested pre-fabricated preemptory plums plastered pointedly presaging parting puttering puffing peons. Phew! No wonder I was tired when I got home!”
125. May 21, 1981 – “PROFANITY IS really a blank check on a bankrupt vocabulary. It is used by some who either wish to be heard, or want to emphasize a point, or perhaps stir a response from another. Two causes occur. One is the lack of being able to select well chosen words and the other is thalamic, emotional reaction. Most men in this latter case, when hitting the thumb with a hammer do utter obscenities.”
126. May 28, 1981 – [pickles]
127. June 4, 1981 – “AS A NATION we have bastardized the joy of acquiring knowledge, especially basic things, an extravagance we can no longer afford in the real competitive world. The young cannot expect better since TV is our culture. On some rather hideous game shows awards are given to those who answer a question correctly. This is tantamount to stating that to know the answer is worthless without monetary reward. Pride should be encouraged in the young in learning for its own sake by supportive reward; verbal acclaim but not material reward. So much for the learning process … IT’S YOUR country and it is falling apart from within with cancerous little islands, each one led by a yoyo who doesn’t know he’s alive. The doctrine of ‘one nation indivisible’ must have a rebirth and the ideologies of those who propose otherwise, like the storks and angels of infantile lore, will vanish. They’ll talk to themselves for a while, but there won’t be any listeners.”
128. June 11, 1981 – “THE REASON that you must be kindly with Mr. Wonderful and not be tempted to tell him he is lying, is that he has told the world these many things for so long he believes them. Just shrug your shoulders, say “Hmmm,” and let the draft circulate through your ears.”
129. June 18, 1981 – “WE ARE ADDING more and more gadgets to everything, all of which is outracing our ability to keep abreast of it with maintenance and repair. Perhaps we are insecure, and adding artifice to artifice in order to procrastinate what we sense is our inevitable extinction.”
130. June 25, 1981 – “THERE YOU have two types from the Field Guide to Human Beans. Mr. Wonderful is characterized by being the last word on everything, owns or once owned everything, and besides constant bragging as a defense mechanism that compensates for his beliefs that he failed in life somehow and should have been destined for better things, he’s really a nasty fellow, quite embittered … GUS BUMPKY, on the other hand, is a jolly fellow, a busy-busy chap who is ‘in’ on everything. You name it, he can get it for you wholesale. When you arrive with the money to take advantage of a big deal, he’ll be absent, at home and quite ill because he was brewing a pot of soup and used cockroach powder instead of nutmeg. Gus Bumpky would be the one who fears retirement. Tie him up with mummy tape and he’d explode. He never really gets anywhere. But let’s face it—How many of us do? … [MISS Wonderful] ALWAYS has a long list of things she wouldn’t put up with at the office. She has another list of things she wouldn’t put up with as far as her husband is concerned, usually adding the phrase ‘any man.’ Her life is wrapped up in the ‘Office experience’ … THOSE WHO think require solitude. Those who seek material things, seek the companionship of many others. Miss Wonderful’s life style then requires the town house apartment. While paying on one, she’ll soon be into another one. Her husband will have his behavior modified …”
131. July 2, 1981 – [fire ants; ridiculous government employment benefits] – “Newspaper readers are better informed than TV watchers. It is true that television offers pictures of events, but if you use a stop watch you’ll find the actual minutes of news are few. Not only do you get more coverage in your paper, but if a point is not clear you can read it again, or save the clipping. BESIDES offering a little entertainment based on today’s life-styles, mores, and antics, this delicious column will serve you from time to time with some of the tid-bits not found in the main stream of the news.”
132. July 9, 1981 – “THERE’S BEAUTY in your own back yard if you take the time to look for it. More than that, there’s drama and exciting, often humorous, things to whet the appetite of a person with an inquiring mind … LIKE I SAY … If only you would sit quietly and let it all happen Mother Nature will whisper her secrets to you, (she always does it in a whisper), you will be amused and amazed … ON THE RECENT flap about whether evolution is fact or not, I believe both sides are in error, viewing the whole concept in reverse. The truth may be that we started out as man and are becoming monkeys. With the increase in violence, the whole process is visibly accelerating. We seem to be going backwards to the savage days; the cave men … FOR A LONG time I thought those that opposed the theory of evolution and its teaching feared that it may all one day become established that man and monkey came from a common ancestor. Now I see that it is all quite the opposite. They fear being reminded of where they are headed.”
133. July 16, 1981 – “Those who have a cause also have in their minds an ingrained misconception that the government and the taxpayers are supposed to solve everything. We have come to rely on this all too much … A NEIGHBOR and friend, Fred Sanderson, who lives in Moline’s suburbs in the higher rent Gold Coast of these environs, once told me, ‘I hope they raise the gasoline to five dollars an ounce – Then maybe we’ll do something about it.’ I thought his analogy a wise one. It does seem that we cannot (like adolescents) think ahead any more than we can think for ourselves and attempt to solve our own problems. We wait for a wreck before we try to prevent the accidents.”
134. July, 23, 1981– [life of crime; zip codes; government sale of planes to Saudi Arabia] – “THE MORAL: Crime is on the decrease. There isn’t that much left worth stealing!”
135. July 30, 1981 – [comics]
136. August 6, 1981 – [political discussion about China] – “I’m sure you heard about the egg in the monastary [sic]—it went from the frying pan into the friar.”
137. August 13, 1981 – “OH! HOW my heart bleeds for these suffering fellows! Just think of some 15 to even 30 brave, true, and stalwart clergymen or social workers gathered in a small hall to do their duty to review or censor a movie with no other comfort than their after-dinner cigars! At one of these affairs, one chap brought along his copy of Hustler magazine for another to censor. There seems to be no limit to their sacrifices for us. Three cheers for them! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! QUESTION: Who is to censor the censors?”
138. August 20, 1981 – “According to a recent study made by the Environmental Protection Agency, 10 cows burp enough gas in a year to provide space heat and hot water for a small home. Burping cows were found to be the number one source of pollution in the US, exuding 50 million tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere annually. The publication of that busy institution concluded that there is no available technology for controlling the cow burping devastation. VARIOUS FORMS of governments and their political ideologies can be defined by using the ‘Two Cow Methodology’. SOCIALISM: If you have two cows, you give one to your neighbor. COMMUNISM: If you have two cows you give them to the government. The government gives you some of the milk in return. FASCISM: If you have two cows you keep the cows, give the milk to the government then the government sells the milk back to you. NEW IDEALISM: If you have two cows you shoot one of them, milk the other, then pour the milk on the fields. NAZISM: If you have two cows the government shoots you, then keeps the cows. CAPITALISM: If you have two cows you sell one of them and buy a bull.”
139. August 27, 1981 – [world leader epithets] – “There are two conditions to this one, too. It is either raining or it is not raining. If it is not raining, then it must be raining … See you next week. Signed… Robert The Nose.”
140. September 3, 1981 – [employee psychology]
141. September 10, 1981 – “It will come to pass that after all it is not the American way to hate a people, or a race, and prevention of this is in order. Let us hope for such enactment. Each individual must be judged, and if there are enemies among them, we’ll sort them out.”
142. September 17, 1981 – “I’D LIKE TO generate renewed interest in this fine game [pool], a sport that has suffered ignominiously by negative publicity, word of mouth belief that hoodlums frequent these places. Times have changed on this—now ladies are seen in all of them enjoying a game.”
143. September 24, 1981 – [crime] – “WE CAN slow it down at once by cutting out the violence on television and in movies. We speak of the hardened criminal. What about the hardened television viewer? And he’s a child! Murder, robbery, and rape have become nothing to him! The only culturally shocking thing to him would be the electricity going off. He is immune, and while he is growing callous, inside is a little growing robot, seeking its goals, its answers embodied in a directionally unified Great Me. There’s where your crime begins. He has no goals. He has no heroes … smoothly. There are thousands of nit-picking cases on the books that quite often could be arbitrated by an understanding third party when it is realized that those involved really only want to be heard, to be listened to a bit, to air their views (or gripes) to someone who would take it all seriously, then with some air of solemnity and heavy contemplation the listener could hand down a wise commonsense decision. The offended parties could go their ways feeling relieved, their aggravations eased and resolved.”
144. October 1, 1981 – [seasons; New Horizons; sports and computers] – “LIONS CLUB HISTORY IN THE MAKING …. While attending a recent meeting of the Lions Club in Goldthwaite, I made the acquaintance of a lively fellow. He is employed at a local funeral emporium. We stood outside after the meeting and had a delightful conversation. At this time, however, I would like to make a request that when we depart to go our ways variously, he might conclude our tete-a-tete by saying ‘Goodnight’, or ‘Ta Ta’, NOT ‘See you later!'”
145. October 8, 1981 – [cookbooks; recipes]
146. October 15, 1981 – [story of Stasch, the low man who was a better engineer than his credentialed bosses] – “STASCH WAS what is termed a ‘car knocker’ on the railroad. His job was to inspect the Westinghouse, brake systems, piston travel, journal boxes and so on. The first time we all realized that he was on a par with the architects that built the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, and the Temple at Karnak, was during the incident concerning train number 208.”
147. October 22, 1981 – “… that one day I was out in the rain, when it did actually rain in Moline, I spoke to Paul Lee, a neighbor rancher, and asked, ‘What are you doing out in the rain?’ He replied, ‘Oh, I’ve seen it before. I wanted my boy Alvis to see it!’ … Store clerks are known to utter, ‘Yall come back!’ in Texas fashion as you leave. Here’s a new one from Carother’s Gasoline Emporium in Goldthwaite’s downtown – ‘Come back if you can stand it!'”
148. October 29, 1981 – “If you’d like to keep up with world affairs, you’ll need this handy dandy in-a-nutshell one-column dictionary to paste on the wall. It contains the major terms you get in your news reports … [e.g.] GRAVE CONCERN – A term used by the state department equivalent to the frowning of both eyebrows. Again it is a signal that no action will be taken.”
149. November 5, 1981 – [book reviews of The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds and The Comet is Coming]
150. November 12, 1981 – [Thanksgiving; piano arranging for two ministers] – “I do try to live by the Golden Rule … do unto others … and never swindled anyone who didn’t have larceny in his heart in the first place and by demonstration showed him the error of his ways. Perhaps, after all, I am a little Pilgrim for Jesus and don’t know it. I do it my way, vouchsafing such philosophy while blaspheming ignorance and hypocrisy.”
151. November 19, 1981 – [BROWNWOOD USA …] – “THE CIRCLE must either go or at least water placed in that round thing in the middle, together with water lilies and a set of flamingoes, but no, the natives would think they are pink turkeys and eat them!”
152. November 26, 1981 – “The sixth letter on this typewriter is not working. I shall have to use “ph” phor the sound of it … PHLATTERY is the phood oph phools, yet ophten it is the tinsel that can beautiphy a phriendship.”
153. December 3, 1981 – [an idea to test the psychological soundness of world leaders who could start a nuclear war] – “WE CAN change the answer to the question of whether we shall have an all out war, from yes to no by acting on testing the minds of those who have the button available, or are responsible.”
154. December 10, 1981 – [various topics; crime] – “WE GLORIFY the mafia. Some regard them as heroic. No wonder crime is a devastating force today! We must like crime! Otherwise, why do we constantly re-create episodes of it again and again on television? It delights us; that is, until one of us is struck by it. Then the attitude changes. Soon enough people will be touched by crime, and they will react en masse to stamp most of it out. STRANGE though, isn’t it, that this kind of success will cost us our freedom. We will then be subjected to a world worse than the present one! We’ll struggle along as zombies, numbered, regimented, dragging through our miserable lives without spirit, shuffling on tired institutionalized feet. Crime will be almost impossible to commit. The watchers will watch the watchers.”
155. December 17, 1981 – “WORD USAGE is a matter of taste, but to point out a single word and announce that it is evil is a dangerous attack on the education process. Evil is who evil thinks, really. If you seek out evil in certain words there are thousands that might become suspect, in this approach. We’d have a backward primitive culture and a skinny dictionary … CHILDREN ARE inquisitive and seek answers. The do-gooders are doing the children a disservice. Emasculating dictionaries will cause youngsters to [resort] to seeking answers to their questions in alleys. Understanding comes with growth and comes with seeing things as they are, not as one would like them to be. THOSE that are hammering away at educational material are like frightened epileptic porcupines being chased by invisible hound dogs in a paint factory.”
156. December 24, 1981 – [the importance of learning English and reading] – “Let’s change an old saw, ‘If at first you don’t succeed… read, read, read.’ If getting ahead is your thing, this is what you must do then. So go do it and quit moaning about it! Pops.”
157. December 31, 1981 – [Denmark]
158. January 7, 1982 – “IT IS A wee bit presumptious of man to think he can explain the creation of the universe. He may entertain himself with the concept that every watch has a watchmaker, but search as he will, he’ll never find the watch shop. He on his little ball in space is too tiny, too insignificant. His thinking, too, is so limited. He thinks everything has a beginning and an end and forgets to comtemplate the circle. He, man, cannot handle the subject. THE UNIVERSE quite likely has always been here. We do not know what it is doing, and it is likely that it will be here forever into the future. We do have exciting theories about its origin (Big bang) that show that it was a ball, and once blew up and spread the stars over the blanket of blue. But we do not know what it was before that, what it was in, and worse … where it was! SUMMATION: Life is short. Make the best of it.”
159. January 21, 1982 – [political predictions for 1982] – “The only thing we seemed to have learned from a study of history is that we haven’t learned anything from a study of history.”
160. January 28, 1982 – [commentary on Car Sagan’s Cosmos book; send video games to the Soviet Union]
161. February 4, 1982 – [miscellaneous; presentation on local taxation] – “He planned on throwing a cliche that would read …”the legislature members in their infinite wisdom… ete etc..” But it came out … ‘The Legislators in their infant wisdom…’ I leaped to remark that his subconscious was working overtime. A Freudian slip, kaff, kaff!”
162. February 11, 1982 – [local government] – “… The answer? A slight change in government. That is, all money to be spent should be listed on a referendum vote by the public.”
163. February 18, 1982 – [television commercials]
164. February 25, 1982 – [on being a descendant of Charlemagne] – “Said Frank, ‘Brag.’ I replied that since I am a Texan by fusion (or fission) I already do that.”
165. March 4, 1982 – “I often wonder why Parker Brothers, the famous game makers (Monopoly, etc.), never came out with one called PUSSYFOOT. It could contain a huge board with a global map, a deck of cards with [portraits] of our leaders in Washington, a pair of loaded dice and a package of marbles for each player. The winner in the end would be the one to lose all his marbles to a ‘foreign power’ … THERE IS one way, and one way only, to handle foreign nations; and that is to handle them, not play diplomatic ping pong with their leaders at these stupid summit conferences or luncheons.”
166. March 11, 1982 – [gardening] – “IF ANY of you out there in my invisible empire have a few to sell, drop me a line at PSR [Goldthwaite], 76844. There must be SOMETHING I can grow.”
167. March 18, 1982 – [Dallas television show; Arthur Miller play]
168. March 25, 1982 – [new IRS tax form]
169. April 1, 1982 – [tumultuous world, political, economic, arms race, the question of war] – “THE PEACEFUL means then would be to freeze everything and let it be so written in history that 1983, 1984, were the Years of Inertia, during which America got back on its feet.”
170. April 8, 1982 – [a fable; calendars]
171. April 15, 1982 – [newspaper history]
172. April 22, 1982 – [game wardens; conservation] – “FOR ALL of it, nothing was conserved when profits were on the horizon. I therefore propose a Latin inscription to be printed on all our coinage and paper money, as follows: AD HADES CUM SAPIENTIA, which means: To Hell With Wisdom.”
173. April 29, 1982 – [disputed North Pole discovery by a family friend, Dr. Frederick A. Cook, and his later incarceration for an oil business malfeasance] – “POOR DR. COOK! He bounced me on his lap when I was a baby. My father, who was also a doctor, and he were good friends, and had corresponded for years.”
174. May 6, 1982 – [inventions and patents]
175. May 20, 1982 – [excessive absences memo; Star I.S.D. board member candidate; Lion’s Club meeting with Johnny Miller and Dave Grebe] – “RECENTLY I tossed my hat in the ring running for public office. I signed to run for Trustee on the Star I.S.D. School Board. After a landslide election Igot three votes. After getting the final result, the first thing I did was ask for the resignation of my campaign manager. Then, I decided that I had better be armed at all times wherever I go. With so many enemies, who needs friends, as the saying goes. Two members were going to retire from the positions, but then decided to stay. Was I a triple threat? No, I don’t [think] that. My error of course was running for the office in the first place. I should have ran for governor. There are some out here that have other suggestions, and have even offered to pay the fare—one way.”
176. May 27, 1982 – [the specter of nuclear war] – “All that is needed is a collection of radio beaming homing devices that would allow a nuclear missile to home in on it perfectly on target. The devices would be placed on the White House, The Capitol, the Pentagon, the Senate Office Building, and all other major government facilities. The devices would also be placed on all official government buildings in the Kremlin, and in fact on all buildings of this kind in all other countries as well. We’d have a durable peace.”
177. June 3, 1982 – LAS VEGAS REPORT – “MOLINE REPORT: Nobody visited anybody this week.”
178. June 10, 1982 – “We are all familiar with the wondrous Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations volume. Yet, I think we could write another from some of the gems of thought gleaned from folks out here in domino land. To cite a few: ‘Lawyers that talk slower charge less.’ Alvis Lee, mail carrier … NOW WE come to one that by Sherlock Holmsian deduction almost wipes out centuries of superstitious nonsense concerning increased numbers of crimes committed during a full moon. ‘The reason more crimes are committed during a full moon is that the culprits can see better.’ Ed Sanders, Attache at Head’s Hardware in Center City.”
179. June 17, 1982 – [copyright] – “LOOKING deeply beyond the gestalt, the conditioned response, I propose the complete abolition of all copywright and patent laws. The result would lift a huge burden from the backs of consumers … AUTHORS, inventors and movie makers have no rights but those given to them by their countrymen. Copyright and patent laws will someday become outdated, for they are contrary to the ideology of freedom, free enterprise, and normal competition. AS LONG as greed is the mainspring of our capitalistic cookoo clock, it is the consumer who pays and pays some more. WHATEVER great and noble work one man creates should belong to every man.”
180. June 24, 1982 – [colonizing the moon and sports]
181. July 1, 1982 – [what happened to …; Lyman Lindas]
182. July 8, 1982 – [vampires; government housing in Brownwood; board member personality types]
183. July 15, 1982 – [Sikhs story; line for a play …; old news] – also, a short piece called “Whenever You’re on the Phone!”
184. July 22, 1982 – [two British folk on the EMS team]
185. July 29, 1982 – [the middle class] – “Awaken! I have had so many people tell me that they are not interested in politics. To ignore politics, your government, and your country could one day cost you your job, your farm and even your life. (On that last I refer to nuclear war) … I never understood exactly how it works, or the basic motivation for it until Lewis Hudson, Goldthwaite’s distinguished pharmacist analysed it and presented a superb analogy on it. In short, he said that he would give me a hundred dollars knowing that I’d spend it in his drug store. Each month I would then spend twenty dollars in his store. On the following and each consecutive month I would return and he would give me another hundred, but spend only twenty during the month. It is this sort of bookkeeping the tax payers are paying for. This is about how it works. What happens to the other eighty dollars? Well, generals do have to live, and they do need swimming pools, cars, boats, and also subscribe to rootie toot magazines so they can study up on how to live the good life.”
186. August 5, 1982 – [statistics; drug awareness program] – “The slogan on the masthead of the old Chicago Herald Examiner was, ‘A paper for people who think!’ This column, then, on occasion should hold to that tradition and be written for those who think. Don’t you think so? … Today, we are being spoon fed so much nonsense by the government. Not only do we accept it, but much of it is printed in the media as given facts … The point to be made, is that we are handed statistics daily. Some of these can be selected, or even twisted to convey what the government people, or the media chaps want you to believe.”
187. August 12, 1982 – [nuclear threat] – “Awaken! If you think today is just another day, a continuation of your many yesterdays, and feel secure in a belief that if events do not occur in your county they are of no concern to you … you are in for a shock! When you read what I am leading to you may experience an eerie cold chill crawling over you … GET RID of the baby kissing, ribbon cutting, good old boys whose chief priority is to stay in office for life. Send someone to Washington from your district who speaks out with daring; a leader, not a follower who is afraid to rock the boat, constantly in fear of not pleasing the voters. All we have from Texas today is lifers. Not one has raised anything of note in Washington. We have a collection of Great Appeasers, diplomatic talking statues. THE NUCLEAR threat is on your doorsteps! Billions have been appropriated to continue the arms race in the belief that matching the Russians with more missiles than ever before will lead to disarmament. But what if it doesn’t stop there? SOMETIMES the answer to a threat is a counterthreat. If this stuff continues, this snowballing of nuclear hardware, I just may roll up my sleeves, start wearing my store teeth, and run for office. And I don’t mean the Star School Board. That’s a peaceful little entity. I am beginning to develop a hunger to tackle Goliaths.”
188. August 19, 1982 – [dispelling Chicago crime by Lyman Lindas]
189. August 26, 1982 – [old timers poem; story about American missionaries and African natives]
190. September 2, 1982 – [foreign ownership of Texas land] – “WE NEED a stand on America for Americans soon, before this nation is whittled away by gnawing aliens who not only are undermining its foundations, but are not limited to a desire for an equal slice of the pie. They want the whole pie … INCOME TAX RESULTS—This year the IRS has had some confusion. Some of the natives out here have sent in their income tax forms, but did the figures in domino dots.”
191. September 9, 1982 – [government lobbying] – “THE SOLUTION is to end lobbying. How can that ever come about when the persons who enact laws are part of it? Congressmen within the House could move for it. Buy how many are that honest, and how many would end the fun and games of the job?”
192. September 16, 1982 – [nuclear threat] – “AFTER THE desensitizing process, the answer is for the citizens of this nation to be more careful, more selective, about whom they elect to the House and Senate. Don’t vote for the popularity chaps. Study your candidates, and above all nominate The Crafty, The Sly, and The Tricky. Especially those of this ilk that have a high intellect. We can no longer afford to send incompetents to Washington, naive fatheads who mouth platitudes, who offer in their campaigns the usual fare: that they go to church on Sunday, have three children, and served in the armed services. We can’t afford it. Look back. It has always been the popular orators of the world that caused the disasters … If you prefer living on, send more brains to Washington. Skip the grand speakers, and study your candidates for their intellects; i.e., adaptabilities. Vote for the schemers. They’ll scheme to save themselves, their holdings, and give us umbrage.”
193. September 23, 1982 – [mysteries: reversing water channel on the island of Euboea; Stonehenge; Shakespeare’s tomb; U.S. Constitution; burn victim has trouble getting care] – “THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION AND ITS MYSTIQUE … The Constitution is the basis for all the laws of the land. It can be perused in an hour. Yet, it contains for the most part generalizations. Therefore, in each generation the laws mean only what the Supreme Court says they mean, depending upon the times, mores and customs of the day. It’s an enigma wrapped up in a riddle.”
194. September 30, 1982 – [uncles] – “We have had Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and some promotion has been given to Grandmother’s Day, and even Mother-inLaw’s Day. What we really need is Uncle’s Day. Nobody cares about Uncles. We need a revival of Uncleism … I didn’t forget Uncle, Sam. But his reputation has been tainted by his meddling in business, not balancing the budget, taxation, junkets by elves, and so on. We accept him as an uncle but have too many scores to settle concerning his behavior recently … WHEREAS: As the Mayor of Moline (and horse cup inspector) I hereby proclaim August 1st a holiday to commemorate uncles. It shall be called Uncle’s Day. WHEREAS: All Americans are invited to join in good fellowship, in a celebration honoring uncles.”
195. October 14, 1982 – [solution for a jealous husband] – “A Texan is a fellow who will run four miles out of the camp then four miles back because he looked down and noticed that he wasn’t on a horse.”
196. October 21, 1982 – “LONE STAR RATE HIKE”
197. October 28, 1982 – [the movie E.T.; Lion’s Club speech] – “I HAVE a strange feeling that I’m being had lately. Do you suppose …? It may be a question of mind over matter. I don’t have a mind and it doesn’t matter.”
198. November 11, 1982 – [thyroid gland; group health insurance story; legalize marijuana?; legalize pornography?]
199. November 18, 1982 – [membership-based stores] – “USUALLY, as a Menace, I take shots at various things. In this case I’ll sign off with: Support your local merchants.”
200. November 25, 1982 – [problems with women’s lib]
201. December 2, 1982 – “THE BEAT WRITERS”
202. December 9, 1982 – [Lum and Abner; Houston news]
203. December 16, 1982 – [mental training is the answer to weight control/dieting]
204. December 23, 1982 – “A CHRISTMAS STORY”
205. December 30, 1982 – [the dummy incident]
206. January 6, 1983 – “A FABLE FOR OUR TIME”
207. January 13, 1983 – [fingerprinting; spoof sheriff’s report on Star and Goldthwaite crime incidents] – “Do monkeys have fingerprints? Sure they do! At present, however, the FBI doesn’t have a very complete file on all the monkeys that have been monkeying around.”
208. January 20, 1983 – [military ruses] – “The U. S. needs a Bureau of Swindles, called in short, the “B S”‘bureau. When they are ready for this, I’ll apply for the directorship. I am sure that you will back me up.”
209. January 27, 1983 – [absurdities] – “I think Americans are catching on. Government spokesmen and advertisers alike are realizing that the public is realizing what Lincoln said, ‘…you can fool some of the people some of the time, but…'”
210. February 17, 1983 – [Father Time; World War II casualties; threat of nuclear war; idea to rid rancher of coyotes]
211. February 24, 1983 – “For some years now, there has been so much in the news on where to hide the MX missiles. This is an easy task for our Bureau of Swindles, also called the BS Bureau. We place the missiles by dividing them among the five largest cities in the U.S., in downtown areas …”
212. March 3, 1983 – [Denton slum lord; Mike Gilbert, Goldthwaite EMS0 – Mike, a British import, paid Bob a compliment: “He’s a bloody nerd!”]
213. March 10, 1983 – [“Hamilton area” sweepstakes]
214. March 17, 1983 – MURDERS IN MOLINE – “We have had a crime wave out here. Raymond Hurst reported that he has been losing chickens at an alarming rate. According to his descriptions, his chickens roost high in a number of trees, yet an unknown culprit has been killing them off by biting them through the head. The marauder leaves the prey … An APB is out for the wanted feathered felons, believed to be two males or two females. Sheriff Wetterman’s Chicken Division is also on the look-out. The trouble with owls is that when they are captured and faced with their accusers, all they’ll say in court is ‘Who?’ Vernon Hurst, a local wit in Moline, almost gummed up the entire case I had built up for the state, when he said, ‘Do you suppose it could be three owls?’ ‘Who?'”
215. March 24, 1983 – [an acquaintance takes a trip to New Zealand and does not confirm that the water drains counter clockwise; computers] – “I know one young fellow about to get his degree in button pushing. It seems as if everything in his mind is being replaced with computer information, its working, programming and so on. He talks of nothing else. I think his wife bends him over in the morning to stuff him in the car, then drives him to work where she gets out and steers him towards the door. On weekends, I suspect that he stands in a closet. She doesn’t seem to be worried about him, for while she is watching TV she likely hears him beep once in a while. The interior of his mind was exposed one evening. He had had too much to drink, and was walking around the room with his arms outstretched, humming and mumbling. After a while the guests became a wee bit alarmed. One asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’ He answered, ‘I’m caught between 7 and 8!'”
216. March 31, 1983 – [local rancher Jack Davis; house wrens build dummy nests; Great Horned Owl hoots six times; golfing news] – “Local rancher Jack Davis who holds a reserved seat at the Waggin’ Wheel, that coffee clutcher’s Mecca where devotees to the sipping of the juices of the roasted bean gather to decide on America’s future, has often thought that I am not quite bright. This was easy to detect. He comes right out and says so.”
217. April 7, 1983 – [modern hiring process]
218. April 14, 1983 – [good news list]
219. April 21, 1983 – [Reagan wants to abolish parole; government takes more; census results] – “More than one in ten homeowners share their dwelling with mice. Out here in Moline we are contributing more than our share to the welfare of homeless rodents.”
220. April 28, 1983 – [caffeine] – “Caffeine has been a boon to mankind! It’s good for you! Yet, we find ourselves in the midst of a soft drink advertising war, in which the pop giants are not only boasting about sugarless and diet-free pop, but are now giving us the impression that caffeine is an evil with such statements as, ‘…who needs it?’ The answer is, ‘I do.’ And I’ll tell you why …”
221. May 5, 1983 – “What’s New?” – [marijuana; rockets; tear gas] – “To quote Ecclesiastes, ‘…there’s no new thing under the sun.’ What about nuclear fission?’, you ask. The sun uses this process constantly! So what’s new?”
222. May 12, 1983 – “Just who did discover America?” – “Recently I visited the site of a slab, 12 feet high, 10 feet wide, and 16 inches thick, reposing in a building built around it, near Heavener, Oklahoma. On it are inscribed eight letters, about 10 inches tall. Of the eight strange letters six were from an older runic alphabet used in about 300 A.D. The remaining two were in use about 800 A.D. Some runes had been found in two alphabets similarly in Scandinavia. There have been other sites. Those in Wisconsin, were found to have been faked. While looking at them, a woman standing next to me asked, ‘I wonder what it says.’ I replied, ‘Wal-Mart’ … If you have a push button phone and push 440 440 you’ll get the opening bars of Brahm’s Lullaby.”
223. May 19, 1983 – [electric fork; theater seats that raise; car thefts could be foiled by removable steering wheel; hand saw with small fog horn to prevent injuries; new way to preview guest rooms in a hotel]
224. June 2, 1983 – “Mills County Judge Wallace Johnson attended a seminar for county judges. When the popular dean of local politics returned from three days of lectures and studies on ways to improve local government, I asked him about one in particular entitled, ‘Dealing With the Media; A Self-Defense Course.’ He cited the speaker as having said, ‘Dealing with a newspaper reporter is like trying to out-squirt a skunk.’ I responded with a phrase often used by one of my editors. ‘That’s cool!’ … MOLINE … We are now being led to believe that everyone will sit in front of a home computer growing huge thumbs to push buttons and square eyeballs. Maybe so. If we want to find out the population of Mullin, we push a button. But there are millions of questions computors [sic] will not be able to answer from their programmed memory banks …”
225. June 9, 1983 – “I am new in covering politics, but I think I am catching on. Recently I had the opportunity to observe, first hand, the arm swinging of a visiting solon from Washington. I put him under the microscope, and here is what I found. (We’ll call him Senator Fly.) The good senator exhibited two motivations. 1. Tell them what they already know. 2. Tell them what they want to hear.”
226. June 16, 1983 – [AIDS; nuclear waste] – “when he finds that all the warring in Lebanon, the PLO bombing Israel, the Israelites bombing Beyrut; all of it, began with a fight between two taxi cab drivers in an alley in Beyrut. Local Christians and Arabs joined in the fracas that grew to a citywide mess!”
227. June 23, 1983 – [ways to make money from marchers] – “SUMMATION: If all the marchers of the world were laid end to end … they’d be more comfortable.”
228. July 7, 1983 – [amputated legs story] – “Another bright story comes from Goldthwaite. It seems that Mills County Judge Wallace Johnson thought a chandelier might be a nice addition to his office, since he often greets VIP’s from Austin and other dignitaries. One of the commissioners (I wouldn’t dare mention a name) said, ‘I would find it difficult to order one. I can’t spell it. Nobody here knows how to play one. Besides you’d be better off with a light up there!’ The story is of course fictional, but a rather fun one at that. It came from Acco Feed entrepreneur Stanley Bessent. When asked about his source he took the Fifth Amendment.”
229. July 14, 1983 – “We have become a nation of mental midgets … Some people fear news and avoid reading it or watching it. Others fear reading anything that would require a bit of thinking, fearing it would hurt their brains … Americans are mentally lazy! They have produced generation after generation of young who have become moreso [sic]. Because this generation won’t read, won’t think, and for many won’t carry on conversation with others, they are ready prey for the nonsense that is repititiously [sic] being pounded at them by advertisers who cultivate these fears to stir people who believe it all to find relief at last by buying their products.”
230. July 21, 1983 – “Since the goal of almost everyone is to be like everyone else (socially, financially, morally, and in outward personality appearances) millions while in a somnambular state have, like sheep, adopted the NAI attitude, a National Acceptance of Ignorance … If we accept low standards we can rely on getting them. The parents are at fault for poor education given in many schools. How could a parent NOT know that Herbert, 15, cannot read nor write? He is living in the same house! … A local citizen reading the local paper was impressed that Jenny Jones, ‘made regional.’ He was not impressed nor did he care to read about a local boy who got a PhD in neurobiology and has already made a breakthrough that may wipe out current, theories on the bicameral mind … Schools have become Football Institutes, where coaches are gods, and a teacher who teaches humanities is looked upon as an oddball. This is NAI thinking. Karl Marx said, ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses.’ Had he lived today he might have changed his thought to: ‘Sports is the opiate of the masses.’ There is nothing WRONG with sports. It is not a BAD BAD thing! But we have gone bananas with it! … Many teachers (not all) are often at fault when overly emulsified with school pride want acclaim through sports superiority (tribal) instead of academic achievement. In summation, parents, television and sports are three of the factors that contribute most to the National Acceptance of Ignorance climate.”
231. July 28, 1983 – [what does the U.S. offer over communism?] – “Huge corporations, factories with low wages, democratic elections to vote for the same entrenched grabber, Willie Nelson records, heavy taxation, higher postal rates, costly brand names, and re-runs of the Gong show. Later comes night clubs, rock music, gambling joints, ABSCAM, a corrupt congress, shoddy education, and plenty of freedom to obtain drugs. We guarantee all the generals new homes and swimming pools. We offer billions to waste. After being saved they can thumb their noses at us, go ahead and join the communists anyway, or settle down to a despotic, nepotistic dictatorship of their own. The way we are going about it, we lose!”
232. August 4, 1983 – [painted tires; population increase; New York City trash; early seismological instrument in China]
233. August 11, 1983 – [crime and punishment] – “In conclusion we must illuminate Becarria’s view that the protection of society is reason to incarcerate, and that certainty of punishment is a deterrent (as opposed to harsher sentences). As for prisons, one hardly expects them to become country clubs, but they should be directed toward rehabilitation, whenever possible, and especially strive to restore and maintain dignity for those who got in because they “didn’t have much going for them”‘ in their development or previous environment. Is this a sob sister approach? I think not, since we should not throw people away. For those who think they should all be shot, stop and think for a moment about what Horace said: ‘The source of justice is the fear of injustice!'”
234. August 18, 1983 – [hand ball burglar; new punchline for “marchers”] – “When it comes to saying words of thanks I owe a vast number of people. When someone does something quite nice for another the very least that should be done is to express appreciation.”
235. August 25, 1983 – “Two Texans went to Alaska …”
236. September 1, 1983 – [why do people join cults]
237. September 8, 1983 – [franked mail; government waste] – “You can always tell he’s an old timer when he steps up to a post office window and you hear him say, ‘Gimme ten penny post cards’.”
238. September 15, 1983 – “HOUSTON REPORT” – [airline pricing snafu, Neilsville to Austin]
239. September 22, 1983 – [benefits of crossword puzzles] – “So try some already! Use your head and remember it is the little things that count!”
240. October 6, 1983 – [story about Chinese magician; joke about post 70 year gentleman remarrying; Black depiction]
241. October 20, 1983 – [cessation of Amarillo warhead manufacture; Russian grain question] – “SUMMATION: From observing how politics works, from my learned teachers in the Goldthwaite School of Government (those governing bodies), I found three points in response to the problems facing Amarillo or the nation. 1. Don’t offend the Good Old Boys. 2. Don’t Rock the Boat. 3. Don’t do anything. Maybe it will just go away.”
242. October 27, 1983 – [Rancher’s Feed Emporium spark plug story]
243. November 3, 1983 – [artist Vernon Fisher] – “The point to be made is clear. I would rather have a huge quarter slice of ice cold watermelon in the refrigerator than one of these works palmed off as art. And so would a duck! … If you wonder how this stuff achieves acclaim, though it be mostly among museum curators and a few wealthy individuals who don’t know what else to do with themselves or their money, it can be explained. The trend today is to seek works that convey the artist’s experience and expression in manners that have not been done before. To paint a can of soup would never make it. Warhohl did it. A prize was given to a winner who exhibited snapshots encircling the interior of a mayonnaise jar, and so on. The art works of today are filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing, as the bard said, a tempest not in a tea pot, but in one of those you shove under the bed.”
244. November 10, 1983 – [tactics for answering bum telephone calls; railroad crossing; relaxing after a hard day’s work]
245. November 17, 1983 – [Shoes Jackson story]
246. November 24, 1983 – [list of electives eliminated from high school and college curriculums]
247. December 1, 1983 – [question of sanctions] – “There are vast numbers of Americans experiencing frustration as a result of the soviet attack and downing of the KAL 747 passenger plane bound for South Korea in which 269 innocent persons were killed …”
248. December 8, 1983 – [William Kirk in absentia trial; wedding vows: removal of “obey” and “taken”]
249. December 15, 1983 – [repercussions of ERA passage]
250. December 22, 1983 – [origin of Santa Claus]
251. December 29, 1983 – [Ford Brothers Big Top Circus in Goldthwaite and giraffes]
252. January 5, 1984 – [dating advertisements/personals]
253. January 12, 1984 – [problems using “junior” in names] – “A conservative is someone who dreads the future … The Jack Davis Ranch was struck with a tornado this year and it did thirty-five thousand dollars worth of improvement.”
254. January 19, 1984 – [election analysis; Mills County Commissioners’ holiday party] – “… But the peculiarity of this election is that there are millions of voters out there who do not vote FOR a candidate. They vote against one by voting for the other one … [Bob puts words in Mondale’s mouth]: ‘If I am elected I shall not support any group representing a religion, a race, or sex difference, but instead I shall support only those causes that will benefit ALL Americans. Thank you’ … But no, they are all obsequous [sic], filling the very atmosphere with the same political gas, and the promises they have no intention of keeping.”
255. January 26, 1984 – [Bob’s article about a recent Goldthwaite City Council meeting published in the Hamilton paper]
256. February 2, 1984 – [St. Peter and the county commissioner; golf joke] – “The reason American motor cars have so many defects is that they are designed by committees. .. If you think your husband is losing his hearing, first find out if he’s listening.”
257. February 9, 1984 – “At a recent meeting with civil defense planners in Goldthwaite it was aired that there is no defense against a nuclear strike, i.e., an arriving bomb. ‘But there is!’ I offered by way of a correction. The answer is linear cities! Cities could could be rebuilt over a hundred miles long, with four or five blocks only on each side of roads and highways. Only a fifteen or twenty block linear strip would be blown up. A nuclear attack would be a dismal failure, at least when compared to the devastation that might be wrought upon a round city … So much for a serious concept. Now what about keeping the peace instead? For those who worry about this one, there is a solution. Immediately after an election we give the new president to the Soviets in exchange for their president. Reagan goes to the Kremlin. Andropov comes over here to roost in the White House …”
258. February 16, 1984 – [a $15 traffic ticket and the Supreme Court]
259. February 23, 1984 – [Imagined Soviet invasion of U.S. and coverage in Moscow newspapers]
260. March 1, 1984 – [U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO]
261. March 8, 1984 – “Someone asked me recently how it is that we have so many nuts, kooks, and flakey people today. The answer is of course that ignorance is wide spread. Education is at its lowest. Cast aside ideas about ‘the good ole days’, however. Quite a number of the New York State Legislators in Albany in the 1870’s were totally illiterate! … The only light in the darkness that is enshrouding more and more people with superstitions, ridiculous beliefs, non-real worlds, is the beam of education, particularly in basic science. If we don’t brighten them up soon we’ll regress to the ninth century.”
262. March 15, 1984 – [Texas State Board of Education ruling that evolutionary theory can be included in biology text as long as creationism is also included] – “Easing it to the public was somewhat insidious, for openers. The worst of it is that Texans may now boast that the state may now be included among the most backward in the nation second only to Louisiana, in the educational field … To eliminate the story of Darwin’s work, as well as the ideas of Lamarck, Wallace, Cuvier, Linnaeus and others is to rob the young of an educational opportunity to become properly versed in the subject of biology … The students, (your children) should not be deprived of the opportunity to review what those before us gave us in the way of insight on who we are, where we came from, and even perhaps what we were. The crime here is the deprivation, not the acceptance of any beliefs. Aristotle said it is the nature of man to know. And the young should want to know, it inquire, to learn and then to inquire some more. There is a relationship between the various forms of both animals and plants. This is the basis for classification, taxonomy if you will … The tenth century minds that invoked this new decree are censoring the very basis of biological studies, and may be preventing young minds growing up today from expanding them, showing us the way, and giving us new thought, new discoveries.”
263. March 22, 1984 – “A Puritan is someone who knows that somewhere, some time, some place, somebody is having a good time. It kills him. He thinks that almost everything is evil, we are all doomed and drenched in sin, and storks bring babies. He spends a great deal of his time staring out the front window in his living room, hating everybody. His type, the waffle-brained, holier-than-thou ‘A’ erotic with his fellow God-Fearing (so he says) exponents of what they mouth off as the True Christian persuasion have managed to keep Goldthwaite in a climate, a miasma, if you will, of the 1870’s … I have had occasion to cruise about the town enroute and observed that the young people, the teenagers really don’t have much to do nor any place to go for a wee bit of entertainment as a healthy respite from the pressures of school or jobs. There is no motion picture theater. Goldthwaite needs a Saturday night dance! Target: The Civic Center … FOOTNOTE: You would not believe what I found out about where the Puritan goes on Thursday nights.”
264. March 29, 1984 – [radioactive fish discussion with Danny, Bob’s son]
265. April 5, 1984 – “Paying farmers not to grow products is a rehash of the Roosevelt method, and more spending than it is worth. It prevents natural and normal competition to bring us to a less artificial economy. Is foreign export as vital as we are told? Foreign import is what is ruining us, and creates the artificial need for exporting to combat its effects. Buying food and hoarding millions upon millions of pounds of it at taxpayer’s expense and storing it at frightening costs is more lopsided economics. In the meantime there are many who do not have enough to eat and are unemployed. When will the administrators in blinders, who have the gall to declare that hunger is not a problem in the U.S., begin to take care of Americans who really need help? Cutting Social Security while giving millions to Nepal and dozens of other countries is the kind of doublethink that calls for a host of new faces in Washington.”
266. April 12, 1984 – [the polygraph] – “If a person refuses to take a lie detector test, it is NOT an indication of guilt. It is an invasion of privacy, and he may exercise his right to protect it. However, perhaps not for long. The nation is ever more being drawn in its octupal grip … I have been very gentle in this diatribe against this encroachment upon our freedoms. It is more to serve as a warning. Those who now do not stand up for their rights deserve to lose them. As each day passes, we are losing more of them. It is truly becoming a Big Brother Is Watching Your Society.”
267. May 10, 1984 – [royal lineage] – “This week we have a photo, above, of King Baudoin of Belgium greeting my cousin, Philippe Altenloh, at a small party in Brussels. It was a case of royalty meeting royalty. Rest assured Philippe didn’t spare the king. He told him that he (and I) are direct descendants of Charlemagne (800 A.D.) five French Kings, and one German Emperor, then added Saint Arnolfe Bishop of Metz (619 A.D.) for good measure. In fact, there is hardly a soul in Europe who hasn’t been buttonholed on it … I wouldn’t trade the Kingdom in Moline for all the hot diggety high class society over there where everyone is posing, pretending on the outside, struggling to be somebody, playing a role, devoting time and energy to it, yet adding artifice to artifice while procrastinating their inevitable extinction. I plan on being myself, full of the devil, and quietly comtemplating the universe in tranquility until I cash in my chips. That is the royal road before me! C’est la vie! Such is life!”
268. May 17, 1984 – [eating out at the Wagon Wheel; bats; trivia games]
269. May 24, 1984 – [television program Airwolf]
270. June 21, 1984 – [Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox has no objection to televising James Autry’s execution] – “The young have been calloused to killing, rape, violence and even the maiming of humans. They are no longer shocked by it. Many enjoy it. The question remains: Are we coming to this? Sorry folks, we are already there!”
271. June 28, 1984 – [college fraternities and sororities; hazing]

Living in downtown Moline I developed a keen interest in politics. I thought I might run for something. The neighbors suggested the border.

I married Shirley because I was short a bookcase, and she had one. I am happy with my little success, this column.

The luckiest ranchers out here are those who have a wife and a cigarette lighter, and they both work.

You can always tell a Texan—but you can’t tell him much.

One thing I never do is stretch things. Well … maybe the readers’ minds … just a little.

Only after a lengthy study of ancient history did I finally learn the truth about Moline. During the time of Noah and the Great Flood, Moline got only three inches!

I … propose a Latin inscription to be printed on all our coinage and paper money, as follows: AD HADES CUM SAPIENTIA, which means: To Hell With Wisdom.

It was a model 290 (Two days on the road and ninety in the garage).

The older a senior citizen in Goldthwaite gets, the farther he had to walk to school when he was a boy.

Moline is so dry these days it takes three acres to rust a nail.

The difference between unlawful and illegal is that ‘unlawful’ is something that is against the law; ‘illegal’ is a sick bird.

WE ARE ADDING more and more gadgets to everything, all of which is outracing our ability to keep abreast of it with maintenance and repair. Perhaps we are insecure, and adding artifice to artifice in order to procrastinate what we sense is our inevitable extinction.

I am now a Texan. ‘How so?’ a native-born asks. I reply, ‘I took my master’s in bull corn. Besides, I brag.’

I firmly believe that all men are created equal. Of course some are more equal than others. Among these there are some who would ride high and trample us down. These we’ll slay, you and I, for we know the pen is mightier than the sword.

The next time you visit a zoo with the youngsters, take a long look at the hippopotamus. He was here before the pyramids. He was here before we were. He’ll be here after we are gone. The way we are going about things, gregariously cooperating with each other (a definition for civilization) we are seemingly headed for our own annihilation. We had better study the hippopotamus. And soon!

When you begin with a subject, Nature takes its course. One thing reminds you of another, and soon you create. Anyone who creates becomes free of depression.

I asked a young girl who had taken music before I signed her on, ‘Do you know chords?’ She replied. ‘Sure I do. Rummy, black jack, poker.’

AS A NATION we have bastardized the joy of acquiring knowledge, especially basic things, an extravagance we can no longer afford in the real competitive world. The young cannot expect better since TV is our culture. On some rather hideous game shows awards are given to those who answer a question correctly. This is tantamount to stating that to know the answer is worthless without monetary reward. Pride should be encouraged in the young in learning for its own sake by supportive reward; verbal acclaim but not material reward. So much for the learning process.

I propose we are just too small to ever know what’s out there. We are smaller than bacteria a billiard ball and are trying to find out who runs pool room.

You can always tell he’s an old timer when he steps up to a post office window and you hear him say, ‘Gimme ten penny post cards.’

If you want to know about something nobody else has heard of, ask me. I’m full of it.

If a man gets into trouble, don’t send him to prison—turn him over to his wife. Save the taxpayer’s money—let HER rehabilitate him.

ON THE RECENT flap about whether evolution is fact or not, I believe both sides are in error, viewing the whole concept in reverse. The truth may be that we started out as man and are becoming monkeys.

I did not create the world—I just observe it. If I had, I would have prevented the mutation that produced man (if that be the case of our origin) and let man remain the monkey he wants to be anyway.

We all develop some system of fictions by which we find some meaning for our lives on our own subjective terms. (I pretend that I am a columnist, writer and thinker, etc.)

Only four things are needed to foretell the future. A good set of volumes on World History, a copy of the Theory of Population by Malthus, your newspaper, and your head in a thinking attitude.

I HAVE a strange feeling that I’m being had lately. Do you suppose …? It may be a question of mind over matter. I don’t have a mind and it doesn’t matter.

And with an election year we have the promise of a whole circus of clowns trying to please all the self interest groups, contradicting themselves, waving their arms like windmills and pounding on their daises. We all know that after they get in office, Washington will settle down and once more become the amnesia capital of the world.

Do monkeys have fingerprints? Sure they do! At present, however, the FBI doesn’t have a very complete file on all the monkeys that have been monkeying around.

Instead of attempting to produce a super race of more members of society that can push buttons as well as the monkey, they should concentrate on developing humans that can round up sheep, bring in the morning paper and find their way home in the dark. We need more of these.

IT’S YOUR country and it is falling apart from within with cancerous little islands, each one led by a yoyo who doesn’t know he’s alive. The doctrine of “one nation indivisible” must have a rebirth and the ideologies of those who propose otherwise, like the storks and angels of infantile lore, will vanish. They’ll talk to themselves for a while, but there won’t be any listeners.

When a Texan is bright, he’s brilliant; but when you find a dumb one, there is only one thing that’s dumber and that’s two of them.

There are two conditions to this one, too. It is either raining or it is not raining. If it is not raining, then it must be raining.

I have one of the world’s most fabulous collections of rejection slips. Some for bum writing perhaps, but most for writing the truth … We must concentrate, and perhaps relearn the old statement, ‘I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it.’ And soon!!

In summation, parents, television and sports are three of the factors that contribute most to the National Acceptance of Ignorance climate.

Don’t let anyone ever convince you that you are old whatever your age. Instead think of yourself as ‘experienced.’ Remember, and I write this with all sincerity, you have knowledge and wisdom we so desperately need in these very trying times. We juveniles are always eager to learn from you.

I’m sure you heard about the egg in the monastary [sic]—it went from the frying pan into the friar.

We often fail to notice the little things in life. With a little creativity an insignificant happening can be developed into a grand work of art.

I do try to live by the Golden Rule … do unto others … and never swindled anyone who didn’t have larceny in his heart in the first place and by demonstration showed him the error of his ways. Perhaps, after all, I am a little Pilgrim for Jesus and don’t know it. I do it my way, vouchsafing such philosophy while blaspheming ignorance and hypocrisy.

It is amazing how much we imagine—then believe it!

INCOME TAX RESULTS—This year the IRS has had some confusion. Some of the natives out here have sent in their income tax forms, but did the figures in domino dots.

If you stop by, enter at your own risk. If you think of me as weird, oddball, hermit, bum, loafer or dreamer, I shall not be fearful. Always remember, there aren’t many of us left!

WHEREAS: As the Mayor of Moline (and horse cup inspector) I hereby proclaim August 1st a holiday to commemorate uncles. It shall be called Uncle’s Day. WHEREAS: All Americans are invited to join in good fellowship, in a celebration honoring uncles.

We have become like trained seals. Public relationists in business and government throw these rubber fish at us and we swallow them. Beware the statistic …

A Texan is a fellow who will run four miles out of the camp then four miles back because he looked down and noticed that he wasn’t on a horse.

I learned that all geographical locations including latitude and longitude are based on a single one-by-one foot Lone Star Gas sign. A place is designated as being three miles up the road to the left of it, or five miles down the main drag from it.

Aristotle said it is the nature of man to know. And the young should want to know, it inquire, to learn and then to inquire some more.

The point of all this, is that we all too readily accept what we read, what we hear, and what we are told without subjecting it to doubt, to closer analysis. Thinking is one of the greatest gifts you have. Using it before you sign something, for instance, might save your neck.

We are looking for intelligent life on other planets in outer space probably because we haven’t found any on this one.

Another one of this coterie is Bruce Sanders, more a rounded unfired missile type, also a prevaricator of propagating propaganda projecting protean pre-digested pre-fabricated preemptory plums plastered pointedly presaging parting puttering puffing peons.

WE NEED a stand on America for Americans soon, before this nation is whittled away by gnawing aliens who not only are undermining its foundations, but are not limited to a desire for an equal slice of the pie.

If all the marchers of the world were laid end to end … they’d be more comfortable.

IT’S YOUR country and it is falling apart from within with cancerous little islands, each one led by a yoyo who doesn’t know he’s alive. The doctrine of ‘one nation indivisible’ must have a rebirth and the ideologies of those who propose otherwise, like the storks and angels of infantile lore, will vanish. They’ll talk to themselves for a while, but there won’t be any listeners.

WE ARE ADDING more and more gadgets to everything, all of which is outracing our ability to keep abreast of it with maintenance and repair. Perhaps we are insecure, and adding artifice to artifice in order to procrastinate what we sense is our inevitable extinction.

THOSE WHO think require solitude. Those who seek material things, seek the companionship of many others.

The only thing we seemed to have learned from a study of history is that we haven’t learned anything from a study of history.

If only you would sit quietly and let it all happen Mother Nature will whisper her secrets to you, (she always does it in a whisper), you will be amused and amazed.

It is either raining or it is not raining. If it is not raining, then it must be raining.

While attending a recent meeting of the Lions Club in Goldthwaite, I made the acquaintance of a lively fellow. He is employed at a local funeral emporium. We stood outside after the meeting and had a delightful conversation. At this time, however, I would like to make a request that when we depart to go our ways variously, he might conclude our tete-a-tete by saying ‘Goodnight’, or ‘Ta Ta’, NOT ‘See you later!’

Awaken! I have had so many people tell me that they are not interested in politics. To ignore politics, your government, and your country could one day cost you your job, your farm and even your life. (On that last I refer to nuclear war)

A Puritan is someone who knows that somewhere, some time, some place, somebody is having a good time. It kills him … His type, the waffle-brained, holier-than-thou ‘A’ erotic with his fellow God-Fearing (so he says) exponents of what they mouth off as the True Christian persuasion have managed to keep Goldthwaite in a climate, a miasma, if you will, of the 1870’s.

… the peculiarity of this election is that there are millions of voters out there who do not vote FOR a candidate. They vote against one by voting for the other one …

We have become a nation of mental midgets … Some people fear news and avoid reading it or watching it. Others fear reading anything that would require a bit of thinking, fearing it would hurt their brains … Americans are mentally lazy!

I wouldn’t trade the Kingdom in Moline for all the hot diggety high class society over there where everyone is posing, pretending on the outside, struggling to be somebody, playing a role, devoting time and energy to it, yet adding artifice to artifice while procrastinating their inevitable extinction. I plan on being myself, full of the devil, and quietly comtemplating the universe in tranquility until I cash in my chips. That is the royal road before me! C’est la vie! Such is life!

I have gone around the sun many times now and know that I have but to plan on being buried in Payne’s Gap, probably to begin to be forgotten within minutes after the last shovel is tamped on me. I plan on being planted high on a hill there. (I don’t want everyone else’s dribblings), but until then I shall try to pass on this enlightened encouragement. That I never accomplished anything doesn’t in the slightest leave me ‘shook up’ … The universe is a giant engine that will go on doing whatever it is doing as it did before me, and I am sure will go on doing so after me.