It is exciting time in Bonham ISD! All of our programs district-wide, from academics to extracurricular, are having successful seasons and representing Bonham well. The "Team of 8" (school board + superintendent) is frequently celebrating these accomplishments and I could not be more proud. Bonham ISD is a truly a schoolhouse undivided.

Residents of Bonham have grown accustomed to the local shopper using tax dollars from its "paper of record" status to sway local elections by publishing libelous, untitled editorials on the front page in an attempt to discredit individuals, but this latest attempt to blatantly attack four current Bonham School Board Trustees is creating a backlash in a community that is rallying around the people who were elected to guide the school district.

I enjoy hearing from readers (and writers) who have a different perspective from mine on something that played a prominent role in my childhood. One of the writers in my current life story class at Grayson College, Carl Roegner, is fortunate to have reminiscences written by his father that included comments about barns he remembered from growing up in the Midwest. Mr. Roegner (senior) wrote about living in his grandmother's house in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, when there was an empty barn on the place that was a favorite playhouse. (Carl Roegner and his sister Norma at play in their grandmother’s old barn. Photo by their father, Russell, who won a prize for it)

Once a year, Lanny’s Zeta Eta fraternal chapter of Sigma Chi of Texas A&M Commerce (named East State Normal College in 1917, renamed East Texas State Teachers College in 1923, dropped the word “teachers” and became East Texas State College in 1957, established ETSU on March 30, 1965, and became part of the Texas A&M system in 1996), gathers in Fort Worth for a reunion of the brothers. For the third year in a row, wives have been invited. Whoopee cushions have disappeared, lampshades have returned to the lamps, and the bartenders are draped in cobwebs.

Numerous destructive storms have passed through Grayson County, but one of biblical proportions is known as the Canaan Cyclone of 1919. It was part of a storm system which spread death and destruction from Hunt County, Texas to Ada, Oklahoma. My paper will focus on reports from Grayson and Fannin County. Since the storm caused the demise of Canaan, the history of that little community is sketchy. Probably it was named for the biblical Canaan, which earnest Bible scholars know was "the ancient region at SE end of the Mediterranean, extending eastward to the Jordan River; the Biblical Promised Land: Gen. 17:8."

This glaring lack of transparency rests squarely on the shoulders of this court, as it sits right now.

April 9 will mark the centennial of a terrible cyclone that wiped out the Red River community of Mulberry, killing seven people immediately and severely injuring many others. On the following day the headline of the Sherman Courier read "Death Rides on Winds of Storm." A current resident of the Mulberry community, Gregory Hall, has recently published a book entitled The Gathered Words of Mulberry, Texas (available from Amazon), which includes an interesting chapter of reminiscences about the storm. Sight-seers arrive in wagons - photo courtesy of Gregory Hall

John Wayne was most likely smiling up there in the Milky Way when Lanny Joe and I got married nearly ten years ago in Ridgway, Colorado. After all, that's where True Grit was filmed, and John Wayne and Lanny share the eternal Sigma Chi fraternal brotherhood. The "Duke" no doubt tipped his heavenly hat when we dined on prime rib at The Outlaw, which was his favorite restaurant in nearby Ouray.

On the same day that I first saw the posting of our campus production of a play about Don Quixote,I witnessed the president of this USA on national news enthusiastically proclaiming that the noise of windmills here causes cancer.

As a child growing up on a farm I noticed that some of the animals we raised were not "dumb" in the sense of stupid. For example, my first horseback ride was rudely interrupted when "Old Buck," my grandfather’s horse, figured out that he could easily rid himself of the small boy riding him when little Jerry dismounted to pick some roadside flowers to take home to his mother. Buck had already put in an afternoon's work as he carried Granddaddy Jones a distance of several miles to enable him to check on his small herd of cows. So Buck waited until Jerry was securely on the ground and then took off running for the house. The incident created some consternation at home but Buck wasn't punished.

The breaking news about the recent arrests of dozens of rich parents for paying bribes and engaging in fraud to get their spoiled progeny admitted to elite schools like Yale, Georgetown, and U.S.C. made me think about the very different experiences I had while going through college and graduate school in the 1960s. Perhaps my reminiscences will prompt older readers of this column to recall just how differently higher education operated 50 or 60 years ago.

A clean public restroom was the Holy Grail for Mama, and it was just about as elusive. Her reactions were horrified breathing, bugged-out eyes with eyebrows yanked up to her hairline, and a voice that gasped, "Merciful Heavens!"