Cherokeean Herald (Rusk, Tex.), Vol. 159, No. 46, Ed. 1 Wednesday, January 7, 2009 Page: 3 of 12
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Cljei'okeeai} Herald ■ thecherokeean.com
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
3A
EDITORIAL BOARD
Whitehead Enterprises Inc.
publisher
MARIE WHITEHEAD
editor
TERRIE W. GONZALEZ
managing editor
FAST I f°rward
This hug was just a glancing brush-off
After spending Christ-
mas in Florida with
her future in-laws,
our daughter Sandy
decided to pay us a post
New Year's visit.
As she drove to our house
from Austin on Sunday, I
found myself looking for-
ward to the time we would
spend together.
When her car rolled into
the garage, my husband
and I darted outside to
meet her with hugs and
open arms.
But her hug lacked
sincerity. It was too brief
— almost a glancing brush-
off that passed for the real
deal.
My "mother radar" went
off immediately. Is she
upset? Has something
happened? Her hug lacked
emotion, and her body lan-
guage spoke volumes.
Maybe she's really tired, I
rationahzed.
After the "hug snub,'' she
abandoned all chit chat
regarding her 200-mile trip.
"Mom, dad, I have a lot
of things to get inside the
house," she said in a rather
bossy tone. "Can you give
me a hand with the stuff in
the trunk?"
TERRIE GONZALEZ
herald@mediactr.com
"Something is definitely
wrong with Sandy," I
thought to myself.
She clicked the release
on the trunk, and as the
hd rose my husband and I
dutifully took our positions
at the rear of the car as her
personal bell hops.
But what we saw next
when she opened the trunk
shocked me. No, "shock''
is too mild. I screamed in
terror.
Inside her trunk was a
body. And from my vantage
point, I thought it was a
dead body.
Was I hving the horror
movie we watched on cable
last night?
In a split second, my
brain tried to process the
circumstances that would
cause her to have a body in
the trunk of the car.
No rational explanations
came to mind.
And then the body moved.
The arms that were
obscuring the head and the
face moved, and they re-
vealed long, curly brunette
hair and a face that looked
like an angel.
Do angels ever get bored
and play cruel pranks
on parents to make their
hearts stop and cause them
to cry out in terror?
That body in the back of
the trunk of the car was
Lauren, our youngest, who
returned recently from the
Galapagos Islands. We
thought she was in Austin
where she is now living,
and we certainly had no
idea she was contemplating
a visit.
"Surprise!" the two girls
yelled in unison.
Surprise, indeed. I want
pay back, and this one will
be hard to top.
I'm totally open to reader
suggestions. Anybody got
ideas on how to get the last
laugh on two girls?
In the meantime, I'm
going to carry a portable de-
fibrilator everywhere I go.
THE QI
íactor
With the passing
of 2008 and the
entrance of 2009, I
decided to actually
try to make resolutions that
I knew I could keep without
much motivation or forget-
fulness. Weight loss? Nope.
Saving money? Well, I'm a
lot better at it than I used
to be.
My biggest resolution
was to start reaching out to
the people around me more
often.
I reahze that readers of the Cherokeean
Herald see my writing and perhaps even
enjoy it, but don't really know a lot about
me. the writer.
Naturally the best way to start is by
writing a column to those people around
me: I.E., the people of Cherokee County
and beyond who read this newspaper for
their news and sports.
Covering sports has always been my
journahstic passion. For 25 years, I have
analyzed, poked, prodded, given statistics
and tried to find the story beyond the
story on sports teams. I wanted to tell
more than just the game story; I wanted to
get behind the game.
Don't worry: I'm not a one-trick pony.
The same is true for any story, You want
to get behind it and tell as many sides as
you can in order to get the entire story.
The beauty in covering a story does not lie
in getting one side, but getting all possible
i
QUINTEN BOYD
chreporter@mediactr.com
sides and seeing how it af-
fects those involved.
I treat my feature stories
and my stories from the
Alto City Council and Alto
ISD School Board the same
way I treat my Rusk foot-
ball and basketball stories.
I also want to be truthful
in all of my stories.
If you were to ask me
what I thought about the
Cowboys this year, I'd tell
you precisely what I think.
You may not agree, but at
least we have an open dialogue about it.
By the same token, if you asked me what
I thought about a story I covered, I'd tell
you the truth.
I forget where I heard it, but I've always
heard the mantra that "everyone has a
story."
My job as a journalist is to tell that story
to the best of my ability. Sometimes, that
story will make you cry Sometimes, it'll
make you smile and still others, it'll make
you mad.
The point of a good storyteller is to make
the readers evoke some sort of emotion.
Whether it's me, writing here in the Cher-
okeean or you, telling stories to your kids
or recounting the trouble you had getting
to work to your coworkers, emotion is key.
That's my goal as a writer. I want to
write articles that put some sort of emo-
tion in your heart.
I hope that I've gotten off to a good start.
BOWMAN'S
easttexas
Two Shelby County, Texas,
communities might
have passed into history
without as much as a
footnote if a singing cowboy
had not popularized a march-
ing and dice playing chant by
East Texas soldiers.
Bobo and Blair, two farm
communities on the old
Houston East and West Texas
Railroad, achieved fame when
Texas Ritter borrowed the
soldiers' chant, "Tenaha, Timp-
son. Bobo and Blair," for his
popular song.
The soldiers' chant Was used by a Na-
tional Guard Unit composed of men from
Shelby County who discarded the familiar
cadence of "hup, two, three, four" in favor
of "Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo, and Blair,"
their home towns.
Dice players also took up the chant to
make the point of ten on a pair of dice
and others argue that the popularity of
the saying began with a conductor on
the HE&WT line, which passed through
Shelby County.
The conductor supposedly called out
the various destinations along the way to
Shreveport, and the alhteration of "Te-
naha, Timpson, Bobo, and Blair" made it a
favorite of passengers.
Historian Robert S. Maxwell of Nacogdo-
ches claims that the song had little to do
with the HE&WT other than through the
recording by Ritter that made the towns
and the railroad hne famous.
Leon Hale of The Houston Chronicle
remembered that, as a young soldier in
World War 11, he watched crap games in
BOB BOWMAN
Italy.
R.R. Morrison, com-
manding officer of
Company B, 3rd Texas
Infantry of the National
Guard, said an outfit
was shipped together
from Shelby County to
France during World
War I, but just, before
being shipped out, some
of the soldiers got into a
crap game. One was try-
ing to make his 10 point
and yelled "Tennyhaw!''
Another soldier from the unit, betting
on the shooter, yelled "Timpson!" Oth-
ers, used to hearing these names, called
"Bobo" and "Blair."
Hale wrote, "Morrison told me that the
Tennyhaw cry went overseas with his com-
pany and fell on fertile ground. It spread,
big time, among dice players who'd never
been to Texas."
As time passed, Tenaha and Timpson
remained viable towns in Shelby County
while Bobo and Blair faded as rural com-
munities, Tex Ritter's familiarity with the
four towns came from his knowledge as
a boy growing up in neighboring Panola
County.
Bobo got its name from John Henry
(Billy) Bobo, who opened a sawmill in the
community, while Blair was first known as
Blair Switch, which was hkely named for
an engineer for one of the trains.
Bob Bowman ofLufkin is the author of
40 books about East Texas, including "The
Forgotten Towns of East Texas, Volume I."
He can he reached at bob-bowman.com
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©ZOA.Tli
Published weekly each
Wednesday by
WHITEHEAD
ENTERPRISES,
INC.
Texas' oldest continuously published
weekly newspaper, established as the
Cherokee Sentinel, Feb. 27,1850. Con-
solidation of The Cherokeean, The Alto
Herald and the Wells News & Views
ecaij
SUBSCRIPTIONS
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Marie Whitehead
editor, advertising sales
(903) 683-2257 ext. 105
mwhitehead@mediactr. com
Terrie Gonzalez
managing editor
(903) 683-2257 ext. 107
herald@mediactr.com
Robert Gonzalez
advertising sales
(903) 683-2257 ext. 102
rgonzalez@mediactr. com
Gloria Jennings
general news
(903) 683-2257 ext. 106
news@mediactr.com
Quinten Boyd
general news
(903) 683-2257ext. 109
chreporter@mediactr.com
Tara Crosby
classifieds, subscriptions
(903) 683-2257 ext. 101
classifiedads@mediactr. com
Sam Florian
advertising sales
(903) 683-2257 ext. 103
sales@mediactr.com
HIGH POINTS !*■ El Camino Real
Folks along El Camino
Real were just get-
ting used to the
80-degree weather we
had on Saturday when the
big norther hit on Sunday
morning and had us all
freezing when we came out
of church.
If this weather doesn't
straighten out we'll be
wearing our Easter clothes
at Christmas. If I was a
new doctor just Starting out,
I'd head straight to East
Texas to hang out my shingle and treat
nothing but colds and flu. I've talked
enough about the weather, and I need to
get your New Year started off right with a
full four bits' worth of news.
My cousin and newspaper colleague,
Gloria Jennings, is going to have surgery
this week in Tyler. Gloria is a tough lady
coming from good Lynches Chapel stock,
but she is still in need of our prayers. As
far as I know right off hand, she is the
only ordained Methodist minister in our
family, and with our family we need all
the help we can get with the man up-
stairs, so we have to get Gloria well quick.
Please keep her in your prayers for a
speedy recovery
The Toney Brothers, a nationally known
Southern Gospel quartet, will perfrom at
A. Frank Smith United Methodist Church
on Friday Jan. 9 at 7 p.m. Alto's very
own Had-A Call will open the show with
some of their great gospel music. I cut my
teeth on going to concerts to hear people
hke Grand Funk Railroad, Ted Nugent
and Black Oak Arkansas with a few Willie
Nelson Picnics thrown in for good mea-
sure. And now I'm getting excited about
going down to the church and listening to
some good gospel quartet music. I'm get-
ting old faster than I thought.
School started back this week, and I
must say I was ready. The boys got a new
video game for Christmas and they hooked
it up to my TV. The wife was bored and
spent her time trying to find things for
me to do in my spare time of which I had
none. As soon as I finished dragging the
last of our Christmas decorations back
into the attic, the mother-in-law started
complaining about all the boxes of decora-
tions that she had ready to go back up into
her attic. The boys would play for a little
while and then fight for a long while every
time they attempted to do something
together. On New Year 's eve we loaded up
the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law and a
niece and nephew to eat Mexican Food at
Little Mexico in Palestine. The place was
closed and the mother-in-law was acting
hke she was going to have a fit, but we
went to another Mexican place and it was
good so she settled back down. Sometimes
getting our lives back to a normal routine
is a good thing, so I'm ready for whatever
small degree of normalcy that can return
to this place.
I'm not going to start attacking products
CHRIS DAVIS
elcaminoreal@consolidated.net
for sale on the televison, but
one in particular has caught
my eye over the holidays.
The snuggie or blanket with
sleeves commercial that is
on every time you turn on
the televison has finally got
my dander up. The people
in the commercials aré
doing all of these wonder-
ful family activities while
staying snug and warm in
their snuggie blanket with
sleeves. If you put your
bathroom robe on back-
wards then you have a snuggie. I hope
that other folks see this hke I do. If you
wear your bathrobe backwards your rear
end is going to get cold. It would be hke
wearing a fleece hospital gown. I guess
since I ve already gotten myself wound up,
I might as Well say something about the
Amish electric heaters they are selling on
TV. The last time I read anything about
the Amish or visited the Amish country
they didn't beheve in electricity and drove
horses and buggies.
Why on earth would they be making
electric heaters and selhng them on TV?
What is going to be next, a new brand of
Baptist whiskey advertised by a bunch
of deacons tending a still? Wake up folks
and think before you fall for some of these
wild TV advertisements.
I've never seen as many cars as Pear-
man Motor Company has on their lot now.
I guess with some of the other dealerships
closing down around the country they fig-
ure Alto was a good place to send cars to
sell. With the gas prices falling some folks
are probably going to be looking at buying
trucks again, so I'm glad we've got such a
big selection in Alto. It was a good thing
that the Pearmans bought that place next
door so they'd have a place to park all of
those new vehicles. It wasn't too many
years ago that we had a Dodge, Ford and
Chevrolet place in Alto and now we don't
have but a few places left in the whole
county. Times, they are a changing.
After everybody has a normal week
after the holidays. I'm hoping that I'll be
able to shake a httle news out of every-
body. The hvestock shows will be kicking
off pretty soon, so lots of our area young
people are going to be pretty busy train-
ing their cows and pigs for the shows and
trying to raise fat chickens. These things
ought to generate a httle news. 1 11 take
the good news with the bad, but I hate it
when I don't have anything to write about
except illnesses and death. When commu-
nity activities are being planned, I need
to know about them so I can get it in the
paper and try and get a big crowd to show
up.
I'd love to keep on going with this, but
I feel like I need to get up and go break
a New Year 's resolution. I wonder if we
have any ice cream? I'll see ya next week!
And remember, It is right to be con-
tented with what we have, never with
what we are.
K
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Whitehead, Marie. Cherokeean Herald (Rusk, Tex.), Vol. 159, No. 46, Ed. 1 Wednesday, January 7, 2009, newspaper, January 7, 2009; Rusk, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth152868/m1/3/: accessed July 10, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Singletary Memorial Library.