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| 4-7 year-olds make a dash at a previous hunt at Old Town Park. |
Please bring cameras and baskets for goodies. For more information, contact City Hall during business hours at 325-766-3871.
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PLOWGIRLS DO WELL AT POST, PLOWBOYS WIN AT ROBY
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| Kinzie Buchanan broke her own record with a shot put of 38’ 5¼”. (Track photos by Tamara Alexander) |
Kinzie Buchanan won the Shot Put and once again broke her Plowgirl record with a heave of 38’ 5¼”. She also finished first in the Discus with a throw of 95’. Bonnie Wilkinson broke 36’ in the Triple Jump for the first time in a meet this year, and her distance of 36’ 7¾” was over a foot better than anyone else did. Still, she finished only third because the jump was in the seed event. In the finals, she managed only 35’ 2”. However, she finished first in the 400 meter dash with a time of 60.9 seconds.
The Plowboys won the Cottonwood Relays at Roby, finishing ahead of Roby and Highland. Other schools at the meet were Bronte, Rotan, Leuders-Avoca, and Trent.
Bryan Medina won 3200 meter run and was second in the 1600 meters. Plowboy team won the 200 meter relay and were second in the 100 meter and 400 meter relays. Jayden Gonzales won the Pole Vault, Coltin Watts was second in the 300 meter hurdles, and Caleb Gray second in the 200 meter dash.
Plowgirls
Event Place Athlete Time/Distance
4 x 100 meter relay 8 Plowgirls 53.24
1) J. Alexander 2) V. Martinez 3) K. Martinez 4) B. Wilkinson
4 x 400 meter relay 4 Plowgirls 4:18.38
1) J. Alexander 2) V. Martinez 3) K. Martinez 4) B. Wilkinson
400 meter dash 1 Bonnie Wilkinson 60.90
10 Kadee Martinez 67.00
800 meter run 7 Riley Sheridan 2:43.00
1600 meter run 6 Riley Sheridan 6:03.00
Triple Jump 3 Bonnie Wilkinson 36’ 7¾”
Shot Put 1 Kinzie Buchanan 38’ 5¼”
Discus Throw 1 Kinzie Buchanan 95’
8 Veronica Cuellar 75’ 7”
Plowboys
Event Place Athlete Time/Distance
100 meter dash 7 Nick Limones 12.4
10 Jayden Gonzales 13.14
200 meter dash 2 Caleb Gray 24.14
3 Micheal Wright 24.20
12 Nick Limones 26.06
400 meter dash 5 Brandon Lavalais 1:01.18
6 Nick Limones 1:02.15
800 meter run 3 Bryan Medina 2:27.87
4 Brandon Lavalais 2:37.67
5 Jose Ortega 2:43.38
1600 meter run 2 Bryan Medina 5:35.28
3200 meter run 1 Bryan Medina 12:56.60
110 meter hurdles 3 Coltin Watts 20.37
300 meter hurdles 2 Coltin Watts 48.72
4 x 100 meter relay 2 Plowboys 47.28
1) Jr. Martinez 2) Jayden Gonzales 3) Jathan Coale 4) C. Gray
4 x 200 meter relay 1 Plowboys 1:38.41
1) Caleb Gray 2) Jathan Coale 3) Micheal Wright 4) Jr. Martinez
4 x 400 meter relay 2 Plowboys 3:58.62
1) M. Wright 2) J. Gonzales 3) Tristan Baker 4) Jr. Martinez
Pole Vault 1 Jayden Gonzales 11’ 0”
Triple Jump 3 Micheal Wright 38’ 6¾”
Shot Put 6 Brandon Lavalais 33’ 9”
The Plowgirls and Plowboys will compete in the Lone Wolf Relays at Colorado City on Friday in a meet beginning at 3:30pm. It will be their final meet before the District 8-2A meet in Albany next Wednesday, April 4.
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UGH! SAY INJUN ROBERT, SIGNS FOR 2018 CROP NOT GOOD
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| The wind this year was from the southeast. |
An east or northeast wind foretold a “very good” year, north or northwest “average,” west or southwest “poor,” and south or southeast “very bad.” This year, a southeast breeze blew the smoke to the northwest. This is not good news because according to the ancient lore, a southeast breeze is the most inauspicious of all the wind directions and portends a bad crop.
However, the wind direction on the appointed day has sent the wrong message for the past two years, so farmers should not contemplate suicide just yet. In both years, the wind was from the southwest, which also foretells a poor crop. However, in 2016 the Central Rolling Plains Co-op Gin produced 87,827 bales, well above its average, and in 2017 it broke its record by ginning a whopping 111,598 bales.
“Injun Robert” says he overcame last year’s bad prediction by chanting a particular mantra (which I will not repeat here), but since we are only learning about this claim ex post facto, it’s impossible to verify its veracity. Speaking strictly from a scientific point of view, the possibility exists, however slight, that "Injun Robert" speaks with forked tongue. Still, he says he has done the same chant for this year, so if the outcome is once again positive, that would lend credibility to the claim and plausibility to the mantra’s effectiveness.
In any case, the rain we’ve received the past two days is a good start. Let’s hope another bumper crop is on the way.
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WEATHER REPORT: RAIN
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| The puddles are back on Broadway. |
From what I could gather, it seems that the amount of rain around Roscoe depended on the area. Some got no more than a quarter of an inch, while others got an inch or more. Some got no hail; others got enough to do damage to any vehicles that were in the open.
Up until yesterday, temperatures were warm with five consecutive days reaching the eighties for highs and the upper fifties to sixty for lows. The high temperature for the week was Friday’s 85°F, and the low was this morning’s 46°.
The rain is out of the forecast for a few days, but the meteorologists are currently giving us a 40% chance for thundershowers on Monday. Temperatures will be cooler until Saturday. Today’s high will be around 61°, tomorrow’s 64°, and Friday’s 70° with lows in the forties. Skies will be cloudy or partly cloudy until Friday. However, Saturday should be sunny, warm, and windy with a high of 83°. Easter Sunday will be cool and cloudy with a north wind, a high of only 64°, and a low of 41°.
MEMORIES OF THE WINTER OF 1931-32
Editor’s note: Anyone with relatives who lived through the depression may recall their reluctance to talk about it, probably because they didn’t enjoy re-visiting those hard times. Rather than go into detail, they’d often dismiss the memory with a statement or two, such as “There just wasn’t any money,” or “You were lucky to find work.” However, the following excerpt from Herschel Whittington’s memoirs details some of the hardships he and his family went through, living in a shack with no plumbing or electricity. With the comparative prosperity most of us have experienced in recent years, it’s truly a different world we live in today.
When the ginning season ended in January, and we no longer could afford to rent the Cedar Street house, Dad moved us to yet another shack in the country, about two miles east of Roscoe and a mile north. Indeed, this house ranked "worst" in my memory: two small, bare, ugly rooms, plus a covered porch, all setting up on posts about 18 inches off the low ground—a necessity since the water stood for months beneath the house while we lived there—water that could be seen through cracks between the floor boards.
We struggled through the rest of the winter there, placing cardboard over the holes in the floor in a pitifully vain attempt to keep out the icy wind and the bone chilling damp.
Dad, Mama, Hillman and Ray worked as field hands whenever work could be found, which wasn't often.
An elderly lady, living alone about a quarter-of-a-mile up the road, had a cow, and a heart of gold.
She often gave us home-made butter, which was all she had to share. Hungry as we were, though, we couldn't eat it. Very nearly blind, this kindly woman was not aware that a virtual mesh of her flaky gray hairs interlaced every block of that butter.
Across the road, the Hamilton family, themselves poor as lizard-eating cats, lived in a much larger house and seemed wealthy by comparison with us. They owned their farm, raised garden vegetables, milked their own cows, owned a pen full of chickens, which kept them supplied with fryers, broilers and eggs, and they butchered their own hogs. In the winter of 1931 Dad helped them butcher and they gave us some of the meat.
It rained so much around Roscoe that fall (1931), and on into the spring (1932), the farmers couldn't head their maize or pick their cotton. Water stood under our house (and over much of the land) for nearly a year.
Very little spring planting got done in 1932. There was almost no field work for Dad to do—almost no way for him to feed his family. He worked a few days helping with a construction job—something to do with the Gulf oil refinery in Sweetwater—then caught a freight train back to where we'd come from in Oklahoma, and on to Arkansas. But folks there were no better off, and he found nothing but an occasional hand-out and a few hours of work in exchange for food and shelter.
During the eight weeks Dad was gone, we had little to eat: the greening meat the Hamiltons had shared with us, some turnips from their cellar, a few rabbits sling-shot or caught by Ray and Hillman and our dog, Penny, and “greens” concocted by Mama: she used tender weeds—a leafy plant we called “Careless Weed” and tender shoots of the leafless “Tumbleweed.” [To this day I've absolutely no taste for greens.]
Throughout my boyhood I often supplemented my diet by foraging. Such “delicacies” as mesquite beans, tender, sweet new cotton bolls, cactus apples and cactus pears, and juicy ripe sorghum cane. These edibles, though perhaps lacking in nutrition, were filling, and quite sating to my “sweet tooth.”
Another measure of our poverty during that miserable winter was what we wore on our feet—when we wore anything at all on them.
Ray's old Keds were so worn out that, to avoid the embarrassment of wearing them to school, regardless of the weather, he'd take them off and hide them in the weeds and grass alongside the road every morning as he, Hillman, and Gwen walked to classes at the Blackland School. As luck would have it in those days when we enjoyed hardly any luck at all, the county road crew came along and burned the grass and weeds in the bar-ditches beside the road, and Ray's shoes.
Ray didn't mind losing those raggedy old shoes to the fire, except that he had to explain to Mama what had happened to them—an unenviable task. There was no money to buy him more, so he did without shoes for quite a while, somewhat as all of us made do without food from time to time throughout that dreadful winter.
The acres of water standing over the fields surely was heaven for toads and bull frogs. There must have been a billion within earshot of our house, all with loud voices: the toads ranged the scale, while the bulls croaked deep, melodious chords. It's impossible to describe their round-the-clock lulling yet insidious din. More entertaining to Gwen and me, however, than the frogs themselves, were their children: the zillions of tadpoles.
Both of us having observed Mama preserving various fruits and vegetables in clear-glass, quart-size Mason jars, decided to "preserve" some tadpoles. I don't recall how many quarts we'd "put up" before Mama vetoed the idea.
A huge mulberry tree shaded the west end of the Hamiltons’ house, nearest the road. That old tree produced a bumper crop of juicy sweet purple mulberries that spring. The Hamiltons never bothered with them, but their children assured me, smiling cheerily all the while, that I was welcome to eat as many as I wished as often as I wished. Consequently, I sated my sweet-tooth appetite many times before sister Gwen finally explained and demonstrated to me that the white core in each berry was, in fact, a worm. I've not been much of a mulberry arbiter elegantiae since that revelation.
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