City Spring Clean-Up Begins Tomorrow

The City of Roscoe's Water Treatment Plant at Broadway and Cedar.

The City of Roscoe's annual Spring Clean-Up begins tomorrow, April 2, and runs through Saturday, April 4. Hours of operation are 9:00am-7:00pm.

Dumpsters are located on the City property just north of the Water Treatment Plant at Broadway and Cedar Street. Two dumpsters are for debris, one for tires, and one for metal.

Items which may not be placed in containers are as follows: paint, oil, oil filters, chemical containers, and tree limbs. Tree limbs may be placed in a separate area. Air conditioners and refrigerators must be tagged land-fill acceptable. There is no curb service, and since the Spring Clean-Up is for Roscoe residents only, anyone dropping off anything must be prepared to show a City of Roscoe water bill.

City Manager Cody Thompson reminds residents that since mosquito season is coming, they should remove standing water in cans, bottles, buckets, or any other containers where water can collect, and to apply EPA-approved insect repellant.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Roscoe encourages responsible individual and group behavior. Please maintain social distancing, and do not gather in groups of ten or more.

For more information, contact City Hall, which is still open, during business hours at 325-766-3871.

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ROSCOE COPES WITH ANOTHER WEEK OF CORONAVIRUS

Another week has gone by dealing with the constraints imposed upon us by the coronavirus pandemic. It’s hard to believe it’s still been less than a month since all this began in earnest, and already it feels like the line in the old blues song, “the minutes seem like hours, and the hours seem like days.” And, at this point, there is still no end in sight. The last time I went shopping, there was still no toilet paper on the shelves, and most of the other missing items like dried beans, spaghetti, rice, bread, etc., were either not there or in short supply.

Since I am one of the old folks with compromising health conditions, I have to be careful. So, I notice when I’m around other people who aren’t paying attention to the guidelines. When I fill up my car with gas, I’m aware that my hands are on the gas pump and wonder if the person before me had the bug. When I’m at the post office, friends I meet want to shake hands as always, and I feel awkward about not extending mine. I’ve pretty well trained myself not to touch my face with anything except the back of my hand or forearm, and when I get home, the first thing I do is wash my hands. I’m spending most of the day at home although some of that is in the yard. Like others, I’m trying to deal with the hand we’ve been dealt, hoping for the best, doing what I can, and looking for light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s all hope it comes sooner than later.

Governor Greg Abbott hasn’t issued a formal stay-at-home order yet, but that may be next. On Monday he ordered that Texas schools stay closed until May 4 and restricted travel to Louisiana.

Roscoe Collegiate ISD is also adjusting to the changes. Provost Andy Wilson reports that RCISD received new Wi-Fi broadcast antennas this week, and the tech team is working to install and test them. A new parent feedback survey is posted on the school website on the COVID-19 drop-down menu, and as of yesterday evening had 80 respondents. 77% of the respondents said that their students are able to consistently complete work, and another 19% said that their students were able to complete some but not all work. When asked to rate their students' distance learning experience on a scale of 1 to 6 with 1 being horrible and 6 being fantastic, 28% of parents gave a rating of 4, 25% gave a rating of 5, and 31% gave a rating of 6. This has changed a bit from a week ago when everyone was excited after the first day. Innovations that are too hard to implement get tossed aside. RCISD is working to ensure that the quality of instruction and the ease of implementation are aligned in order to sustain distance instruction for another month.

The city of Abilene has issued a “limited shelter-in-place” order, meaning all residents should stay in their residences except for essential activities, such as employment, shopping for food, and medical visits. It has also ordered the temporary closure of businesses involving close personal contact with customers, which includes hair salons, barber shops, nail salons, tattoo parlors, game rooms, bowling alleys, smoking rooms, and food truck gatherings of more than one truck.

As far as I know, there are still no confirmed cases of coronavirus in Nolan County, although there are at least 14 in Taylor County and one in Mitchell County as of yesterday.

So, stay safe out there as you go about your daily business. If you’re not working or are working at home, limit your trips out as much as possible, and do your best to take these precautions:

• Maintain social distance, at least 6 feet, from others.
• Cover sneezes and coughs.
• Avoid touching your face.
• Wash your hands after touching common surfaces, door handles, or gasoline pumps.
• Stay home if you are sick.
• If you have coronavirus symptoms, call your medical provider or the hospital for instructions before going to the emergency room.

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NICK PANTOJA WINS GOLD IN QUARANTINE 500

 

Roscoe auto mechanic and demolition derby driver Nick Pantoja has smoked the opposition in the first ever running of the Quarantine 500 stock car race in a pasture southwest of town on Saturday, bringing “LaFonda,” his ’95 Honda, across the finish line in record time.

In keeping with Governor Greg Abbott’s directive to limit crowds to ten or fewer, there were only two other cars in the race, the silver going to Caleb Dean with wife Kimberly Dean riding shotgun in a ’95 Ford F250 pickup, and the bronze to Nathan Evans in a ’99 Volkswagen bug.

The Quarantine 500 was captured in the video above, taken from the cab of the F250. No one is sure what the 500 stands for (fathoms, rods, chains, leagues??), but all agree that it sounds impressive. The drivers likened the course to Mario Kart except instead of shells and bananas, they were avoiding cactus and mesquite trees.

After the race, instead of a victory lap, all four contestants took turns driving blindfolded around the course with a passenger giving directions on when and where to turn. Videos were also made of these blind runs, but none are shown here to protect the faint of heart.

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FOOTBALL LIGHTS HONOR ROSCOE STUDENTS

When you see the lights of Plowboy Field on tonight, don’t wonder if there’s a game or band practice going on. There won’t be. Instead, the lights will be on to honor the Roscoe students, who are having to give up so much this spring because of the coronavirus orders.

District rivals Haskell and Stamford are doing the same and challenged Roscoe, and Roscoe in turn is challenging other schools. 

Coach Jake Freeman thinks the idea will rapidly expand to schools all over the state.

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ROSCOE IN YEARS GONE BY: THE TIMES OFFICE

Part 1

The Times Office building after it had been abandoned in 1983.

There is no telling how many boys in Roscoe grew up with one of the focal points of their life being the Times Office, i.e., the office of the Roscoe Times, where Roscoe’s weekly newspaper was produced for over a half-century. Certainly, it was for dozens of boys, beginning in the 1930s, when George Parks took over its operation, until 1983, when he was no longer able to do so.

Just exactly when George started hiring boys to help him put out the paper is no longer known, but from that point on, life in the Times Office followed a pattern that many can still recall, although the number declines now with each passing year. In the following memoir, I will focus on my own years spent there because those are the ones I remember best and because my experiences there were not unlike those of all the other boys who “worked for George.”

The narrative goes at times into a lot of detail which may be tedious for readers who have no interest in such matters, and for that I apologize in advance. But I include it for those for whom it will bring back boyhood memories and because it describes a once common way of life that is now gone forever, namely, the methods small-town newspapers used to put out their weekly editions and do their town’s print jobs in the days before computers and modern printers.

It is uncertain just exactly when the Times Office building was constructed, but it was sometime between 1921 and 1927.* 

* The 1921 Sanford fire insurance map of downtown Roscoe shows the Roscoe Times office facing Broadway on the west end of the Roscoe State Bank building (now the Roscoe Historical Museum), where it had been since 1911. However, the Sanford map of 1927 shows it to be at the south end of the business district on the west side of Cypress across the street from City Hall. This location is now the part of Old Town park next to the south wall. 

The building was abandoned for a while before being torn down in the mid-1980s, but during the years it existed, it was next to W. W. Shields’ Red & White grocery store and one of the liveliest spots in town, particularly for boys, because in addition to being the newspaper and print office, it was also the informal headquarters for the Boy Scouts, and later on the Boys Club.

Like many other Roscoe boys, the first place I ever worked for real money was at the Times Office. When I was nine, George Parks gave me a job folding newspapers on Thursday afternoons when the weekly paper came out. I started as soon as I could get there after school and worked until all the papers were folded, two hours at the most and usually less. And for this I was paid 75 cents, which at the time seemed like a small fortune. There was no such thing as an allowance at our house, and I’d always depended on others to buy me things. So, this was a whole new world of independence, one where I could just walk into the drug store, plop down a nickel and say, “Give me an ice cream cone.”

This was in the early fifties, and like the other buildings on the block, the Times Office had a glass storefront with store windows facing the street. Just inside the store window was a wooden display shelf about 15” above the floor, but it wasn’t used for anything, so that’s where I folded the papers. There were  about three other boys scattered around doing the same thing, and when we finished our stacks, we’d take them to other boys who were preparing them for mailing, one wrapping them individually into a roll for ones mailed out of town, and two others manning a handheld labeling machine (one stamping on name labels while the other pulled the labeled papers off the stack). One boy also bundled and tied the stacks of folded and addressed papers and carried them to the post office a block away every time a batch was ready to go. Grady Norris, a friend of George, was the postmaster, and he always made sure to get them into the P. O. boxes as soon as they were delivered to him.

When the job was done, George turned off the big press, and we put things back and picked up the mess. Then George would stand behind the counter in the front and call out names one by one and settle up with each boy. When it came my turn, I’d go up to receive my fifty-cent piece and quarter. (Back then, fifty-cent pieces were still as common as quarters.) He’d ask me if I wanted to put any in the Boys Club bank. If I said yes, he’d ask me how much and record it in a cloth-bound ledger that had a page for each boy. I always gave him at least the quarter, and more often than not, the fifty-cent piece. The saved money was for Boys Club trips and excursions where money was needed for food, fishing supplies, or .22 or shotgun shells. Putting in my pocket the money that I kept, I’d then go off to Haney’s drug store for an ice cream cone or lime coke, and in the summertime a pack or two of baseball cards. Then I rode home on my bike because by then it would be suppertime. I thought I had a great job.

The summer I was ten, Daddy, who was a cotton farmer, put my brother Joe and me to work in the fields hoeing weeds out of the rows of cotton. He worried that he might be spoiling us by not making us work all day like he did at our age, but our workday started right after breakfast, about six-thirty or seven, and went until noon, when we went back to the house to eat dinner and drink iced tea. At the time, I couldn’t imagine a worse way to spend the morning. Hoeing weeds was a hot and endless task.

The following spring, when I was eleven, George offered me a regular job in the Times Office. He always had four older boys who worked for him every day after school and from eight to noon on Saturday, and he asked me if I wanted to be one of them. He said he would start me at four dollars a week and bump it up to five after I’d been there a month. I told him I wanted to do it, but I’d have to ask my parents. That evening I told them, and they agreed to let me do it. This was great, because Joe was already working there, and I didn’t like the prospect of working in the fields that summer without him. And four dollars a week was an immense amount—plus I’d now have a job title: printer’s devil, which is what George called us. It sounded a lot better than cotton chopper.

Right after that, I started and continued to work there for the next four and a half years. If I ever missed a day except for Boys Club trips or the time I got bitten by a rattlesnake, I don’t remember it. As soon as school was out, I would hop on my bicycle and ride the half-mile to town, where the Times Office was, put on my printer’s apron, and work until George said we were through for the day, usually about two hours, but on Wednesdays, more like three. Jobs varied and depended on what you were capable of. The oldest boy was usually the printer who ran the job press, a task that required judgment and manual dexterity. Another boy’s main job was casting mats (i.e. pouring hot lead into cardboard molds called stereotypes or mats). Most of the pictures thus cast were what today we call clip art, and they were used for the pictures in the ads that ran in the paper. Another boy handset type. George’s linotype produced most of the copy for the paper in little lines of molded lead, the eight-point type for the news stories and the sixteen and twenty-four point type for ads and small headlines. But anything above twenty-four point had to be handset—large headlines, sale items in store ads, and important announcements. Grocery store ads were almost completely handset with a dozen or more sale items and their prices boldly announced.

I hadn’t been working there long when George decided that handsetting type and making up ads was what I was best at, and that turned out to be the main thing I did the first half of each week while I worked there. Handsetting type involved getting out a metal typeholder about a foot long called a stick, taking it over to the shelves of font trays that lined the walls, finding the right font, pulling its drawer out, and going to work. You would set the paper draft of the ad where you could see it, put the stick at the bottom of the tray, lay in a lead slug, a long metal piece that served to secure the loose type, and then start picking the letters out of their respective boxes and placing them in the stick until you had all you needed from that font. Then you would take your handset lines back and place them in the form that would be the ad, putting leads and slugs around them to make everything fit tightly. The job required a good speller and someone who could easily read backwards and upside down—since the letters were all backwards on the type and since you went from left to right when setting type—hence upside down. By the time I quit working there, I could read as easily and quickly upside down and backwards as I could right side up and forwards.

George Parks at the linotype in 1979.

The Times Office itself was in a long cavernous building with a concrete floor, plastered brick walls, and a tall ceiling covered by thin metal sheeting with embossed squares. When you walked in through the front door (wooden with a big glass), you noticed that the establishment had a front area for customers that went about a third of the way back—and a larger back area, where all the work of the business took place. On the left-hand side of the front was an open area, just concrete floor. It was spacious enough to hold a trampoline, which it often did, and along the left wall was a sack of baseball bats along with the catcher’s gear and other baseball equipment. On the wall was a small sign that said “As long as you’re green, you grow” beside an image of a healthy green tomato. Below that were the words “As soon as you think you’re ripe, that’s when you begin to get rotten” beside a rotten tomato.

This area was separated from the right side by a wooden counter that ran from just inside the door to about twelve feet back. Just inside the door on the counter sat an old manual typewriter, and at the far end of the counter was a butcher-paper dispenser with a roll of butcher paper. In between, there were always some copies of last week’s paper, which we sold for a nickel apiece, and behind the counter were a couple of old wooden desks, one with the telephone on it, where a woman sometimes gathered local news a day or two a week during school hours. Sometimes it was Ruby Graham and sometimes Nellie Ben Young.  Next to the wall was an open gas stove that people stood around during cold weather.

The work area was divided into three parts running toward the rear of the building: the left wall, the middle, and the right wall. On the left, about fifteen feet in from the front door, was the linotype, where you usually found George sitting in a cane-bottom chair with sawed-off legs, wearing a baseball cap and typing up the news of the week or composing his editorial column, Pickin’s. The clickety-clack of the linotype was a constant but unobtrusive noise. To his right, in the middle of the building was a heavy wooden worktable that had on it a roller for galley proofs. This roller was a horizontal heavy, steel spool about 9” in diameter with smooth handles sticking out of the ends (like plastic corn holders stick out the ends of corn on the cob). It sat on a couple of tracks between which you placed a galley, a long, metal tray holding type, inked it up, and then laid over it a long strip of blank newsprint paper. Then you rolled the roller over it to make a proof, which the proofreader would then read for errors. Ink for the galley proofs, black and gooey, was on a wooden block on the shelf below the roller, as was the ink roller used to apply the ink to the type. It resembled a paint roller, except its roller was made of rubber.

In foreground, the first worktable with galleys of type and the clipper. Second and third worktables visible on left. Against the wall, the font shelves with several drawers of type fonts.

Also in the middle, behind this table, was another heavy wooden table, this one with a smooth steel top on which were the two forms that held the lead, unprinted version of the Roscoe Times, all still backwards at this stage. The forms themselves were steel frames, each holding what would be two newspaper pages. They were about an inch in thickness all the way around with a half-inch thick divider running down the middle, dividing each form into two pages: 1 and 4 on one side, 2 and 3 on the other. The front page always had the masthead on top with the words: The Roscoe Times, centered and in 48-point Old English font, with the slogan in smaller regular type beneath it: “In the Heart of the Blackland Divide.” Beneath that, a long horizontal line separated the header from the paper proper. Below it on the left-hand side was the volume number, in the center was that week’s date, and on the right, the issue number for the year. Below that was the headline for the week and the eight twelve-em columns that held the weekly news and pictures of local newsworthies. The other pages were mixes of ads and news items, with ads running one, two, three, or four columns wide.

Behind this table was another one, this one with a rock surface on top. It always had on it two or three galleys filled with ads or notices that periodically ran in the paper, but which weren’t being used that week. It also had on it a lead-cutting device we called the clipper, which was used to trim ends off linotype-set lines that were too long for the forms they would fit in.

Against the north wall in the front part of the work area was the paper cutter. This was a contraption that worked something like a guillotine. It had a big vertical steel lever, about five feet tall, which was pulled down and to the left to bring the blade down on whatever was being cut. Most print jobs, especially pads of sheets that had been glued on one edge (like note pads) were trimmed before they were packaged and delivered, and the paper cutter would cut well over two-hundred sheets at a time. You put the paper in perfectly straight and set it at just the measurement you wanted it. Then you turned a big wheel on top to make a long weight come down and clamp the paper to the table like a vise. You then brought the handle down to make a clean and precise cut with a long, heavy blade that was as sharp as a razor.

Along the north wall were three shelves of fonts (sets of moveable type) set beside one another, about fifteen drawers in each shelf—each drawer about three feet wide and an inch and a half tall. Not all were large fonts. Some were small (six-point and eight-point) fancy fonts used for wedding invitations and the like. These were the hardest to work with. Next to the font shelves, towards the back of the building, was an eight-page newspaper folder. This strange steel contraption would take two sheets of newsprint (four newspaper pages each) and collate and fold them. It was used only on the infrequent occasions that the Roscoe Times had eight pages instead of the usual four or six—namely the Christmas and high school graduation issues or issues for special town occasions.

The big press used for printing the newspaper.

Behind the folder was the big press, a big, noisy machine with a huge cylindrical roller (about 36” in diameter) that printed the sheets that were the weekly paper. It could print two pages at a time. First one side of large sheets of newsprint, fed from a wooden platform on top, would be printed. Then, when the run was finished, they would be turned over and the other side would be printed. Above the press bed, running the length of the forms, was a trough that held printer’s ink and dispersed it evenly over long thick rubber rollers that inked the type. The whole thing was powered by a small, black motor connected to the press by a series of wheels and canvas belts.

Behind the press, in the back right-hand corner of the building, was a heavy wooden table with all the apparatus for melting lead and casting mats: gas burner, lead pot, steel dipper, cardboard molds impressed with images, and so on. The boy whose job was casting mats spent most of his time back here away from the other workers.

On the opposite back side of the building was the bathroom with a toilet and lavatory with Lava soap, a gritty soap for inky hands. It also had a paper-cup dispenser for the thirsty, and on the back wall an old mirror and towel rack.

The area opposite the big press was where the supplies were kept—packaged reams of newsprint, buckets of ink, packages of various sizes of paper and poster board, bundles of red cotton rags for cleaning, large cans of naphtha for removing ink, and so on.

On the left-hand side of the office just behind the linotype, there was another font shelf with with one and two-inch wood type, and farther back along the left-hand wall, two job presses. These were used to print up small jobs for businesses and clubs: pads, forms, booklets, checks, business cards, and so on. Usually, the oldest and most experienced boy ran the job press. He often worked independently of the others and made the most weekly pay.

(Next Week: Part 2)

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WEATHER REPORT: SPRING IS HERE

New spring buds on  the old mesquite tree mean spring is here for sure.

The weather this past week was typical for spring in west Texas, two days with highs in the nineties, one in the eighties, one in the sixties, and two in the seventies, in short, a little bit of everything. It was also a week of drying out after the rains of the preceding two weeks with some days cloudy and others sunny.

But one thing is for sure—spring is here. The buzzards are back, and the old mesquites are beginning to bud out. Jimmie Cantrell has also had a hummingbird visit his feeder in Abilene, prompting me to put mine out. I haven’t had one yet here in Roscoe, or if I have, I didn’t see it, but I’m hopeful and will be watching for one again tomorrow.

The forecast is for mostly cloudy weather today through the weekend with temperatures varying with the wind direction. Today and tomorrow, the south and southwest winds will bring warm temperatures with highs of 76° and 83° respectively, followed by a cooling north wind on Friday and Saturday with highs both days of only 65°. On Sunday, the wind will shift once again to the south with a slightly warmer high of 72° along with a 50% chance of showers. Monday will be similar with a 40% chance and a high of 81°. Lows will be in the fifties or sixties with the exception of Friday when it will fall to 43°.

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