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| Roscoe students are making these medical masks for area hospitals. |
The template for the masks comes from the University of South Carolina Medical School and is designed for medical use. Their cartridges, which contain HEPA filters, can be replaced with new ones when necessary.
The students have already donated some of the completed masks to Abilene Regional Medical Center and are currently working with them to finalize a design to meet their needs for more. They are also supplying both Rolling Plains Memorial Hospital and the Mitchell County Hospital with batches of masks and cartridges. Both hospitals were dangerously short and in dire need of them. Edu-Make It director Dan Boren thinks they’ll have the batch of 100 to Mitchell County completed by Friday and 25 to Rolling Plains by Monday with more on the way.
Led by Boren, two P-TECH students and five RCHS Edu-Make It students are involved in the project. (P-TECH students are those working on bachelor’s degrees). The masks can be sanitized and reused, and the cartridges are replaceable, lasting up to a couple of days if necessary.
If you feel like donating to a good cause, RCHS teacher Katie Ralph has set up a GoFundMe page online, which you can access by clicking here. The donations will be used to purchase more materials so students can make more masks and cartridges for local hospitals, all of which need them. She is also seeing about getting other area 3-D printers on board to help with the project.
Roscoe’s Edu-Nation is also working on a documentary film on the way Roscoe is addressing the move to online virtual high-quality education for all students.
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CORONAVIRUS FEARS AGAIN DOMINATE DAILY LIFE
Another week of dealing with the coronavirus has gone by, and once again the efforts to curb its rapid spread are being felt throughout the country. On Friday, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) reversed its previous advice regarding the wearing of masks and is now trying to get everyone to wear them any time they are out in public.
However, for a number of reasons, commercial masks are almost impossible to find. Some people have hoarded them, and everyone agrees that any available ones should go first to hospitals and emergency workers. In fact, some of our Roscoe students are doing what they can to alleviate the mask shortages of our local hospitals, as this week’s lead article indicates.
For the rest of us, it means that if we are going to comply with the CDC suggestions, we will most likely have to make the masks ourselves. Fortunately, there is no shortage online of “how to” websites with instructions for making them. However, everything looks easy in a YouTube video until you try to do it yourself. At least that’s been my experience. Your mileage may vary.
The good news is that there are still no confirmed cases in Nolan County, although the test kit shortage makes it hard to know if there aren’t some unconfirmed ones out there. However, it’s probably safe to say that so far the Big Country has been spared compared to other parts of the country. Let’s hope it stays that way. Still, it’s too soon to let our guards down as the number of cases in Texas is rising rapidly, and one projection model many are going by estimates peak hospital use in Texas will be April 19.
As always, here’s wishing the best of health to you all!
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NOLAN COUNTY ISSUES “STAY HOME” ORDER
Businesses in which contact with customers is necessary must close, e.g., hair and nail salons, barber shops, tattoo parlors, as do businesses where groups congregate, such as bars, auctions, garage sales, game rooms, and theaters. Church services may be held only remotely, and funerals and weddings may have no more than ten people attending.
Essential activities are those necessary for household maintenance such as obtaining food or medicine and items to maintain safety and home operation as well as work or essential travel such as checking on elderly family members.
Government offices and functions remain open, and outdoor activities are okay as long as social distancing is maintained, as it should be in all public situations. Schools will operate remotely, and essential healthcare operations will continue.
The order is effective until Monday, April 13, at 11:59pm. More specifics and details are available on the Nolan County website.
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WEATHER REPORT: ANOTHER MIXED BAG
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| Thursday's sunset. (Photo by Eden Baker) |
Today’s high is projected to be even higher at 89° under partly cloudy skies, but then we move into another stretch of cool, cloudy weather that will last through the weekend with highs in the sixties or low seventies, followed by a couple of days with highs of only 57° early next week.
There’s a good chance for us to get more rain this weekend with a 50% chance on Friday and an 80% chance on Saturday.
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ROSCOE IN YEARS GONE BY: THE TIMES OFFICE
Part 2
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| George Parks at the Linotype in 1979. |
When I was eleven years old, my weekly pay for daily work at the Times Office began at four dollars a week. After a month, I got the raise to five dollars a week, and before the year was out it went up to six. Now I put four dollars a week in the Boys Club bank, mainly for trips, and kept the rest. I liked the work and the other boys in the crew, so it was a good job. In fact, I have had few jobs since that I enjoyed more.
The work week there followed a rhythm. Mondays were normally pretty light and devoted to print jobs. The older boys manned the job printers, but for me, this often meant trimming or straightening sheets of printed materials. When we printed business checks, it meant numbering the checks, which involved stamping the numbers on with a hand stamper. The only trick there was to set the stamper on the check and slam it down in such a way that the numbers came out straight and not blurred. Then, when you were done, you straightened and packaged them, and sometimes delivered them on foot if the business was close by.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays were generally devoted to preparing the weekly edition of the paper. I spent most of my time handsetting type and making up ads. On Tuesdays we stayed longer than usual as the new issue took shape, but on Wednesdays we stayed longest, trying to make sure that all our individual jobs were ready for Thursday’s press run. George, who was normally friendly enough, was generally tense and ill-tempered on Wednesdays. This was especially true in the fall when the gins were running. The air all over town was filled with smoke and dust, and George had asthma and didn’t feel good, plus the pressure to get everything done before Thursday increased his irritability. As a result, everybody worked grimly without any joking, pranks, or goofing off.
On Thursdays, when we got there from school, George had already begun to man the press and print the paper. Usually he was working on the first side, and shortly thereafter, the half-printed sheets were turned over and the other side printed. As soon as these came off the press, they were taken away to be folded, addressed, and made ready for mailing. Each boy had a specific job to do and did that same job every week. About four boys, who worked only on Thursdays, folded the papers and gave them to the daily workers, who prepared them for mailing. On a good day, we could all be done in an hour and a half, but usually it was more like two hours. Of course, if the press broke down, it could be longer.
Fridays were the lightest day of the week. We would break down the forms, clean the lead lines of type for remelting, and put the letters of the handset type back in their proper boxes in the font shelves. This latter operation was called distributing type. We generally stayed only about an hour and a half, and even part of that time would be spent goofing off. On Saturday mornings, we spent most of the time cleaning up. All debris was discarded, oily red floorsweep sprinkled everywhere, and then the concrete floors swept, ink cleaned off anything that needed it, the bathroom made shipshape, and so on. At noon we knocked off, and George settled up with us, one at a time. Then we didn’t work again until Monday after school.
Summertime was different. Once school was out in May, we showed up in the mornings at eight or eight-fifteen and stayed until George said we could go in the afternoons, with an hour or so off for lunch. We didn’t get paid any more than during the school year, but nobody minded because we didn’t do much more work than normal, either. It was just scattered out more. The only afternoons we weren’t done by two-thirty or three were Wednesdays and Thursdays, and even then, we were usually done by five.
In the summer, life moved at a slower pace. There was normally time to go next door to Shields Grocery for a Dr. Pepper and a package of Tom’s peanuts or a banana flip or moon pie. Entire mornings were sometimes spent playing stickball out behind the Times Office, and there were frequent games of chess or checkers, usually played on the display shelf of one of the front windows. If two of us had to go out back and melt down lead and make pigs, the long metal bars required for the linotype, the other two would also come out for talking and joking around. And George would frequently tell us we could go over to the Boys Club hall and play, as long as we were around when he sent for us.
This latter opportunity meant that all the boys who worked in the Times Office were good at the games boys played in the hall—pool, table tennis, pinball, cards (rummy, hearts, auction bridge, and poker with matchsticks), dominoes (matching ends or Moon), checkers, chess, and Monopoly, along with a couple of other games like knuckle ball, or baseball on a game that used a steel ball “pitched” by rolling it down a steel pipe across a magnet. We also bounced on the trampoline outside or, after the little pool beside the Boys Club hall was built around 1955 or ’56, went swimming. Boys who didn’t work in the Times Office but who had permission and free time also hung out at the Boys Club hall, so there was always something to do there and someone to do it with. Also, on many afternoons when we were done by three or so, George would take a bunch of us in the Moose Wagon, his carryall van, out to Turner May’s tank for a swim.
Whenever someone in Roscoe died, George would be notified, and, as soon as it was possible, he would make up and print off funeral notices. These were done on thick, white 5” x 8” sheets of paper with a black border all the way around. The top line read FUNERAL NOTICE in all caps. Then below that would be the deceased’s full name, and below that, his or her birth and death dates and age in years, months, and days. Below that would be the particulars for the funeral: the church, the date and time, and the place of interment. As soon as these were printed, George would get someone to deliver them. If a boy was around who wasn’t a regular employee, he would usually be the one chosen. This was a good job because it paid 35ȼ and could be done in about forty-five minutes. You would go to each store and place of business in the town and give the notice to the proprietor or someone in charge. They would then tape the notice to the middle of the shop’s front door so that anyone coming in would see it. At each place you went, you would wait while the person receiving the notice would say something about how it was a shame that the person had died, and then you would go on to the next store. Any boy who got this job considered himself lucky because it was easy money, and because it was generally followed by a trip to Haney’s Drug Store for ice cream or a milk shake or cherry coke. Sometimes, when I was the boy selected, I would spend the entire thirty-five cents on a banana split, complete with whipped cream, nuts, and cherry.
Another way to get to Haney’s was to get a malt for George. George had a passion for chocolate malts, and whenever he sent a boy over to Haney’s to buy him one, he gave the boy enough money to get a malt for himself, too. Any boy selected for this job considered it his lucky day. Malts cost a quarter apiece and were thus out of most boys’ price range. Such treats were more special back then than they would be today. Few families, including mine, had ice cream or sodas in the refrigerator at home, and dessert after meals was not usual but reserved for Sundays and special occasions.
As I got older and learned more about the work, George gave me harder jobs and more responsibility. When I was about fourteen, he sometimes put me on the big, slow job printer in the back. This was used to print larger sheets, anything above around 8” x 11”. The other printer was faster, but it couldn’t take as large a form. I naturally assumed that I’d graduate from the slow printer to the fast one, but I never did. George always got someone else to do that job. When I was fifteen, he started showing me how to set type on the linotype. He said that when I grew up, it would be a useful skill because a linotypist could always get a good paying job in practically any city in the country. In some ways, it was like typing on the typewriter (which I could do because I’d taken typing at school when I was thirteen), but in other ways it was different. For one thing, the keyboard was different, and you read it vertically instead of horizontally. The keys in the left row from top to bottom were etaoin, and then the row to its right was shrdlu. The rest of the letters and numbers were in rows to the right of that. On the left beside the keyboard was a handle used to raise the little letter molds to the level where they could create a lead line of type when typing the line was done. Raising the handle required just the right amount of pressure—too hard and you could jam the works, not hard enough and it all fell back down. I never became anywhere near as good as George at the linotype, but I did learn enough that I could tell someone that I could run one.
I was also a proofreader. Often I would read the columns of type, backwards and upside down, scanning for errors. I would do the same for the made-up ads. George also did this kind of spot-checking. Occasionally, someone who handset something would make a stupid spelling error that George would discover. When this happened, he would yell like a wounded bull and then accusingly call out the name of the culprit. Then, there would be a chewing out that began with “Oh, for crying out loud,” and at some point would include the phrase “you stupid little freak!” Then he would grab the brim of his baseball cap, pull it down on his forehead disgustedly, and go back to whatever he was doing. It is no wonder that many of us learned to be excellent spellers.
Work wasn’t the only thing that went on in the Times Office. Hanging from a nail on the side of the back worktable was George’s spatboard, which he used to mete out punishment to the backside of misbehaving boys. It was about two feet long, three inches wide, and ¾” thick with a handgrip at one end. It had been made for him by one of the town carpenters and looked very much like the boards used for the same purpose by college fraternities. A spat was one blow to the victim’s rear with the flat side of this board. A good, hard spat would make a pop that resounded off the walls. Punishment for a minor offense was one spat, for a more serious one, five, and for a major one, ten. Spatworthy offenses included fighting, punching, bullying, vandalism, smoking, cursing, being disruptive at the wrong time or place, and other forms of misbehavior that boys occasionally indulged in. People frequently complimented George on the excellent behavior of his boys, and this was why they behaved so well. Parents and other adults were well aware of his methods, but none of them objected because the general feeling was that if you spared the rod, you spoiled the child, especially if it was a boy. Most boys were also spanked or whipped by their parents at home and by teachers, coaches, and principals at school, so it was nothing out of the ordinary—just part of growing up.
Two offenses that were absolutely forbidden by anyone working for George or in the Boys Club were swearing and smoking. These were serious enough that repeat offenses could get you fired or thrown out of the Boys Club. As far as George was concerned, there was no forgiveness for either offense, and all the boys in the club knew it. It was for this reason that a contraption George had was so effective as a practical joke. Someone who was a good woodworker had made it and given it to George when I was around 11 years old, if I remember right. Called the lung tester, it was about a foot tall and made of wood. It had a wooden mouthpiece similar to a metal one on a cornet attached to a hollow horizontal piece like a straw that ran to a vertical column seven or eight inches tall. Also attached to the column was a wooden propeller that turned. The tester was made in such a way that it appeared that blowing into the mouthpiece would create enough force to turn the propeller. What the victim of the joke didn’t know was that the column the propeller was attached to was hollow and filled with flour—and there was a small hole a little below eye-level to the one blowing on the mouthpiece.
At one time or another, George played this joke on just about every boy in the club. The boy would be in the Times Office for some reason, and George would tell him in a very serious manner that he had to speak with him about something. He’d say he’d had a report of the boy smoking cigarettes, and when he said that, the boys who worked there would stop what they were doing to watch what was about to happen.
The accused boy would protest that it wasn’t true, and George would get the lung tester out. He would then ask the boy if he was willing to prove it, saying this was a lung tester, and if the boy had been smoking, he wouldn’t be able to blow into the mouthpiece hard enough to turn the propeller. The boy, determined to prove George wrong, would accept the challenge and blow into the mouthpiece with all his might. When he did, he’d get a face full of flour and be hardly able to see as everybody watching cracked up because they had once done the same thing themselves. After the boy had washed the flour off his face, George would usually soften the blow by handing him some change and telling him to go to the grocery store next door and get him, George, an Orange Crush and to buy himself a soda pop too while he was at it.
I worked in the Times Office until I was into my junior year in high school and almost sixteen years old. But the day finally came, as it did for most boys somewhere around that age, that I got tired of putting up with George since he could sometimes almost be like a third parent in his attempts to control his employees’ behavior—not just at work but in all aspects of life. And there were other things I wanted to do before I grew up and graduated from high school, like act in the Junior Play or be a Plowboy and play football or other sports that I couldn’t do because the practices always took place after school when I was working.
So, on a cold winter evening in the Times Office when it was already dark outside, he and I got into an argument, which we frequently did. He lost his temper and said, “If I didn’t have so much work that’s got to be done in the next month, I’d fire you right now.” I said, “If you’ll give me my pay, I’ll quit.” Without another word, he went over to the cash drawer, got some money out, and handed it to me. I took it, and I left. And that was it. I never set foot in the Times Office again for a long time after that.
However, a year or two later, he and I became friends again, and after I was grown, whenever I came back to Roscoe, I always made a point of going around to the Times Office to see him. He continued to put out the paper for the next twenty years or so, always hiring boys to help him do the work as he always had and always using the same ancient equipment, most which he’d inherited when he took over the business.
Many years later, after I’d gone to college, traveled the world, and done many things, I found myself working on a Ph.D. at the University of Texas in Austin. One of the required courses for my subject area was called Bibliography, which contained a unit on the history of printing. The professor enjoyed teaching the unit because she had taken an 8-week hands-on summer course at historic Williamsburg, Virginia, where she learned the printing methods used by Benjamin Franklin in the 1700s. In one class, she was explaining how loose type was tightened by using iron wedges that make everything firm, but she forgot what the wedges were called. “Quoins,” I said, and she said, “Right, quoins.” Then in a later class, she was having trouble explaining something about handsetting type, and again I raised my hand and helped her out. “Duncan,” she said, “how in the world do you know all this stuff?” I told her that’s the way we still did it at the Roscoe Times, where I used to work every day after school. She was amazed to learn that the methods she had learned at Williamsburg were still being practiced somewhere. She thought they had probably died out shortly after Franklin did.
George continued to run the Boys Club and put out the Roscoe Times until shortly before he died at the age of 77 in 1983. When he died, a whole way of life died for the community. The paper didn’t make enough money for anyone else to take it over, and the local businesses could get all their print jobs done in Sweetwater. The Sweetwater Reporter added an extra section to its Friday edition called the Roscoe Times, but it just wasn’t the same as it had been when George put it out in the Times Office.
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† PRENTISS AUDREY WOMBLE, JR.
Family graveside services for Prentiss Audrey Womble, Jr., 94, were held at 6:00pm on Friday, April 3, at Maryneal Cemetery with Cody Muncy officiating. Interment followed under the direction of McCoy Funeral Home. He passed away on Thursday, April 2, at Sweetwater Healthcare in Sweetwater.
P. A. was born on December 22, 1927, in Haskell to Prentiss Audrey Womble, Sr., and Daisy Marie (Martin) Womble. He grew up in Austin. He married Wanda June Adams on May 21, 1949 in Sweetwater. They built their home on the ranch in Maryneal, where they raised their children. P. A. was a member of the Maryneal Baptist Church and a graduate of Highland High School.
He is survived by two daughters, Gena (Truman) Davis of Sweetwater, and Julie (Acey) Hurn of Maryneal, and one son, John Womble of Maryneal; six grandchildren, Adam Womble of Keller, Lisa (Manuel) Galvan of Ballinger, Laura (Rex) Leath of Wasilla, Alaska, Michael (Jennifer) Sager, Josh (Kit) Womble, and Kevin (Stephanie) Sager, all of Sweetwater; eleven great-grandchildren, Amber Galvan of Austin, Ashlie Galvan and Cameron Galvan of San Angelo, Jeffrey (Isabel), Wesley, Joshua and Wylie Leath of Wasilla, Alaska, and Bailey, Hartley, Brianna, and Buster Sager of Sweetwater; two great-great- grandchildren, Kathryn Leath of Wasilla, Alaska, and Carter Galvan of San Angelo; six step- grandchildren, thirteen step-great-grandchildren and nine step-great-great-grandchildren.
P. A. was in the Army and an active member of the VFW Post #2479, where he served as Commander, on the Honor Guard and as District Commander. He was a member of the Highland School Board of Trustees. He helped build the Lone Star Cement plant and worked there for 40 years until he retired. He was a member of the Roscoe American Legion Post #227 and of the Hylton Masonic Lodge for many years and then was granted a Lifetime Membership to the Sweetwater Masonic Lodge #571. He was also a member of the Maryneal Fire Department.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Wanda, on September 25, 2017, both of his parents, and stepdad John Archer, his sister and brother-in-law, Mary Elizabeth and her husband Bob Bailey, and his daughter-in-law, Sandy Womble.
In lieu of flowers, the family request memorials be made to the Maryneal Volunteer Fire Department.
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So many memories. Excellently presented very similar to my experiences both with George and working at the Times Office. Don't know how your remembered all of that. Thanks Bitsy!!!
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