The Message Forum is an ongoing dialogue among classmates. The goal is to encourage friendly interaction, including interaction among classmates who really didn't know each other. Experience on the site has revealed that certain topics tend to cause friction and hard feelings, especially politics and religion. 

Although politics and religion are not completely off-limits, classmates are asked to be positive in their posts and not to be too repetitive or allow a dialog to degenerate into an argument. 

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David Cordell

David Cordell

I just heard that Mark Zuckerberg strongly thinks that the shelter-in-place guidelines should remain indefinitely, while Elon Musk thinks that the guidelines are "fascist" and should be halted immediately.

Hmmm. Is this another example that money is amoral?

I am shocked, SHOCKED that the guy whose Facebook revenues benefit when people hunker down at home wants people to stay at home, and the guy who sells Tesla cars wants people to get out and about.

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Separately, my wife's obsession with paring down my stuff is getting ridiculous. She contiues to press me to get rid of items that have special importance to me.

For example, do you remember those neat little name cards that many of us purchased before graduation to exchange with other graduates? You might want to check your scrapbook to see if you may have failed to get one from me. If so, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to 3413 Melanie Dr, Plano, TX 75080. You need to hurry, though. I only have a few hundred left, and Martha has her eye on my stash.

David Cordell

Lance, the laughing woman in your post reminded me of the Laughing Chewbacca Lady, who was from somewhere in this area. Below: her video and her appearance with James Corden.

Jerry May

The previous posts on peeing, urinals etc reminded me of bars and clubs in the 70's and 80's.

Posted above the Men's room urinals were "Notices" of: "We aim to please. You AIM TOO; please!"

THE MANAGEMENT

Janalu Jeanes (Parchman)

To All,

A current issue:

Is anyone on this forum concerned about how the FBI and the DOJ framed Gen. Flynn in an effort to get rid of him from service to Trump, as the number one advisor for "cleaning up the abuse of power in our intelligence positions of power?"

Judge Durham and AG Barr are currently investigating CIA director during the Obama administration, John Brennan, and also, James Clapper, who headed the DNI, during Obama years, yet there is little reporting of these facts on the Mainstream Media networks.

Does that seem odd to you?

Lowell Tuttle

Jury pools in Texas, we/I don't know about California.

How are jurors selected in Texas?

Each county receives a list of potential jurors from the Secretary of State that consists of those individuals in the county that are registered to vote, hold a Texas driver's license, or hold a Texas identification card. Citizens on the list are randomly selected and mailed a summons to report for jury service.

David Cordell

Janalu, the more that comes out about the Flynn situation, the worse it looks. 

I think one of Comey's appearances on TV was particularly disturbing. He said he sent a couple of agents to the White House early in the Trump administration without goiing through the normal bureacratic channels. He said the Trump administration wasn't organized and he thought he might get away with it. 

Here is my translation: "I decided not to do the right thing, Instead I chose to do whatever I could get away with." That's not what I'd like to hear from the head of the FBI.

The Flynn situation is not a Trump issue. Neither is the K.T McFarland situation. It is about gross abuse of power by the most powerful law enforcement entity in the universe. But I believe that this issue is being treated in a highly partisan way. 

Janalu Jeanes (Parchman)

David,

I agree completely!  

I heard K.T. McFarland speaking as you report here, last night.  It is astounding, and so corrupt!!!

Steve Keene

David and Janalu,

What I want to hear from top law enforcement is "We tried to get to the truth." not "We tried to catch him in a lie."

The latest rumour is that Trump is going to rehire Flynn once he is exonerated and he is thinking about putting him in charge of the FBI.  You've got to love Trump.

David Cordell

David Cordell

Did you see the Virtual Kentucky Derby with all the Triple Crown winners? I know it was just "virtual" but I still got intto it.

David Cordell

Did you see the Virtual Kentucky Derby with all the Triple Crown winners? I know it was just "virtual" but I still got into it.

Lowell Tuttle

My pick was War Admiral.  

Wouldn't it be cool to go back in time and get your dad to drive you to Vegas and hit the sports books every year. 

69 Mets

73 Secretariat Tripe Crown

SFSASU Beating Duke last fall.

Wait, I guess if you always won in those days in Vegas you wouldn't have lived as long as our dads did.

Steve Keene

Lowell,

The kind of time travel bets you are going to make, the casino's of that era will send a plane to pick you  up until you completely break them.  The last thing I would want to do was get my parents involved.  Then they are going to tell you how to spend your money, tell you Apple and Microsoft and TI and Mesa Petroleum are too big a gamble, etc.

Kurt Fischer

Steve (and other Tech graduates)

I've often taken note of your references to being out at Tech.  I too attended Tech from 1969 to 1974.  I finished up my BS in Math in 1973 and then for some silly reason thought it would be a good idea to pursue a MS in Math also.  That lasted a semester and then I enrolled in SMU for an MBA.  When I originally went out to Tech, it was with three other high school friends - George HIgginbotham, Bill Sieling and Bill Carpenter.  We all lived in the same dorm (Wells) and on the same floor.  In fact, Bill Carpenter and I roomed together.  Unfortunately he and I took somewhat different directions.  He began to enjoy college life much more than I did, so I turned out to be a lame roommate.  He took off for other directions at the end of the freshman year.  However, George, Bill and I continued to be good friends and lived in Wells in our same rooms until after our junior year, and then moved to a house on 23 rd and University for our senior year.  I moved to a backyard "house" during my graduate work on 6th or 7th street.  It has since been torn down and apartment built in its place.  It was $40 a month including electricity and water, so it was pretty harsh.  I had a stand alone gas heater that wasn't vented, but fortunately the wind blew through the windows enough that there was never a fear of carbon monoxide poisoning.

George, Bill and I all became very involved in Lubbock Bible Church.  At that time it had a pastor who both graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary focused on Systematic Theology and Old Testament as well as being a MIT graduate in the sciences.  It was a great learning and edification experience for young Christians since he combined exegetical teaching (he even used an overhead projector) and line-by-line Biblical analysis with an emphasis on understanding how Christianity was perceived and received in the culture.  He was an early advocate of the teaching of Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til.  Plus he was the first Creationist I ever met and did a wonderful job of explaining that position.

Anyway, I've always had great memories of Tech.  It's grown and expanded in such a way that many of my old landmarks no longer exist (do you remember playing basketball in the old barn which had a dead spot under the basket so each time you dribbled there the ball would not return?).  One experience which gave me continuity with Tech was taking an English class with Dr James G Allen (Works of John MIlton).  He came to Tech in 1927, was the Dean of Men, the Dean of the the Student Body, etc.  He actually retired in 1968, but was still teaching in 1972.  The large theater in the Student Union Building is named after Dr Allen.   I didn't appreciate his history at the time, but the changes he saw at Tech during those years must have been staggering.

I hope your time at Tech was equally enjoyable. 

Steve Keene

Kurt,

After going to UT and majoring in fraternity, beer and girls (not in that order)  I worked a year and then went to Tech in September of 1975.  I lived at Bledsoe with an Ag major from Nazareth or East Jesus or somewhere.  He was big as a lumberjack and dumber than a box of rocks and I had to hit him with a shovel upside the head every morning to wake him up for class.  He was kind of like the idiot in Mice and Men.  I found a couple of guys down the hall that enjoyed watching Star Trek with me in the afternoon.  One was a coonass from Burrus, La and wanted to be a dentist, the other was from Galveston and his older sister was best friends with Farah Fawcett and his uncle was the wildlife manager at the King Ranch.  They were more my type.  I moved in with them in a three bedroom duplex at 33rd and University. What was that place with the great chili dogs on University across from the Bledsoe parking lot?  Not der wienersnizel, this was a local place.  I seldom got down towards Wells.  That was where all the jocks seemed to be.  I did like to ogle the girls at Weymouth and Chitwood.  All I did was study and went to Summer School in 1975.  In 1976 I worked for Chevron at Snyder then went to work for them in Denver in December 76.. All night Risk games and an occasional trip to New Mexico were the total of my extracurricular activities.

Tech was a great place to go to school after UT, because even if you found a place to hang out and have a beer, after UT and the Dallas hotspots, the Lubbock spots bored me to death.  Lubbock seriously needed a College Party Coordinator and Recreation Director to bring them out of the barn dance era.

David Cordell

Steve. 

I suspect that one reason you performed so well at TTU compared to UT was because there aren't as many places to go fishing in West Texas.

Steve Keene

David,

I did find some stock ponds on ranches northeast of Snyder when I worked the summer there.  One tank was really great.  One day I caught a 4 and 6 lb bass in it.  I took them out to a drilling rig that was running production casing later that evening.  They were a big hit.

Up the road from that tank my roommate from the PE department at Tech who had a summer job similar to mine at Union Oil, and I started fishing and caught a few small bass in another smaller tank.   We noticed another tank back in the brush that we originally did not see.  We hiked over there after climbing thru a few fences and it had the biggest bull frogs I had ever seen.  We used lures to snag them and caught about twenty.  Later we were in town and mentioned to some oilfield workers where we had been fishing.  One of them said, don't mess with that rancher that imported big bull frogs from Africa that is near there.  He has been known to shoot trespassers trying to steal his frogs.  I guess we dodged a bullet on that one. I have always loved frog legs.  The only place to get decent ones in Dallas are at Joe's Seafood on Peak and I-30.

Terry Mitchell (Reddy)

Hey Steve - your bullfrog story reminded me of a time Royce took me to his Dad's property in Fairview, I think, to gig frogs. I had no idea of what that meant. We went out in the dark in their tank on a canoe or something, with flashlights and gigs. We would scan the banks with flashlights, find a frog, blind it with the light, paddle over and gig it. His dad fried them up for dinner. They were surprisingly tasty!

Steve Keene

Terry,

Tastes like chicken!   More like chicken dredged in moss.   One of my favorite things is to shoot them with a 22 rifle at night.  You have to hit them in the head or they will jump in the water and you will have a hard time retrieving them.  You can also use a Johnson spoon in the day time that has a yellow feather.  You throw the spoon up on the bank behind the frog and twitch it.  They think it is a big shiny grasshopper.  They come right out of the water and eat it and then you just set the hook.

Royce's Dad's property was at Fairfield,not Fairview.  It is south of Dallas between Corsicana and Buffalo.  Fairview is up near McKinney.

David Cordell

From a classmate:

Kurt Fischer

Steve:

Tech stuff....

One of the things I most appreciated about attending Tech was the portion of the student body from small towns and ranches.  People from Idalou, Ralls, Crosbyton, Dimmitt, Tulia, Sunray Earth, Claude, Muleshoo and everywhere else.  These folks didn't grow up in Richardson, Texas and they seemed to have a different way of looking at life.  They weren't all angels, but I liked what they represented.  When I look back, I seriously believe they were half of my education.

I had one guy sit me down and lecture me about the 5 or 6 cowboy hats on his wall.  He had his work hat, his go to church hat, his rodeo hat, etc.  And he did rodeo - bareback.  And he was suffiently crazy to enjoy it.

I had another female friend who won the barrel racing contest at Tech and was honored for it.

I had a student in the algebra class that I taught when I was a teaching assistant.  He was a range and wildlife management major., but was almost a complete failure at algebra.  One day he brought a small case to show me after class.  Inside he had lined it with velvet carved out places to hold his coyote calls.  Maybe eight different calls.   He explained each call to me.  He hand whittled each of the calls.  After that, I decided he was going to pass because he knew a lot more about wildliife than I did about math.  

For some reason those memories stick with me more than the education.

Hollis Carolyn Heyn

Hollis Carolyn Heyn

Steve Keene

Kurt

That is why I love the Panhandle. They are good people who scratched a living out of the desert like prairie.  They are tough as nails. My job I just got laid off from was negotiating with West Texas and New Mexico big ranchers.  I know a bunch of them.   A bunch of them would have lost their ranches had oil and gas not been discovered on them in the early 1930's.

I even met Chancellor Weymouth who donated the dorm at Tech. He married one of R.B. Masterson's daughters and his ranch was a portion of the old Masterson Ranch just east of Lake Meredith on the North side of the Canadian river.  My Dad had to talk him into putting an access road to access the lake that cut his ranch in two parts.  It was a definite no from Mr. Weymouth.  Dad notified him of an old settler burial site that was on his side of the Canadian.  The Bivins and Masterson cowboys had killed him for rustling and squating on the land.  Dad, who was working for the Bureau of Reclamation relocating the wells out of the riverbed to places high on the bluffs, gave Weymouth a choice  Allow the road for access to the lake or he was going to place a national monument at the gravesite telling the tale of the Masterson and Bivins cowboys killing the unarmed settler.  Dad got the road.