August 23, 2023 - When is a bicycle path not a bicycle path? That is the question that my wife had to decide a number of years ago in Colorado. I had taken a new job in 1974 with an insurance company whose home office was Littleton, Colorado. We moved there in January of that year, native Texans in a foreign country, whom the natives teased about our “accent.” I never felt that we had any detectible accent, but the Colorado citizens felt differently.

August 8, 2023 - You are walking down the sidewalk downtown and you meet a friend – “How’s it going, John?” you ask. “Fair to middling,” he responds. I know you have heard that phrase for a long time, but do you know for sure what it actually means? Or, from where did it originate?

I have always understood it to mean “about average” – you’ve been better, and you’ve been worse. I did a little research on this phrase and offer the following:

July 23, 2023 - Some time prior to 1940 the town of San Augustine, Texas purchased a fire siren, and placed it atop the city hall building. This building, which still stands, housed two fire trucks. The purpose of the siren was to alert the citizens and the volunteer firemen of an emergency, usually a fire. It said to everyone that somebody needed help.

When the people in town heard the siren, it told them that there’s an emergency going on somewhere. It also warned the people to be alert for volunteers responding to the firehouse, and to watch out for fire trucks.

June 5, 2023 - I wish that you could have met this giant of a man, a fellow worker at Allstate Insurance Company in Houston, Texas.  In the mid 1960s, I was working as an insurance underwriter for Allstate.  In case you are not familiar with the term “underwriter”, let me explain.  Every insurance company has these “risk evaluators” who examine applications for insurance submitted by their agents.  They can approve or reject applications for coverage.  In so doing, they often make people angry.

May 5, 2023 - The Attorney General of Alabama, who was denied the Democratic nomination for Governor, was furious.  He denounced the people around his opponent as “a bunch of sleazebags.  You can see that in a New York minute”.

“If there was any hint of impropriety”, a Dallas police official, eschewing the subjective, was quoted as saying 1980, “They’d be on us in a New York minute”.

In a 1983 television movie, “A Killer in the Family”, someone says of the brutish father played by Robert Mitchum, “He’d kill you in a new York minute”.