Category: Every car is a story.
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THE GRADUATE
Dax Shaddock was lost. It wasn’t that he didn’t know where he was. It was that he had no idea where he was going. He’d taken a “gap year” after graduating from Our Lady of Immeasurable Concern, but he’d fallen into the “gap” and couldn’t seem to find his way out. Most of his friends…
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RIDING IN A WALKER
There’s a theory that men aren’t nearly as apt to make friendships with other men as women are with other women. That can be chalked up to the sheer number of words women say every day, 20,000, compared to the number men do, 7,000. Maybe men can’t get a word in edgewise. Maybe they are…
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THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER
Miss Betsy could occasionally be seen tooling around Fort Stockton, always by herself, usually with a smile on her face in a rusty old Chevy Greenbrier just like this one. Her husband had purchased it as a project decades ago. She kept it after his departure, mostly as a reminder of things he had promised…
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GOOD OLD DAYS
Looks like summer’s here in Fort Stockton. It was inevitable, I guess, but spring seemed like just a hiccup between the bleak scenery of winter and the scorched earth of summer. A little depressing, but nothing a trip to The Grounds for Divorce can’t fix, so that’s where I headed. Plenty of other folks felt…
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THORNTON GOODNIGHT’S IMPERIAL
Southwest of Fort Stockton, Thornton Goodnight owned a spread that most said was second only to the King Ranch in size. Folks may have been exaggerating when they said it stretched almost all the way to Ozona, but it was a fair-sized piece of real estate that yielded cotton and cattle and some sizable legends…
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CONTINENTAL CONTRITION
When they saw this, everyone in Fort Stockton thought this was the Continental Mark II out near the back row of Earl’s Salvage Yard and Formalwear. That damn thing is legendary. Folks had pretty much forgotten about it the last decade or two, but for ever and a day it was known as “Larry Ludlow’s…
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WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU
Hardly ever is a certified letter from an attorney you’ve never heard of a sign of good things to come. “We regret to inform you of the passing of your great uncle, Buford Ludlow, earlier this year . . .” the letter started. Luke Bynum was not immediately filled with any emotion other than mystery…
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THE SANDS OF TIME
Mayor Goodman had kind of a running competition with his wife’s cousin going all the way back to their high school days. Always attempting to one-up each other. Going out to dinner with them and their wives was difficult, each trying to get the upper hand on the other with just about any topic that…
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A SUNBURN IN MONTEREY
When Connie-Jean was asked to travel to Denver in order to attend training on a new punch-card system for the DMV office, she was reluctant to go. She’d barely ever left Fort Stockton, much less the state of Texas. But, being the only female in the office, she felt a pressure to perform. Besides, a…
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UNCLE LOWELL’S IMPALA
Hard to look at this and not see it through the filter of yellowed Kodachrome, parked in the shade of the driveway in front of the grandparent’s bungalow. Uncle Lowell had bought it brand new off the showroom floor of Longhorn Chevrolet in Wichita Falls just a couple days before heading back home to Fort…