STORIES
If our lives are a book, the cars we drive define the chapters.
These are stories featuring cars, trucks, and even RVs that played a role in the lives of the people who owned or drove them. Many are set in Fort Stockton, Texas and involve a cast of characters in and around the dusty southwest Texas town. A lot of the stories are shared around the table at The Grounds for Divorce, where the ‘regulars’ meet.
Pull up a chair and let Lucinda pour you a hot cuppa joe and enjoy.
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DELGADO’S DUECE AND A QUARTER
Deuce Braxton went with his dad to pick up the Buick Electra he’d ordered six weeks earlier. Deuce was only five, but remembered the rest of his life seeing the ’63 convertible, top down, waiting for them at the dealership when they pulled up. Arctic white over red. Seemed as long as the driveway to…
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HIGHER EDUCATION
When Kyle Kingwood gave the valedictory speech at his graduation from Jim Bowie High School in June of 1974 he was a virgin, a baptist, and the smartest kid in the auditorium. Two years later, at the end of his sophomore year at The University of Texas, he was no longer any of those. …
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FURY IN A FLURRY
It was a cold, blustery night in Auburn Hills, Michigan deep in the winter of 1958. The kind of night that the wind is like a knife that cuts you to the bone and the snow is swirling in front of your face so much you can’t feel your nose. Three random strangers dressed in…
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FAILURE TO LAUNCH
Paul Dillon was stopping by The Grounds for Divorce for a cuppa coffee. It was early on a Saturday. Most people in Fort Stockton were still asleep, except the paperboy delivering the weekend edition of the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch. Paul had waited for the kid to drive by on his red Schwinn Panther III and toss…
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BOBBY TOMMY WINS THE LOTTERY
When Bobby Tommy and his girlfriend, Tammy, won the lottery they swore they were going to maintain exactly the same lifestyle they’d had before. They’d get married. Bobby was going to keep his job out at the Gripper Urinal Factory turning raw kaolinite, mined just outside Fort Stockton, into the finest urinals made west of…
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KODACHROME
Old pictures. Boxes of old pictures. Crates of boxes of old pictures. An attic full of crates of boxes of old pictures. So many of them taken in front of cars, or beside cars, or in cars. New cars being photographed for the ‘official record’. Vacations. Trips to the beach. Most of the time, when…
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MAGIC BULLET THEORY
“There’s just too much to love about this ’55 Studebaker President,” Rusty said, holding up his iPhone. “There hasn’t been anything to love about a President since Reagan,” Rex noted. About then Lucinda stopped by to see if anyone was going to actually order anything, or if it was just another morning of maximum Maxwell…
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JUST LIKE OLDS TIMES
Part III of a Trilogy. When his secretary dropped the mail on his desk, she was sure to place what looked like the most interesting correspondence on the very top of the stack. It was addressed to ‘Bobby’ rather than ‘Robert’ or ‘Mr. Hardin’. In her years of working for him, she had never heard…
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SMALL TOWN COSMOPOLITAN
Part II of a trilogy. Part I was posted yesterday. Part III will be posted tomorrow. Bobby threw his duffle bag into the backseat of the new Ford convertible, grabbed the letter Jo Ellen had put under the windshield wiper, and crawled in behind the wheel to read it. It said she couldn’t leave North…
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A SOLDIER’S DREAM
This is Part I of a Trilogy. Part II will be posted tomorrow, Part III the following day. Bobby Hardin was barely 18 when he enlisted in ’43. Prior to that, he’d never been further than 50 miles outside Fort Stockton. After 13 weeks of basic training he found himself on a train heading from…