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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THE LAST FAMILY VACATION
The white 1961 Plymouth Savoy came rolling into Fort Stockton with no particular need to be noticed, which naturally meant everyone at Grounds for Divorce noticed it at once. It was not flashy enough to be admired by people who thought admiration required chrome in heroic quantities, and it was not ruined enough to be…
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HIKING THE HAPPY TRAIL
Bryce Gunnison rolled into Fort Stockton from the west in a 1970 Jeep Wagoneer Custom Special with all the subtlety of a spring hailstorm crossing the Davis Mountains. The Jeep didn’t so much arrive as announce itself. It came rumbling down Interstate 10 beneath a cloud of West Texas dust, its replacement Buick 350 V8…
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SEA DUTY
Benjamin Earl McCall had never expected Fort Stockton, Texas, to prepare him for sea duty. Fort Stockton was not a place that spent much time considering oceans. Oceans were decorative rumors that existed somewhere beyond El Paso and a succession of other places nobody in Pecos County had any serious intention of visiting unless the…
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WAITING FOR PARTS
By the late summer of 1969, the Silver Slipper Supper Club had developed a reputation for aiming considerably higher than its ZIP code suggested it should. It wasn’t that Fort Stockton expected the Rat Pack to wander in looking for supper after getting lost on Interstate 10. It was simply that the owner believed every…
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TRUNK FULL OF BURIED TREASURE
By the time Rusty Hammer and Debra Lynn walked into K-Bob’s for supper, Rusty had reached the stage of recovery where a man was grateful to be alive but tired of everybody asking him how he felt. He felt fine. He felt sore. He felt lucky. He felt irritated that his own body had briefly…
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FIRST A FISH, THEN A PONY
The first time Edwin Rasmussen proposed building the Plymouth Barracuda, he was standing ankle-deep in the cold edge of Walloon Lake with a fishing rod in one hand, a half-eaten ham sandwich in the other, and five Chrysler executives behind him explaining why there could not possibly be any fish where he was fishing. It…
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RADIOS AND ROCKETS
The first thing Nolan Haskell learned about Fort Stockton was that nobody there was in a hurry to be impressed. That wasn’t criticism. It was survival. People who lived in places where the nearest major city was measured in hours instead of minutes had developed a healthy skepticism toward promises. The desert itself encouraged such…
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SPARTAN, BUT RICH
Godfrey “Mac” McAllen graduated from Jim Bowie High School in 1950, back when the sign out front still looked freshly painted and “Home of the Fightin’ Knives” sounded less like a lawsuit waiting to stretch its legs. He was not the sort of student teachers described with words like promising, scholarly, or likely to keep…