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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HERE COMES SANTA CLAUS
A Fort Stockton Christmas Chronicle The Fort Stockton Annual Christmas Parade was supposed to be a simple affair this year—twinkling lights, a few half-frozen majorettes, and the smell of kettle corn and livestock in the same general vicinity. But as anyone within city limits knows, when Mayor Goodman gets involved, “simple” is a relative term.…
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REFLECTIONS
The first thing folks noticed wasn’t the car’s sound—it was the light. It started as a glint, a flash off the courthouse windows just after lunch on a Tuesday when the wind had died down and the air was clear enough to see the shimmer of the Davis Mountains forty miles away. Something bright and…
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HIGHWAY TO THE HEART OF IT
The ’60 Fairlane 500 rolled into Fort Stockton like a tired preacher’s sermon—dusty, low, and held together by conviction and a few well-placed prayers. The black hood was sun-scorched matte, the coral body faded but proud, the whitewalls chalky as communion wafers. Out back, the chrome letters still spelled Fairlane in a crooked grin that…
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QUIET LUXURY, LOUD PANIC: When the Low-Priced Three Went Brougham
The General Motors boardroom in autumn 1965 smelled like burnt coffee, cold anger, and the faint perfume of panic. Outside, the maple trees along the Detroit River were turning gold. Inside, the biggest car company on Earth was turning red. “Gentlemen,” said Bunkley McAndrews, Vice President of Corporate Planning, slapping a folder on the mahogany…
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ASK THE MAN WHO BONES ONE
By the time Angus Hopper turned fifteen, he’d already developed two lifelong interests: machinery and poor judgment. Both came to a head one muggy Saturday in 1974 at Academy Surplus, a blocky, low-ceilinged building on a scruffy stretch of Highway 10 outside Fort Stockton—back before the name “Sports + Outdoors” got slapped on and the…
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GONE, NOT FORGOTTEN
I’ve heard folks say a house is just lumber and wires and shingles, but anyone who’s lived in one long enough knows that’s a load of cow pies. A house is a memory vault with plumbing, and ours—our little place in RoadRunner Estates—has been holding our life together for forty-three years. Buttercup and I moved…
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WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS….
The Brysons of RoadRunner Estates were the sort of family that made Fort Stockton seem like a place where things were, if not perfect, at least steady. Their ranch-style home sat near the end of Palo Verde Drive, a three-bedroom with a tidy patch of St. Augustine grass and a basketball hoop that leaned slightly…
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THE BUFFALO BUS, Part II: The Resurrection
Part II of a two part story involving sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Or, just another day in Fort Stockton. Then the title to the Buffalo Bus wandered into a fog most of us call paperwork and reappeared in the name of Iwania Goodman, the mayor’s newest wife and longest-standing donor to his campaign, though one…
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THE BUFFALO BUS, Part I: The Arrest at the Amphitheater
Part I of a two part story involving sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Or, just another day in Fort Stockton. They called it the Buffalo Bus because calling it a miracle would’ve made the Baptists nervous. Thirty-five feet of pearl white and silver aluminum, the coach pulled into Fort Stockton like a traveling moonbeam: black-and-red stripes…