brerrabbit

The Joskees I'm refering to in referance to the church is in San Antonio. The store was built around the church when the church refused to sell their property.

I graduated from Milby in 1977 and attended Jackson Jr High prior to that. I played football and can tell you that all of our Jr High home games were played at what they called Little Jeppesen. It was was west of Jeppesen stadium behind the old fieldhouse. There are U of H residential apartments on the site today. The Little stadium also doubled as a baseball field in the spring and therefore the bleachers went all the way down the field, and then turned left to form a corner. In that corner was where home plate was for the baseball field. I played high school football at Jeppesen till my junior year and in the fall of 1976 which was the start of my senior year all district 17-4a home games were played at Barnett which was built on the site of the old Golfcrest Country Club. Golfcrest moved to its current location in Pearland in 1971. When they closed the old course my friends and I used to go swimming in the old ponds that were part of the course. If you want to see some neat architechture right next to Barnet is the old Spanish styled Golfcrest clubhouse that they still use as an office for HISD transportation. There is also a bus barn at the old Golfcrest site. I also played baseball in high school and we played at Little Jeppesen until 1977 when Barnett's baseball fields were opened. In college at U of H I played Lacrosse and during my junior year we were allowed to play our home games at Little Jeppesen and that brought back a lot of memories.

Two of my more vivid memories of Joskees. At their Gulfgate location the store had three floors. It's first floor was really the same level as the basement for the rest of the stores. There was a hill that had a sidewalk that ran from the bowling alley entrance and the Picadilly reasturant towards Joskees looping around the hill and down to the lower level. As kids we would ride our bikes down the hill as fast as we dared and try not to hit the front of Joskees. Well a friends brother went a little to fast, couldn't pull it out and crashed through the front plate glass window of the store. He got cut up pretty good. The second story was one my mother always told me about the Joskees in San Antonio. To this day if you look at the live.maps overhead view of what is now Dillards at the Riverwalk Mall you will see that the store is actually built around a small Catholic Church and is on three sides of the church property. The story was when Joskees built the store they aquired all the land except the churches and the church refused to sell. I would link to the picture but this site does not allow it.

I have way to many memories of Joskee's. M Mother retired from there in 1986 after working for them for 37 years. Needless to say I spet a lot of times in the stores and worked there many times over the years during Christmas, the famous EOM sales and during inventory time.

The first Taco Bell in that area was at the corner of Bellfort and Telephone. Not really on the corner but just a littl east of the intersection down Bellfort. It was our late night hangout when I was in high school. After a night of drinking we would sober up with $.25 tacos and burritos.

Three more that were not listed, My favorite band from college, the Cars. Also Rush, and the Steve Miller Band. I saw all three in the Summit. (not at the same time) Also saw Devo at Cullen Auditorium on the campus at U of H and Jethro Tull at Sam Houston Coliseum. To Susan, I was at the Elton John and Kikee Dee show at Hofienz and remember it well, September 26, 1974. I remember it because it was my 15th birthday and I went with two friends.

I will agree we are on oppisite sides and I will conceed I don't like paying higher prices for gas but I can see what goes on and understand realities of the marketplace. Never said I agree, just that I understand. As far as controlling the valves you have to understand certain realities of the marketplace. With the billions and billions of dollars tied up in this business, you will find that oil producers will virtually never shut down production in order to increase prices. Yes I know, what about OPEC? Well when you look at the numbers from those guys what you find is they have very little room over the top. While they talk about producing more the reality is they don't really have enough to increase production much more. Additionally their economics don't mirror the big oil companies. They have a natural resource in their countries with little if any investment on their part, in other words no sunk costs while the major oil companies do. As a major energy producer told me one time, the engineers job in production is to produce as much as they possibly can every day and the marketers job is to sell it. Based on the level of investment shutting down production for any period could turn the economics of a field from a profit to a loss based on costs and time value of money. While I concur the ethanol is not totally green you have to understand that the feds made the decision to require ethanol in fuel to replace the previous oxiginator that they had required called MTBE. After the colorless, odorless liquid that is MTBE was found to be a known carcinogine the feds decided to outlaw its use and replace it with ethanol. We were immidiately short ethanol to meet the requirements so we started and continue to import ethanol from South America. It seems that sugar cane is a much more efficient source than corn. So the starting shipping ethanol from Brazil to the US. Not wanting to let the tankers return empty the nice guys that we are we decided to start shipping MTBE ( the US banned additive) to Brazil, so we effectively exported our problem. Ethanol in the US uses over a gallon of fossil fuel to make a gallon of ethanol, ie no cost savings there or much help with pollution. On the other hand sugar cane only uses a gallon of fossil fuel to produce about 6 gallons of ethanol. The reason is because then burn the sugar cane stalks to generate the heat for the ethanol making process. The relaity is right now we have no good alternatives currently and can only hope technology comes up with some realativly soon.

The whole bio fuel movement is not about price, its a green issue, it burns cleaner with less emmisions. Alternatives like ethanol won't be about price because as the Feds changed the rules to require 10% of all motor fuels to be ethanol the price (because of the demand) jumped up considerably.

Yes you can demand the physical delivery of product for any commodity traded and they all have standards as far a grade, quantitiy, and delivery point. However the goal of most commodity traders is to reach settlement for the month with a balanced position such that you have bought and sold the same amount and net out to zero. Comming out of the end of the trading month long or short means you are making or taking delivery of something.

Just so you get it straight, one I no longer "trade". Second when I did the absolute price of the underlying commodity really didn't mean that much to me whether it was going up, or going down. I made my money on the spread. Third in my current position I am a price taker, ie I get no say in the price it is pretty well dictated to me by the market. Fourth I buy all my product as feedstock for Chemical plants and very little of our product winds up in somebodys gas tank. My business makes a whole lot more money when the price of oil goes down. As far as owning Oil Company stock, yep own a lot of it been a good investment lately. I even collect royalties on a couple of oil and gas wells. I get more money each month every time the prices go up. In traders terms you could consider it a hedge. I pay more at the pump for gas but in turn I get bigger royalty checks. I spend more but I make more. One question though. In my earlier post I mentioned that not to many years ago oil companies were losing money. Heck I know I lived through the layoffs and blood bathes of the late eighties and had lots of friends who lost their jobs and were out of work for some time. My wife, a pipeline drafter even got caught up in it and was out of work for over a year. Those were very lean times and I can assure you no one was out there saying lets help the oil companies out. As late as 2002 and 2003 the refining division of my company was sucking wind and posting over a $100 million loss a year and I can assure you that no one shed a tear for us. You never addresed what you think the average returns for oil companys have been over a longer term. Finally, I can tell you don't trade because if you think a 7% return comprible to the auto industry is acceptable in the energy business given the level of investment and risk involved then you don't fully understand the whole risk reward theroy. I feel your frustration about gas prices, its just that the story is not as simple as a lot of people think. I usually save my rage for the property tax debate because personally that on bothers me a whole lot more than gas prices do. Its easy to not drive as much, but I can't do anything about property taxes except move to another state. Edited to add. I forgot also that when you referenced my Wal Mart story you felt that if everybody was forced to rack rates then it would be a good thing. Well no it wouldn't because the only money the independents make (and they are the vast majority of the people who own the gas stations) would be $0. They would be buying from the refiners and selling to the consumers for no profit. You still don't get the fact that the majors don't own most of the gas stations in this country. The small guys do!

Boycotte Citgo all you want, your not hurting Chavez in the least or Citgo for that matter. Your hurting either the small independent who owns one station, or a mid size company that owns a chain of stations, and they usually don't brand all their stations the same anyway. Ever see the Bucee's brand. They fly about six or seven different brands depending on where the station is. They have Texaco, Citgo, Phillips etc. Boycotte their Citgo but go down the road and buy from their Texaco. The point is the retail site makes very little profit from selling gas. The majority of their money comes from inside sales at a 30% plus profit margin. Take one major brand, say Shell, they have over 16,000 retail sites across the country and yet with recent divestments they only have refineries in Houston and Louisiana. Do you think every Shell in America gets their gas from those refineries? No, they buy from whatever refinery is closest, put in their additive and away they go. Also of those sites the company actually owns and operates about 400. Wholesalers, jobbers and independents own the rest. Boycotte Citgo, organize, put them out of business, Chavez still makes his money, Citgo refineries still sell all their gas and you just ran some hardworking fellow Americans out of business without having any effect what so ever on the retail price of gasoline. As far as the price of gas goes the price is up and guess what? Demand continues to grow. The market will set the price. Sell me a car for a 50% profit margin, if I like the car or better yet a lot of consumers like the car and want the car and are willing to pay that price then yeah, its going to sell. If the market says no and the car doesn't sell then no I and nobody else will buy your product. Demand for gasoline is inelastic and people including other countries will pay what it costs. The market, ie the commodities market is setting the price. Look at what RBOB trades for on Nymex. Add delivery and taxes and thats roughly what consumers are paying at the pump. The market has spoken. I will conceed you are the market as well and if you choose to boycotte a brand that is your right, but as far as having an effect on price it really won't. That will not happen until demand worldwide drops and we start weaning ourselves off the use of carbon based fuels. Run the economics and critize profits all you want. Its not about that, its about what the market says and right now they say they are willing to pay the price and do. As far as market manipulation goes, yes Enron as well as other companies manipulated the California Power market. One thing to keep in mind though is that the California regulators wrote the rules that allowed the manipulation. While what Enron and others did was certainly unethical and immoral believe it or not not everything they did in that market was illeagal. Quite a bit of it was done because some really terrible rules were written and enacted by the California Public Utilities Commision. If you want to get really mad a someone for manipulating prices try some of the large hedge funds that play in the commodities markets. The have billions of dollars to play with and are not against moving markets counter to fundimentals in the market place to extract profit. They have no skin in the game so to speak because they are not physical players, own no assets and have no responsibility other than to their investors to make money. Price of the underlying commodity they are trading be damned. As far as Chavez and his let them eat cake attitude, I really can't say. All I know is that in Saudia Arabia they have prices nearly as cheap and have for many years. Additionally they pay no taxes because the Royal family is flush with cash from selling oil. I ask you how long will that mentality last? Its been going on for about 40 years at this point. Sorry I had to add this as well after rereading TJones comment about making individual sites lower their prices. In many states in the US there are laws on the books concerning the sales price of gasoline. The refiners and distributors are responsible for posting "rack" prices which equate to wholesale prices that individual dealers pay for fuel. What many of these laws say are that dealers cannot sell at the pump for less than the rack price. This law was enacted to prevent larger dealers with multiple sites and the majors from undercutting the Mom and Pop shops long enough to run them out of business. I know for a fact Florida has this law because Wal Mart tested it several years ago by selling gas under the rack rate. They got hauled to court and lost the case. So as you boycotte the retail site remember that many are very limited on how far they can actually lower their price and again your not hurting the majors but rather the independents.

Not really sure what you mean by this comment. It's cheap down there because the government owns the oil, the government owns the refinery and they choose to sell it for $.40 a gallon to their citizens. Its a subsidy because they are selling to their own people for far less than they could get selling it internationally. Chavez sees it as a way to placate the masses.

I always love to read discussions like these on forums. I worked as an energy trader for nearly 15 years before it took a downturn and then kicked around until I wound up back in the energy business working for a major producer in theri retail division so I got to see the retail fuel side of the business as well. I currently price and buy about $200 to $250 million worth of oil a month for a major energy players Chemical division. I spent a seven year hitch with Enron and have stories to burn about that place. I was not there for the fall but still lost a lot of money as a result (goodbye early retirement). There are so many false beliefs, inaccurate data, and just plain lies put out there every day that no one knows the truth. I will tell you this, markets set prices period. It's not the big bad oil companies, its not the government unless like Venezuela where they heavily subsidize the market to achieve $.40 a gallon gas costs. Leaded and a heavy polluter by the way. The reason so many other countries are not as shocked by rising prices is because they have been paying $4 and $5 a gallon for their gas for years. Why? Taxes! We pay a little over $.19 a gallon federal any anywhere from $.15 to $.40 a gallon for state taxes while the rest of the world has paid upwards of $3 to $4 a gallon in taxes for years. Why? Their governments have been trying and succesfully I might say to wean their populations away from individual autos to mass transit for a long time and apparently in a lot of places it has worked. We have been spoiled for a long time and now as the supply stays relatively flat and newly industrialized countries like China, and India enter into the bidding for international oil the prices have risen for crude. Gas prices are up partially because of crude prices and mostly because of demand. Demand continues to grow while the supply of refined products does not. We have not built a new refinery in the US in well over 20 years. To costly, to many regulations and to many people crying, not in my backyard. Boycottes, get real would you? Go buy a tank of gas, and then tell me whose gas you just bought. Exxon? Really? Even though Exxon doesn't have a refinery within 1,000 miles of where you bought your last tankful? No you just bought Citgo gas refined down the road that was taken to an Exxon terminal where Exxon's additives were added and then it was loaded into a non descript tank truck and delivered to the local Exxon station. Wow! I thought you were boycotting Citgo! Didn't see that one coming did you. Gas is Gas is Gas! Its made to Federal standards and then it is sold as a commodity period. Can you trace the cotton fibers in your jeans to know what state or country the cotton was grow in? Didn't think so. It's a commodity, look that word up. A homoginous product that is made to a standard and traded on a regulated exchange in what many economist call the last true open market left in the world, a commodity trading floor. Buyers and sellers freely transacting in an open call market place. Now if you are a responsible CEO and you can sell your product out of Africa to a market in China for $65 a unit because the free market dictates thats what they are willing to pay, would you as an American say on hell no! I'm taking it to the US Gulf Coast for $55 a barrel plus a bigger transport cost to help out my fellow citizens. No, because you would'nt be a CEO for long would you. I know, I know, lets all hate big oil because they are making so much money, its not fair. Windfall profits, price regulation, price caps, lets nail them to the wall. Well as little as five to six years ago where were you when those same companies were loosing money or barely making any money? Were you calling for subsidies to keep them afloat? No you were not. Look at a period of ten to twenty years and see what the average return was for the major oil companies. Also don't include the last two years in your calculation. The returns are not that great. Oh by the way their market capitalization is enormous, billions and billions of dollars and they are returning in some years as little as 2 to 3 percent. At that rate why not just put it in a money market account with no risk and make 4 or 5 percent? As major oil is making money in large chunks today they are putting it back into exploration and development. The problem is people all the easy oil has been found. Elephant hunting for the big reserves is not cheap. We have to go deeper, farther offshore, and into countries and place we have never gone before and it costs a lot more to do it. I hate paying more for gas as much as the next guy but the reality of the situation is it along with all other carbon based energy sources is a scarce commodity. While technology has made DVD players fall from $700 to $880 when the were first introduced to something like $29.95 at Wal Mart today the same cannot be said for carbon based energy. We find better ways to extract it but we have to look more and more places to find it. Oh and by the way what is about 90% of that $29.95 DVD player made out of? You guessed it carbon based energy products. We use oil, gas, gas liquids and petrolem based products to make, plastics, polyester, latex, rubber, nylon, and about a thousand other everyday products that we all take for granted. We use it to generate power for homes and businesses and to even fuel the processes needed to turn the energy itself into the afore mentioned products. The relality is we pay more and will continue to pay more for oil and gas. There will be price fluctuations down but the overall trend is up. In the interum energy producers i.e. Big Oil will show big profits but a some point in the not so distant future they will run out of the cheaper produced product and be forced to find more expensive stuff. Once they sell through the inventory their costs will increase significantly and their profits will crash. When it does I just hope all the people bashing them today will have a little sympathy for them then.

September till May Tuesday nights at Pearland lanes on 518. My wife and I both bowl in league play. A lot of the lanes in town have closed but the ones in the burbs are going strong. There are two on Bay Area Blvd within a mile or so of each other. One is between 45 and Highway 3 and the other is farther down across Highway 3 past El Camino Real. Aramadillo Lanes on Fuqua in South Belt still has real wood lanes not the synthetic ones. Spencer Highway inside the Beltway. I am not sure on Meadowcreek lanes on Richey in South Houston but I think they may still be there. Alleys I know have been lost from years past, Belfort Lanes corner of Mykawa and Bellfort, Gulgate Lanes in the basement of Gulfgate Mall, Mimosa Lanes right off the Gulf Freeway near Airport, Tropicana Lanes on Lawndale. I also know there is still a bowling alley on Holcomb near West U. They are still around and believe me bowling is actually still growing in number of participants. I still get the USBC Bowling magazine.

Not Houston but I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine who is from Columbus, Indiana and he was telling me that Cummins Diesel was headquartered in Columbus and that the CEO of Cummins and the charitable foundation of Cummins decided long ago that their contribution to the community would be to pay for some of the worlds greatest architects to design buildings in this town. It has a population of 39,000 and has over sixty buildings in town designed by I.M. Pei, Eliel Saarinen, Eero Saarinen, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, Dale Chihuly and Henry Moore. This is a link to the Cities website about architecture but you can do a web search for even more. The CEO of Cummins was J. Irwin Miller and his house was designed by Eero Saarinen, with landscape by Dan Kiley The city is ranked sixth in the nation for architectural innovation and design by the American Institute of Architects on a list that includes the much larger cities of Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. http://columbus.in.us/listings/index.cfm?catId=336

Just a little note about your area, actually a good part of what is now SCR was actually planted in soy beans, not rice. I spent a lot of time dove hunting out there and there were'nt any flooded rice fields, just rows and rows of soy beans. When I was a kid and the 288 right of way was cleared and the bridges over the creeks and bayous were built, we would drive out the ROW from Almeda Genoa and stop along the way and dove hunt on weekends. I also had a friend who knew the guy that farmed the area just north of 518 and west of 288 (basically a lot of SCR) and he let us hunt out there all the time. We did that up until the mid 90's when development was thinking about starting and the City of Pearland was looking to expand that direction. Right across 518 at CR 90 which is/ was the main entrance to Silverlake there was a sign hanging on the gate that advertised day leases for dove hunting right there. Not long ago when I drove by I saw that the posts for the gate were still there but it looked funny because all the land behind them was cleared and they were starting to build something there. Where 518 interscected with Cullen was known as Dead Mans curve because long ago that was where 518 ended and you could only turn north on Cullen resulting in a 90 degree turn in the road, hence Dead Mans curve. Wow, how things have changed over the years.

When Allstate said they would no longer cover Windstorm I checked with GEICO homeowners, Farmers, Allstate Direct (no agent) and several others. All of them said no to all inclusive insurance and I was forced to split the policy. I pay Farmers for normal homeowners, and the Texas Windstorm Insurance Pool for the Hail and Windstorm coverage.

It depends on whether you are in Brazoria County or not. Since 518/288 is Brazoria county then yes you will have a hard time buying all inclusive homeowners insurance. You will have to do what the rest of us do which is buy your homeowners insurance excluding hail and windstorm coverage which is what hurricane coverage is under, and then buy a seperate policy from the Texas Windstorm pool which is a state mandated fund that covers Tier I risk areas. Tier I areas are all coastal counties (which Brazoria is) and certain other areas that are not in coastal counties but are subject to storm damage. The Deer Park, La Porte, Seabrok and Kemah areas that are in Harris county but subject to storm damage are in the same boat as Coastal counties. For $244K ok coverage on my house I pay just over $2,000 a year for the two policies. The only insurance company I have heard of that is still writing comprehensive policies that include storm damage is State Farm, and then they will only do it if you have your auto insurance with them as well. I was with Allstate and effective with my renewal in February they decided to stop writing storm coverage. That lead me to talk to a friend who sells Farmers Insurance and deciding to go with him. Good luck with your insurance if your looking for it but just accept the fact that to live in the area you will probably have to get the seperate windstorm coverage.

Teresa Riddle or Kathy Warfield at Remax. I know both of them personally and they both grew up in Pearland and graduated from Pearland High School. They know the area better than most and would do a great job for you.

Red, I don't have any problem with your logic, and I do agree that at some point the voters will get their say. While you point out that the parking garge and the soccer stadium are seperate I see them as being linked in the backroom negotiations as Drayton thinks if the stadium is built he will give his support on the contingency that he gets the parking garage that he feels he must have in return for the sacrafice of the surface lot to the new stadium. I doubt Drayton is merely a huge soccer fan. As far as the overall money I must admit I tend to be bias because I have a good friend that works in the middle of it all and gets extremly frustrated when money is not available from the private sector because there is a fixed amount of it available from year to year. He can and has lost numerous smaller projects because of the large amount of funds that have been dedicated to the GRB project. It is certainlt accesable to many but his multiple projects are spread all over Houston while the one that got the money is downtown. As far as addressing wasteful spending, I have no specifics other than my discussions with my friend as to how much the $70 million going downtown could have done in multiple other smaller projects.

In my little rant I guess I failed to mention that what I was saying was really two different things. Corporate and Foundation funds can not be used on anything that taxes would probably go to pay for. So no they would not pay for the building of a new stadium. There exsists in Houston an orginazation that is the Houston Parks Board. A small non profit 501 © organization that solicites donations from the cities large foundations, and corporations and in turn buys land for parks and oversees the construction of the facilities. When they finish they give the park to the City of Houston. My rant covered two things, first how many stadiums can we actually pay for before we scream thats enough? Second in the current proposal to build a Dynamo stadium the Parks Board is being asked to spend money to buy and build the training facility for the Dynamo. In this case it would in fact be taking dollars out of the Parks Board hands to build other parks all over Houston and create a limited use facility on 288 for the Dynamo. Granted soccer could be played on some of the fields built there but the majority of the cost of the structure would be for the exclusive use of the Dynamo. There has been discussion on other parts of this board about the east of downtown project along Buffalo Bayou with the concert island on paths and developments. The project is on hold and somewhat scaled down in the near future and one of the big reasons is the amount of money that Bill White was able to get from the above mentioned donors. There is a finite amount of that available each year and he has got a lot of it for the next couple years to build a smaller $70 million park in downtown. I guess the jest of my rant is that while I am a huge advocate of improving Houston in every way possible, I am pragmatic enough to know that it has to happen in moderation so we can afford it. Lets face it we already pay quite a bit in property taxes, and when you add in all the rest of the taxes we pay including an 8.25% sales tax we are pretty heavily burdened from the start.

This may be slightly off topic, but here goes. Discussion here has come around to parking for events in downtown and that is certainly a big consideration, but the jest of the discussion is really about a new stadium for the Dynamo, how to fund it and where it will be. I'm all for sports and while I don't watch soccer I understand those who enjoy it. What is starting to bother me is the idea of build, build, build and let the city/ county pay for it. Make no mistake about it, if funds to build anything are provided by the city or the county, it costs you the taxpayer. Forget the politicians buzz phrases like "all the funds will come from hotel taxes, and rental car taxes, so your not paying it". Thats a load of BS because since that money is paying off Reliant, Minute Maid, Toyota Center, and oh by the way the $50 million of improvements to the Dome from the eighties its not going to other concerns that would benifit the larger population as a whole, like parks, roads, and other city infrastructure. Some one even mentioned the new park in front of GRB. While it will no doubt be nice, I seriously question the idea of spending $70 million on a 2 maybe three block park. Again the majority of the money is coming from donations, but just like any other scarce commodity (in this case money) there is a limited supply of it and they just took a huge chunk of it from the foundations and corporate givers for a while. This project will delay widespread park projects all across Houston because your spending so much, for so little. While Drayton McClain looks to be pushing for the new Dynamo stadium, keep this in mind, he will only support the ide if in return he gets a publically funded parking garage that he can take revenue from. He knows the loss of surface parking to the stadium will be what he needs to force the city's hand on the matter. The latest proposal for the practice facility to go along with the new stadium would be at highway 288 and Airport on a 40 acre piece of land there. And get this the rumor is the powers that be want the non profit group that aquires and build park for the city to fund the aquisition. Guess where they get their money from? The same places Mayor Bill has raided for his $70 million park at GRB. I want to see Houston be a dynamic beautiful city that grows and prospers, after all I am a native Houstonian, and a sixth generation Texan. This is my home, and this is my heritage, but mortgaged the future to get all this stuff is not what I had in mind. The city/county needs to stop spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave or Houston is going to suffer greatly tomorrow for todays short sighted actions.

I remember the place very well. My Great Aunt and Uncle lived right off Braodmoor on Pearson for many years, and Uncle Jake as we all called him worked for over fourty years for Houston Belt and Terminal Railroad. He was a Lead Forman on the track crews and was swinging a hammer and pick axe right up to the day he retired at the age of 65. He was probably the strongest man I have ever known in my life and even at sixty five could out work men in their twenties. As a kid I spent a lot of time with my Aunt as she took care of me while my parents worked. Her and Uncle Jake adopted four kids and were foster parents for Harris County for over fourty years. Many a day I rode with Aunt Gladys to drop off or pick up Uncle Jake at Produce Row because that was the maintainence facility for HBT RR. They met there every day before heading out to different sections to work. We would pick him up every day at 5 when he got off work. Aunt Gladys had so many mouths to feed she got the best deals she could on food wherever she could get them. We would go to produce row for vegetables and fruit, a family owned meat market on Long Drive just off Telephone for meat, and she bought all her cakes and baked goods at the Dinner Bell bakery. This was during the sixties.

Lonnie Elliot owns Elliot's and is a friend of mine. We go to the same church. His wife runs O'Day's hardware which is a pretty good place to go to find hard to find plumbing and electrical parts from around the house. Another good auto shop is Ellis automotive on Wagon Wheel and Fite Rd. Rick Ellis is the owner and they will fix it right the first time. I get all my work done there.

Few pics from my trip today. Hope you enjoy. Just had to comment on this last picture. With the expansion of the school the addition was built between the football field and the main building. It totally changes the feel of the building. I remember riding the city bus to Jackson and getting off on Telephone Road and walking to school. The approach from that direction made the back of the school look like a prison. It was the Boys and Girls gymns from that angle with the lunchroom above them on the third floor. It had a definite prison feel to it. The newer building really takes that away and really softens the look.