The alarm sounds at 4am. In a dimly lighted barn the horses are fed and saddled, the stalls cleaned, all before the light of day, all before the real work can begin. The mornings may be routine, but the rest of the day is far from it.
Continue Reading →“With so much trauma and stress over our country’s situation, it’s nice to have a little happy, and you’ve got to be happy around goats and Western music,” said Waynetta Ausmus. “Goats will make you laugh, and Western music will make you tap your feet.”
Continue Reading →My days are filled with logistics, spending time with guests, attending to the needs of guests and staff, corresponding with guests yet to arrive, and keeping in touch with the goings-on at the knife companies at our Denison office. Grocery orders and supplies are ordered from Anchorage and delivered to the air charter company, then flown out with the guests each Saturday.
Continue Reading →The weekly Tuesday evening gathering at Four Rivers Outreach is a combination camp meeting, pep rally, Alcoholics Anonymous session, gospel song fest, and tent revival—sans the tent—with a leavening of motivational self-help positive thinking thrown in for measure. It starts with introductions. “Who’s here for the first time?” says the woman with the microphone. “Stand up and tell us who you are and how you got here.”
Continue Reading →A lifeguard’s work is never done. What does it take to keep your cool at the pool? TLM caught up with two local lifeguards, a rookie and an eight-year veteran, to find the ins and outs of this traditional summer job. Sara Bilyeu, the rookie, is sixteen and a Sherman High School junior. She is a member of the SHS varsity swim team.
Continue Reading →One of the things that set Texoma Living! apart is the inclusion in each issue of a long-form profile, usually three thousand words or more, on someone who brings something special to our community. From the beginning, the goal was to offer the reader something more than a superficial glance at the subject. We wanted the reader to finish the story and say, “I never knew that.” This is a very short retrospective of some of those stories.
Continue Reading →There are a dozen or so books on the shelf behind White’s desk in his office in the DSH Athletic office building. Churchill on Leadership is up there, so is Winning Maxims, but there is nothing about football, nothing about the Xs and Os of the game.
“The Xs and Os are a lot less than what people think they are,” he said. “The first thing I ask a coach in an interview is, ‘Why do you like coaching?’ The answer I want to hear is that they like kids. That’s the most important thing.
Kent Black was the first CEO of the United Space Alliance, a joint venture between Rockwell International and Lockheed Martin formed in 1996 at the behest of NASA to consolidate Space Shuttle programs under one prime contractor. Not bad for a farm boy from Illinois with a yen for electronics.
Continue Reading →After more than 500 shows, Dennis McCuistion and Niki Nicastro still do programs about “…things that matter, people who care…”.
Continue Reading →There is a wire-mesh business-card holder on Brad Underwood’s desk in his office at the TAPS headquarters in Sherman. The cards in the holder face Underwood’s chair. “Most of the people who come in here already know who I am,” he said. The real purpose of the holder is to support a button attached to the back, facing the visitor. It reads, “But we’ve always done it this way,” in the middle of a circle with a slash, the international shorthand for “don’t.”
Continue Reading →Featured Archive Story

Pirates, Soldiers, & Fat Little Girlfriends
The pirate is former Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach, the soldiers are the members of the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M, and the fat little girlfriends—well, we’ll let Leach explain that one. “I worked with a guy from Louisiana in a camp one time—he used to say at the end of drills—he used to say—‘All right, that was a good job, man.’
Category: FOB

Chasing Bootleggers in Texoma
The year was 1956. Bootlegging was the number one crime in Grayson County and a way of life in Sherman and Denison. Thirsty drinkers were willing pay for their liquor, and a bootlegger could double his money hauling hooch up US 75, the two-lane ribbon of concrete that connected Sherman to Dallas.
Category: Heritage

TLM 2.0
By Dan Acree
Somewhere between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 my skill level declined dramatically. Just think old dogs and new tricks.
Category: Dan Acree, Editor Blogs
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