Sometime after the impoundment of Lake Texoma began in the spring of 1944, when waters that had started in the high county of Eastern New Mexico and wandered lazily down the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red and into the river proper began to spread out behind the dam at Baer’s Ferry, an old man came to the shore of the rising lake with a reporter from the Denison Herald.

The problem with many restauranteurs today, is that people get into the business to make money,” so says Charlie Watson. “Well, we got in it to make good food. Some think they can work 8 to 5 and make $200,000 a year in the restaurant business. Well, that ain’t gonna happen.” Watson knows a thing or two.

The knock on the door of Richard Pressley’s house in Sherman on January 4, 1960, was one he never expected. Standing on the porch was Grayson County Sheriff Woody Blanton, and he was there to end the fifteen years of freedom enjoyed by Pressley following his escape from prison in 1945. Though unidentified, Pressley was [...]

As a promoter of the Sherman Ex- Students Association Museum, I wanted to make sure two of our alumni got credit for the parts they played in the Sherman High School Band of 1940. In the article on William “Billy” Collins “Young Men with Horns,” the two men on opposite sides of Mr. Collins were [...]

They were all young once, the men in the murals that now grace the walls of the old Masonic Hall in Sherman. Satchmo is up there. So are Dizzy and Doc, Miles and Maynard, Bix and Al, Bunny and Harry, and more. Over the decades, these men of music—American music, jazz—set the tone for trumpet [...]

The saga of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow is the substance of which legends are made—and great Hollywood movies too. Who can forget the 1967 motion picture classic that starred Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde? “We rob banks,” will rank as one of the greatest movie lines ever. That film received [...]

The bootlegger flinched twice, once when I jacked a shell into the chamber of the sawed-off 12-gauge and again when I jammed the muzzle against his left ear. To me, the backward-forward action of the shotgun was a smooth schnick-schnick. To him, it must have sounded like thunder. The smell in my nostrils was fear [...]

The spring of 1941, Europe was eighteen months into a resumption of the hostilities that were little more than act two of the drama begun in 1914. The cast of characters was much the same, but the plot had developed twists that would bring revulsion to even those hardened by the carnage of the first [...]

In the early 1930s, Louis Ringler emigrated from his native Poland to seek a new life in America. He met his wife Esther, who was Austrian by birth, in New York City, where they were married. When their son Herman was born, Louis and Esther decided to seek their fortunes outside the big city. A [...]

They are long gone, the chic shops, boutiques and haberdasheries that once dotted downtown in both Sherman and Denison. Probably the last upscale dress shop to close in downtown Sherman was The Vogue, operated by Joanna Kaufman. It was Sherman’s last vestige of downtown fashion, while Ringler’s in Denison held out until just this year [...]