Willie Bate Jacobs

Willie Jacobs & The Strikes

At the end of one spring semester, when Willie Jacobs was in school at North Texas in Denton in the mid 1950’s, a friend and classmate ask him if he would like to join a band he was forming to play around Wink, Texas for the summer. “No,” Jacobs told Roy Orbison, “you’re never going to make any money in the music business; I’m going to the wheat harvest.”

Remembering Dr. Sara

After 38 years of marriage, the doctors P.T. and Sara Swamy had discussed most every subject—including death. Sara’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, as well as her aunt, lived well past 90, and Sam, as Sara affectionately called her husband, was sure he would precede her in death, but a automobile accident took Sara’s life on June 17, 2005, the day after her 62nd birthday.

Lee Hudgins: Cowman

Traveling west from Sherman on U.S. 82 where Bar 7 Road hits the highway, you top a rise. The horizon reaches out as the land falls away, and you are out of the cross timbers and onto the prairie. This dividing line is a great fold in the earth’s crust running from central Texas to Montana. Geologists call it the Preston Anticline, and it is where the West begins.