A few years ago, before caller ID, I got a call from a young woman seeking donations to Highlands University for scholarships. Why was I suspicious? Well, for starters, she asked to speak to Mr. True-Jill- oh. I’ve pointed out in previous columns that the unusual Anglicizing of my name has its benefits, as it provides reasonable assurance that the caller is up to selling something or asking for a donation to some charity. Continue reading
Isn’t it amazing what people can do with words? Try speaking the following string of words: the teacher said the student is a fool. Most people, taking these words in order, and without compunction or punctuation, would assume the teacher holds the student in low esteem. But dolly up the sentence with commas and quotation marks and you have the opposite meaning: “The teacher,” said the student, “is a fool.” Guess which pupil qualifies for semester-long blackboard-cleaning duty.
    A couple of photos in this week’s Optic provide proof that Christmas comes but once a year, for little ones and loved ones dear. Even if it comes late.
    My first glance at the Christmas gift-tendering photos convinced me that the photographer, Don Pace, had forgotten to develop the photos in a timely matter. But “develop” dates me, way back to the middle 1950s, when I used to “soup” black-and-white film in the Optic darkroom.    Continue reading
    This installment more properly ought to be titled “Work of Art(‘s Son).” Having learned that there have been 205 such columns, my son Stan, on vacation from his job in Denmark, asked me to turn the keyboard over to him. I can use the break but take no responsibility for any correct spelling, punctuation or coherence his contribution may contain.
    During the ‘80s, Joe and Ginger were a common sight in town. She pushed the shopping cart, heavily loaded but neatly packed with bags and boxes. He always led the way, usually by about 10 feet. Ginger was drab and ordinary looking; her demeanor was quiet and polite. In contrast, Joe was intense, both in appearance and behavior. Continue reading
   Could Kim Holland have been right? Kim, a reporter for Albuquerque TV channel 13, KRQE, was on the air when she pronounced the name of a state policeman, Pacheco as “Pu-cheek-oh.”
   In my last column, I had a lot of fun citing instances in which our surnames get murdered. At a party, I met sisters Alice and Donna Menzor, who commiserated and said they too had heard many variations on Hispanic last names. Continue reading
    Late last Wednesday I was writing an e-mail to a friend and half-listening to the TV news when I was jolted by a sound that wasn’t pretty. The noise startled me in the same way one starts when hearing a sonic boom or a ‘copter flying overhead — an increasingly common occurrence.
    I had the feeling my Optic colleague, my partner in muckraking, David Giuliani, heard the same sound, even though he lives three miles away.
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    It all started with a photo in the Journal of a kid camped outside an electronics store in Albuquerque. He literally was camped out, determined to be the first to purchase his own version of PlayStation3.
Juanita Salas was a sophomore at Robertson High School, immersed in her social studies class, when the principal got on the P.A. system to announce the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Everybody was just shocked for awhile. They dismissed school right away,” said the retired teacher assistant with the Las Vegas City Schools. Like several others interviewed for this column, marking the 43rd anniversary of Kennedy’s death, Juanita has crystallized the events, “just as if it happened yesterday.”
    Trying to keep from choking up, a member of my congregation, a soccer mom, announced Sunday what many of us didn’t know — and what some of us had just read — about the deaths of five Las Vegas residents whose minivan collided with a truck going the wrong way.
    The letters, e-mails and phone calls probably won’t come this time, or if they do, they’ll be mild and courtesy of people my age whose memory banks are keen, if not a bit biased.
    A while back, a Work of Art column addressed the perils of being a sports editor, a condition being felt by current Optic sports editor Dave Kavanaugh and previous sports eds Khushroo Ghadiali, David Wesner, Jesse Gallegos and a host of others, all the way back to Vince Rivera, a couple of decades back.