The Texas Star

Sometimes I’m slow of mind.

I wish I’d known my father better. As a child it seemed like he was always busy with work. That’s often the way it is with people who own their own business. They start working shortly after they get out of bed and keep going until it’s time to turn in for the night. For the rest of us our bedrooms were a place to sleep but for Dad’s bedroom did double duty as an office. He had a desk and drafting table and a shelving unit for blueprints (and hiding Christmas presents). Probably had some filing cabinets in there too though I don’t remember them. When he built his and my mother’s dream home it included an office attached to his bedroom. It’s a claustrophobic little space with no windows and a fluorescent light on the ceiling. Most people would be upset if their boss put them in an office like that but he was the boss and that was the room he designed for himself. Sundays we’d go out to eat, either with Dad’s parents or Mom’s, and then back to their house for a visit before heading home. On the way home, though, we’d often drop by houses he was working on to see how they were doing or drive around residential streets looking at other houses and seeing if anything inspired him.

Food was one of his passions. He’d grown up on a farm where food was plentiful so I suppose it should have come as no surprise that he enjoyed eating, particularly salads. I understand in his younger days, before he started his own business, his co-workers used to joke that he had to bring his lunch up in the freight elevator because it was so big. Always a penny pincher, a result of growing up during the Great Depression, he was always on the lookout for good deals which usually translated into a preference for buffets. Though he wasn’t fat, hours spent waiting for him to finish eating undoubtedly contributed to my own weight problems. While he’d spend a lot of time at the salad bar I was more inclined to go for the desserts as most kids would be.

He liked to travel and so we tended to take trips in the summer when my brother and I were out of school. Dad would spend hours poring over the Mobil Travel Guide figuring out where he wanted to stop on our route. I can remember driving in the family station wagon, caravaning with my aunt, uncle, and cousin in theirs, to Key West and San Francisco and parts in between. There came a time when I was spending my summers at a camp and when they’d pick me up at the end of the session our route home would take us to an amusement park whether it was Six Flags Over Texas, Worlds of Fun, or someplace smaller like Silver Dollar City or Dogpatch USA. Once my brother and I had graduated and were on our own they were able to travel more often and were particularly interested in attending Elderhostel programs.

And that brings me to Dad’s other interest and the reason for this post. He was interested in self-publishing very much like this blog. Only there were no blogs and no Internet when he got bit by the self-publishing bug. Out in the garage sits a printing press and boxes of type to go with it. It’s not his original press but it’s much like it. Today I just type away, run spell checker, and push a button to publish. All very easy. He had to write his copy, set his type by hand, ink it, and run the individual pages through the press. And he did just that. As a member of the American Amateur Press Association he published a journal called The Texas Star. In the 90s he finally got with modern times. Sort of. He’d type his journal up on a manual typewriter and then give the copy to me. I’d then type it into PageStream on my Amiga and print it out for him. I don’t know if he considered it real printing or not but it got the job done.

So it is that it has finally penetrated my slow mind that there is only one name for this blog and that name is The Texas Star. I’ve got a feeling Dad would approve.