High Points| from El Camino Real

Folks along El Camino Real are filling up the football stadiums on Friday nights as the glow of the stadium lights draw the people in almost hypnotically. Whether you like football or not a football stadium in Texas is the greatest place you can be if you want to see lots of people and have a great time catching up with old friends and meeting new ones.
Sometimes when I listen really close over the sound of the band, the cheerleaders, and screaming fans, I can even pick up a little news for your six bits worth.
It was plenty hot on Friday night when we climbed into the stands in Alto to watch the Yellowjackets take on the Timpson Bears. There was a black and gold balloon release just before the game in memory of faithful Jacket fan J.C. Dover. I got a lump in my throat as I walked in that back gate and J.C. wasn’t standing there selling programs.
A big thanks goes out to Beverly Milner for the great job she did on the football programs this year.
I settled in for the ball game and it was moving a little slow and the wind wasn’t moving at all, so I didn’t cry a bit when the lightening detector went off and they called the game off for thirty minutes for a lightening delay. I went home and cooled off and came back just in time to see the band perform and the team run back onto the field through the tunnel.

My Uncle Charles Dean Davis is in charge of the smoke and with help from Jeremy West, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so much smoke. It blew into the stands and you could barely see the field for several seconds.
The second half went a lot better than the first half after the Yellowjackets settled down and started putting points on the board, but by then I was hot again, so towards the end of the fourth quarter I headed out.
Football on the radio is a wonderful thing in hot weather.
The Yellowjackets finally took care of the Timpson Bears by a score of 51 to 27 and I cheered loudly from my recliner. This week the Yellowjackets will have to travel all the way to New Diana on the other side of Longview to play.
I may have to put a piece of tin foil on my antennae to pick up that one.
While I’m on the subject of football, I’ve got to brag on a 2016 Alto Yellowjacket. Keenen Johnson is playing football in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the Tulsa Hurricanes. He showed out on Saturday night catching a beautiful touchdown pass against the Texas Longhorns in Austin.
He graduated with our youngest son Creager and I knew from his kindergarten days that he was going to be some kind of athlete. Way to go, Keenen, you are making the home folks proud.
I drove by the spot where the old locker plant in Rusk was the other day and I thought about the old days when I would make trips to the locker plant with my grandparents. Most people didn’t have freezers, so if they had a cow or hog butchered they would store it in a locker in the giant freezer at the locker plant for a monthly fee.
If you needed some meat for the week, you would just stop in, put on a big coat and go back and get it out of your locker or basket. Something like this would seem very odd for people today, but it was a great idea back in those days.
I guess it was like the many storage warehouses we have today where people pay to put stuff that they should throw away.
I guess after a few years at the locker plant your basket wouldn’t have anything in it but neck bones and ox tails. Speaking of neck bones and oxtails, when I was growing up there was always a big slick bone in a pot of vegetable soup. They said it was the soup bone. I’ve been cooking soup for years now without a bone and I just remembered what was missing. Its funny how the littlest things can spark so many memories.
The power went off in Alto on Saturday morning around four o’clock, leaving folks in town scrambling to figure out what they were going to do for their morning coffee. There is nothing that starts a day off worse than no coffee. I bought me an old stove top percolator years ago just in case of a power outage.
The red light at highway 69 and highway 21 goes out when the power does, somebody pulling a camper rammed the Alto City truck while it was heading to see about cranking the generator on the water well, and even worse than that the doughnut shop was closed.

I didn’t know anything about the power being off until people started calling me from town to ask me if I knew what happened. I know that the wind didn’t blow, because like I told you before, I nearly burned up at that football game. Nobody in Alto has to worry about their meat getting freezer burned, it never stays frozen that long.
I’m glad they got it fixed before dinner, because I didn’t want a bunch of people coming out to my house soaking up the air conditioning and running my electric bill up.
I hope the rains over the past week have greened up your lawns and pastures and put a smile on your face. I know I’ve been loving it.
If you have something exciting going on around your place or if your organization is doing something that people need telling about, then give me a call or shoot me an email.
I’ll see ya next week!

And remember, The only way to succeed is to not worry about what anyone else is doing.