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High school in the 1970s was so very different from what students experience today. One difference was the dress code. Boys couldn’t wear their hair below a standard shirt collar. They could however tuck their hair under a cheap wig. Some of them hid truly beautiful hair underneath the cheapest, nastiest wig you ever saw,…

Forty, or so, years ago on a hot September evening, I found myself working at a hamburger stand during the West Texas Fair and Rodeo. I was volunteering for the Abilene church I had recently joined, and this was their big fund-raiser each year. I worked there several times over a couple of years. We…

And suddenly we’re in February. I saw many folks on social media this month bemoaning the length of January, but I’ve always thought of February as the longest month. I don’t really know why, maybe because having grown up in the southern tier so I’m ready for spring by mid-February. Regardless, the year is well…

According to Wikipedia, ABC’s Wide World of Sports was an “sports anthology program” that ran from 1961 to 1998. I’ve written before about watching it regularly over the years, even watching the professional bowling that was on television first. It was known for the “thrill of victory” and the “agony of defeat”, but what I…

One of the best ways to understand an organization is to learn its history. As Peter Senge puts it, “Today’s problems are the result of yesterday’s solutions.” That seems to me a straightforward way to remind us that an organization didn’t simply appear when we joined it. It has a full history of good ideas…

So, as promised last week, here’s my list of goals for the coming year. It’s a bit overwhelming when I look at it all written out like this. However, as I also said last week this is like a strategic plan in that it doesn’t all have to be done this month or even in…

Based on many of my newsletters, it’s time for New Year’s Resolutions! And I’m going to follow the herd and write about them too. I’d like to come at it from a slightly different perspective though and suggest the reason most people think resolutions are useless, and those who still try to make changes at…

We did it. We moved me out of my apartment in Oklahoma City and back to our home in San Marcos. Of course, thanks to my Galloway genes (that’s my mom’s side of the family) nothing is ever simple and straightforward about such things. I used to wonder about my uncle who seemed to make…

Oh, the challenges of the information age. I do read news from a much wider variety of sources than I used to when I read an actual newspaper. And, thanks to my “strengths” as defined by Clifton, of Learner, Input, I can find myself following a trail of information through Twitter/X or Threads or any…

In 1997, I went to work as Associate Vice President and Dean of Students at SMU. The Vice President was Jim Caswell. I had seen Jim at my first TACUSPA about fifteen years before that and he had become a friend and mentor over the years. I had worked in my new position for about…