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Opinion

Readers share many tales of internet woe

Rural Texans have a lot to say about the lack of broadband service in their communities. Since we covered the topic earlier this month, many readers have emailed to share their stories and pleas for help.

An example is the email from reader Kathryn Steuart of Freestone County, who reads the column in the Fairfield Recorder. In her east central Texas county of 20,000, she reports that cell phones don’t even work well. She and her husband pay for internet via a highpriced satellite service, which isn’t sufficient to allow her to work from home.

Re-Visiting a Champion…

It is tempting--ever so tempting--to claim authorship of the headline introducing a column written a dozen years ago.

To make such a claim, however, wouldn’t set well with my conscience, even if no libel charges took me to task.

The account detailed travails of a then 15-year-old Alabama girl who lost a leg to a cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma in 2000, then the other to the same disease in 2007. She chose these words for a sign on her hospital room door: “Footless but not DeFEETed!”…

You are not my boss!

Most of the people who read my column aren’t from Missouri, the Show-me State, but they are from Texas where we pride ourselves on an intelligent refusal to be bullied into anything. We don’t like to be told what to wear, to eat, to watch, or to support. Back in the day we didn’t like being required to buy liability insurance for our cars, and many really balked back in the 1960s when we had to have seatbelts installed in our cars. We are a tough bunch of people who, because we live in God’s Country, are pretty sure we know what’s best for us.

Where do we go from here?

Many of us are either glued to the television set or internet to find out who is, in fact, president of the United States. Judging from the polls, the national mainstream media initially thought there was going to be a blue wave. Those who voted for Trump in 2016 thought it was going to be a landslide from a man who kept his promises. In either case, according to the election ballots, 50% of all Americans will either be heartbroken, disappointed, or some angry enough to the point of generating more hate and destruction.

Harpersville Part 2

The old General Store in Harpersville eventually became a barn on land once owned by W.D. Gentry. A relative, Mr. Gilbert Gentry, had owned and operated the General Store for years and his daughter, Anna Gentry, began the first telephone exchange from their home in the early 1900s. There was a phone line strung along the fence row into Breckenridge. She had as many as 10 customers on one party line and maintained several party lines like that in the community. One might say that Anna Gentry was the first switchboard operator before there was any formal phone service to that area of the county.

Double Mountain/Harpersville founders

Those of you who are more inclined to identify specific towns in relation to landmarks in the county, maybe more aware that Double Mountain became Harpersville because it was organized at the foot of Double Mountain. Of course, since I originated in Pennsylvania, where there are the real Appalachian Mountains, I consider the slight uprisings in Stephens County topography to be more like ‘hills’ than ‘mountains.’ Tongue in cheek touch of humor there Breckenridge.