![\"Painting\"](\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/sept14\/sept44.jpg\")
<\/center><\/p>\nThat is Harmon and Grace Dobson. Harmon founded Whataburger. He married Grace in 1955, somewhere between store number five and 20. He died in a plane crash in the 60s. Grace ran the place until the early nineties. She passed it along to her son, who broke the 500-store mark. Grace died in 2005<\/a> after building an empire and raising three children. No wonder she could hit that pose. <\/p>\n I saw that last night and thought it was an interesting setting, even without any context. The young man and the older woman. It all makes sense now, except for Harmon’s see-through arm. I’ve seen a few photographs of him, and he has one of those mugs that just fits right into the time, whenever it is, 1950s, Somewhere, Texas. He’d been a bush pilot, a diamond courier, a car salesman and a wildcatter. No wonder he looks like he’s in a hurry. Just leaning here for a moment. <\/em><\/p>\n Whereas, Grace, even when she stepped down from the day-to-day was still seen with reverence. The company execs didn’t like to boast<\/a> about what their success for fear of her hearing. Just leaning here for forever.<\/em><\/p>\n Things to read<\/strong> … because reading stays with you forever.<\/p>\n This guy is racing in Chattanooga this weekend, My Finish Line Road: Winning the Battle in Chattanooga<\/a>:<\/p>\n Like so many others, I was hooked. I progressed to longer distances and in 2012, signed up to complete my first IRONMAN\u2014IRONMAN Arizona. Training was going well and my wife and I welcomed our third child (our first girl) that July. Three weeks later, after a morning workout, I began having severe abdominal pain and was rushed to the hospital. Scar tissue from my previous surgery had wrapped around my small intestine and twisted it over on itself. I was rushed into emergency surgery. My IRONMAN dream was over\u2014for a time.<\/p>\n Recovering from surgery brought some dark days. I had doubts about whether I could do an IRONMAN with this disease, and if I even wanted to try again. This was the first time I had ever truly felt beaten by the disease. As I was feeling sorry for myself, Hurricane Sandy threw me a curveball and forced me out of my funk. The building that housed my dental business was inundated with over eight feet of water. Everything was destroyed. The next few months were a blur as I healed from surgery while trying to rebuild my business. I had no time to feel sorry for myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You read those things and you realize how amazing people are, and how much of everything is just a mental exercise.<\/p>\n This is a personal story about a SR-71 coming apart at more than three times the speed of sound. I’m just going to excerpt one quote, because that should be enough to get you to read the whole thing, Bill Weaver Mach 3+ Blackbird Breakup<\/a>:<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t help but think how ironic it would be to have survived one disaster only to be done in by the helicopter that had come to my rescue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Talk about your bad days.<\/p>\n Starting to hear more about this now, Save the press from the White House censors<\/a>:<\/p>\n So we were uneasy to learn that some reporters have been pressured to alter their reports by the publisher, aka the White House. While some of the emendations and deletions (a presidential aide\u2019s swoon, a politically charged Obama joke) might seem frivolous, what\u2019s at issue here is precedent. This represents the peak of a slippery slope we don\u2019t want to go down. And that\u2019s why we think it\u2019s time to for the reporters to begin putting out their own pool reports.<\/p>\n The practice of the White House disseminating the reports dates back to the paper era, when reporters obtained poolers\u2019 notes from copies that White House press assistants placed in bins in the White House press room. Today\u2019s technology offers an opportunity to liberate the pool reports.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is pretty interesting, but it makes you think “Southern” has changed. That’s good in a lot of ways, but it ain’t Ransom or Warren or Tate, The Southernness of being: Nationally recognized poet wrestled with the legacy of civil rights violence<\/a>:<\/p>\n For the boy, the poetry first showed up in the trees behind his family\u2019s home in Gadsden. The words came to him through the sunlight in the loblollies, with the swallowtails in the pines \u2014 in the Alabama he knew and loved on that Etowah-Calhoun county line.<\/p>\n For the man, the poems appeared in the names on a stone outside the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. These words came to him through the stories of 39 men, women and children, martyrs of the civil rights era \u2014 people Jake Adam York never knew, who died in an Alabama he didn\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n “He used his poetry to take on the beauty and the responsibility of being Southern,” said his mother, Linda York.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n