Sam Kindrick, publisher of Action Magazine for 43 years, is now back with this biographical log (as in blog). This site will contain old Kindrick columns from Action Magazine, as well as current posts which will be far ranging in content.
And if you’re looking for the old PDF back issues of Action Magazine, they are up under the menu under “Issues.” If you don’t see what you’re looking for there, you’ll have to go to the Wittliff Collections for it.
I have survived both bladder and thyroid cancer. A ruptured appendix many years ago almost did me in, and I received third-degree leg burns in a senseless gasoline fire that could have killed me. Such minor inconveniences are hardly worth mentioning. The physical pain from the surgeon’s scalpel, and mishaps inflicted by the machinery of…
The sun was shining and the birds were singing as I rode my bicycle on that bright spring morning near my Bulverde home. A year had passed since my last drug bust at the hands of Sumner Bowen and the Alamo Area Drug Task Force, and I had been sober and drug-free for an entire…
My drinking was in full bloom during my last years with the Express and News. This was during the early 1970s when I was nearing my alcoholic rock bottom. A typical workday found me arriving for work around 11 a.m. after a full night of heavy drinking. When I was a general assignments reporter for…
I have known and written about all manner of characters over the years. One of the most notorious was Arthur Harry (Bunny) Eckert, the local pimp and pill head known for killing numerous other denizens of San Antonio’s darker side of society. Bunny disappeared March 2, 1986, from the Eckert home on Overhill Drive in…
Ask me if I knew Hondo Crouch, and you might get a half-straight answer or a half-crooked one. I don’t believe there was ever a man, woman, or child who knew Hondo a hundred percent or from gizzard to craw. He was the clown prince of Luckenbach, the inimitable Hill Country Imagineer, and a genuine…
This is about Willie Nelson, Texas Girl Magazine, and my face-to-face meeting with the Devil in Jackson, Michigan. It will all be part of the book I am writing which will be titled The Outlaw Journalist. I took my two sons, Grady and Steven, to Willie Nelson’s first July 4 Picnic at Dripping Springs. That…
Former San Antonio musician Larry Patton is having a rough time of it with fourth stage metastatic melanoma, a deadly form of cancer which is in his stomach, pancreas, lymph nodes, liver and pelvic area. Patton will be recalled by San Antonio music fans for his 1970s work with Claude Morgan and the Buckboard Boogie…
Immediately after my firing at the Express and News I was in shock. I knew I couldn’t feed myself if I continued the drinking, but what the hell was I to do? Willie Nelson offered to take me in. He said he would find something for me to do on the road, maybe with publicity…
When I was a cub reporter with the San Angelo Standard-Times in West Texas I learned a basic truth about people that set the tone for my life as a professional writer. Not all readers demand a conventional winner, and the Norman Rockwell myth has never applied to the vast majority of us. Tom Steph…
My involvement with San Antonio’s world fair--HemisFair 68--actually started in 1967 when a group of business people sent me to Montreal for the purpose of selling San Antonio and our upcoming fair to a film company from the Czech Republic. Expo 67, the world fair in Montreal, had just ended. This venture was almost as…
Legend has a young lovesick Indian couple leaping to their deaths from a rugged limestone bluff near my hometown of Junction. Their parents had refused their dream of marriage, so they went hand-in-hand together over the edge and into the Great Beyond. The craggy cliff is known to this day as Lover’s Leap, and the…
Famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair sashayed into the Express and News city room like she owned the place. It was summer time and I will swear that I could smell her body odor. I had been assigned the job of interviewing the most hated woman in America, who a few years earlier had filed the…
This is about my part in Sugarland Express and the zany world of movie folks like Steven Spielberg and Goldie Hawn. Goldie did not like Luckenbach. This and other material may be viewed on the Sam Kindrick blog. The link is actionmagsa.com When I met Steven Spielberg my head was falling off my shoulders and rolling…
My transition from San Angelo to the San Antonio Express-News was seamless, partially because I was already familiar with the Harte-Hanks way of gathering and printing the news, and partially because I wasn’t terrified of Houston Harte Sr. Strange as it may seem, old man Houston Harte took a shine to me after I pitched…
I was working with Elmer Kelton on the San Angelo Standard-Times when Buffalo Wagons, his first best-seller western novel was published. Kelton was my friend and one of my early influences in the writing game. He told me to always hang onto my day job if I ever tried writing books. Elmer Kelton was voted…
This is about Lacy McAndrew Brinson, my favorite female singer/songwriter who with husband Mike has written a hot new song about my late circuit-riding preacher friend George W. Cooper. The song, which will be produced in a Nashville recording project by Dean Miller, son of country music legend Roger Miller, is titled Moonshine Revival. Lacy…
When I left Sul Ross at Alpine for my final two years of college at Southwest Texas State College in San Marcos (now Texas State University), there followed jumps to newspaper jobs in Bay City, Kerrville, and San Angelo before I landed a general assignments reporter job at the San Antonio Express and News in…
When I graduated from Junction High School in 1953, I had little to show. I lettered in football, basketball, and track and field, no big accomplishment in a small Class A school. From Junction I went to Alpine where I enrolled in what was then Sul Ross State College. It became Sul Ross University in…
I never knew for sure what first inspired me to write. Looking back now, I know Fred Gipson was a major influence. Gipson was the Mason County writer who penned books like Hound Dog Man and the nationally acclaimed best seller Old Yeller, which became a major motion picture. I grew up on neighboring ranchland…
Yesterday was my 30-year sobriety birthday. I didn’t post it until today because lightning had knocked out my computer. I haven’t had a drink of alcohol or an illegal drug since October 16, 1989. It was rough and rocky traveling through those hard years of 1988 and 1989. I was busted four times and charged…
We will never forget the Cosmic Sweetheart and her cadre of foxy followers. They took the San Antonio, Texas nightclub scene by storm in the rowdy and rip-snorting 1970s and 1980s. The first time I laid eyes on Carol Cannon she was tending bar at Al Hoxie’s Horse Feathers Saloon on Wurzbach Road in San…
This piece will be my sickening and debilitating admission to being an idiot of the P.T. Barnum description. We are talking here about an online product touted as the world’s fastest chain saw sharpener. This little booger would sharpen a running saw chain in “three seconds.” Circus magnate Barnum was the biggest con artist of…
This electronic cigarette phenomena is increasingly taking shape as a fairy tale with a less than happy ending. Yes, the medical experts are starting to find that vaping ain’t what the vape manufacturers had it cracked up to be. Inhaling nicotine fumes with a plethora of fruity flavors has been touted as a way to…
She was foxy, plucky, irreverent and dressed to the nines, a working girl who would become both famous and infamous in the city of San Antonio, Texas. Some even called her beautiful. This was my friend Madam Theresa Brown on the day we met. I was a cub reporter for the San Antonio Express and…
I never thought I would see the day, but the day has arrived. My snuff-dippping oral surgeon first cousin Dr. Roy Kindrick has laid down the snuff can. Since a recent piece on Roy that ran on my Facebook page, the doc has suffered a blackout that caused a fall which split open his head…
Memorial services for Bobby J's owner Beth Sfalos were both simple and uplifting. I'm not a funeral fan, but this service was one that didn't leave me wondering where all the liars came from. If anything, the testimonials for Beth were more euphemistic than contrived glorification, for there are not enough adjectives to really do…
This piece is about me and my snuff-dipping oral surgeon and professor cousin Roy Kindrick. I hope somebody gets a hoot out of it. I had to look it up to be sure. A maxillofacial surgeon is a medical expert in face, mouth, and jaw surgery. That’s my first cousin and lifelong friend, Dr. Roy…
Action Magazine can now be viewed in its entirety on the world wide web. We are completely online. It took me long enough to get there. In addition to the complete publication issues, the site includes select Sam Kindrick columns, advertising rates and ad measurements, a history of the 35-year-old entertainment publication, photos of me…
He called me Soul. He gave me strength and saved my ass. He was an angel with a microphone, the safety net I needed back during the mid-1970s when I was free-falling out of the daily newspaper business. Ron Houston is the name.The greatest voice in the history of San Antonio radio. Maybe you read…
I was touched with a sense of both sadness and regret when I read that Elmer Kelton had died at his home in San Angelo. Kelton was kind to me when I functioned as a kid reporter on the San Angelo Standard-Times back in the early-1960s, and I was saddened that he had departed this…
I know it's a bit late for Christmas stories but I've got one that is just too hairy to keep under wraps. It would be more fitting for halloween, but one can't always pick the season for reports on creepy, crawly, multi-legged creatures which might appear on a darkened sidewalk. The event of which I…
The June 12 Express-News death notice of former Bexar County Sheriff Harlon Copeland brought back a torrent of bad memories which I have never attempted to shut the door on. Copeland and his deputies represented only one of several law enforcement agencies which were to bust me for drugs during the middle and late 1980s,…
This will be my first-ever and (hopefully) my last critique of modern-day Christian church music. Call me a prehistoric throwback, an ignorant Junction redneck, or even an infidel by 21st century standards, but I firmly believe that most contemporary music heard in protestant churches today sucks. My research for this project, I must admit, has…
This will be the final report on Petey the wonder dog, my tough little Jack Russell Terrier who guarded our truck and slept under my covers for the better part of 16 years. Petey is gone now. I had to put the ornery little booger down on May 9. It was the hardest decision I…
After 43 years and 10 months of continued publication without missing a single issue, I have pulled the plug.
Happy Fourth of July from Action Magazine and the Kindrick family. We have glad tidings to report this July 4, much better than the doom and gloom from last year's painful Independence day experience. First on the good news list is the favorable medical report that just came in on my thyroid cancer. Second on…