Archives for July 2019

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 D. Kindrick, a snuff-dipping dental specialist and assistant clinical professor in the department of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the Texas A&M University College of Dentistry and Baylor University Medical Center Oral and Maxillofacial Residency Program.

This is a mouthful, I know, but there is plenty more.

[Read more…] about Roy Kindrick

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 and compadre Joe Cardenas, whose son Danny designs many of our better color covers, and some kind words of appreciation to webmaster Harry Thomas, the knowledgeable computer “techie” who put it all together.

[Read more…] about Action Magazine is now online

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 his obituary last month in the newspaper. Death, they say, has silenced the mellifluous voice. How this can be I am not sure. Over more than 40 years, Ron Houston and I were intent upon living forever. It was a feeling we both had, and a feeling which I experienced again last month as I stood next to a little gold-colored urn in the First United Methodist Church of Blanco, Texas.

[Read more…] about Ron Houston

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 earth at the age of 83 from what his wife Anna described as “multiple causes.”

My big regret is that I didn’t get to know Kelton better, for he was to become the greatest western novelist of all time, and a Texas legend-in-the-making who will surely grow in death to be bigger than the “Staked Plain” and “Spindletop” combined.

[Read more…] about Kelton remembered

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 write took place in the King William area of San Antonio two nights prior to Christmas Eve. The precise spot would be on the Alamo Street sidewalk, at the intersection of Alamo and Wickes streets, at about 11 o’clock at night.

This is an area directly in front of the restaurant and saloon known as Casbeers at the Church, a multi-level eatery and live music venue which is actually housed in a former Methodist Church building which is almost a hundred years old.

[Read more…] about A Christmas Scare

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, a tragi-comic period of pitiful and incomprehensible personal demoralization in my life.

Getting busted by Copeland and his bevy of beer belly Keystone Cops with deputy badges was an indicator of my mental frame of mind at the time.

[Read more…] about Sheriff Harlon Copeland: R.I.P.