T EXAS History By BARTEE HAILE This Week in Texas History Sep. 3, 1878 was another tense day for Wild Bill Longley, as the famous gunfighter waited in the Giddings jail for an appeals court to decide whether he lived or died.

La Grange Police Chief David Gilbreath reports on the following incidents his department responded to during the week of Aug. 14- 21.

Van Gogh spent the last years of his life struggling to make his perceptions of life speak from his canvases. Unlike so many others who sought to capture the essence of truth and beauty through the complexity of detail, Van Gogh found his answers in simple triggers to our mind’s perceptions. That a short flutter of brush stokes, could bring memories of morning crows over a wheat field, sounding their regal entrance for the day, is tribute to Van Gogh’s genius in finding simple ways to powerfully inspire.

To The Editor: We live in times not seen for many years if ever before. The economy is unpredictable and people are uncertain about so many things.

To The Editor: I find it very sad that you Democrats spent all the years of President Trump’s presidency fighting against all the good he was doing for our country and only trying to impeach him. And now that you are in power, you are still using all your energy through your corrupt appointees to fight against him to try to ensure that he won’t run against whomever represents your party in 2024.

That Little Voice By MARGO JOHNSON Back to reality and the life of luxury to which I have grown accustomed. I learned several things about myself from my travels around Kenya some years ago: I am not a missionary, and small luxuries are mandatory.

The first time I saw a pear burner was when I was a young lad during the drought of the 1950s. The burner consisted of a pump-up kerosene tank and a long hose. On the tip of the hose was a fan nozzle surrounded by a shroud of metal with holes. From the tip of the hose, a ball of fire exploded toward a patch of prickly pears. The man operating this contraption was in his fifties, with a wrinkled, sunburned face. My uncle Walter told me he was a well-known rancher with a lifetime of experience. He wore blue jeans, cowboy boots, a worn leather belt and gloves, and a western-style, long-sleeved shirt. His straw hat looked older than he was. His task this day was to feed his cattle. Drought had killed most of the grass on his ranch. His choices were to sell cattle, feed hay, or burn the needles off the prickly pear so the cattle could eat it. With little money to buy hay – or pay his ranch taxes – he knew that if he could keep his animals until the drought was over, he would reap the benefit of higher cattle prices. Prickly pears, at least those in the area around Gonzales, have two types of needles, big and small. Big needles are easy to see and can be broken off with a machete or machine. If you burn prickly pear, the needles are flattened with fire. It is the glochids, or small needles, that are troublesome. They are small and easily burned but missing even a few can swell a cow’s tongue. Prickly pear is extremely nourishing. Each pad contains a high amount of minerals, nutrients, and water. Since most ponds had dried up, ranchers with windmills pumped water daily. Cattle often had to travel more than a half mile to get a drink. Prickly pear cactus had enough water in each pad to satisfy the animals until they could return to the windmill trough.

By GARY BORDERS Texas Press Association As Texas gets at least a temporary reprieve this week from the heat, with a nice round of rain blanketing much of the state, the Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting January will bring significant snowfall to the state. The periodical, founded in 1818, develops its extended forecast “using a 204-year-old mathematical formula focused on sunspot activity, planet positions and tidal actions of the moon.” The almanac’s website claims its forecasts are 80% to 85% accurate.

This is a true story and one that could only happen in a place like La Grange. My neighbors, the Bradleys, keep chickens––yes, inside the city limits.

La Grange Independent School District trustees adopted a new hair and dress code in their hefty updated administrative manual. In general, the policy called for good taste and common sense in the way students wore their hair and clothes. Items ruled out for boys included beards, goatees or hair hanging below the eyes, ears or normal collar. T-shirts resembling underwear, shirts with tails worn outside the pants, belt-style pants worn without belts and going barefoot were also ruled unacceptable. For girls, extreme styles in which hair protruded more than two inches from the side of the head, hotpants, see-through blouses, halters, midriffs, skirts shorter than five inches above the knee and going barefoot were improper.