Jennifer Fry | Uvalde Hesperian

07/25/26

  Wilson County resident Jason Lowery was listening to the radio one afternoon last week when he heard warning of a “500-year flood” headed to the city of Uvalde, Texas.  He had been watching news coverage of the storm that had set up over the Texas Hill Country and was getting worried.  He knew his sister—me—lived in Uvalde, so he reached out to ask us to leave.

“I didn’t know the topography,” he told me later, “but I knew y’all were here.”

By the time he called on Thursday afternoon, most of the rain was behind us, but the floodwaters had yet to recede.  That morning, both the Leona River and Taylor Slough had swelled to their fullest, overreaching their banks by as many as two city blocks on either side.  The flooding was worse further downstream.

It was the most difficult day of the whole ordeal for most residents.  It had rained every day since Saturday.  My little rain gauge measured a combined total of 12” for the week, and we were on the lower end of rain totals.  All roads leading in or out of Uvalde were closed due to flooding.  Driving around town was also difficult.  The river and slough had bisected the town, leaving some residents unable to go to the store or visit relatives.  We were all under orders to “shelter in place.”

In his compassion, my brother urged me to get out quickly, but I couldn’t have left even if I had wanted to.

“Jason, we’re fine.  We’re on high ground,” I told him—and we were.  Our house sits in Old Town Uvalde, just behind the Briscoe-Garner Museum, four blocks west of the Leona River and two blocks north of Main Street, well out of reach of the floodwaters.

“As you drive around town, you start to see how protected this area is,” my husband had told me earlier in the week.

Indeed, our street, which is off West Leona St., rides high at 927 ft. above sea level, whereas East Leona St. at the river crossing is only 902 ft.  My husband was quick to point out, though, that elevation is only part of the story with flood plains: The further north one is, the higher in elevation one needs to be to escape a river overflowing its banks.

In a text message, I told my brother of the severity of the plight of our city that day.  “The footage you have seen does not lie,” I wrote.

“If I came down there tomorrow, do you think the city could use volunteers?” he replied.

At the time of his query, there was rain in the forecast for Thursday night—a pattern that had emerged in this extended weather event—which looked to worsen conditions for the area.  I was sure we were not through the worst of it.  I did not want him to start out on the two-hour drive, only to have to turn back two-thirds of the way into his trip because of road closures.  I did not even have a clear idea of where to direct his volunteer efforts.

“You are welcome to come.  I’m not trying to discourage, just being realistic.  Please be careful,” I wrote back.  “Volunteers will be needed when the water recedes and we start clearing debris, demo-ing houses, and picking up the pieces.”

More rain in Uvalde did not materialize that night, but plans solidified for my brother to come on Monday and Tuesday the following week, July 20-21.  He was willing to bring others with him if they wanted to join recovery efforts, but in the end it was just himself and his trailer.

In an interview, I asked him why he chose to come.  He had seen the devastation in Kerrville on July 4, 2025, he said.  “I wanted to help out here… because I didn’t help then.  I figured it would be easy to get in, help out, and get out.”

He was counting on whatever community contacts I might have to plug him in.  I managed to connect him with a family friend, Constable Max Dorflinger, who told my brother, “Just show up.  No one’s going to turn you away.”

Dorflinger directed him to three of the hardest-hit areas, Rio Seco and William off Studer Street, and Private Road 4330 off Old Pearsall Road, otherwise known as the Dodson subdivision.  My brother never made it to Rio Seco, as the Leona River was still rushing over the roadway as of Tuesday morning, but he was able to help out those who live on Barry and William Streets, just to the east of the river.

“I don’t know the names of the people I helped out today,” he said.  But it did not matter.  With his trailer, he was able to haul six loads of debris to the dumpsters across from Uvalde Meat Market set up by the National Guard.  “I feel like I helped out a lot more today than yesterday because I was able to help out more people.”

As the National Guard was closing up operations for the day at two o’clock on Tuesday, my brother pulled up to a house on Wood Street across from the golf course.  A second truck-and-trailer pulled up alongside him, strangers both of them, and together they hauled one final load to the dumpster.

In the middle of helping to haul trash, he noticed a ruined, mud-smeared photograph of a mother and father with their daughter in military uniform, possibly having graduated a military academy.  It wasn’t just stuff he was hauling away; it was memories.  “You realize people’s lives were affected in a negative way,” he said.  “You want people to survive, sure, but you can’t move a house.”

In the interview, my brother talked of larger organizations that might ask volunteers to run a background check or complete other paperwork before heading out to the field.  He stressed the urgency and the need of simply getting out there.

“You just need to come help these people,” he said.  “You need some hands to load garbage.  I have a trailer.  I can devote what I have.  Other people don’t have that.”

“I didn’t know I wanted to come until after the flood,” he continued.  “I figured it was going to be just as bad, if not worse, than Kerrville [last year].”

After talking with affected flood victims, he concluded, “Y’all didn’t think it was going to be as bad as it was.”

My brother includes me in that assessment, and he is right.  I did not know what to think.  I spent the week checking on friends and neighbors as I thought of them, and praying for those I had not yet heard from.  Thankful for the rain, I took notes on daily totals from my newly-installed rain gauge, reminding myself that 5” in one night is extraordinary and not to be thought of as the norm.

Looking outside my door last week, you would think there was no flood raging around me.  The air was fresh and clean-smelling, the grass a bright green.  I had a humming refrigerator stocked with fresh food.  My children even splashed in the rain.  It seemed there was no care in the world.

When my neighbor texted, “It’s bad, girl,” earlier in the week, I could hardly believe her.  I did not venture out with my children until Friday when the waters began to recede and I gave them strict warning not to get out of the car.  It was only through pictures my husband and others took that I realized the enormity of the tragedy.

“Nobody had flood insurance,” my brother told me after he came back from his rounds of debris-hauling.  “One guy off Wood St. just built the house—he couldn’t get it.  They wouldn’t sell it to him.”

My brother had come into town about 10:30 Monday morning, looking for a place to drop off a few donations he and some well-wishers had collected for the town.  He made his way to the Dodson subdivision, where most of the residents and the Red Cross were busy with cleaning out flood-soaked houses.  This was a hard-hit area, with some residents having had water inside their homes to the eight-foot ceilings.

Not even the Red Cross would take my brother’s donations at the time, but several homeowners took a few necessities.  That is how he met the Cochrans.

“Jason pulled up to our house in his truck and asked if we needed help and offered supplies and drinks that he brought,” said Kim Cochran after the fact.  “He immediately got to work.”

Chris and Kim Cochran, who hail from Fayetteville, AR and moved to Uvalde eleven years ago for work, currently live at the end of Private Road 4330 and had three to four feet of water in their home as a result of the flood.  They have a 1978 split-level home located a little less than a half-mile west of the  Leona River.  Taylor Slough joins the Leona about a half-mile north of them.

According to David Fry with Medina Real Estate Photography, who was out last Wednesday and Thursday capturing the devastation with his drone camera, water from the swollen Leona River came within 20 feet of the south bend of Johnson Loop, which is nearly one-third of a mile (1,600 ft.) west of the center of the river and about that much further west of Private Road 4330.  The footage shows the river over Old Pearsall Road up to 1,000 ft. west of the Dodson subdivision.  That would make the floodwaters at this juncture 780 feet shy of a mile wide.

The elevation of the Dodson Subdivision stands between 895 and 897 feet above sea level. The elevation of the Leona River at the Old Pearsall Road bridge, located less than 1,000 ft to the west, is 890 feet.  The Cochrans’ home was assessed to be “outside of the flood plain, so we expected everything to be okay,” said Kim.

Uvalde County had received a considerable amount of rain by mid-week last week.  According to David Reimer with Texas Storm Chasers, almost 17 inches had fallen just north of the city between Monday and Wednesday evening.  Julye Keeble with the Uvalde Leader-News recorded that “more than 14 inches” had fallen in that same time frame.  And more rain was on the way.

“Understand that the rivers out here are already forecast to be a major flood stage,” Reimer said as a warning to his viewers in the Uvalde area in his July 15 evening update.  “Any additional rain will just exacerbate that and just push things that much higher.”  His models predicted an additional 10 inches of rain in or near the Uvalde area in the overnight hours of Wednesday into Thursday.

“Given what we’ve seen the last couple of days, it’s entirely possible someone could get a foot, a foot and a half of rain tonight… If you live in an area that is near the river, creek, streams, pay attention and skedaddle if you need to skedaddle because this is going to get rowdy real quick overnight,” he warned.

According to my brother, the Cochrans did not think they were close enough to the river to be affected by its floodwaters.  “Prior to the flooding, we actually discussed it among our neighbors and a few others in the area on Wednesday afternoon,” Kim wrote in an email interview.  “The consensus was that it would probably flood the slough and we would be cut off from town, and the field to the side of our house would be boggy, but that we would be okay.”

Wednesday night saw the heaviest rainfall totals of the severe weather event.  The rain gauge at my house, which is 3.2 miles northwest of the Cochrans, recorded 5 inches that night.  Three point two miles due north of them is Garner Field Road, where Carol Kothmann reported “more than 11 inches overnight into July 16.”  It seemed David Reimer’s predictions had come true.

All that water flowed south.  By 5 A.M. Thursday morning, many along Private Road 4330 had evacuated their homes by boat, but no one had been able to get in touch with the Cochrans to see if they were all right.

“My family had slept through the storm and all the notifications on my phone, as well as the neighborhood text thread trying to get ahold of us as everyone on our street evacuated,” Kim wrote.  “My next door neighbor Crystal Alejandro-Jiminez called me at about 5 AM… and told me all the neighbors down the street were actively being evacuated by boat.

“We declined evacuation from [the Texas Game Warden’s] Game & Fish swift water rescue,” she continued.  “We discussed it and made a ‘plan b’ to evade water if it continued to come up. The east side of our property is higher, and the neighbor’s house to the southeast a little higher, so we still had a place to go if the water continued to rise even if we had to cut the fence to get out.”

Plan B proved unnecessary, but the floodwater ravaged their home.  “The entire first floor of our home and large four-car carport workshop was flooded with over 3 ft. of water,” Kim reported.  “The septic tank was totally flooded and a retaining wall was washed away.  We saw on a home security camera feed that our old Volvo was floating like one-to-two ft. off the ground and set back down about three ft. to the left of where it was, so that’s a total loss.”  Additionally, the carport acted as a catch-all for whatever the river had collected and floodwaters filled it with all manner of debris.

“We do plan to stay,” she added, “but plan make significant modifications to try to prevent this from happening again.”

Thankfully, by 9 A.M. that morning, the storm had fizzled out and no more rain came.  By 3:20 that afternoon, the floodwaters had started to recede.  By late Thursday night, the Cochrans were able to make it out of their subdivision.

It was life-saving that the Cochrans stayed behind in their home.  Their next-door neighbor contacted them about cats, a fifteen year-old senior and six foster kittens, trapped in the adjacent home.  Immediately Chris jumped into action, and waist-deep floodwaters, to rescue them.  He found them in a bathroom, soaking wet and exhausted from trying to keep their heads above water, and floated them out of danger in a plastic bin he had scavenged among the debris.

“To say I was relieved to see him coming back down the street intact is an understatement,” his wife wrote, “since, if the water was too strong for him, there was no way I could get to him quickly and I couldn’t leave my girls.”

“It probably meant the world to those people I helped yesterday,” my brother told me later.

Indeed, it did.  Both Chris and Kim assured me that my brother was “a massive help” in their recovery efforts.  “Jason was such a blessing in both physical help and boosting our spirits,” Kim said.  Not only did he help them with the “huge job” of debris-hauling, “He also helped immensely by simply visiting with us while we were working, especially my husband. Most of our friends and all our families live 700 miles away or more, so my husband shoulders a lot by himself. During the course of the day, Jason and Chris discovered they have so much in common interests…”

“We could be twins,” my brother told me when I dropped off his lunch.  “I know we’re twins,” he stressed—which is true—“but he and I could really be twins.  He even loves Star Trek!”

Because the floodwaters only reached the lower portion of the house, the Cochrans are able to stay in their home, which is not the case for some flood victims.  They were certainly among the more fortunate in this disaster.

“I’m usually the one helping others,” Chris Cochran told me.  “It’s hard to be the one to accept help.”

After assisting the Cochrans most of the day Monday, my brother was finally able to give his donations to the community by way of the staff at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, who eagerly received them.  Sacred Heart has set up recovery efforts at the CCD building on its Ft. Clark Road campus.  Please contact the church office at 830-278-3448 for more information.

As I think about the flood and its impact, what keeps coming back to mind is a verse from Ecclesiastes:  “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all (9:11).”

In the coming weeks, months, and years, no doubt there will be plenty of blame to smear in people’s faces in regard to this storm, but sometimes life just throws us a curve ball and the best we can do is swim for dear life while praying God sends us rescue.  Sometimes that rescue comes in the form of an out-of-towner—or a twin brother—just looking for a way to help out his fellow man.  It may takes weeks for Uvalde to get back on her feet, but with friendly volunteers like Jason Lowery, there will be no shortage of helping hands to go around.

by Jennifer Fry | Uvalde Hesperian

07/02/26

Top Image Credit: Public Broadcasting Service

The costume and setting is meant to invoke in viewers’ minds a sense of authority on the historical time period presented, in this case the Revolutionary War.

I recently came across a PBS Origins short-form documentary that fills me with a deep sense of ire, especially on the eve of our nation’s birthday.  The presentation, posted to YouTube nine months ago from PBS’ “Rouge History” series, is called “The Founding Father They Don’t Teach You About.”  The description of the episode identifies its purpose:  it is “part of PBS’ America@250 collection, celebrating the country’s 250^th anniversary.”  What was presented is a story of the founding of a different country entirely.

When I read the headline (which is itself a snob-appeal fallacy), I was intrigued.  I am student of history and pride myself on my knowledge of the events that shaped the country in which I live.  I had, in fact, clicked off in my head the events of that history as recounted on a recent podcast I had listened to.  Is there part of this history I didn’t know?  Perhaps I should know it.

The fallacy worked.  If you click on me, the video seemed to say—as it was indeed designed to do—I will impart to you the knowledge necessary to look smarter than all of your friends.  The serpent in the Garden could not have said it better, or been more misleading.

I clicked on the video expecting to find new information to enlighten my understanding of the events surrounding July 4, 1776.  “Founding Father” in this context meant everything I understood it to mean:  One of the 56 delegates to the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence on that day, or, conversely, the framers of the Constitution and, thus, our government.  By using the phrase “founding father” in its title and coupling the video with the 250^th anniversary of the United States, this is indeed the association that PBS meant to invoke in its viewers’ minds.

Instead of a rousing retelling of the antics of Josiah Bartlett or Button Gwinnett—signers of the Declaration who get little, if any, mention in the history books—the host, Joel Cook, regales his audience with the story of a black man named Thomas Peters, an escaped South Carolina slave who fought on the British side of the Revolution, attempted settlement in Nova Scotia (a British colony), and later led a band of Black Loyalists to settle Sierra Leone with a British charter.

Cook calls Peters an “Egba prince” (a Nigerian people), the details of whose early “life in his homeland aren’t well known.”  Cook presents him as the noble underdog who endures unimaginable hardship at the hands of the white man with unmatched strength (to say nothing of the Africans who first enslave him!).  Without any reference to the United States—but, again, with that association firmly established in viewers’ minds—Cook proclaims of Peters that “his courage would soon make him the father of a nation.”

I listened to the entire story expecting the narrative to somehow turn back to the U.S. and Philadelphia; that turning point never came.  Cook gets the timing right.  According to him, Peters is born in Africa in 1738 and sails with his charter to Sierra Leone in 1792.  But Cook’s assessment of Peters’ importance in American history is dead wrong.

Before today, I had not heard of Thomas Peters, and perhaps that is to my shame.  I am not as well-read as I should be.  Biographies are fascinating, and this one is quite intriguing.  I certainly have not endured the trials which Peters was asked to endure.  He did, indeed, play a significant role in the founding of a nation.  But it is no wonder that I had not heard of him in my studies of the founding of the United States—because he did not found the United States!  He may have been a founding father, but not of my country.

At the close of his video, Cook says the quiet part out loud:  “For people like Thomas Peters, the American Revolution wasn’t the independence movement we celebrate today.  While his enslavers preached a fight from liberty at their tables” (a phrase that appears in the original video, emphasis mine), “their hypocrisy forced him to pick up arms against the revolution.  Thomas’ story reminds us that while the American Revolution is called a fight for freedom, that included the freedom to own human beings.  For Black Americans who remained in the U.S., their revolution would continue for years to come.”

The message is clear:  The United States is not a nation worth celebrating, the truth of its founding irrelevant to the plight of black people today.  The reason this story is not taught in American history class is because of racism.

Talk about a bait-and-switch!

Liberals tend to think that white people don’t want to hear about stand-out black men and their histories.  That could not be further from the truth.  Men of integrity and grit of any color deserve to be celebrated, praised, and studied for their heroics.  Thomas Peters certainly lived through more than I ever will, and his grit is to be commended.  I will gladly retell his story in its proper context.  But I will never claim that he is a “forgotten founding father” of my nation—because that is a lie.

I find myself surprised at presentations like Cook’s, but I shouldn’t be.  Not only are we moderns facing an onslaught of “AI slop” these days—made-up facts and skewed perspectives generated by machines touted to replace God Himself—we are also facing increasing deception from the human-kind.  But this is an old war.  In Scripture, Jesus calls Satan “the father of lies” and those who perpetuate falsehood, Satan’s children.  This is a stark warning against bearing false witness against one’s neighbor, even if the falsity is an elevation of status and the neighbor has been dead more than 200 years.

Not only does Cook lie about Thomas Peter’s legacy in his closing remarks, in order to do so he plays a game of comparison that podcaster Jack Henneman names “presentism.”  Henneman, who calls himself a “humble history podcaster” instead of a bona fide historian, is the creator of the successful Spotify podcast “The History of the Americans,” which specializes in early American history prior to its founding in 1776.  Henneman was recently on the conservative podcast “Dad Saves America” (DSA) to talk about the history of the United States being “weaponized” against her people.  “Presentism” is one such tool by which this is accomplished.

Presentism is an anachronistic placement of an object, a person, or idea into a certain time in history which would not have existed at the time.  Suggesting that Columbus sailed the ocean blue because he couldn’t afford jet fuel is an absurd example.  But there are more subtle plays, which sometimes show up as a presenter’s own biases coming out in the narrative he tells.  Recognizing this behavior by historians and those who write about history is what Henneman calls one’s “BS detector.”  Depending on how developed the skill is, “you start to see people who write frivolously as having an axe to grind.”

Case in point: Joel Cook.

As Cook sets the stage for Peters’ heroics later in the narrative, he says at the beginning, “Now, as you might imagine, a prince didn’t take too kindly to being sold halfway around the world to harvest sugarcane.  His first escape attempt resulted in a severe whipping, which probably isn’t the best way to convince someone they should stay.”

In this case, presentism appears as, first, Cook’s, or PBS,’ own views on slavery: not “tak[ing] too kindly to” it.  Of course, no one wants to be forced into anything against his will; it should go without saying.  This, though, is a modern judgment call.  Historical fact should be presented without comment.  Additionally—laying aside whether Peters was indeed a “prince” and whether he attempted escape prior to 1776, the facts of which are in doubt—the phrase “to harvest sugarcane” is out of place.

Cook is speaking of Peters’ early life, which he records as Peters being sold into slavery at 22 and sent to work in French Louisiana sugarcane fields.  The year might have been 1760, if Peters was indeed born in 1738 as is claimed (a likely scenario).  The historical record is in doubt about this development.  Of the five accounts of Peters’ life which I have consulted, including Cook’s, three of them mention the French Louisiana narrative, although only Cook’s adds the detail about sugarcane fields.

This detail is speculative at best.  It is unclear whether there would have been any sugarcane fields in Louisiana for slaves to work at the time Peters was sent there, provided his being sent there in the first place is historically accurate.  The Louisiana State University Ag Center asserts that sugarcane was introduced to Louisiana agriculture in the early 1700’s but was not a widespread cash crop until 1795, well after Peters would have been in the area, if he was there at all.  The Jesuits were the first to be successful with this crop in the 1750s; it is unclear whether they owned African slaves to accomplish the task.

Sugarcane, a tropical plant, is difficult to cultivate in Louisiana because of its subtropical location.  According to the Ag Center, Louisiana is “the northernmost latitude” in which the crop is grown and has a much shorter growing season due to climate.  The crop is still harvested in Louisiana today.  Hundreds of years of cultivation have produced a hardier sugarcane plant able to withstand Louisiana’s less-than-ideal growing conditions.  This would not have been so in the 1760’s.

Inserting a dubious detail like working the sugarcane fields in Louisiana long before there were such cultivation is not solid historian’s craft.  It is simply an embellishment of the story to make the hero look better.  Indeed, as John Papola, from Dad Saves America, points out, sugarcane fields were the “coal mines” of their time—brutal work.  Having one’s hero first work sugarcane and later turn millwright (a detail confirmed by the historical record) makes him seem larger-than-life and all the more worthy of praise.

Softening or adding to the details of a historical narrative actually changes the story entirely into an interpretation instead of a representation of the truth, which holds implications for studying and writing about history for this and all future generations.  I could go on about Cook’s misuse of the historical record, but I digress.  Peters’ story needs no embellishment to be worthy of praise.

It is far more academically honest and accurate to state when the details of an historical account are not clear.  Modern scholarship is full of embellishment when certain details are missing or in doubt; people tend to fall on one side of the debate or the other.  But historian’s craft is not the place for taking up sides, but rather discovering the truth.

Though conversational in its tone, and, thus, more palatable to the masses, Cook’s scholarship is sloppy at best.  But therein lies the danger:  One cannot be so conversational as to betray the truth of history to the whims of the people.

June 8, 2026

Guest Column by Jennifer Fry

Dad.  For some, the word may strike fear in the heart.  For me, it strikes the funny bone.

While my brothers and I were growing up, Dad’s favorite band was Trout Fishing in America.  If you Google the name, a mix comes up of angling advice and lyrics to nursery rhymes, re-imagined for the kid at heart.  Their song “The Window,” for example, features Little Miss Muppet and the spider who sat down beside her and “threw her out the window!”  And don’t forget Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, who who “put [his wife] in a pumpkin shell and threw her out the window!”  You get the idea.

I can remember the day Uncle Bill—near-spitting image of my dad, and even today, hard to tell apart from him at first glance—first introduced Trout Fishing to my family.  The year was 1991; my twin brother and I were seven years old.  The five of us were over at Uncle Bill and Aunt Liz’s house to let the kids play together, when all of a sudden Uncle Bill blurted out, “You gotta hear this new band, Jim!”

Soon, cassette-tape lyrics like “It’s mine!  I won’t share it!” whined into the room.  From then on, my dad was hooked.  He owns all the CD’s and more signed T-shirts than he can wear in a day.  He’s been to eight concerts, the last of which filled the room with all 81 eager listeners.  In their 60’s now, Mom and Dad might have been the youngest ones there, including the band members.

Formed in 1979, the two-member, Texas-based band is composed of acoustic-guitarist Ezra Idlet and upright-bassist Keith Grimwood.  Idlet stands tall at 6 feet 8 inches, while his band partner Grimwood only reaches 5 feet 5 on a good day—a difference of about 15 inches that only adds to the comedic element of their performance.  The pair depend heavily on word-of-mouth for their success.  As of 2020, they had released 25 albums and were nominated for four Grammy awards.

In the band members’ own words, it is “impossible to tell you what sort of music Trout plays.”  Their website lists inspiration from “rock and roll, blues, folk, country, bluegrass, funk, Latin, and reggea” to flavor their music.  In a word, it’s weird, which is all the more fitting for my dad.  Their music caters to children as well as adults.

Through the years, Trout Fishing’s lyrics have come in handy for me.  As a parent now, they seem all the more apropos.  If my child rubs his face with grimy fingers, my impulse is to belt out, “Don’t get it in your eye-o!”—a nod to a song they once wrote about pico de gallo.  Or, if two of my children are fighting over a toy, I might sing defiantly, “It’s mine!” and stomp my foot like a five-year-old.  Indeed, the apple falls not far from the tree.

I complained one day that my husband didn’t appreciate “Mine!” as a song.  My dad replied, “Your husband has never been a child.  And I have never grown up!”

Truer words have never been said.  I should have expected as much from my dad, knowing how my parents met.

In 1979, Jim had a roommate named Howard whose girlfriend Rita (affectionately called “Rita-babe” by my dad) had a best friend named Marie.  In the days when landlines put limits on telephone communication, Howard would call Rita from the shared apartment phone, sometimes while Jim was awake; Jim worked night shifts.  Ever the jokester, Jim wanted to make Rita-babe laugh, so he’d steal the receiver from Howard.  Unknown to Jim, sometimes Marie was over at Rita’s house and was privy to her end of the conversation.  Upon hearing Rita laugh, Marie wanted to laugh, too—so she stole the receiver from Rita.

What started out as Howard talking with Rita became Marie talking with Jim.  She married him two years later because he made her laugh.  Sadly, the very thing that drew her to him was a source of conflict throughout their marriage.  The conflict didn’t stop us kids from having fun with Dad, though.  Mom, we thought, was just a stick-in-the-mud.  As a wife myself now, I’ve come to see Mom in a more sympathetic light.

I remember sharing jokes with Dad that I had gleaned from the Reader’s Digest “Laughter, the Best Medicine” section.  Usually, he’d have read them already.  When the punchline didn’t come out right (it almost never did), he would say with an emphasis on each word, “Timing is everything.”

I did the same with the Peanuts comic strip from Dad’s collection of six volumes.  He would, of course, have already read those, too—many times over.  The set was the only thing he remembers ever asking from his dad.  It was a special set.  The jokes and comic strips, and later movie lines, became a sort of culture between us.  It was an echolalic habit—“movie-speak,” for those unfamiliar—that somehow encompassed life’s great variety.

We have all heard the adage, “God must have a sense of humor.”  If he does, I want it to be like my dad’s—off-beat, but not off-color; unexpected, but not out-of-character; child-like, but not childish.  And in the end, right as rain.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.  May I never grow up to be just like you.

May 22, 2026

TOP PHOTO: Dawn and Ethan Fry walk home from school in Old Town Uvalde.

Guest article submitted by Jennifer Fry

My brother called yesterday afternoon as I was walking two of my four kids home from their last day of daycare for the school year.  My daughter may or may not return for a short summer session before she goes to kindergarten, her “new school.”  It was a special moment for us.  Though we live only two blocks, at most, from the daycare, we rarely walk either to or from the program.  It was a beautiful, cool day on account of the recent rains, and I wanted them to enjoy the short trek home—which they did by, first, dipping their toes in the puddles and, later, traipsing through the mud.  In the middle of this idyllic scene stormed my brother’s fury.

A talk with Jason is never an equal give-and-take.  He is usually the one to do all of the talking, with the one on the receiving end left with no room for rebuttal.  In fact, his abrupt, argumentative nature earned him the nickname “the Judge” by our great-grandfather when we were six.  Arguments are not usually a fair fight with him, and this occasion was no exception.

The conversation started off peacefully enough.  He reminded me that my family were moving back to San Antonio—an eventuality that I was not able to rebuff by saying that my husband had been having second thoughts.  The topic quickly moved to gas prices.

I should convince my husband to move closer, he said, because “gas prices are $4.19 a gallon and they’re not going down, despite what the president says.”  I later found the average gas price in San Antonio to be $3.43—not great, but well below his quoted price.  Pain at the pump was a good segway into politics for him, my brother’s preferred topic these days.

“Did you know they’ve destroyed all this gas and oil infrastructure in Iran that will take years if not decades to rebuild?”  he asked.  I didn’t know.  I’d been too busy raising my kids.

Somehow the “war in Iran” led to talk of the primaries for midterm elections and Thomas Massie’s recent loss to an inferior candidate in the Kentucky senate race.

“Thomas Massie was the only Republican to vote to release the Epstein Files.  He was in office 12 years and he lost to a guy who never went out and actually campaigned!  It’s because Trump spent millions of dollars against him because he doesn’t want the Epstein Files released,” he said.

This I knew something about.  “Thomas Massie is embroiled in his own scandal,” I told him calmly.  “His dear wife of 35 years died suddenly—he didn’t cause her death—and within 18 months he was married to a woman half her age.  And it sounds like he had a girlfriend or mistress between them.”

What I didn’t say is that Massie’s call for the Epstein Files to be released could signal to voters that he’s a RINO, a Republican in Name Only.  Tony Gonzales, a Congressman from our district in Texas, was ousted for a similar reason.  In the middle of both the campaign leading up to a run-off election and a brewing scandal of his own, Gonzales rescinded his bid for re-election.

Jason was dismissive.  “People grieve in different ways.  I knew a guy, my neighbor down the street, who got married within a couple of months of his wife dying,” he said, still angry about Trump’s alleged interference in Massie’s re-election.

“I tell you the Republican Party of today is not the Republican Party from when we were growing up in the ’90’s,” he went on.  “Did you know they’re redistricting congressional districts in Georgia to push out black voters?”

I didn’t know that either.  But was this true, I wondered.

The conversation then turned to how “all” Republicans should be to blame for things like Alex Pretti’s death, on account of many of them having supported Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal—again, something I knew a little about.

This was, I wanted to point out, a false analogy.  The circumstances of the two cases are not the same. On the one hand, two civilians were interacting in a dangerous situation and one became (or continued being) aggressive to the point of threatening life; on the other, as far as I understand, the man escalated tensions with the police.  Policemen have the state’s authority to use deadly force for a reason.

“Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial outcome was just,” I said.  “He acted in self-defense.”

By this point, I had reached home with my two kids in tow; my husband had been at home with the youngest.  The kids and I left our muddy shoes at the door and I sat down to wait one quarter hour until it was time to get my eldest son from school.  I was still on the phone with my brother and he was on speaker.

Mine was not a counterargument that Jason had time to listen to, it seemed.  Erratically, the topic turned to internment.  Earlier in the conversation he had mentioned a detention center being built down the street from our father’s house, a fact that I had not personally verified.  I have since learned that it is a massive, already-built warehouse at 542 SE Loop 410, three and a half miles almost directly south of our childhood home, that federal agents are looking to convert to a 1,500-bed holding facility.  As of February, there was no word on when the facility would be finished out.

“If these are for deporting illegals, then why are they permanent?” Jason asked.

The purchase of the facility faced some push-back by local leaders and concerned citizens, to no avail.  A News 4 San Antonio/WOIA article from February pointed out, “Ultimately, officials acknowledged ICE does not need local approval to buy property.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement provided a statement to News 4 regarding the purchase of the facility:  “Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”  I could not have said it better.

“Tell me,” Jason asked again, “do you think that what happened in Germany in the 1930’s could not happen here?”  It was a tiresome trope.  “Why would people living here have to prove their loyalty to the U.S.?”

“It’s human nature,” I countered.  I reminded him that something like that had already happened.  “We rounded up the Japanese and the Germans during World War II out of fear.”  Thankfully, our family was not among them, but this is the exception which proves the rule.

Our great-grandfather, J.O. Klatt, the one who nicknamed Jason, had emigrated from Germany to the U.S. as a child in the 1910’s and by 1941 was an integral part of the smithing operation at Alamo Iron Works in San Antonio.  He was an exceptional metallurgist. At the time, Alamo Iron Works provided metal supplies to the war effort.  Because his supervisor stepped in to say that he was already serving his country through blacksmithing, Klatt was not subject to the draft—nor, as it would seem, to internment.  Perhaps he had proved his loyalty to his adopted country by his civilian service, something younger generations would do well to emulate.

On and on it went like this.  At one point, Jason’s gruffness made me cry.

I began to notice a pattern:  Jason would give what he considered a bombshell revelation based not on facts but his interpretation of the facts—facts that he didn’t consider worth my time to retell, because facts alone aren’t explosive.  It was ad hominem after ad hominem, sensational claim after sensational claim, while all along, he was claiming the moral high ground.

“I’m telling you the truth here,” he said, expecting to be believed.

When I tried asking for proof, he whined.  “You’re coming at me with logic,” he said.  “What do you want me to do, give you my sources?”

Actually, yes.

“Are you sitting in front of your computer?  Can you pull all this up?”  he asked.

In vain, we tried—as the minutes ticked by for me to go get my son.  Frantically, my husband paced about the room, unsure of who was getting the schoolboy and what to do about the other kids.  I was already five minutes late by the time I pulled up any articles related to Alex Pretti, to say nothing of any other name my brother had dropped.  Meanwhile, Jason was dully reading out meaningless headlines, as if that alone would pull me to his side of the aisle.

This is not the way to persuade, I reasoned.  Like a good wine, arguments take time to develop.  Clearly, he had not studied rhetoric or the human condition.

“I don’t want to be a Democrat,” I finally told him, more abruptly than I had meant to.  The conversation had touched a nerve that both of us were uncomfortable with feeling.  “I have to get my son.”  I nodded wordlessly to my husband that I would pick up the schoolboy.

Had Jason called to strong-arm me into performing my civic duty, I wondered.  If so, he was more than three hours too late. I had already voted in our county’s run-off Republican primary election just that morning—a fact I had been unable to convey.

“I’m just telling you this because I care,” Jason said simply.  “You need to look into these things.”

“And you need to stop being a bully!” I wanted to tell him.  “And stop berating people for not having the time to look into it.”

And so the storm blew over, with neither of us giving ground.  I can’t really even say we agreed to disagree.  It was more like a stalled chess game, the pieces of which we will, no doubt, pick back up to hurl at each other the next time he calls.