Who is in Lubbock?

[Dora]

[PDittie]

1. Bobby Knight n/t

[420inTN]

9. some cousins from my father's side. n/t

[hollywood926]

2. Waylon and Willie and the boys?

I am just trying to get to my 300th post.

[hobbit709]

3. Everybody left Lubbock

[Nothing Without Hope]

4. me - briefly - 30 years ago

Back when I lived in Texas (I'm a native), I had about four occasions when I could not avoid Lubbock and passed through as quickly as I could. One of those times was during a dust storm. It's not my favorite part of Texas. Or my second favorite...

Texas Tech is in Lubbock, I think.

[TheCentepedeShoes]

6. I went to Tech

thirty-something years ago. Dust storms suck.

[Nothing Without Hope]

10. They also blow

...something fierce. When I was in high school living with my parents in Odessa (my high school football team--the Permian Panthers--was the subject of a popular book and movie, I think called something like "Bright Light Nights"), also in West/central Texas, the dust storms would get so intense that the automatic street lights would come on as if at night. Street signs had to be replaced or repainted from time to time as the paint would get sandblasted right off. So did automobile paint if you didn't bring them into a closed garage when the storms hit. I recall the ground level of my uncle's front yard -- they lived several blocks away -- kept getting higher. It was 6-8 inches above its original level by the time they had lived in that house for a number of years -- the sand had settled into the grass and gradually raised the level. This was a problem because they had a buried spriinkler system with ground-level sprayers and they had to raise it.

With all the windows and doors sealed as tight as we could manage, after dust storms there would still be little drifts of reddish-tan sandy dust collected under the windows, and I would always feel grit in my mouth during a storm. Other than major hailstorms (we had one with apple-sized hail in our neighborhood) and tornado-bearing clouds (we never got hit, but my uncle did after he moved out of town) and the superhot days when the asphalt melted and the bad ice storms (a frequent menace), the dust storms were my absolute least favorite local weather. Lubbock's weather was similar to Odessa's.

The dust storm in Lubbock the day I mentioned in my earlier post in this thread was a bad one, with a dirty-brown sky and screaming wind. *Shudder* I'll always love Texas and respond to it as my home in some ways, but the weather here in New England is paradise in comparison to the West Texas plateau. When I hear these Northeast coastal people complaining about the awful weather, I just have to smile. I've lived here for over 20 years now, and with a few exceptions like a hurricane and several major blizzards, I really don't think they have much basis for complaint.

I don't know why all this recollection just poured out, hadn't thought of it in years. Sorry if I bored you.

[spatlese]

11. Friday Night Lights

The movie just came out... :)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390022/

[Nothing Without Hope]

13. Thanks!!! I'll have to see it

It's absolutely true that those Friday night football games in the Ector County coliseum were the highlight of the whole town during high school football season. I was as carried away as the rest of them -- it was great fun though a bit weird in retrospect. I'll have to see the movie and find out how they present it all. My brother told me that a number of Odessans and people associated with Permian High School (he went through there 8 years later than I did and with even greater school spirit if possible) were rather put out over the book. They thought it put things in an unfairly negative light and was biased. It will be a bittersweet experience, but I am curious to see what the movie makes of it all.

[Nothing Without Hope]

15. I just read the review at the site you gave

...and one thing struck me immediately. One of the high school football stars in the movie is apparently black. When I was there, which was long before the setting of this movie, Odessa was a strictly racially segregated town. Permian High School had no black students at all as I recall except the year I arrived as a Sophomore. Then there was a single black girl in the senior class, a foreign exchange student, and she must have been really something, because in that situation she became so well-liked and respected that she was elected Senior Class President. That's my recollection, and I hope that it's right. Virtually all the black and most of the Latino students my age went to Ector High School (there was no Catholic high school in town). The third high school, the perennial Ones To Beat (along with the Midland High School Bulldogs), was Odessa High School, another predominantly white school like Permian. Unsurprisingly, PHS and OHS were both top-rated AAAA league football schools, while EHS, poorer in a lot a ways, was AA or AAA and never competed with the other town teams. Awful, and sad, and I was totally clueless about it.

I just never thought about racial inequity issues or the other global social/cultural/political plagues until after I was out of that walled-in environment and joined the rest of the world. Incredible as it may seem, the subject simply did not come up, unless you count racial stereotype "jokes." When I did leave Odessa for college (at Washington University in St Louis) and suddenly was surrounded by a wide range of people from all sorts of backgrounds, it was quite a shock. Then I couldn't believe I had totally missed such a huge thing. How could I have cared so much about supporting the football team when THIS was going on? But because I was isolated from these issues, they just didn't penetrate until I finally left the bubble world of PHS.

Because of this experience, I am both more patient and less patient with people from similarly insulated backgrounds--if that makes sense. More patient because I know how being insulated from reality can allow even good-hearted people to believe things that are dead-wrong, especially if that's what they hear from people they trust. Less patient because dammit, in this age of mass communication how can they not know?

Again, I've digressed. This time for sure, I'm going to bed.:boring:

[PDittie]

5. We used to live in Plainview in the '80s

and had to go to Lubbock (50 miles or so) just to have a margarita with our Mexican food.

[bmbmd]

7. I just moved away after a lifetime on the plains-

Levelland High School class of 1973. I miss it sometimes.

[Nothing Without Hope]

12. Levelland -- love the name

I never noticed that one, or I would have added it to my collection of memorable town names. I don't know where it is, but it could well be in West Texas in the Odessa/Midland area or in the Panhandle. Extremely flat, featureless country, at least the Odessa/Midland area. No hills--except for the famous Monahans sand dunes -- no rivers, no trees, no lakes. As one of my Illinois uncles said, "Just miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles." Whereupon another visiting Illinois uncle chimed in, "No scenery to obstruct the view!" You know it's flat when natives of the Mississippi plains of southwest Illinois are poking fun at the lack of hilliness.

Not far from Odessa we had "Notrees" and "Plano" a bit further on -- more hints about the landscape. Then down the highway there was "Wink," so named because -- according to its welcome sign -- it was so small that if you winked, you'd miss it.

But I will say that the night skies were awesomely beautiful, dazzling and huge and magical. The horizons reached out forever over the curving edge of the planet and the sunsets were always different but always amazing. Here in New England, everything is lush and surreally (to me) brilliantly colored and moist--and those straight, tall, impossibly thin TREES!--but you don't get many chances to revel in a deep expanse of sky with wide open views all around. I miss that sometimes. Maybe that's one of the many reasons why so many people here love to go out sailing on the ocean.

Boy, I really AM in an odd mood. I think I'll give you guys a break and sign off.

[spatlese]

8. Are you moving to Lubbock? n/t

[bloodyjack]

14. the Lindbergh baby