Cyber-squeaking = not helpful

I moved from Galveston to Atlanta last February. I love my island and quickly adopted the habit of reading the Galveston Daily News online a couple of times a week to appease my homesickness.

It didn’t take long for me to notice a pattern in the online comments about a few apparently salacious subjects: the democratically elected yet unpaid Mayor & City Council, who should live on the island and who should pick them (seriously?), East End-West End relations, Houston area collaboration, progress in general… okay, change of any kind. The public remarks were and are consistently negative, critical, angry, bitter, regressive, and completely not helpful. It made me sad to think the island that showed so much promise and was given seemingly endless opportunity to improve after Hurricane Ike was instead in the radical free-fall that the comments implied.

The First Amendment says nothing about the right to be published

I’m really struggling with this one. Here’s the question:

Should newspapers publish every letter to the editor and every comment on every letter online, no matter how vile, insensitive, ignorant, petulant, or mean?”

I was the victim of this editor-less trend twice in the last couple of years: Once when I suggested privately that Karl Rove was possibly not the best choice of keynote speaker for a real estate convention (and someone leaked it to the press), and another when I was speaking out against the repeal of a local indoor smoking ban. The unmoderated online vitriol that followed got so bad that friends began asking me about my security system. I was called a commie, anti-American, self-centered, narcissistic, domineering, do-gooder, self-righteous, shmenah (?), creep, perverted, a-hole, nagging nanny, tyrannical, omnipotent moral busy-body, tormentor, arrogant jerk, rich social elitist, and [mother of] lawn apes. When it was revealed that I was a real estate agent, they added histrionic, radical, greedy, two-faced, unethical, con artist, and puke in the mouth.

Of tornadoes & hurricanes & the uniquely qualified

Just last weekend, many of us recognized Easter and Passover, and meditated on the blessings of cleansing, renewal, and rebirth or freedom from the past, both literal and metaphoric. Some of us considered the practical application in our modern lives, and the idea that sometimes we make deliberate choices to separate from what has gone before, and sometimes those choices are foisted upon us.

Bolivar Peninsula after Ike - Sept. 2008

Tuscaloosa after the tornado - April 2011

In the days that followed those holiest of remembrances, tornadoes unexpectedly ravished the Southeast — leveling towns and neighborhoods and taking over three hundred lives. I was riveted to the television and computer, much as I had been thirty-one months ago as the sun came up on what had been my home in Galveston, Texas, the morning after Hurricane Ike roared ashore.

Visiting the inner circle of Hell — by subpoena

The Mother of the Bride walks into The Main Attorney’s office and says, “I’ve been wronged and I need help.”

“Come in,” says The Main Attorney, “and tell me your story.”

“Well,” she says, “Last year, my daughter was getting married and I needed a Mother of the Bride hat for the wedding. I went to the local hat shop, and there was a delivery of new hats just arriving. As The Hat Delivery Driver was unloading the hats, right away I spotted one that would be perfect with my Mother of the Bride dress, but it lacked the pink pearls it needed. I told The Hat Saleslady that I needed a hat that could have pink pearls added, and she assured me that would be no problem. As the hat was quite expensive for my budget, I called my Long-time Seamstress and asked her to come over and look at the hat before I bought it. She said right away that the hat could not be beaded because of something to do with the material of the hat. I don’t know about those things, so, of course, I have to rely on the experts.

The business of foreclosures… Say what?

February 19, 2009, I wrote a piece called Face it, Galveston’s been Raped about my friend Alex’s Ike experience. It was awful — he lost his business and ultimately his home because the lender wouldn’t defer three months of payments during the Ike months, and wouldn’t restructure the loan because Alex was self-employed in a business that didn’t bounce right back. In March 2009, the bank foreclosed and Alex lost his dream home.

He moved on and found a new place and made peace with the fact that he’d probably be a renter for a long time, if not forever.

Today the Texas Attorney General called for a moratorium on foreclosures and sales of foreclosed properties, so Alex looked up his loft to see if it had closed yet. Turns out it closed a month ago.

Here’s the kicker. Alex owed $307,000 on the loft, and was happy to continue paying on it at that price, but the lender refused all attempts at compromise. But a month ago they sold it for $92,500.

If anybody has any insight into what’s fair, smart, or even decent business about that, please comment below.

Meanwhile, Alex is throwing up in the bathroom and asked me to send his apologies.

Rolling over in their untimely graves

I was adopted when I was four days old by two of the smartest, coolest, funniest, did I say smartest?, people on Earth. In almost every way.

I still miss them all the time.

My father died in 1977 at the age of 56. I was 19. My mother died in 1983 at the age of 56. I was 25.

Jury duty! Can’t we all just get along?

I heard this story today.

In 1215 A.D., King John signed the Magna Carta, decreeing that no man is above the law, not even the king. Law shall be determined by the little people.

The little people of Galveston have decreed that nobody shall harbor (i.e., own or keep around) more than four dogs, four cats, or a four-course combination platter of the two. Animal lovers might find this discriminatory. Animal haters might find it excessive.

And therein lies a lawsuit.

I was a Lasker Home Girl

As published in the August 2010 issue of The Islander Magazine.
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My name is Rebekah Boyle. I was born March 3, 1918, and my family moved to Galveston, Texas, when I was just five years old. My father left us soon after, and my mother found work as an upstairs maid for a prominent Galveston family. As it seemed she would be quite busy with her duties, it was arranged for me and my younger brother, Jamie, to stay at the Lasker Home for Homeless Children. My older half-brother, George, went to live with his father’s grandparents. I never saw him again and have always wondered what became of him.

The Lasker Home, 1019 16th St. (photo courtesy of Texas Historical Commission)

Jamie and I were picked up from our mother and brought to the Lasker Home by a stern but kindly lady named Mrs. Frenkel and a strange looking gentleman with a long beard, funny hat, dressed all in black called Rabbi Cohen. It was Thanksgiving Day in 1923, and before we could even unpack our small grips, the home became the scene of a wonderful dinner with turkey and all the trimmings, the likes of which Jamie and I had never seen. The meal was followed by a musical fairy playlet that betokened much thought and care and was played with great charm by the children, who seemed happy, and who we would come to know as our friends and siblings. The costumes, made of paper in the pastel and autumn shades, were unusually beautiful. They were designed by the matron, and made by the older girls. There were about a hundred people present that night, all having a festive spirit about them and treating us children like members of an especially large family, and I did think that maybe this place would not be at all an unpleasant place to be for a while.

An interview with Ida Smith Austin

As published in the July 2010 issue of The Islander Magazine.

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The Austin House (Oak Lawn) c. 1936

Sitting stately for the past century and a half on the corner of Market and 15th streets, The Austin House, with its double galleries and dual entries, pays homage to the at-one-time-equally important thoroughfares it faces. It is one of those iconic structures where tourists and residents alike stop to point and shoot every day. The home was already over 30 years old when Ida Smith Austin came to live in it and became its loving steward through the turn of the century and the Great Depression.

The Islander: Good afternoon Mrs. Austin. Thank you so much for meeting with me today. I’d like to start by asking you about your background. How did you come to Galveston?

Ida Smith Austin: I was born in 1858 in Lexington, Virginia, and educated at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. At thirty-three, I came to Texas and began teaching Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church. Four years later, I married Valery E. Austin, a prominent real estate dealer and city commissioner.

The Hatfields and the McBOIs

When I moved to Galveston in 2003, I learned to my amusement that there was a feud of sorts — certainly a rivalry — between residents of the East End and residents of the West End of the island. I stress the word “island” because that’s what this little spit of sandbar is — a barrier island. Its two distinct social/cultural ends — where people on the West won’t go (10-15 miles) “to town” and people on the East have never been past the end of the Seawall — is the stuff of Garrison Keillor’s ”Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” I wonder if he means the East side or the West side of the lake…

Face it, Galveston’s been raped

First published on February 19, 2009, five months after Hurricane Ike.

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It’s taken me a while to figure out how to talk about this. I didn’t want to distract from the impact of the actual event…but now that the storm is pretty much behind us, we all need to face a really big problem that it uncovered. There are as many stories as there are people on the island, but I’ve picked one to serve as metaphor for all of us. Once you hear it, I trust you’ll share your own here. If we put in a little effort, maybe we can make some changes for the next victims.

Hurricane planning: What not to do

This piece originally ran as a New Year’s story 100 days after Ike, but on the occasion of the First Day of Hurricane Season 2010 (625 days after Ike) as we all begin commiserating over evacuation plans, it seems worth a rerun. It’s good to have a plan.

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December 28, 2008

I haven’t told this story before.

My loft the week before Ike

On Wednesday, September 10, 2008, I decided to cash in my birthday massage coupon – it being six months old already and all – and since we thought the third storm in a month was headed south of Galveston, I thought what the heck? And if it decided to come closer to us, we still had ‘til Friday to get out. We’re well rehearsed at this stuff, and I deserved an afternoon off.

About twenty minutes into some pretty intense deep tissue acupressure on my neck – a luxury strangely akin to putting your head in a meat press, I’m guessing – the room started spinning. I mean SPINNING like I was a pencil let loose beneath a twisted rubber band. I stopped my guy and truly thought I was having a stroke. He kept working on me gently for another half hour or so, but the room kept going and before long, it was clear I was sicker than I had ever been in my life, and in no condition to transport myself to the bathroom, let alone home.

The Great Test of 1915

I just unearthed this article I wrote with Frank Billingsley for The Islander Magazine in 2006. I think it’s a vivid reminder of how much modern building codes and technology (and a kick-@ss seawall) have done to protect us.

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Indianola is a ghost town on Matagorda Bay. But in 1875, it was a major port and the county seat of Calhoun County. In September that year, a big storm struck, killing between one hundred-fifty and three hundred of its five thousand residents, practically decimating the town. Its plucky citizens rebuilt it.

By the turn of the Century, nearly thirty-eight thousand people called Galveston home. It was the second richest urban area per capita in the country. Mansions adorned 25th Street and Broadway, punctuated by amenities befitting the first Texas city to use telephones and electricity.

Yin-yang, thank you, Ma’am

Brooke got up Wednesday morning in a particularly good mood. She was going to show property all day to a couple who had just three weeks to buy, which meant they were serious and would probably make a quick decision. She had emailed them listings to consider in advance, and they had told her which ones they wanted to see. She had a List B, just in case none of those worked out.