Allow me a departure from script. No controversies, no analysis. Just a neighbor sharing a story. I think I remember the exact day I looked at my Mother and realized I couldn’t have found one better – not if you lined up a million of them. My shorts didn’t fit, my right shoe had a [...]

A lot of people (and we’re talking about my Mom here) often ask why I don’t use this weekly column to talk about some of the issues impacting areas beyond the Heights, Garden Oaks, Oak Forest and North Houston. Without fail – even to Mom – the answer is pretty simple: Because we don’t do [...]

I feel sorry for students these days, and I’m not talking about college boys who are forced to mingle with coeds in possibly the greatest four to six years of a person’s life. I’m talking about these poor souls in elementary, middle and high school. Before going any further, let me make something very clear, [...]

We’re going to keep this week’s column fairly short, and that’s probably music to the ears of many. Last week, my column on the Greater Heights Chamber of Commerce drew a number of – shall we say – challenges, and each of those letters deserves space for publication. If you didn’t read last week’s column, [...]

For those who don’t know, this is the most important weekend of the year for one of the most important organizations in the Heights area – and I’m including Garden Oaks, Oak Forest and North Houston in that area. This weekend, the Greater Heights Chamber of Commerce hosts its annual Crawfish Festival, and the proceeds [...]

Every day, we get calls at The Leader asking that we publish a story or a picture or a poem or a drawing or a… well, you get the point. To say we get a few odd requests is kindly understating the ridiculous. A couple of years ago, what seemed like a very nice lady [...]

One of the things I love most about our area of this enormous town is that we have locally owned businesses that employ our neighbors and friends. The Leader is a locally owned business, and I’d guess that 80 percent of the businesses we interact with on a consistent basis have their roots within a [...]

In all the years I’ve written columns, whether for this newspaper or many others, I’ve had a hard and fast rule that each opinion must always end with a solution. It’s bad form to suggest something needs to change without offering an avenue for that change. I may break that rule today. Ever since moving [...]