Give Philip Blander a black pencil, a white pencil, a sheet of gray paper, and he will take your breath away. The 59-year-old artist has done photorealistic portraits so lifelike he has people insisting that his work was not drawn. “One woman looked at a portrait I did and argued with me, telling me that it was a photograph! I love when that happens,” he said.
Summer vacation is over. School has started. Nikki Bitzer is back in the classroom. Life is good, really good. For this Sherman teacher, nothing sounds so sweet as the bell signaling the start of another class.
John Astin Perkins was born into a well-to-do, well-connected McKinney family in 1907. Educated at Yale, the University of Texas and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, he moved to Dallas upon finishing his education and began to design and build houses.
When Jason and Daresa Sofey purchased the former W.S. Dorset family estate on Sherman’s North Preston Drive, they were committed to bringing the 1939 residence back to its former glory, and then some, but the project would have to be a rehabilitation, rather than a restoration.
Chef Cathy Zeis special Margarita Chicken Taco Salad is a delectable treat.
Susan and Marvin Watley were in the southern latitudes on a round-the-world cruise when the barometer started falling and the seas began to rise. Marvin was down, injured from a fall a few days before, and that left Susan to manage the ocean-sailing yacht alone.
An estimated 3.5 billion wire hangers go into U.S. landfills every year, and they sit there for over a hundred years. That does not count the 1.25 million hangers in my closet at home. Leave it to American ingenuity to identify a problem and turn it into an advertising campaign. A New York company, EcoHanger®, is making a 100%-recyclable, biodegradable clothes hanger made of paper.
One. It’s the number of stars in the Texas flag. It’s the number of U.S. Presidents who have conducted the OU-Texas pre-game coin toss. And it’s the number of shirts lost by Texas Laundry in the last six months. For a business that handles upwards of 1,000 garments per day, the statistic is unbelievable.
Just 17 miles southeast of Sherman on US 69 and SH 11 in extreme east Grayson County, Whitewright is a prototypical Texas town with one foot in the past and the other firmly planted in the here-and-now. Settlers from Kentucky established the area in the late 1800s. Whitewright was a land rich for cultivation and cattle, a wilderness of grasses, flowers and forest.
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was born in LeClaire, Iowa, in 1846. During his early life he herded cattle and worked as a driver on a wagon train, went on to fur trapping and gold mining, then joined the Pony Express in 1860. After the Civil War, Cody scouted for the army and gained the nickname “Buffalo Bill” as a hunter.