Category Archives: Grapevine Lines

Columnists conference in Texas, summer 2005

Travel notes

Tues­day, June 28, 2005: I am writ­ing together so many odds and ends that I’ve been tak­ing notes on for more than a week that they qual­ify for place­ment under var­i­ous dates, not just today. This riff has as its gen­e­sis the 29th annual con­fer­ence of the National Soci­ety of News­pa­per Colum­nists, which was June

Hat trick

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Mon­day, June 27, 2005: Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of High­fill, home of North­west Arkansas Regional Air­port, should mosey down to Grapevine, Texas, and take notes, them­selves. This town has cre­ated a his­tor­i­cal dis­trict, which on some hol­i­days and by request (such as for vis­it­ing colum­nists) puts vol­un­teers in early 20th-century cos­tume and gives

Lessons from Pete Hamill

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Sat­ur­day, June 25, 2005: The colum­nists had a great after­noon at the Sixth-Floor Museum meet­ing with three eye­wit­nesses to the JFK assas­si­na­tion and-or its imme­di­ate after­math. But the focus of this entry is a morn­ing ses­sion led by New York writer Pete Hamill. My long­hand notes are fine as records

Couple columnists hit a bar

Two colum­nists walk into a bar Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Fri­day, June 24, 2005: A temp­ta­tion is to write rather com­plete arti­cles from the notes I took at the just-completed con­fer­ence of the National Soci­ety of News­pa­per Colum­nists, meet­ing in Grapevine, to the north­east of Fort Worth and north­west of Dal­las. But what I would