Don Campbell
PERSONAL OBLIVION
Chapter One Riley Folsom didn’t really want to join the “D” Association, but membership was mandatory for anyone who earned a varsity letter in football at Desmond High School in the late 1960’s. At age 16, Riley had played varsity football for the first time as a sophomore and managed to log enough minutes of…
A BASEBALL LIFE
Part One Baseball was a very large part of my life as a boy growing up in Bonham, a small town in Northeast Texas, during the 1950’s. Whether playing catch with my older brother Ray, or playing a game we called “flies and skinners”, or tossing up pebbles and swatting them with a home-made…
A CUBAN SCAR
Eleuthera is a small island located on the far eastern edge of the Commonwealth of Bahamas. Its land mass stretches about 110 miles in length, but averages barely more than a mile and a half in width. It is one of the several archipelagic states of the Bahamas, located approximately 50 miles from Nassau. Prior…
IMAGINATIVE STEALTH
Sonny Parsons almost always looked forward to his youth league baseball games. He had played two years of Little League baseball and was drawing near the end of his second year in Pony League. Now nearing his 15th birthday, he had looked forward with eagerness to every game he played in those leagues. Tonight’s game…
HOW THE SCREW TURNED
There was no training manual for new hires in the Dallas County jail when Ethan Caldwell first began working there in the summer of 1964 as a “relief” jailer. At the time, all full-time jailers were required to take their annual 2-week vacations during the months of June, July and August each year. During those…
Rupert at Rest
Ethan Caldwell was in New York on business on this particularly warm June day in 1990, representing American South Bank as legal counsel. The occasion for the trip was a meeting of a syndicate of 15 banks from around the world to negotiate the final terms of a $750 million credit facility for News Corp,…
A Mob Scene
In the mid 1960’s, Antonio (“Tony”) Caminiti was the head of the Cosa Nostra in Miami, Florida. In the spring of 1967, he was called upon to testify before a grand jury in Albany, New York, where an ongoing investigation into organized crime was being conducted by New York State officials. Upon his return to…
Parallels With the 38th
Along with some friends, Beverly and I rented a vacation home in Vail, Colorado in early December of 1979, hoping to beat the holiday rush at this popular resort. On the morning of the second day of our stay, I answered a call at the house from a real estate agent, saying that Jerry Ford…