EXPLORE Magazine

JULY 2015

Welcome to Boerne

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Bluebonnet Realty HOMES FOR SALE D L O S 1.) FOR SALE - TAPATIO SPRINGS TOWNHOME

3.) FOR SALE - $398,000 - 4 bedroom, 2.5 baths, approx. 3095 s.f. of living area on 3.65 acres new on the market! Great Views!

2.) FOR SALE - $267,000 - 2 bed, 2 bath charmer in Ranger Creek. Beautiful yard, covered porch, bonus room, garden area, water catchment system, and much much more!

4.) FOR SALE - $421,000 - FAIR OAKS RANCH, 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath approx 2612 s.f. in beautiful Cibolo Trails of Fair Oaks Ranch.

PROPERTIES FOR LEASE

5.) FOR LEASE - $3200 - BRAND NEW! Never occupied 3 bed, 2.5 bath, office, gameroom, fenced yard on corner lot in Woods of Frederick Creek. Available immediate occupancy!

D

E LEAS

7.) FOR LEASE - $1400 - 1 bed, 1 ba cottage with amazing views!!! About 3 miles out of Comfort

6.) FOR LEASE - $1595 - 4 bed, 2 ba in Boerne Heights. Available now.

D

E LEAS

8.) FOR LEASE - $1700 - 3 bed, 2 ba approx. 1674 s.f. of living area on 1 acre lot, fenced. Near High School.

MORE HOMES AVAILABLE. CALL FOR LISTINGS.

830-816-2288 • www.boernetexashomes.com

FATHERS. SONS. WE ARE ALL GENT.

Dr. Ben Stahl, MD and his son Charlie Owner, Boerne Family Medicine

styling for the discerning gentleman™

$10 OFF YOUR FIRST EXPERIENCE

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Stop by or purchase one online for the gentlemen in your life.

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930 E. BLANCO, BOERNE TX

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830.443.4500

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w w w. c o m p l e t e g e n t . c o m

JULY

Explore what's inside this issue!

10 From the Publisher 12 Calendar 14 MUSIC

28 BBQ

36 LIFE

30 INSIDER’S GUIDE

40 SPIRITUAL

SECRET TIPS ON MAKING THE BEST BBQ. LESSER KNOW DESTINATIONS FOR THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS

TROUBADOUR

Publisher Benjamin D. Schooley ben@hillcountryexplore.com

QUIT QUITTING

Operations Manager Kristine Duran kristine@smvtexas.vom

GREAT & BEYOND

Creative Director Benjamin N. Weber ben.weber@smvtexas.com

18 The art of HELPING

Frank Ritchie is a good guy.

Through and through.

Assistant Creative Director Kayla Davisson kayla@smvtexas.com ADVERTISING SALES 210-507-5250 sales@hillcountryexplore.com

42 OLD TIMER

OLD TIMER DOESN’T LIKE CHANGE. Well maybe some things can change.

34 CHARC WEEK

EXPLORE magazine is published by Schooley Media Ventures in Boerne, TX. EXPLORE Magazine and Schooley Media Ventures are not responsible for any inaccuracies, erroneous information, or typographical errors contained in this publication submitted by advertisers. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the opinions of EXPLORE and/or Schooley Media Ventures. Copyright 2015 Schooley Media Ventures, 930 E. Blanco, Ste. 200, Boerne, TX 78006

What exactly is charcuterie and how the heck do you say it?

22 History boerne in the beginning

How our fair city came to be.

Contributing Writers

8

Marjorie Hagy History

Rene Villanueva Music

Kendall D. Aaron Spiritual

Old Timer Just Old Timer

Paul Wilson Life & Living

MARJORIE is a bibliophile, a history nut and an insomniac, among several other conditions, both diagnosed and otherwise. When she's not working tirelessly to avoid getting a real job, she nurses an obsession with her grandson and is involved in passing legislation restricting the wearing of socks with sandals. She is an aspiring pet hoarder who enjoys vicious games of Scrabble, reading Agatha Christie, and sitting around doing nothing while claiming to be thinking deeply.

Marjorie has five grown children, a poodle to whom she is inordinately devoted in spite of his breath, and holds an Explore record for never having submitted an article on time. She's been writing for us for five years now.

Rene Villanueva is the lead singer/bass player for the band Hacienda. Having toured worldwide, hacienda has also been featured on several late night shows, including Late Show with David Letterman.

Rene and his wife Rachel live in Boerne, TX and just welcomed thier first child.

I’m just a normal guy. I’m not a theology student, I don’t preach in church, and I’ve never written a book. I’m just a normal guy that thinks, and feels, and is on a never-ending journey attempting to be the best person I can be. I fail frequently at this quest, yet each day, the quest continues.

I’ve lived in Boerne since the late ‘80s, I’ve got a most beautiful wife, three wonderful children, and just really, really love God. Thanks for going on my spiritual journey with me.

The Old Timer tells us he's been a resident of Boerne since about 1965. He enjoys telling people what he doesn't like. When not bust'n punks he can be found feeding the ducks just off Main St. or wandering aimlessly in the newly expanded HEB. Despite his rough and sometimes brash persona, Old Timer is really a wise and thoughtful individual. If you can sort through the BS.

An insatiable curiosity for life and an incurable fascination with human behavior has forged in Paul Wilson a keen interest in helping people think about wise living. As a Life Coach, Paul offers professional mentoring to clients seeking greater personal fulfillment in their life. He currently serves as the Lead Pastor of Cibolo Creek Community Church in Fair Oaks Ranch, a faith community he began in 1996 to serve people who didn’t really like church. As artistowner of The Paul Wilson Studio, he also creates bronze sculptures for private and corporate collections. Paul and his wife, Charlotte, who make their home in Fair Oaks Ranch, are the proud parents of two teenage sons. If you’re interested in receiving daily thought-provoking insights about life and living, follow Paul on Twitter at @paulwilsonTX or Facebook at facebook.com/ paulwilsonTX.

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

PUBLISHER DEAREST EXPLORE READER, Things tend to overwhelm me.

I don’t mean that the situations of my life are always overwhelming to me, but I do mean that I am tempted to look at something that needs to be fixed or addressed, I scratch my head, and think “Sheesh – this looks way too complicated.” I’ve never been able to work on a car, or do basic plumbing work, or a myriad of other tasks simply because I stop before I even try. I wish that it wasn’t that way, but I am just a little defeatist about the whole thing: “Well, if I try to fix this leaky pipe, I’ll probably break it somehow behind the wall, flood the entire house, and end up homeless. Spending a few bucks on a licensed plumber is probably a good investment.” Never mind that I could PROBABLY figure it out – but I defeat myself before I even try.

I hate this trait, and am actively trying to overcome it. When I complain to a friend about a vehicle of mine that might be running rough, he’ll ask “Did you check the timing belt?” I’ll say, “Duh! Of course I checked that!” The reality is that I don’t even know where the timing belt is. Maybe I’m just lazy about stuff I can pay others to do. I don’t know, but dammit, it has to stop.

When I was a kid, I stumbled across an old guitar in the back of a closet at home. I unpacked it from its case, dusted it, and marveled at the simplicity of it. Its 6 strings running up the fret board. That’s it. There aren’t 88 keys, no massive drum kit, and no crazy electronics or settings. I remember thinking to myself, “This looks easy.” And then I tried to play a chord. It hurt my fingers, my coordination was clumsy, and even a clean note I played just sounded like a clean note – I wasn’t instantly transformed into Slash like I expected. The note was pure, but I had no understanding of how it was supposed to fit into a song. As in, where do I go from here?

So, in standard fashion, I got frustrated with it and set it aside. A few days later I found (further back in that same closet) a songbook for Jim Croce. Above each line of the song, a fully diagramed chord was illustrated. I knew the song “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and after a few clumsy attempts, I was actually slowly playing the song. I was able to take one clean note, and then put it with a second clean note, and sure enough, I was actually playing guitar.

From there I discovered a fact that most people don’t know: If you can learn 6 or 7 chords on the guitar, you can literally play millions upon millions of songs. All those songs you sing to on the radio that have a symphony behind them are really just playing 4 chords. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, the iconic Bob Dylan song is the same 3 chords played over and over. That’s the whole song. The entire George Strait catalog has maybe 6 chords in it. Your favorite praise songs are the same 6 chords. Differently arranged, with a slightly different beat, but millions of songs are built upon the premise of simplicity.

I think that’s why I like the guitar: it gives the impression of complexity and depth of knowledge, but with an amateur’s skill, almost anyone can enjoy the creation of music.

The guitar is capable of some ridiculously complex stuff; your favorite lead guitarists does some wildly complicated scales and exotic bar chords to compliment the song, but when it stripped down to its basics…it’s still the same damn 3 chords.

So the “problem” of learning guitar, while imposing at the onset, is surprisingly simple. I learned this by sheer luck. Thankfully I didn’t give up and become overwhelmed with a skill that ultimately was quite simple.

As for my plumbing woes or basic car repairs, I am not sure I’ll ever figure it out, but I can safely say that it’s probably due to a similar issue: I’m intimidated by it. I’m sure that there are a few techniques for basic plumbing repairs I could learn and VOILA! I would know how to fix 90% of my plumbing needs. Similarly, I’m sure that if I knew where that damned timing belt was, or how to monkey with spark plugs, I could probably keep my cars running. But I don’t and may never.

I don’t care enough to get really bent out of shape about my lack of knowledge in certain areas, but I have found the correlation between this lack of knowledge and trepidation in other areas: Relationally. Spiritually. Creatively.

The desire to grow relationally or spiritually can seem beyond imposing. I can’t change. My spouse can’t change. My heart can’t change. I can’t learn what I need to learn to improve the situation. So without trying, I throw in the towel and say, “This is too damn complicated,” and pout in the corner.

But is it?

We tend to think of things as large, imposing problems. “I can’t fix my marriage!” “I can’t grow as a Christian! I’ve tried for YEARS!” That might be true, but what are we trying? Are we trying to sit down and have a conversation with our spouse and have all of our hang-ups miraculously fixed? Do we think that we’ll say a magic prayer and then be John the Baptist himself?

What if we simply slowed down and worked on just being NICE to our spouse (just as I slowly learned ONE single chord)? And then when we learned how to be NICE, we snowballed that into being RESPECTFUL? And on and on and on…

It’s the same thing with our own spiritual growth. Take one small step. Say one small prayer. Repeat it, and practice it. Grow with it. And then add something else. Memorize a verse. Sing a song. And then let it branch out from there.

Is life as complicated as we make it? I’m here to say NO. I’m saying that we are all so hung up on the “chore” of learning and growth, and we’re intimidated by it. I am not a good guitar player, but I can do it. I can sing you a song and am better than many people (who can’t play at all). I have much to learn (which I may never do), but I did take the time to sit down and unpack what was necessary and learn the basics.

I think that if we all took the time to identify the “issue” and simply have the guts to take a step forward (no matter how small), so many of life’s problems become ones that just require your effort. Be nice. Seek kindness. Love when you can. Pray. Pray some more. Smile. Give of yourself. These are all pretty simple things that we are all capable of, that ultimately, will only move you forward, teach you some new skills, and change your life if you allow it to happen.

It only takes 6 chords to play millions of songs. It also only takes a smile and kind word to change the world.

Welcome to July. As we all celebrate our freedom this month, I pray that you also celebrate the freedom that can be found in your own life. May you seek blue skies, belly laughs, kindness and love. EXPLORE your heart and find what you can give. Then give more.

Smiling,

ben@hillcountryexplore.com

10

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

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JULY 2015

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11

JULY

Get out and enjoy the great Texas Hill Country!

The most comprehensive events calendar. Send submissions to info@hillcountryexplore.com BANDERA July 4, 11, 18, 25 Flying L Ranch Chuck Wagon Dinner Includes barbecue, wagon rides, roping lessons, hat and pistol branding, archery old-fashioned photos, a cowboy stage show, gunslingers, line dancing and other entertainment. Hours are 5:30–7:30 p.m. www.flyingl.com July 7 Cowboy Capital Opry Features Grand Old Opry-style entertainment hosted by Gerry and Harriet Payne. Silver Sage Community Center, 803 Buck Creek. www.silversagecorral.org July 25 National Day of the American Cowboy Watch real cowboys from South Texas ranches compete in events that showcases teamwork and skills used every day on the ranch in the evening. Also includes a horse race in the afternoon and other events at the Frontier Times Museum. Mansfield Park. www.frontier timesmuseum.org BOERNE July 7 Abendkonzerte Enjoy traditional German music and tales from Boerne’s historic past from the Boerne Village Band. Main Plaza, 100 N. Main. www.boerne-tx.gov/parks July 11-12 Market Days Hundreds of festive booths display everything from collectibles and nostalgia to modern innovations. Also enjoy food and live entertainment. Main Plaza, 100 N. Main. www.boerne marketdays.com July 11 Second Saturday Art and Wine Enjoy complimentary beverages and hors d’oeuvres with fantastic art in local galleries. Various locations. www.boerne-tx.gov/parks July 12 Moondance Concert Enjoy music under the oak trees and stars at the Cibolo Nature Center. 140 City Park Road. www.cibolo.org July 21 Abendkonzerte Enjoy traditional German music and tales from Boerne’s historic past from the Boerne Village Band. Main Plaza, 100 N. Main. www.boerne-tx.gov/parks BURNET July 25 Burnet Summer Concert Music Series Enjoy of a great evening of music by Whiskey Myers in the Texas Hill Country. Hours are 7:30–11 p.m. Haley Nelson Amphitheater, 301 Garden Trails Drive. www.cityofburnet.com DRIPPING SPRINGS July 4 Fourth of July Fire in the Sky Dripping Springs Ranch Park. www.dripping springstx.org July 12-14 Hill Country Cutting Horse Show Cutting horse competition showcases talents of horses and riders. Dripping Springs Ranch Park. www.drippingspringsranchpark.com FREDERICKSBURG July 3 First Friday Art Walk Tour fine art galleries offering special exhibits, demonstrations, refreshments and extended viewing hours the first Friday of every month. Various locations. www.ffawf.com July 4 USO-Style Hangar Dance Spend an evening dancing to the sounds of a 1940s-style

12

KERRVILLE July 3 First Friday Wine Share Meet new people and try new wines at this fun and friendly event at a different location each month. Bring one bottle of wine per two people and your own glass.

Begins at 6 p.m. www.storkcountry.com Big Band. Includes swing dance lessons and a costume contest. Pacific Showroom at the Hangar Hotel, 155 Airport Road. www.hangarhotel.com July 4-5 Pacific Combat Living History Program See a living-history demonstration of WWII weaponry, clothing, training and tactics of U.S. and Japanese military complete with tank and flame thrower. National Museum of the Pacific War Combat Zone. www.pacificwarmuseum.org July 17-19 Fredericksburg Trade Days Shop with more than 350 vendors in six barns, acres of antiques, a biergarten, live music and more. Seven miles east of town off U.S. 290. www.fbg-tradedays.com July 18 Night in Old Fredericksburg Fredericksburg’s original celebration of its German Heritage includes live music, food and other vendors. Gillespie County Fairgrounds. www.gillespiefair.com GRUENE July 12 Gospel Brunch with a Texas Twist Serves awe-inspiring gospel music coupled with a mouthwatering buffet from 10:30 a.m.–noon. Advance tickets recommended. Gruene Hall. www.gruenehall.com July 16 Come and Taste It A featured winemaker showcases three of its newest released, top-selling or hard-to-find wines, alongside a craft brew hand-picked by The Grapevine staff. Also enjoy live music and giveaways. Grapevine Texas Wine Bar. www.grapevineingruene.com July 18-19 Old Gruene Market Days Nearly 100 vendors offer uniquely crafted items and packaged Texas foods. Hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Gruene Historic District. www.gruenemarketdays.com JOHNSON CITY July 4 Spangle Dangle Parade and Celebration Begins at 10 a.m. with a parade around the courthouse.

Washer pitching begins at 1 p.m., and music and other activities at 5 p.m. The day ends with fireworks at dusk.

Blanco County Fairgrounds. www.spangledangle.com July 12 Art, Wine and Live Music Tour local galleries on the last Saturday of each month from 4–8 p.m. Taste Wine + Art Gallery, 213 N. Nugent. www.tastewineart.com July 25 Art Walk in Johnson City Tour local galleries on the last Saturday of each month from 4–8 p.m. Various locations on Main and Nugent streets. www.lbjcountry.com July 25-26 Market Days in Johnson City Enjoy food, artisans and other vendors in the heart of Texas Wine Country on the fourth weekend of each month. Hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.–4 p.m. Sunday. Memorial Park. www.lbj country.com

July 4 Hill Country Auto Clubs Open Car Show Kerr County Courthouse, 700 Main St. www.hillcountryautomobileclub.com July 4 Kerrville’s Fourth on the River Enjoy live music, family activities, food and vendor booths before fireworks begin around 9:15 p.m. Louise Hays Park, 202 Thompson Drive. www.kerrvilles4th.org LLANO July 4 Rock’n Fireworks Show Features fireworks over the Llano River. Begins at 8:30 p.m. Badu Park. www.llanochamber.org MARBLE FALLS July 4 Community Fireworks Display Lakeside Park. www.ci.marble-falls.tx.us July 12 Founders Day This community celebrates its founding in 1887 with music, exhibits, food, stories and demonstrations of skills from the past. Falls on the Colorado Museum. www.falls museum.org July 17-18 Marble Falls Rodeo Includes rodeo events, a downtown parade and dance.

Charles Taylor Arena. www.marblefalls.org WIMBERLEY July 1-4 70th Annual VFW Rodeo This 70th annual event offers live entertainment and nightly rodeo action including bull riding, tie-down calf roping, bareback bronc riding, steer wrestling, team roping, women’s breakaway roping, women’s barrel racing, calf scrambles and mutton bustin’. Fireworks light up the sky on July 4. Wimberley Valley Veterans Park. www.texasvfw.net July 3 Independence Day Parade On Ranch to Market 12. www.wimberley.org July 4 Wimberley Lions Market Day Stroll along a shaded path to more than 475 booths filled with a wide variety of arts, crafts, antiques, gift items, clothing and more. Wimberley Lions field, 601 F.M. 1325. www.ShopMarketDays.com July 10-August 2 “Catch Me If You Can” Presented by The Wimberley Players. Shows are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m.

Wimberley Playhouse, 450 Old Kyle Road. www.wimberleyplayers.org July 11 Second Saturday Gallery Trail More than a dozen galleries offer wine, snacks and art displays from 4-7 p.m. Wimberley Square. www.wimberleyarts.org July 16 Susanna’s Kitchen Coffeehouse Concert Series Features locally and nationally known musicians. Wimberley United Methodist Church. www.facebook.com/pages/ Susannas-Kitchen/184258808258085

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

TROUBADOUR

A LONG TRIP

By Rene Villanueva

I’m going to tell you about a trip when our friend, Jack, drove the three of us through a long western night, determined to get us all home in one 35-hour go. The first hours were the easiest.

“I used to think you get what you put in.” She was looking back at me again and I lowered the TV volume to listen. “But things aren’t balanced, are they? Things aren’t going to be fair for you.”

No matter how tough or grueling a tour is, I always get a boost when we leave our final hotel. So it’s nothing to pass 8 - 12 hours burning pavement and trading playlists on our phones. But at the 16th hour, as we just barely approach the halfway point of the trip, that feeling turns into something else. Some new kind of exhaustion. ‘Cause I know time is the only thing keeping me from home.

I waited for her to continue as she looked me over, but she wanted me to share too.

“Why don’t you get some sleep? You can rotate back in the morning,” Abe said, jumping up from the backseat next to me on the middle bench.

“Every job has its politics... that’s why you gotta enjoy what you do, right?” I smiled, turning the volume up again for the bang of timpanis. “If we weren’t having fun, that’d be a different story.”

He caught me in a bit of a daze, lost in the green numbers of the radio. “Did you rest?” I asked, crawling to the back.

He shook his head, “Enough. I’m ready to get driving, though.”

I fumbled over in the dark: clearing the bench, taking off my shoes. I could feel the tunnel vision hitting me. To make it worse, all the caffeine had worn off and my body was coming down.

Looping around America, the band had done six weeks of heavy touring. Up the east, then west, through the north, occasionally popping up into Canada, we finished with a night in Seattle and one in Vancouver. So why we decided to do this drive straight through, I’m still not sure.

“I don’t know, the band’s doing alright.”

“You won’t always be,” she said, understated like she was talking to herself. “I hear stories... You boys are talented, but that’s not always enough...talent... I worry.”

“You can’t feed a family with that René. You won’t be ready.” Such a motherly thing to say. I remember the way my heart sank a little.

The van slowly swung into a turn, as we slowed down for an exit. There was a jolt at the stop sign.

“A quick bathroom stop if anyone needs it,” Jack whispered, unsure if I was sleeping, whipping the van into a spot under an orange light.

I kept still as the guys left the van running, locking me inside. And for a moment the van was quiet. I wanted to finish that dream. ‘I am happy,’ I wanted to tell her. But my mind had other places to go.

But, like a good dream, most of it seemed to fade with only flashes and fragments remaining. Good thoughts for another day, then all I wanted was silence.

The wind cut in over the water hitting my chest. I kept my jaw clenched tight, breathing between my teeth, wishing I had brought a jacket or a least a long sleeve.

3:00am-5:00am

“I want to stay.” Mom stood at the bank of the Guadalupe, in the smooth gravel, the ice-cold water barely hitting her feet. “Just a little longer. We don’t have to eat here.”

I fell in and out of sleep as we slipped further away from the Vancouver, the last club; a really nice Holiday Inn that we didn’t get to enjoy; the mountains; the tall pacific trees that are nothing like the brush of Texas; the desert, going south and south.

I closed my eyes.

The radio, the guys talking stories of future plans, the noise of the road, it all hung distantly on my consciousness, pulling me awake.

I buried my face deeper into the back of the bench, feebly hiding away so I could try to sleep. I was tired. Really tired. I felt the weight of sleep taking over me, pouring down the back of my brain, down into my chest, flooding my lungs with its gravity.

The other guys need noise to help them drive. You don’t complain about things like that. It’s an unspoken rule. I’d rather them blast the speakers then have us all fall asleep while driving. We’ve had our close calls before and I don’t care to relive that again. So I just listen to the road, slow my breathing and drift...

“Are you... are you happy with this, the music?” Mom was reclined in a worn black leather massage station she’d bought for Dad many Christmases before, in her corner of the bedroom, two steps from her pillow; a place to watch TV, look out the window, and drift into a nap when nausea or insomnia kicked in. “Of course.”

Why was I remembering this moment? Lying on her bed, watching For A Few Dollars More, she had fallen asleep early on. I hadn’t noticed her waking up. “It’s not easy, but it’s still fun,” I said, watching the desert and the steel eyes looking back at me. “I used to think,” she started, then stopped herself at the sounds of gunfire and cowboy groans.

Her head rolled to the window. Mom never liked violence. It wasn’t so much the killing, she told me, but the way he smiled afterwards that bugged her.

There was a bump in the road that jolted my body and laughing from the front of the car. The crackling foil of an empty gas station snack. The engine let open, pushing harder as we started rolling uphill. And I fought to keep level on the bench then a hum like the rollers in her chair.

‘Am I happy?’

The sound swelled like the rising of sustained strings. A breath. A wave of violins. And down the road, bells breaking across the desert. The hum of her rollers gliding back and forth against her back.

The morning tinted by soft blue curtains broke around the floral scarf covering her head. Mom never changed for me. Her hair was gone. She had lost weight. Her skin had turned from olive to a pale white but it only made the green of her eyes stronger. Those were only superficial things. She was still as bright as ever.

14

This. This memory. A weekend drive. We hadn’t been ready for this trip. The whole family off on a whim, and the weather was cold, much colder than we planned. We had wanted to go tubing, but the water was low and the wind was powerful.

“You might think right now that work matters, I know we’ve told you boys that, but it’s the people. Of all the things I remember,” she continued, “of all the things I want to remember, I never go back to my job. Sometimes I’m sorry I let it take so much of my time,” Mom kept her eyes on the drifting river.

“Mom,” I walked up beside her, looking back, Jaime and Dad were at a fire pit working on getting a fire going.

The river was dancing with the sunlight, turning, jumping quickly on itself.

“You might think right now that work matters, I know we’ve told you boys that, but it’s the people.” Mom took a step into the cold water, then another. “That’s what I want you to keep. You should always do what makes you happy. You were right.” She went deeper in, the water hitting at her knees. “You should make others happy.”

I threw off my shoes, stepping in after her. And the river was so cold, so brilliant, instantly jumping up my body. I wanted to get out of the water. I wanted to head back.

“Mom,” I called, but she was deep in her thought. The river felt like it was moving me away. Or pulling everything away from me.

The song grew louder. The dancing lights flickered faster.

“Mom.” I thought looking up at her in slow motion, she was like water, she was light.

She dove in the air. A slender flicker. Suspended above the river. Like all sound held on one note, waiting for her to land. And the river pulling me down and down.

“New Mexico, and coming up on sunrise,” Abe said from the driver’s seat. “Who’s ready for breakfast?”

I sat up on the back bench. Feeling like the dream was still in my head, but every second, disappearing.

Jaime flipped through the GPS menu looking for a food stop, while Jack searched Yelp on his phone.

The highway had tapered off into a narrow, winding two-lane stretch. The sky was a dark purple but the daylight was coming, splashing the rocks with the orange glow of dawn.

We were getting closer to home now. Only 14 hours to go.

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

JULY 2015

www.hillcountryexplore.com

15

Rehabilitate in Boerne, One Step Closer to Home

Cibolo Creek provides accommodations

in the heart of Boerne, with individualized therapy programs that enable one to return home quickly. By receiving rehabilitation services close to home, family and friends are able to visit often and with ease.

Cibolo Creek stands apart by:

• Being the most contemporary rehabilitation facility in Boerne • Providing physical, occupational, speech, and vital stim therapy in a modern and innovative setting under the guidance of highly trained and experienced therapists • Offering both inpatient and outpatient therapy services to improve one’s overall strength and mobility • Facilitating admissions 24/7

1440 River Road • Boerne, Texas 78006 • 830.816.5095

C ibolo C reek H ealtH . org

16

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

Premier Custom Home Builder in the Texas Hill Country For over 40 years, KCN has been building beautiful custom homes of all sizes in Boerne, Comfort, Bandera, Castroville and throughout the Texas Hill Country.

Our reputation for honesty and integrity, combined with our commitment to deliver excellent quality, expert craftsmanship, and customer service, has afforded us the opportunity to build many long lasting relationships with our clients. In fact, we have constructed two or more jobs for 31 different customers.

830-816-5202 920 East Blanco Road Boerne, TX 78006 www.kcnbuilders.com

JULY 2015

www.hillcountryexplore.com

17

ART OF

BY KRISTINE DURAN

There’s a tangible difference between good customer service and pure, good-hearted business. Frank Ritchie, owner of Ritchie Automotive, is the local mascot for the latter. In eight years, his Christ-centered business has risen above the local competition by simply lending a helping hand where it is needed.

As a mechanic at Boerne Collision, Frank began meeting with a local Christian men’s group every Saturday morning. One of the group’s members surprised Frank one morning by stating, “God’s been putting it on my heart to buy you a business and you can pay me back when you start making money.” Taken aback, Frank laughed, but his friend insisted, “You’re a good man of God and you follow your faith, and I think it would be a good service for you to provide to the community.” So, the two were off in hopes of finding Frank’s future business. Some offers were made in town, even on some shops that weren’t for sale, but nothing had been set in stone.

A year passed by and his friend became increasingly ill, causing the hunt for a business to remain on the backburner. Another member of the group approached Frank and said, “Well I think God is putting it on my heart now to get you a business.”

Stunned at this second opportunity, Frank told his wife, “Obviously God wants this. Opportunities like this don’t come every day and this is twice.” As he had recently felt a calling to become a minister, he sought council from his pastor who assured him that he could open the shop and be a minister in his business. In 2007, an offer was made and Ritchie Automotive was born. Frank says, “My wife was a fulltime student and I was only one making any income, but we just put our trust into God and that he would provide.”

From its inception, Ritchie Automotive was built to serve Christ above all. “That’s what we’re called to do as people and that’s who we are called to be as Christians. So that’s how I set up my business,” Frank says. From the moment you walk in, you will hear Christian music playing, read scripture all throughout the shop, and overhear bible study during lunch. The shop’s slogan displayed on company invoices, business cards, shop doors, and the backs of their shirts is Colossians 3:23 “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.” And Frank strives to embody that message in everything they do. “Whether it’s replacing a spark plug or replacing an engine, we’re going to do that to glorify God. If we can do that every day, while fixing cars and helping people, then it’s been a good day.”

If there is an opportunity to save some money for a customer, he will talk them out of extra repairs, unlike most automotive shops. And it is Frank’s mission to show those in need the “love of God” whenever he gets the chance. “Does your car need repairs?

Maybe. Is it a matter of life and death? No. If it comes down to choosing between feeding your kids or fixing your car, feed your kids and we’ll fix your car.”

Obviously, Frank knows that he can’t fix everyone’s car for free, although he wishes he could. But his intent is to give someone a hand up, not a handout. He says, “If I do $10,000 worth of work a year that I’ve done expecting payment later, and I only get $5,000 back, oh well. The good that we do outweighs the financial gain. Plus, 90% of the people we provide those services for honor their debt.”

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From a business standpoint, financing a number of customer repairs each month doesn’t seem profitable, but Frank doesn’t let that opinion affect the way he runs his shop. “We do a lot of stuff for free, but for me it’s about building relationships.”

Walking into Ritchie Automotive is unlike most shops, where the customer is just a number. Frank’s team is going to talk to the customer and figure out their situation to determine which services are dire and which ones can stand to wait a few months.

“Maybe you’re a college student who has no money. Maybe you’re a single mom that has four kids. So is air conditioning a must? Not necessarily. Are breaks a must? Absolutely. We’ll say you take care of the breaks and we’ll take care of the air conditioning and you can make payments.”

He may own the business, but Frank will be the first to admit that he is not a businessman. “There’s no real format or formula, we just follow the Holy Spirit.” And that mentality is not only towards customers, but also towards the team that has made the business what it is today. Since the shop opened, only two employees have left. One joined the Air Force and the other moved closer to family in Oklahoma. Frank never says that the guys work for him, he says they work with him, and they appreciate that he looks at them as family.

On top of the services he provides to the community through automotive services, Frank also gives back in many other areas as well. From the get-go, his business sales have been tied to the church. He says, “God blessed me with great people in my life to help me get it started and he has continued to watch over me and make this business a success. It’s about taking that little bit that’s left over and giving it back.” Frank and his wife are also very involved in the community with local high school sports, Hill Country Daily Bread Ministries, YMCA functions, and Frank is now an associate pastor at Spring Creek Community Church. Frank’s motive is to make a difference in the world any way he can. “Any profit that comes out of this business is God’s profit and we need to be good stewards of that. That’s how we as a business can not only help the community but also serve Christ,” He says.

As for the future of Ritchie Automotive, Frank is content with the way things are.

The shop is busy, the parking lot is full, and there’s not much more he could ask for.

“My guys get paid, I get paid, everybody’s paid; it’s not about becoming a millionaire,” Frank says. “We don’t measure success by how much money we make, we measure success by showing Christ to someone every day. When it becomes a business, then I’ll quit.”

Ritchie Automotive 29059 I-10 Boerne, TX 78009 830-755-8550

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

Frank Richie, Owner, Ritchie Automotive

JULY 2015

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EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

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HISTORY

HISTORY OF BOERNE: PArt 5 Welcome to another installment in the continuing Saga of Boerne, Texas, in which we’re going back over the whole, entire history of our fair town. You can go back to the beginning at www.hillcountryexplore.com, and under the archived issues tab see March, April, May and June...yes, it’s taking me a while to unwind but there’s so much good stuff! This month we’ve just come out of the Civil War, certainly not unscathed but with our resolve intact.

The bloody Civil War, the deadliest still in American history, was over. Texas, as part of the defeated CSA, was under martial law, along with the rest of the southern states, and life was brutally hard in the aftermath. Property tax receipts in the newly-formed Kendall County fell fifty-two percent during the war years, most of that drop from losses in farm acreage, land and livestock values, with only fifteen percent of the loss due to a loss of human chattel, since there hadn’t been many slave-owners in the county. But most, if not all, of the slaves that had been owned here had ‘belonged’ to Boerne people. And Boerne, for the most part, had backed the Confederacy during the war, while most of the other towns stayed loyal to the United States. It was an uncomfortable, bitter time, and tensions ran very high.

All over Kendall County, people were becoming oddly silent about the late war and the parts they had played in it. Among the German-Texan settlers who’d fought on the Confederate side there was no joy of men coming home from a fight but only a bitter resolution, a tight-lipped feeling of having done what they had to do, now just leave it alone. There was rancor, too, in the hearts of those who had remained loyal to the Union, who had been beaten down and hunted by the Confederate guard, who’d been prey to the hangebund – the ‘hanging gangs’ who’d rained down misery on the abolitionists- who felt deep betrayal at the hands of those whom they’d considered their friends and neighbors. There were also grim material hardships in a defeated land where their money had disappeared or become worthless, their produce and stock sucked up into the coffers of the war machine, their fields and farms untended for years as they went off to fight in a war with which they didn’t, at heart, agree. All the factors for a wildfire were present, and Boerne and the embattled hill country sat uneasy and simmering under the baking sun, just waiting for the spark that might touch it off.

By Marjorie Hagy

adjectives- has an emotional and physical effect on me. Racism and hatred in all their forms make me physically ill. But my purpose in writing this column at all is to present our true history in all its ugliness or beauty. I called out a bit of absolutely false history in these pages last month, and just as I felt I had some kind of responsibility as your local historian to tell you that story was a lie, so I feel like covering up some terrible times in our shared history would also be a huge disservice. These are the things that happened, good or bad, shameful or heroic; all these elements went into making us who we are, and Boerne what it is, and there’s no good at all served by trying to pretty them up and make them more palatable. There’s gonna be some more of that kind of talk in this article, and I’m just going to go ahead and report it, and hope you get how important it is to keep the record straight.)

Here’s another thing about that time in history, this is interesting to keep in mind: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had just ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, less than twenty years before the time of Reconstruction, and that was still definitely an issue in the post-Civil War period in Texas. In case any of you don’t remember what that particular war was all about, it was this: when Texas joined the United States in 1845, Mexico was pissed because they still thought of all this territory as part of Mexico, in spite of the nine years this state spent as an independent republic, and they didn’t want it being annexed to the US. And there was more to it than that, of course; Mexico wasn’t quite the consummate villain they were painted, a lot of American imperialism and Manifest Destiny was mixed up in it and the US was after California too, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, but hey, I’m not here to re-fight that one. At any rate, in this treaty that everyone signed to end the conflict the US made all kinds of promises that they weren’t exactly emphatic in keeping, and a lot of Mexican people who’d been living in what was now Texas were feeling (and were actually being) cheated out of what was rightfully theirs and being treated as second-class (or worse) citizens. And in those dayssigh, as in these- white people weren’t overly particular about who had been born here and who was here legally and all that, they just painted everyone of a certain heritage with the same broad brush. It was a powderkeg. It was a sun-burnt prairie lying under a lightning-hot sky. It was a fire waiting to happen.

And on August 29, 1868, the spark was lit.

Race relations were absolutely rotten during this time. A whole lot of defeated Confederates were looking for a scapegoat, and the African-American population all across the south was an easy target. Boerne and the hill country didn’t have a very large black population but there were some black citizens- according to the census there were one hundred and one African-Americans living in Kendall County in 1870, most if not all of them in and around the town of Boerne. John O’Grady, Irish transplant, inn-keeper and leading citizen of Boerne, wrote in a report on Kendall County for the 1867 Texas Almanac, of his and other locals’ disdain for their neighbors of color, ‘The negroes since emancipation are impudent, their general behavior scandalous and their numbers diminishing.’

John Bickel was a widower, an older man whom contemporary reports called ‘an old, unoffending, industrious farmer’, who lived on his 160-acre place (four miles outside the village of Boerne out East 46 way) with his teenage daughter Katherine and twelve yearold son Henry. Also, possibly living with the Bickels in their tiny, two-room dog-run style log cabin, was a younger man named Henry Spangenberg with his three year-old child.

John Bickel and his son, along with friend Henry Spangenberg, had all been in the field all that day shearing John’s herd of sheep (remember, George Kendall had introduced sheep ranching to Boerne, and it had become the county’s principal industry). There was a whole crew of hired hands both white and Hispanic out on the Bickel place that day to help, and the men had lined up at the end of the day to collect their pay which John handed out from the leather wallet marked with his initials. After the men had been paid and the work was done, the family finally sat down together around the fireplace to eat the supper Katherine had made.

(As I typed out that quote, I actually felt a little sick. I hate recording those kinds of sentiments because they make me so horribly uncomfortable and sad. The way in which people, otherwise possibly wonderful, intelligent, kind people, spoke about and treated people of color in those days and, God knows, even now- although I retract the positive

They may have been talking together, John and Henry of the day’s work or the crops or the weather or the things that men talked about, while Katherine cooed and cajoled the Spangenberg child into a few bites of her meal. Then a voice called John outside, and as he walked out to his porch the sun turned black and the demons of hell were

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EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

let loose on this family. John Bickel was struck down with a piece of stovewood and his throat slashed on that twilit August evening. His friend Henry Spangenberg was close behind him, and was able to struggle with the attackers, but in the end was also slaughtered. Young Miss Katherine Bickel was chased into the house yard where she was also slain, as was the tiny Spangenberg baby. As for Henry Bickel, who’d been in his tiny sleeping loft when the trouble broke out, he was able to jump out the window to the ground and ran for his life, eventually hiding himself in the branches of a grandfather oak where he spent surely the longest, worst night of his young life. In the morning twelve year-old Henry left his hiding place and made his way to the nearby Zoeller place where he told of the massacre, and he and ‘Old Man’ Zoeller lit out for town to fetch the sheriff, at that time AH Barter. Barter and several other Boerne men went back out to the Bickel place and gathered up the bodies of the victims, all of them ‘mutilated in the most horrible manner’, and brought their poor remains back to town where they were buried in the brand-new cemetery, on land donated by Boerne founding father Adam Vogt.

Mexican horse-stealing gang, and somehow those suspected horse thieves got all mixed up in their anger and rage and grief with those who’d mercilessly slaughtered the Bickels and Spangenbergs. The men of Boerne, the pioneers, the leading citizens, those sworn to uphold justice in this tiny frontier town, went on a rampage, they dragged Hispanic husbands, fathers and sons out of their homes to beat them mercilessly in the street- men they knew and worked with, men against whom they had no evidence, men who screamed their innocence and terror, men whose wives and mothers begged for them to be spared. The horse thieves were believed to have used arrowheads and other things to throw suspicion off themselves and onto the specter of Indian raiders, so any home in which relics were found- feathers, a native blanket, a bowl- were torn apart, their residents brutalized. Also targeted in the spree were Mexicans who had ‘been staying around Boerne without any visible means of support and never working [therefore] the supposition was that they were the prime factors in the daily occurrences of horse stealing.’ This had become that raging wildfire.

Stop here for a bit – the custom of the time was for country people to be buried on their own land, and not in the village cemetery. Indeed, the family that later bought the Bickel place are buried not too far from the still-standing little cabin where the families were murdered. But on this blistering hot August day, Sheriff Barter made the decision to bring these sad remains four miles over rough road to be interred in the town cemetery. Why? I believe it was so that the townspeople could see what was done, and become incensed and whipped into a vengeful frenzy. And that’s exactly what happened. ‘Many people gathered around the place where the slain people were,’ reads a report of the time, ‘And after they were buried a party was made upon the spot to take the trail of the murderers and punish them, whoever they might be, as soon as found.’ To punish them as soon as found. Their intention was not to bring these men to trial. This had become a lynch mob. The sight of those four bodies, piteous in their wounds, taken from the blood-smeared wagon bed and lowered into the earth, acted upon the people gathered in the cemetery, and if indeed the purpose was to stir them to vengeful action, the purpose was served.

Now young Henry, sole survivor of the destruction of his family, who had ‘[run] so far and exerted himself to such an extent...that his lungs were affected, from which he never entirely recovered but [spoke] with a wheezing noise,’ had been able to gasp out his description of the demons who’d committed the atrocity: they were men, he said, who’d been in his father’s fields the day before, shearing sheep alongside them. He said there had been six or seven men, mostly ‘Mexicans’ and, he thought, two white men. The detail about the white men, however, was soon forgotten and discarded when a saloon-keeper in town- quite possibly our own August Staffel – told the sheriff he had had a rough crew of Mexicans drinking in his bar the night before, and that they’d been paying from a leather purse ms robed with the initials JB. This clue, which would come to be known as the ‘Bickel purse’, was the smoking gun. Henry Bickel, who must’ve known his father’s wallet as well as he knew his father’s own hands, said that the last place he had known it to be after John Bickel stood paying his men out of it the previous afternoon, was in the table drawer at the house, with fifty-five dollars in gold inside. So the posse set out to catch themselves some Mexicans. And, I believe, they weren’t any too particular which Mexicans they caught- if they got the ones who’d committed the murder, so much the better.

Madness – literal, chaotic, violent madness – gripped them as these otherwise quiet, peaceful men of Boerne went on the rampage. There had been rumors abroad of a

JULY 2015

These men had become maniacs, indiscriminate in their frenzy, punishing the entire Hispanic community of Boerne for horse thieving, for the massacre, for idling around, for being Mexican, for being there. At some point, the fact of the murder, devastating and abrupt and brutal as it was, had loosened other dark forces in the hearts of these otherwise ordinary men. Maybe the bitterness of those Civil War years, maybe the harsh realities of life after the war’s end, the poverty, the scarcity of almost everything they needed, the heavy hand of martial law handed down by Federal troops- maybe all those dark, angry things boiled over into this rioting, into this wholescale hatred visited on their Hispanic neighbors. Everything that had oppressed them, that had taken the heart out of them, that had ground and worn them down – they were striking out at all those forces beyond their control, beyond their ken, and there was hell to pay in Boerne those nightmarish days and nights in August.

In the Freie Presse fuer Texas, the German language Texas Free Press newspaper of September 5, 1868 – a week after the bloodbath at the Bickel farm – at the end of an account of the murders was tacked this statement: ‘(later report) From Boerne

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comes the news that the murderers of the Bickel family have been captured.’ But as the breaking news report continued, the lines blurred even more. The next sentence read: ‘Subsequent information is that 6 Mexicans were found hanging to a tree on the Cibolo.

They were not the murderers of the Bickel family, but were connected with the band of thieves and cut-throats [sic] that is harassing the upper country.’ Hang on- they were NOT the murderers? So who were they? Why were they hanged? Why does the paper report that the murderers had been captured but not elaborate? Certainly nobody else was ever brought to trial for the murders of the Bickels and Spangenbergs; in fact, the whole incident was hurriedly forgotten, as if all the white citizens of Boerne had agreed never to speak of it again. The Free Press merely goes on: ‘The supposition of their guilt became a reality in the minds of the people when the loafing vagabonds were caught making arrowheads. These had been used by them occasionally to kill cattle, with the object of giving the impression that Indians had been around.’ So- were they hanged for horse and cattle thieving, or were they the men who killed the Bickels and Spangenbergs? Was this justice? Were the murderers of the Bickel and Spangenberg families among those six men on the hanging tree? What happened that bloody, brutal week in Boerne?

Texas was, of course, under martial law under the rules of Reconstruction, and word of the lynching and the outrages visited on the Mexican people of Boerne got to the United States soldiers stationed in San Antonio, a squad of whom came to town and arrested about two dozen men. How did word get to the Federales all the way in San Antonio? ‘[M]any of the men concerned in the raid on the Mexicans were arrested on affidavits, furnished it is supposed by Mexican women, none of whom were killed.’ It is nothing short of a miracle that these Hispanic wives and mothers, in 1868, somehow made their way to the federal garrison in downtown San Antonio, and spoke out against their attackers. They are the only group of people, besides poor young Henry Bickel, whose behavior during the whole sorry affair stands up to scrutiny, whose actions were brave and courageous, and they were surely women of determination. The accused men were held in custody in San Antonio for about two weeks, ‘but when the trial came up there was so much conflicting testimony among the witnesses against the men that they were all turned loose and allowed to go back home.’ Almost certainly the women were bullied and harassed into retracting their statements, everyone else who might have supported their accusations had suddenly developed amnesia, and no one was ever punished for the deadly raid on the Hispanic community, nor for the lynching deaths of the six men hanged, nor, in fact, for the murders of the Bickels and Spangenbergs.

In fact, a blanket of forgetfulness was almost immediately pulled down over the whole incident. Red herrings were dragged over the trail- there was mention of a nameless man in San Antonio who’d owed John Bickel money; it started getting around that Indians had been behind the massacre; people suddenly forgot where they had been at the time; nobody liked to talk about it much. Henry Bickel, that traumatized twelve year-old who hid in a tree all night and who would never breathe easily again, died in 1917 at the age of sixty-three and was buried beside the mass grave of his slain

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people, and some time later a flat stone was placed on the plot but even that got the details wrong- ‘Killed in Indian massacre in 1867. Henry Bickel was 12 at the time of the massacre and escaped to neighboring Zoeller farm. He was buried in 1917.’ By virtue of the date on the stone, that mistaken 1867, the grave made it onto the historical marker at the front gate as one of the first burials in the cemetery, which it simply wasn’t. The massacre that stole the lives of four people in a few bloody, brutal minutes, that broke the young Henry and left him struggling for breath for the rest of his life – that led to the murders of at least six others and the vicious assault on the Hispanic people of Boerne, happened in 1868, by which time there were plenty of people buried in the cemetery.

And it wasn’t an Indian massacre, of course – it was a robbery, a terrible, heartbreaking tragedy that tore the little village apart, committed by neighbors against their neighbors, by people who worked side by side and must have believed they could trust one another. The story changed so much in the passing down, naturally or by design, that even the stone that marks the grave of the first victims tells a different tale from the terrible things that really happened.

Boerne, Texas, wasn’t settled only by white European pioneers. Those Hispanics- both the Tejanos and Mexican citizens who still lived here from the time when the Cibolo Valley belonged to Mexico- they also worked to build this little town from scratch, as did the African-American settlers here, both slave and free, and their blood and labor and dreams are part of the fabric of this town just as surely as those of the German-Texans, the Anglos, the Irish and French settlers. This is a place where people from many different lands and ethnicities and backgrounds and colors and beliefs all came together to create a truly American town from a few acres of hard-won wilderness.

In the 1870s, all these different people were about to be joined by one more ethnic group. We don’t tend to think of our British neighbors across the pond as quite the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, fleeing from oppression and all that, but of course that’s just what George Washington and all those other guys had been doing back a hundred or so years earlier, and another influx of English were about to recreate the earlier British invasion right here in Boerne.

So William Gilliam Kingsbury- whose mom, I don’t know, maybe she didn’t catch the William Gilliam thing or maybe she thought it was funny- he was this guy who was born in Oneida County, New York, and who made a pretty good living up there as a dentist, had a wife and family and the whole thing. But by 1846 he’d been hearing so much about Texas, all this free land and wide-open country and adventure, cowboys and Indian fighting and all that, that he hauled off and moved down here with his family, and they settled in San Antonio, while William promptly went off to the Mexican-American War with the Texas Rangers. Kingsbury went as a civilian dentist, but he still got injured eighteen times, once a slice to the face from a Mexican saber that left him marked for life. Perhaps having had his fill of adventure of that sort for a while, he finally came on back home and started being a plain old dentist again, and in the the1870s moved with his family to Boerne. He bought the old Johann Menger place south of town, on the

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

creek named for Menger, and Kingsbury would improve upon the place he called ‘Molar Ranch’, one of his additions being a tower he built as an aid in defending his place against Indian attacks. Later this place would be sold to the Schumard family, and later still to WalMart, and those few relics that still remain are the last vestiges of Kingsbury’s Molar Ranch.

But he didn’t retire. No, Kingsbury had a whole other career still to go, and it started because he was just in love with his adopted home in Texas. He was writing and telling people about it like a mad man- seriously, he was a very prolific writer, doing pamphlets, brochures, newspaper articles and books, singing the praises of the hill country and urging others to come to Texas, and he was a colorful and very active speaker as well.

This creative output of Kingsbury’s eventually caught the eye of the Texas governor who appointed Kingsbury commissioner of immigration to the state; in that capacity he kept an office in St Louis for several years, encouraging immigration among residents of other southern United States.

In those early train days, the railroad companies all owned vast tracts of land in very sparsely populated places in the country, and were interested in settling towns in order to create customers to travel by rail out to the city lots the railroad would sell to them. Get it? It was a win-win for the railroad to get people settled on their land and quickly, and all mixed up in the whole Manifest Destiny thing, in populating the US from the Atlantic to the Pacific so nobody else could get their hands on all that empty land. Kingsbury and his enthusiastic descriptions of the beautiful country and the wonderful pioneer life around here caught the attention of those railroads, and soon he also represented several of them in Europe, including the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad- later the Southern Pacific. He kept an immigration office in London from 1875 through 1884, calling himself a Texas land and emigration agent.

Two editions of his pamphlet A Description of South-Western and Middle Texas were published in London in 1878 and 1883, and Kingsbury is credited with having convinced thousands of Britishers to immigrate to Texas, many of them to Boerne. There is even a town named for Kingsbury In Guadalupe County.

So the English settlers began to appear in Boerne, and before long there was a whole little English colony here, many of them settling in close proximity to one another out west of town, down today’s Hwy 46 towards Bandera and the Upper Balcones Road, out that way. One of the new settlers was a fellow by the name of William Hughes, Willy, who, when he was eighteen years old and despite the fact that he’d been born into wealth and privilege in England, shipped himself over to America in the cheapest way possible, in the steerage hold of a ship. Remember, these ocean-going vessels carrying human cargo to their new lives had been called ‘reeking hulks with the chance to drown’. Anyway, young Willy Hughes finally fetched up in San Antonio and the first thing he did was apprentice himself to a sheep rancher who agreed to teach Willy everything he needed to know about sheep ranching in a three-month crash course.

Once Willy got that knowledge under his belt, the next thing he did was buy himself one hundred and sixty acres of prime hill country land right outside of Boerne. Over the next twenty-some years, the Hughes place would grow to include 20,000 acres, from Boerne to Pipe Creek, and Willy would establish a post office to serve the sixty-odd people who lived in his community, which he named Hastings after his father.

their infant baby. John was an architect by trade but the whole Howard family was surrounded by an air of mystery; they received an enigmatic monthly remittance check from England, rumored to be from the estate of no less a personage than the Duke of Norfolk. The Howards established their own family seat on three hundred and twenty acres south of town on the Old San Antonio Road, and the old rock home in which they lived still stands, next to the cemetery the Howards lie buried in, but not for long if the current owners have their way and the City doesn’t intervene. There are plans afoot to demolish the old homestead, surely a travesty and a horror.

Some of the other English family names were Clark, Gray, Grogan and Guthrie, Homer, Johns (as in Johns Road), King (as in the Kuhlmann/King historical house), Molesworth, Oughten, Perrin, Stephenson, Taylor, Upham, Whitworth and Wilkins, many of whose descendants still live and thrive in town.

And Boerne being Boerne, and people just naturally being people (Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple said there’s a lot of human nature in all of us,) everybody didn’t just get along and welcome the newcomers into their midst. In the first place, Boerne of the 1870s- and in fact, Boerne up into the 1970s when my family got here- was a tight little intimate, closed-off society, and these people were Different. Also, the people of Boerne and Kendall County had just been through a long period of suspicion and mistrust, of betrayal and animosity and bitterness, so during the post-Civil War period they were probably doubly and triply insular. Something else that drove a wedge between Old Boerne and New Boerne (wow, some things never do change,) were the two groups’ feelings on the issue of education and language.

School in Boerne, from the original private school taught by Professor Karl Dienger, to the first public school led by Herman Toepperwein, was taught in the German language, and presumably the few children who didn’t speak German either learned it or got their lessons elsewhere- I suspect the latter, that kids like the Kendalls probably had private tutors in English and French, but then again I really can’t prove that. Anyway, Willy Hughes, along with four other English immigrants, promptly established what they called the Boerne Academy Commercial College, an Englishlanguage school in Hughes’ Hastings, which made a point of holding class in English.

The German-Texan Boerneites- who had been here first; who, they felt, had done all the back-breaking groundwork to put together this pretty little village only to have these snoots come along with their disapproval and reap all the benefits- probably had some strong opinions about what these johnny-come-lately Englishmen could do with their school, and the 1889-90 Hastings school prospectus fired back at them: ‘Hitherto Boerne has suffered as regards material progress from the want of academic advantages, and an institute where a sound English education could be obtained at reasonable rates...’ it read rather acidly. ‘The classes,’ sniped the British, ‘are conducted in the English language.’

So in the years following the Great Bloody War, Boerne struggled along, tried to repair the damage and rebuild, but in their bitterness and anger they lashed out and tore each other down again, and rained fresh misery on their neighbors. It was a dark time, this decade or so, an unfriendly, hopeless time, a time of loss and rancor. But there would be light ahead, like a gleam over the crest of a hill of the first, faint glow of dawn.

And Boerne would survive, and one day soon, would thrive again.

Another British boy-transplant was a young man named Alfred Gilliat who was stone deaf from the same scarlet fever that had taken his mother from him at his birth. He was not yet twenty years old when he arrived in the New World, and his first order of business was adventure; he traveled around Mexico and road a cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail before he finally settled in Boerne in 1880. Alfred Gilliat would eventually introduce mechanized farming to Kendall County, the first farmer to use a steampowered threshing machine, tractor, combine and baler.

John Howard came over to America from England with a little more responsibility on his shoulders than those two fellas- John and his wife Fanny arrived on American soil with their eight children in tow, from their eldest at fifteen all the way down to

JULY 2015

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THE PARTY WAS GREAT. THE DRIVE HOME WASN’T.

L AW F I R M

B O E R N E , T X : : 8 3 0 - 2 4 8 - 1 7 7 7 : : N E W L O C AT I O N O C T O B E R 1

BBQ

SECRET SAUCES

READER SUBMISSIONS ON HOW TO GETTING THE MOST MOUTH-WATERING BBQ ON THE BLOCK

HERE’S THE

RUB

Grill rubs are a blend of spices and herbs used to flavor infuse different meat before you grill. BBQ rubs are usually dry, although they can be wet, or paste-like. Grill rubs can be used on chicken, steak, pork, fish, shrimp, or turkey. BBQ rubs can be an alternative for those who don’t like their meat smothered in sauce but they can also be a compliment to some sauces.

So what do folks around town use as their secret rub?

COFFEE GROUNDS Yeah, it sounds kind of gross. But for whatever reason, it adds a REALLY good flavor to the meat and creates an kind of pseudo bark that keeps it nice and moist. Best Used On: Pork and Beef.

SWEET SWEET SUGAR Brown sugar to be exact. Use that and honey and let the meat sit overnight. The sugars help to break down and tenderize the meat as well as create a great bark. Best Used On: Just about any meat.

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MUSTARD Not necessarily a rub in and of itself, but it’s worth mentioning here. Mustard does a lot of things at once. The vinegar in mustard helps to break down the fibers, tenderizing, which helps to carry the flavors of the other rub components through the meat. It also helps to hold the rub on surface so that a better bark has a chance to form. Some people swear by it and say the mustard flavor is not even noticeable in the end product. Best Used On: Pork, Chicken and Beef.

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

MARINADE The straight from Webster’s mouth definition is: a sauce, typically made of oil, vinegar, spices, and herbs, in which meat, fish, or other food is soaked before cooking in order to flavor or soften it.

Everyone who fires up the BBQ regularly has their own go to.

Which one do you think sounds the best?

MOMMA CALLED THE DOCTOR It seems in the Hill Country area the Dr. reigns supreme. Dr. Pepper was hands down the most common marinade submitted to us. Maybe it’s the 23 flavors inherent in every can of Dr. Pepper that people love. Or the fact that the sugars give the meat a beautiful glaze AND help to tenderize. Whatever the case may be, if you’re cook’n up some ‘que, and you haven’t tried this yet, you’re missing out on something big my friend. Best Used On: Pork and Beef.

SHARE A COKE WITH... DINNER Coke was another popular marinade we received. Some folks added chopped yellow and green onions and a jar of chili sauce for an added kick. Others would use it straight out of the can (or bottle) like Dr. Pepper. Either way, you can’t go wrong. Unless you burn the meat. But if you do that, you’re beyond any of our help. Best Used On: Pork and Beef.

SOME LIKE IT HOT For those of you who like to give your taste buds a swift tasty kick in the shorts combine Tapitio Salsa Picante sauce, worcestershire sauce, red AND black pepper (I’m sweating already), honey and cooking oil. Marinate overnight and smoke. You’ll wake up your taste buds and then smash them into submission.

Best Used On: Anything that once mooed, clucked or squealed.

During, after and some other interesting tips we’ve received on the subject of making better BBQ.

Like a shepherd tends to his flock, so shall the grill master watch over his (or her) cooking meats.

EVERYTHING

ELSE

AN APPLE A DAY While it might not keep the doctor away in this case, it WILL keep your meat moist. Using a spray bottle of diluted apple juice, conservatively spray the meat a few times in the first hour of cooking. Then more liberally in the last few hours to give you meat a nice, crisp apple coat while keeping the outer layer nice and juicy. Best Used On: Pork and Beef.

FROM APPLES TO ORANGES Something that surprised us was that a few people wrote in suggesting and orange or orange honey glaze for use as a sauce once you’ve worked your rub or marinate magic. Admittedly, we here had not heard of that before so we looked it up. Sure enough, seems that orange honey BBQ sauces are pretty popular. Now, we all know the saying that good BBQ doesn’t need sauce. But we’ve got to admit, some of the recipes we pulled up with a quick Google search sure sound tasty. You learn something new every day. Best Used On: Any meat you can think of. Really. There seems to be an orange honey sauce recipe to go with any kind of protein you might encounter in these parts.

YOUR INNER UNDERTAKER The concept of this tip might make some of the readers a little squeamish. But when you think about it, it makes sense. When buying your meat that you’re going to BBQ, look for cuts that are nearing their “sell by” date. The meat is further along in its “decay” and as such, the fibers are more broken down.

This apparently yields a very tender piece of meat. Best Used On: Pork and Beef. Fish and chicken need not apply.

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HILL COUNTRY

AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO BOERNE AND OTHER AREA DESTINATIONS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT LITTLE GRETEL Located just off Main Street, this authentic Czech and German restaurant is anchored by head chef Denise Mazal. And authentic Czech herself. Little Gretel and Chef Denise have been featured in a myriad of local and regional publications and TV spots. As well as winning several national and international awards. What’s so great about Little Gretel is that if you can’t find at least one thing on their menu you’d like to try, you might as well go home and make yourself a PB&J sandwich. Everything from Schnitzel to Bratwurst to Roast Duck to Rib Eye Steak to burgers and sandwiches. And to wash it all down they offer a wide selection of domestic and authentic beers in their Biergarten.

They even offer selections from Boerne Brewery. All in an outdoor dining area where you can sit and relax in the evenings eating some good food with good people. And Little Gretel also boasts one of, if not the best Sunday brunch in the area. So don’t miss out. 518 River Rd • Boerne, TX 78006 BUMDOODLERS LUNCH COMPANY Bums as it’s affectionately called by, locals has been serving the local masses for going on 33 years now. With no sign of stopping. Bums most popular offering and the only sandwich you should ever get there (according to our illustrious publisher) is called the Brainstorm. Get it cold, hot or double hot and your tasted buds will dance and sing you into a food induced coma. Soups and sandwiches are what made this place, but they also serve up a mean cake. The shop is connected to a cake bakery and you can watch folks decorating wedding and birthday cakes as you wait in line to order. Which you’ll be doing a lot of waiting if you don’t get there early. Bums fills up fast around lunch time so plan accordingly. You’ll be glad you did. 929 N. Main St. • Boerne, TX 78006 RANDOM When I first heard about RANDOM I’ll admit, the name took a little getting used to.

But once you go there it makes perfect sense. Located right beside Boerne Town Lake, RANDOM is a great place to go for an evening of family fun. We know people who go out and spend hours there just hanging out, listening to live music and enjoying some of the 80+ different beer they have on tap. No, that’s not a typo. It’s one of their claims to fame. Over 80 different beer for you to enjoy. And while you’re kicking back and having some good laughs with friends, don’t worry about your kids. RANDOM as several areas specifically for kids to play. They also boast some great food in the form of food trucks. We had pizza the last time I took the family there and it was by far the best pizza I had tasted in a LONG time. 11 Upper Cibolo Creek Rd. • Boerne, TX 78006 BERGHEIM GENERAL STORE When you look up the definition of General Store, there’s a picture of Bergheim General Store. This place has been around for years and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The quintessential general store this place sells just about everything. Blue jeans next to produce. Bubble gum and bullets. Hay and beer. Basically, everything a true Texan needs, you’ll find it here. Located approximately 11 miles East on Hwy. 46, stop in and say hi on your way out of town. 843 State Highway 46 E • Bergheim, Texas 78004 CIBOLO NATURE CENTER & FARM The Cibolo Nature Center & Farm is located about two miles from Main Street on Hwy. 46 East. It’s actually a pretty popular destination spot for people who like get out and experience some nature in their own back yard. But if you’re not familiar with the area, you’re probably going to miss it. It’s just a little bit outside of town so you’re not going to come across it if you’re walking and shopping Main Street. But it’s worth the detour. The CNC&F is a nature preserve that attracts all kinds of people from families out for a nature hike to volunteer scientists. The Nature Center offers classes, volunteer opportunities, children’s enrichment programs and a lot more. They’re a non-profit organization so they’re always appreciative to receive donations from folks who want to help. 140 City Park Rd, Boerne, TX 78006 WELFARE CAFE A few miles past Boerne on I-10 is the little town of Welfare. There isn’t much there and it’s easy to miss, even if you’re looking. When you do find it, you’ll probably wonder if you missed a turn somewhere. Surely this place that looks like a stiff breeze will blow it over can be the destination. Don’t worry, it’s all part of their plan. Welfare Cafe may look unassuming from the outside, but what it may not have in curb appeal, it makes up for on your plate. There aren’t very many places in the area you can go for a five star meal in what first appears to be a shack in the middle of the Hill Country. Welfare Cafe is extremely popular with the locals and they strongly suggest reservations. Yeah, this place, it what might as well be the middle of nowhere. It’s just one of the many gems the area has to offer. 223 Waring Welfare Rd. • Welfare, Texas 78006 HIGH STREET DISTRICT, COMFORT Comfort has the unfortunate reputation of not really being a destination spot. It’s that place you drive through on your way to Kerrville or Fredericksburg. But if you do, you’re really missing out. Comfort boasts quite a hip and trendy shopping district called the High Street District. It makes sense when you remember that Comfort was once a bastion for “fee thinkers” in the area. Quaint yet upscale retail shops next to restaurants offering some pretty high class dining. The word is getting around about the area so you should make your way up there sooner or later. High Street • Comfort, TX 78013

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EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

Hard surface and carpet restoration and cleaning.

Commercial and residential properties.

Specializing in luxury homes and businesses.

BEFORE

AFTER

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EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

C O M E

V I S I T

T H E

R I V E R

R O A D

D I S T R I C T

RETAIL • DINING • WALKING TRAIL • FINE WINE

FOOD

Charc Week is a Texas-wide celebration of charcuterie (sausages, ham, bacon, garde manger, salumi and other smoked/cured meats) put on by Restaurant Gwendolyn downtown San Antonio.

had the opportunity to study under Chef Brian Polcyn who brought a class to San Anotonio instructing chefs on the fine art of charcuterie. Mazal is very excited to bring this to Boerne on a whole other level!

What is Charcuterie you ask? Charcuterie is the branch of cooking devoted to prepared meat products, such as bacon, ham, sausage, terrines, galantines, ballotines, pâtés, and confit, primarily from pork. Charcuterie is part of the garde manger chef’s repertoire.

This will be the third year Charc Week has hit the plates of San Antonio and surounding areas. This gives the chefs a chance to really construct food and create so much in house. The rules to the game are simple...

1. YOU MUST BE A RESTAURANT.

2. YOU MUST BE IN CONTROL OF YOUR OWN MENU.

3. YOU MUST MAKE EVERYTHING ON THE PLATE YOURSELF. (Yes, EVERYthing on the plate must be your own.

Ex: no storebought mustards, commercial mayonnaise-based puree crap, crackers out of a bag... come on guys, let’s give them what they came for. The only exceptions are foods naturally occurring, such as honey or salt crystals.)

4. EACH CHARC PLATE MUST INCLUDE AT LEAST FOUR MEAT (or meat-functioning) ITEMS. (This is a minimum--there is no maximum.)

5. ALL RESTAURANTS MUST SELL THEIR CHARC PLATE FOR THE SAME PRICE OF $25 FROM JULY 20th-JULY 26th, 2015.

If you are a foodie this is the week you don’t want to miss, it’s a culinary movement that focuses on techniques that reach back thousands of years.

Joining us at Little Gretel is a must, we can’t wait to serve you. Make your reservations today.

What is Garde Manger? A garde manger (French for “keeper of the food”) is a cool, well-ventilated area where cold dishes (such as salads, hors d’œuvres, appetizers) are prepared and other foods are stored under refrigeration. The person in charge of this area is known as the chef garde manger or Pantry chef.

Gwendolyn Charc Week is a celebration of handmade charcuterie (sausages, bacon, pates, salumi, and smoked, dried, fermented or otherwise cured meats) that displays the efforts of serious cooks to preserve and revive this ancient and deeply meaningful culture and craft. Charc Week does not happen in just one place, but in every restaurant that supports it. From Monday, July 20th--Sunday, July 26th all participating restaurants will offer their own entirely in-house-made charcuterie selection, for a set price of $25 across all our restaurants.

Little Gretel’s Executive Chef Denise Mazal will be part of this for the first time! We are honored to explore the world with Chef MICHAEL SOHOCKI of Gwendolyn Restaurant. All restaurants participating will offer the $25 Charc Plate for one week. This is a must try food week and you can start right here in the beautiful Boerne Hill Country. Chef Denise

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EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

PW

WILSON

Artist Life Coach Writer Speaker

w w w. p a u lwi lso nt x.co m

LIFE

QUIT QUITTING

By Paul Wilson

Two very determined mountain climbers depart from a remote Himalayan trailhead to embark on the extreme challenge of reaching the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. It will take them weeks and every ounce of courage they possess to do it. Call it whatever you want; it is their goal, their vision, or their dream to reach the pinnacle of the earth’s most imposing glacier of granite.

Both climbers are equally capable physically. Each is sufficiently prepared in terms of gear, equipment, supplies, and support. Both boast the experience and knowledge to successfully complete the endeavor.

Along the way, both climbers will encounter their fair share of obstacles. Extreme temperatures. Buffeting winds. Impassable crevasses. Falling rocks. Sheer cliffs. Icy passes.

All of it made even more difficult by the brutal effects of extreme altitude.

While each of them may take slightly different routes along the way, both will endure an extremely difficult trek. There will be no way either of them could say their journey was more challenging than the other’s. In terms of sheer difficulty, their experiences will be identical.

Nearly forty-five days later, both survived their summit attempt. However, only one climber actually arrived at his destination at the top of Everest. The other turned around and hiked back to the trailhead only a day or two from reaching his goal. He was so close!

His excuses for not reaching the top could be many: It got too difficult.

He didn’t know what to do.

He got discouraged.

He became distracted.

He felt defeated.

He lost his way.

Excuses and explanations aside, the only difference between the two men is that one chose to persist and the other decided to quit. Even if his excuse is valid, he chose to stop rather than to endure. We may admire that he tried, that he made it further than most, or that what he faced was overwhelmingly insurmountable. In the end, the other climber encountered similarly challenging obstacles along the way, but he made it to the summit of the very same mountain.

In short, one quit. One did not.

THE QUITTER IN ALL OF US If we are honest, every one of us has quit something at one time or another in our life.

A diet An exercise routine A New Year’s resolution A financial plan (budget) A job A recovery program A marriage A cause A project A degree A goal A dream Our resume is populated with numerous jobs we quit because of one thing or another was not to our liking. Our garage is full of the equipment we accumulated with that hobby we quit because we just didn’t have enough time. Our closet is full of clothes that don’t fit us anymore because we quit another diet to lose that same thirty pounds we committed to shedding two years ago.

Everybody has quit something at one time or another. And we all have excuses for why we did. Our excuses are as varied as the rationalizations we adopt for allowing them.

We blame our schedule, our boss, our job, our spouse, our kids, our parents, our surroundings, our finances, and even our body.

Very rarely do we ever blame ourselves.

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In the very beginning, every pursuit in our life is deemed worthwhile. Its perceived importance is why it becomes a priority to tackle in the first place. While each of our ambitions may be of different value in the grand scheme of things, nonetheless, they are significant to us for one reason or another when we decide to pursue them.

The desire to lose some weight is worthwhile.

The goal to get into better shape is worthwhile.

The dream to own your own business is worthwhile.

The ambition to become an artist is worthwhile.

The pursuit of earning your degree is worthwhile.

The decision to overcome an addiction is worthwhile.

However, at some point along the way, we lost motivation and gave up doing what we wanted to do.

WHAT HAPPENED? Some kind of obstacle got in the way of our progress. Call it a problem, a challenge, a hiccup, a snafu, or a wrench in the works. Whatever term you use, something stood in the path of what we were endeavoring to accomplish.

Life is a journey. Along the way you will encounter hundreds, even thousands, of obstacles.

In the classic adventure stories of fiction that involve a character on an important journey (think Lord of the Rings), the inevitable obstacles along the way look like enormous mountains, broken bridges, lost maps, unexpected detours, turbulent oceans, severe weather, haunted forests, vicious animals, blood-thirsty adversaries, booby-traps, a string of bad luck, or an evil spell.

However, in the story of our life, the obstacles are all very real. There are no dragons and daggers, of course, but the impediments are every bit as challenging. They look like fear, failure, inexperience, lack of credentials, disappointment, discouragement, insufficient finances, negative thinking, criticism, enormous odds of success, competition, recession, loss, lack of time, divorce, missed opportunity, addictions, mistakes, unexpected pregnancies, poor choices, illness, injury, disability, death of a loved one, natural disaster, difficult people, or injustice. The list goes on and on.

There are literally thousands of obstacles strewn about on the path of our life’s journey.

Thinking you’re going to travel the path of your life without encountering challenges that will send your ambitions careening into some discouraging detour is just plain naïve. That is the stuff of life. Wise people expect it, plan for it, and determine not to let it defeat them.

“The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.”

-Theodore Isaac Rubin Unfortunately, we don’t get to watch the story of our life from the comfort of a theater seat while enjoying a bucket of popcorn before we head home to bed. Our life and the obstacles we encounter along the way are all very, very real.

EVERYBODY WANTS TO QUIT. Neither the opportunity nor the temptation to quit is unique. It presents itself to everybody on life’s journey. Ask any person who has ever succeeded at something, and they will tell you there was a time (or two) when they really wanted to quit somewhere along the way.

Successful people wrestle with the urge to quit too. The truth of the matter is that everybody who has ever wanted to accomplish something worthwhile has been tempted to quit at one point or another. In the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and overwhelming challenges to one’s ambitions, all of us grow weary along the way and entertain the thought of quitting.

The urge to quit is not the problem. It’s inevitable on the long, difficult road to any worthy destination. The choice one makes when tempted to quit is what determines the rest of the story.

Every success story has a point in the script where the main character determined not to give up.

EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

They persisted, or they kept going, or found a way through, or hey figured out a solution, or they took a different route, or they stuck with their plan or they simply refused to quit.

our own, there is a host of people out there who have already mastered them. When stuck due to the lack of skills you need for your next move, find some people who have the skills you lack and start asking your questions.

If we get right down to it and parse all the explanations and excuses, the only thing keeping us from achieving our goals is quitting. Call it whatever you want. You got derailed, distracted or even discouraged. But when you decided not to take another step forward toward achieving your ambitions, you quit.

Neither ignorance nor incompetence is reason to hang your head. Not knowing what to do or how to do something is the perfect environment for discovery. Being embarrassed or angry that you don’t know how to do something you’ve never done is the height of narcissism. Swallowing one’s pride and admitting one’s limits are part of what it takes to figure out the solution to overcoming the obstacle that stands between you and your dream.

Every person with a goal will encounter what seems like a million obstacles. You must find your way through, over, under or around each of them if you hope to get where you want to go. But you’ll never get there if you quit.

The key to getting where you want to go is to quit quitting!

Your dream - that thing you’ve always wanted to do, to be or to become - does not need to remain a wish or a fantasy. It’s not the stuff of positive thinking and naive ambition. If you can imagine it, you can create a plan and a strategy for pursuing it. And then, with enormous amounts of diligence, discipline and determination, you can enthusiastically pursue it with all of your heart.

Expect delays and obstacles along the way. They are inevitable. Adopt them as your teachers and your trainers. What you learn by navigating your way through each of them reveals the depth of your passion and the character of your commitment.

The degree to which we stick with something says a lot about us.

The only thing that can ultimately steal your dream away from you is quitting. And that’s on you. If you quit, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

NOBODY SAID IT WOULD BE EASY If you think for a moment that achieving your dream will be easy or quick, you’re sadly mistaken. If your dream is easy to achieve, it’s probably not big enough to really make a dent in anybody’s world.

The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.

- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf A dream, by nature, is enormous and difficult. It borders on the impossible. To expect that it will come to reality easily is a reflection of the fact that you have not dreamed big enough.

At the risk of sounding overly simplistic or even inconsiderate of your most valiant attempts, the decision to quit is almost always the result of one of two obstacles: 1. IGNORANCE: WE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. Ignorance is a legitimate explanation for why you are stymied, but it is not a good excuse. When you don’t know what to do next, figuring out what to do next is the work you have to do on your way to achieving your goal. Some days you’re working on your goal. Other days, you’re working on learning what you have to do next in order to achieve it.

The wisest people on earth recognize they do not know everything and accept help from those who possess the knowledge they lack.

About the only other explanation for why many people fail to complete the important endeavors of their life is paralysis by fear. There are occasions when we know what to do and how to do it, but our insecurities seize control of our initiative and steal away our momentum for achieving what we want to accomplish. In our fear of failure, we invite it in to steal our dream right out from under our nose.

There will be a hundred disappointing things that will happen along the way toward your goal. Learn from each of them. See them all as experience; the elimination of one more obstacle between you and what you want.

The evil cousin of disappointment is discouragement. She’s the one who shows up at your door when you allow disappointment to stay longer than you should have.

Discouragement is the cold north wind that blows through when you leave the door to disappointment hanging open. It chills you to the bone and causes you to crawl deeper under the covers where it’s warm. Stay there too long and you never leave the cozy confines of your comfort zone.

Life begins outside of your comfort zone.

-Unknown Even the most positive person wrestles with doubts, fears, insecurities and discouragement. It’s pretty normal to the human experience. However, positive people do not let negative thinking determine their destiny. Time and time again, they draw upon the resolve to see their ambitions fulfilled. Tenacious people learn to tune out the negative and demoralizing obstacles that stand between them and their goal.

So go ahead, look up one more time and take another peep at that mountain summit above you. Stop for a few moments to remember why you got started in the first place.

It was worth it when you began.

Rest if you must.

Look for another route to the top.

Ask for some help if necessary, but whatever you do, don’t you dare quit.

Between the internet and the local library, we are rendered without excuse for not being able to figure out what to do next. There are just far too many resources for learning what to do in the face of whatever it is we can’t figure out. Name the topic and there is a book, a video, a blog, a network of people out there to help you figure out the next step you need to take to get to where you want to go. Go ahead, just try it: search any topic you can come up with on your internet browser, and you will be presented an almost endless choice of options to explore in search of answers to your question.

Don’t know what to do next? Don’t quit. The next thing to do is to figure out what to do next.

2. INCOMPETENCE: WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO WHAT WE NEED TO DO. Not knowing how to do something is a matter of skill. And skill, my friend, is a matter of knowledge, practice and patience. The human capacity for developing new skills is remarkable. With enough persistence, it is amazing what we can learn to do if we want it enough. Fortunately, for those skills we have neither the time nor talent to acquire on

JULY 2015

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Gentle, Caring, Family Practice, Courteous Professional Staff • State of the Art Procedures & Techniques

WE’ VE RECENTLY E XPANDED George E. Metz III, DDS • Michael Hoeppner, DDS

830-229-5581

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Kendall Woods Dental 830-229-5581

25 FM 3351 South Boerne, Texas 78006

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Now accepting appointments for Kevin Beitchman, DDS, MS - Orthodontist

Kendall Woods Dental EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

SPIRITUAL

GREAT & BEYOND

By Kendall D. Aaron

Sometimes I think that God simply must have a great sense of humor. Because, we humans, are a pretty hysterical bunch to observe.

A few years ago, some NASA guys sent a satellite to space. It flew through space with precision on its route to the moon. Once there, it orbited the moon and shot some video of the dark side of the moon. Apparently this has never been done before. These NASA guys were all excited and high-fived one another and sent out press releases about how they had done something so spectacular, so amazing, that they simply required more funding so they could go get some video of Mars. They shot video of the moon. You know – the planet that in planetary terms is the equivalent of walking across the street.

On the flip side of the coin, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we have explored 5% of the oceans. The very oceans that are 3 hours south of here. 5% of the body of water that exists right here on our home planet. There are probably amazing and mind-boggling animals that exist in these un-explored waters, but instead we focus on applauding ourselves for sending a video camera to send us images of the dark side of the moon.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s pretty cool that we even know how to shoot a satellite into space, and guide it with the precision necessary to enter the moon’s orbit properly, make a video, and beam that back to earth. That’s some pretty cool stuff right there.

What really gets me is the sheer arrogance of the human race.

In the same article about this little satellite, some scientist speaks to the age of the moon, saying that is 4.6 billion years old. Not 4.5 billion, and not 4.7 billion years old. It is precisely 4.6 billion years old. This is where God must chuckle at us, the way a parent chuckles at their child that is pretending to be Superman.

Our human mind cannot even comprehend the vastness of space. It apparently has no end. It goes forever. Now stop for a second and try to truly comprehend “FOREVER”. No beginning and no end. It simply can’t be done. Because of how God hard-wired us, our little brains demand that everything must begin, and everything must end. And that’s because EVERYTHING on our planet follows that rule. Even the mountains will eventually erode away. But space goes on eternally. And so here we people are floating around space on our little marble known as Earth, and we are so amazingly proud of ourselves for having visited the planet across the street. And, of course, because we are so smart to have accomplished such an amazing feat, we are able to use our super-powered brains to compute the age of the universe down to the very year.

Am I the only one that thinks this is extraordinarily ridiculous?

I, like most of the human race, likes to lay on a blanket out under the stars at night and simply marvel. There aren’t enough numbers in my brain to compute the amount of stars that dot the sky, and it’s an amazing feeling to soak up the majesty of space. The power necessary to create SPACE in its entirety (which can’t even be comprehended) is staggering. Made by a God that did not begin, but has ALWAYS been. A God that decided to place our planet at the precise location in the endless space to ensure that we could have beautiful spring days. A God that built us with the brains to marvel at the skies and dream and paint and laugh and cry. He built us the passion to worship Him for His amazing power, but instead, we mock it by claiming that He didn’t even create the moon – it was formed when some star exploded (but who created the star) and by sheer chance, the moon landed in a perfect orbit around our earth.

And that’s just too bad.

You would think that if man had been on the earth for 5 million years (or whatever), we would have had plenty of time to map every square inch of our planet. But we haven’t – we’ve mapped 5% of the oceans. And with this infinitesimal amount of knowledge, we immediately assume that we know EVERYTHING there is to know about darn near everything. We can’t cure the common cold, but we can tell each other that the cold virus evolved over 5 million years to become what it is. Does anyone else see the absurdity of this?

I think that it’s perfectly fine to admit that we don’t have the answers. And instead of coming up with nutso explanation (like how stars and planets were formed), I wish that we would all lie out under the stars, and just whisper “My God – Thank you for your power and majesty. And thank for you caring about ME.” Look around you – the creations of God are everywhere, and are absolutely amazing.

How does an acorn become a tree that’s 7 feet around? How do salmon know to swim upstream and then die? Why does everything that is not man-made operate perfectly and without the need of our assistance? There are an infinite number of questions, and we’ll never know all the answers. But sometimes, the easiest and most correct answer to some of these questions is: “I don’t know. God just made it that way.”

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EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

OLD TIMER

Things that shall never change

They’ll remember your name and what you were in for the last time. Name a chain business that can do that.

There are a lot of things that I’d like to change about our area. From traffic to noise to housing developments to bone-headed decisions made by city government, my list is long. Oh yes, there are many things I’d like to see cleaned up around here.

However, as the July 4 holiday is upon us, and we take this time to reflect on our many great freedoms, I think that I will discuss a few things in town that shall NEVER change. As in: EVER. They are so crucial to the personality and lifeblood of this town, that the day that they are altered, the entire town of Boerne shall cease to be. It shall finally succumb to its cancer of “urban sprawl.”

So in no particular order:

Nothing like a little smoke filled family fun to boost the immune system. Breathe deep kids.

W&W TIRE We’re getting a new Discount Tire in town. I laughed for about 3 days when I saw the sign that it was coming soon. Someone didn’t do their market research. Every redblooded Boerne-ite knows that there is but one place to have a flat fixed or a new set of tires installed: W&W. They’ve been around forever, they’re all local guys, the garage is spotless, and their service is beyond compare. Even if Discount Tire is less expensive, I wouldn’t set foot in it. Long live W&W. BUMDOODLERS With virtually no parking, requiring many patrons to attempt to drive through a drainage ditch in the back, and with a building that hasn’t been updated since the ‘70s, Bumdoodlers continues to churn out the finest sandwiches on earth? Subway? Pfffft. I’d much rather stumble across the drainage ditch, stand in the line that is 25 deep, and sink my teeth into a Brainstorm than set foot in Subway any day.

My buddies who didn’t make it back would be proud to see this.

VETERAN’S PARK They (the city) just tore it down and remodeled it. And, dare I say, they did a wonderful job. The new park is inviting, respectful, and gorgeous. See? Change isn’t always a bad thing. That said, if they ever touch it again, I’ll personally hold them back with my bayonet.

THE OLD LIBRARY oh, never mind.

THE BOERNE TURNVEREIN Established 110 years ago, the Boerne Turn Verein hasn’t changed much since then (save for the electronic scoring system), and I’ll be damned if it changes any more.

Where else can you go, down some suds in a smoke-filled bar, and let your kids play?

Before we all lost our mind about everything that might kill our precious snowflakes, we actually took them to places like the bowling alley and we drank beer with our friends while our kids ran around the place. We survived. Your kids will survive, too. I promise.

Gas station BBQ doesn’t get any better.

RIVERSIDE MEAT MARKET I know that the business has sold, but so help me God, if the new owners do much beyond putting a new coat of paint on it….there’s a certain smell that is exclusive to Riverside. When you walk in, you could be blind-folded, and you would know exactly where you are. Their jerky is cardboard, but the smoke stained walls have been putting out some great BBQ since as far back as anyone can remember. And that better not change any time soon.

It may not look pretty. But it’s the best damn sandwich you’ve had. EVER. And you won’t have to eat again for a week.

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EXPLORE it! LIVE IT! The REAL Kendall County.

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