Natural wonders were Leon Hale’s lifetime subject matter. He looked for them wherever he went, and found them surprisingly often. In the lives of plain people and eccentrics, in the brilliant smile of a tiny 100-year-old black lady, or the hi-jinks of his cousin C.T., in what happened on a dirt farm in 1930 or why he found value in chiseling brick, he revealed truths and wonders we might not have noticed on our own. When published in 1982, A Smile from Katie Hattan was Leon Hale’s first column collection after nearly thirty years of writing for The Houston Post. It was widely celebrated for presenting the delightful daily work of this writer, at last, to a wider audience. What is remarkable, now, forty years later, is how fresh and interesting the 155 columns remain, as we roam with the author through a Texas that remains as vivid and enjoyable as the day he wrote about it.

Folklore is everywhere, whether you are aware of it or not. A culture's traditional knowledge is used to remember the past and maintain traditions, to communicate with other members within a community, to learn, to celebrate, and to express creativity. It is what helps distinguish one culture from another. Although folklore is so much a part of our daily lives, we often lose sight of just how integral it is to everything we do. If we look for it, we can find folklore in places where we'd never think it existed. Folklore: In All of Us, In All We Do includes articles on a variety of topics. One chapter looks at how folklore and history complement one another; while historical records provide facts about dates, places and names, folklore brings those events and people to life by making them relevant to us. Several articles examine the cultural roles women fill. Other articles feature folklore of particular groups, including oil field workers, mail carriers, doctors, engineers, police officers, horse traders, and politicians. As a follow-up article to Inside the Classroom (and Out), which focused on folklore in education, there is also an article on how teachers can use writing in the classroom as a means of keeping alive the storytelling tradition. The Texas Folklore Society has been collecting and preserving folklore since its first publication in 1912. Since then, it has published or assisted in the publication of nearly one hundred books on Texas folklore.

In this charming volume, popular Texas columnist Leon Hale recalls with wit and poignancy his early life, from birth to college through combat duty in World War II to his first job. By tums touching and hilarious, Paper Hero provides a personal look at Depression era life, as the Hale family chases an elusive prosperity from town to town across the West Cross Timbers of Texas. Difficult though the times were -- with the frequent absence of his traveling salesman father and several periods of real hardship -- there was much to smile at, too. In his graceful prose Hale renders vividly for us his youthful delight at games like tin-can shinny; his rueful discomfort at the limitations church membership placed on a growing boy's freedom of expression; his admiration for his father's joyous showmanship and for his mother's ability to draw comfort from the beauty of ordinary things. Also, for the first time in print he talks about his lifelong aversion to mirrors and the reason for it. Hale's style, clear and musical in its rhythms, evocative of laughter and pain within a single paragraph, is a masterful achievement masked by its deceptive simplicity. Every page of this remarkable book breathes with humanity and heart.

Selected articles from the author's column in the Houston chronicle.

Home Spun is a delightful collection of Hale columns selected from work over the past eight years -- full of humor and wry observation -- presented in the easy-going, graceful prose style for which the author is noted.

**** The first edition (1989) of this appealing popular reference is cited in ARBA 1990, Sheehy Suppl., and--we blush--RandR Book News. It provides a detailed yet concise portrait of every state (as well as D.C. and Puerto Rico), combining facts and statistics to profile the state's history, economy, population, cultural development, natural resources, and political system. Each chapter concludes with an extensive bibliography of nonfiction and reference volumes and an annotated list of literary works (fiction, memoirs, and biographies) in which the state and its people play a major role. Included in this revised and updated edition are two new sections, one covering the environment, the other presenting unusual state facts. For a broad audience. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR