Actor, WWE Monday Night RAW Richard Morgan Fliehr isn't what you'd expect from a professional wrestler. A medical student at Minnesota University (his father was a doctor, his mother an actress), Flair dropped out college to train for the mat wars under legendary former AWA World champ Verne Gagne. He made his professional wrestling debut on December 10... Self, Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows Self, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan Actor, The Princess Bride One of the most colorful wrestlers in and out of the ring, Randy "Macho Man" Savage became a larger-than-life pop icon along with other wrestling superstars, such as "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, Hulk Hogan, Jimmy Snuka (aka "Superfly Jimmy Snuka"), Jesse Ventura and Dwayne Johnson (aka "The Rock")... Born on March 24, 1965. Best known as "The Undertaker" from World Wrestling Entertainment. He first came to the WWF in 1990 as Ted DiBiase's mystery partner at The Survivor Series. At first, he was a heel, but later turned face, around WrestleMania VIII.
He has held the WWF World Title on four separate occasions... Dwayne Douglas Johnson, also known as The Rock, was born on May 2, 1972 in Hayward, California, to Ata Johnson (born Feagaimaleata Fitisemanu Maivia) and Canadian-born professional wrestler Rocky Johnson (born Wayde Douglas Bowles). His father is black (of Black Nova Scotian descent), and his mother is of Samoan background (her own father was Peter Fanene Maivia... Self, Reginald LeBorg - Man nannte mich den Alleskönner Paul Levesque, otherwise known as Triple H, has established himself on the big scene in Blade: Trinity opposite Wesley Snipes. Levesque has already made an impression with his guest roles on The Bernie Mac Show, The Drew Carey Show, Grown Ups, and MADtv. Triple H is the WWE's number one athlete... Michael Francis Foley was born on June 7th, 1965, in Long Island, New York. Nicknamed Mick by his father, a lifelong Yankees and Mickey Mantle fan, he attended college in upstate New York, he hitchiked to New York City to see a wrestling match between Jimmy Snuka (Jimmy Snuka) and Don Muraco that convinced him he wanted to be a professional wrestler...
Self, WWE Hall of Fame 2004 Self, Jim Crockett Sr. Memorial Cup Producer, WWE Monday Night RAW Actor, Ready to Rumble Actor, Over the Top Funk has strong wrestling bloodlines. His dad, Dory Funk Sr., was a well-known grappler from the 1940s to the 1970s, and his brother, Dory Funk Jr., wrestled from 1963 until the early 90s, and won the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) world heavyweight championship in 1969. Self, The Unreal Story of Professional Wrestling Producer, AWA All-Star Wrestling Self, Kaisha monogatari: Memories of You Like his younger brother Terry Funk, Dory Funk Jr. was a success in the hyperbole that is professional wrestling. Their dad, Dory Funk Sr., was a long-time pro of the "golden" era of wrestling when the matches were real. Dory Jr. got his pro start in 1963 and excelled as a wrestler, winning the coveted National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) championship from Canadian wrestler Gene Kiniski... Actor, Jim Crockett Sr. Memorial Cup
Self, AWA All-Star Wrestling Actor, Georgia Championship Wrestling Writer, WWE Monday Night RAW "The American Dream" has been one of the most popular and colorful professional wrestlers in history. Rhodes began wrestling in the 1960s and gained a reputation as a fast-talking, hard-rocking wrestler. He teamed early in his career with fellow Texan, the late Dick Murdoch, and, for more than 20 years... Self, I Like to Hurt People Self, WWE Monday Night RAWThis site is intended as an online directory of Alano Clubs and an online store for 12 step related items. This site is not affiliated with any organization, group, Treatment/Rehab/Detox Center, NA, CA, AA or other 12 step program. An Alano Club Is… A source of information about the diseases of alcoholism and addiction. A meeting place for recovery groups to have meetings on a regular basis. A facility to provide social and recreational activities for the recovering addict/alcoholic and their families in a clean and sober environment.
A contact point for individuals seeking assistance in the recovery process. A non-profit corporation owned solely by its members and funded entirely through dues, contributions and retail sales. Monthly Blog Monthly BlogShop unique and handmade items directly from creative people around the world Popular items for louis tomlinsonBorn in the spring of 1926 to a West Texas ranch foreman and his wife in a line shack called Horse Camp on the Five Wells Ranch in Andrews County, Elmer Kelton by all rights should have grown up to be a cowboy. But while his father, Buck Kelton, spent decades in the saddle working cattle, it soon became clear that the nearsighted youngster had not been stamped from the same leather. Young Elmer preferred reading books about the Old West, an era still within the memory of many people during his early years, to doing horseback chores on a ranch. And fortunately for Texas letters, Kelton decided early on that writing for a living suited him better than cowboying.
When he told his father that, however, Buck Kelton saddled his son with a look that would “kill Johnson grass.” After graduating from Crane High School in 1942, Kelton left West Texas for the cedar-covered hills of Central Texas to attend the University of Texas in Austin. As World War II progressed, he tried to enlist in the Navy, but it wouldn’t take him because he was flat-footed. His condition didn’t concern the Army, which drafted him in 1944. Back from the war, Kelton married Anni Lipp, an Austrian woman he had met while overseas. He resumed his coursework at UT, earning a journalism degree in 1948. Returning to West Texas, he got a job with the San Angelo Standard-Times as an agriculture reporter. During his off time, he started writing and selling Western short stories and then paperback Westerns. Not long into Kelton’s newspaper career, it stopped raining over West Texas and much of the rest of the state. The drought didn’t break until the spring of 1957.
The protracted dry spell inspired a Texas classic, Kelton’s 1973 novel The Time It Never Rained. The novel’s central character is a tough, 50-ish rancher named Charlie Flagg, whose 15-section (“three deeded, the rest under lease”) spread is near the county seat of Rio Seco. As the drought worsens, Flagg, a moral but cantankerous man who does not believe in government agricultural assistance programs, struggles to save his ranch until it rains again. Beyond telling a good story, Kelton artfully portrays West Texas culture midway through the 20th century. “Someone has said that fiction by definition is a lie,” Kelton says in an audiotape released in 1995 by TCU Press. “By extension this means that fiction writers are liars. In that context, I will admit to it, and go a step further. I will say that fiction writers are thieves.” Kelton refers to “thieves” in the sense that a good novel often borrows from real events, “liars” in the sense that writers of fiction make things up to tell the truth even more powerfully.
Kelton lived the reality of what meteorologists now refer to as the drought of record in the 1950s. As a reporter, he saw firsthand the impact on ranchers and farmers of the virtual disappearance of precipitation, later joking that he spent seven years waking up every morning thinking of some other way to write: “Still dry.” Just as it can take years to recharge an aquifer, it took nearly two decades for Kelton to process what he saw during that drought into The Time It Never Rained. “The Time It Never Rained was as much a reporting job as it was a fiction work,” Kelton told a reporter for San Angelo’s Livestock Weekly in 2001, “because I just had so many things happen to my characters that I saw happen to real people.” Despite Kelton’s growing national stature as a writer, he had to write three different versions of The Time It Never Rained before it finally appealed to an editor. “The first two times, no one wanted it,” he says. “I let it sit for about 10 years before I tackled it again.”
The third time proved to be the proverbial charm when he submitted the manuscript to Doubleday in New York. The novel about the Texas drought turned out to be the only book Kelton ever wrote that did not have a single word changed by an editor. Hard to imagine anyone quibbling with a book that starts like this: “It crept up out of Mexico, touching first along the brackish Pecos and spreading then in all directions, a cancerous blight burning a scar upon the land. Just another dry spell, men said at first. It would rain this fall. And many a boy would become a man before the land was green again.” The Time It Never Rained proved Kelton was more than a writer of formulaic Westerns. The novel netted him a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, one of seven such honors he would receive during his career. In addition, his writing won four Wranglers from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Other honors piled up over the years. “I believe that The Time It Never Rained is one of the dozen or so best novels written by an American in this century,” critic Jon Tuska declared in The American West in Fiction.
Assessing The Time It Never Rained along with Kelton’s other books in 1995, the WWA voted Kelton the greatest Western writer ever. That put him at the head of a herd including Zane Grey, Willa Cather and Louis L’Amour. “I wouldn’t want to defend that in a court of law,” he said in 2003, demonstrating a sense of humor as dry as a West Texas stock tank is these days. But he did tell friends he believed The Time It Never Rained was his best book. Though branded for marketing purposes by his agent and publisher as a writer of Westerns, Kelton in reality had moved well beyond the traditional shoot-’em-up oater. In the opinion of San Angelo bookstore owner Felton Cochran, who stocks all of Kelton’s works and has sold thousands of his titles over the years, “Elmer wrote literature set in the West.” Cochran says The Time It Never Rained (he shortens the title to TTINR) has remained a steady seller. “It’s his best book, and in my opinion Elmer didn’t write a bad book,” he says.
Now that another drought grips Texas — one that looks as if it could be worse than the 1950s dry spell — Cochran says a lot of his customers see the book in his store and comment about living through that time again. “It seems a lot of folks who have read it are buying copies now to share with friends or youngsters,” Cochran says. “When someone not familiar with Kelton’s works asks for a recommendation, I always suggest TTINR. And more often than not, they’ll return for more of his books. Kelton died in San Angelo on Aug. 22, 2009. When they buried him a few days later, most of the grass in Lawnhaven Memorial Gardens Cemetery lay as dead as those below it. Much of Texas had been in the midst of drought for more than a year. That Kelton died at a time when it wasn’t raining, in what turned out to have been a prelude to the current extraordinary drought, made his passing seem all the sadder, but with The Time It Never Rained he left Texas a novel that is a reminder of the power of human endurance and the truism that nothing lasts forever — not a great writer