The week started off with the head of Trinity Press, Barbara Ras, reading from The Last Skin at The Twig Book Shop. Then there was the San Antonio Public Library Foundation’s spectacular Copyright Texas Dinner last night featuring the dynamic Carl Hiaasen. His Star Island is populated with celebrities and paparazzi; there are drugs, sex and the excitement of a kidnapping. Hiaasen’s book even has a sensational trailer.
The stimulating journals of Anita Brenner, a young American Bohemian living in Mexico City amongst artists such as Frida and Diego, will be unveiled at the Instituto de Mexico in HemisFair Park at 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 18, and then Saturday brings David Sedaris to town.
With so many important literary events this week, how can I possibly convince you to come out to The Twig at 5 p.m. tonight to celebrate the publishing of Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill: Voelcker Roots Run Deep in Hardberger Park – a book with no drugs, sex or celebrities?
Think of it as an intervention. How could you leave me there alone with a case of wine? And how about the music of Hank Harrison and the Lone Star Swingbillies in full cowboy regalia and the opportunity to support the Phil Hardberger Park Conservancy?
Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker certainly was no Cherry Pye, but that’s not a bad thing. She was homegrown and reflects a part of our agricultural heritage we tend to forget.
Hope to see you tonight at 5, or better call a cab for me.
Update on November 17: Thanks to everyone who protected me by coming to share the wine!
The Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund is donating 60 percent of the cover price of books sold during the November 16 celebration at The Twig Book Store to the Phil Hardberger Park Conservancy, which kept the former mayor smiling. (photo by Kathy Babb)
Front Cover of "Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill: Voelcker Roots Run Deep in Hardberger Park"
Never realized how much virtual travel it would take to get a book to press. Certainly, Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker could not have envisioned their story would do the amount of traveling it has done this summer; of course, they would be shocked to find their story told at all.
Editor Lynnell Burkett of LBJ CommuniCo of San Antonio found our book designer, Amy Layton, in Sanger, Texas. The indexer (I never had given any thought at all to how indexes arrived in the back of books.), Sherrye S. Young, PhD, of RedLine Editorial Services worked from her home in White Bluff, Tennessee. I tracked down Char Miller in Delaware. He read Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill while relaxing on a beach, then wrote the blurb for the back of the book when back in Claremont, California, where he serves as director and W.M. Keck professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College. Former Mayor Phil Hardberger docked his sailboat at some unknown port to email in his blurb. And now Last Farm temporarily has moved to the offices of Four Color Print Group in Louisville, Kentucky, before its journey to somewhere in China.
Back Cover of "Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill"
And then we wait. And wait. While Max and Minnie were doing all of this virtual travel with the click of a send button, that is not how they will return. Their journey back to San Antonio actually will be aboard a proverbial slow boat from China. Their story will arrive, no longer in only a virtual state, at the end of October.
As I packed up the pieces of paper and photographs documenting their lives that have encircled my desk for so long, I wondered what good the couple has accomplished posthumously since I completed writing the manuscript more than a year ago.
The Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Trust has announced their Scholar and Young Investigator Awards for 2010. The Young Investigator Awards are designed to support young scientists conducting medical research to find cures for cancer, heart disease, arthritis, muscular dystrophy, retinitis and/or macular degeneration of the retina. Recipients are provided $150,000 per year for three years ($450,000). The Scholar Awards provide a one-time award of up to $500,000 to each recipient and are intended to foster development and productivity of outstanding, established scientists conducting medical research to find cures for the same diseases.
Investigator Award recipient Alexander Bishop, PhD, of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) is striving to determine cisplatin survival factors to augment ovarian cancer treatment. UTHSCSA’s Doug E. Frantz, PhD, is working on the development of novel stem cell-based therapeutics to treat heart disease and cancer. Lorena M. Havill, PhD, of the Southwest Foundation for Medical Research, is studying genetic contributions to knee osteoarthritis risk. Sunil Sudarshan, MD, PhD, of UTHSCSA is delving into the metabolic links to renal cancer. Scholar Award recipient Tyler J. Curiel, MD, MPH, also of UTHSCSA, is devoting his energies to the development of effective and tolerable age-specific tumor immunotherapy.
Pretty amazing that the frugality of two former dairy farmers with little formal education is contributing so much to the advancement of medicine. Makes me even more proud to have been privileged to get to know them, if only from the scraps and traces they left behind, and to preserve some remnant of their lives on paper.
Bon voyage Max and Minnie, and, as I resume my other writing projects, I already miss your presence in my study.
Note Added on September 15: The Twig Book Shop, 200 East Grayson in the Pearl Brewery complex, will host a book-signing welcoming Max and Minnie back from China from 5 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, November 16.
We’ve been here before. Friday the 13th is my birthday (surely you don’t suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia).
I thought it would be great because, after all of this time, that is the day we finally are scheduled to upload Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill: Voelcker Roots Run Deep in Hardberger Park to the printers. Getting a 240-page book on the press should be something to celebrate, but my birthday looks more like gloom and doom. (Click here to help me now.)
Law enforcement officers are picking me up and locking me away in The Vault on August 12 as part of the MDA (Muscular Dystrophy Association) Lock-Up. While some of my friends have shown their generosity and compassion, others seem to have their hands stuck in their pockets, meaning I have not yet raised my required bail – $2,000. (Click here to help me now.)
Fearing I might not be able to secure the funds to get out, I thought I better hatch a back-up plan. Jail break. Zinc and Boudro’s are donating a last meal to all of MDA’s prisoners. Maybe I can find a way to surreptitiously slip my utensils under my bra (Ow!). (Click here to donate now.)
I asked Ronnie of Zinc Bistro to show me where I would prefer to spend my sentence, next door and the floor below. The wine cellar. If I could just tunnel from The Vault into Zinc’s wine cellar, I would be content to stay imprisoned for life. (If I can tunnel into the wine cellar, you don’t have to give a penny.)
But then Ronnie took me up to The Vault where I will be locked up. He laughed cruelly as he showed me the thickness of the door on the huge safe, and said all four walls, the ceiling and, unfortunately, the floor are the same thickness. No way I’ll be able to dig out of there with a knife and fork. There is no escape. (Click here to help me escape now.)
And, hey, I’ll take Friday the 13th over any Monday.
Update on August 12: The police car came and took me away, but, thanks, thanks and more thanks to a rather philanthropic hand of followers (who did, however, make me sweat it out until the last minute, but all’s well that ends well), I served no time. Enjoyed the bountiful spread contributed to the incarcerated by Zinc and Boudro’s, but particularly enjoyed one of “the secrets from the cellar” one of the owners shared with me: JC Cellars 2005 The Imposter, a 92 on Wine Spectator described as:
As exotic as it is potent, with deep blackberry liqueur, sandalwood and wild game aromas and rich, ripe cassis, blueberry and licorice flavors that power on toward the bold, spicy finish. Zinfandel, Mourvedre, Petite Sirah and Syrah.
And, best of all, I will be free to drink again tomorrow on my birthday.
Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker certainly was no Cherry Pye, but that’s not a bad thing. She was homegrown and reflects a part of our agricultural heritage we tend to forget. 
Postcards from Barton Springs 