Flight From Callahan County

When I was growing up on the family farm on the Callahan County side of Scranton, Texas in the ‘40s and ‘50s, we didn’t have a telephone. In fact, a lot of families there did not have telephones. One of the reasons was probably the economic status of folks suffering from a long drought and the decline of the family farm. But a primary reason to go without a telephone was poor phone service. Downtown Scranton, in Eastland County, was served by Southwestern Bell, which provided their customers with good phone technology. However, that company’s franchise extended westward less than a mile just over the county line into Callahan County. Thus, our area of the Scranton community was beyond that boundary and in the service territory of a small company situated in Putnam, later to be absorbed by another small firm in Baird, Texas. This phone company on the Callahan County side provided poor line maintenance and antiquated equipment. The phones in use on the rur

ON1 Software’s non-destructive raw photo converter/editor, Photo RAW 2020, is now in public beta with the official release scheduled for next month. I have been using this software for several versions now, and the latest release has some impressive features. Here are the most useful changes I have found: First, the presets in the Browser are either brand new or remodeled previous offerings. After selecting a preset, there’s a slider for controlling the intensity without having to open the Effects module. The black and white film presets appear to have been reworked and much better than those in RAW 2019. Second, the Develop module in much improved. The Auto button does a better job of balancing the contrast in a troublesome image without blowing the highlights. There’s an AI Match option that shows you to change to the look of the image you saw in the camera EVF when you took the picture. After choosing either Auto or AI Match, a master-control slider change

Back when I was growing up on the Callahan County side of Scranton, Texas in the 1940s and 1950s, radio was the primary mass medium for most of that time. Local-service television did not arrive until 1953, and many farm families there did not immediately purchase TV sets because the small-screen, black-and-white receivers were expensive. The Federal Communications Commission began licensing TV stations after the end of World War II. However, because of unanticipated problems of interference and scarcity of frequency assignments, the FCC halted the authorization of new stations with the Freeze of 1948 . (Scroll FCC history page for more details.) At the start of the freeze, Dallas-Fort Worth, too far away for reliable service in Scranton, had television stations. Smaller markets like Abilene, 45 miles to the west of Scranton and the heart of the Big Country market, did not. The first folks to have a television set in our area were our neighbors, the Battles. Ray