Hello boys and girls and welcome to another edition of The Juice. You can definitely tell that the start of school is here. In fact it was Wednesday for Bridge City. Everyone else is next week. Roads are busy. School supplies are front and center in every store. Thousands of pics on social media. And of course we are now seeing football players on the field and bands working on their new routines.
I got to visit all of the teams we cover between Monday and Tuesday and see a couple of bands. It was good to see all of the coaches. There are big expectations for all of our teams. Big congrats to LCM grad/coach Ed Dyer who has been selected to next years SETCA Hall of Fame Class along with Willie Wilson, Ben Stewart and Bobby Woodard.
Sounds like the idea of going to school all year has faded away. Only 17 out of the 1200 districts in the state do it. The four day week schedule seems to be the hotter topic. TEA says there are 116 districts now using that formula. Haven’t heard much from our schools about it. Our schools are busy spending that bond money on a variety of projects. Orangefield, Bridge City and Vidor are turning dirt and WOC will be building a new North Early Learning Center.
And speaking of Vidor, man what a mess they have with their roads for another school year at the high school. The contractor waited until the first week of school last year to start and this year it doesn’t look any better as far as the inconvenience. As a non-resident who was there Tuesday they need better signage. Can’t even imagine the mess with opposing teams and fans coming over on Friday nights.
The school will send us some maps that we’ll post. But if you’re planning on traveling to the football field this season, you should plan to leave the house early.
It’s also sad to note that it’ll also be the first time in 100 years that St. Mary School won’t be opening the doors for their students after closing in May.
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Talked with retired LCM grad Mike Poutra who lives in Houston. He’s a good friend who was the owner of Dominion Forms for many years. Mike recently won a battle with breast cancer. He told me he has given a few talks about it after learning how many men he’s spoken to didn’t know they could get breast cancer.
Yes it’s true. There are approximately 20,000 new cases of breast cancer in men every year. Mike said he was sitting in his chair with his arms folded and his right hand could feel something in his chest that was harder than the rest. He wasted no time getting to the doctor which proved crucial to his treatment and survival.
As men we shake a lot of things off because we don’t want to think something is wrong or maybe you ignore it because it doesn’t hurt. That was the same for Poutra but with his wife Gwen going through cancer years ago, he knew better to ignore it. So don’t be that guy and Mike, thanks for letting me share your story.
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Learned something this week that I wanted to share. My Verizon phone was not getting any service. In fact it just had the SOS in the top right corner. I waited a while to see if it would come back and it didn’t. I was near the new Verizon store and decided to stop and ask what they knew about the outage and was surprised to hear there was no outage.
A young lady said, “I probably know what’s wrong with your phone” and before you know it she had it in her hand and had popped out the sim card. She said, “See it has turned silver.” She busted open a new one and had me running in less than 30 minutes. I have never heard of that and about a half dozen people I asked about it afterwards hadn’t heard that either. So now we all know.
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Guess who has the best record in baseball right now? Nope. Nope. Nope. It’s the Milwaukee Brewers! The first team to 70 wins. WOS alum Grant Anderson is a middle reliever on the team and leads the relief pitchers in innings pitched. He might be a good luck charm. He came up with the Rangers in 2023 when they won their first title.
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I talked to Charlie Gandy. He’s the guy creating the 1500 mile walking trail all the way across Texas called XTX. I spoke with him last October when he first released his intentions and I was intrigued because the starting point for the trail was in Orange.
But a new map has been released and the start, or at least the east side of the trail, is going to be in Bon Weir at the Sabine River. From there it will travel to Kirbyville and then across the Neches and Woodville, over the Trinity River to Coldspring. I asked Charlie what happened and he said there was too much traffic on narrow roads. That’s too bad because we could’ve gotten creative with our location.
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Told you a few weeks ago about Singin’ Roy Mazzagate from Orange getting to perform in Nashville. Well now he’s released a five song EP and he wrote a song about Orange called “The Edge of Texas” and yours truly made the lyric sheet. Really appreciate the shout out my friend. You can find the “Reflections” EP on most major music streaming platforms.
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Hey if you’re looking for a building that could house a business, business office, a day care or many other possibilities with close access to I-10 please get in touch with me about buying the KOGT building on Meeks.
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Have a great week! Full moon on Saturday.
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
-Gary Stelly-
gstelly66@gmail.com
Volume 1 No. 27
The Juice is a weekly column where Gary Stelly discusses things that happened the past week and mixes it with 40 years of being involved in the Orange County community. (If we think of a better way to explain it we’ll change it) You can also check out his podcast by clicking on the Behind the Mic banner on the KOGT.com front page.
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