Back in August 1978, convicted murderers Gary Tison and Randy Greenwalt broke out of the state prison in Florence, Arizona, assisted by Tison’s three teenage sons, Ricky, Donald and Raymond. Their inept plan to slip into Mexico began unraveling the minute they left the prison grounds. After a hectic week-long scramble, during which they killed six innocent human beings and one defenseless chihuahua, the fugitives were caught just thirty miles from where they started. Their desperate swath cut a ragged figure-eight through three states, starting in Florence, sneaking down to the Yuma area, then all the way up to Flagstaff, down through the White Mountains and over to Clovis, New Mexico, then up to the four corners area. From there, they returned to Tison’s home town of Casa Grande, where they ran into a police road-block. After a gun battle that killed one of his sons, Tison fled into the desert. He endured over a week of searing summer temperatures before suffering the same fate he consigned to the chihuahua: an agonizing death from exposure.
Continue reading ‘Things I Should Throw Out: Readers Outraged By Tison Escape’
Tempe, Arizona is a college town adjacent to Phoenix, home of the Arizona State Sun Devils. I lived there for fifteen years, moving from my mom’s house at the ripe old age of 25, using proceeds from the smash hit Meat Puppets album, “Up On The Sun.” I lived with my bass player and his girlfriend for a while, until I set up housekeeping in a cool old duplex with a young woman of my own. Shortly after that relationship crashed to the ground, the house itself was demolished. So I moved in with another couple — aguy who roadied for us occasionally and his girlfriend. This time, the house was a darling old red brick bungalo with inadequate air conditioning.
Nowadays, we have the internet to keep us aligned with the wonderful world of entertainment. (Many of you, in fact, may at this very moment be reading this for entertainment.) But couch potatoes of previous generations were not so lucky. They had to rely on such rudimentary tools as print. I was no exception of course, but I did attempt a privative sort of interactivity. Armed with nothing so advanced as scissors, some glue and a few free pages in an ordinary spiral bound notebook, I managed to create my own “channel” of sorts, made up of my favorite newspaper clippings.
Though I’ll never make it to full-grade philatelist, I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed doing the research for this series. While navigating the labyrinth of spotty stamp collecting info available on the web, I’ve browsed auction sites, fan collections and home pages of philatelic societies. I’ve found 
More and more these days, it strikes me that I’ve become a decidedly anti-social person. With every passing year, I turn away a little more from a world that leaves me increasingly aghast. I’ve been on earth too long; I can’t help but notice how the pieces are all fitting together. As curmudgeonly as it may seem, as I survey the landscape, I just don’t care at all for what I see. But I still have one thing going for me: I’m not fool enough to expect anyone to believe things were “better when I was a youngster.” I had this point driven home to me just recently when I pulled out an old scrapbook of clips I saved from when I was a teenager in the seventies. Quirky news items I clipped and saved for my amusement back then fill me not with a yearning for days gone by, but with a feeling of dread. It’s all there in black and white: the creeping morass, the “malaise,” our oft-maligned downer of a chief executive, Mr. Carter, warned us against. (He’s still 
Though it may come as a surprise to those among you who find me boring, I don’t actually collect stamps. I never did. However, I am a pack rat, and at this point in my life I’ve accumulated far more stuff than I could ever remember where it came from. Case in point: a couple of very old stamp collections from 1940 and 1935. My wife disavows any knowledge of them, which suggests they must have been left in lieu of rent by one roommate or another from the distant past. To the good fortune of those among you who don’t find me boring, I intend to share some of my favorites. The stamps themselves are probably worthless, but many of them are very beautiful. But our first foray is more concerned with history than aesthetics.
Young Bostworld gets a lot of traffic from folks visiting her big sister, the ten-years-running