Sara Inés Calderón

Reaping the benefits of high gasoline prices
By Sara Inés Calderón

VERDI — Eugene Martinez reached among the big, green leaves in his field and pulled out two yellow squash. So far this year, he’s harvested and sold 1 million pounds of them.
Farming is hard work, he said, but it rewards those willing to put in the hours. A recent and unexpected surge in demand caused by high fuel prices doesn’t hurt, either.
“Fuel costs are so high it gives the stores a better reason to buy from a local grower than hauling from a long distance,” Martinez said…

 

 

 

High gas prices fuel rural retail boom
By Sara Inés Calderón

PLEASANTON — Before gas prices hit nearly $4 a gallon, Kelly Miller used to drive to San Antonio once a week to shop or go to the movies.
Now the Pleasanton resident says she buys her clothes, food, electronics, entertainment and everything else closer to home.
Miller, whose gasoline costs have doubled since February, is pouring significant amounts of her spending into local businesses. And as she and other area consumers outside San Antonio have decided to stay put, their rural communities have begun collecting historic amounts of sales taxes…

 

Texas soldier’s body identified after 58 years
By Sara Inés Calderón

Joseph Valencio, 60, used to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and think about his own lost soldier: a father who disappeared during the Korean War.
Valencio spent years imagining different scenarios about the father he never knew, Carrizo Springs native Cirildo Valencio, but eventually accepted the idea that his father had been killed in a faraway place when he was a 1-year-old.
But all that changed in March, when Valencio received word that his father’s remains had been identified and would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 4…

 

 

 

Atascosa rejects SAWS contributions
By Sara Inés Calderón

PLEASANTON — David defeated Goliath here Thursday, at least in the minds of Atascosa County residents who have long seen San Antonio’s water utility in the giant’s role.
Atascosa County’s 43,589 residents are jealous of their groundwater resources and wary — downright suspicious — of what they perceive to be anyone from the big city of San Antonio trying to “steal” it.
The issue blew up in Pleasanton when word got out that the local chamber of commerce had received a $10,000 sponsorship of its annual Cowboy Homecoming festival from the San Antonio Water System. After a public outcry, chamber officials at a packed City Council meeting Thursday said they would not accept SAWS’s money…

 

 

 

‘Gabe fever’ hits small town
By Sara Inés Calderón

LYTLE — This small town straddling the Bexar, Atascosa and Medina county lines has a disease. The symptoms are everywhere.
Businesses are adorned with “Vote for Gabe” banners, residents have hung homemade signs on their picket fences, the staff at City Hall wear “Gabe Fever” pins.
And newspapers here and in Devine, Pleasanton and Hondo have dedicated extensive amounts of ink to the object of all this adulation.
Native son Gabe Garcia, 28, is one of six remaining finalists on the sixth season of NBC’s “Nashville Star.” Since it began airing in June, Lytle’s streets have been empty on Monday nights, with most of its 2,689 residents glued to their TV sets, cheering him on and voting for him…

 

 

 

Gas prices spur interest in carpooling
By Sara Inés Calderón

Agnes Villarreal has found a way to chop in half what she pays for gas for her daily commute. And if things go her way, she’ll cut it in half again.
Villarreal, who lives in far Northwest San Antonio but works near the airport, began carpooling this week — a measure she calculates will shave up to $80 a week off her fuel costs.
She’s found someone to share rides with her and is looking for two or three more to establish a rotation that would have her driving just one week per month.
High gas prices are beginning to convert motorists to carpooling in and around San Antonio. Since February, the number of people registering for the area’s River Cities Rideshare program has nearly doubled every month; similarly, the program’s online inquiries for carpooling partners has risen from 148 in February to 452 in May…

 

 

 

Small-town cops grapple with big-time gas prices
By Sara Inés Calderón

KARNES CITY — As fuel invoices arrive with bigger and bigger numbers, Police Chief Roel Salas shakes his head with resignation, pays them, and turns to the task of tightening the department’s belt.
There’s not a whole lot he can do about the rising cost of gasoline, he says.
“I can’t predict the future,” Salas said on a recent weekday. “We’ll just have to bust our fuel costs.”
As with many rural departments operating on limited revenue from low tax bases, police in Karnes City are trying to figure out how to enforce the law on budgets designed to buy gas that was supposed to cost less than $3 a gallon…

 

 

 

Berries become business
By Sara Inés Calderón

POTEET — Ten years ago, a railroad conductor and a dairy farmer concocted a plan to make fine wine here with the remnants of this town’s annual strawberry crop.
In the decade since, the pair has gone on to make award-winning wine with a distinct Texan accent in several varieties — and make a living at it, to boot.
Using wild Mustang grapes and local mesquite wood, Jim Collums, the former dairy farmer who would only divulge that he’s in his 60s, and Bob Denson, the retired conductor who acknowledged he’s in his 50s, have been making the Poteet Country Winery a financial success…
Poteet’s winery is part of an industry that has experienced robust growth in the past decade and especially since 2001, when the first legislation was enacted to give wineries legal and financial room to develop. Many Texas wineries have since become something of the modern version of the family farm, where labor and life become intertwined and the tradition of living off the land passes from one generation to another…

 

 

 

Fest features tasty berries, but growers becoming rare
By Sara Inés Calderón

POTEET — Albert Reyes stoops down in his strawberry field and pulls back the leaves of one of his plants, revealing ripe, bright red strawberries practically begging to be plucked.
Three acres of the plants await the same fate here, just in time for the 61st Annual Poteet Strawberry Festival.
Reyes was born here, a place with a field with red, sandy dirt and green rows of strawberry plants, in a house that has long since been torn down. He’s quick to point out that he was the first in his family to plant strawberries.
Reyes, 66, said he is the third generation of his family to farm in Poteet, and likely the last. None of his six sons took to farming the way he did when he was a younger man, and now he says he’s only got about four or five years left in him…

 

 

 

‘Eyes and ears’ of U.S. security
By Sara Inés Calderón

JOURDANTON — Residents here may not know it, but homeland security begins in their small town 35 miles south of San Antonio.
The weapons and training of the nine police officers who patrol between its two traffic lights have improved in recent years with the acquisition of an automatic rifle.
An M-16, to be precise. It may be unusual, but it’s not unique for a police agency that size to have such a weapon, experts said…

 

 

 

Definition of democracy is slippery in 17 counties
By Sara Inés Calderón

Ben Briscoe is a Republican in Democrat’s clothing.
Frio County has been without a Republican Party chairman since 2005. So Briscoe said he and other conservative voters in Pearsall register as Democrats.
Otherwise, he said, they would have no way to influence local elections that have been largely decided in Democratic primaries.
For much of the 20th century, Democrats ruled the state with little or no competition. It’s rare now for Texas counties not to have both parties in place, although in many places the competition is still one-sided…

 

Handy Poteet man crafts cow dung into ballpoints
By Sara Inés Calderón

POTEET — One cow’s excrement is one man’s fine writing instrument.
At least it is for John Lopez, 42, who began making his South Texas Cow Patty Pens six years ago with local, natural materials.
He perfected the process through trial and error. The end result: flecks of brown suspended in a clear plastic, looking almost like wood from a distance…

 

Sex offender status limits Poteet mayor
By Sara Inés Calderón

Poteet’s mayor could get arrested for attending City Council meetings.
Or just for going to City Hall.
As a registered sex offender, Mayor Lino Donato could be charged with violating his probation if he goes there because it’s close to the Atascosa Boxing Club and Youth Center…

 

 

 

Rural communities becoming prime targets for identity theft
By Sara Inés Calderón

PEARSALL — Carlos Cortez thought it could never happen to him.
The Pearsall native wanted to buy a home for his growing family and applied for a mortgage. He was turned down, repeatedly, for several years. It wasn’t until the end of October that Cortez realized the reason: Someone had made thousands of dollars’ worth of fraudulent purchases in his name.
Identity theft is not usually associated with rural communities like Pearsall, but South Texas law enforcement officials say it’s more common than most people think. The method used to lift personal information such as a Social Security or credit card number may vary — stolen wallets, stolen mail or Internet fraud — but not the result: Victims find themselves in financial trouble that may take years to resolve…

 

 

 

Small earthquake jolts South Texas
By Sara Inés Calderón

FALLS CITY — Diana Sherman was startled awake Monday morning by a loud thud that sounded to her like someone had fallen out of bed.
“I heard a boom, a shake and rattling of my walls and windows. I thought my sweetheart had done fallen out of the bed,” Sherman said.
In fact, it was a small earthquake that rattled her and others in Karnes County. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, an earthquake registering 3.7 on the Richter scale was recorded about six miles southwest of Falls City…