Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge some of the people who steered me down this path, two of them English profs at the University of Texas when I returned in the late Seventies to finish my degree. Though I picked up a BS in journalism at UT, I determined at the time I would take every writing class available to polish up my blarney. In that pursuit, I first encountered Katherine Staples in a freshman English class, who allowed me to chart an independent course—chronicling my years at the Fillmore East—as opposed to the requisite “How I Spent My Summer” essays of the class.

She also steered me into the Advanced Expository Writing class (325M), an authorial boot camp presided over by the dean then of polished prose, John Trimble, in whose custody my bombastic bullshit took on a slightly more genteel finish. A good deal of exposition herein first saw the light of day in John’s classes, though perhaps now without the artistry as shown under his expert eye (and ever more heathen in aspect given the intervening years).

In the UT journalism school, I wrote several pieces for an exceptional professor of feature writing, Rebecca Schorin, who also allowed some leeway to an older, if still headstrong, pupil in doing my own thing. The beginnings of the portion of this book on the Armadillo World Headquarters took root in her class, resulting in an article published in the Texas Observer on the occasion of the ’Dillo closing and later articles in the Austin Chronicle.

Thus, some of what ended up in this work first appeared some forty years ago during the tutelage of these teachers. This proved fortunate, as events transpiring upwards of fifty years ago might otherwise have been lost in a somewhat benign haze, the fog of a flagging memory. I have attempted to remain faithful to the truth as I remember, through good and bad, while assigning fictionalized names to some of my cohorts to absolve them of any blame for my wayward ways. I own the mishaps and missteps of my life and only allow that a few colorful characters may have shared some of these adventures.