David Dettmer  ·  Published work

The Texas Book:  Profiles, History, and Reminiscences of the University:  In the late 1990s President Larry R. Faulkner's administration initiated several projects to improve the "symbolic communication" of the University, one of which was a collection of essays about the University to be written and produced in the spirit of The Harvard Book, a collection of essays and reminiscences about Harvard University written by several of its prominent alumni and faculty over the generations, first published in 1953.  Former UT General Library bibliographer Richard A. Holland accepted the task of compiling, editing, and writing portions of The Texas Book, which eventually took the extended title of The Texas Book: Profiles, History, and Reminiscences of the University, published in 2006 by the University of Texas Press.

Dick Holland's work required extended trips to the Center for American History for exploration and inspiration, and Kate Adams, an associate director of the Center and my supervisor at that time, instructed me to chaperone him in the closed stacks of the library and archives as needed.  While helping him find materials in the vast holdings of the Center, I shared with Dick some stories I had recently learned from Jim Nicar about B. Hall, the rowdy all-male dormitory that faced the east wing of the old Main Building of UT back in the early decades of the University.  (Having survived four years of living in rowdy all-male dormitories during my undergraduate education at the University of Kansas, I felt qualified to write on this topic.)  He encouraged me to write an essay about it, and that essay, titled "When the Poor Boys Ruled the Campus:  A Requiem for B. Hall", found its way into the book.

I worked closely with Dick to guide the book through its writing and editorial phases and eventual publication.

The Texas Book Two:  More Profiles, History, and Reminiscences of the University:  After The Texas Book was published, I realized that there was still a lot of excellent material and potential for new stories to be told that we could not include in the first effort, so I approached UT Press about producing a sequel.  UT Press published The Texas Book Two:  More Profiles, History, and Reminiscences of the University in 2012.  I am the book's editor, having managed essentially every aspect of its creation, from contracting with UT Press to produce the book and recruiting the contributing authors all the way through to the compiling of the index and helping to market the book.  In addition to my having edited it, the book includes two essays that I wrote — the "Introduction" and "Benedicere Benedictus:  A Profile of H. Y. Benedict" — as well as other essays that I crafted from interviews of the contributing named authors.

Happily, this project has afforded me opportunities to participate in the literary life of Austin and Texas.  During a public book launch in Etter-Harbin Alumni Center on The University of Texas at Austin campus shortly after the book's publication, I conducted an interview with contributor Ben Crenshaw to discuss his relationship with his teacher Harvey Penick.  Later that year, the 2012 Texas Book Festival included a panel session on the book, "The Forty-Acre Outlaws:  UT Confronts the Modern World", moderated by contributor Richard A. Holland and including as panelists myself and three other contributors to the book:  Alice Gordon, Vance Muse, and Sam Hurt.  In September 2013 I moderated a book talk at the local independent bookstore BookPeople featuring contributors Cat Osterman and Brad Buchholz.  Also in September 2013 I moderated a panel discussion on the architectural themes in the book as a "free lecture" in the Odyssey Program within UT Austin's Division of Continuing Education, the panel comprising four contributors to the book:  Wayne Butler, Richard Cleary, Richard W. Oram, and Lawrence Speck.  I have also given several book talks at retirement communities and neighboorhood-association meetings in and around Austin over the years.

Journalism

In the late 1990s my good friend Brad Buchholz was serving as the editor of the Travel section of the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.  Brad's goal during his stint as editor was to give the Travel section a distinctive literary quality, seeking thoughtful reflections from authors on their travels and sprinkling in the interior pages quotations from famous authors' travel writings, as well as including "Postcard" features with a photo and accompanying brief text from a contributing author's sojourns.

My first effort for Brad was a postcard feature about the ongoing construction of what would be the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum in downtown Oklahoma City, built on the site where had stood the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which had been destroyed in April 1995 by a domestic terrorist's homemade truck bomb.  My postcard feature was published in the Sunday, September 19, 1999 issue of the Austin American-Statesman.

Earlier in the summer I had suggested to Brad that I try my hand about writing a piece about, of all places, my twice-annual trips to Kansas, and Brad's open mind and good humor about my ironic travel destination carried the day.  My essay, titled "Why Kansas?", appeared in the Sunday, September 26, 1999 issue of the Austin American-Statesman to the rave reviews of the readers of the Statesman who count themselves, like I do, as being part of the quiet yet not insignificant diaspora of Kansans (and Kansans-at-heart) who now dwell in Central Texas and beyond.

Technical Writing

As a technical writer at Computer Associates International, Inc., I was a member of the four-person publications team that produced the print manuals and the online help for the accounting software brands — ACCPAC Plus Accounting and ACCPAC BPI Accounting — developed at Computer Associates' Austin development site.  (This was in the early 1990s, just before the advent of the internet.)

During my four-plus years there, the major project for which I was the lead writer under our department head, Cynthia Gardner, was the print manual for the U.S. Payroll module of ACCPAC BPI Accounting for DOS Version 3.1A and Version 3.1B and the addendum for ACCPAC BPI Accounting for DOS Canadian Payroll Version 3.1A.

(Alas, ACCPAC BPI Accounting is no longer sold or maintained.  Tech products in the early 1990s had a relatively short lifespan.  Perhaps my work can now be found in a software museum somewhere — or perhaps not!)

Journalism (writing for which I was paid — but in my pre-professional youth . . . )

Council Grove Republican:  My first paid job as a writer came during the high-school football seasons of 1980, 1981, and 1982.  The daily newspaper in the town in which I attended high school — the Council Grove Republican in Council Grove, Kansas (which can claim to be the smallest town in America with a daily newspaper) — was owned in that era by Don McNeal and operated by him and his son, Craig McNeal.  A few years earlier they had decided to contract the reporting of the Council Grove Braves football games to a senior on the high-school newspaper staff, and in 1980, even though I was just a sophomore, I received an invitation to take on the role.  (My recruitment was aided by the fact that I ran cross country rather than play football, and none of the non-football-playing seniors on the staff of The Trailblazer, our school newspaper, was interested in the job.  Also, my brother, a junior at the time, suggested to the high-school journalism teacher, Ms. Nadine Burton, without my knowledge, that she and the McNeals give me a look.)

I remain genuinely appreciative of the trust the McNeals put in a novice fifteen-year-old writer, as well as the $5 bill I received from the cash register for each article.  I earned that stipend by attending each Friday-night game, home or away, and recording all the statistics while walking the sideline, and then spending part of the weekend crafting my article for the Monday edition of the print newspaper.  (The pay went up to $6 my junior year, $8 my senior year.  And I was glad to get it — the dollar went further in the early 1980s than it does today, and interest rates on my money-market checking account were sky-high!)  On Monday morning, rain or shine, I would walk (or jog, or sprint) my article — typed at home on an electric typewriter after I had composed it with pencil and paper in cursive longhand — over to the Republican's storefront on Main Street in the five minutes between my getting off the bus (Council Grove High School was a consolidated high school) and my hustling back to the school to my first-period class.  (Email, .pdf files, and "the cloud" had not been invented yet.)  The printed article was in readers' hands by Monday afternoon.

A cherished possession near my elbow as I write this CV is a small square of marble that I received on my high school's Awards Day at the end of my senior year, the trophy representing the 1983 Don McNeal Journalism Award.

Alta Vista Journal:  When I was in high school, my parents purchased our local small-town newspaper, the Alta Vista Journal, which was in danger of being discontinued by its out-of-town owners.  During the seventeen months my parents owned and operated it (November 1981 to April 1983), I wrote uncredited copy for some of the issues, as well as keeping the books for the business and spending my Wednesday evenings applying mailing labels to all the copies going out in the mail the next day to our few hundred subscribers.

The sine qua non for small towns in America is, of course, the community's federal Post Office — without a zip code, a small town ceases de facto to be a town, even if it remains incorporated.  (Alta Vista's zip code is 66834.)  Next in ontological importance for a small town is the local school (at the very least, the survival of an elementary school — many small towns have lost their high schools and even their middle schools to consolidation in the last fifty years or so), followed by at least one gas station, a grocery store, and a barber and beauty shop.  In farm communities, the grain elevator and the lumber yard are crucial as well.  Somewhere farther down the list is the local newspaper — not essential, but certainly a valuable part of the fabric of a community.

To understand the dynamics of our current political landscape, one does well to understand the plight — the near despair — experienced in today's small-town America.  Some communities are finding new ways to thrive in this new economic reality, but many are not.

My family was proud to do our part to keep the local newspaper going for a few more years in the 1980s, as small farms ("farming with a five-gallon bucket", as my dad would say) were becoming a thing of the past and the economic well being of rural America was already eroding as agricultural industries, and land ownership for farming and ranching, were consolidating and corporatizing relentlessly.  The Alta Vista Journal continued briefly under its new ownership after my parents sold it, though it was eventually consolidated with the newspaper in White City, Kansas to become The Prairie Post, which today publishes from White City in Morris County and serves the small towns of White City, Dwight, and Alta Vista in the Flint Hills of Kansas.