The Harlingen school district is encouraging students to “work their plan” so to speak by sticking with their educational and career plans.

This afternoon students will gather with their parents in the Harlingen High School cafeteria to sign an agreement called “Commit to Complete.”

The agreement is a promise to themselves that they will finish their academic degree in a university, a trade program in college, or a hitch in the military.

Please note that what I’m going to write is very sarcastic. So here we go.

I caught the Valley Star in a misprint. They reported that the mayor got re-elected in a landslide, he got about 1,900 votes.

The total vote count was 2,822, if I remember the numbers correctly.

Landslide? We say that 1,900 out of 2,822 is a landslide – maybe so if our city population was 5,000.

I wanted to drive north out of Harlingen and then return taking note of the sign telling the population of Harlingen, but there is a sign warning of rough road for 10 miles north. If I remember the sign, it boast about 70,000 happy, carefree people are residents of our fine city.

City Hall will need very few people handling complaints, There were only 2,800 or so that care how the city is run.

Don’t complain if you didn’t exercise your right to voice your opinion by voting.

If my math is correct that is about 4 percent of the Harlingen population that cares how the city is managed.

Is that frightening or what?

Maybe the misprint is that the Star missed a zero, like between the 8 and the 2 which would mean that 40 percent love our city enough to care how it is managed.

People who didn’t vote better not complain about their streets or anything else.

And what about all those signs and trailers parked all over, and all those people waving placards.

Seems to me they could do just as well parading through the local cemeteries.

Maybe we should resort to the Chicago area system where dead folks vote.

Tony Bos Harlingen

EDINBURG — The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley received initial accreditation for the first residency program in general psychiatry in the new School of Medicine.

This is the first of several graduate programs in psychiatry planned for the school of medicine, which opens its doors this fall. Dr. Arden Dingle, UTRGV School of Medicine clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology, will lead the program and was involved in its entire development.

“It’s very exciting that everything seems to be working out,” Dingle said. “I think we have the potential to have a great program that really is needed in the Valley.”

The plan is to start recruiting medical graduates during the summer so that the first cohort of residents can start in July 2017, she said. In the meantime, UTRGV officials will be planning and applying for accreditation in other specialties within psychiatry, such as child, addiction and forensic psychiatry.

The need, she said, for a graduate psychiatry programs is obvious due to the fact that there are approximately 1.3 million people in the Valley, but only 34 psychiatrists in practice.

“There aren’t enough mental health providers, just in general,” Dingle said. “There aren’t enough specialty people, so there aren’t really programs for the elderly, there aren’t really programs for substance abuse. I think you can pretty much name any area of mental health and there’s a tremendous need.”

The program will take six residents per year, and they will be based at the Regional Academic Health Center in Harlingen and will practice at outpatient facilities throughout Cameron and Hidalgo counties, including the Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen and Brownsville, the Rio Grande State Center in Harlingen, Tropical Texas Behavioral Health facilities and at the VA Texas Valley Coastal Bend System’s clinics.

The initial accreditation by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education will be followed by a council visit in two years to determine the state of the program and whether it qualifies for full accreditation. Overall, the School of Medicine has been accredited for eight residency programs so far.

Dr. Gabriel de Erausquin, founding chair of the department of psychiatry and director of neurosciences department, said this initial program is only the start of many possible qualifications.

Right now, the department is in the planning phase to apply for accreditation for the child psychiatry program and a general neurology program, he said, as well as an internship program through the American Association of Psychology.

“We intend to have a fully developed academic program,” Erausquin said. “The plan is to have a very extensive coverage of the needs of the Valley by providing specialty care across the board.”

The general neurology program will also open the door to other specialties in the future, but in the mean time the idea is to have the program in 2018.

The overall goal for the School of Medicine is to be accredited for a wide variety of residency programs to encourage doctors to stay in the area and meet the medical needs of Valley residents.

[email protected]

The Regional Academic Health Center in Harlingen operates under the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio.

A 19th-century carbine that has been described as “a national treasure” because of its personal links to Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle will go up for auction Saturday.

Expected sale price of the rifle? Somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000.

The rifle is from Custer’s personal collection of firearms, passed down through the family for generations.

But what makes it unique, said Fred Holabird of Holabird Western Americana Collections which is auctioning the gun, is that the 150-year-old Sharps carbine has its own fascinating story.

Holabird says the rifle is attributed to Black Kettle, who was killed by Custer’s troops in an 1868 massacre of a Cheyenne Village along the Washita River in Oklahoma. That was eight years before Custer and his 7th Calvary were overwhelmed and killed to the last man at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

After the Washita River battle, Custer saw the carbine in a wagon full of artifacts collected from the battleground and took it as a war trophy for himself. But Holabird learned even more last winter when the Custer carbine was studied by a South Dakota scholar who has only recently unlocked the code that allows translation and interpretation of pictographs such as those displayed on the rifle’s stock.

The pictograph and accompanying brass tacks not only show that the carbine was the property of Black Kettle, but also detail the chief’s leadership in two societies of the Cheyenne tribe.

Also for sale is an 1847 Colt Walker .44-caliber percussion revolver once owned by Texas Ranger Lamartine “Lamb” Sieker.

This gun is expected to sell for somewhere between $175,000 and $350,000.

Sieker, born in 1848 in Baltimore, died Nov. 13, 1914. He was Confederate veteran and Texas Ranger who joined Company D of the Texas Ranger Frontier Battalion in 1874. By 1881 he had become a lieutenant, and was promoted to captain in 1882.

His service involved directing operations against Indians, investigations of crimes as serious as murder, and dealing with Texas outlaws. From 1885 to 1893, and 1899 to 1905, he was Texas Ranger Quartermaster.

The auction, to be conducted live at Holabird’s Western Americana Collections in Reno, Nevada.

Those wishing to make bids online can do so through iCollector.com and Invaluable.com

HARLINGEN – Lozano Park sits across from the Baxter Building, a swath of green grass on an empty lot with a lonesome stage at one end.

But 10 architectural students from Texas Southmost College showed yesterday the forlorn little park doesn’t have to stay that way.

The student projects to renovate the park were laid out for the Downtown Improvement District’s board of directors at City Hall.

All the design plans attempted to incorporate or pay homage to the nine-story Baxter Building, which looms above the site to the west across South A Street. Lozano Park is bordered on the north by West Jackson Avenue.

TSC students have been designing assorted projects for downtown Harlingen since 2009, said Dr. Murad Abusalim, instructor and head of the architecture and design program.

Although none of the design projects have been implemented in Harlingen, Abusalim said Brownsville is going to use one of his students’ design projects there.

The program at TSC does not bestow a degree in the field, but it has had great success in sending graduates on to the University of Texas San Antonio and to Texas Tech University to continue their design and architectural studies.

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BY NORMAN ROZEFF

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second part in a three-part series by local historian Norman Rozeff. Part one can be found at www.valleystar.com.

“He was also quite a joker like the time that he painted an upper classmate’s toilet seat with varnish. Once we neighborhood “Goons” were playing football under the screened upper porch of his house when he dumped a whole trash can full of water on us from the porch. Still another time he approached us goons and began to hit what we thought was his eyeball with a pencil. Turns out the “Click. Click. Click.” was against his new glass contacts.

While Leland was in the process of “dusting” for a friend, he was needing to wear eyeglasses for his vision. He also needed to wear goggles because he was dusting with powder in an open-cockpit plane. He solved the problem by taking the lenses out of the eyeglass frame and sticking them into the inside corner of the goggles.

During this period of time I was working for a crop duster, Roy McCardle who was also a good friend of Leland. Roy was teaching me to fly in lieu of paying me for the hourly work. Roy and Leland went down to Nicaragua several times, and Roy recounted this incident to me. He and Leland had taken off at daybreak to dust fields across a large water lake that harbored fresh water sharks. Roy looked over at Leland’s plane to then observe Leland standing outside the plane while holding on to a strut. And putting the gas cap back on. It had come loose at takeoff. Because of his prior experience when a similar incident had occurred while he was spraying cabbage, Leland knew that the plane wouldn’t make it across the lake with fuel spewing out the uncapped tank so that is why he found it necessary to put the cap back on.

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While Leland was conducting the FAA test for the landing gear of his newly designed S2 aircraft, the wingwalks, cockpit, and hopper were loaded with 50 lb. sacks of powder to a maximum of 2500 lbs. then raised to the ceiling of the hanger by a larch winch and released. Upon hitting the floor the right gear strut broke at the weld allowing the right wing to slam into the floor and become all twisted. If that was a hair-raising incident so was the following. This was the same wing that flew off later while he was testing G stresses for the FAA. The left wing sheared during a steep dive. Leland had to bail out. This was difficult with the plane spinning so tightly. ( It turns out the design had been miscalculated when Leland misplaced a decimal point in his slide rule calculations. From that time on Leland always double-checked his numbers.)

In one of the tests for the FAA, he flew right in front of the investigators about two feet off the ground with both hands up over his head waving at everyone.”

Such an escapade was nothing new for Leland who had an earlier history of adventurous actions as Anderson was to recall. “Leland (once) stated that when his high school graduating class had a party on Boca Chica Beach, he and a buddy flew the old J2 Cub to the party, hung a rope between the landing gears like a trapeze and took turns swinging on the “trapeze” while dragging one another in the water as they flew back and forth in front of their classmates on the beach.

One time when Leland was in college he bought a new war-surplus Harley 45 motorcycle still in its wooden crate. He assembled it in his garage.

He rode this cycle to and from school. One time while at home for the weekend a large rainstorm came up, but he needed to be back at school at a certain time. He took off on the cycle but later returned soaked to the bone. He then proceeded to put on goggles and a raincoat backwards and took off again, only to return home when the bad storm continued and his goggles filled with water. He later found a ride back to school.

During this time, I was in high school and taking a leather working class, so his mother asked me if I could make him a wide belt with back support to help in those long rides back and forth to school. She instructed me to tool the name “Zip” in the middle of the belt and tool a design around it. I gladly did this as he was my “hero”.

Leland and his partners in his Piper Cub (J2) used to fly every chance that they had. During one period they would look for a field of melons, load up the plane, and fly around looking for tractor drivers and field workers to bomb with the melons.

Bored with just flying around they bought a surplus parachute and began taking turns jumping out of the their plane. Of course, they learned to repack the parachute themselves. Leland says they even got so crazy that they started jumping at night. One night Leland landed in a cotton field, repacked the chute, and jumped again, but the chute almost didn’t open because he had repacked it with a cotton stalk stuck inside it. Still that parachuting experience saved him when he had to bail out of his radial engine S-2A when its wing flew off during the “G” test in 1957 that he conducting for the government.

One day Leland showed me a government letter that had come that day in the mail. He was ordered to report to Wright Patterson Air Base to begin his military time. He had been graduated a second lieutenant. He had however asked for and received a deferment in order to work on his plane. Later he was to receive another letter ordering him to report to the Edwards Air force Base. Again he was given a deferment and no more orders were to follow.”

Bob Anderson concluded his reminiscences with the following: “The depth of the influence that Leland had on every part of my life will never be known but will always be greatly appreciated. What a Man! I will always cherish the memories of knowing this dearly loved man, Leland Snow.”

Leland was later to write : “My first employee was my next door neighbor’s boy. He was about 14. maybe 15 I paid him 25 cents an hour to help me make wing ribs for the first S-1 airplane that I was building in my garage in 1951. In those years that’s what kids made working in bowling alleys or washing dishes in a restaurant. I had a rib jig attached to my workbench in my garage. It was fairly easy work, nailing the 1/4-inch square strips of spruce to the jig, and then gluing the truss structure to the top and bottom contours. Just a big model airplane. The boy’s name was Bobby Anderson.”

Brownsville — The public had an opportunity to hear the platforms of several candidates, including county judge candidates Eddie Treviño Jr. and Dan Sanchez, at the Cameron County Democratic Party forum held Thursday evening at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Pub and Event Center.

Treviño spoke of his experience as the former Brownsville mayor and as a city commissioner.

Sanchez emphasized the partnerships he forged during his tenure as a county commissioner, and recounted his time in Bexar County for ideas on what could be done in Cameron County.

The two candidates also spoke to how they could succeed as county judge.

The most important thing that can be done, Sanchez said, is working together.

“I think the key is for us to all work together between the different entities, including the Cameron County Regional Mobility Authority, the Metropolitan Planning Organizations and the county,” Sanchez said. “Many times people have their hats on for projects, but to be truly effective we need to work together.”

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HARLINGEN — The students had set up a course for children to ride bicycles.

They’d helped the American Red Cross share information about services and healthy living and spoke to children about safety. Their involvement had also facilitated the success of the Viva Streets Harlingen 5K Adventure Run/Walk last month.

“It was basically just going out there and helping the community,” said Ricardo Bazan, 15, a freshman at the Harlingen School for Health Professions.

Ricardo was one of 39 students from HSHP recognized yesterday morning for their participation in Viva Streets Harlingen. The event included numerous health-related activities in a blocked off section of downtown. About 1,500 people showed up, including 460 who participated in the run.

More students from HSHP volunteered than any other school. For their enthusiasm the Harlingen-San Benito Metropolitan Planning Organization and Harlingen Mayor Chris Boswell presented them with the Viva Streets Harlingen Spirit Challenge Award.

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SAN BENITO — Upon first glance at the current location of the skate pad, all one can see is a cement base.

That should change soon.

Assuming skating equipment will eventually be there, it should make for a fun place for the local skating community to spend their time.

Last week, city officials said the skate pad construction would be done this week.

However, by the looks of it Wednesday, it could take longer.

City commissioners are expected to receive an update on the project when they meet Tuesday evening for their regular meeting.

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SAN BENITO — There are only two more work sessions needed to complete the San Benito school district’s Re-Imagine 2021 Strategic Plan.

Superintendent Dr. Adrian Vega said a final copy is expected to be sent to the board for approval in July.

Work on the strategic plan began as soon as Vega arrived. From the beginning he stated the plan as a main goal to realign the district.

Staff, students, teachers, community members and area officials are part of the strategic planning process.

Several groups are charged with coming up with future goals and concepts regarding all aspects of the district, including curriculum, facilities, financials and communications.

Although those categories are key to the strategic plan, another part consists of results from an efficiency and curriculum audit.

Last month, The Texas Association of School Administrators and the Texas Association of School Business Officials conducted a district-wide curriculum and efficiency study.

Vega said he should be receiving a rough draft of the efficiency audit findings by the end of this week or early next week.

“I will review it with staff to make sure that everything is accurate, send it back, then hopefully get the final draft in a few weeks,” he said.

Vega will then present the audit findings to the board.

The curriculum audit is a different story, according to Vega it might take longer to get those results.

“Because the curriculum audit is very exhaustive and comprehensive report,” Vega said. “We should get them in July.”

Vega will then go through the same process of presenting the report to the board.

The information from both studies will be used to provide a better understanding of the district.

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