Billy Hall was my journalism teacher at Nixon High School and sponsor of The Pony Express, the school newspaper for which my friend Loni Rose and I were co-editors.

He didn’t seem much older than those of us who filled our small staff, which made for much light-hearted bromas and fun. He wasn’t a taskmaster with a hard, driving edge. He was instead kind and encouraging, and when your work merited praise, he said so. When it didn’t, he said, "Why don’t you try it this way?"

Nixon High School was barely a year old when Mr. Hall came on as our sponsor in 1965. Mr. Hall was 25.

The Express was printed at the Hall family’s South Texas Citizen, which was housed downtown in a long brick building with a storefront that was the Citizen’s editorial offices. We child editors, once our publication was ready, hung out at the Citizen as unobtrusively as possible watching the Linotype hot lead typesetting, the formation of columns, the manual setting of headlines. We came home smudged with printers’ ink and filled with the little power surge that comes at the moment your publication rolls off the presses.

That school year of interaction with Mr. Hall publishing The Pony Express was a lesson in deadlines, layout, counting picas and carats, and learning to write headlines -- little droll details that you would indeed need to know in the long scheme of things journalistic. China marker crayons, dummies made of newsprint, and pica rulers were our tools.

The greater lesson, however, was in comportment. In putting our little newspaper together, we shared not only hilarity but also intellectual exchanges about the world beyond us that was changing daily in events that had a direct bearing on many of us (Vietnam, civil rights). We all had a voice, Mr. Hall said, and we owed it to each other to listen respectfully.

The decades since high school graduation in 1966 have come and gone quite nearly like a vapor. In the recent years that I’ve published LareDOS, I had numerous occasions to visit with Billy Hall, most recently just a few weeks ago when he and Annabelle came by to place an ad for his re-election campaign in LareDOS.

He was what he always had been -- gracious and kind. We joked a little, as we always had, and in a pause, he said, "You do a good job."

I felt a prompting to thank him for the time we’d known each other when I was a student, and I did.

MarÌa Eugenia Guerra