Welcome aboard, folks! Welcome to a new spiritual project for the Southwest and the Chihuahuan Desert’s Upper Rio Grande region around El Paso and Las Cruces in particular, a borderplex. I’m Dan Bodine, a retired Texas justice of the peace and former journalist. I’m your publisher.
Desert Mountain Times, the idea, started long ago in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with Southwest Times, Inc. A friend and I bought a weekly newspaper and added three small ones to it, in a common dream. We wanted a strong regional publication, heavy on human interest features, opinions and reader participation.
But that dream fizzled out in a bad economy; the corporation folded. And my life as I knew it then more or less ended. I ended up hundreds of miles away–in the mountains of the Chihuahuan Desert!
Ended up with hardly nothing more than a paper in a border community in Far West Texas, and having to take on a second job as a judge later to keep it alive. But God was smiling on me. Few people will be lucky enough to gather such experiences.
And in the process, a new family and new culture, this strange, exhilarating, new desert mountain environment, and new good friends, too, all combined to keep the dream alive that the late Don R. McNiel and I started back in the Dallas-Fort area, all those many years ago .
Now that I’m retired, our family living upstream a ways from Presidio but still in the desert mountains (in El Paso), we’re going back to some extent after what was started in 1985–only in electronic publishing.
We’re small now, but we’ll grow. Watch us, and keep checking back, please. Our first year has been heavy on political blogging, but with our feet on the ground now and hopefully with improved health, look for more news features and business stories about the borderplex itself, with photos of course, as we start our second year in this Easter Lent season, 2013.
Also noteworthy is a sister site — Desert Times East — being built at desertzines.com, which should be taking baby steps, too, sometimes in late spring or summer, 2013. It’s expected to carry advertising, calendar of events and news upgrades more for readers on El Paso’s fast-growing east side, and the other contiguous Trans Pecos counties. Follow the link on over and review the sign we’ve put up for it. Send a message to us if you like of specifics you’d like to see in the new weekly online paper. Maybe we can get it in.
But above all pull yourself up a chair and get comfortable. We’re here to entertain, inform, and hopefully shed some new light on ourselves as a people, not just coping in what some see as a barren desert, but actually a people comfortable and enjoying Life in that desert– which on closer look, is full of life itself. We hope to reflect some of that.
Thank you always for your visits and support.
