Sunday, September 23, 2007

No detail escapes tis graphite artis

Telegram Staff Writer

A pencil is all he needs to make others go 'wow.'
Jonathan McGinnis doesn't just draw. He draws detail. The faces from his portrait art look like reflections from a mirror.
'He did a drawing once of Johnny Cash,' said Michael Donahue, chair of the Temple College art department. 'Every wrinkle and down to every pore in his nose, Jonathan got it right.'
After graduating from a Kansas high school five years ago, McGinnis attended TC on an art scholarship, earning his associate's degree in 2005. While there, Donahue said, McGinnis excelled and started to expand his creativity.
'I mainly do pencil drawings - with graphite,' McGinnis said. 'But there was an exercise where you were given a blank canvas and told to do whatever you see in your head. Most of those, I like to do in marker with bright colors.'

Sunday, September 2, 2007

For two men, the code still calls: Volunteers bring Morse code to railroad museum

Telegram Staff Writer

To the untrained ear, it's gibberish or white noise. The quick-to-come dashes and dots sound like never-ending bullet shots or beeps - depending on the volume and type of key used.
But to 90-year-old Norman Resor and 79-year-old Floyd Bumpus, the shots and beeps make perfect sense.
'I don't hear dots and dashes, I hear words,' Reser said. 'When I speak, you don't hear 't, h and e.' You just hear 'the.' It's the same for me.'
The two gentlemen work the telegraph booth at Temple's Railroad and Heritage Museum. Telegraphy is a method of communication that predates the telephone; it uses Morse code. For more than 100 years since the Civil War, trains talked to each other with telegraphs.
'If you have one train coming from one direction and another train coming from the opposite direction on the same track, and if you don't have a way to talk, well then you have a problem,' Reser said. 'Morse code was how the depots would communicate arrivals and departures.'