ARRIVING IN SABINAL: Daddy said that he was riding the rails west.
 He always joked about riding the rails but he still had his railroad union card and all he had to do was show the train crew his card and he had a free ride in the caboose They always had a pot of stew on. He told me that he got off in El Paso. He was about broke so he went into a restaurant for a piece of pie and coffee. He picked up the menu and asked him if he wanted new menus printed free of charge. He agreed and gave Daddy authority to do it. He left with a copy and sold advertising on the back. He paid a printer to print and deliver the menus to the cafe. He headed back east with a pocket of money. He got off the train in Sabinal and was hired as a linotype operator. He lived in an apartment in a house down the street next to city hall, a block west on the left. He was a good looking man and was popular with the ladies. He met my mother Carrie Orene Love and they were married. They lived in Sabinal for a while then he got a job at the Edinburg paper. My older sister Betty Lou was born there. A delegation from Sabinal visited him there and asked him to come back to Sabinal and run the paper there. The paper had shut down. They guaranteed him advertising. He accepted and they moved back to Sabinal. Curtis Kay and Peggy Sue was born there. He won an award for one of his headlines. "Commissioners eat chicken and lay plans". He told me one of his trips to west Texas he stopped for gas and a man had a panther he had killed in the back of his pickup. It was 9 feet from nose to tip of his tale. The sand was blowing and choked up his carburetor. He had his head under the hood fixing the problem when the high wind sent a bouncing, tunbling tumbleweed into his rear end. He thought a panther had him and almost crawled over the car. I can see him in my mind as he told these stories. He would puff on his pipe as he paused in his story and the pipe would crackle and sizzle as he rekindled the fire. I can almost smell the tobacco smoke. He smoked half & half tobacco. He told of going to Cristoval to see about buying printing equpment that was in storage there. The man wanted him to make an offer but Daddy wouldn't. The equipment was covered in grease and dirt and didn't look too good. The man finally came up with a price and it was all Daddy could do to keep from dancing it was so low. He played it cool and said: "I don't know.....I'd have to have it hauled." The man came down on the price some more. Daddy said he almost stole the equipment. All it needed was cleaning up. It basicly was printing equipment for a whole paper. Daddy said that when the bank closed in Sabinal due to a run. That he played banker for Sabinal for a while. He had about $700 in his pocket at the time. He brought his brothers from North Carolina to teach them the newspaper business. Kay McKinney and Robert Earl McKinney. He was the one that I was named after.--Robert E. McKinney