'I started reading The A-J when...'
Paper provides memories for Hawley
DANETTE BAKER; A-J Special Contributor

Scrub Hawley flipped through the pages of his scrapbook, stopping when he found a piece of folded up newspaper. Gingerly unfolding the underneath edges, he revealed a mortar board and placed it atop his head.

''I actually judge people by whether they read the paper or not,'' said the retired educator. ''If they don't get the paper and read it, they already have one strike against them in my book.''

Hawley said he learned to read in the mid-1930s as a young student attending elementary school in Dickens. ''My parents were big on reading, but we just couldn't afford a newspaper subscription until some years later when Dad got a janitorial job at the school.

''He then started buying some national publications like the 'New York Mirror' and 'Grit,''' Hawley recalled. ''It cost about a nickel a copy ... but provided some pretty good human interest stories and a little national news.''

The experience must have left an impression, he said. Some 20 years later, after a stint in the Navy and as a roughneck in the Texas oilfields, Hawley majored in journalism and English first at West Texas State University in Canyon and then at Texas Tech, during which time he learned the day-to-day workings of The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

''I think it was when I first got back from the Navy that I began taking The A-J,'' he said. ''But while I was at Tech, I took a photo journalism class in which I actually got to work in the photo lab.

''The newspaper soon became something that I couldn't do without.''

So when Hawley began teaching, he naturally made the newspaper a part of his curriculum.

''Each Wednesday we would get a copy for every kid in the classroom,'' he said of his 20-year tenure with first- and second-graders in McAdoo. He began teaching in 1960 at Cone and retired in 1988 at Spur.

''We would read the datelines of the different cities in which the news was reported from and find those cities on the map,'' Hawley recalled. ''Through the newspaper we learned to shop, to read (weather) maps ... With the paper, I could show how they might actually use things like English, math and geography.''

The newspaper also served as a source of entertainment, he added. ''That's how I got this mortar board.''

Sometime during the 1970s, best as he can recall, Hawley said The A-J published instructions on how to recycle a newspaper into a printer's cap.

''While the whole class was engineering their printer's caps, I looked around the room and this one kid was sitting at his desk with this mortar board on his head,'' Hawley motioned to the headgear now slightly yellowed with age. ''I looked at him and thought, 'Now that took some thinking.'''

The student gave the newspaper mortar board to Hawley as a memento, he said, adding that it serves as a nostalgic reminder of the newspaper's ability to entertain and educate the reader.

''What better way is there to start your day than with a laugh provided by the comic strips?'' he said, showing off some all-time favorites like 'Hagar the Horrible' and 'Shoe' that he has clipped through the years.

''Likewise, you need to stay abreast of what is happening in the community,'' Hawley said. ''And the newspaper's the best way to do that.''

(EDITOR'S NOTE As part of The Avalanche-Journal's 100th birthday celebration, the newspaper will publish a monthly feature entitled ''I Started Reading The A-J When ...,'' which will look at the newspaper's influence on a person's life through the years. Today's installment looks at Scrub Hawley, who has been an A-J reader for more than 40 years.)


Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Sunday, May 28, 2000

Racing across France
Local enthusiasts prepare for fifth 750-mile bicycle race
RAY WESTBROOK

Hubert ''Scrub'' Hawley is taking down his bicycle for one last ride in the three-day, 750-mile Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race that begins Aug. 23.

Technically, the race is three days plus 18 hours, giving riders up to 90 hours to complete the 750 miles across Eastern France.

But Hawley, who will be 68 on the day of the final 250-mile segment, typically finishes it in about 82 hours. That means he rides a bicycle 750 miles in three days and 10 hours.

His friend and a fellow participant in the Paris-Brest-Paris event, Sherman Phillips, once rode the course in less than 80 hours by keeping company with Hawley for all but the last 50 miles, then sprinting for the finish line to set his own benchmark for the future.

Phillips finds Hawley's determination and endurance amazing. ''Here I am 49, and it's difficult for me to do. I look at him, and I'm thinking ... how?''

Hawley successfully completed the race all four times he has attempted it, and has the medals from France to prove it. But this year he has something new a ''bionic hip joint'' and isn't sure what effect that may produce.

It isn't always easy to determine when Hawley is being serious and when he is playing mind games. He is a retired school teacher, a farmer and a free-lance writer who is able to switch with near electronic speed from a sober mood to humor.

''My old body is wearing out,'' he says with a straight face, then adds in the same breath that he became interested in cycling after his lobotomy.

''Ever since my lobotomy I have had a passion for cycling and adventure to see how far I could go and how fast, and what's over the next hill. Basically, I ride a bicycle just for the joy of it.''

Hawley lived a bachelor's life until he retired from school teaching, and on the last day of school, he married his wife, Kaia, whom he met while cycling.

She often accompanies him to France, but doesn't ride in the race.

He is mostly confident about this year's ride, yet a twinge of doubt lingers.

''I had that dang hip replacement ... it's been just a little over a year ago,'' he says reflectively. ''It was a year ago last March, on St. Patrick's Day. It feels good, though. The other old hip is the one that hurts. This one ... there's no pain ... it's sort of weird. It's like it's just a ball bearing no pain, nothing.''

Pain is an expected part of every Paris-Brest-Paris race, whether there is an ailing hip joint or not. Each rider must subject his body to a kind of crisis mode to be able to complete the distance in the required time. For most of the trip, they ride 20 hours and sleep four except for the start, when they ride for 36 hours straight.

There is 36,000 feet of climbing hills in lower gears along the way.

Phillips said of the ride, ''We try to be steady. We are trying to go as far as we can as fast as we can on the least amount of energy. We don't talk a lot, we don't look around a lot. We simply try to focus on what we have to do, and we try not to pay any attention to the pains because we know they are going to come and they are going to go.''

What hurts?

''Everything hurts,'' he said.

According to Phillips, Hawley never complains. He doesn't take along so much as an aspirin to lessen the discomfort.

Feet and toes become numb from the pressure on the bike pedals, and arms, extended to the drop bars for most of 80-plus hours, become virtually frozen in place, according to the riders.

''I usually can't lift my arms very high afterward,'' Hawley said.

Why do they do it?

''This is a challenge, and it puts your body in top shape,'' Hawley said. ''You set a goal, and it makes you feel good.''

Phillips said, ''I guess I do it simply because if he is going to do it, I have to do it there's no choice. But it also makes everything else in life seem a whole lot easier after this.''

According to Phillips, the hardest part for him is getting up at 3 a.m. to begin a day of riding. ''Scrub can get up, and he will say, 'Let's go,' and I say, 'What are you talking about I don't even know where I am.' He's real good in the mornings, and I am better in the afternoons and at nighttime.''

The ride is an adventure at times. Phillips recalls getting lost along a roadway with no signs, and found help only through a kind of international cooperation. He was riding with three others, who were from France, Spain and Denmark. They knocked on the door of a farmhouse at 3 a.m. to ask directions.

Phillips could speak Spanish in addition to English, but not French. The man from Denmark could speak English as a second language, but not Spanish or French. The man from Spain could speak French as well as Spanish, and the Frenchman could speak Spanish in addition to French.

''I could tell it wasn't going well, and then I heard a swearword in Spanish,'' Phillips said.

''The Frenchman told the Spaniard, the Spaniard told me, and I told the guy from Denmark what had happened.''

They were three miles off course.

Hawley has ridden the race so confidently in the past that he sometimes has taken the last leg of the ride lightly, once delaying the finish until the 89th hour of a required 90 hours just to add a touch of drama.

''You've got all these French people out cheering you on,'' he explained, ''So, we had to slow down a little. We did it in 89 hours and 20 minutes, but we did that intentionally.''

Hawley has ridden qualifying distances across some of the most difficult terrain of Texas. In the past, Americans were perceived as wimps because only about 50 percent of them finished the French race. So, France began requiring qualifying rides. Now, almost all finish within 90 hours.

Hawley likes the French ride, despite its rigors: ''They have corn fields and sunflowers and summer wheat. The corn is usually just past the roasting ear stage.''

And when they finish, after a brief time of recovery, they tour Paris and eat all they can hold of anything they want. It has been worth the effort, Hawley believes.

But will he ever try riding the Paris-Brest-Paris distance again?

''No,'' he says, entering his fast-shifting writer's mode. ''This is absolutely the last time I will undertake this probably.''


Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Monday, August 16, 1999