Serving Argyle, Bartonville, Copper Canyon, Corral City, Double Oak, Flower Mound, Highland Village and Lantana
April 2015
Once Snakebit, Twice Shy By Dawn Cobb, Editor
Phillip Herr kneels not far from where he was bitten by a copperhead in his Lantana yard.
After dark one day last fall, Lantana resident Phillip Herr was moving the recycling bin from his front yard to the back when he felt a small bite on his ankle. At first, he thought it must be a lizard. But it would soon become a date his family clearly recalls – October 10. Finishing his task, Herr went inside his home in the Sonora neighborhood as sat down on the sofa. “I was starting to feel a sensation in my left leg, like heat,” Herr recalled recently. His physician wife, an OB GYN, donned a pair of boots and walked outside where she spotted a copperhead snake. Immediately, she called 911. “I was taken to the hospital,” Herr said, recalled a two-day stay in ICU and three days total at Texas Health Presbyterian
www.CrossTimbersGazette.com
By Dawn Cobb, Editor
A popular purple dinosaur, known to parents and children alike as Barney, became the catalyst for setting Abbey Cone on course to releasing her second of two CDs in the next month. “I would sing to cartoons,” Abbey said from the living room of her Argyle home. Her mother, Melissa Cone, chimes in: “She knew every Barney song.” Listening to Abbey sing the little ditties on key, memorizing every word, her mother realized she had a songstress in the family. At age six, she started piano lessons and, shortly thereafter, vocal lessons. By age 9, she was taking guitar lessons and singing onstage at the Grapevine Opry House. That first song was Martina McBride’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” By age 12, she was penning lyrics to create her own country songs and traveling to Nashville – the nexus of country and western music – to make connections. She even took band in school, where she learned to play the alto/tenor saxophone. The youngest of four, Abbey would sing at rodeo arenas where her siblings were performing. To this day, she’s still
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Abbey Cone of Argyle strums a guitar as she picks out one of the soulful country and western tunes she has written.
See CONE on Page A22
Family Tradition Keeps Man Growing By Noelle M. Hood,Contributing Writer
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Ralph Morriss continues to grow a bounty of vegetables each year on Flower Mound land that has been in his family for generations.
80-year-old Ralph Morriss lives on Morriss Road. Long before Marcus High School even existed in imagination, the 4-lane highway that passes its front entrance started life as a dirt road through the Morriss family’s peanut farm. In 1923 Ralph’s grandpa, Andrew Morriss, and his son James used timbers from the original family cabin to build the present farmhouse which stands about a quarter mile down the road from the sprawling modern school. The tiny, white clapboard home with gray trim has an A&M doormat on the front porch. Guess where Ralph went to college? He laughed. “Once an Aggie, always an Aggie.” After the Civil War his great-grandfather, also a James, and an older brother, migrated from the Bowling Green area of Kentucky to the roughly 900,000 acre Peters Colony Land Grant tract with their guardian aunt and uncle. Scanty records indicate the boys’ parents both died early in life--during a history-making typhus epidemic. The family’s Presbyterian Church congregation of farmers had been recruited to migrate to the Cross Timbers See MORRISS on Page A18