Five to Nine - A.M.

The Donut Palace on 118 North King Street is really hopping from 5:00 a.m. until 9:00 a.m. seven days a week!

Folks come here to talk about community and world events while drinking a cup of coffee and eating a doughnut. The place is always busy! The doughnuts are very very good and the service so professional and helpful.

This is one of those community places where it is just fun to be! I will always remember the second day after our home flooded in 1998 and we met at The Donut Palace at 5:00 a.m. with fellow 'evacuees' to drink a cup of coffee, eat a pastry, and commiserate with one another before heading to our homes in the Elmwood neighborhood to get started on the job of 'mucking' out our houses and seeing if anything was salvageable. [The first day of the flood we weren't allowed back into the neighborhood because of the danger and another round of flooding!]

Doing our part

Saturday mornings we take glass, cardboard, and aluminum cans to recycling bins on the Wal-Mart lot. During the week, our newspapers and magazines are dumped in bins located at our First United Methodist Church. The monies from this recycling benefit the Methodist Day School.

Any day of the week, plastic, etc. items can be taken to the recycling bins at the Guadalupe County Fairgrounds.

As for packing materials such as the bouncy and stick-to-everything 'peanuts,' I take these items as well as small boxes to the UPS & Grounds store on Kingsbury and they are re-used.

Why recycle??

Recycling—substituting scrap for virgin materials—not only conserves natural esources and reduces the amount of waste that must be burned or buried, it also reduces pollution and the demand for energy.

In an international study published last year by the Waste & Resources Action Programme, a British group, researchers compared more than 180 municipal waste management systems. Recycling proved better for the environment than burying or burning waste in 83 percent of the cases.

It makes sense to reuse products, of course, and to reduce consumption altogether, as well as to improve initial product design. But given the rising mounds of waste worldwide, it also makes sense to recycle.

http://www.recyclingcenters.org/Texas/Seguin_78155_recycling_centers.php

For Alice

This charming Doll House was built in 1910 by Louis Dietz for five-year-old Alice O'Brien.

Alice, born in 1905, was born in the New York Foundling Hospital and was one of the Orphan Train Children.

An estimated 1200 orphan train children from New York came to Texas in the years commencing in 1854 and ending about 1929.

Some of these children were orphans, some lived on the streets, and some were merely poor.

The police arrested vagrant children, some as young as five, and locked them up with adult criminals. In 1853, Charles Loring Brace, IV founded the Children's Aid Society in New York. to arrange the trips, raise the money, obtain the legal permissions needed for relocation. To recruit likely children, Brace and his staff of volunteers visited orphanages and reformatories and the homes of impoverished parents.

Three times a month agents of the Society assembled the children into groups ranging from six to one hundred and fifty. The groups were booked at a discount on regular passenger trains.

My son-in-law spoke of the Orphan Trains coming through Waterloo, Iowa and some families in that town would take in children - often because another hand was needed to work on the farm.

On May 31st, 1929, the Children's Aid Society sent three boys to Sulfur Springs, Texas. It was the last of the orphan trains.

Although some of the Orphan Train children did not have a happy life, little Alice O'Brien was a beloved daughter of the Dietz family.

http://www.seguinconservation.org/DollHouse.aspx