Dave Parsons

Joined the Marines after high school...returned to attend U.T. and SWTSU, where I have a BBA. After opening and managing a haberdashery(Dave Parsons Menswear) and an Ad Agency(Parsons & Moore) in Austin for several years, I moved to Houston to teach Marketing and Coach Basketball/ Baseball at Bellaire High School, where I had the privilage to be on Coach Ray Knoblock's staff when he won one of his many state championships in 1979. I moved to Conroe to be Mgr./Pro at Conroe Racquetball Club. I soon after, reopened an Ad Agency with my wife, Nancy (www.graphicdesigngroup.net) with clients in Houston, New York and Washington. In the mid-eighties, I studied with poet, Stanley Plumly in London, afterwhich, all my ad writing sounded like poems and all my poems sounded like ads, therefore, I quit advertising and pursued a graduate degree in poetry at U. of Houston. I have been teaching Creative Writing and Kinesology (Racquetball/Handball) at Lone Star College-Montgomery since 1992, where, I also Coach their Racquetball/Handball Team. I have four poetry books still in print (Editing Sky & Color of Mourning, Feathering Deep, David M. Parsons New & Selected Poems) and I was fortunate to have been inducted into The Texas Institute of Letters in 2009 and proclaimed 2011 Texas Poet Laureate by the Texas Commission on the Arts/Texas Legislature. Ironic...check out my School Story. On August 3, 2013 the City of Conroe and the arts community erected a bust of me by sculptor Craig Campobella in Founder's Park by the town square...mot humbling...I felt like I should have worn my coveted Spam-a-lot souvenir T-shirt that says on the front, I'M NOT DEAD YET.

I did not get to graduate on time with everyone because I failed Senior English (I believe my Teacher was Ms. Slatton?) and had to go to Summer School...a great irony to me now that I am a college English Teacher.

Random memory: Chopped beef sandwiches from House Park Bar-B-Q after athletic practices.

Return to my favorite job of my entire life: Lifeguard at Barton Springs...those mornings when I had to open the pool and there was no one there but me and the springs...'course, there was also the topless sunbathers later in the day, too.

I have experienced some monumental failures in my life: early on I screwed up a wonderful marriage causing a divorce, I took a great business I had built from scratch to a bankruptcy, and I had a stroke that took some of my vision away and many other smaller items, and in every case, I was propelled by the failures to attempt something I would never of thought of or tried to do...seems to me if I am careful to remember where the "potholes" I step in are, I fare well.

"How old would you be, if you didn't know how old you was?"

Satchel Paige

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