WHO'S ON FIRST? ATKINSON AT BISD? JESSICA IN DISTRICT 3? MACHALE AT THE CAMERON DOWNTOWN?

By Juan Montoya
The summer doldrums with their heat and sweltering mugginess tend to stultify the senses in Brownsville.
Things seem to be getting along swimmingly that you tend to just let them float along. Here and there issues surface and sink again as if they hadn't bubbled out at all.
That happened in this period surrounding the Fourth of July.
Is it true that former City Commissioner Charlie Atkinson has been hired by the BISD as an athletic coach?
Is it true that residency-challenged city commissioner Jessica Tetrau-Kalifa has moved into a home within District 3?
Is it true that Dr. G.F. McHale-Scully has become a denizen of the downtown area and is using his considerable talents to attempt a one-man renaissance of the entertainment district? We were assured that after Charlie sister, Dr. Sylvia Atkinson, was promoted to Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources, brother Chuck's application for employment wended its way through the interminable process at BISD that had resulted in his being awarded a position there.
We inquired of some board members who themselves were unaware of his possible employment and told us they would inquire into the matter and into the process of his reported hiring. Was everything done on the up-and-up if this was true? And, if so, where will sport-loving Charlie dispense his athletic prowess for the benefit of the BISD would-be Emmet Smiths?
We will report the fact as they come in.
We are also told that commissioner Tetreau, whose residency Charlie challenged during the recent city elections, no longer lives on Heather Lane with her parents. We are now inquiring about the correctness of the information. Someone claiming to be the commissioner has emailed us to say this is incorrect. We will gladly post the correct information if the commissioner will furnish us with verifiable facts.
Some say that this (moving into a home in the district) would make sense if she is trying to stave off the Atkinson challenge to her candidacy. He has gone to court a few times trying to convince a judge that she lied about where she lived to get elected to the position.
We remember that he furnished the city with a package which icluded at least one domestic violence police report where she told police she lived in an address on San Marcelo, outside the district a few months before the May 14 elections.
Additionally, Facebook postings, and a marriage license – indicated that she lived with her husband at the San Marcelo address.
If she has, indeed, moved, it could mean that the district will be her home at least until her term runs out. Or perhaps she is merely trying to diffuse the issue once and for all.
Who's on first?
What we have been able to ascertain is that Jerry McHale, a BISD teacher, bon vivant, and now the writer of http://www.browntownnews.com/ is now encamped at a local downtown hotel as he launches a new campaign to resuscitate what he calls the New Orleans of the Rio Grande.
Jerry first came to Brownsville decades ago and has never forgotten the cool, cozy nooks downtown that provided him solace and wonderment as they did to a legion of former Brownsville Herald writers and hangers on. He started his acerbic rag El Rocinante written on appropriate yellow sheets strategically placed in restaurants, bars, doctors' offices, lobbies, etc., and just about any place they would let him.
Ernie Hernandez wouldn't, and from there, we are told, flowed the beginning of a bad-blood antagonism between both hombres.
From there on he moved to the Internet and the rest, as Dr. Pangloss would say, is history, Candide.
Like most Irishmen, Jerry is driven by a mad passion that only that hardy race seems to have inherited and we wish him the best. Perhaps we'll stumble onto the good doctor in our wanderings through the historical district.