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By John Toth The Bulletin What are the chances of anyone in Brazoria County enjoying a late-summer beach outing, wading in the Gulf waters and being attacked by a shark? I know you have not been staying up nights worrying about this, as you shouldn’t. Brazoria County beaches are among the safest along the Texas coastline when it comes to shark-related encounters. You may be worried about strong currents along some sections of the county’s 17 miles of beachfront. You may disli

By John Toth The Bulletin I love to cruise, but I want to do it on an affordable budget. I don’t want to come back to port and be financially drained. I’m going to share with you in this column how I have a lot of fun cruising while keeping the cost down. Sharon, The Bulletin’s travel editor, and I have taken eight cruises so far and plan to take many more. In my humble opinion, it is the best way to relax and enjoy a vacation from the time we board a ship, to the sad morning

By John Toth The Bulletin I haven’t been dreading it, but I was also not looking forward to my annual visit to the doctor to make sure that all my vitals are still in the “alive and well” category. Sharon - my partner in The Bulletin and my life - decided to get our annual wellness visits at the same time to save a little gas and do some shopping afterwards. Sharon’s doctor was on one side of the clinic, and mine was on the other, which required that we go to separate waiting

By John Toth The Bulletin When I was a teenager in the 1970s, at the urging of a friend, I smoked a cigarette - or at least I tried. I was just puffing on the cigarette like it was a cigar. He encouraged me to inhale because, as he said, “that’s how it’s done. Otherwise, you’re just wasting it.” I did, and immediately I started coughing my lungs out. I couldn’t stop. It took several minutes for me to be able to breathe again normally. “That happens at first. You’ll get used t

By John Toth The Bulletin Thirty-two years ago this week, Sharon and I published the first Bulletin. It was eight tabloid pages, black and white. We didn’t know how long we’d last in the then-crowded Brazoria County newspaper market. Before we took on this endeavor, I worked 12 years for the Houston Chronicle covering Brazoria County and adjacent areas. I lived in the county and reported on events happening here. Sharon, the Bulletin’s co-publisher, was free-lancing for the C

By John Toth The Bulletin My former editor, Mary Moody, called me in 1995, five months after I quit the Houston Chronicle. “Did you get that weekly paper publishing bug out of your system yet?” she asked. “Why are you asking,” I asked back. “Because I have to fill your position, and I thought you’d like to come back,” she replied. I was honored. Mary and I didn’t always see eye to eye, although we managed to resolve our differences and became friends again – and again. I had

By John Toth The Bulletin You all know that summer is my favorite time of the year, no matter how hot it gets. I probably like the heat more than many others around here, which is why we are going to help some of our readers to cool off. If you’re reading this column, you have already seen our Page 1 promotion for free tickets to Moody Gardens’ Palm Beach Water Park in Galveston. We are giving away a bunch of tickets to help you get through the summer heat for at least one da

Many keep returning for the same reason I returned to my summer job as a student By John Toth The Bulletin When I was working in a summer camp in my high school and college years, leaving at the end of the summer was not a happy occasion. It meant leaving behind a very comfortable and simple existence and all the friends I made throughout the summer. I had no choice. I had to go back home and start the fall semester. Departing my world for the previous two months was not easy

By John Toth The Bulletin I always wanted to own a nail gun but never really had a good excuse to buy one - until now. There is a large workshed next to the Bulletin Hideaway, which has not been getting all that much attention. It has been something like “out of sight, out of mind,” even though it was not all that much out of sight. It was more like, out of mind. Recently, I noticed that this huge, overbuilt structure that serves the sole purpose of putting in there what was

By John Toth The Bulletin My mother had her poker face on as the border guard entered the train cabin and said, “papers, please.” The train just left Budapest, Hungary, where I was born and lived for the first 10 years of my life. We were poor, but all of Hungary was poor. The country became part of the Soviet Union’s bloc of countries over which it maintained control. My mother saw no future in raising her only son there. At the time, the situation seemed hopeless to her. Sh

Except for Kevin, who danced up a storm and wanted me to send him the video By John Toth The Bulletin There are a few things that Sharon and I are good at when cruising: We party at night, rest during the day, eat more than we should and meet people. Cruising is like a floating live-away camp. I spent many summers in camps as a child and then worked in them when I was a teen. At the end of the season, we would promise up and down that we’d stay in touch, call or write, and th

By John Toth The Bulletin Let’s go somewhere we can watch theatrical shows most nights, follow up with a concert, parties, eat anything we want and gamble a little, if we want. Oh, yes, and I want to go swimming and snorkeling in the ocean, so the place has to be near water and somewhere warm, like summer warm. How about not just near the ocean, but on it? I can find all these things in one place - on a cruise ship; this time it was on the Regal Princess. This was the first t

By John Toth The Bulletin People have urged me for a long time to write a book about my childhood - growing up in three different countries and immigrating to the United States in 1967. About a decade ago, I started toying with the idea and started writing down what I went through after my mother and I escaped from Hungary and landed in Vienna, Austria. I kept asking myself, why would people be interested in reading about my childhood escapades? There were better stories to t