Improvement on Silence… My late father, T. J. Newbury, was a grand story teller. Friends and neighbors in Early, TX, gave him high marks for joke-telling, and so do I. Usually, hearty “ho-ho’s” erupted when the punch line was unleashed, but on the rare occasions when silence hung heavy and listeners looked blankly as if ghosts had been seen, he had a back-up plan. At such times, he’d laugh at himself, contending that if he didn’t think the story to be worthy of eliciting con ...