News

June 15 kicked off the Olney Cubs summer football camp program. Each year the coaches at Olney ISD put on a football camp to get the 1st through 6th graders excited about playing football.

Olney welcomes its new head basketball coach Dylan Ballard. Coach Ballard played high school basketball at Ponder High School in Ponder, Texas. “I was very fortunate there. Being able to be apart of three teams that made the state tournament,” Ballard said. Coach Ballard went on to win two state championships in basketball at Ponder in 2008 and 2009.

This house was built in 1927 for J.D. Carpenter and his family. Mrs. Carpenter was a Howard and they had three children – Joe, Mattie, and Mauddie, the latter of the two being twins but only fraternal twins. Mr. Carpenter was farming 240 acres at the Southwest corner of Shearer Road and Campbell Road when the oil boom came, and this acreage was completely enveloped by oil production and today it is scarred by saltwater spills. The children graduated from OHS – Joe in either 41 or 42 and the girls in the class of 44. Joe went into the service and to Texas Tech afterwards. Joe married Jacqie Duggan in the late forties and this calls for a detailed explanation about his wife. She was the niece of Bowman Criswell who came to Olney with the opening of the Baldwin-Lovett Clinic in 1935 as the head nurse. Bowman was her maiden name and if she had a given name, it was never used. The Criswells settled into the Anderson Apartments on West Bloodworth for a long tenure. Joe joined with Mr. Criswell in oil ventures and citrus groves in the lower Rio Grande Valley. Mr. Carpenter invested in farmland around Plainview and eventually the girls settled in that area to manage the farms.