Throughout his nearly thirty-year career at the San Antonio Express-News, Vincent T. Davis has perfected his craft of finding the extraordinary in ordinary lives. The Front Porch: Stories from the Soul of San Antonio presents a mosaic of the community composed of individual profiles of San Antonians. This luminous collection, which gathers some of Davis’s finest work, takes readers through San Antonio’s neighborhoods to trace the cultural and human legacy of a city built on the margins. Drawn by the lives of those rarely seen in headlines, Davis puts readers in places they’ve never been, including at a rural country rodeo where old wranglers watch the next generation, at a reunion of Vietnam veterans paying tribute to a fallen comrade, and in the sanctuary of a Baptist church where the women wear fine church hats of all sizes and colors during Sunday worship. He discovers the vulnerability of forgotten communities and pulls back the veil on his own family’s rich narratives, including a beautiful Mother’s Day tribute and his “Granddaddy,” Theodore H. Martin, the cigar-smoking World War II veteran whose spellbinding tales in Columbus, Georgia, taught young Vince “the magical sway of stories.” This isn’t just a book about San Antonio. Readers will come to care about people they never knew existed, whom they may have passed or caught a glimpse of on the street. And by the final page, they will understand something profound: Every community is rich with untold stories waiting for someone who cares enough to listen, stories passed from one person to another, one generation to another, one culture to another.
