Monday Musings #25: Summer Break
San Antonians have been settling into the long, hot South Texas “summer” since May, when the city recorded the first three days of 100 degrees or more. Check out a national heat map right now: The rest of the country, north and east of Texas, is experiencing a lingering hot spell with temperatures soaring well above late June norms. Surprisingly, June is coming to a “normal” close here: days in the low 90s and nights in the mid-70s.
Still, this is the time of year when many residents start to contemplate escapes to cooler climes. I am one of them, departing the States for a one-month sojourn that will include work on a book project and a bucket list golf trip with friends to Scotland.
I’ll be taking a break from the bigcitysmalltown podcast and the Monday Musings newsletter starting next week. This week’s episode with our friends at San Antonio FC, the city’s professional soccer club, is co-hosted with Cory Ames, our producer and the host of his own Ensemble Texas podcast. Many of you probably watched last week’s episode of BCST that featured Cory in conversation with Monika Maeckle, author of the newly released Plants With Purpose book and last year’s release of The Monarch Butterfly Migration, Its Rise and Fall.
Yes, that Monika Maeckle, my wife and co-founder of the Rivard Report 13 years ago.
Monika and Cory will be in conversation again on Tuesday, 5:30-7 p.m., at the Twig Book Shop at the Pearl. Afterwards, she will be signing books.
It’s a good thing former San Antonio mayor and HUD secretary Henry Cisneros invited me to co-author The Austin–San Antonio Megaregion: Opportunity and Challenge in the Lone Star State, which will be published this fall by Texas A&M University Press. I’m starting to feel like I'm falling behind on the book publishing front.
Cory will be hosting bigcitysmalltown in my absence. As someone who moved to San Antonio with his wife Annie in 2017 and together are raising their two young boys here, I am reminded of a time four decades ago when Monika and I moved here with our two young boys. Cory is insatiably curious, a skilled writer and podcast host, and a video whiz. When I think about who will tell San Antonio’s story in the years ahead, I think first of Cory. I hope you get to know him and his work better this summer.
I’ll see y'all in August when Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones and the City Council reconvene from their summer break to wrestle with the fiscal year 2026 municipal budget. If you will be in San Antonio throughout July, consider attending one of the city’s 10 public gatherings to explore the proposed public-private investments in Hemisfair and downtown, notably a new Spurs arena and surrounding entertainment zone.
After watching two “small market” teams—Oklahoma City and Indianapolis—battle in Game 7 of the NBA Finals on Sunday night, with OKC winning its first title since relocating there in 2008, I’m ready to walk to a new Spurs arena at Hemisfair and watch the team play—just like my family did decades ago at the old HemisFair Arena. Spoiler alert: Something tells me we won't have to wait that long for the Spurs' next (sixth) championship run!
Bob Rivard
Host, bigcitysmalltown
Robert “Bob” Rivard is a veteran American journalist whose 46-year career has taken him across Texas, Latin America, and beyond. He co-founded the Rivard Report (later named the San Antonio Report) with his wife, Monika Maeckle, in 2012, building it into the city’s leading nonprofit news organization before retiring in 2022.
Bob has worked for five Texas newspapers, beginning his career on the border at the Brownsville Herald, then moving to the Corpus Christi Caller, the Dallas Times-Herald, and later serving as a foreign correspondent and chief of correspondents for Newsweek. He returned to Texas as senior editor of the San Antonio Light before becoming executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News (1997–2011).
His journalism has earned widespread recognition, including being named Editor & Publisher’s “Editor of the Year” in 2000 and receiving the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his reporting on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of journalist Philip True in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The book, published by Public Affairs in 2005, was widely reviewed, excerpted in Esquire, and selected by People magazine as one of five recommended nonfiction works that year.
Bob now hosts bigcitysmalltown, a podcast featuring the people shaping San Antonio’s future. He and Monika live in Southtown, where she runs the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog and previously founded the annual San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pol… Read More
