The Famous Cafe

The Shiprock---still forty miles west of Farmington---the good things in life stay that way.

    

     The center of the job market and the social scene in the oil fields around Farmington, New Mexico, in 1956 was the Famous Café.  The café filled a blocky, white stucco building on the main drag, just a half block from the Animas River Bridge, and was convenient for everyone who worked in the fields.   Painted signs in big plate glass windows proclaimed “Open 24 Hours” on one side of the entry and “Air Cooled” on the other.   The air conditioning was provided by a “swamp cooler’, but it was efficient in the low humidity of far northwestern New Mexico.

     A sit-down counter spanned the cafe's entire back wall, in front of the pass-through to the kitchen, booths lined the side walls, and several four-seat tables finished the room.  The waitresses were slender, quick, efficient, and as tough as any field hand.   The over-worked juke box filled the room with the earthy music of Earnest Tubb, Jim Reeves and Webb Pierce.   Warm, inviting aromas of chicken-fried steak, hamburgers and French fries permeated the air-cooled atmosphere.

     Wire line crews, roughnecks, roustabouts, tool pushers, and “hands” gathered here before and after shift change, some looking for work, some looking for help, and some just looking.  Gin pole trucks fitted with removable bench seating queued up out front each morning to take roustabouts to the fields.  A bulletin board behind the cashier’s counter listed available jobs, and crew chiefs hired on the spot every morning at five-thirty.  Depending upon your point of view, that end of the oil business either enjoyed, or suffered, frequent turnovers in the work force.

     The Famous served pancakes, biscuits, sausage, bacon and eggs, plate lunches, hamburgers, French fries, and gallons of coffee and iced tea.   Like the oil fields, it was open 24/7 and anything on the menu was always available.  Dollar-and-a-half sack lunches, with two sandwiches, chips, and dessert, provided an invaluable service for a bunch of hungry boys away from home for the first time.  For larger appetites, three-sandwich lunches were two dollars.

    Our roustabout crew met every morning at the Famous at six.  We had breakfast, picked up our lunches, and climbed onto the appropriate truck at seven.  The trucks took us deep into the desert, dropped us off, and we worked in the hot sun until the trucks returned.  Our time on payroll started when we mounted the trucks at the café and stopped when the trucks picked us up at the end of the day, so we were paid for travelling one way.  We worked ten hours a day, six days a week, and were paid a dollar-fifty per hour, with double time for all over forty hours.  One hundred twenty bucks every week, before taxes.  We were getting rich.

     The walk to the Famous each day was invigorating.  The desert mornings were crisp, the air was fresh and clean, and you could see, as they say, forever.  We could look out west and watch the sunrise light up the Shiprock, forty miles away in the desert.   At the time, I was nineteen years old, eating and sleeping properly and working outside all day, every day.  I was robustly healthy.  I should have paid them---I’ve never felt better.

     I went back to Farmington in 1989 and, with a bit of trouble, located the Famous.  At least I located the building—it was a barber shop.   Like everything else from my youth, it was much smaller than I remembered, but still retained the large windows and stucco facade.  When the new bridge was built and the old one removed, the building was left isolated, away from the action.  It was now alone and lonesome, in an otherwise vacant area, about three blocks west of the new main road. 

     Other things have changed.  Just off the highway to Shiprock, the Navajo Nation has built a gigantic, coal-fired electric generation plant.  The air is hazy now and I doubt if anyone can see the Shiprock from Farmington on most days.  If you fly over the area today, you can see gigantic circles of green vegetation, made possible by circular sprinkler systems drawing water from the Navajo Reservoir.  I understand they grow pumpkins now, out there in the desert, where the Anasazi once lived.

     Everything changes.  No more will a nineteen year old kid learn the rules of life from a rag-tag bunch of oil field hands and skinny waitresses at a twenty-four hour café.  No more will that kid earn enough in a summer to go to college for a full year.  No more will the desert air be so clean and clear that anyone can see details on a vertical shaft of volcanic rock forty miles away.   I will never again be nineteen, with all my dreams spread out in front of me, blissfully unaware of my shortcomings.

      All that happened once and I was there.  I can only be
thankful that I was so priviledged and I can only be sad for all the young people who are forever deprived of that first glimpse of the real world.


Note:   I have tried several times to fix the jammed up paragraph above.  I was not attempting to write free verse poetry.  I wanted it to simply look like, and be spaced like, the paragraphs above, but this machine won't let me fix it and I don't want to write the whole thing over.  Bear with me--or is it bare with me?  I've got a lot to learn about this writing stuff.  Jim