Road Trip #24 Back in Texas--Reflections on the Trip

Wayne and I followed I-10 until it hit the ocean and turned right.

     Sunday morning, we had breakfast with Buck and Lynn in Muleshoe and left for Lubbock at eight a.m.  Others might not enjoy the drive from Muleshoe to Lubbock, but Wayne and I found it exhilarating.   The High Plains infects its people with a hunger for the sky and a thirst for open space.  We didn’t talk much, just soaked up the scenery—the ever-present, overpowering sky, a few sand hills, a grain elevator every so often, endless plowed fields, and two or three cattle feeding operations.  No matter where we’d been or what we’d seen, looking at this country filled us with pride and contentment.  We were back in the Panhandle.  “Home” looks different to everyone, but this is what it looks like to us.  We were glad to see it.

     We made the eighty miles to the Pecanderosa Forge before ten o’clock because R.G. Box planned for us to guest star at his Sunday Morning Coffee Clatch.  We met several old friends, drank coffee, told stories, joked, and generally did what older folks do when they socialize.  Fifty years ago, we would have been bored.  At this time of our lives, it was an enjoyable way to spend the morning.

I don't know the young fellow up close on the left, but that's John Bacon with the white hair and moustache and R.G. Box on the stool beyond.  James Eby has his back to us and that may be Garland Weeks pointing his finger in front of Bacon.

     R. G.  rounded up the usual suspects—James Eby, John Bacon, Garland Weeks and several others.  Roy Turner brought his lovely wife, Nelda, who may have been the first female, other than a family member or potential customer, to visit R.G.’s Smithy.  Nelda added some much-needed class to the affair.  James Pope, one of the regulars, didn’t show.  He was confused and forgot all about the coffee and went to a local café instead.  Forgetfulness happens when you get our age. Wayne and I have not aged all that much—we just have prematurely gray hair.

Ratisseau, looking into the distance and telling a spell-binding story to Roy and Nelda.  Note the Iron Roses and Apples on the table in the foreground.  R. G. did these during his "Fruit and Floral" period.  He did the Roses pretty well, and the Granny Smith Apples are OK, but he never learned to do a Red Delicious, Fuji or Winesap.

     After the coffee and visit, John Bacon invited us over to see his new home.  Actually, I pushed him for the invitation, because the house is unique and I take every opportunity to see it when I’m in Lubbock.  I notice new details with every visit and am fascinated by the whole thing.  John and Patricia designed the home and had it built, with John supervising every phase of construction every day. The results are pretty much what anyone with the advantage of world travel, good taste, and unlimited creativity would build.  John and James Eby, a boyhood friend who happens to be a landscape architect, are currently finishing the back yard.  It will be another masterpiece.

     About fourteen miles past Lamesa on Highway 87, near the turnoff to Sparenburg and Patricia, the odometer on Wayne’s pickup said we'd been 5,000 miles since we left my driveway in Kerrville two weeks ago.  I never pass that intersection without thinking of my college friends, Bobby Brown and Donell Echols.  They both live somewhere down that road and have all their lives.  I never see them, but I think about them, and wish we could have a nice long visit and remember our college days. 

     Nice long visits with seldom-seen old friends are great fun most of the time.  Sometimes, however, when I get a long visit with an old friend, it gets to be too long.  I want him to be the person he was forty years ago, and he wants the same from me.  We both end up wanting the visit to end, so we can put each other back into neat little boxes we’ve created in our minds.  Like an old book in the shelves of the library, we can look at it and remember it fondly, without having to go to the trouble of reading and understanding all the latest footnotes and revisions.

     Wayne and I passed through Big Spring, (my dad irritated and embarrassed me by calling it “Big Sprangs” all his life), Water Valley, (the only green spot in the county is the high school football field), and San Angelo.  We were nearing the end of our trip.  We were eager to get home, but saddened because such a great experience was coming to an end.

     I need to get something off my chest.  I can say smart alec things like “Wayne and I have prematurely gray hair,” all I want, but it doesn’t change the facts.  We are three quarters of a century old.  In human years, any way you cut it, that’s old.  We are healthy, active, mobile, and lucky as all get out to be that way.  Some of our friends are still in decent shape, some are not in such good shape, and some are dead.  I can’t help but notice this.

     When I get up in the morning, I take my blood sugar, swallow nine dollars worth of pills, brush my teeth, look at the old man in the mirror and wonder, Is that all there is?  Am I through? Will I just go to the doctor every three months, let him adjust my meds, and hunt around for something meaningful to do with the rest of the day, the week, the year... my life?

     I am not foolish enough to think that I have as much time left as I’ve already used, but I intend to enjoy what time is left.  As much as I’d like to, I don’t expect to splash around in a hot tub with a bevy of naked cheerleaders, but I can have fun in other ways.  That’s the important thing—sight adjustment—adjusting my sights to fit my capabilities.  If I can’t play a furious game of handball, I can ride my bike to the grocery store.  If I can’t write the great American novel, I can peck around on my blog.  If I can’t impress heads-of-state and super-models with my quick wit and incisive remarks, I can write a truculent letter to the editor of a small-town newspaper.

From the right, James Pope, Wayne Ratisseau and myself, enjoying a cold beer and fantastic seafood at the King's Inn, on the shores of Baffin Bay, near Kingsville.

     I can take a road trip with an old friend, and I have lots of old friends.  James Pope joined Ratisseau and me for a mini-trip around Texas last spring.  We explored historic sites, ate Polish sausage—did you know the first Polish settlement in the United States was in Texas in 1845?—and spent a half-day at the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi.  We stood in the courtyard where James Fannin, the most inept commander in the Texas Army, was executed. We ate Coconut Meringue Pie at the local café in downtown Utopia, where Robert Duvall hung out as they filmed Seven Days in Utopia.  We sat in the basement of Arkly Blue’s Silver Dollar Club in Bandera, drank beer and listened to great country music as "Open Mike Saturday" went down.

     All that does not hold a candle to splashing around in a hot tub with cheerleaders, but it will have to do.  As my baseball coach said, sixty odd years ago,“Don't ever give up--as long as you’re swinging, you’re dangerous.”

You can tell right away that this ain't Wichita Falls.

      

    

    

    

    

Some Texas Humor Ain't Funny

      Someone gave me a book entitled Texas Humoresque.  I was eager to read it and find out about everything funny in the Lone Star State.  I was disappointed.  Maybe the book was too intellectual, written for people with more intelligence than I possess.  Maybe my sense of humor is underdeveloped.  Maybe the guy who wrote it is a jerk.

     I have never been comfortable laughing AT other people.  I prefer to laugh WITH other people.  The author of this stilted work is a PhD from Harvard named C. L. Sonnichsen, and he evidently enjoys laughing at other folks, especially Texans.  “Author” may be the wrong word.   He didn’t write any of the book himself, except the foreword and a few introductions.  None of that was funny.  I’m reminded of the old saw, “Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach.”

     Published in 1990 and subtitled Lone Star Humorists From Then Till Now, the book is a collection of dozens of articles by Texans and some non-Texans.  I saw familiar names in the table of contents—Joe Bob Briggs, Leon Hale, John Henry Faulk, H. Allen Smith, and Shine Phillips.  I flipped over to a Leon Hale story.  He grew up on the edge of the Caprock, on a farm near Petersburg, and wrote for the Houston Chronicle.  Leon is a columnist and a humorist and his pieces always leave me with  a warm feeling.  He is one of my favorite storytellers. 

     Dr. Sonnichsen picked a Leon Hale article that had to do with Aunt Lizzie dipping snuff, spitting with great accuracy, and talking like an East-Texas hick.  I suppose all that would be funny to a Harvard PhD, but I admire the more self-deprecating sense of humor which Hale displays in most of his writing.  I remember a bit he did on the proper way to prepare and eat a hamburger, another on how to teach chickens to fly, and his annual articles about the exact location of spring.  All of them are wildly funny and none of them have fun at the expense of others. 

     Hale wrote honestly about his Aunt Lizzie, describing her character, her idiosyncrasies, and her speech patterns.  The learned professor chose to ignore all this good work and laugh at the way Aunt Lizzie talked.   It was the only way she knew to talk and she’d been talking that way for over eighty years.  While the fine doctor was living in a dorm in Boston,  reading Chaucer and Shakespeare, Aunt Lizzie was washing clothes on a rub-board, hoeing cotton all day, and cooking on a wood stove.  He hasn’t earned the right to laugh at her.

     Elsewhere in the book, the good doctor included a drive-in movie review by Joe Bob Briggs.  Being a fan of Joe Bob’s, I considered this particular review somewhat mediocre when compared to most of his work.  This one dwelt on the fact that Tanya Robert’s boobies were so unimpressive that she popped her top on the big screen and the movie still got a “PG” rating.  Joe Bob’s sense of humor and lack of taste finally got him fired at the Dallas newspaper where he worked.  I’m not sure if his comments about Oral Roberts and his brother Anal got him fired, or if it was something else, but Joe Bob continued to write and do late-night TV for a devoted audience.    

     I don’t know why Dr. Sonnichsen assembled this work, except the idea that he must publish something to be taken seriously by the intelligentsia—those brilliant folks back East.  The stories he quoted wove the same theme all through the book—Texans are rude, crude, loud, dumb, and lack good taste.   They are rural, have double first names, are socially unattractive, and incapable of speaking proper English.  The whole state is one big Aggie Joke, told especially for the enjoyment of brilliant Yankees.

     Having said all that, I do not believe the man held any malice toward his adopted state.  He taught at Texas School of Mines in El Paso (now UTEP) for many years. I think he had a sense of humor warped by too much high-toned education.  He picked the right authors but the wrong stories.  His PhD is in English Literature and perhaps he should have stayed in that field, instead of wandering into the fields of Texas, where good honest humor is serious business.  Humor is necessary for survival here.

     I should point out that condescending Harvard PhD’s may not be alone in their distain for what they consider lesser beings.   Many Texans, including me, demonstrate a biased point of view when it comes to our well-educated neighbors to the north.  I don’t think that will change—look at how the Kennedy family treated Lyndon—and what he thought about them.  

     Leon Hale said, “Nobody reads books anymore.  If you think people read books, just write one.”  Dr. Sonnichsen published this book in 1990.  Thankfully, neither has been heard of since.

Road Trip # 23--The Time Charlie Flowers Demolished the Neighborhood.



Sunset from Buck and Lynn Campbell's back fence in Muleshoe.  A friend says that every picture you see of the Panhandle is at Sunset, because there is not much else to look at.  He's from Wichita Falls.  Have you ever seen a picture of his hometown?



    

      As soon we climbed out of the Canadian River Gorge, we were back on the trackless plains, with space and sky in every direction.  Except for the deer and the antelope playing in their home on the range, we had the country to ourselves.  We came upon several mule deer, grazing near the highway.

     “Look out, Mac.  Those deer will run across the road when you get near them,” Wayne said.  We approached a group of six or seven deer, spread out along the right of way on our side of the fence.  I slowed to a crawl.  Sure enough, just as we came abreast and I started to breathe easier, the whole herd took off across the road in front of us.  I narrowly missed two of them. All of them effortlessly cleared the fence and disappeared into the distance.

     Wayne was either comfortable with my driving or still too tired to care.  He dozed off and I started to daydream.  Imagining how this country must have been a hundred fifty years ago adds to the respect I have for mankind.  The pioneers, the soldiers, and the settlers who came here in the late 1800’s had no roads.  They had no maps.  Most of them had no guides.  They had what provisions they could carry, the courage to face the unknown, and the tenacity and intestinal fortitude to persevere.  They survived because they didn’t know how to give up and their children prospered for the same reason.

     In Logan, New Mexico, there is a bar called, “Whiskey the Road to Ruin.”  Local characters, cowboys, travelers and sightseers have been taking the road to ruin there since 1887.   I always thought there should be a comma after “Whiskey”, but the first guy to make the sign obviously didn’t have a woman to correct him.  He also didn’t have a bottle of Scotch, or he would have spelled it “whisky.”

     My friend, Johnny Latham lives in a house built before 1900, right next door to the “Road to Ruin.” Even though we were running late, we couldn’t go through town without stopping to see Johnny and his lovely wife, Susan.  Johnny and I have been friends since boot camp in the Marine Corps.  Afterwards, we spent a couple of years at Tech, then he married and moved off to New Mexico and we lost touch.  I found him on the internet a few years ago, and we renewed our friendship.  He is truly one of the good guys.

     Our visit was much too short.  We had a glass of iced tea, and bemoaned the fact that the “Road to Ruin” was now the Elk’s Club.  New paint job, same name but now also displaying the “Elk’s Club” in big letters.  We concluded that was a better solution to the march of time than closing altogether, but a hundred- twenty-five-year old saloon should remain in business, even if it has to get a government subsidy.   Makes as much sense as paying farmers not to plant.  The federal government needs to get its priorities straight and spend a little recovery money on a good historic place where the voters can do some drinking.

     We pulled into Muleshoe just before sunset, about an hour later than planned.  Buck and Lynn Campbell and Jerie Flowers had started “Happy Hour” without us, but we caught up.  We sat in the Campbells lovely back yard, talked and laughed and watched the unbelievable sunset. 

     This was my first visit here since Charles Flowers’ funeral and all of us were acutely aware of his absence.  We were also aware that life goes on and enjoyed our visit, knowing that is the way Charles would want it.  In the mid-fifties, Faron Young recorded Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young and Leave a Beautiful Memory.  It could have been a theme song for Charles.

     Lynn told the story about, “When Charles Flowers Demolished the Neighborhood.”  It has become a Muleshoe legend, along with several other “Flowers’ Stories.”  Charles had taken a load of steers to the auction in Clovis.  When he returned home about Ten P.M., in his words, he “might have had a drink or two.”   He was pulling his empty cattle trailer behind his big pickup truck, and made it home without incident.  Almost. 

     Buck and Lynn live on the corner, six houses up the street from Charles.  The street takes a little jog there, and to take advantage of it, Buck had a circle driveway installed, coming in from the side street.  Since the road jogs and Charles’ mind was a bit foggy, he mistook Buck’s circle drive for an extension of the street and entered the driveway at about thirty-five miles per hour, cattle trailer and all.  Getting into the drive was no problem—getting out was something else again.

     The driveway turned a sharp left, back to the street, but thirty-five is too fast to make the turn, so Charles wisely chose to go straight, take out the new oak sapling that Lynn was nursing and go through the neighbor’s yard.  The next thing he knew, he was deep in the grass, still dragging the trailer and, now, the small oak tree.  The neighbor’s brother-in-law and sister were visiting for the week.  They parked their gooseneck travel trailer in front of the house where it would be safe while unoccupied.  Again, Charles used good judgment.

     Seeing the travel trailer on his left and the neighbor’s house on his right, Charles coolly decided to stay the course and move through center of the lawn into Charlie Isaacs’ front yard, the next in line.  He was stomping around on the floor boards, trying to locate the brake pedal, because things were happening fast.  His speed had dropped to about thirty by this time, what with the oak tree dragging and all, but he had forgotten to take into consideration that the cattle trailer he was pulling was at least a foot wider than his pickup.  

     Estimates are that about eight inches of that foot worked like a can-opener and peeled off the side of the camper trailer, front door, picture window, and all.  The refrigerator was somehow cleanly removed and left standing upright in the neighbor’s flower bed.  The dining table and sofa were exposed but untouched.  A copy of Ladies Home Journal, open to page 127, rested on the sofa.

     All the noise made by the travel trailer interrupted Charles’ train of thought.  His plan had been to re-enter the street here, but he was still moving pretty fast and the collision with the camper caused him to involuntarily veer to the right, away from the racket.  Charlie Isaacs, a close friend and good neighbor for many years, had purchased a new GMC pickup that day.  He had bragged to Buck that he knew it was 5.2 miles to the GMC dealer from his house, because that was the mileage on his new pickup.  He parked it up close to the house, right in front of the garage, away from the street.

    As Flowers veered to the right to disengage the travel trailer, his big front bumper whammed into the new pickup’s back side with such force that the new pickup reversed direction.   When Charlie Isaacs came out to investigate the noise, his pickup was facing the street.   The tail end had demolished the garage door and was resting in the caved-in trunk of his wife’s Cadillac.  Lynn’s little oak tree had finally worked loose, and was lying, denuded, in the yard next door.

    Tracks indicate that Charles found the brakes about then, and managed to get almost back into the street.  He parked in front of his home, with one side of the truck and the trailer on the street and the other side in his front yard.  He went in and had warmed-over dinner and mentioned to his wife that he “might have hit something.”

     Meanwhile, the neighbors were assessing the damage.  The brother-in-law with the travel trailer was livid, screaming for someone to call the police.  Everyone else realized that Charles needed sleep right now and might be a bit unreasonable if he was disturbed.  They knew he would make things right in the morning.  Charlie Isaacs, Muleshoe’s “token A-rab”, and a world-class negotiator, managed to quiet the neighbor’s brother-in-law, the police were not called, and most everyone got a good night’s sleep.  The insurance agent, who lives four houses down and across the street, started his report on the remarkable series of “unavoidable accidents” before he went to bed that night.

     It is good to be back in Texas, where neighbors help each other.

    

    

    

    

Buddy Holly, Glenna Goodacre, and Judge Tom Head

Lubbock Girl, Glenna Maxey Goodacre, poses with some of her work.

     When I was in Lubbock High School in 1953 or 1954, a rumor floated around town about a report Lloyd’s of London published.  The report concluded Lubbock would be one of the top ten most populated cities in the United States by the year 2000.  Some of the rumor mongers flatly stated Lubbock would be the largest city in the nation.  Most everyone in town wanted to believe this notion and it was fifty years before anyone would know, so, even though no one saw the report, it was accepted as fact.

     Back then, Lubbock was just starting to show up on the national radar. In 1959, Buddy Holly died in that plane crash, but other Lubbock folks were gaining national attention.  E. J. Holub became the first consensus All-American football player at Texas Tech and went on to a stellar career with the Dallas Texans, and later the Kansas City Chiefs.  Ralna English signed a long term contract to sing on the Lawrence Welk Show.  Waylon Jennings lived to carve his niche in country music after he gave his seat on Buddy’s ill-fated plane to Richie Valens.  Mac Davis’s songwriting career took off—Nancy Sinatra, Elvis, Bobby Goldsboro, and others recorded his music.  Mac’s TV and movie career developed later, during the seventies and eighties. Glenna Goodacre attracted some attention with her compelling bronze sculptures, and in a relatively short time, she gained world-wide recognition.

     Most everyone in Lubbock had some contact with one or more of these celebrities, and everyone knew they were “regular” folks.  Any sort of “uppity” behavior or pretense is frowned upon in West Texas and these people all grew up in that atmosphere.  Lubbock citizens have come to expect some of their associates to become internationally famous.  They also expect these people to say “Hi” when they see them on the street. 

     In addition to this “down home” attitude, people from the panhandle have developed a quiet confidence that the world revolves around that part of Texas.  They are convinced that Lubbock plays an important role in world affairs.  

     Some people on the South Plains become famous for less than noble reasons, and consequently, the whole country gets to point at Lubbock and giggle.  Judge Tom Head is the latest plainsman to gain the attention and ridicule of the national media.  Judge Tom was minding his own business, trying to get a bond issue passed.  He brought up a ”worst case scenario” during a local TV interview and all hell broke loose.

     A little more background here.  Lubbock was named “The second most Conservative City in the Nation” in cities with more than 100,000 people by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research, a California think-tank concerned with such things.   (Provo, Utah, was first, although it couldn’t have been by much)  Liberal Democrats are not so rare in West Texas, but it is next to impossible to find anyone out there who will admit they voted for Obama.

     Judge Tom said he is expecting civil unrest if President Obama is re-elected.  “He is going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N.” Judge Tom said.  “O.K.  What’s going to happen when that happens?  I’m thinking worst case scenario: civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war, maybe.  And we’re not talking just a few riots here and demonstrations.  We’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.”

     The judge went on to say that he would block the road by standing in front of the U.N. armored personnel carriers to keep them out of Lubbock County, and the county sheriff has already promised to watch his back.

     A local criminal defense attorney, Rod Hobson, immediately went to the A-1 Flag Company and bought their entire stock of U.N. flags.  Both of them.  He has one hanging outside his office, two blocks from the court house.  Rod’s wife made a blue U.N. beret for their five pound Yorkie, a “war dog” now on duty protecting the law office.

     Many Lubbock people are embarrassed by all this, and several Democrats have called for Judge Head to resign.  The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal has also called for his resignation, but, not surprisingly, he has a small, very vocal group of supporters.
 
     That’s the way it is in Lubbock.  The judge publicly repeated something he and his cronies have been saying privately  for months.  They don’t like our current president.  They don’t want him in office.  They’re afraid of what he might do and they feel powerless to prevent the disasters he has planned.  So they think about it and they talk about it.

     My friend, Charles Flowers, said, “You can’t let people go to thinking.  If you let them go to thinking, there’s no telling what they might think up and get to believing.”  That’s true in Lubbock and it is true everywhere else.

     I’m not embarrassed by Judge Head.  I’m amused.  He is obviously very Lubbock in his thinking.  People out there believe that the world revolves around West Texas and the nation is waiting to hear what Lubbock thinks before making a move.  Some of them actually believe that Obama has singled out Lubbock County for attack by the United Nations Peace Keeping Force.  That’s silly.  Everyone knows they’ll hit New York City first.