IT CAN'T BE TOO LONG after this that Pop must have come home one night and since by now, we all knew the drill... announced we were moving once again. This time: Amarillo - up above the "Caprock" (the real one - The Edwards Escarpment) in the Panhandle - where the wind blows 24/7 and the only thing between it and the North Pole in winter (we were to see our first real snow ever in Amarillo!) was "... a bob wire fence and the top strand is down today...." This far West and North, and this high in Texas is a very different land than the central "Hill Country" and the Gulf Plains down below. Or the far desert regions of Langtry, El Paso, and the Rio Bravo...
It takes its name as it is part of the much vaster expanse the Spanish Explorers called the "Llano Estacado" - or Staked Plains. This attribution being somewhat questioned, but most historians agree it refers to a method used for "navigating" across these limitless reaches: scouts would go forward and erect a "stake" and then the main body would move forward aligned on the stake - while the scout moved on yet further off. In such manner, 'tis said, the first whitemen moved cautiously through the area and managed to walk a straight line - bound for the gold and other wonders of Coronado's "El Dorado" and the Seven Cities of Cibola...
WE SNUGGED IN to 1611 Harrison (left). What an ugly horror this place was! ("California Plane Style" the rental agent told my father...LOL!). The ceaseless Panhandle wind howled day and night around those overhanging eaves. The bilious pink was no one's favorite - but Hey! - my father was one of the first of the "Corporate Gypsies" which later became a widespread lifestyle in the U.S., and since we had to move about every two years we couldn't be choosy. Matter-of-fact, this picture was taken just this past winter (2009) when my wife and I happened to be travelling through the "Queen City of the Plains" (68 long years since my family had decamped from there and Texas forever...). 'Twas shortly after the Fall following my Summer on the Brazos, in fact, for December 7th - the "Day That Will Live in Infamy" followed on - (I was sick abed with the sniffles in Mom and Pop's big bed) - and the radio crackled for hours on that day about the perfidy of the Japs, while my parents and our neighbors huddled close...like Macauley's long ago, panicky, Noble Romans at the approach of the dread Etruscan army,
AMARILLO was a piece of work, believe me! Treeless plains as far as the eye could see. And the ceaseless wind. The streets were easy to find: they were named serially after the U.S. Presidents - so that you learned your way around and your country's history all at the same time (!). I did one more year in Junior High, then I graduated to Freshman in Senior High School at last! The High School football team in those days was quite well-known - the "Golden Sandies." I thought it would be fun to "go out for football." As is well-known, in some quarters down that way, there is no real life anywhere divorced from the gridiron... I had been paying full price at the movies since I was about 10, as I was over six feet by then and must have weighed 170 - 180 pounds as well. No ticket taker at the Bijou in South Texas would believe I was not older than twelve, so I had long ago given up trying to convince them, or "talk my way in.". So it was some shock to me when the Coach turned me down, saying I was "too small" for the team! But when I saw the first string run out of the locker room not long after, I understood what the Coach meant! LOL! These guys in their mid-teens were many - most - of them well over 215 pounds and some stood 6-6 in their stocking feet (make that cowboy boots!). The explanation was always said to be that Amarillo High drew from a wide range of small communities and working ranches spread around the wide open spaces - a pool of raw-boned hulks said to be unexcelled for this all-consuming sport. (Part of the mystique back then, too, was always said to be that this particular part of the U.S. in the heartland of the Continent, harbored yet one of the "purest" strains of Anglo-Saxon heritage yet to be found in our country - certainly the roster calls and the phone books were mainly old English surnames...). This, of course, today, will be said to be "racist" - as is the favorite "put down" of our times! LOL! Suffice to say, that the Golden Sandies in those days actually played in the Southwestern Football Conference (I think it was) - composed mainly of college teams - and the "Sandies" regularly made hash out of their older brethern! Wheee-Hawwww!
So I was enrolled again in ROTC. But this time, a Senior unit! We were older now, and our uniforms approached much closer to those of the regular Army than had the somewhat "Military School" look of the South Texas Junior Units. Also, in keeping with the fact of so many others "bigger'n me", I now marched way back in the mid-ranks, where down South I had been in front! LOL! We had a military band, too, and every Monday afternoon, our massed formations, trooped colors and dipped guideons as we "passed in review" across the gritty, sandy, barren "playground." And we had an Armory, too. It stood right across the street from the playground between the Junior and Senior High's. It was a low, red-brick building with barred windows, I remember. It contained a fifty-foot rifle range and we practiced with .22's endlessly and in rotation here. A regular Army officer, Second Lieutenant Tyson (I remember his name) was our "Commandant." He wore sort of regulation WWI jodphur "pinks" and cavalry dress boots, and O.D. shirt, and the old stiff-brimmed WWI Campaign Hat. He was lean and mean and the epitome of the "D.I." There was no "messing" with Lt. Tyson. We drilled and marched to a cadence count day after day. We stripped "03's"; we fired on the range; we learned first aid; cover and concealment; camoflauge; the dangers of fraterization with girls, members of foreign races and climes, LOL!; respect for the flag ("salute all colors and standards not housed or cased"); obey always all constituted authorities; and why Waterloo was almost a washout, and that Pickett ducked out of the Charge that bears his name... Heck, when some years later and miles away, I was inducted by the Draft, it was almost like going back to High School again! LOL!
Now several pages back, I promised to tell you more about firing Tommy Guns in public school. Horrifying news, I know, to Northerners, Easterners, and present-day liberals alike (often also, one and the same). That is, a round or two for "familiarization" (no "climbing fire" or practice "rub-outs" you see. LOL!) It is probably also a shocker to at least some of you, that back then and more particularly the Depression Years then just closed, you could buy Tommy Guns from Montgomery Wards and Sears Roebuck through the mail order catalogs! No questions asked! And you could buy one for (by today's standards) ridiculous prices: maybe all of $12 or $14, maybe. LOL! S' truth! Every home could use one, no?
Our "California Plane Style" house was heated by a converted coal furnace in a chamber of horrors below stairs: part dirt and part cement floor. My Dad skipped rope on the cement floor down there every morning. A huge salamander lived under the slab and came out each morning to regard these odd proceedings with its beady, basilisk eyes. Pop began affectionately to call it "Sally" - and standard greeting at the breakfast table when he came up, was to inquire "How is Sally this morning?" The interior was dark and gloomy and heavily panelled. Every board in the old wood floors gave out a characteristic squeak or creak. The window sills were about a foot wide, and when the "Dusters" came, the following morning the sills would be covered with a thick skein of dust. The color of this dust showed from which quarter the wind had blown in the night: yellow dust was commonly taken to indicate a west wind out of the New Mexican flats; red dust was said to come down on the "Northers" from "up in the Canadian breaks and over toward the Oklahoma line." Black dusts at first signified easterly or southerly origins down in the more salubrious climates "under the Caprock" south of us... but in time, black dirt and dust came to be attributed to the wind "being off the Borger Carbon Black plant last night" - as this intrusion into the vast realm of the old Llano Estacado (Staked Plains) was, I believe, a crisis wartime plant put up in great haste to supply some critical ingredient needed for the growing war effort...
The only other thing I ever remember Borger being distinguished for was its Jehovah's Witnesses' baseball team, whose prowess was equaled only by their notorious beards - but my recall may be partly mythic at this time...
Sometimes we rode our bikes clear out to the Canadian River. This was some "hump" believe me, particularly if you had a headwind, sometimes so strong you could just stand on your pedals and not move against it, like rowing a boat upstream and just staying in one spot all the time. Those "dusters" - they were often as thick as Eastern sea fogs - and the street lights would be turned on at noonday. I know you are not going to believe this, but at every corner where there was a traffic light, there was also a loud alarm bell on a post that rang every time the light changed during real bad dusters, to "alert" the traffic and pedestrians it was "their turn" should they wish to risk it in the enveloping murk! LOL! Needless to say, Boy Scout 'kerchiefs over nose and mouth were the order of the day. I understand these horrendous 'dusters" of the past are largely no more now - more enlightened practices having at last got them under control. But they were real and they were earnest way back when: a legacy 'tis said of the First War itself, when unwise ripping up of the Great Plains sod to grow grain for the troops and starving civilians in Europe brought on the Dust Bowl in the first place.
And once we dug our first cave in the vacant lot behind us. Next door they had cut down a lot of lombardy poplar trees - not very strong wood, granted, but straight as arrows and just right for roof supports of a cave. So we dug this huge hole out back and roofed it over with lombardy logs and tarpaper and what not and covered it all back over with the dirt we had removed. It had a narrow entrance you could just crawl in at one end. Inside we contrived a fireplace where we mostly burned straw, and deigned not to breathe for hours on end, as the smoke was so fierce! LOL! We would snitch potatoes from our mothers' kitchens and pretend to bake them in the burning straw. Yes, I know now: Yuk! But we ate these "Baked Mickeys" back then, and nothing ever tasted better. (Did you ever eat a Baked Mickey? Pity...)
And one night the fire apparently rekindled after we were all gone home and set the logs and tarpaper interior ablaze. The resultant smoke soon covered the whole neighborhood with a dense impenetrable smoke. Someone called the fire department. The trucks came and they raced up and down alleys and adjoining streets, red lights flashing in the smoke fog, firemen halloing one another back and forth, but they never found the source of that fire which burned itself out eventually. We kids all watched from our respective houses, and true to the Oath that all kids live under (just like the Pirates of old, you see) we never told our parents, and only rarely discussed it among ourselves...
But the best thing about Amarillo, bar none, was proximity to Palo Duro Canyon - a miniature Grand Canyon of the West, only some thirty miles or so south of the City. Your parents either drove you down, or you hitched a ride with some pal or pickup truck owner, and in no time you were deposited at the entrance to a spectacular example of North Texas Badlands and Breaks - a canyon cut down into the Earth revealing the stacked Geological Ages - and their retained fossils! - just like its bigger namesake! At the bottom lay the Prarie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, a drinkable stream with waterholes here and there and the whole with thickets of canyon cedars and grassy glades. Deer and turkey lived there. And coyotes howled at night. Buzzards rode the thermals overhead all day long. Kiowa and Commanch once wintered in its sheltered draws: days when "Northers" blew up on top and the wind would chill you to the bone, you could find warmth and sunshine and almost balmy airs down at the canyon bottoms.
It was indeed an anomaly. I'll never forget the first time I saw it: Pop drove us down from Amarillo one time for another family "picnic." We were going over this flat, featureless plain when suddenly, there was a crack that began in the land right outside the car window off a bit to the right side. A tiny crack, actually , you could span with your hand! I am not kidding! And this crack then ran on getting deeper and deeper and deeper and wider and wider - till its two sides diverged apart twenty or more miles and distant bluffs and fantastically colored strata of red, grey and yellow soils, sands and clays shimmered in the distant heat. The road lead on to the "offical" entrance, where there was a small one room stone "Museum" and an old, one-eyed, garolousgarrulous Texan who was guard and gatekeeper all in one. In his Museum were stuffed horned toads, fossils, and occasional Indian relics he had picked up around. Nearby too, was a captive herd of genuine Longhorn Cattle, I remember - their great horned heads peering at you from behind the bob-wire.
The road then wound down switchback fashion - just like in mountains! - all the way to the Canyon bottom and ran on maybe eight or ten miles - I don't know till it sort of petered out (back then). It crossed and recrossed the Prarie Dog Town Creek many times in open fords - the water sometimes up to the running boards...
My archaeological compatriots here, if any ever read these notes, will appreciate it when I tell them that tree burials were still being reported even at this late date down in these dry gullies and forks... This was maybe (only) sixty - sixty-five years past the last time when I suppose stray Indians might have had access to the Canyon, and in the heat and that dry climate, and sparse settlement, isolated tree burials are probably not to be considered wholly unheard of occurrences. I never saw any - but remember once having to pick my way through such a place, carrying two sleeping bags on my back around midnite one nite - alone and listening to the coyotes "on the rim," and the hair standing erect on my head! LOL! (The circumstances were that Alfred Dunham and I had gone on a long camping trip down into "the Bottoms" that time and on the last day when we turned back, we could not shoulder all our equipment. So we left our sleeping bags behind deliberately and that night when we made camp, we "matched out" - and I lost and had to hike all the way back over our daytime route to our former camp and bring back the two sleeping bags (while Alfred cooked dinner and roused up a good fire for me when I finally returned around midnite). There used to be a small historic marker by the ford here that noted "Indian Burials" off somewhere in the woods to my right... A screech owl that night would likely have sent me straight up the nearly thousand foot walls to the top without ever having to pause once on the way up! LOL! Where Alfred and I had pitched our pup tent and made up our fire was right alongside the creek in a really remote place of the Canyon. Decades later, travelling through Texas once again, I detoured off the highway and drove down through Palo Duro once more. The fords were all cemented roadways now, and in fact, bridges spanned most. I found where we had camped! But what was this? There were children's swings and outdoor gym stuff all over the place and a long, low cement block "Restrooms" building all along down by the Creek...
More tears... I drove back up the switchback to the Rim. I turned to view the still impressive sunset across the vast sweep of those Plains. My last memory is of the row of twinkling street lights along the Canyon road way down below...
We sometimes found old cowboy camps from the preceding half century or so - with old campfire spots and broken whiskey bottles in them and so on. The first white men to enter Palo Duro were likely Spaniards who gave it its name, meaning "hard wood" in Spanish - possibly a reference to the abundant juniper and mesquite trees in the Canyon. These intrepid explorers, one of whose number was certainly the Conquistador, Coronado, came this way seeking the "Seven Cities of Cibola" and other chimeras north and east as far apparently as the modern state of Kansas. I remember once, a bank in downtown Amarillo had on display in its window the brass "slipper" or complete encasement for a man's foot as was part of Spanish horse armor of those times - and it had been found down in Palo Duro. This, too, since I remember it so well, was doubtless a "stimulus" to latent archaeological tendencies... Col. "Charlie" Goodnight arrived in 1876 and began to run cattle in the canyon. Legend held that a small dirt "soddy" built near the canyon's upper reaches was his first "ranch." This was always sort of a "checkpoint" where it stood off to one side from the road, and we often stopped and took pictures of ourselves and the surrounding area. You could go into the low, one room structure, dirt floored, and dirt-and-log walled. There was nothing in it and it was not "restored" or taken care of at all. But everyone "knew" it was Charlie Goodnight's cabin. (He of the famous Goodnight-Loving Cattle Trail, over which so many beeves went north up the Pecos, into New Mexico and so on clear to Denver).
Once, long after these boyhood adventures, I headed a large group of archaeological volunteers back in CT (NEAR or North Eastern Archaeological Researchers). And one Spring, in making plans for a site to study and excavate that Summer, it somehow came up that we should seek permission to excavate this potentially important site of the first settler in modern times down in the Panhandle area, and maybe some of us could go out and do a preliminary excavation to test and see what might be around the soddy. I actually broached this to the then-Curator of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum at Canyon, Texas - kind of official "keeper" of the early history of the Canyon. He waxed enthusiastic and offered to help clear the way and obtain permissions, a place for us to stay, etc. At the last minute came news that someone had, however, only a short while before, established that the soddy was not Col. Charlie's soddy at all - but rather the "...abode of two coyote hunters who had camped one or two seasons in the Canyon back around 1904 or some such date...". We thus abandoned our plans and stuck to "our own last," as 'tis said. But I will always remember famed old Col. Charlie's "dugout" down in the lonely confines of the Palo Duro Canyon...
Thus, Palo Duro, an El Dorado of my boyhood...
And as almost an anticlimax, I must note Birch Hollow. If ever there were a misnomer in place names, this is it! There can't have been a "birch" growing within a thousand miles of this long-forgotten Panhandle "draw"! But it was "known" to generations of "Scouts" and boyhood-campers - and was, moreover, reachable on bicycles unlike Palo Duro, so necessitated no parental transport. And it was a scene of one of the greatest fiascos of my Scouting days... Sigh...
I had recently been elected "Patrol Leader" of the Bat Patrol, Troop 2. (We took our name from an actual bat I had captured and brought indoors once - when we had been left in keeping of our Black cook and housekeeper, while my parents decamped for New Orleans (or the baths at Mineral Wells, maybe). Whatever. Anyhow, Ceily, now much grown up and no longer sporting her youthful Ish-Kabibble hairdo, and very much the proper young lady, and I, were left in Della's keeping. And the bat disappeared in the house! The next morning I was awakened by a shriek from the kitchen! Rushing downstairs, I found Della in near-hysterics over "... the mouse in the teacups..,." as best I could decode her screams. I opened the kitchen cabinet doors where her trembling finger pointed ... and therein was the bat, wings folded over his abdomen, peacefully asleep, hanging upside down from a hook for the teacups on the bottom of the cabinet shelf!
But during the night a "Norther" arose. Now those of you from more salubrious climes, will have no knowledge or understanding of "Northers." Such as descended on the Llano Estacado of my youth, and presumably still do (?). I will try to explain: The wind, one day, sets into the North (hence the name). Then the temperature starts a dramatic and precipitous decline. Remorseless. The wind increases. Steadily. Hypothermia City, right? Right! You gotta experience same to understand it. "Northers" are known to all Texans who venture into these wildernesses. (As they used to say in the Texas Panhandle of my youth: "We got a Norther today. Ain't nothin' 'tween us and the North Pole but a bob-wire fence... n' the top strand is down!").
By midnite, we were all in one tent - all eight boys and Buck. Steadily the mercury dropped. The wind rose. 1:30 a.m. - dissension in the ranks! (My first challenge as a leader!). A faction - shivering - rose from its blankets and said it was going to go "...somewhere else and maybe look for a place to go..." Whatever.
They soon departed and were gone.
An hour or so went by. Someone went outside the tent. "Hey! Come look! Big fire or somethin' over there!"
We piled out of the tent. Way off up the draw, we could see light in the nighttime sky, and flames now and then.
It was decided we would join them! By now it was snowing! Off we went!
We came up to them in a side-draw. They had built a huge bonfire with downed logs they had stumbled upon, up against the canyon walls. The fire was almost the size of a small building aflame. We all joined in! Logs and brush - we just kept piling them on! The dirt walls - heated beyond endurance - caved in now and then - huge clouds of dust and smoke and sparks!
We were all a-shiver! Cold! Running noses! Still - it was grand and wild and remote beyond compare! A true-to-life scene out of "Lord of the Flies." Eventually the fire began to burn itself out. Like the savages we emulated and so-admired, we now took off up the draw we knew not where (maybe about 4:00 a.m.!). A virtual pack of animals - the Bat Patrol now run by "group consent" and its erstwhile leader only one of the pack...
(Actually , gentle reader, I am ashamed to admit to all these things, but something nowadays drives me on and on and on and I must somehow explicate my sins.... Sigh)
Eventually we came to an old abandoned ranch house. It had collapsed but the attic was still intact and now it sat flush upon the ground. The snow was falling fast now and blew into the still-standing attic... I remember the shadows (we had a kerosene lantern) and the rafters and the snow flakes swirling... Buck whimpered and whined... We walked on through the attic and kept going...
Further down the draw (the temperatures now dangerously low in fact!), we saw a soddy-type old ranch house - and a low light in the window!
We crowded up onto the porch under the overhang. Someone knocked on the door. A young cowboy guy - an elder to us - but maybe only 18 or 19 - answered the door - holding a lantern out over us. He was in his skivvies and had his hat and boots on (as do all true Texans to this day, when bathing, making love, eating in fine restaurants, or answering doors in the wee small hours).
He took us in, in that remote place and hour, entirely in stride: "What all's you young boys be doin' out here this-a hour, innyhow?" he said.
Before we could muster a group answer, he was joined by two or three other cowboy guys - in the same general mode and attitude. Beyond their collective backs, a gruff oldtimer's voice said preemptorilyperemptorily, "Bring them whelps in h'yere, y'hear?"
The cowboys shoo'd us freezing, shivering youngsters into their simple abode.
It was only a sort of bunkhouse or something. I can see it yet in my mind. Kerosene lanterns only. All the sons and the old man had their hats on. Dark shadows everywhere. We were told to stand (respectfully!) around "the table". There were no chairs: only a couple of old dim bedsteads in the corners. This table was the main furniture. The grizzled old man was tending a smoky skillet on an old wood-burning stove in the corner. The father and his sons (for so they were ), were eating "breakfast" and a place was made for all of us. Eggs, some kind of steak-meat, and potatoes - all fried hot and dark (no light from the lamps), and greasy. We gulped it down in unison. We were given to understand we were on their ranch - and they rose early! - and dined! - and then went to work.
We were welcome to warm up, eat - and then best be on our way "...back up the draw, way's
y'all come" and out of their lives and " off'noff their"... prop'ty..."
LOL!
And so we did. And the sun rose at last, and broke through the clouds. The snow stopped. Now the "blue" part of a "Blue Norther" shown forth. Crystal clear and cold as the Arctic! The anticlimax to it all being how my dad and the mother of one other derelict Bat Patrol member, drove their cars out to Birch Hollow to find us (or our frozen remains), after waking to find the Plains in the grip of a "Norther." Which they did, and my dad broke his good wristwatch, trying to shovel Mrs. Massey out of the frozen slush over the railroad tracks where she had stalled right on the Santa Fe mainline, and more too - but we need not list these unpleasant details here nor unduly prolong this tale. Pop was some put out though, and grumbled for some time later about, "Bernard and all these yahoo friends of his and this constant, infernal "camping-out" in this infernal wilderness of a State." Etc. Etc.
Sigh...
As for Alfred, who had in turn and in time, replaced Julius and then Carl, and then Kermit... Alfred was a year or so older than I was. He was my first and really best friend I ever had in Amarillo - though our friendship lasted less than six months maybe. But not before we had had a number of adventures and camp-outs and expeditions down in Palo Duro. We were both older scouts now in Troop 2, BSA, and much given to camping and hiking on our own. He lived with his divorced mother some blocks away. He was big for his age, and shaving before most of the rest of us, and when he turned 16 - and I believe with his mother's consent if not connivance - he somehow managed to join the Navy! He was immediately gobbled up and came back by the house just one more time - in his Navy "blues" and seemed quite grown up and already some "remote." I never saw or heard of him again. Pearl Harbor followed on in due course. My Mom, who believed in ghosts and preternatural happenings, as I do not, was always troubled by Alfred's abrupt disappearance and never hearing from him again. She often mused "Perhaps poor Alfred was at Pearl Harbor...". How or why she seized on this I have no idea. I am not "into preternatural" myself - then or now...
It is a fact, however, that many, many years later, my second wife, Millie, and I found ourselves one day on the tourist launch going out to the remains of the Arizona where she has lain at "Pearl" ever since "... the day that will live in infamy." We lay alongside and the horde - unbelievably consisting mostly of Jap tourists with their numerous and expensive cameras - pushed aboard. (See also The Sandwich Islands in my Chaper 14 here: "Tales of the South Pacific" for more on the pestiferous Japanese tourist invasions there). I remember descending the gangways to the boiler room which now is always awash, but has a viewers' platform above the water at one end. On the bulkhead opposite is a large plaque of some kind - listing some of the crew and boiler-room Sailors who died that day aboard Arizona. Alphabetical, you know. Shimmering reflections from the oily (still!) water half flooding the boilers ran nervously over the solemn bronze. My eye ran idly down to the "D's." And there almost as though I somehow almost "willed" it, was listed, as I now recall, "Dunham, Alfred - Able Seaman". There were likely a lot of "Alfred Dunham's" in the U.S. Navy in WWII - I know that. And lost on both land and sea, as well. I know that. I have no way of knowing if the Alfred who perished in Arizona's boiler-room was my onetime pal from the Panhandle city of Amarillo in far-off Texas. My Mother often "knew" a lot of things that I did not. (Interestingly, the "Arizona" link here does not list an Alfred Dunham among its causalties - but there is in fact, a "Dunham" and from Texas, too. I even remember something vaguely about how Alfred and his mother changed his name to hide him from his father when they had fled to Texas from Iowa... This was all a very long time ago...).
And, inveterate name-dropper as you will doubtless find me to be (perhaps - but the dropped nomens and events are all true!), I must tell you that I used to carry Cyd Charisse's books home from school! Only the most uninformed now will say "Who she?" - so we will push on (for them there are always Game Shows and the Web, and such diversions). But she was just Tula in those days, Tula Finklea (it was always pronounced so it sounded like "Fugquay" which for many years I thought it was). She was my senior - but not by much. They lived right behind us, but one house over, facing Polk Street, I guess it would have been. A big old house on the corner I believe - partially vine-covered maybe (?) but I do remember its most outstanding aspect: out back was a full-bore, real, old-time High Plains windmill - seen nowadays mostly as garden decorations in small, reduced "miniature" versions by those who have no inkling of what they one once signified out on the Plains. Perhaps Finklea's place had been an original ranch house out this way - who knows? But this old mill rotated day and night and creaked and groaned in every shift of the ever-present wind. To my Dad's great distress, when trying to get to sleep, of course. With the crayfish and the lizards, and the blizzards in the breaks, the old windmills were just one more Texas abomination he had to bear...
So Tula and I walked sometimes over the same route down to High School, you see. Hence, my putting on airs this way! LOL!
And I got my first job! Substitute news boy! Let me explain: every boy's dream back then was to get his own paper route. You "contracted" for these limited options with the Amarillo Globe downtown. But since you had to put up "earnest money" and the routes were strictly limited, and the lines to get them very long, it was all but impossible to crack into this field.
Save for one way: a "Subby!" Now Subby's were guys the regular route owners could call on short notice to deliver the papers "tomorrow morning," or night or whatever. (The Globe was both morning and evening editions then). And so you would get paid for doing the other guy's route. To assure some regularity to your income, however, most Subby's found it necessary to "sub" several routes at once. Now the challenge here was that whereas an "owner" (the regular newsboy on the route) only had to memorize one route to deliver, a Subby might have to memorize two, three, or more separate routes - and know them as well as their "owners!" Though the designation has a rather a "put down" ring to it, Subby's were definitely your superior newsboy: guaranteed to be out in all inclement weathers, and able to rattle off an endless list of rules and instructions having to do with where and where not to leave papers, let dogs out, let dogs in, where to steal ripening fruit, where to stand out of the cold wind for five or more minutes at times, stuff like that. Another advantage to being a Subby, was that you were spared the agonies of "Collection," while actually making as much money (even more) from your working several routes at once. "Collection" was a private hell reserved for the route owners, for once a month they had to go around to collect dues from their customers. The world was as full of deadbeats, 'skips,' and sob stories back then as it is now - and "keeping books" and all was something we less cerebral Subbys were thankfully spared...
Subby's, as might be expected, worked mostly in bad weather. I subbed for this one guy regularly, and it got so whenever he would call - usually around 8'oclock at night, my Dad would shake his paper in the other room and intone, "Must be snow predicted for morning: there's a call for Bernard on the phone..." LOL! And so it would prove 9 out of 10 times: at 4:30 I would wake to my alarm and get up. Dress warmly - stocking cap and woolen gloves with the fingers cut off : this let you pick papers from your bag easier, and fold and throw them. I would grab my old ink-stained Globe bags (there were two of them - you wore them crossed over your shoulders like bandoliers on a Mesican bandito...) and let myself out of the still dark, sleeping household.
"Drop off" was a gas station about two blocks away on 16th Street. On the corner. Across from the old Poole Drug, now shuttered and dark, of course. (I think 16th there was actually a continuation of old Route 66 going west where it crossed through Amarillo. No "beltways or "loops" in those days: a highway came to a town: it bulled its way right through to the other side! "66", of course, being the infamous "way west" of the Okies and other Dust Bowl victims, the last of whose "Grapes of Wrath" style flivvers could even then still be seen traversing 16th Street now and then...). The morning edition would be kicked off the delivery truck in big, bound bundles an hour or so before, then over the next few hours, we "newsies" would materialize out of the dark and congregate silently under the Gas Station portico, opening the bundles and filling our bags. There would be a few jokes, a lot of noses wiped on coat sleeves. Some of the newsies were still little guys and we bigger ones would help them into their crossed bag loads and send them staggering on their way. There would usually be a small fire in the gutter started by the first arrivals - consisting mostly of burning, surplus papers and we would stamp this out amidst flying sparks and melt back into the dark of the various neighborhoods we each covered.
Sundays of course, were the toughest, because the papers were double the thickness of weekday editions. This often meant you had to leave half your load behind at the Gas Station and come back half way through your route and load up again. Alternatively, some would first shoulder the extra bundles and carry them on their shoulders to some halfway point where they would cache them under a bush or porch step...We newsies for the Globe also had a unique way to "fold" papers. When you joined our select group, you were initiated into this arcane art. It was virtually origami, and when you were done, you had an object that you could whip out sort of like a boomerang (but it never came back to you), and if done right, it would unerringly fly up to lodge onto overhanging porch roofs, hit milk bottles in the dark (anyone here remember when the milkman - another denizen of the wee small hours - left milk on your door step?), knock out an occasional window pane, and clump with a resounding bang against the outer door of the sleeping inhabitants within.
My favorite route had a large apartment house on it. First, it was warm in there, and out of the universal Plains wind, and there were lights. But best of all, the ever-blowing wind around the eaves of the old building made of the drafty, old complex a sort of giant chimney with perpetual strong updraft. I would walk down the hall and pause before each apartment door (that was a customer, of course) and then I would withdraw an (unfolded!) paper from my bag, and holding it just so, drop it at a certain angle, and when the folded edge hit the crack between the door and the floor just right.... SLURP! ... with sort of a rattle and flap, the draft would suck the entire newspaper clear under the door and into the customer's apartment! Neat-O! And of course, apartment complexes, besides being warm and lit, let you get rid of a lot of papers in short order...
Dogs, occasional drunks... there wasn't much else to bother you on the cold, dark, windy streets of the "Queen City of the Plains" in those days, believe it or not. Far contrast from now! I usually was home around sunup - plenty of time to clean up, have breakfast, and get on to school. The ink was the main hazard of the trade: it came off all over your hands and clothes, giving us a sort of "grimy" look. "Newsies" usually had raw, chapped hands, criss-crossed with dirty, black lines where the ink worked into paper cuts and scratches. Sort of a badge of honor among us... and "money for college" constantly grew in the piggy bank... But Amarillo was winding down. There were new clouds on the horizon and new winds - the Winds of Change once again - blowing in off the Llano Estacado.
That night Pop came home. Unlike today's silent, somehow always morose diners young or old, engrossed in their perpetual snacking and TV watching , we always discussed "family matters" openly and "at table." He was leaving GMAC! (Bombshell!) But on a "wartime leave" (Eased the pain. At least for Mom, I bet...She could handle pain though, as well as give it...). He would be going "...back East to Washington (D.C.)" Quite an honor it seemed: he had been selected (by whom? I don't think I ever knew...) to serve on the "War Renegotiation Board." This was some kind of august wartime government body back in Foggy Bottoms. Pop never liked to "explain" things to me ("you are too young to know, and I am older anyhow, so I am always right" was his credo). But it went something like this: Sharpe & Dome (say) - a big medical outfit... was supplying first aid kits to the Army fighting in Europe. Okay. I understood that much. And sometimes (not always!) - Okay, if you say so - when soldiers were wounded on the field, the medics would open the first aid kits and there would be nothing in them!
Yeah! Well, I "cottoned" (Texanese) that: "So you going to hang the buggers, Pop?"
"No! You are too young still - despite you're big for your age! - to understand, it seems! We are going to 'prosecute them' you see, and get back zillions of dollars! For the Government!"
"Oh!"
So Pop, who lived as spare as a Tibetan monk, packed his meager suitcase and emplaned for Washington. Lucky Mom won the assignment of "breaking camp" and tieing up loose ends, returning the keys (or whatever you do in these situations) to the owner of 1611 Harrison, and readying her brood once again to leave house and home.
Everybody knows that - I'm the newsboy of the town...
You can hear me yellin' Morning Star - runnin' along the street...
Got no hat upon my head - no shoes upon my feet..."
(...Jimmy Brown the Newsboy - Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs)
(Click Here)