Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  Budding involved grafting eyes taken from mature rosebushes onto small green plants called cuttings, which were planted each January in bedded fields. Once spring rolled around, the Campbell kids each morning would line up at one end of their property and, stooped, spend hours making their way through the furrows. The first person in line grafted the eye—or bud—to the base of each young cutting. Without this eye, the cutting would end up a thornless plant with a few scraggly white blossoms—essentially, a wild rose. The eyes were taken from bud sticks, cut from two-year-old rosebushes the previous November just before harvest and kept in cold storage until budding season. Each bud stick, about nine inches in length, had about seven eyes—enough to graft seven rosebushes. The bud sticks were marked according to variety—there were about fifty varieties altogether, at least a third of them some shade of red—and were de-thorned for easier handling during budding season.

  This was the procedure Margaret mimicked, practically on all fours, as a wide-screen TV nearby played MSNBC and her younger sister, Martha, laughed from a La-Z-Boy. The rich smell of a baking chocolate pecan pie wafted from the kitchen. Like a surgeon whose fingers were still fluent in a procedure—even if she hadn’t been in an operating room for years—Martha cut, de-eyed, grafted, and tied a series of imaginary rosebushes. “Oh, brother, how I remember them days,” she said. During school hours, the kids spent early mornings in the rose fields; when there was no school, they worked on their knees from six in the morning to six at night.

  Earl joined his family crew at the age of five. He had shown a precocious physical prowess from infancy. His brother Herbert remembers that when Earl’s twin brothers were born, Earl, less than two, still in diapers, managed to run to a neighbor’s house to alert some relatives. But the family joke was that for all the praise heaped on Earl as a football player for his hard work, he had never been keen to toil in the rose fields. “He was always the laziest hand we had,” Ann Campbell once laughed to a reporter.

  By age five or six, a Campbell would qualify as a “tie-er,” securing the newly grafted eyes in place with “bud rubber,” a four-inch-long strip of rubber-band-like material. The Campbell kids earned positions as budders through seniority and hard work. Later, using his special budding knife, Earl would make a small slit on the lower stalk of the foot-high cutting. He would then part the bark slightly and slide in the eye he had sliced off the budding stick. “They do it so fast you don’t know what they’re doing,” said Bill Kinzie, who watched as a kid while rose growers pressed through the furrows, one rosebush at a time. As the year went on, a tame bud would appear and the Campbells would return to the fields the following spring to trim off all the wild bush above it. Then the eye would sprout into a full-fledged rosebush. Earl and his family probably prepared as many as sixty thousand plants a year; 65 percent of them would survive the budding process and become rosebushes.

  Eventually, two years after budding, a tractor would make its way through the furrows, digging deep beneath the bush and shaking off the sandy soil. The Campbell family would sell most of their harvest to a wholesaler, who dipped the roots in hot paraffin to seal them for shipment. And beginning in the late 1940s, Ann Campbell manned a wooden roadside booth not far from the house, selling roses from her farm. “I’ve been on this corner for thirty-two years,” she told a reporter in 1979, “and all my life I never had to file an income tax return, never had no money in a bank. What little we made on the roses we spent right here.”

  The horticultural manuals are rich with florid language: cuttings were to be stored “in moist sphagnum moss or shingletow.” Beware “heavily callused cuttings,” J. C. Ratsek, a researcher with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station in Tyler warned in 1933, and “do not bury in soil where they may become infected with crown gall.” But the reality was much earthier. At most farms, the white owners slouched in lawn chairs, as if on the porch of a modest plantation home, and shaved thorns from bud sticks while the budders, frequently African American, wearing long sleeves and bonnets, grafted in the field.

  A 1988 Tyler newspaper story recounted how one set of black women—the Beasleys—had worked in the fields of a white family, the Moores, for four generations. “Her mamma’s taught her just how to tie,” the latest Mr. Moore told a reporter as they watched twelve-year-old Tomekia at work. “She wraps two times below, then three to four above, then ties it off with a good knot. Look how fast she is.” When harvested, the sixty-five thousand or so surviving rosebushes brought in just more than $1 each; the Beasleys—Mrs. Beasley and her four daughters—got a nickel for each bud they grafted, and could do about two thousand plants a day. “I sometimes wonder how many pretty flowers I’ve made in all these years,” Mrs. Beasley told the reporter. “I wonder how many rose queens really know, really see, how much work goes into making roses.”

  But the Rose Festival is about fantasy, and it’s an all-white one. A. W. “Dub” Riter Jr., a civic-minded banker who served as president of the Texas Rose Festival Foundation, once said: “If I had to say one thing that makes the festival run, it’s a spirit of cooperation.” In truth, many African Americans—and working-class whites—were not much interested in lining the streets of Tyler to wave to the new white queen. “I think my babysitter took me once,” snorts Cedric Golden, the black sports columnist who grew up in Tyler. And the event doesn’t benefit anyone except, perhaps, the tourist industry. “It’s not about benevolence,” said John A. Anderson, the (white) Tyler historian who once served as a fund-raiser for a major hospital in the area—a tough task during Rose Festival preparations, when tens of thousands of dollars is spent by leading families on gowns, crowns, and accoutrements. In Tyler, Anderson said, “between September and December, if you’re trying to raise money, you’re dead meat.”

  By working the rose fields and taking odd jobs around town—B. C. worked at Kmart, and Ann spent Saturdays as a maid at the lake house of Henry Bell, a prominent Tyler banker—the Campbells earned a couple of hundred dollars a week, always enough to eat, even if the food remained basic. Breakfast consisted of a baked potato. Dinner might be canned salmon—jack-mackles, the Campbells called it. Another standby was canned sloppy joe meat, stretched with flour, eggs, and cornmeal to satisfy the hungry family.

  In 1966, the Campbells were a family of thirteen—two parents and eleven kids, including Earl, an eleven-year-old with a mischievous streak. They lived in a creaky, cramped cottage with peeling linoleum floorboards. A rough dirt driveway led to the front door; across the road sat a junkyard. The backseat of an old automobile served as the porch bench. The family would wake up cold in the winter, even though they nailed quilts to the walls as rudimentary insulation. “You’d walk through that house and you might step through the floor,” is the way a high school classmate of Earl Campbell’s described the place. Alvin Flynn, whose family owned the land once worked by Reuben Collins, and whose father would drop off hand-me-downs and fresh deer meat for the family, remembered that the cracks in the wooden frame house were so wide that you could see outside. Rain leaked through the roof. The bathroom was an outhouse. Three or four kids crowded into each bed, and whoever slept with the youngest kids sometimes woke up to a wet sheet.

  That year, B. C. Campbell died, his alcoholism having caught up with him. He had been forced to go to the hospital, where he soon succumbed to organ failure. Naturally, the episode deeply affected Earl Campbell. After games, he once said, “I’d bust out of the locker room, and I’d be happy until the time I hit the door. Then I’d feel real sad because I’d see all my friends going off with their fathers.” When, at the age of twenty-two, Campbell was summoned to New York City for the presentation of the Heisman Trophy, he opted to take a taxi from the hotel instead of the limousine ordered for him: the limo reminded him too much of his father’s hearse. Even thirty-five years later, when a reporter asked him about his upcoming induction into the NFL Hall of Fame, his thoughts trailed to his father: “I have to be honest and say the one thing I hate most
of all is that although my father will be there in spirit, I wish my father would be sitting there,” the words of a son searching for fatherly approbation. “I think he’d be very quiet, but I think he’d say, ‘I always knew my son could handle it.’”

  Ann Campbell, stricken but indomitable, took stock of a suddenly dire situation. She had all of two dollars in cash. Her youngest child was just three years old. She began clothing the kids—Willie, Evelyn, Ruby, Herbert, Alfred, Earl, Timothy Bob, Steven Rob, Martha, Margaret, and the baby, Ronnie—in Salvation Army castoffs and made sure to give them as much loving as she could muster, without playing favorites. She kept the house neat, and visitors remembered it as full of family pictures. The wood-frame home is “not much to somebody coming in,” Earl said his senior season, when he was the most heavily recruited schoolboy in the state of Texas. “But to me, it’s the world. We don’t have much but we’re happy with what we’ve got. I’m happy and I’m loved. That’s all I want. Without love, you’re nobody.”

  Despite that pride, he could still be a self-conscious teenager about his home. Embarrassed that his girlfriend, Reuna Mozell, who grew up in a relatively middle-class household and who would later become his wife, might see where he lived, he purposely gave her wrong directions to his house. Finally, keen to celebrate Earl before a key high school homecoming game, she asked his sister Evelyn the way. Reuna, as a surprise, decorated the house with balloons and streamers and wrapped the house in butcher paper that said: “Let’s go Lions! I love you Earl!” How did Earl Campbell meet this show of enthusiasm? Mortified that Reuna had seen his home, he demanded to know which of his siblings had given him away—and he avoided Reuna for at least a day.

  Self-reliant, Ann Campbell baked bread, churned butter, made plum and pear jelly, canned peach preserves, and each spring slaughtered a calf or a hog. At one point, when Earl was a young teen, the family had a pig named Arnold that had earned the kids’ affection. (The pig was named for the swine on the TV show Green Acres.) “I said to Mama, ‘I don’t want to eat that poor thing,’” said Margaret. The reply was succinct: “Y’all are going to eat that pig.”

  In many ways, the life of the Campbells was not unusual for African Americans in the South. In 1975, the year after Earl Campbell graduated from John Tyler High, 13.5 percent of white Texans lived below the poverty line; among black Texans, the figure was nearly 28 percent. (Today, a fifth of black Texans live below the poverty line.) The annual income for white men was about $41,000 in today’s dollars; for black men, $27,000. Extra money came to the Campbells in the way of $20 every month and $100 every Christmas from Laura McGregor, Ann Campbell’s sister-in-law. After graduating from Texas College, the all-black school in Tyler, McGregor saw no opportunity for herself in that town. A moment of humiliation from 1941 stuck with her after she left college, as it still did, fresh with pain, in her brick ranch house in 2017: she was seventeen and taking a city bus to see some friends when a white man ordered her to the back before slipping into her seat. She found her way to Los Angeles, where she taught elementary school, outliving three husbands before eventually making her way back to Tyler. Added to regular small gifts of cash from one of Ann Campbell’s sisters in Houston, McGregor’s contributions were received like remittances from a shiny, far-off land.

  McGregor, childless, saw Ann Campbell as a hero. Her kids thought of her that way, too. They took to calling her the First Lady. “When God took that rib from Adam to make a woman,” Campbell wrote in a Mother’s Day appreciation in a now-defunct Austin paper in 1989, “I believe he gave some of that rib to my mother, because she’s such a strong woman.” Even when her kids were grown and she had long occupied the brick home that Earl bought for her, Ann remained resourceful. The Tyler attorney Charles Clark, who has represented members of the Campbell family, including Earl, remembered visiting the Campbell place for a cookout around 2003. It was hard for Ann to get around, and she sat on an elevated chair frying hamburgers in an iron skillet. Clark started talking with her about the burgers and noticed that she was mixing oatmeal into the burger meat. “I said, ‘That’s unusual.’ ‘It will make it go a lot further,’ she told me.” When Ann Campbell died, in 2009, her pallbearers included Earl Campbell and her other sons. “Not a day goes by we don’t think of Mama,” said Margaret.

  Earl Campbell was always a big kid—a “nice-sized fella, even in his grade school days” is how his fifth-grade flag football coach, Thorndyke Lewis, described him. Lewis grew up in nearby Henderson, the son of a school principal who believed that athleticism was next to godliness. Lewis decided to show his charges the fundamentals of football and baseball after school each day. He taught hand movements and speed drills. Even at a young age, Earl Campbell had more drive, more speed, more size, than the other kids. Lewis even made him a kicker—“he had a big leg.” Lewis is a religious man—he said he survived the humiliations of segregation by adhering to the Christian edict “have neither envy nor malice in your heart”—and so his words carried special heft when he said that “watching Earl Campbell play football was almost as good as going to heaven.”

  But though as a child Campbell was superior—in the way that parents can pick out the top athletes in their kids’ little league basketball and baseball games, and even the kids themselves know who is fastest and strongest—he was as yet no star. A man at a tire shop on the Cut, once the central boulevard of African American life in Tyler, now a mostly boarded-up set of storefronts, said he worked it out later that he had played against Campbell early in high school—no reputation had yet preceded him.

  Campbell wanted to play defense in those early years—he was bowlegged like his hero Dick Butkus, the hard-nosed linebacker for the Chicago Bears who appeared on the cover of a 1970 edition of Sports Illustrated—when Earl was fifteen years old—with the caption “The Most Feared Man in the Game.”

  As he emerged into teenagehood, Earl Campbell had the sort of revelation that all great athletes have—an early self-awareness of some welling-up of ability. The great basketball skywalker Julius Erving once said that as a kid, in the early 1960s, he had felt “these different things within me, certain moves, ways to dunk.” Athletes articulate this moment of self-knowledge in different ways; Campbell characteristically couched it as a near-religious epiphany. “When I got to the ninth grade”—at Moore Junior High—“that’s when I began to realize that God gave me a talent that he didn’t give Johnny down the street,” he once said.

  Others began witnessing, voluntarily or not, Earl’s greatness. Andy Dillard, a pro golfer from Tyler whose ten minutes of fame came when he birdied the first six holes of the 1992 US Open at Pebble Beach, was asked once how he got hooked on the sport. “Earl Campbell got me interested in golf,” the story goes. “Oh, really? I didn’t know he golfed.” “He doesn’t. I was playing football in junior high and I tried to tackle him one day and right then and there I decided to take up golf.”

  It was in ninth grade at Moore that Campbell began to date Reuna; she first spotted him in the yard of the junior high. “My cousin kind of liked him, too,” said Reuna, the daughter of a machine operator and a hair stylist, “but I decided I’d go after him.” To some extent, their match, too, could be laid at the feet of William Wayne Justice. It was the first day of busing in the Tyler school system, and the authorities had ordered Earl Campbell to Moore Junior High, all the way across town. “That first day, when he stepped off the bus, there was this halo over his head,” Reuna Campbell remembered. At Moore he started learning formal football technique from Butch LaCroix, who was black. He partnered with Ann Campbell to focus Earl on football. Campbell once described LaCroix as “someone I’d have wanted my father to be like, if he were alive.” Years later, when LaCroix died prematurely from a heart attack, Campbell decided not to attend the funeral—training camp obligations, he explained to LaCroix’s widow. “Earl simply couldn’t handle burying someone who had become another father to him, not at that stage of his life,” Ann LaCroix told a rep
orter.

  But in 1971, Campbell’s ability had not yet fully revealed itself, especially not to Corky Nelson, the thirty-three-year-old first-year head coach of the John Tyler High football program. Campbell, the big sophomore linebacker, missed early season workouts and appeared uninspired when he did show up. Thrust into a new school, Campbell said he suddenly “felt a lack of passion” for the game. He was homesick, in a way. Like other African American students, he had been flushed into a foreign-feeling high school, one that was still trembling from the cheerleader discrimination episode and subsequent African American walkout the previous year. And unlike Butch LaCroix, Corky Nelson was a white guy who drove a green Volkswagen and hailed from San Antonio—a completely foreign part of the state. Nelson, who had shown up with an all-white staff, launched a charm offensive, sending each assistant to have dinner in the homes of varsity players. “In the heart of north Tyler,” Michael Johnson, a black receiver at John Tyler, once told ESPN, “that was pretty bold.” African Americans and whites on the team had little to say to one another on or off the field: 1971 and 1972 were “two years of what you might call close encounters,” Nelson, who died in 2014, once told a Dallas Morning News reporter. “There weren’t too many people—black or white—who liked integration. It was definitely a time of turmoil.” In the book Silver Rights, about the integration of schools in Mississippi in the early 1970s, a white math teacher, Ruby Nell Stancill, describes the period this way: “We had our little boat that was going along and integration rocked that boat. It was frightening to the white people and to blacks because what we had been accustomed to was changed—two separate ways for all these years and then everything changed—just ruined—is the way most of us felt.” When the black and white schools merged “we were really afraid.”