The Time of My Life

by Bryan Woolley

  Some of the fans who have followed the story so faithfully won’t be satisfied with the ending, of course. They’ll complain that it’s a little bland, a little anticlimactic, a little too pat for such a big production. They might wish for one more trial, or a guest shot for Cullen or Priscilla or Karen on another show. They might even demand a new series on the renewed search for the man in the black wig, the villain for whom the wavy-haired Daddy was mistaken, the anonymous intruder who shot the child and the basketball player and left the blonde Mama bleeding. He’s still out there, supposedly, and if the series is ever revived, it surely will focus on him.

  But it will be a low-budget production. A search, an arrest, one trial, then fadeout. A miniseries at best. We won’t see such a cast, such a production, such a budget again in our lifetime, for it will be a long, long while before Tarrant or any other county will dare to try another so rich a man for murder.

  Every movie can’t be Gone With the Wind, after all, or every novel War and Peace. Every trial can’t be Texas vs. Davis. Ordinary minds can’t retain the details of such complex stories, anyway, and minor characters slip, one by one, out of memory. But the stormy amours of Rhett and Scarlett and Andrei and Natasha are not forgotten, and it isn’t likely that Cullen and Priscilla will be forgotten either.

  Not in Texas. They’ve lived with us too long.

  November, 1979

  Radical Ideas in the Education Biz

  THE TEACHERS of the Dallas Independent School District have been hollering a lot lately. Their main complaints are about wages and working conditions. To borrow a phrase from the old days of civil rights marches, they resent being “second-class citizens” of the education biz. Or is it fifth-class or sixth-class? Anyway, they see themselves as the bottom of the DISD pecking order.

  Their complaint about wages is that they aren’t paid enough. Their complaint about working conditions is that they have so much paperwork to do that there’s little time left to pay attention to the kids. If they were paid more, they say, the DISD might be more competitive with other school districts in hiring the better, more dedicated teachers and might fill the 150 current vacancies on the city’s public school faculties. If they had less paperwork to do, they say, they would have more time to teach things.

  These are radical ideas. They challenge our basic understanding of teachers and modern schools. They’re dangerous.

  For instance, everybody knows teachers aren’t supposed to be paid much. Traditionally, they’ve been idealistic individuals who liked their work, and any boss will tell you that people who like their work shouldn’t be paid as much as people who don’t.

  And look at the fringe benefits:

  • Teachers get summers off, so they can go back to school and work on another degree in education or pick up some extra dough mowing lawns or slinging hash browns at Steak & Egg. Governor Bill Clements reminded the legislature and the public of this little plum when the teachers asked for a raise earlier this year. Since President Carter’s guidelines for raises these days are 7 percent, 5.1 percent ought to be enough for the teachers, because they can get summer jobs, he said. And it wasn’t his fault that his oil-well drilling company, SEDCO, didn’t need any summer help.

  • Teachers get to be around our kids all day. We parents love our kids and wish we were lucky enough to be with them constantly. Unfortunately, they have to go to school, and we have to go to work. What a pleasure it would be to work and be with our kids— and thirty or forty others like them—all day, enjoying the colorful nicknames some of them call their teachers, and even an occasional bout of playful fisticuffs. Teachers even get to be with our kids at night, at school athletic events, dances, play rehearsals, club meetings, and the like.

  • Teachers rarely have to work past midnight or on Saturdays and Sundays. They have this time free to enjoy the homework that the kids have turned in or catch up on administrative paperwork, in case they allowed their teaching to interfere with this during school hours.

  Paperwork is very important in the education biz. It is proof that something is being done in the schools.

  For instance, the DISD’s Progress Form: Mathematics Baseline, which is filled out in quadruplicate (white for parent, canary for teacher, pink for parent [again], and goldenrod for miscellaneous) informs the parent, the teacher, and miscellaneous that Johnny can “use the commutative (order) property and the associative (grouping) property of addition in solving open sentences” and lots of other stuff. Form S-95 in quadruplicate indicates that Johnny got sent to the office, and Form H-25E says he got sent to the school nurse. Other forms are for field trips, free lunches, books, attendance, materials, the Red Cross, lockers, yearbooks, and almost every other detail of little Johnny’s life. Some of them go to parents, some to the DISD, some to Austin, some to Washington, and some to miscellaneous, where they are put in files with other white, canary, pink, and goldenrod forms.

  These files are proof that the teachers are doing something (filling out forms), that administrators are doing something (making the teachers fill out the forms), and that the office help in Dallas, Austin, and Washington are doing something (putting the forms in file cabinets).

  Some teachers like paperwork so much that they’ve quit teaching and have taken jobs filling out forms for government or business for higher pay. Others leave the classroom and get jobs within the DISD or some other school system thinking up new forms for teachers to fill out. They also get pay raises.

  So teachers who remain in the classroom claim that since they do a lot of paperwork and teach the kids, they ought to get paid more, too, or have less paperwork to do, or both. Some of the radicals say they even want to “make our students a priority.”

  This is a silly argument, of course, and a dangerous one.

  It’s silly because the radicals never point out that teachers who desert the classroom for money have to give up the true rewards of teaching—being with our kids all day, making hash browns at Steak & Egg in the summertime—and the Dallas school board knows there are probably people out there somewhere who still prefer these benefits to mere money. These people, wherever they are, are expected to show up eventually and fill the DISD’s faculty vacancies.

  And the dangerous part is the radicals’ desire to make the students “a priority.” If the DISD permitted our teachers to do that, who would fill up the file cabinets? Huh?

  November, 1979

  A Stolen Car and a Stolen Soul

  THE LAW HASN’T CREATED any such classification as “crime against soul,” so what happened to Bruce Fant went into the Dallas Police Department records as “crimes against property: auto theft.”

  At 7:45 on the morning of November 9, when Bruce left his apartment to go to work, he discovered that his car was no longer in the parking lot where he had left it the night before. “I felt like my throat had been cut,” he said. Checking with the neighbors, he learned that one had seen his car in the lot at 6:55 A.M., and another thought he heard its engine fire up around 7. That’s more than most of us could find out if somebody swiped an automobile from us, but Bruce’s is a special car.

  Bruce, who’s now seventeen, bought the car when he was thirteen, two years before he got his driver’s license. But it didn’t matter that he couldn’t drive the car, because the car wouldn’t run. It had no engine and no transmission.

  “It’s a ’65 Chevelle Malibu sedan, and I’ve been told it’s a rare car,” he said. “I’ve been told that only about five hundred ‘65 Chevelle Malibu sedans were made. I don’t know that for a fact, but I’ve never seen another car like it. It was just the body that I bought, really, but it was beautiful. It was a clean white and didn’t have a dent on it. So I paid five hundred dollars for it.”

  Bruce’s father, Milton, is an auto mechanic, and Bruce inherited his dad’s gift and his fascination with mechanical things. So he started to work. He saved enough money to buy a 327-cubic-inch Chevrolet V-8 engine and installed it. He bought a Turbo 400 automatic tr
ansmission and a high-stall converter and a shift kit and installed them.

  He did all the work himself, using tools that he had begun buying and collecting when he was twelve and also a chest of tools that his dad had collected when he was young and had passed on to Bruce with the pride that’s known only by a father who has a good boy following in his footsteps.

  Bruce labored over the car for two years and still didn’t have it running by the time he was fifteen and had won his driver’s license. But when it was finally finished, it was a joy to behold. It had a hood scoop. It had rally sport wheels, and Bruce bought big, wide tires and installed them on the rear ones. It had the name “Casper” painted on the right side of the trunk, and a picture of the friendly little comic-strip ghost.

  By the time Bruce was done, he had invested about five thousand dollars in his car, but it was worth it. “When I would drive down the road, everybody would look,” he said, because nobody had seen a car like that. It was a beautiful, unique car that Bruce had created with two years of his time, five thousand dollars he had earned himself, his own hands, and knowledge and skill and the tools that represented both his heritage and his aspirations. The car was as bold an expression of its creator’s talent and personality as the Pieta is of Michelangelo’s.

  In the daytime Bruce drove it to his work, where he rebuilds air conditioner compressors. At night he drove it to the Braniff aircraft maintenance center at Love Field, where he takes courses in mechanics and gets credit for them at Mountainview Community College. And at the end of his long day, about 11:10 P.M., he parked it in his apartment parking lot and locked the special kinds of locks he had installed to make the car hard to burglarize.

  He did everything a guy can do to and with a car except insure it. “It cost more to insure a 1965 automobile than I could afford,” he said. “Of course, I’ve learned a lesson about that. I’ve lost a lot more than the insurance would have cost.”

  Forty-five minutes after his neighbor heard his car start, Bruce called the police and reported the theft, but in two weeks the police have learned nothing. He has run classified ads in both Dallas dailies, offering a five-hundred-dollar reward to anyone providing information about the whereabouts of the car named Casper. He has cruised his neighborhood, an area of town full of apartments and parking lots, looking for the car that everyone looked at when he used to drive it down the road, but he hasn’t found it. He has posted notices in the area, begging for information and offering the reward, and has received nothing.

  And he has lost more than his car, for in its front seat when it was stolen were his school books, and in the trunk were all the tools that he has collected since he was a child and the tools that his father collected before him.

  “Everything I owned was in that car,” Bruce said, “except my set of weights and my stereo. That’s all I have left.”

  So anyone seeing a white ’64 Chevelle Malibu sedan named Casper should call the cops immediately. It has a stolen soul in it.

  November, 1979

  When Ma Bell Doesn’t Want to Talk

  IMAGINE THAT YOU’VE just moved to the Dallas area from a decadent city in the wicked Northeast. Imagine that you’re glad to be out of the Northeast, where nothing works anymore, and in the shiny new Sunbelt, where life is so much easier.

  Imagine that you live in a house in Lewisville—the section of Lewisville serviced by Southwestern Bell, not the part serviced by General Telephone—and that you’ve decided you want a phone in your house.

  You work in downtown Dallas, so you pick up the Greater Dallas phone book and look up the number you’re supposed to call to arrange a new phone connection. The woman who answers tells you that Lewisville isn’t in Greater Dallas. To have a phone connected in Lewisville, you don’t call the Dallas office of Southwestern Bell, you call the McKinney office. She gives you the number.

  You call the number and get a busy signal. You call it again and get a busy signal. You call it again and get a busy signal. You call it again and get a busy signal. You call if fifteen times and get a busy signal.

  You call it again, and it rings. Ah. Click. A voice. Ah.

  “This is Southwestern Bell Telephone Company,” the voice says. “All our representatives are now on the telephone. Please call back, and we will be glad to help you.”

  Click. The voice is a recording. It doesn’t ask you to hold the line until a representative is available to help you. It doesn’t play music while you wait. It doesn’t let you wait. It hangs up on you.

  You try again. Ah. It rings. Click. Ah. A voice.

  “This is Southwestern Bell….” The recording completes its seven-second speech and hangs up. You call back, as the recording advises you, eight or nine times. Sometimes you get a busy signal. Other times you get the recording that tells you to call back.

  At last a human voice answers. You’re so surprised that it takes you a moment to collect your thoughts. No, you don’t want a phone in every room of your house, you tell the lady. A couple will do. You make your choices from the cornucopia of styles and colors that Southwestern Bell has available.

  She asks for your social security number. Why does she want your social security number? you ask. She says you can’t get a phone without a social security number. You give her your social security number.

  She asks for the name of a relative to contact. You’re fifty-two years old and don’t stay in very close contact with your relatives yourself. Why does Southwestern Bell need the name of a relative to contact? you ask. You can’t get a phone without a relative to contact, she says, so you give her the name of your sister. You hope your sister won’t mind Southwestern Bell calling up to chat now and then.

  Time passes. Problems arise. You can’t find time to go to the phone center and pick up your phones. What to do? Southwestern Bell probably has given up on you, you think. Maybe you should call and replace your order. This is a mistake.

  One day you come to work and find a note on your desk. Mrs. X at Southwestern Bell in McKinney wants you to call her as soon as possible. You call. You get a busy signal. You call again. Busy signal. And again. The same. And again.

  Ah. It rings. And rings. And rings. It rings thirty-one times. Nobody answers. Not even the recording. You go to lunch.

  When you return, there’s another note on your desk. Mrs. X at Southwestern Bell wants you to call immediately. If you don’t, Southwestern Bell can’t give you a phone. So you call. Busy. You call. Busy. You call. Busy.

  Ah. It rings. Click. Ah. A voice. Is it…? No, it’s not the recording!

  It’s a human voice!

  “Is this Mrs. X?”

  “No, Mrs. X is busy.” But it’s a feminine voice, a pleasant voice, a kind voice. You decide to tell the lady your problems. You tell her about the busy signal. You tell her about the recording that hangs up on you. You tell her how upset you’ve been.

  “I know it’s terrible,” she says. “This office services McKinney and Lewisville and The Colony and Allen and….” She names several other North Texas towns. “It’s a fast-growing area,” she says, “and we have only five incoming lines and six people to answer the phones.”

  “But why does the recording keep hanging up on me?” you ask.

  “We don’t have a system that lets you wait.”

  “Motels and airlines have systems that let you wait,” you say. “Why doesn’t the phone company have one?”

  “I don’t know. We just work here. Nobody cares about us.”

  “But what if the big boss in the big office in Dallas needed to call you? He could never get through, could he?”

  “Oh, he could get through. He has a special number.”

  The phone center opens at eight o’clock in the morning. You can go there and pick up your phones, she says. Everything is going to be all right.

  You show up at 8:15 and ask for your phones. The lady hasn’t received your order, she says. No order, no phones, she tells you. Sorry.

  On second thought, don�
��t imagine it. Only the name of Mrs. X has been changed to protect the innocent.

  December, 1979

  Heroes Are Where You Find Them

  WHILE DRIVING through Dublin, Texas, one day, I told my sons about one of the memorable experiences of my childhood—the time I met Gene Autry.

  “It was during World War II,” I said. “Gene wore his Army uniform when he rode Champion in the Dublin rodeo parade. Later, he stood in the middle of the arena and sang ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ and everybody cheered. I got to meet him after the rodeo, and he shook my hand.”

  I’ve been to Dublin only a few times since that long-ago day, and as I drove through the town every detail of that meeting—my first encounter with a hero, my first brush with the famous—flooded my mind with sweet sadness.

  I remembered myself as a towheaded, six-year-old farm urchin dressed in striped overalls and no shoes, gazing worshipfully into the eyes of my number one hero, a peace-loving, milk-drinking cowboy who had donned the uniform of his country and was taking a brief rest from the war to come home and visit his horse and sing. Only Norman Rockwell could have done the scene justice.

  “Who’s Gene Autry?” my ten-year-old asked. The eight-year-old said nothing, having nodded off during my story.

  “He’s the guy who sings ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Our conversation died. My sacred memory was desecrated, my frail bubble of nostalgia shattered. My sadness was no longer for the boy in the striped overalls, who’s gone forever anyway, but for the blond boy on the seat beside me and his redheaded, sleeping brother, my flesh and blood, who would never understand Gene Autry or Roy Rogers or Johnny Mack Brown or Tim Holt or the Durango Kid. I remembered a Saturday morning when they were younger, watching an ancient rerun of the Lone Ranger on TV with them. I loved every minute of it, but they were bored—as bored as they were now with Gene Autry.