However, it didn’t make the TV news. The Post and the Daily News ignored it. Only the Times considered it fit to print. Just another whispering voice on the phone, it said. More than 950 evacuated. No bomb found. It happens maybe ten times a year.
So now I’ve visited the Statue of Liberty. Next time, I’ll just stay on the subway, thank you, and study the graffiti.
December, 1980
Needless Worry about Snowless Christmases
NORTH TEXAS WEATHERMEN are predicting Dallas won’t have a white Christmas. Their prediction made headlines in Monday’s paper, but as news it ranks with “Dog Bites Man” and “Catholic Named Pope.” Since 1898, when somebody started keeping official weather records for the area, Dallas has had only one white Christmas. That was in 1926, and the snow had melted by noon.
But year after year, newspapers and radio and TV stations keep on reporting that Dallas will have yet another unwhite Christmas. In my opinion, their reporting of such nonnews does nothing but worry a lot of children, and I wish they would cut it out.
I was lucky when I was a little kid. I began life on a Central Texas farm that Franklin Roosevelt hadn’t yet wired for electricity. Our radio was supposed to run on batteries, but it never did, and TV hadn’t been invented. If we subscribed to a newspaper, my parents never told me what it said.
However, I knew all about Santa Claus. I knew he lived at the North Pole with Mrs. Claus and a lot of elves. I knew that the residents of that strange community toiled all year, making toys for good little boys and girls the world over, and that on Christmas Eve, while children slumbered, Santa emptied his warehouse into a sleigh, hitched up his eight reindeer, and made his deliveries. Upon arrival at the residence of a good little boy or girl, Santa would park his sleigh on the roof, slide down the chimney, and lay gifts under the tree.
There were a few problems with this simple scheme, but my mother explained them all. Times were hard, she said, and Santa probably wouldn’t give me all the toys I had asked for in my letter to him, but I would get some of them. Also, World War II was on, and Santa was helping in the war effort like everybody else. So I would receive nothing made of metal or rubber, but I shouldn’t worry because the elves had done their best with the only material they had, which was wood.
Another problem was Santa’s mode of entry. We had a chimney, but no fireplace. Our chimney opened into a stovepipe, which descended into the wood-burning stove in the living room. If Santa slid down that chimney, he would be in for a big surprise and maybe even some danger. A Santa stuck in a stovepipe wasn’t likely to be in a generous mood when he got out.
But my mother explained that Santa had been delivering gifts to that particular house for years and years and was familiar with its chimney. Santa always came into our house through the front door, like everybody else.
Another problem was snow. I knew the upper half of the United States usually was covered with snow at Christmas, and that Santa would have no trouble delivering gifts to the kids up North. But I was in Central Texas, where it rarely snowed at all, and never at Christmas.
A neighbor’s kid had told me his father had explained that Santa customarily parked his sleigh at the edge of the southernmost snow and continued his journey to Texas by airplane. Being a crack pilot, he had no trouble landing in our pastures in the dark.
I didn’t believe that story. If Santa owned an airplane, I reasoned, he would have donated it to the war effort. If he were a crack pilot, he would be flying B-29S for the Army Air Corps.
My mother agreed that the neighbor’s kid was misinformed. Santa always came to Texas by sleigh and reindeer, she insisted, and always landed on the roof, just as he did up North. Since Santa’s sleigh travels through the air, the fact that there’s no snow on the ground is of no consequence whatsoever. All Santa needs, she said, is snow on the roof. And snow always appears on whatever roof Santa is about to land on, she said, no matter what part of the country it’s in. In Texas, of course, the snow melts away before dawn.
In those days, Christmas was a magic time, and Santa Claus was a wonderfully mysterious figure. The only kids who had ever seen him, so far as I knew, were the children in The Night Before Christmas, whose narrative of their experience was my main source of information about the jolly old elf. My mother said those kids were lucky, because Santa is very shy and has been known to bypass houses where children are staying awake in hopes of catching a glimpse of him.
Because Christmas was magic, it was easy to believe everything my mother told me—including that business about the snow on the roof—and I went to bed on Christmas Eve with visions of apples and oranges and English walnuts dancing in my head.
But what if some wise guy of a weatherman had been able to penetrate our rural isolation and inform me there would be no white Christmas, not even for a little while, not even on our rooftop? I wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep and might have worried myself sick.
Times have changed, though, so maybe I’m being too hard on the weathermen. Maybe Dallas children don’t share my primitive fear of a no-snow Christmas. After all, Santa Claus has been in town since Halloween.
December,198O
Friendly Enforcers of an Unfriendly Law
YEAH, I’M FOR conserving fuel. Yeah, I’m for safety on the highways and saving lives. I would no sooner speak against these civic and social virtues than I would make ugly cracks about home, flag, and mother. But I still don’t think 55 m.p.h. is a sensible speed limit for every damn highway in the land.
In this matter I’m in fervent agreement with President Reagan, who’s from the West and recognizes that driving in Texas and Utah and Wyoming isn’t like driving in the District of Columbia and New Jersey and Vermont. A fellow could walk from Rhode Island to Maine faster than he could drive from Dallas to El Paso at 55 m.p.h., but has Congress ordered Easterners to rid themselves of cars in the interest of conservation and safety? Of course not.
Instead, a senseless hardship has been imposed on citizens of the wide-open spaces by congressmen and senators who rarely do their own driving at all, and never endure the nerve-frazzling monotony of a long journey on barren interstates, and therefore believe a speed limit that’s okay for New England is just as swell for the Southwest.
The only thing that has made the 55 m.p.h. farce endurable is the generally tolerant attitude of Southwestern law officers in the enforcement of it. Until recently, if a motorist remained more or less in the vicinity of the speed limit, Texan and New Mexican officers would leave him alone. But Washington frowns on such common sense, and the Department of Transportation has railed against us as a region of bandits and scofflaws and has threatened to punish us. “Drive like Rhode Islanders,” the bureaucrats screech, “or we’ll get even with you! We won’t give you any more of your tax money back to build highways with!”
So the Department of Public Safety and local law officers have had to go out and arrest a lot more Tex-ans in hope that the feds will return enough of our money to maintain the interstate system, which is the only form of surface transportation we have left, the feds having taken away nearly all our trains.
Despite their increased workload, the DPS patrolmen and the justices of the peace to whose courts they direct erring motorists still maintain the high standard of courtesy for which they’re famous. I had an opportunity to be the object of that courtesy just the other day.
It was just a few miles west of Weatherford. The day was crisp and sunny, and Interstate 20 was dry and smooth. Traffic was light, so light that I saw Officer Vandygriff’s car in my mirror when he was still half a mile behind. Something (perhaps his revolving blue lights) told me that he wanted to chat with me. I pulled over, and sure enough, Officer Van-
He handed me my ticket. “Just call the judge within ten days. His phone number’s on the ticket. He’ll tell you what to do.”
Officer Vandygriff was so nice, I wished I had time to stay for a cup of coffee. But my sister-in-law’s lunch was on the table. “You be
careful, Lowell,” he said when I got out of the car.
Yesterday I called Justice of the Peace Glen Dens-more in Weatherford and told him about my conversation with Officer Vandygriff.
“You want to plead guilty?” he asked.
“How much would that cost me?” I asked.
“Including court costs, $36.50,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll plead guilty.”
“Okay, just make out a check to Parker County and mail it to the address the officer gave you.”
“That’s all?”
“Yep, that’s all.”
I hope Congress will listen to Reagan and make speed limits the business of the states again, the way they used to be. But meanwhile, it’s nice to know there are so many courteous folks along Interstate 20.
January, 1981
They Had Better Leave Well Enough Alone
THE PEOPLE of the Davis and Chisos mountains of Far West Texas have always figured the perfect government would be no government at all, and they’ve come closer to perfection than anybody. You would have to look long and hard through the canyons and arroyos of that blessed place before you would find anything resembling your typical bureaucrat.
Fort Davis, the seat of Jeff Davis County and the oldest town in the area, never even bothered to incorporate itself, because when you incorporate a town you have to elect a mayor and a city council and whatnot, and that can lead to all kinds of trouble.
But some of the folks in neighboring Brewster County are bucking tradition and demanding more government, not less. They’re complaining of “taxation without representation” and are threatening to secede from Brewster and build their own courthouse, elect their own sheriff and clerk and judge and treasurer, and adorn themselves with all the trappings of big-time county government.
For those who have never been West of the Pecos, a few facts might make the situation a little more understandable.
Brewster is the largest of Texas’ 254 counties. Its area is 6,204 square miles—roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. All the land is either mountains or desert, nearly all of it magnificent. The southern tip of Brewster County, down on the Rio Grande, is occupied by Big Bend National Park. The rest of the county is occupied by about seven thousand people and tens of thousands of cattle, sheep, goats, and various wild critters. About six thousand of the people live in Alpine, the county seat, and a few hundred live in Marathon, the gateway to the park. The rest—ranchers, rockhounds, desert rats, dreamy prospectors, smugglers, and lost tourists— are scattered hither and yon.
The people who want to secede live in the southern end of Brewster County, around the park. The population centers are Terlingua, an old mining ghost town that regained some renown several years ago when Frank Tolbert started leading crazy people out there once a year to cook chili; Lajitas, which used to be just a store run by Bill Ivey but now includes a resort built to look like an old Wild West town; and Study Butte, another old mining ghost town that now has a few stores that sell beer, ice, and other necessities to tourists.
The population of Lajitas and Study Butte is estimated at thirty-five each. The population of Terlingua is disputed. Some say it’s fourteen, some say it’s six. The whole area they want to incorporate into their new county is about three thousand square miles with a population of about three hundred. I would say that estimate is generous.
It sounds like paradise, doesn’t it? So why do the folks down there want to mess up their landscape with a courthouse and a speed trap and all the other stuff that counties have to have?
Because they’re being ignored. Terlingua’s county commissioner lives in Alpine, which is ninety miles away, and he rarely goes down to check on the welfare of his southern constituents. The area’s dozen teen-agers have to ride a bus on a daily round trip of 180 miles to go to Alpine High School. The citizens of Terlingua, Study Butte, and Lajitas pay taxes, by durn, but don’t believe they’re getting their fair share of service from the courthouse in the big city. So why not keep the money at home, build your own courthouse and school, and tell the fancy Alpine people to go to hell?
The scheme isn’t as outlandish as it may sound. When the Texas legislature split Jeff Davis and Brewster counties off of Presidio County to go it alone in 1887, it authorized the creation of a third county out of Brewster County’s southern river country. It was to be called Foley County. But Foley County never got around to holding elections and organizing itself, so it has remained part of Brewster. If there’s no time limit on organizing, there may be no legal reason why Foley can’t still become Texas’ 255th county.
Before they decide to do so, however, the southern Brewster County folks should send a study group to Texas’ 254th county to find out if its citizens are really any better off than when they organized back in 1931. Loving County, a triangular plot of 648 square miles between the Pecos River and the New Mexico border, has one town—Mentone—about three roads and one hundred citizens. The rest of its territory is occupied by some of the sorriest livestock range in the state and several of Texas’ finest oil fields.
A number of years ago, the federal bureaucrats started feeling sorry for poor Loving County. They mailed a check for a whole lot of money to Mentone, but Loving County returned it with a note. “We’ve already got plenty of money,” it said. “What we need is rain.”
And the feds never sent any.
That’s typical of all governments, I think. They never give you what you really need, and there’s no reason to believe a Foley County administration would treat the river people any better than Brewster County does.
Furthermore, the tranquility of the wilderness would be ruined by the fight over whose relative would get the janitor’s job at the courthouse.
March, 1981
That Sinking Dallas Feeling
MONDAY AFTERNOON, I was sitting in my living room, reading the new issue of Texas Monthly, which had just arrived in the mail. The article was entitled “Welcome, Mr. Kennedy, to Dallas,” and began:
The murder of President John F. Kennedy quickly became linked, in the minds of the American public, to the city of Dallas. Other major assassinations—Dr. Martin Luther King’s in Memphis, Robert F. Kennedy’s in Los Angeles—never seemed to affect the reputations of the cities where they took place, and for years the leaders of Dallas found it immensely frustrating that their city had somehow been tarred by a tragedy perpetrated by a lonely drifter. But tarred it was.
My sons, visiting me during their spring break from school in Saint Louis, were in the den, watching an ancient rerun on Channel n. Suddenly the tone of the television noise changed. The wacky babble of comedy gave way to a solemn news voice announcing—erroneously, as it turned out—the death of James Brady, President Reagan’s press spokesman.
By the time I got to the den, the bulletin had ended and the babble resumed. “What was that about?” I asked.
“Somebody has shot the president and some other men,” replied Ted, who is eleven.
“My God!” I said. “Where did it happen?”
“In Dallas, I think,” Ted said. “He came here to make a speech.”
Fighting that sinking feeling that has become so familiar to Americans during the past twenty years, I asked, “When? When did you hear it?”
“About fifteen minutes ago,” said Patrick, who is nine. “It was during ‘I Dream of jeannie.’”
“Why didn’t you come tell me?” I yelled.
“You were on the phone,” Ted said. “And then we forgot.”
My sons’ account, as it turned out, was as erroneous as the bulletin about Brady’s death and many other reports during the early hours of the newest American outrage. It was Vice President Bush who was in Texas, and he was in Fort Worth, not Dallas, and he wasn’t shot. But my reaction to the news and my sons’ reaction were typical of who we are, and somehow embarrassing.
Upon hearing news of an assassination, only a citizen of Dallas would ask first: “Where did it happen?” Or fee
l the deep relief I felt when I switched to a network station and learned that this president had been shot in Washington, not Dallas.
And only children who have been fed on television almost from birth would forget to mention that, by the way, Dad, the president was shot while you were on the phone. To them, a bulletin about an assassination attempt on the nation’s leader was only another pause for a message, another interruption of “I Dream of Jeannie.” Just something that happened on TV, where everything happens these days.
That’s what I thought at first, anyway. “May we turn back to Channel 11 now?” asked Patrick after a few minutes of network solemnity.
“No!” I said. “Don’t you realize how important this is?”
Then Edwin R. Newman said NBC had received so many phone calls asking when regular programming would resume that he was obliged to announce, sorry, the newsmen would remain on the air until they learned whether the president of the United States was going to live or die, whether there was going to be a new president sworn in or not, whether the country was in danger or not. My sons and their generation were not the only Americans impatient with the intrusion of boring reality into their TV fantasyland.
I was wrong about the other thing, too.
When Dan Rather of CBS said the accused assassin, although a resident of Colorado, had gone to high school in Dallas, I was angry. Why, why, why did the networks have to find some puny Dallas angle to every assassination? If an assassin once changed planes at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, I thought, the network guys would mention it and raise their eyebrows. John Hinckley, Jr., was from Colorado, damn it. Leave Dallas out of it!
Then Frank Reynolds of ABC announced that Hinckley had bought two guns at a Dallas pawnshop. He paused to let the news soak in, then, in case we missed the significance, repeated: Dallas! Why didn’t the s.o.b. have the decency to buy his guns in Memphis or Los Angeles or Denver? I thought. Anywhere but on the very street where Kennedy was shot.
The Time of My Life Page 18
