Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  Becky, Barb, Judy and their Republican coworkers had no idea I detested George W. Bush, wanted to legalize all drugs and wished I could reduce the size and bite of government by 90 percent, for starters. Even if they knew about my radical politics, I bet they would have searched their land records and their memories just as hard to help me find Steinbeck’s cattle ranch. Trouble was, I hadn’t actually found it.

  The Real Ranch

  I was leaving Lubbock for Austin at dawn on Thursday when I got a call from J.B. Lane, one of the Amarillo people I had left a message with the day before. Lane told me the bad news first. The ranch house I found was the wrong house because I had been on the wrong ranch.

  Lane managed L R Hagy Estate, an Amarillo cattle/oil/gas company. Lawrence R. Hagy had been Zachary Scott’s brother-in-law and at one time he owned both the wrong ranch I had found and the right ranch I didn’t. The place I had seen, what Lane called “the rock house,” was the current headquarters of the Hagy Ranch. The other Hagy ranch, the one the Steinbecks visited in the fall of 1960, was 60 miles east of Amarillo in Clarendon, Texas.

  Lane, who used to be married to a Hagy, knew the Clarendon ranch intimately. He said it was where the wealthy movers and shakers of Amarillo would regularly go to hunt and fish. “It was a working cattle ranch,” he said. “Thom Steinbeck worked at that ranch. Elaine was there that Thanksgiving, too. I’ve seen pictures.”

  Lane had more bad news. In 2003 L R Hagy Estate sold the ranch to the Crofoot Cattle Company. I thought that was the end of my trail. But Lane gave me the company’s phone number and three minutes later I was babbling to Terry Crofoot, trying to explain why a Pittsburgh guy had called him out of the blue.

  Mr. Crofoot was 130 miles away from Lubbock, standing in a pasture. The ranch I was looking for was 156 miles the other way, northeast of Lubbock on the other side of cotton country. I figured I was doomed. Texas was too damn big. Life was too short. No way would I get to visit the ranch. But then that famous Texas hospitality gene must have automatically kicked in.

  “You’d be welcome to go there,” Crofoot said before I even thought of asking. For the next 10 minutes he filled me in on the history of the ranch, going back to Indian days. It had been remodeled since he bought it from L R Hagy Estate, but it was essentially the same place Steinbeck stayed.

  Next Crofoot recited Google-plus directions to the ranch, down to the big water tower I’d see seven miles from Clarendon. I swear he sounded apologetic when he said his place was just a little under 40,000 acres, which would fit the City of Pittsburgh plus a few suburbs. The cattle ranch was almost three hours away from where I was in Lubbock. But after 9,000 miles on the Steinbeck Highway, what was a little 156-mile detour? I kicked myself all the way. In my fit of triumph the day before, I had committed the mortal sin of journalism – the sin of presumption.

  If I had been on the ball, or if I still trusted anything Steinbeck wrote, I would have re-read his description of the place in his book before I declared success. Steinbeck said its one-story brick ranch house "stood in a grove of cottonwoods on a little eminence over a pool made by a dammed-up spring." At the ranch north of Amarillo there was no pond full of trout, no hill and no brick house. Lane’s returned phone call had saved me from an embarrassing mistake.

  Between Lubbock and Clarendon the first thing I hit was a dusty swath of cotton country. Gigantic fields covered with billions of cotton balls were crawling with insect-like sprinklers half a mile long. Loaves of tightly packed cotton the size of train cars baked in the sun beside the two-lane highway, which was arrow-straight and had little drifts of escaped cotton along its edges.

  I was flying alone across yet another vast chunk of dry, flat America that had been put to productive and profitable use by invisible men and their magic machines. After a token bump of uninhabited hill country, complete with canyons and curves, the terrain turned into scrubby rolling cattle land. Like so much of the American outback west of Chicago, traffic, houses and people were rare to nonexistent.

  In Clarendon the impressive stone entrance to the Bitter Creek Ranch was exactly where Terry Crofoot said it would be on Farm to Market Road 1260. I drove a few minutes across open grassland sprinkled with a few dozen Herefords until I came to a compound in the shade of some old cottonwoods. There were several brick houses, four or five parked cars and pickups, a few horses in a corral, a trout pond, a spacious maintenance garage with its door open and lights on – but no one was home.

  Thanks to Terry Crofoot’s long-distance trust and hospitality, I was free to roam around the compound with my cameras and notebook like I owned the joint. Though two buildings were new and many upgrades had been made, it was clearly the place Steinbeck described in “Charley.” The main structure, a long one-story redbrick house, had a big screened-in porch overlooking a trout pond surrounded by trees. The great room had a white-brick fireplace and a high white ceiling with heavy beams. Each of the three bedrooms had a Texas-size bed, its own bathroom and a door to the outside.

  It was like a little motel, only in 1960 the regular guests were members of Texas’ richest cattle families. The showroom of heavy wood outdoor furniture on the covered patios was worth more than my house. Yet, notwithstanding the “Dallas” stereotypes, nothing inside or out was ostentatious or in bad taste, just expensive and heavy.

  Enjoying the sun and wind and park-like setting, I tried to imagine what it was like to be a vacationing cattle baron. I couldn’t. My hat was too small. But I didn’t need to imagine anything, since Steinbeck did a thorough job of detailing the cattle-baron lifestyle in "Travels With Charley." When Steinbeck writes about something he really did on his trip, you can usually tell. Instead of inventing pages of wooden dialogue, he delivers detail.

  After having the ranch compound and its ghosts to myself for half an hour, I did what I had to do next – set out for New Orleans. As I left a Texas-size pickup truck with a long enclosed trailer came down the driveway. We stopped to talk, window-to-window like we already knew each other. I squinted up at him, established why I was trespassing and waved my Professional Reporter’s Notebook around as if it had special powers. He was the 20-something son of Mr. Jones, the ranch manager. Handsome as a movie star, wearing a cowboy hat and work clothes because he needed to, he was like every other Texan I had met – friendly and real.

  He thought my crazy Steinbeck story was more interesting than suspicious, probably because Terry Crofoot had tipped off him or his dad that I was coming. Mr. Jones’ boy said he had just delivered a few head of cattle to their doom at the meat plant. He, another cowboy and a maintenance man lived full-time at the ranch. It was no surprise and no big deal to him that he slept every night in a bedroom the great John Steinbeck might have used.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Thursday, Dec. 1, 1960 – New Orleans, Upper Ninth Ward

  Steinbeck says in “Charley” he wanted to go to New Orleans to witness the anti-integration protests at a public school. Though he actually left from his wife’s sister’s place in Austin, which is 500 miles west of New Orleans, in the book he describes picking up Charley at the vet in Amarillo and driving south and east across Texas to New Orleans, a total of 1,000 miles. Hardly sleeping, he says he traveled in the bad ice storm that actually did hit southeast Texas Nov. 29 and 30. He writes that he arrived in “frozen-over” Beaumont, Texas, at midnight and in Houma, Louisiana, at dawn. In New Orleans he says he parked Rocinante and took a cab to William Frantz Elementary in the Upper Ninth Ward.

  Bound for New Orleans

  Again I awoke to the smell of idling trucks. Another sleepover in a Texas picnic area. This time it was on I-20, near Kilgore, east of Dallas and west of Shreveport. The GPS Person, into whose omniscient hands I was fully entrusted, had chosen my route to New Orleans. The day before she had guided me for 597 miles through Texas cotton country to Texas cattle country to Texas oil & gas country. It was the farthest I had driven in a single day.

  Now I could smell the finish li
ne. Via New Orleans and the Steinbeck Highway, home was only 1,700 miles away. I hoped to make Pittsburgh by Sunday. I skipped Austin. I didn’t need to go there to find Elaine’s sister’s place. My last major stop, like Steinbeck’s, was an elementary school in the soggy Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans. He went there in early December to see the bigoted white mothers – the so-called “Cheerleaders.” Their morning protests against the integration of their neighborhood public school had become a national news story. New Orleans was about 400 miles south and I wanted to reach William Frantz Elementary before dark.

  No such luck. As soon as I entered the northwest corner of Louisiana there were serious traffic backups. Slow, thick, stupid traffic for miles along I-49. On I-10 near Baton Rouge was the worst traffic jam of my trip. There obviously were too many bayous and too few roads in the state for all the drivers – and most Louisiana drivers were crazy.

  George Carlin once observed with his usual keen perception that when you’re driving you think the drivers you pass are morons and the drivers who pass you are assholes. The closer I got to downtown New Orleans, the more obvious it became that in Louisiana’s case nearly everyone behind a wheel was a moron and an asshole.

  I had never seen so many road jerks in one city in my life. I wasn’t a wimpy city driver. I’d had 12 years of training in Los Angeles, where freeways were clogged but fast and drivers were aggressive but good. I also spent half a lifetime in Pittsburgh, where the only thing worse than the drivers was the roads. At first I thought it was just a few Louisiana hotheads. Then I realized their moronic-aggressive driving style was an ingrained cultural thing – a permanent state of community road rage. The worst ones were young, always white-male and usually driving cheap American muscle cars or pickup trucks plastered with Saints decals.

  When I was going 70 in the fast lane behind a solid line of cars, a Louisiana loser would suddenly appear in my rearview mirror 12 feet from my bumper. Meanwhile, if I left two car lengths of air in front of me another moron/asshole would fly up the slow lane and jam into the space. It wasn’t one or two cases of this kind of tailgating or lane-jamming. It was at least 25 in two hours.

  The sudden wave of highway hooliganism was a strange development. Not four hours earlier I had told my wife Trudi on the phone that I couldn't remember being tailgated once from Maine to Amarillo. I also told her I had not had to flash anyone the finger, which actually wasn’t that impressive since most of the time there was no one else on the road with me. Ten thousand consecutive miles of civilized driving behavior ended during three hours on southern Louisiana’s crowded, bumpy, beat-up freeways. Everyone drove aggressively and tailgated at 70 – including Louisiana Highway Patrolmen. I took a fuzzy photo of the tailgating cop car to prove it.

  It didn’t surprise me to find out later that based on 2009 national highway stats, Louisiana -- the most violent state in the union and home of America's highest homicide rate, by far -- was also one of the most deadly states I had driven through. Its auto death rate, like Arizona’s, was 1.8 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared to the national rate of 1.1.

  Montana, Louisiana/Arizona, North Dakota, New Mexico and Texas, in that order, each had fatality rates higher than the national average. The safest state I had crossed (and the safest in the country) was Massachusetts, which makes no sense to anyone who’s driven in Boston. Roads in rich Connecticut, where every other family has a chauffeur, and Minnesota, where most people drive a John Deere combine to work, were almost as safe.

  Montana, with its 2.0 death rate, owed its deadliest ranking to several factors that apparently drive up the number of fatalities per mile in large rural states. Along with the usual reasons, drinking and low seatbelt usage, Montana’s nice people kill themselves at a higher rate by wrecking their Ford 150s on remote rural roads, where EMS response times average 80 minutes instead of 15 in cities. Louisiana’s cowboys kill themselves in the same ways, plus they’re mostly morons and assholes.

  20 – Hate & Filth in New Orleans

  No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?

  – “Travels with Charley”

  The White School That Made Black History

  It was dark by the time I parked in front of William Frantz Elementary in the Upper Ninth Ward. The stout brick school that made civil rights history in 1960 and drew the attention of America and John Steinbeck was closed, locked and boarded up. The building and its entire block were protected from local vandals and copper thieves by a cyclone fence topped by barbed wire.

  Five years after the floods unleashed by Hurricane Katrina had devastated it, the neighborhood on both sides of North Galvez Street looked shabby and unfriendly, at least at night. The street was quiet with no people on the sidewalks and few cars on the move. It was too dark to take decent photos, so I checked into a Holiday Inn across town.

  The next morning William Frantz Elementary and the small, single-family homes surrounding it looked much better. Despite its broken windows, the building seemed less battered and the neighboring residential streets didn’t look so dangerous or blighted. There was a freshly broken beer bottle on the sidewalk – next to the BMW at the curb.

  The Upper Ninth Ward is 98 percent black, inordinately poor, troubled by crime, too close to the Mississippi River for comfort and less than a yard above sea level. It was inundated when the city’s poorly built levees broke under the strain of Katrina’s storm surge. William Frantz Elementary had to be closed and nearly 2,000 homes in the ward were left sitting in polluted seawater up to the tops of their front doors.

  The post-Katrina population of the Upper Ninth was half what it was in 2000. It was hard to believe, but the Upper Ninth Ward was lucky compared to the Lower Ninth Ward on the other side of the Industrial Canal. The Lower Ninth was virtually swept away when a 900-foot section of the levee holding back the canal collapsed. Half of the 1,577 people in Louisiana who died during or after Katrina lived in the Lower Ninth, where the pre-Katrina population had fallen from 14,000 to 2,842 in 2010.

  My best drive-by journalist’s guess, after a quick stroll, was that about 80 percent of the tiny homes in the streets around William Frantz Elementary had been fixed, rebuilt or replaced since Katrina. There were vacant homes and at least a dozen vacant lots, including the historic one across the street from the school that used to contain the boyhood home of the Upper Ninth Ward’s least-favorite son, Lee Harvey Oswald.

  The neighborhood was still hurting all over. The Great Recession’s national unemployment rate of 10 percent would have been cause for dancing in the streets. Its jobless rate was pushing 40 percent. There were few iron bars on the windows and front doors, but crime was an issue in a poor and violent city whose drug gangs generated a murder rate nine times higher than New York’s.

  Still, if you didn’t count moldy houses sealed with plywood or landscaped with piles of debris left by the flood, the inexpensive new and old homes were well kept. On Alvar Street, around the corner from the school, a young man armed with a weed whacker and a power mower was attacking a two-foot tangle of weeds and grass choking a partially remodeled vacant house.

  “It got away from me,” he said apologetically. He said things were slowly improving in the Upper Ninth Ward. He was getting the front yard cleaned up because the owner was going to move into the house. “He has to move back because his house keeps getting broken into. He needs to live in it to protect it.”

  Steinbeck Goes to School

  It was 8:57. Birds were chirping and the ward was still sleeping in the warming sun. Following my neighborhood walking tour, I stood on the sidewalk across the street from the front door of William Frantz E
lementary. The small old wood house behind me had electric service but it was boarded up and rotting. Like the school and the other unoccupied homes, its front door still bore the spray-painted code used by the search and rescue teams who went house-to-house after Katrina looking for survivors and human remains.

  Fifty years earlier, in late November of 1960, there were no peaceful and quiet mornings on the sidewalks of North Galvez Street. William Frantz Elementary – then an all-white school in a virtually all-white working-class neighborhood – was making national headlines. The city of New Orleans had taken its first token steps to integrate its public schools. The crowded grade school was ground zero in a bitter civil rights battle that segregationists and white parents could never win but were viciously fighting anyway.