by Texas
He launched our three-hour discussion on a high philosophical note: The essential character of Texas, at least in this century, has been formed by three experiences, but before I say what they are, let me remind you of this essential truth about things Texan. The significant ones have never been determined by the big cities. Houston, Dallas, San Antone, they've never defined what a Texan is. That insight comes only from the small towns. Always has and I'm convinced always will. The good ol' boy with his pickup, his six-pack and his rifle slung in the rack behind his head, he's a small-town creation. Limited to places of under eight thousand, I'd say.'
Miss Cobb would not accept this: 'Do you mean to say the pickup and the six-pack define Texans?'
'I do not. What I intended to point out was that even these modern characteristics are predominantly small-town.'
'What are the essentials?' she asked.
'I was about to say,' Hatfield said, with just the slightest irritation at having been interrupted on the subject of football by a woman, 'that my significant characteristics derived from the small town, and I think you'll agree that they account for most of the Texas legend as it exists today: the ranch, the oil well, Friday night football.
'Now, it's curious and I think particularly Texan that books and plays and movies and television shows galore have idealized the [first two. How many cowboy films have we had? How many television shows about Texas oil people? You ever see that great Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert picture Boom Town? Or [the best Texas picture made so far, Red River, or the second best, Giant? All oil and ranching, and I could name a dozen other [goodies.
That's because outsiders made the pictures. That's because ioutsiders were defining how we should look at ourselves. But there's never been a really first-rate book or play or dramatic presentation of Friday night football. And why not? Because people outside of Texas don't appreciate the total grandeur of that [tradition.
'1 never met a single stranger to Texas who had any appreciation of what high school football means to a Texan. Closest were those! clowns in the Pennsylvania coal regions. They started boasting that J they were the hotbed of high school football and I do admit thev i sent a lot of their graduates to colleges all over America, like joe Namath to Alabama, but I started a movement to send an All-Texas high school team north to play the All-Pennsyivanians. Youl know what happened A slaughter. Texas won every game." He! rattled off the scores as if the games had occurred yesterday—I 26-10, 34-2, 45-14—and he could do this with all the statistics! of his chosen field. He needed no notes.
'So after we'd clobbered Pennsylvania three times, they called] off the game. Too humiliating. And if we'd played any other state! on the same basis, our scores would have been higher. Texas high! school football is unbelievable. We have about a thousand schools! playing each weekend. Five hundred fascinating games. In a year,! maybe half a million spectators will see the eight Dallas Cowboys'! home games. Eight million will see their favorite high school! teams.'
He now dropped his voice to that whispered, seriotragic levell which clergvmen use when conducting funeral services for people! they had never known while living: 'As you know, an All-! Oklahoma high school team beat an All-Texas the last two years.jj We didn't send our best players, but you just can't explain it,' andl he sighed.
'But let's get back to fundamentals of the Texas character. The! ranch gives us the cowboy, and now that there are hardly any of! them left, what's more important, the cowboy clothes. You eveil see that great picture of Bum Phillips walking across the football! field in his Stetson hat and his General Quimper boots? That's! Texas. Or.the Marlboro man herding his steers in a Panhandle! blizzard 7 That's Texas.'
'I thought the Marlboro man was from Wyoming,' Garza said, and Pepper dismissed him: 'They shoot all the photos out on the 6666 Ranch in Guthrie, King County. Keep the Marlboro store right on the ranch.
'And the same goes for the oilman. He may no longer be the dominant economic factor, what with OPEC misbehavior and the rise of Silicon Valley over in Dallas, but emotionally he is stil emperor of the Texas plains. Best thing ever happened to oil, i< moved from being a monopoly of East Texas out to Central Texas, where I grew up, and then on to the Permian Basin, real out west Made it universal Texan the way cattle never were, and gave ui some powerful imagery, not only in the production of the oil vvel
itself, that wonderful gusher blackening the sky, but in the oilman, too. Best cartoon on Texas I ever saw showed a typical West Texas wildcatter, living in this shack with his bedraggled wife. Behind them you see a gusher coming in on their pasture, and the old woman is yelling to her husband "Call Nciman-Marcus and see how late they stay open on Thursdays!" '
'You seem to incline always toward the cheapest view of our state, Mr. Hatfield,' Miss Cobb protested, and Pepper replied, with never a pause: 'I don't do the choosing, ma'am, the people do, and one of the best things I ever heard about any state came
, from Hawaii. Group of local politicians there, about 1960, awoke to the fact that their new state was no longer a bunch of hoolie-
; hoolie girls waving their hips. It was a modern state, with a sugar industry and pineapple and a good university. So they started advertising such things in mainland magazines, and tourism dropped forty percent. Right quick they went back to the hoolie-hoolies, and there they stay, with tourism way up. Texas, ma'am, is ranches and oil and Friday night football, and you people in command better not try to sell anything else.'
Pepper was at his best when reminiscing about the great high school teams and players he had known: 'I started as a boy, watching Coach Cotton Harney's immortal teams at Larkin: they won three state championships. As some of you may remember, I got
L my big break as a sportswriter by a romantic piece I submitted to a Dallas newspaper about the five awesome linemen Coach Harney brought with him to Larkin. I called them the Five Oil Derricks, and the name caught on.'
1 He smiled, recalling that lucky shot: 'Three papers spoke to me
: about jobs, so I prepared a second article about my Five Derricks, because they awed me. They all seemed older than my pop, because eligibility rules were a little looser then. Well, my second article proved that when those five men enrolled as freshmen at
: ' Larkin, they'd already played a total of twenty-three years in high
■ school or beyond.
'Do you know what that means? Four years of high school in some place far distant for each man, with three of them having
; Dne year beyond that. The oldest man was married, had two
; :hildren and had played for an Oklahoma college. Now he had four more years with us. Ten years in all and still in high school.'
! ; 'I never read that story,' Rusk said, 'and as you know, my father
: .vas crazy about Larkin football.'
- 'There was good reason you didn't read it. Someone warned
j; |70ur father about my story before I finished it, and he came to me
■ l pne night: "Son, you're not going to print that pack of lies, are
you?" I showed him my documentation, and he brushed it aside: "Son, would you pee on your mother's grave? To befoul Texas football is the same thing." He grabbed my story and tore it up, my notes too. And next day the editor of the Larkin Defender called and said: "Mr. Rusk has recommended you highly for a job on our paper." I've never left.'
He smiled at Ransom Rusk, then said. 'Other sportswriters didn't have the same high regard for the welfare of the game. During the year of our second championship, maybe the best high school team Texas ever produced, a cynical writer on a Dallas newspaper did a famous column in which he wrote: "My All-Texas high school team for this year is the Larkin Fighting Antelopes, because each player on that team comes from a different town in Texas and is the state's best in his position." I never stooped to cheap shots like that.
'But certain fundamental facts must be remembered if you're searching for the true Texas character. The population of Larkin in t
hose days after the oil boom had retreated to its natural level, leaving just a little boost, thirty-six hundred. But when the Antelopes played at home in the golden years, forty-two hundred attended each game, and when they played at some nearby bitter rival like Ranger, Cisco, Breckenridge or jacksboro, nineteen hundred of our thirty-six hundred would travel to the other town.
it was mass mania. Nothing in life was bigger than Friday football, and when lights made it possible to play at night, even more people could attend and the field became a kind of cathedral under the stars. Now it was Friday Night Football, as grand an invention as man has made, with the entire community meeting for spiritual warmth.
'A storekeeper who wasn't a hundred percent behind the team, his business would go bust. A bank would have to close shop if its manager wasn't at every game, and putting up money on the side to pay for uniforms, and paying for training tables and other goodies. Every man in town had to root for the Antelopes, or else. And that still applies throughout this state.'
it sounds to me,' said Miss Cobb, 'like the birth of the macho image. A lot of grown men playing like boys and no women! allowed.'
'Ah, now there's where you make your great mistake, ma'am! Because the genius of Texas football was that early on, it realized it must also involve the girls. So in Larkin we started the cheer- ] leader tradition, and the drill team, and the rifle exhibition, and the baton twirlers, and the marchers in their fluffy uniforms. On a good Friday night now a big high school may have two hundred
boys doing something, what with the squad and the band, but it'll have three hundred pretty girls in one guise or another So girls I play almost as important a role as the boys. Otherwise, the spec-I tacle might have lost its grip on the public '
Like all Texas football coaches and sportswriters. Pepper aspired to be the perfect gentleman, and now he smiled at Miss Cobb: 'You were right on one thing, though, ma'am. Football does carry a strong macho image. One of the reasons why Texans distrust Mexicans, or even despise them at times, they can't play football. Quite pitiful, really. Put them on a horse, they can swagger. But the one game that matters, they can't play '
'Aren't you stressing the values rather strongly, Mr. Hatfield 7 '
'Not at all! Texans identify honest values quickly. They can't be fooled, not for long. That's why seventy-eight percent of our high ■ school administrators are ex-football coaches.'
'That may account for the sad condition of Texas education,' Miss Cobb said.
'Wait a minute! Back up! School boards hire football coaches to be their administrators because they know that anyone connected with football has his head screwed on right. He understands the important priorities, and he isn't going to be befuddled by poetry and algebra and all that. He knows that if he can get his students involved in a good football program, girls and boys alike, the other things will take care of themselves.'
Miss Cobb had a penetrating question: i read that last year Texas colleges graduated five hundred football coaches and only > two people qualified to teach calculus. Is that the balance you recommend?'
'For many Texas boys high school football will be the biggest, noblest thing they'll ever experience. Calculus teachers you can ? hire from those colleges in Massachusetts.'
He was especially ingenious in outlining the symbiotic relationship between oil and football. 'Never underestimate the importance of oil. That's where the extra money came from. Great teams like Breckenridge and Larkin and Ranger were fanatically supported by oilmen. Odessa Permian, too, in a way. You see, each stresses the big gamble. If you're in oil, you wildcat and lose everything. If you're that first Larkin team, you go up against Waco and lose eighty-three to nothing. You don't give a damn. You come back with another try. Oilmen and football heroes were made for each other.
'But there was another aspect, equally strong. An oil millionaire in a place like Larkin had damned little to spend his money on. No opera, no theater, no museums, no interest in books, and when
you've had one Cadillac you've had them all. What was left? The high school football team. You cannot imagine how possessive the oilmen of Ranger and Breckenridge and Larkin became over their football teams. Most of them hadn't gone to college, so they didn't become agitated over SMU or A&M. The high school team was all they had. And they supported it—boy, did they support it! I know high school teams right now that have a head coach and ten assistants. Yes, a coach for tight ends, one for wide ends. Two coaches for interior linemen, offensive and defensive. Quarterback, running backs, linebacker, defensive backs, a coach for each. Special-teams coach, kicking coach. The four top Texas high school teams could lick the bottom fifty percent of college teams up north.'
The highlight of his comments came toward the end of the afternoon, when he said, with his eyes half closed: 'I can see them now, those legions of immortal boys who got their lives started on the right track through Friday night football. They were enabled to go on to college, and some to big money in the pros, and there wasn't a hophead or a drunk or a bum among them: Sammy Baugh, Davey O'Brien, Big John Kimbrough, Doak Walker, Don Meredith, Kyle Rote, Earl Campbell. And add the two who were famed only in high school, they may have been the best of the bunch—Boody Johnson of Waco, and Kenny Hall, the Sugar Land Express.'
His eyes misted over. He was an old man now, but he could recall each critical game he had attended, each golden boy whose exploits he had described as if they had been fighting not on the football fields of Texas but at the gates of Troy or on the plains of Megiddo.
Thank you, Mr. Hatfield,' Miss Cobb said in closing. 'We, needed to be reminded of the values you represent. You see, I wasj sent north to school.'
'Ma'am, you missed the heart of Texas.'
MEXICO
THE TEXIAN EMPIRE
rejas 1722-1835
Incorporated into Texas finally
Claimed b Texas. 1836. but ceded to United States. 1850
Greer Count) claimed by Texas and Oklahoma.
awarded to latter by U S Supreme Court. 1906
I
N THE FOUR DECADES FOLLOWING THE LARKIN ANTELOPES
last football championship, 1928-1968, that little oil town witnessed many changes, as did the state. In World War II, Texas fighting men performed with customary valor: one native son, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was leading the Allied armies to victory in Europe while another, Chester W. Nimitz, was doing the same with the fleet in the Pacific; and still another, Ira Eaker, was sending his Eighth Air Force planes to devastate Nazi military production. One tough little Texas G.I., Audie Murphy, was so eager to get into combat that he lied about his age, and won so many medals that he leaned forward when he walked.
Equally important was the emergence of Texas politicians as powers in Washington, because previous Texans with leadership possibilities had usually seen Texas politics as more important than national. For example, John Reagan, Postmaster General of the Confederacy and one of the very greatest Texans, had served in the national Congress for many years and was a United States senator when an appointment to the Texas Railroad Commission opened in 1891. Without hesitation he surrendered his Senate seat to help regulate this important aspect of Texas life, apparently in the belief that what happened in Texas was what really mattered. Under the principles laid down by his prudent leadership, this commission became the arbiter not only of railroads so essential to the state's development, but eventually, also of trucks, utilities and particularly the oil business, including the transport in pipe lines of petroleum products to the rest of the country. Insofar as his career was concerned, Texas was more important than the nation.
This provincialism denied Texas the voice in national affairs to which it was entitled. But now a trio of ornery, capable, arm-twisting Democratic politicians came on the scene, to become three of the most capable public servants our nation has had. In 1931, Cactus Jack Garner became Speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington, and soon after, a powerful Vice-Presi-'dent. In 1940, Sam Rayburn becam
e one of the most effective Speakers of the House, a job he held, with two short breaks, till
his death in 1961. And tall, gregarious and able Lyndon Johnson became a congressman, later, majority leader of the Senate, then Vice-President and, finally, on 22 November 1963, in an airplane standing on Love Field in Dallas, the thirty-sixth President of the United States.
Coincident with these accomplishments in war and politics, Texas surged to the fore in another aspect of American life, which sometimes seemed to have equal importance. Motion pictures of striking originality and power began to depict life in Texas in such a compelling way that the grandeur and the power of the state had to be recognized. Audiences by the millions swarmed to see movies like Giant, The Alamo, and the various John Wayne cowboy epics, especially the excellent Red River. Other good westerns involved Texas in no specific way but did help keep alive the legend: Cimarron (1931), Stagecoach (1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and the film of his which Wayne preferred above all others, The Searchers (1956). Even in faraway Italy, the 'spaghetti western' created an alluring vision of the West, and Texas reaped the benefit. The state was seen as heroic, colorful and authentic. Its men were tall, its women beautiful, its Longhorns compelling. Even its Mexican villains displayed uniqueness, if not charm, and each year the legend grew.
Of course, there were disadvantages. Many thoughtful people in other parts of the nation began to resent this emphasis on Texas and saw the state as a haven for broken-down cowboys, rustlers and prairie misfits, men who treated Indians, Mexicans and women with contempt. Jokes about Texas braggadocio became popular, one of the most imaginative concerning the Connecticut river expert who was hired by Dallas to determine whether the Trinity River could be deepened so as to give the city shipping access to the sea. 'Very simple,' the engineer said. 'Dig a canal from Dallas to the Gulf, and if you characters can suck half as hard as you blow, you'll have a river here in no time.'
