Generations and Other True Stories
Page 21
Except for an annual five hundred dollar grant from the Terry County Commissioners Court, the fair is self-supporting. “It doesn’t hurt that the staff sergeant in charge of this building happened to go to high school with my son,” Mr. Dellinger says.
Outside, the antique tractor pull—an event added to the fair just last year—is beginning. One by one, the old tractors—some of them nearly sixty years old, many as beautifully restored as the old Fords and Chevys in the parade—are hitched to a weighted sled. As the tractor pulls the sled, the huge weight slowly shifts forward, making the sled harder and harder to pull until the tractor can go no farther. The tractor in each class that pulls the sled farthest is the winner. The audience is almost entirely men and teen-age boys, clad in gimme caps and jeans, admiring the old machines as some men admire fine horses.
On the other side of the armory, at the pet show, the crowd is smaller, almost entirely women and small children.
“You never know how many pets will show up,” says Edreann Jones, one of the fair volunteers. “Sometimes we only have two. We had a dog and a turkey one year.”
This year, five dogs and a goat are entered. Every one is awarded a blue ribbon.
Peanut, the goat, wins “most original pet”; Princess, a Chihuahua, is “shiniest pet”; Coco, a scruffy puppy with “mutt” written all over him, wins “friendliest pet”; Noel, a toy dachshund, is “longest pet”; Daisy and Perky, toy poodles, are “fluffiest” and “curliest” pets respectively.
The Fowler children—Stephanie, Louis, and Jordan—smother Coco with hugs. Coco, as the “friendliest” pet should, turns into one big wag from nose to tail.
“He’s two months old,” says Leslie, the Fowler mother. “We got him from the SPCA. He’s going to be a fine dog.”
As the afternoon shadows lengthen, kids get cranky, mothers herd them home for naps, crafts exhibitors start packing their unsold wares, food booths run out of things. The Harvest Festival is winding down. But one last duty remains: The queen must be crowned.
Since April, when the civic clubs named them candidates, the five girls have looked forward to this moment. They’ve performed in a talent show. They’ve helped build, then ridden on, their floats. They and their families and sponsors have sold tickets relentlessly.
Now they’ve marched to the stage dressed in beautiful gowns and new hairdos, escorted by bathed and curried boyfriends. And the winner is…
Cara Burran, sponsored by the Noon Lions.
Miss Burran puts hands to face in the traditional I-can’t-believe-it’s-me way. Rodney Keeton places the crown on her head. Snapshot cameras flash. Camcorders turn. The other contestants continue smiling, some through tears.
“She worked so hard,” says Gail Burran, the queen’s mother. “The club worked so hard. We worked on the float daily for a month. The whole town pulled together. That’s how Brownfield is.”
October 1994
From time immemorial, people have believed that water can cure whatever ails you—if it smells and tastes foul enough and deals in a purgative way with your bowels. In recent times, the regulations of the Federal Food and Drug Administration have dampened the enthusiasm of this belief in this country, but it still has its adherents.
In the past, Texas was blessed with a number of mineral water health spas, but none other as magnificent as Mineral Wells, which now stands as a monument to a wacky time in America’s medical history.
Crazy Water Days
This is the story as they still tell it around Mineral Wells:
It all started in 1877, when James Lynch sold his farm near Denison, hitched a team of oxen to his wagon, and headed west with his wife, Armanda, their nine kids, and fifty head of livestock. They were in search of a higher and drier clime because the whole family, the story goes, was feeling poorly. Tired, listless, feverish. Kind of malarial, you know. No spizerinctum at all. Armanda’s rheumatism had been acting up something fierce. Sometimes she couldn’t raise her hands to her head. And James was nigh as rheumatic as Armanda, stiff and creaky even for a man of his age, which was fifty, and way too skinny.
Leaving behind the dank, heavy air of the Red River bottoms seemed the thing to do. Go west to some unknown spot where the air was drier, where a body’s joints could function with greater ease and the kids could grow up strong.
They wandered out beyond the Brazos River with no apparent destination in mind, turned back eastward when they heard rumors of Comanche raiders, had one ox collapse and die after a rough recrossing of the Brazos, had the other ox get struck by lightning while Mr. Lynch and his boys were skinning the first one, and wound up in a pretty little valley in the hills of Palo Pinto County on Christmas Eve.
They built a fire, cooked their Yuletide dinner, and decided they liked the place. The ground looked fertile. There was plenty of wood about. The scenery was nice. Besides, the rigors of their journey were debilitating the ailing Armanda and the remaining oxen. So for $240, Mr. Lynch bought eighty acres from the Franco-Texan Land Co., which owned a big swatch of that part of Texas, and settled down.
Trouble was, the Lynch place didn’t have any water on it. Mr. Lynch and his boys dug down forty-one feet and still didn’t find any, so they had to haul water from the Brazos, four miles away.
Then in July of 1880, a fellow named Johnny Adams was traveling through the country with a well-drilling outfit. Mr. Lynch traded him a yoke of oxen to drill a well. One of the Lynch boys, Charley, who was about eighteen at the time, claimed many years later that he was the first to draw a bucket of water from it.
“It tasted funny and everybody was afraid to drink much of it, because they thought it might be poison,” Charley would tell a historian. “But after sampling, we found it did not harm us. Mother was suffering from rheumatism, and after drinking the water for some time she was not bothered with it anymore.”
The Lynch children, following their mother’s example, drank the water and perked up. And father James, reluctant at first, finally joined in the imbibitions, got rid of his rheumatism, and started putting on weight.
As news of the rejuvenated Lynch family spread across the countryside, neighbors began arriving to try the water for their own ailments. Within a month, strangers were showing up, too, and were more than willing to pay the nickel a quart that Mr. Lynch now was charging for the water.
“There are several hundred people there for the benefit of their health,” J.H. Baker of Palo Pinto wrote in his diary a few weeks after Charley raised the first bucket. Mr. Baker had sent his own wife and children to the well. In February 1881, they were still there, living in a tent, apparently growing healthier by the day. During one of his periodic visits with them Mr. Baker wrote, “It seems that the waters here are performing wonderful cures of cancer, neuralgia, nervousness, rheumatism, and other various ills that the human flesh is heir to.”
Soon a town was growing up. James Lynch had taken to calling himself “Judge” and would be its first mayor. The town would acquire a name: Mineral Wells.
“Selling water! Whoa! What a business it was!” says Ron Walker, the present owner of the Crazy Well and the Crazy Hotel in the city that embraces the word “crazy” with pride.
Uncle Billy Wiggins was the one who drilled the Crazy Well at what’s now the corner of First avenue and Fourth street. That was in 1881. He was among the first of the entrepreneurs who flocked to Mineral Wells after the Lynches and bought land and drilled, hoping to strike miracle water. Uncle Billy did.
How his well got its name depends on whom you ask. The simplest version says a woman suffering with a “nervous breakdown” came to the well. She hung around for weeks, imbibing copious amounts of the elixir, resting under the shade trees. The pupils at the nearby school took to calling her the “crazy woman,” and when she finally departed, apparently whole and healthy again, Uncle Billy’s well became known as the “Crazy Woman Well,” and then simply as the “Crazy Well.” It’s the well that made Mineral Wells worldwide famous.
The “crazy woman” might have been “cured” by the substantial amount of lithium contained in the water of the Crazy Well. The chemical, which was found in several but not all the one hundred or so wells that eventually were drilled in Mineral Wells, is used even today to regulate the moods of manic-depressive patients.
Hundreds others who came to Mineral Wells in a sickly condition testified that they were cured of cancer, rheumatism, arthritis, neuritis, addictions to alcohol and cocaine and morphine, high and low blood pressure, goiter, St. Vitus’ dance, gout, diabetes, Bright’s disease, female complaints, various stomach disorders, dropsy, malaria, insomnia, and any number of other ailments, simply by drinking the water and bathing in it for periods of weeks or months. And, in that prescientific age of medicine, the doctors who sent their patients to “take the waters” were equally lavish in their praise.
There was no scientific evidence that the chemicals most commonly found in the water—calcium, magnesium, and sulfates in the form of Glauber’s and Epsom salts—were capable of working such wonders. But there’s no denying that the Crazy Water, as it came to be called, and its competitor brands from other wells worked powerfully well as diuretics and laxatives.
An early ad for the Crazy Water Pavilion hawks various strengths of the stuff ranging from No. 1, the mildest, to No. 4, the most potent. Near the pavilion where the waters were served up to the puny stood a staircase of some one thousand wooden steps leading to the top of a hill. Many of the patients, after drinking a few glasses, would climb the stairs for their exercise.
The locals still swear that spectators could tell whether a patient had indulged in No. 1, 2, 3, or 4 water by noting how far up the stairway he got before having to turn around and run back down.
The pavilions—gazebo-like affairs built around the wells—became centers of social life as well as treatment centers. Chairs and tables were provided, so the patients could drink and visit in comfort. Sometimes they played dominoes or checkers or cards. The fancier pavilions even offered orchestra music and dancing. Bath houses, hotels, and rooming houses grew up around them.
By the 1910s and ‘20s, the socializing had become almost as important as the therapeutics, and folks were making a good living figuring out things for the patients to do between their drinking and bathing and restroom sessions. When a rich widower rancher wanted to meet a lonely widow, he was likely to come to Mineral Wells, for it was easy to meet people and strike up courtships there.
Widows knew this, too.
Those couples who were only moderately sickly could rent donkeys and ride them about the Palo Pinto hills and loll in romantic nooks among the rocks and trees. The less hearty or more sedate could ride a streetcar to Lake Pinto or Elmhurst Park for boating and picnicking. The little town of some 4,000 or 5,000 people was attracting 100,000 to 150,000 visitors a year, and most of them were staying a few weeks or several months at a time.
In 1925 a fire destroyed the Crazy Hotel, Mineral Wells’ most famous landmark, dealing the town a discouraging blow. But a year later, Dallas financier Carr P. Collins—a fervent believer in Crazy Water’s curative powers—and his brother Hal bought the well and the burned-out hotel and began construction of a new, million-dollar, two hundred-room, fireproof Crazy with a beautiful roof garden for dancing, a huge bath house and massage parlor in the basement, and a drinking pavilion featuring a row of doctors’ offices and a long, elaborate, Moorish-looking bar at which patients could order a tall glass of No. 1, 2, 3, or 4.
“The doctors would prescribe the water,” says Ron Walker. “They’d say, ‘Take twelve twelve-ounce glasses of No. 3 a day’ It was a helluva deal. They were all in on selling the hype—the doctors, the Collins brothers, everybody.”
For sufferers who were too far away to seek relief at the Crazy Hotel, or couldn’t afford the trip, the Collins brothers had a factory that evaporated Crazy Water and packaged the mineral residue. Crazy Water Crystals were purveyed over drugstore counters throughout the country and several foreign realms, so that the puny could mix a spoonful of the crystals into a glass of ordinary water at home and enjoy the same blessed result as those who were bellying up to the Crazy’s water bar.
“I heard that even back during the Depression the Collins Brothers were doing eleven million dollars in business a year from the hotel, the bath house and selling the water and the crystals,” Mr. Walker says. “Eleven million dollars a year during the Depression!”
By the time the new Crazy opened in 1927, another, even larger hotel was under construction only a couple of blocks away. And it would be T.B. Baker, owner of the Baker Hotel in Dallas, the Gunter and the St. Anthony in San Antonio, and several other of Texas’ finest hostelries, who would usher little Mineral Wells into its truly Golden Age.
Charles Pool is sitting on a counter stool at Murray’s Grill, which he owns, looking through the plate-glass window at the Baker Hotel across the street. “People came from all over the world,” he says. “Some of them would stay six, eight months, a year at a time, drinking that mineral water, taking those baths and massages. They said it really got them back on their feet. They said they would limp in and walk out.”
Mr. Pool went to work at the Baker in 1949, when he was fifteen. He started as a hall boy, or janitor, then was promoted to bus boy, then waiter, then bartender, then cook. When he quit in 1970 he was manager of the hotel’s food department.
“It has 450 rooms,” he says, “but you’d have to make reservations six weeks ahead of time to get in. Once you were in there, you never had to leave. Anything you wanted was right there in that hotel.”
The Baker, fourteen stories and almost as wide as it is high, looms over Mineral Wells like a cathedral over a European village. Even now that the population has grown to some fifteen thousand, it’s still the town’s dominant landmark, and in its heyday was the center of the way of life that gave Mineral Wells its origin and reason for being.
The hotel opened in 1929, two weeks after the Black Friday crash of the stock market drove the country into the Great Depression. But while most of the country was suffering, Mineral Wells was enjoying not only prosperity, but glamour.
The Collins brothers set up a radio station in the lobby of the Crazy and broadcast live music and comedy daily over the Texas Quality Network and weekly over the nationwide NBC hookup, hawking their Crazy Water Crystals and making the whole nation aware of Mineral Wells and its amazing water.
“The Baker packaged its own brand of water crystals, called Pronto-Lax. It was powerful stuff,” says Vernon Daniels, who worked at the Baker from 1935 until 1962 and was its general manager for the last ten years of his stay. “But we didn’t get into shipping it all over the United States as the Crazy did. We didn’t want to sell the water to people in other places. We wanted them to come to the Baker and drink it.”
Well, come they did. The Baker quickly became an “in” spot for the rich and famous to see and be seen in. “The leading doctors were all in the Baker Hotel,” Mr. Daniels says, “and they had a great clientele from all over the United States. People would come to the Baker, mostly on the recommendation of their doctors back home, and they all would stay at least a week—some for several weeks at a time—and would drink the water. We had it flowing through a fountain in the lobby, and they could have all they wanted, and they would go up to the bath department on the second floor every day for their baths and massages.”
Will Rogers was a frequent visitor to the Baker. Tom Mix signed its register, too, and Clark Gable, Marlene Dietric
h, Jack Dempsey, Helen Keller, Roy Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Gen. John J. Pershing, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s son Elliot, Pres. Harry Truman’s vice president, Alben Barkley, Sam Goldwyn, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Minnie Pearl, Judy Garland, Joan Blondell, Harpo Marx, Our Gang’s Spanky McFarland, and even the Three Stooges. Charles Pool remembers serving breakfast to Wild Bill Elliott, the cowboy star, every morning. “He had a ranch out west of town here,” Mr. Pool says, “but he lived at the hotel.”
Most of the celebrities came by train from Hollywood and New York. “We picked them up at Millsap, nine miles from here,” says Mr. Daniels. “That was our railroad station. We would send a car and drive them to the hotel. They were very ordinary people. So down-to-earth. They liked to sit around and talk, and they just mingled with the other guests.”
The Baker had a social hostess who greeted them as they arrived. She would ask if they liked to play bridge or other card games, and would arrange for like-minded people to get together. There was bingo every night on the West Terrace, dancing in the ballroom, sunbathing in the garden and swimming in the large outdoor pool. The locals say the Baker was the second hotel in the United States to have a swimming pool.
“But people stayed for long periods of time,” says Ninfa Daniels, Vernon’s wife. “In a little town like Mineral Wells, where there’s really nothing going on—we had one movie theater and that was it—what in the world did they do with themselves? But they never complained. And of course a lot of their time was taken up with their massages, their baths, their facials. And they loved sitting on the veranda. I can still see them, in their rocking chairs.”
For twenty-five years, Jack Amlung and his Orchestra—which had been hired away from the Crazy—played in the lobby and ballroom and, later, in the hotel’s swanky Brazos Club. Sometimes entertainers would be hired from outside as well. Some, like Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, already were famous. Others soon would be. A young accordion player named Lawrence Welk, “whose English was really atrocious,” says Mrs. Daniels, played the Baker when he was starting out. So did a young North Texas State College student named Pat Boone and a young dancer from Weatherford named Mary Martin.