The black community installed a bell on the Tomlinson Negro School to call children to school, parishioners to church, or to alert the entire community in case of an emergency. When someone needed help, or someone died, they usually sent a teenager to ring the bell. Vincent always responded when the alarm rang and organized whatever help was needed.54
If someone got sick, African-Americans could rarely afford a doctor, so they relied on home remedies or community healers. Traditionalists talked about malevolent spirits and used magic potions. Charles came down with typhoid when he was a child and missed his first two years of school as a result. When he cut his foot so deep that the blood spurted out with each beat of his heart, his mother immersed the wound in coal oil, a type of kerosene, to disinfect it, and then bandaged it herself.
At the Gravel Hill Negro Baptist Church, the congregation elected Vincent a deacon, and he spent much of his free time doing church work or attending Masonic meetings. Vincent helped organize tent revivals in the summer that brought together African-American Baptist preachers from across the county. Lizzie Mae said her father made all the children attend. “It would be about two or three weeks.… We’d all go to church at night and get out about ten, but we had to go to church because my dad was the deacon and we went. I went to church many days in a wagon, with my legs hanging off the wagon. Sitting back in a wagon, you thought you was in a Cadillac.”55
The Tomlinsons and another family, the Whites, were the most prosperous African-Americans on the Hill. Vincent bought a used Model-T Ford, which he drove to Marlin on Sunday mornings to pick up the church’s preacher. After the service, the minister followed Vincent home for a Sunday dinner of fried chicken, fresh-baked rolls, beets, and collard greens. During the week, when Lizzie Mae and her friends started attending high school, they piled into the Whites’ Hudson for the daily trip to Marlin:
They called the Whites and the Tomlinsons big shots. We were well brought up and eating. We didn’t want for things. I tell you, we had a beautiful mother and father.
We weren’t real poor. I didn’t think so. I thought we were up there.
They were nice families, two families, Tomlinson and the Whites. They would can their food. We did corn, peas, all that.… We had everything that we should have. Sometimes it was hard, just like it is now. There are hard times and good times and everything, but I had the beautiful life, best, I thought, in the world.56
Christmas was a quiet time for farmers. Lizzie and the other children spent those cold months waiting for Santa Claus to bring oranges and fresh apples, a rare treat in those days. Julie would cook six or seven cakes.57
At Easter, all of the families wore their best clothes, and women put on special bonnets. Church ladies brought food for a picnic and the one hundred African-American families living on Tomlinson Hill and in China Grove shared the feast. The community also celebrated Juneteenth, gathering at the Old Settlers and Confederate Veterans’ reunion grounds for a barbecue. Albert often made a brief appearance to wish his family’s former slaves well. For the African-Americans in Falls County, Juneteenth was more important than July 4.58
When the crop came in between September and October, Albert collected the cotton as it was picked and sold it in Marlin. Albert would decide how much money to keep to pay off Vincent’s debts, then give Vincent whatever was left over. Albert didn’t allow Vincent to keep his own records; Vincent had to take whatever Albert gave him. Vincent grumbled that he didn’t get all that he deserved, but he kept working for Albert.59 Not all African-Americans complied with the practice.
Milo Travis, the freedman who had rejected the Tomlinson name, owned his own land and valued his independence. His granddaughter, Roberta, moved back to Tomlinson Hill in 1930 after working in the Dallas area and marrying Hezekiah Taylor. They brought her two children and settled next to Milo and his wife, Martha. One of those children, Pinkie Taylor Price, described their life on the Hill in the 1930s:
We used to go and pick berries for Albert [Tomlinson] and Willie S. Hayward. And those people would have us picking. If you know anything about blackberries, those vines are full of stickers. But you had to get there and pick them. You didn’t have no gloves, and pick a gallon of berries for five cents. And it was quite a few children in my family, and we would go there and we would try and pick as many as we could. And we would cook berries and we would pick more than twenty gallons, and the man would cheat us out of it. He didn’t want you to make no dollar.
He’s say you didn’t pick too many yourself. I tried to argue with him; sometimes you’d get your money; sometimes you wouldn’t. You didn’t have no “I’m going to court.”60
Pinkie described what happened when Hezekiah tried to negotiate a different kind of sharecropping arrangement with one of the Stallworths:
My father went to Stallworth and asked him for some land, and he was going to raise his crop like that.
[Stallworth] told him, “Say now, you just go down to the [store], or whoever and all this, and you just get what you want for your people. You can get all the groceries you want, and you go to town and buy some [clothes] and we’ll keep all the credit here.”
[My father] said, “No, what I want you to do, let me have the money and I’ll go to the man and take up the groceries and everything. And then at the fall of the year, I owe you so much money and I pay you what I owe you.”
[Stallworth] said, “No, I tell him. Let me go and take it up.”
My father said, “I got a name just like you. I can use my own name.”
[Stallworth] said, “I’m not going to do that.”
My father said, “Well then, I’m not gonna work for you.”
He didn’t work for Stallworth. Stallworth told Albert Tomlinson, and he absolutely told whoever owned enough land what happened. They got together and said, “Don’t let Hezekiah have nothing, because he’s smart.”61
When none of the whites in western Falls County would rent him land, Hezekiah considered asking for work by the day, but they refused to hire him. Hezekiah knew he could find work if he went to West Texas, where farmers paid cash, but he didn’t want to leave his family.
A few months after his falling-out with the white planters, Hezekiah joined a Works Progress Administration road crew a few miles away. His family remained in the house they rented in China Grove, and Roberta and the children cultivated the family’s vegetable garden, tended to the hogs, and worked on the white farms. But the Taylors never again relied on tenant farming.62
ABANDONING THE FIELDS
Vincent accommodated Albert and became the informal mayor of Cedar Valley and Gravel Hill, negotiating with white landowners on behalf of the others.63 Vincent’s house was a little larger than most and was raised off the ground, a desirable feature that kept snakes from getting in. A few hundred yards down the road was John White’s house. No one was surprised when John’s son Winston started dating Lizzie. She dropped out of Booker T. Washington High School in the eleventh grade to marry him in 1937. Lizzie moved in with the Whites and could see her parents’ house across the cotton field. Lizzie and Winston lived with his parents for two years before they saved enough money for their own house.64
Lizzie gave birth to her first two children on Tomlinson Hill in 1940 and 1942. Then her mother-in-law moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, and sent word there was indoor work available. Winston and Lizzie followed. They had visited the beach town before, and Lizzie was excited to get away from village life and cotton picking. In the fall, Lizzie’s aunts, uncles, and brothers stayed at her house on the coast, hiring on with any farmer who needed pickers that day. Lizzie’s eldest daughter, who had never worked in the fields, decided one year she would make some money and go with her relatives. “She went on out there, and, well, my cousin brought her back home. She said she didn’t do nothing but sit up under the wagon and drink water. She wasn’t used to no picking no cotton. She didn’t want to go back anymore.”65 None of Lizzie’s children ever worked the cotton fields again.
They went to city schools, worked city jobs, and several went to college. They were the first of the black Tomlinsons to abandon the cotton fields since their ancestors had landed as slaves in the United States.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Nobody can play music that beautifully and not be a good person, and Miles could. The music really opened up a world for me that I hadn’t realized I was missing.
—Bob Tomlinson
In the 1920s, Edgar Flippen and Hugh Prather’s firm was becoming Dallas’ premier builder and seller of residential and commercial real estate, with my grandfather Tommy Tomlinson as one of their lead engineers. These weren’t tract homes; buyers purchased plots and hired builders to construct custom homes. Flippen-Prather built hundreds of them, sometimes selling the land, often just connecting buyers with sellers. Tommy’s role was prominent enough for Flippen-Prather to include his name on advertisements in the Dallas Morning News.1
Wealthy housewives living in the company’s Highland Park development often complained in 1928 about fighting traffic to go shopping in downtown Dallas. American shops at the time generally occupied individual buildings along major streets, but Flippen-Prather wanted to build something different closer to their growing residential neighborhood. They traveled to Spain, visiting Barcelona and Seville for inspiration.2
Flippen-Prather, with Tommy as the chief engineer, spent the next three years transforming ten acres of north Dallas pastureland into Highland Park Village, a Spanish Revival town square, designed by architects Marion Fresenius Fooshee and James B. Cheek. To accommodate cars, all of the stores faced inward toward a parking lot. Flippen-Prather retained ownership of the property and rented out 200,000 square feet of floor space to all kinds of merchants. They constructed what the National Register of Historic Places calls “a pivotal point in the evolution of the shopping center as distinctive building type in 20th century American architecture.”3
Having started as a trading post, Dallas was the natural place to give birth to the American mall. The city was home to some of the earliest experiments in national department stores, including Neiman-Marcus and Sanger-Harris, and many of the city’s merchants rented space at Highland Park Village. The nomination of the village to the National Register of Historic Places reads:
Thus the complex provides an excellent representation of the role of the shopping center in facilitating the decentralization of the downtown commercial core of cities across the United States. In this particular case, the Highland Park Shopping Village contributed to the decentralization of downtown Dallas and the northern expansion of commercial and residential development that continued into the late twentieth century in Dallas.4
Tommy, meanwhile, was still single and getting older. He attended the First Baptist Church’s mixers and bridge parties and was an excellent golfer. He traveled to Paris, Texas, in 1928 to attend the wedding of his college friend and star Texas A&M quarterback Robert Berry. One of Tommy’s golfing buddies was Dennis C. Chapin, a junior executive at the Sun Oil Company, and Dennis’s wife, Margaret, was part of Dallas’ high society. The Chapins introduced Tommy to Mary Frances Fretz, who also enjoyed golf and competed in tournaments at the Lakewood Country Club, the same club where Tommy played.
Mary’s grandfather had arrived in Dallas from Switzerland in December 1870. Jacob Fretz and his son Emil opened one of the first barbershops when Dallas was, according to Emil, “a collection of sorry shacks on a sandy foundation around the courthouse square.” He built his shop on Lamar Street, between Main and Elm, where the Bank of America Plaza stands now.5 Emil took advantage of those early days to purchase downtown real estate and build his business into E. A. Fretz and Company, a statewide distributor of barber and beauty supplies, which became Revlon’s exclusive agent in the state.6 Emil was a founding member of the Dallas Commercial Club, which became the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.
Emil led the development of the city’s parks and was known in his time as “the father of Dallas parks and recreation.”7 When the Dallas Zoo opened, Mary was pictured on the front page of the Dallas Morning News holding a baby cheetah. A city park was renamed in Emil’s honor.
Growing up, Mary enjoyed the best that Dallas had to offer, attending the private Ursuline Academy, an all-girl’s Catholic school, and graduating in 1928 from Saint Mary’s School for Girls, an Episcopal high school. She loved to play the piano and started a citywide pianist’s club in 1931.8 When she and Tommy started dating, young couples watched movies at the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff and the Majestic Theater downtown, where Mary had held her graduation party just a few years before.
The Fretz family announced that Mary and Tommy were engaged at a tea party on April 23, 1933. Mary’s house was decorated with bluebonnets and pink rosebuds, the colors she’d chosen for her wedding. She was surrounded by her friends, and Tommy’s sister Ruth drove up from San Antonio. They set the wedding for June 8, at the chapel on the St. Mary’s campus.9 Over the next six weeks, the Morning News reported that the daughters of the Dallas elite organized six wedding parties for the couple, including one hosted by the Chapins.
George Rodgers Wood, the dean of St. Mary’s College, performed Mary and Tommy’s wedding ceremony at noon at an altar decorated with lilies and palms. Mary wore a white French crepe suit trimmed with white fox fur and handmade lace. Tommy’s sister Ruth was her maid of honor, and Mary’s brother Emil Fretz, Jr., was Tommy’s best man. R. E. L. and Bettie Tomlinson, along with some Stallworth cousins, took the train from Marlin to attend the wedding. The Fretzs hosted a reception at their home with a ring-shaped wedding cake. The young couple’s honeymoon took them to the world’s fair in Chicago, where nightclubs on the Midway featured fan dancer Sally Rand and future singing stars Judy Garland and the Andrews Sisters. From there, they traveled to Canada.10
WILDFLOWERS ALONG THE FALLS
Mary had a special love for flowers, including bluebonnets, the state’s official flower, which grow wild in the spring and carpet Central and East Texas meadows. They grow particularly well in Falls County cow pastures, and in April 1937, Marlin organized the first Bluebonnet Festival for amateur photographers. The festival was headquartered at the Falls Hotel, where organizers signed up photographers and assigned them a young woman to serve as a model, usually dressed as a southern belle. At the end of the competition, judges gave awards for the best photos in a dozen categories and national photo magazines published the winners.11 Tommy was interested in photography and Mary loved the flowers, so they often made the drive to his hometown for the festival.12
Mary continued to participate in Dallas society events and regularly scored near the top in women’s golf tournaments at Lakewood Country Club.13 Tommy started his own general contracting business, often working for Flippen-Prather. Dallas County’s population reached 398,564 people by 1940 and showed no signs of slowing down. Tommy built homes across north Dallas and, together with architects and real estate agents, advertised them in the Morning News. He built a home sponsored by House & Garden magazine in 1940 in a promotion that was unusual for its time. Flippen-Prather built the property and the Titche-Goettinger department store furnished it, calling it a “Wishmaker’s House.” The “revolutionary development” they offered was the chance “to be your own decorator”: “Wishmaker is a wide assortment of everything to furnish your home. More than 1,600 individual items—so skillfully coordinated in color and design—that no matter how you may ensemble them, the result is absolutely perfect. You simply cannot make a mistake! Never before has this been possible in home furnishings. It is truly amazing.”14
Mary and Tommy wanted to have children, but had trouble conceiving. In October 1941, when Tommy was forty and Mary thirty-three, they adopted a blond baby boy born in Fort Worth, whom they named Robert Lee Tomlinson, nicknamed “Bob.”
ANOTHER WAR
A few months before Bob was born, the U.S. government bought 116 farms and ranches just west of Texarkana, on the Arkansas border, to build an amm
unition factory and storage facility. The situation was worsening in Europe, so much so that a year earlier, Congress had required young men to register for a possible draft. Tommy won a bid to help construct the Red River Ordnance Depot, one of the biggest projects of his career. He spent a great deal of his time after adopting Bob at the fifty-square-mile site, which grew over the next year into one of the largest arms depots in the United States.15 Matériel traveled by barge down the Red River to New Orleans, where the U.S. government could ship them anywhere in the world.
Marlinites kept close tabs on international affairs, since Tom Connally, their hometown political hero, was chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. He made regular visits and often spoke about global affairs. Americans knew trouble was brewing in October 1941 when Connally moved to overturn the nation’s Neutrality Law. Debate ended on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war.16
The onset of war came as J. M. Kennedy, who had started the Marlin Democrat in 1890, was honored as one of the state’s most respected editors and publishers. After fifty-two years in the business, he had earned the title “Dean of Texas Journalists.” Kennedy had crusaded against lynching when most citizens considered it swift and simple justice. He’d opposed the Klan when almost 50 percent of eligible Texan men paid membership dues. His fellow Marlinites had elected Kennedy mayor three times and state representative once. He worked at the Democrat’s office, and never missed an issue until March 1942, when he fell ill and checked into the hospital. Four weeks later, he was dead at age seventy-three.17
R.E.L. had recently turned eighty and was senile when the war started. Tommy and his sister Ruth had planned a big celebration for their parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary on January 22, 1942, but after the declaration of war, they scaled it back to a family reunion at the house on Fortune Street.18 The following January, R.E.L. passed away at Marlin’s Torbett Clinic.19
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