It just seemed pretty apparent that some things were wrong and I don’t know that there was any particular incident or moment that made the decision for me.
The only thing that it could have been, I guess, was the people that I knew, the people that I had actually dealt with. Not in the sense of going out together socially, but you get to know people and you kind of have to figure out that these people are individuals.44
KENNEDY IN DALLAS
Bob was crossing class lines when he was twenty-one, something certainly not lost on his father, who understood Dallas’s stratified society. Dating back to the rise of the Klan in the 1920s, the Dallas elite constantly worried about what the unwashed masses might do. Builders and bankers like Tommy were at the top and controlled the city, and under them came, in order, working-class whites, poor whites, Mexican-Americans, and finally African-Americans. Tommy and Mary socialized at the Lakewood Country Club, but Bob spent his time in bowling alleys and enjoyed a camaraderie with working-class whites and upper-class blacks who shared his love for the game. This difference divided the two men.45
The starkest example of the division between Dallas’s elite and the working class was the election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960. He carried 45 percent of the working-class vote in Dallas, versus only 23 percent of the upper-class vote. The addition of Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson to the ticket did little to assuage fears among conservative Democrats that Kennedy was a civil rights–promoting socialist. In fact, Kennedy hurt Johnson’s reputation.46 Tommy, who bore a distinct resemblance to Johnson, got angry every time someone brought it up.47 In many ways, the 1960 presidential election marked the beginning of the end for Democrats in Texas.
The Dallas elite’s disgust for Kennedy was expressed in a full-page advertisement that the American Fact-Finding Committee bought in the Dallas Morning News on November 22, 1963, which proclaimed, “Welcome, Mr. Kennedy,” then went on to attack almost all of his policies as dangerous to the United States.48 Members of the John Birch Society distributed leaflets along Kennedy’s motorcade route that morning. Showing his face from the front and in profile, the leaflet declared him “Wanted for Treason.” In contrast, more than 250,000 working-class Dallasites enthusiastically welcomed Kennedy on that clear, cool fall morning. When Kennedy’s open-topped limousine passed through Dealey Plaza, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy and wounded Governor John Connally.
Outsiders considered Dallas’s leaders culpable in the assassination because they had so vociferously denounced Kennedy. Neiman-Marcus executive Warren Leslie blamed Dallas’s right-wing extremism on nouveau-riche Republican women. Yet the real right-wing ideologues in Dallas were oilmen H. J. Hunt and Clint Murchison, who were behind the American Fact-Finding Committee, and John Birch Society leader Gen. Edwin Walker.49
Moderate whites in Dallas recognized that change was inevitable and supported conservative African-Americans. The white business community backed Joe Lockridge for the Texas House of Representatives, and he became one of the first three African-Americans to serve in the legislature since Reconstruction, along with Houston’s Curtis Graves and Barbara Jordan, who won election to the state senate. In 1969, white elites backed George Allen, a conservative African-American who had served on the Committee of 14, in his successful bid for city councilman.
Bob wasn’t involved in politics, but if asked at the time, he would have considered himself conservative. Beth, on the other hand, was a liberal, and Bob says she slowly convinced him to take more progressive stances. But he was mostly concerned about bowling.
Harless Wade, the bowling reporter for the Dallas Morning News, began chronicling Bob’s successes and failures in city tournaments and often referred to him as a “rapidly-rising young star.”50 Bob qualified for the biggest amateur tournaments, such as the 1965 National All-Star in Philadelphia,51 but he maintained his amateur status to qualify for local tournaments that often paid winners very well.52 In 1965, he was a finalist in the Master’s and chosen for the Morning News’s All-Greater Dallas men’s team.53
Bob was driving back in March 1965 from a bowling tournament in Miami when the interstate highway in Alabama was abruptly shut down on one side and all the traffic was shifted onto one side of the divided highway. He saw thousands of marchers on the closed side of the road.
I saw Dr. King’s march from Selma to Montgomery in person. It was only driving along the highway, but … it was impressive seeing all those people.
You couldn’t avoid knowing what was going on and you would look at those cops beating people and turning fire hoses on them and the people [weren’t] doing anything except just trying to go from point A to point B. It just wasn’t right.54
A few months later, I was born in Dallas’s Baylor Hospital on July 18, 1965. Bob and Beth named me Christopher Lee, maintaining the family tradition of the eldest son bearing the name of the Confederacy’s greatest general.
Bob looks back on the mid-1960s as a golden age in Dallas’s bowling scene. Nationally ranked players lived and bowled regularly in Dallas and the alleys made solid profits. When the Morning News hosted the annual Dallas Bowling Awards Dinner on May 21, 1966, the newspaper named Bob to its six-member All-Star men’s team for the second year in a row.55 Bob wrote a column for a free weekly newspaper called the Bowling News. He wrote about tournaments, teams, and products, but he couldn’t write about what he really loved about bowling alleys—the people from all walks of life.
Most bowling alleys operated on the same schedule. Corporate leagues brought in the city’s businesspeople at 6:30 P.M. for corporate leagues, and at 8:30 P.M. the social leagues bowled. Late at night, the city’s seedier crowd arrived to gamble, if not on the lanes, then at the billiard tables or the pinball machines. One of the toughest places was the Cotton Bowling Palace, where the Dixie Mafia guys hung out.56
DESEGREGATION
Dallas had grown from an important Texas town to a nationally recognized city with a county population of 951,527 people. The Dallas Cowboys football team set up shop in 1960, and direct flights to Europe started from Love Field in 1962.
Yet Dallas remained a southern city. The mayor in 1960 was Robert L. Thornton, a former cotton picker, self-made millionaire, and former Klansman. Seven elementary schools in Dallas bore the names of Confederate heroes, and the Thomas Jefferson High School mascot was the rebel, the Confederate battle flag its emblem.57 Dallas talk radio was full of people spouting theories blaming the Soviet Union and the devil for stirring up African-Americans, and Bob remembered hearing a regular caller nicknamed “Granny Hate.” She called herself “Dixie Leber,” for the word rebel spelled backward, and she claimed to be the chief Ku Klux Klan recruiter in Dallas. Bob knew Granny Hate’s daughter from bowling, but she was polite enough not to discuss her views on race in the bowling alley.58
After four years of inaction by the Dallas school district, a federal judge in 1960 ordered board members to begin integrating one grade a year.59 Dallas school administrators and teachers proclaimed that integration would spark violence, particularly among underprivileged students of both races. The district hired a public-relations firm to produce a film warning Dallasites not to cause trouble, because school violence would harm their children and hurt Dallas’s reputation. Dallas police chief Jesse Curry promised that his force would go after those who tried to stir up trouble, warning that he already knew the likely suspects.
In the fall of 1961, police and school officials escorted eighteen African-American elementary pupils to eight white schools. Protestors hanged a dummy from the flagpole of one school, while police intercepted a nineteen-year-old protestor preparing to burn a cross at another. Despite such acts, Dallas took its first step toward school desegregation relatively peacefully.60
District Superintendent Warren T. White was in no hurry to do any more. Over the next three years, out of a population of 9,400 African-American students, he transferred only 113 blacks to previously all-white schools. The passage of the Ci
vil Rights Act of 1964 placed additional pressure on White by authorizing federal officials to cut off funds to segregated schools. In 1967, he reported that 67 out of 171 schools were integrated, but in most cases, only a handful of black students were attending predominately white schools. By May 1970, 113 out of 177 Dallas schools remained all-white institutions. As Dallas school officials stalled, white parents moved to the suburbs.61
Dallas was not the only district dragging its feet. In 1964, only 18,000 out of 325,000 African-American students statewide attended a formerly all-white school. This unimpressive achievement, though, put Texas at the top among former Confederate states. The white Texas State Teachers Association merged with the Colored Teachers State Association in 1965, and by 1967, nearly 47 percent of black students attended an integrated school.62
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that whites had to stop using cleverly drawn district boundaries and student choice to avoid meaningful integration. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare filed suit against all of the major districts in Texas, including Dallas, because they maintained schools that were “visible vestiges of the dual school structure.” Both sides engaged in a war of statistics. The Texas Education Agency in the spring of 1970 reported that 70 percent of black students attended an integrated school, while the HEW pointed out that only 35 percent of African-American students attended a predominately white school. In Dallas, 97 percent of African-American students still attended a predominately black school.63
Federal judges drafted desegregation plans and redrew school boundaries, pairing up black and white schools and closing others. In 1971, the Supreme Court declared busing a viable solution for ending unconstitutional segregation, and the NAACP and HEW filed a new suit against the Dallas school board, demanding a desegregation plan that used busing.64 That year, I started the first grade.
John Tower, the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction, had built his career by appealing to conservative Democrats who’d lost faith in their party. He immediately condemned the Court’s decision and vociferously opposed busing. Whites complained that riding the bus not only placed their children in danger of traffic accidents but that long bus rides resulted in increased drug use and immoral behavior. Blacks complained that their children would go to school outside their neighborhoods and spend the most time on the bus. As part of his southern strategy for reelection, President Richard Nixon came out against forced busing, and white Texans flocked to his party.
A NEW TOMLINSON HILL
After Albert Tomlinson died in 1955 with no heirs, his cousin John Peoples Tomlinson moved from Marlin to Tomlinson Hill and took over what was left of the farm. Known as “Uncle John,” he and his wife, Olga, were well liked by both the white and black communities. John liked Vincent Tomlinson and hired him as a farm manager and handyman.65 Early most mornings, Vincent walked a hundred yards to John’s house, where they shared breakfast and discussed what needed to be done that day. Neighbors often saw the two men riding together in a pickup before John went to Marlin for the day, where he managed a bank. He and Olga were first cousins and chose not to have children, so the Hill was the center of their lives.66
The black Tomlinsons continued to grow their own vegetables, raise hogs, and work on nearby farms. In the spring and fall, Vincent and his family traveled to plant and harvest cotton around the state, but he reserved one weekend every summer to use the Old Settler’s reunion grounds for a family reunion. He remained active in the church and the Masons, but his youngest sons were different. O.T. and J.K. preferred to go to Wood Street, listen to music, shoot dice, play pool, and hang out with their friends.67
O.T. was short and slight like his father, and he carried a chip on his shoulder. He never hesitated to say what he thought, but he also worked hard and could be generous to a fault. O.T. played baseball in high school and fought in underground boxing matches around Falls County. He kept a .410-gauge shotgun in his truck to hunt rabbits and squirrels for meat and raccoons for their pelts. O.T. and his friends on the Hill started a hunting tradition on Thanksgiving mornings, but they always returned home in time for dinner.68
O.T. turned twenty in 1955 and started dating Jewell Butler McClain, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a farm laborer from nearby Reagan.69 Jewell was married, but her husband was serving time in a California prison. She became pregnant with her first child by O.T., Linda, and moved into a house on the Hill with O.T. In 1957 they had their first son, Oliver Terry Tomlinson, Jr., whom they called Terry. They had another son in 1958, Ronald, and a third son, Charles, in 1960. The name on the children’s birth certificates was McClain, because Jewell and O.T. were not married, but the children grew up calling themselves Tomlinson. Some of the kids used the name McClain when they got their driver’s licenses, but Terry officially changed his name to his father’s. O.T. took a job constructing mobile homes with Centurion Homes in Waco, which paid him a decent wage.70
O.T. and his family lived in a small white wooden house on a sandy road around the corner from his parents. He often said the Hill was his favorite place on the planet. It offered quiet country living and he knew all of his neighbors, many of whom were family. He also loved that it bore his name. He felt a special responsibility to everyone who lived there, just as Vincent did.71
In the early 1960s, more than one hundred people lived on the Hill, and most worked on other people’s farms. The older families had built their wooden bungalows in the late 1940s, but after Uncle John sold individual lots in later years, newcomers built new brick houses well into the 1960s.72 The middle-class African-American village soon became known as Tomlinson Hill, and O.T.’s children grew up believing the village was named for their family and didn’t know about the slave plantation.
Jewell worked at Frank Smith’s chicken-processing plant in Waco, and O.T.’s mother, Julie, would care for the children during the day. O.T. and Jewell were both strong-willed and a little stubborn, and they often fought, upsetting Terry. One day, when he was four years old, Terry packed his things in a sack and walked one hundred yards up the street to his grandparents’ house and moved in. Terry lived there until he graduated from high school, but even though he slept at his grandma’s house, O.T. and Jewell saw him every day. The Hill was like a family compound, and it protected the family from the societal and racial problems afflicting Texas. Everyone looked out for one another, and no one was ever truly alone.73
SMALL-TOWN CIVIL RIGHTS
The Civil Rights movement didn’t reach Marlin until the late 1960s, when a few African-Americans staged a sit-in at the lunch counter in Houston’s Restaurant. J. C. Williams was working as a cook and described how Sheriff Pamplin convinced them to leave, but only after identifying the protesters’ parents, many of whom worked for the school district or the city.74 Their white bosses informed the protesters’ parents the next day that if their children mounted any more demonstrations, they’d lose their jobs. Pamplin took a harsh view of anyone who wanted to stir up trouble, white or black.75 He made it clear that neither the Ku Klux Klan nor the NAACP were welcome to protest in Falls County.76 The Dallas Morning News published a fawning profile of Pamplin and his thirty-two-year career as a lawman in 1966:
Pamplin was one of the original, most caustic critics of the new legal emphasis on the rights of defendants and suspects.
Says Pamplin, “It has completely broken down law enforcement. Any place you look you can see proof of that. Everybody’s ‘rights’ are getting well taken care of now except the law-abiding citizens’. What kind of a system is that?”
One of Pamplin’s favorite helpers is a shaggy 5-year-old German shepherd dog named Chief, trained by the sheriff to be both an excellent tracker and a guard. Chief loves his law work. He can follow a scent as good as most bloodhounds. If Pamplin posts him to guard the jail door it’s dangerous to get close by it, particularly from the inside.
The sheriff can bring in the worst of prisoners in a car, with only Chief’s aid. Pamplin put
s the two in the back seat and cautions the prisoner, “Now you just sit real quiet until we get to the jail and you’ll be okay. I sure wouldn’t make any sudden moves if I were you.” With Chief staring him intently in the eye, no prisoner needs a reminder.”77
Elsewhere in Texas, African-Americans were more active. Students from all-black Wiley and Bishop colleges staged protests in Marshall in the spring of 1960. Prairie View students protested in Hempstead in 1963, while the NAACP and the Congress for Racial Equality petitioned and protested segregation in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Protests continued against discrimination in small towns into the 1970s.78
Many African-Americans, though, voted with their feet by moving into the city, or leaving the South completely. In the twenty years from 1940 to 1960, the rural black population in Texas dropped by half, while the number of African-American farmers dropped from 52,751 to 15,041. The number of white farmers didn’t drop nearly as precipitously. During that period, white farmers added acreage, while African-American land ownership was a third of what it averaged in 1940. Only 3,138 black sharecroppers remained by 1960.79
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times they are not forgotten;
Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.
—Songwriter Dan Emmett, an Ohio native who sang in blackface about the virtues of slavery.
Bob’s best chance to join the Professional Bowling Association’s tour came in 1966. At his first PBA-sanctioned tournament, he bowled well enough in the opening matches to qualify for the national tournament, which was held in New Orleans. He and Beth agreed that if he won one thousand dollars, he would turn professional.
My first match was against Nelson Burton, Jr., and I won it. I lost every other game after that. I was just completely out of gas. And I don’t know whether it affected me or not—or whether it was a part of it—but I got a chiropractic workout that made me feel really good in between shifts. Whether this made me feel too relaxed or whether I was just out of gas or whether I just choked, I don’t know. I just didn’t have the courage to finish. I guess that’s what it was. I could get close, but I couldn’t win.1
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