The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  “Our problem is that we’ve isolated ourselves. We’ve segregated ourselves out here on the reservation. We need to integrate, educate ourselves and find out about all these new technologies,” he said. “But a lot of people say we would lose our customs and traditions if we did that. When I talk about these things, people think I’m nuts.”

  Among those who want to stay clear of the white man’s way is Alex White Plume, a member of the tribe’s executive committee, who called Mr. Mickelson’s Year of Reconciliation “just plain silly.”

  “For 100 years the whites tried to terminate our tribes,” he said. “They tried to assimilate us into mainstream society. But at the same time, they wouldn’t allow us into their society because of racism…so we had to come back here and stay with our own people. As a result of that, our language has survived and our religion has survived. Our culture is coming back in leaps and bounds now.”

  Mr. White Plume said he was “on the road to assimilation” until AIM occupied Wounded Knee in 1973.

  “When I was a kid and I went to see a John Wayne movie with other Indian kids, we cheered for John Wayne, against the Indians,” he said. “But the occupation of Wounded Knee changed all that. The young people are proud to be Indian now.”

  Mr. White Plume suspects that the Year of Reconciliation is a scheme to trick the Indian tribes into giving up their sovereignty and their fight to regain ownership of the Black Hills.

  If there is to be reconciliation between the races, he said, it must be done on the Indians’ terms, not those of white society, and not the governor’s. “If the governor wants to reconcile with the tribes, he’s got to go all the way, not just part of the way. There have to be apologies made for all the massacres that were done to us, for all the awful things that were done to us over the last 100 years because of racism,” he said.

  But, Mr. Mickelson said, it is not in his power to “go all the way.” Many of the problems and disputes that the Indians want solved—ownership of the Black Hills, hunting and fishing rights, gambling on reservations—are the federal government’s responsibilities.

  “I can’t change the federal law,” he said. “I can’t solve problems that Congress is too gutless to deal with. But I can be an advocate for economic development. I can be an advocate for education. I can be an advocate for health care. And I can do what I can to change attitudes.

  “I didn’t grow up on or near an Indian reservation,” he said. “And I came to this job fully believing…that I could solve all these problems in four months. I was totally naive. I didn’t realize what a century of distrust had done. But we can start trying to put things right, and we ought to do it together.”

  July 1990

  OLD FRIENDS

  How many high school classes would attempt a 50th anniversary reunion? But the North Dallas High School Class of 1941 - the last class to graduate before World War II changed the world -always has considered itself special. After hanging around with its members all weekend, I did, too. I had as much fun as they did, listening to their memories of the way they were.

  ARROW SHIRTS WERE ON SALE AT SANGER BROS, FOR $2 APIECE. SIRLOIN steak was 27 cents a pound at Safeway. Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell were starring in Blood and Sand at the Majestic and William Powell and Myrna Loy in Love Crazy at the Palace. The Dallas Morning News was promoting an upcoming series by Ernest Hemingway, who was “hobnobbing with Chinese, Japs, Britons, Russians…getting inside information on the ticklish Oriental situation.” Royal Air Force fliers were training at Love Field.

  Elsewhere, German bombs were falling on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, German U-boats were torpedoing American merchant ships in the North Atlantic, Nazi saboteurs reportedly were awaiting word from Hitler to destroy the Panama Canal, and while Mrs. W.P. Zumwalt of the school board was handing out diplomas to the graduating seniors of North Dallas High School, the Royal Navy was sinking the battleship Bismarck.

  Bombs wouldn’t fall on Pearl Harbor for six months yet, but the seniors of June 1941 already knew they were stepping into an extraordinary time. “We knew we were going to war,” says Archie Hunter. “Some of the guys had skipped their senior year and had gone on and enlisted. Some of us went in right after Pearl Harbor. Some went to college for a year or two first, but nearly all of us got into it eventually.”

  Mr. Hunter is a member of the committee planning the 50th anniversary reunion of his class. He’s sitting at a table at El Fenix restaurant in downtown Dallas on a sunny day in May, talking over plans with two other members of the committee, Erwin Hearne, an artist, and Alfred Martinez, the owner of the restaurant. They and Maurine Martin McAlister, who keeps track of the addresses and doings of their classmates, are the core of the group that has kept the spirit of the 1941 North Dallas Bulldogs lively.

  They’ve remained more closely knit than most high school classes, they say. Their first reunion was in 1966 in the Crystal Ballroom at the Baker Hotel, 25 years after graduation. Every five years since then, class members have traveled from all over Texas and both coasts and the Midwest to gather for a weekend of reminiscence and revelry.

  “I happen to mention to people that we’re having a high school reunion,” says Mr. Hearne, “and they say, ‘You’re having a what? You’ve got to be kidding!’ They just don’t understand. Heck, we were so glad to see one another after the war. I mean, that was a big war, and a tough war on many of us. A lot of our class members were lost. Just the fact that we had survived…that had a lot to do with it.”

  It’s to remember those first of their number to die, and all those who have died since, that they still get together, and to laugh again at themselves the way they were half a century ago, and the world they knew then, which has disappeared.

  “Back then, most of us lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same grade schools together,” Mr. Hunter says. “Back then, people stayed in place more than they do now. Some of us went all the way through kindergarten and grade school and high school together.”

  “In those days, they didn’t have organized sports for grade school kids like they do now,” says Mr. Hearne. “We made up our sand lot teams and played each other in the neighborhood.”

  “It was the Depression,” Mr. Martinez says. “We didn’t have a lot of money and didn’t go many places. Everybody was in the same category.”

  Dallas was a city of 235,000 the year they graduated. Cotton fields rimmed Northwest Highway. Fort Worth was a long way off. Collin County was in another universe. And the corner of Cole and Haskell avenues, just beyond Oak Lawn, where the school has stood since 1921, was in North Dallas.

  “It was a different place then,” says Marylynn Newcom Wilhite. “Even as a child, you could go all over Dallas on the streetcar, and nobody would worry about you. I remember when I was nine years old, going downtown on the streetcar and shopping for my aunt at the old Titche-Goettinger.”

  Mrs. Wilhite and her husband are among almost 200 North Dallas Bulldogs—members of the class of ‘41, and smaller numbers of the classes of ‘40, ‘42 and ‘43—roaming the lobby of the Colony Parke Hotel, drinks in hand, during the May 31 Friday night mixer, the reunion’s opening event. She says she started going steady with John Connie Wilhite when he was a junior and she a freshman.

  “And we’re still going steady,” he says.

  “He left me and went into the Air Force, and I was stuck by myself here for the last year and a half of high school,” she says.

  When Connie got his pilot’s wings in 1944, they got married, and the bridegroom went off to join the D-Day invasion. He liked the Air Force so much he stayed in for two more wars and retired a few years ago as a lieutenant colonel.

  “I volunteered for Desert Shield,” he says. “I called them, and they said they had recalled a few who had retired very recently, but no 67-year-olds yet. The war was over before they got to me.”

  Jody Lander, who graduated a semester behind Col. Wilhite, in January 1942, was president of his class and a foot
ball player. “Our team was kind of a joke,” he says. “In the 1940 season, my last year, we won only one game. We beat Sunset, 7-6. They then went on to the state finals. I don’t know how we managed to beat them.”

  “North Dallas never was strong in sports,” says Nancy Hunter Gilmore. “We liked to say we were academically oriented.” Mrs. Gilmore was so studious that she was double-promoted and graduated within half a year of her older brother Archie. “He didn’t speak to me the whole time I was in high school,” she says. “He was the meanest son of a gun in the world. But now he’s just a doll.”

  All about the room, the Bulldogs are regarding each other with that chin-raised, eyelids-lowered, peering-through-bifocals gaze. The tags on their chests display their senior yearbook pictures alongside their names, and it’s the young, smiling faces of 1941 that make the memories click into place:

  “Ah! My goodness! Look who’s here!”

  “Is that really you? It’s so good to see you!”

  They speak of Saturday matinees at the Knox Street Theater and midnight shows at the Majestic, smoking cigarettes behind the rifle range in back of the school, skinny-dipping in the school pool during PE class, double-dating in the family’s ‘37 Ford and parking in the moonlight on Flagpole Hill.

  “The most precious memories to me are the school assemblies,” says Mitzi Schaden Messier. “They were always big productions, and I just loved them. When the band would play Deep Purple I would cry. And Saturday night there was always a dance in somebody’s home. We danced to the big-band sound: Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra…”

  Others recall hours without end spent in detention in Room 103, under the watchful eye of Miss Minnie Keel. “She was a fiery little redheaded woman,” Erwin Hearne says, “and everybody gave her a hard time, rolling marbles down the aisle, setting wastebaskets on fire. She endured it well, though. She died a few years ago at 107 years of age.”

  “Remember how we would lay the fuse of a pack of firecrackers across a burning cigarette in the locker room, and then go off to class?” Billy Sempert says. “And the cigarette would bum down? And when we had been in class about five minutes, it would reach the fuse and set off the firecrackers? And how those teachers would run out into that hall, trying to find out what in the world had happened?”

  Alan Myers, editor of the yearbook and staffer on the school newspaper, says he wasn’t the mischievous type. “Due to my particular nature, I went through North Dallas High School kind of in a dream. The only bad thing I remember doing was when we were studying Browning in English class, and five or six of us played hooky one day to go down to the Browning Museum in Waco. That was my only deviation from the straight and narrow.”

  At a table at the edge of the hubbub, Caroline Cherry Shoemaker is holding court. She was a baton twirler and the drum major, and she has brought her scrapbook, full of pictures and newspaper clippings from her twirling days.

  She has lived in Dallas all her life, she says, but this is her first reunion, because the planning committee didn’t know her last name until now. “The others have seen each other every five years, but I don’t know who these people are,” she says. “A gentleman called and wanted to bring me tonight, and I didn’t recognize him when he walked up the steps.”

  As they recognize her picture on her name tag, the men approach her with a kind of shyness, as they must have when they were boys. They shake her hand and speak to her in low, respectful tones. But the women greet her with gushes of enthusiasm:

  “Ooooh! Caroline! I would never have recognized you!”

  “Isn’t she pretty?”

  “Yeeeees! You’re gorgeous!”

  “I twirled a baton with fire at both ends,” Mrs. Shoemaker tells a visitor, “and we were the first ones to wear short skirts. Before us, the skirts were below the knees. We had a good band. Our band was selected to lead all the bands one year from downtown Dallas to Fair Park, so of course I got to lead them all.”

  As she talks, her eyes are scanning the milling crowd. “It’s strange when you’re in high school, and you’re a senior—remember?—and you’re so in love and you’ve been going steady and you just know you’re going to marry that boy and live together for 50 years and be happy. But you didn’t marry him. I don’t know if he’s here tonight or not. I wouldn’t recognize him. In the annual he took a whole page and wrote of his enduring love, he would never ever leave me, death do us part. He would marry me and we would be forever flying away. I started to bring that annual tonight, in case he was here with his wife.”

  Woody Brownlee and O.S. Castlen ran the Cole & Haskell Drug at the comer of those two avenues, just across the way from North Dallas High. The store had a soda fountain and a jukebox, so of course it was a Bulldog hangout.

  During World War II, Mr. Castlen published a little newspaper called Bulldog Bull, which he mailed to all the North Dallas boys who were in the service, to let them know what was going on at their school and what was happening to their classmates.

  When the war finally ended, he published his last edition, in which he wrote:

  “There is one final tribute due and one most hard to express because words are too weak and undramatic when we come to consider those long rows of white crosses… How weak we living appear…when we try to offer anything in comparison to those gallant ones…. So, to those white crosses in Africa and Europe, and on the Pacific’s sandy atolls, we offer this promise: There will never be a final chapter ascribed to you. We will never speak the final word for you, but will refresh your memory in the coming generations and point you out to our sons and daughters as time lasts.”

  Under the headline “To Those Not Returning,” Mr. Castlen listed the names of 87 North Dallas High School students who had been killed in action, eight who were still missing in action and three who were prisoners of war.

  Robert Breault is standing with several others on the front steps of the high school in the cool June 1 morning, gazing across Haskell at the boarded-up building that used to be Mr. Castlen’s store. “It was a wonderful place,” he says. “I used to take my lunch money and start off my morning with an ice cream soda before school. And we would go back and play the jukebox and jitterbug after school.”

  Many of the group haven’t stood on these steps since the night they graduated, but remembering the drugstore triggers memories of the other businesses that used to stand along the streets near the school: Abbott’s Barbershop, Patricia’s Beauty Shop, Dick & Don’s Texaco, Lange Florist, the China Clipper Restaurant, Pat & Monty’s Drive-in Grocery, Jack Jolly’s Cleaners, Charlie Pittman’s Barbecue Stand… “A root beer float was the greatest thing there ever was,” Archie Hunter says.

  Inside, M.O. Black, the school’s current athletic director, has rescued from the basement several framed pictures of the old senior classes and has cleaned them up and stood them against the wall in the hallway. The grads crouch before them, searching out themselves and their friends.

  Mr. Black says he’s collecting pictures of North Dallas athletic teams from the past. He plans to have them enlarged and display them about the school. “So these kids today can see that this school once had a great tradition,” he says. “Most of the high schools in Dallas have lost their sense of tradition. We want to bring tradition back to North Dallas.”

  Dr. Ewell Walker, 94 years old, father of SMU football great Doak Walker and the first coach that North Dallas High ever had, studies a display of old faculty pictures on the wall. “She’s dead,” he says, pointing. “And he’s dead, and he’s dead, and she’s dead.”

  Jack Howell is roaming the hallway with his 1941 yearbook and a pen, asking his classmates to autograph their pictures. “I didn’t get my annual until after we graduated,” he says, “and I didn’t have a chance to get anybody to sign it, so I’m getting them all to sign it now. When you get to the 50th anniversary, you throw all inhibitions out.”

  “Jack is having a ball with his little book,” says his wife, Margery. “He’l
l recognize somebody and look at their picture in the book and say, ‘Oh, my Lord, look how fat he is.’”

  “There are only about five people here I would recognize on the street,” says Bill Allen. “The rest are like strangers to me.”

  “I’ve been called John, Bill, one guy called me Stephen,” says Erwin Hearne. “I just answer, ‘Oh, yeah,’ to whatever they call me.”

  They file into the auditorium and sing the North Dallas fight song and the alma mater, which is sung to the tune that 99 percent of all alma maters are:

  High above in stately beauty with their spirits true

  Wave our white and orange colors glorious to view.

  Lift the banner, raise it skyward; loud its praises sing.

  Love and honor to North Dallas we forever bring.

  Hardy Brogoitti is emcee. “Fellows, do you remember the first box of Valentine candy you bought across the street at O.S. Castlen’s Cole & Haskell Drug? And some of the fellows teased you about it, so you said it was for your mother? And it really was? What about the first time you skipped school and you prayed your mother wouldn’t be home to answer the phone when Miss Bigbee called? Remember the day you drove your family’s ‘35 Chevy to school for the first time, and you circled the school three or four times, and nobody even noticed you? Remember who gave you your first kiss, and where you were? I don’t.”

  He introduces Oscar Rodriguez, the young current principal.

  “The school has changed quite a bit,” Mr. Rodriguez begins.

  Of the 1,400-member student body, he says, 65 percent are Hispanic. Most of them are of Mexican descent, but there has been an influx of South Americans lately. Twelve percent are Asian—Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian—and their number is growing. Some of the new students are from Africa. “The last time we counted, we had 32 countries represented here,” he says.