I don‧t remember why I didn‧t call the TV stations. I didn‧t see much TV, so maybe I never thought of it having news.
During a lonely lunch at the Oasis Restaurant, the bright-idea light flashed in my head. I slipped a nickel into the pay phone and called Ed Hochrein.
Hochrein was one of maybe a dozen public relations people who came to the Times every day to drop news releases into a basket on Engledow‧s desk. The releases were long, fulsome things extolling whatever company or charity or club or big shot the PR man had been paid to promote. From time to time, Engledow would grab a handful of them, drop them on an idle reporter‧s desk and say, “Give me a couple of graffs on these.” So the PR guy‧s glowing pages would appear in the paper as a few lines of plain facts. They were filler.
Some PR men would hang around and gossip and joke with the reporters and deskmen. Engledow enjoyed some of them. But he hated Ed Hochrein. I never knew why. His hatred was complete and unebbing.
Hochrein feared Engledow. But his livelihood depended on getting his clients‧ names into the city‧s largest newspaper, so he stepped through the swinging doors, dropped his releases into the basket and tried to withdraw before Engledow shot an insult at him.
I phoned Hochrein and asked him for a job.
There was a pause on the line. Then he said, “Really?”
“Engledow fired me.”
I swear I could hear him smiling. “How much do they pay you over there?” he asked.
“Sixty a week,” I said. It‧s what I would have been paid had I accepted the promotion.
“I‧ll pay you that,” Hochrein said. “Can you start Monday?”
“You bet,” I said. “Tank you.”
I arrived at the Times at four o‧clock. It was a busy part of the day. The daytime beat men were batting out their stories, the night people were drifting in. I stood in front of Engledow‧s desk and said loudishly, “I don‧t need two weeks notice. I start a new job Monday.”
“Doing what?” Engledow asked.
“Writing PR for Ed Hochrein.”
He went slack-jawed. So did everybody. The wire machines‧ chatter punctuated a long silence.
“Why the hell you doing that?” Engledow said. “You‧re a goddamn newspaperman!”
“I got to have a job,” I said.
He picked up a piece of copy and swiveled his chair to talk to the wire editor. Back to work. Our conversation was over.
As the night deepened, his funk grew darker.
Near one o‧clock, when the last of us were quitting for the night, Engledow called me into the morgue. “If you turn down Hochrein, you can stay. I‧ll give you the 5-dollar raise.”
“OK,” I said.
Then he and I went to the Stag and had a beer.
SECTION H
JUÁREZ
El Paso was a small city, maybe 200,000 people, but being a reporter there wasn‧t at all like working in Albuquerque or Denver. Even Dallas or Houston didn‧t offer the drama and adventure that El Paso did. For Juárez lay across the river.
Juárez was bigger than El Paso but didn‧t look it. It still resembled the tacky old adobe town where Pancho Villa fought three battles during the Mexican Revolution. But it was in a foreign country and spoke another language, which made it exotic to tourists and young GIs. And it was a pit of danger and sin, which made it irresistible.
In the ‘50s, if you didn‧t have much money or the right connections, Texas was a hard place to get wicked. Bars couldn‧t legally serve hard liquor, only beer and wine. The few dance floors were at hillbilly honky-tonks on the edge of town. Marijuana and heroin, though more plentiful in El Paso than elsewhere in the U.S., was costly. Strippers couldn‧t uncover much. Whores had to be found through bellhops and taxi drivers.
But in Juárez …
When you crossed the Santa Fe Street Bridge over the Rio Grande, you emerged onto Avenida Juárez, the city‧s main tourist trap. In daylight, the main business there was “curios,” the cheap, useless crap that American tourists can‧t go home without: fake silver-and-turquoise jewelry, straw sombreros, velvet paintings of bullfighters and flamenco dancers, salt-and-pepper shakers with “Souvenir of Old Mexico” on them, garish serapes, shoddy leather purses and wallets adorned with the Aztec calendar. Pitchmen stood at shop doors, tugging tourists‧ sleeves. “Hey, mister, step inside! Buy your lady a diamond! See it to believe it!”
But as the sun went down, the spiels turned seductive, urgent. “Hey, señores! Take a look! Naked blondes!” Avenida Juárez morphed into a sleazy Cinderella decked in neon, beckoning gullible Americans into the Crystal Palace, El Rancho Escondido and the Tivoli with their big bands and tuxedoed emcees and dirty jokes, or up dark and stinking stairs to raw sex shows in ratty dives.
On side streets where lights were sparse and dim were the real brothels, their names, too raunchy to print here, advertised in flyspecked, sputtering neon above their doors.
And drugs. All you had to do was ask.
People got murdered in Juárez. A hard rain or a coyote would uncover a shallow grave in the desert south of town. An American tourist would wind up naked with his throat cut, a victim of wandering into the wrong section of Juárez alone and in the dark. A bloated floater would be lifted from the river.
Since I could use the big Speed Graphic camera, Engledow sometimes sent me to Juárez to see what I could find about the latest dead, get quotes from the police and shoot a few pictures. My photos were of cops investigating, witnesses pointing and the like. The Times didn‧t want pictures of the grisly remains. But the Juárez papers did. Sometimes the entire top half of a front page would be a close-up photograph of a corpse. Sometimes it was printed in red ink.
I met Juárez reporters and photographers at these scenes. One became a friend. He was Hector Padilla, a reporter for El Fronterizo. He looked like a Mexican movie star – wavy hair; sexy mustache, loads of Latin charm – and he was well connected in Juárez. He knew the cops, politicians, rich businessmen, major pimps, everybody.
Hector and I made a pact: If he knew a hot story happening in Juárez, he would call me with the lowdown. If I knew one happening in El Paso, I would call him. We gave each other names and phone numbers. These were always stories about dead bodies.
Our pact had a second part, too.
Working for the Times had one perk: free movie passes. Theater managers brought small stacks of them to the newsroom each week and gave them to Mr. Latham, who locked them in his desk. If you approached him humbly and asked politely, he would give you a pair, but only once a week, like a stern father handing over an undeserving child‧s allowance.
Hector loved American movies. About once a month I gave him my passes to the Plaza, the big downtown picture palace. He could simply have bought tickets, of course, but entering the Plaza on a free pass was special to him. In return, he gave me shady-side tickets to the bullfights. He used his connections to get me membership in the rooftop swim club at Hotel Monte Carlo, near the big new bullring, Plaza Monumental. My friends and I would go there and have a drink after the bullfights, waiting for the traffic to thin.
Through a cousin who worked somewhere in the Mexican government bureaucracy, Hector even got me a Chihuahua fishing license.
Giving me this gift made him especially happy. But I never went fishing.
SECTION I
ROSA
The union at the copper smelter down by the river went on an illegal strike. Union leaders called the walkout because of some internal political rivalry, and the rank-and-file workers had nothing to gain by its outcome. They were just out of work.
Many workers lived in the adobe slum between the smelter and the river, called Smeltertown. They were poor. They had wives and children. When some workers defied the union leaders and tried to go to work, picketers attacked their cars with rocks and clubs.
The following Sunday, a heavy rain was falling, a rare sight in El Paso. When I arrived for work, Engledow was standing at an open windo
w, watching the rain, smelling it. He said, “Come here, son.”
I joined him at the window.
“Grab your camera and go see what‧s happening on the picket line,” he said.
“In this?” I whined. “I‧ll get soaked! Nobody‧s going to picket in this!”
Engledow said, “Get your ass out there and don‧t come back till you‧ve got the story.”
I had my own car now, a two-tone-green 1955 Ford Fairlane with white-sidewall tires. I loved it. I wasn‧t about to risk it among a mob of club-swinging strikers. I called a taxi.
The driver stopped in front of the smelter gate. A single picketer stood there, holding a sign. He wore a soggy serape and a big straw sombrero like the ones that tourists bought in Juárez. The rain had destroyed its shape, and its wide brim drooped around the man‧s thin face.
On the other side of the road, a dozen cars were parked in a row, facing the gate. Each car held three or four strikers.
“Wait for me,” I told the cabdriver.
“No,” he said. “Pay me.”
He made a quick U-turn and was gone. I was in the middle of the road, holding my Speed Graphic, my notebook and an Army-surplus bag of flashbulbs and film holders. Quickly, I was wet as the picketer.
I shot a picture of him. “What‧s this strike about?” I asked him, trying to sound casual.
He said nothing. He stared past my face.
“How long have you been standing in this rain?
No reply.
I had no way to get back to the Times, no way to call Engledow. So I stood in the road, trying to protect my camera with my drenched sports coat.
The driver in one of the cars across the road opened his door, got halfway out and waved. He was motioning me toward him. He was burly and had a big mustache and wore a brown felt hat. He looked like Pancho Villa. Tree men were in the car with him. I was scared, but I went to the car.
“Get out of the rain,” the man said. He told the man in the front passenger seat to move to the back. I climbed in beside the driver. “What you doing out here?” he asked.
“I‧m a reporter. From the Times.”
“Yeah, I figured. Because of the camera.”
“My name is Bryan Woolley.” I stuck out my hand. The driver shook it. “Rudy Gonzales,” he said. He introduced the other three men. I shook hands with them all.
They started talking about the strike. They didn‧t like it. They couldn‧t feed their families. Their union bosses were no good. Slowly, I relaxed. These weren‧t thugs. No clubs were hidden under their seats. They were getting a raw deal, and it was hurting them. I wanted to take notes, but was afraid they would stop talking if I opened my notebook. I just listened. We had been sitting maybe half an hour, quietly talking, gazing through the rain-streaked windshield at the miserable picketer across the road, when Rudy told me about Rosa.
She was his daughter. She was 9 years old, a beautiful girl. She was a victim of polio and wore steel braces on her legs. She had outgrown the braces and needed new ones, but Rudy didn‧t have the money to buy them. If the strike didn‧t end soon, who knew when he could save enough? His voice was full of love and sorrow.
I cleared my throat. “Rudy,” I said quietly, “may I take a picture of Rosa?”
Rudy didn‧t answer. He started the car and steered it through the rain to Smeltertown, to one of the adobe shacks. We all got out. A face, Rudy‧s wife‧s, appeared behind the screen door. She opened it and invited us in.
Rosa was sitting in the sparsely furnished living room. She smiled big when she saw her father. She seemed to light up the room and the whole gloomy afternoon. Rudy lifted her from the chair, sat down and set her on his lap. Rudy‧s wife made us coffee. We talked.
Finally I asked, “May I take the picture?”
Rudy told his wife what I wanted. She didn‧t want to be in a picture, she said. She didn‧t like the way she was dressed.
I shot a picture of Rudy kneeling, buckling the braces on Rosa‧s legs. Rosa was smiling shyly into my lens.
Rudy and his companions gave me a ride to the Times. I wrote the story and developed the picture. Engledow put them in the middle of Page One.
Next afternoon, an anonymous caller told Engledow that if I returned to the picket line, something bad would happen to me. It didn‧t matter. Two days after the story ran, the smelter workers refused to picket anymore. In defiance of the union politicos, they went to work.
I end this little collection of memories with Rudy and Rosa because theirs was the best story I ever did for the Times. And it taught me the power of the word. It taught me that telling the truth in a newspaper can do more good than you expect.
Meanwhile, I was engaged to my high school sweetheart. She told me that a reporter wasn‧t a respectable thing to be and she wouldn‧t marry me unless I entered another vocation. This, I later learned, was really her mother speaking, but I agreed to it. In August 1958 I turned 21, she turned 18, I graduated from Texas Western College, I quit my job and we married.
Engledow was deeply hurt, I think. He had given me the big break that I was throwing away. I was full of grief.
Over nine years, I taught high school English, worked as a bank teller, did manual labor on a seismograph crew, spent six years in two graduate schools and edited a church magazine for teenagers.
Then the marriage ended and I got a job as night correspondent in the Tulsa Bureau of The Associated Press. At last I was back where I had always belonged. For nearly half a century, the wonderful room has been my home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bryan Woolley‧s wonderful room wasn‧t always in Texas. During the 1960s, after several unsatisfying non-newspaper jobs and six years of graduate school at Texas Christian University and Harvard, he served a short time as an Associated Press correspondent in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then as city editor of The Anniston Star in Alabama. In 1969 he joined The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and wrote there for seven years. In 1976 he moved to The Dallas Times Herald, and in 1989 to The Dallas Morning News, where he worked until his retirement in 2006. In addition to several collections of his best newspaper work, he has published four novels and two children‧s books.
Woolley is the recipient of numerous honors for his writing, including the PEN West Literary Journalism Award; three Stanley Walker Newspaper Journalism Awards and one O. Henry Magazine Journalism Award (from the Texas Institute of Letters); four Texas Headliner Journalism Awards; and the Spur Award for Best Historical Novel from the Western Writers of America.
He lives in Dallas with his wife, the poet Isabel Nathaniel. He has two grown, married sons and two granddaughters. Over the years, he has written about them all.
Wings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing—meaning all of the Americas, without commercial considerations clouding the choice to publish or not to publish.
Wings Press attempts to produce multicultural books, chapbooks, CDs and ebooks that, we hope, enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. We believe that writing is a transformational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other‧s souls. Good writing is innovative, insightful, and interesting. But most of all it is honest.
Likewise, Wings Press is committed to treating the planet itself as a partner. Tus the press uses as much recycled material as possible, from the paper on which the books are printed to the boxes in which they are shipped.
As Robert Dana wrote in Against the Grain, “Small press publishing is personal publishing. In essence, it‧s a matter of personal vision, personal taste and courage, and personal friendships.” Welcome to our world.
WINGS PRESS
Colophon
This first edition of The Wonderful Room, by Bryan Woolley has been printed on 55 pound Edwards Brothers Natural Paper containing a high percentage of recycled fiber. Book and section titles have been set in “PaintPeel” type, the text in Adobe Caslon type. All Wings Press books are designed and produced by Bryce Milligan.
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Bryan Woolley‧s “wonderful room” wasn‧t always in Texas. After stints in graduate school at Texas Christian University and Harvard, he served as an Associated Press correspondent in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then as city editor of The Anniston Star in Alabama. In 1969 he joined The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1976 he moved to The Dallas Times Herald, and in 1989 to The Dallas Morning News, where he worked until his retirement in 2006.
Besides four novels and two children‧s books, he has published several collections of his newspaper work. Laura Furman wrote that “Woolley has long been one of the state‧s best writers, and his modest eloquence suits his stories perfectly. Bryan Woolley is the troubadour of Texas journeys, large and small.”
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