by Bryan Mealer
With Wills at the lead, the band traveled for most of the year, playing dance halls across six states. Back at home, Frances cared for Mary Ellen, plus Tommy’s daughters whenever they visited. After Flossie had her baby, the two sisters settled into the shared chaos of diapers, feedings, and little ones underfoot. The kids ate Creamsicles by the big pool and played in the creek behind the club. Each night at bedtime, the ceiling shook from the touring acts playing the ballroom above.
During this time, Frances was carrying her second child. Despite being surrounded by her sister and a houseful of kids, she grew lonely without Tommy, and found her only comfort in the letters he sent from the road.
One afternoon at the mailbox she saw an envelope addressed to Tommy. The handwriting appeared to be a woman’s, so Frances opened it and began to read. Sure enough, it was from a woman named Betty in Oklahoma, who, judging from the contents of the letter, was clearly her husband’s girlfriend. Frances stood outside their apartment and read it again and again, then something happened. She felt dizzy, then the next thing she knew she was lying in bed with a crowd of people standing above her. A doctor was checking her pulse, asking about the baby.
The next week she sent a telegram to Betty, pretending to be Tommy, and asked for a photograph. She wanted to see this woman; she had to know. A few days later she received a glamour shot of a pretty, buxom brunette. The gauzy evening dress she wore looked just like the one hanging in Frances’s closet.
It just so happened the band was coming home for a showcase at Wills Point. The day they arrived, Frances asked her sister to take the kids so she could confront Tommy. He was dressed in his band uniform, about to go upstairs for a sound check, when Frances pulled out the photo and threw it onto the table.
“Are you cheating on me?” she asked.
But Tommy deflected the question. When he refused to answer a second time, Frances grew so angry that she grabbed the nearest object, a black stiletto heel, and went after him. The blow laid his head open wide and caused him to crumple to the floor. Blood was pouring from the wound when he came back up and smacked her so hard that her feet left the ground. He then cursed as he fumbled in the kitchen for a rag to stop the bleeding. Within minutes he was gone, leaving her alone with a throbbing head and the sound of his steel guitar playing upstairs.
Neither of them wanted a divorce. Besides, the arrival of their daughter Janet worked to realign their commitment. Then tragedy brought them together. In the early morning of June 16, 1956, the family was fast asleep when a teenage kid, for reasons unknown, lobbed a Molotov cocktail through a window at Wills Point. The explosion woke them up, and the smell of smoke and crackling of flames told them the fire was above their heads on the dance floor. They had just enough time to scoop up the kids and dash out into the night. Within minutes, the fire engulfed the entire compound, taking with it everything they owned.
The Red Cross arranged an apartment for them, where they stayed for several months while plotting their next move. Before the fire Bob Wills had returned to Amarillo and left Billy Jack the ballroom again. But for Billy Jack, what he’d created at Wills Point could never be reproduced. Shortly after it was destroyed, the band broke up and went their separate ways, and within four years, the younger Wills brother retired from music altogether. As for Tommy, his career ended, too.
The family moved to Bakersfield, where Tommy’s two daughters lived, along with Frances’s brothers, Leamon and John. Leamon was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners and John worked as a roughneck north of town in the Kern River field. Tommy enrolled in college on the GI Bill and began studying music, hoping to become a teacher. They took a one-bedroom house, which they furnished with a five-dollar sofa they found at a flea market. But they still had no clothes and no money; everything had been lost in the fire. At their lowest point, they couldn’t even feed themselves. One afternoon, a Catholic food pantry turned them away because they weren’t members of the church.
Her brother Leamon was having success selling Kirbys door-to-door, mainly to suburban housewives. One morning, looking to help the family, he picked up Tommy and took him along on his route, hoping Tommy could land a sale of his own. When her husband walked through the door that evening, he had a big smile on his face.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You sold a Kirby!”
“I sold a Kirby,” Tommy said. He’d found himself a new career.
Tommy began selling lots of Kirbys, so many in fact that there was talk of opening his own distributorship in Bakersfield. Leamon got one, and before long, even John quit the oil patch and was knocking on doors, demonstrating the power of the Suds-O-Gun, Crystalator, and Handi-Butler attachments. Push-button housekeeping—now that was the future! “It does everything but the cooking, ma’am! Don’t buy a mere vacuum cleaner, buy a clean home for the rest of your life!”
They were a Kirby family now of all blessed things.
* * *
They moved into a bigger house and enrolled Mary Ellen in school. And now that they lived near Tommy’s two girls, Frida brought them over for longer stays. The girls arrived with dirty hair, their clothes wadded up in cardboard boxes. Frida also dropped them off unannounced at odd hours of the day, then took them back without telling Frances. The family lawyer told them to stand up to Frida, so one day Frances refused to let them go. Frida hauled off and punched her in the face, breaking her nose.
Tommy and Frances went to court and got custody. Frida moved to Los Angeles to live with a boyfriend, but the judge still gave her a month that summer with the girls. When they came home after their first visit, Frances noticed something was wrong. The older one, who was twelve, refused to go outside and wouldn’t sit near a window.
It was through her younger sister that Frances discovered that while in Los Angeles, Frida had propositioned two older Hispanic men, who took the girls to a motel. “Do whatever they tell you,” Frida told her daughter, “just get their billfolds.” The younger girl sat outside while the men had their way with her sister. They so traumatized the older girl that she was convinced they were coming to kill her, so she was hiding from view.
Frances and Tommy went to the district attorney and tried to build a case, but nothing ever came of it. The DA finally told them that in order to truly protect the girls, they should leave the state. So that’s what they did. A Kirby distributorship opened up in Phoenix, and Tommy jumped on it. Leamon soon followed and opened his own shop, working the opposite side of town, while John found a store out in Tucson.
The family moved into a brand-new house in Scottsdale, right across from an elementary school. And over the next ten years, while Tommy sold vacuum cleaners and parts, Frances stayed home and raised the girls. Each year her old life seemed to recede more and more into memory. Bob Wills and Billy Jack, Gail and Ernie Ball, the stars of the Grand Ole Opry—it was like she’d met them all in a dream.
She began to see her life in distinct chapters—Texas being the first, then California, and now Arizona. The funny thing about this chapter was that it was the hardest one of all, but the one in which she took the most pride. She would be the best mother in the world, she vowed. She would give her children the love and devotion that she never received from Bertha. And this is what she did, but it came with a price.
PART 3
1
The drought ends … hard times again … Bobby and Preston … Clem finds his reward … enter Grady …
In May 1957, the rains finally returned to Big Spring. After seven long years of drought, a series of soakers laid a carpet of lush green grass along the dry and brittle range. After that, the family’s fortunes began to shift.
By now, the ranches were mostly empty, and the long hauls to feedlots and packinghouses were fewer and fewer. Beef production in the United States declined, while at the same time, Americans were eating more steak and bologna than ever before—ninety-five pounds per person per year. To meet the demand, cheap imported cattle began flooding the market from Argentina, Ireland,
Australia, and elsewhere, and drove prices on American cattle into the basement. They arrived to the coasts, where local truckers hauled them inland, leaving Herman without an edge. By the end of 1958, his business was in trouble.
First he failed to make payments on several trucks he’d purchased during the boom. But instead of giving them up and cutting his losses, he chose to refinance using his entire fleet as collateral. He even threw in the family house. The only thing left off the note was Little Opal’s Buick, only because Homer talked him out of it.
Soon the bank came for the whole lot. It was Homer who met the repo team at the office, pulled the logos off the truck doors, and handed over eight sets of keys. Back home, his mother and sister packed their house and prepared to move.
His father, meanwhile, climbed into the Buick in a fog of despair and headed to San Angelo. In the glove box sat a .45 that he planned to use on himself once he arrived. But luckily his brother Tooter had noticed the gun missing from the office and talked his way into the passenger seat. By the time they hit town, he’d coaxed him off the edge.
After that Herman looked for other trucking jobs. He heard the Fort Worth stockyards were hiring drivers and drove all the way there, only to come home dejected, telling his children, “They weren’t even interested in me. I told them all of my experience and they weren’t even interested.”
For a few months he sold cantaloupes door-to-door, until his feet swelled so badly he could hardly walk. Then one day he noticed that the owner of the Jumbo Restaurant on Gregg Street had a FOR SALE sign in the window. It was a small lunch counter with just six stools and a couple of tables, but the price was decent. With a small loan from Little Opal’s mother, Herman went into the restaurant business.
The property included a tiny shotgun apartment behind the kitchen, where the family lived. It was too small to accommodate their nice furniture, so they stacked it against the walls to create a walking path. And to make back their money, they stayed open twenty-four hours and worked in shifts. Herman hardly slept from all the stress. After two months, he collapsed from a heart attack.
It was Charles Miller, Homer’s friend, who discovered him one morning sitting on the edge of his bed, clutching his chest and going pale. Charles called an ambulance, which broke down on the way to the hospital. It took Herman, in the throes of cardiac arrest, to explain to the driver how to fix the engine. By the time they reached the ER, he was in a coma. The doctor told Little Opal, “If he lives, it’s because of higher hands than mine.”
Little Opal looked down at her husband, covered in tubes and wires, and felt panic and despair. What on earth were they going to do? She drove back to the restaurant, telling her daughter, Evelyn, “I owe my mother two thousand dollars and we have to pay it back. There’s no way forward but straight ahead.” With Herman lying in a coma, flat broke and buried in debt, they went back to work.
* * *
The only good news to come that year was that Homer got engaged. He’d met Stina at a youth conference in Odessa. She was a good Pentecostal girl, tiny as a mouse, but equipped with a sidelong humor that Homer found irresistible.
They exchanged vows at the altar of First Assembly, then stunned everyone by announcing they were leaving the church and becoming Baptist.
To live a simple Christian life, one possessed of love, joy, and compassion, rather than judgment and condemnation—that’s what they wanted, and the Baptist church that many of Homer’s friends from school attended seemed like a good enough place to start.
But the old flock didn’t let him go easy. For months they called and warned him against leaving, as if to illuminate his road to damnation. They stopped him on the street and asked to pray. And in crowds and family functions, they greeted him with cries of “John the Baptist.”
Homer told his wife, “This must be what it’s like to escape a cult.”
No one was more wrecked by Homer’s decision than Little Opal. She bore the weight of his breakaway, feeling as if she’d failed to hold him in glory. Four times a week, she threw herself on the altar at First Assembly and pleaded for the return of her wayward boy. “Bring him home, Lord,” she cried. “Please bring home my son.”
Sitting in the pews watching all of this was my father, Bobby.
* * *
Opal had gotten pregnant with Bobby when she was thirty-three, an age considered ancient for childbearing in those days, especially when her eldest child was already old enough to drive. When Zelda heard about the pregnancy, she planted both hands on her hips, and cried, “Oh, Mother!” and refused to tell her friends.
Bobby arrived in December 1953, when the sky was red and the sum value of the land—including the oil and the men who pumped it—amounted to nothing. The following year is when Bob quit the oil patch and colluded with the drought, his eyes full of sand dollars.
The minute that powder-blue Ford appeared behind the house, you’d think the stork had dropped two babies on the family instead of one. From that day forward, dump trucks and blow dirt took hold of Bob’s heart and never turned loose.
He attacked the sand drifts with vigor, backing his truck against the first one he passed on the highway. With no proper tractor yet, he chipped away at the piles with a pair of No. 2 shovels. Holding the other one was Preston, my father’s older brother, who could sling dirt as far as any man.
“Fill her to the top, Big Boy. There’s plenty more.”
At eight years old, Preston was already tall, broad in the shoulders, and tough as an old tire—no doubt his father’s pride and joy. Bob called him Big Boy Blue.
Preston was quiet, never spoke without necessity. When Bob worked the rigs, Preston would roam the pastures with his single-shot .22, hunting rabbits. Sometimes Bob climbed off the derrick floor and found him standing in the shade of the doghouse, a dead jackrabbit between each finger, never sure how long he’d been there. It’s possible the only people to ever get ten words out of Preston were the ticket clerks at the Ritz Theater. On Saturday mornings, when a Gandy’s milk carton got kids under twelve in for free, he was forced to actually argue his age.
Because of this, Bob liked to tease Preston during the long silent moments while they drove.
“You say somethin’?” he’d ask.
But Preston stared ahead, the dust boiling all around him.
“I—I—” he’d stammer, as if surprised by his own voice. “I didn’t say nothin’.”
* * *
Bob sold the loamy “cat-claw” sand for ten dollars a load. Business was brisk, enough to buy a used Ford tractor to make the work easier, followed by a second truck, also a Ford. He got it cheap because it was missing its passenger door.
“I’ll get you that door once I get going good,” he assured Preston, who didn’t seem to mind the extra air-conditioning. In fact, Preston loved working with his father. Each day at noon, Bob pulled into a little grocery and came out with two cans of pork and beans, a pound of bologna and bread, and a white onion. Together they ate their lunch in the cab under a blanket of dust, chasing it down with a jug of warm water, never happier.
That first year, Bob preached the wonders of dump trucks to anyone who’d listen, especially to the men in his family. “Can’t ya see? It’s the best work going,” he told his brother-in-law, Bill White, who’d married Opal’s sister Veda. “Everywhere you look: sand! And it’s yours for the taking.”
Bill was fresh out of the service and needed a job. He’d never considered dirt, but Bob was sure crazy about it, and soon Bill was following behind with a wheelbarrow and spreading it on people’s yards, collecting the fee. Then one day Bob spotted a 1952 Ford for sale over in Stanton. It was just a stripped-down chassis, no bed, for five hundred dollars.
“If you don’t jump on it, I will,” Bob said, and Bill jumped on it.
Luckily for Bill, Davey Jones had a spare bed lying around his house, which they welded onto the frame. It held only two cubic yards of dirt, but after mounting several two-by-sixes on each side, it
was able to carry a few more. Now Bill was in business.
Around that time, Zelda graduated high school and married an Alabaman named Charles Odom, whom she’d met at church. Charlie worked in the grocery business and had recently taken a manager’s job at the air base commisary. Norma Lou had also married. Earlier that year, she fell for an airman out at the base named Bill Glaesman and demanded to wed at sixteen, which Opal—who’d done exactly the same thing—reluctantly allowed. As soon as Charlie Odom and Bill Glaesman joined the family, Bob had them driving dump trucks, too.
Together with the Jones gang, they hauled caliche and hot mix to build the feeder roads to Interstate 20, which would eventually divert traffic around Big Spring and drain the lifeblood right out of it. And during slow weeks, when public interest in cat-claw was lacking, Bob and Preston combed the pastures filling tow sacks with cow patties. Preston sold them door-to-door as fertilizer while Bob crawled behind in the truck, encouraging the shy boy to speak.
* * *
Bob bragged to anyone about Big Boy Blue, but once at home, it was clear who was the darling. Like his brother Bud, Bob had never showed affection toward his kids. But he was different with my father, who crawled up into his lap like a little kitten to be petted. And seeing this made Preston seethe.
But what upset Preston even more—as if it were a direct attack—was Bobby’s gift of smooth talk. The kid was a born bullshitter. Preston grew sick of hearing the adults recall the hilarious things Bobby would say, like the time he rode his tricycle up to Zelda’s Charlie, milk bottle tucked into his pocket, and said, “Give me a stick of gum and I’ll let ya be my pal.” Or after his first day of school when Opal asked, “So, did you learn anything today?” and Bobby shook his head and replied, “Nope. Teacher said she can’t teach me nothin’.”
