by Bryan Mealer
His funeral, held two days later, was the biggest the city had ever seen. The refinery closed until noon so workers could attend. Over a thousand men and women who’d given Tollett the best years of their lives packed St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, buried their faces, and wept. Joining them were oilmen from Fort Worth and Oklahoma, executives from New York and Chicago, along with so many others who’d visited the man at the top of the Petroleum Building and not walked away empty-handed. The church couldn’t hold them all. They crowded the aisles and spilled onto the sidewalk, where the line to pay respects to the last king of Big Spring stretched around the block.
As for my family, Tollett’s passing came as sad news, if nothing else. Aside from Bobby’s cousin Granville, who developed patents at the refinery, our two orbits had remained mostly independent. It would take another eight years for them to cross.
3
Bobby grows up … meets Ronnie and Marie, battles the Lord …
Back when Tollett was still perched on his throne, in December 1966, Bobby turned thirteen. That winter a growth spurt seized him unawares and left him long and skinny, with two gangly arms that nearly reached his knees. At the same time, Bob finally concluded the boy would never dirty his nails beneath a Ford, much less drive one. The least he could do was impart a work ethic.
That summer, Bobby began sacking groceries at the air base commissary, where Zelda’s Charlie was manager. From the start, he heeded his father’s words and performed his work with pride. He took special care not to make the sacks too heavy, as most of his customers were women who’d be unloading them alone. Because he worked for tips, he learned early to spot the officers’ wives and walk them to their cars, saying softly as they crossed the parking lot, “I’ll bet that’s a new dress you’re wearing, ma’am,” or “I was thinking how you remind me of the actress Audrey Hepburn.” The women would smile and reach into their purses for change, sending Bobby home with around thirty dollars a shift.
* * *
It was the summer of 1967, but the tumultuous events taking place around the country unfolded without Bobby’s knowledge. That July, as hippies protested Vietnam and paraded naked in the Haight-Ashbury, and as race riots raged in Newark, Detroit, Houston, and eight other American cities, Big Spring remained isolated by its geography, shielded by its sand and wind and locals bent on keeping the status quo. The 4-H Club held a “calf tour” through downtown and The Alamo, starring John Wayne, returned to the Jet Drive-In, back by popular demand. The Old Settlers held their forty-third reunion at the park to reminisce about the pioneer days and cook a batch of son-of-a-gun stew. And it rained, an honest-to-God soaker.
Aside from the Cosden engineers and air force officers who brought their modicum of high society, there was everyone else, who observed the rules of the frontier. For any longhair bold enough to express himself in the Summer of Love, there was a pickup full of cowboys ready to test his mettle.
While Big Spring didn’t experience the same kind of racial strife as the rest of the country—the air base had long brought minorities to town and the schools had been integrated since the mid-fifties—most blacks and Hispanics still kept to the north side of the T&P tracks. Except for the times when the world’s problems blindsided the town—like the dust and sand of the thirties and fifties, which came from above—things did not change. In fact, people still talked about the summer of 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King rallied the march on Washington. All week long passenger trains full of blacks rolled through Big Spring from points west. None of them ever stopped, yet judging from the reaction to so much dark skin through the windows, you’d think each car cradled an atom bomb.
* * *
While the Summer of Love passed without incident, it marked Bobby’s first awareness of girls. And much to his surprise, girls liked him, especially church girls. He was independent, which made him seem older, which suggested the possibility of mystery that girls reached for like a glimmer at the bottom of a pool. At fourteen he even got his own car, a used Galaxie 500 that he drove thanks to a hardship license his father had helped him get, more out of family tradition than anything.
Plus he could dress. With the money he earned at the commissary, in addition to mowing lawns, he shopped at the men’s store downtown and pieced together a mod wardrobe of mock turtlenecks and cardigans, straight-cut jeans, and tapered slacks. And his gift of florid BS, which so enraged his brother Preston, had developed into something resembling confidence.
The ensemble was fully flexed the following summer when a new preacher arrived at First Assembly. Brother Farmer had a daughter named Marie, with long dark hair and big brown eyes that took in her new town. Big Spring was seven times the size of Muleshoe, whose only calling card was a life-size fiberglass mule named Pete that stood at the north end of Main Street. Marie had aspirations, which amounted to being popular and beautiful and driven around in muscle cars. She also desired a boyfriend right away, and Bobby seemed good enough.
He fawned over Marie and took great pains to be the boyfriend he thought she wanted. He buried her in gifts and kitschy cards and kept his charm on overdrive. Marie gave him just enough in return: a brush of bare leg in church (while her father preached the sermon), a wet kiss at the end of a night, perhaps a note that suggested he was her only one. He’d never met anyone as pretty as the preacher’s daughter or anyone harder to please. He would work for her love.
Marie had two older brothers, both of them infamous. The oldest boy, who now lived elsewhere, had been kicked out of Southwestern Assemblies of God College in Waxahachie for humping a mannequin in his bed, a prank that had clearly gone wrong. The next oldest, Ronnie, lived at home and was far worse. It was rumored that Ronnie was the reason his parents had to leave Muleshoe, on account of some trouble he’d gotten into on graduation night. He and some buddies got liquored up and painted Pete the Mule neon green, then spent the night in jail for it. And not long after arriving in Big Spring, he drove back to Muleshoe for a football game and got arrested with a trunk full of beer. His parents were trying to enroll him at Waxahachie, hoping it might straighten him out. But until that happened, Ronnie was set loose on Big Spring, and right behind him was Bobby.
Bobby liked Ronnie even more than he liked his sister. For starters, Ronnie drove a two-tone Pontiac GTO. He was also handsome and sharply dressed, and girls paid attention. It frustrated Marie to no end when cheerleaders and class officers approached her and asked to hang out, then casually added, “So is your brother gonna be there?”
Ronnie dated several girls at a time. He filled his car with cheerleaders and drove to the top of Thrill Hill. Then he gunned the engine and flipped off his lights as they sailed over the rim into pure black, which encapsulated Ronnie’s theory of everything. There was also the night when Ronnie and a bunch of girls filed into a local steakhouse and Ronnie ordered half the menu: T-bones and chops, fish and Sunday ham, every kind of dessert. When it came time to leave, Ronnie spotted an old man and his wife sitting at a nearby table.
“Hal Johnson, is that you?” Ronnie said.
No, the man replied, but Ronnie kept at it, just to keep him talking. As he walked out the door, he told the waitress, “Dad says he’ll take the bill.”
Ronnie did anything for money. “Ten bucks says I won’t drink this,” he said once, holding a bottle of dish soap, then poured it down his throat. Years later up in Pampa, Ronnie consumed one hundred jalapeno peppers in fourteen minutes and nineteen seconds, and entered the Guinness Book of World Records. “My stomach felt like a small campfire,” he told a reporter.
* * *
Ronnie drank beer and smoked cigarettes, so Bobby did too. And when Ronnie walked into a grocery store and slipped a pack of Winstons into his coat, Bobby did the same. Filching cigarettes became routine and the burden of sin clung like sediment to his soul.
Lately, his relationship with God had gotten harder to maintain. It seemed that no matter how hard he tried, or how much he prayed, he could not follow th
e church’s myriad rules that guaranteed salvation. Breaking just one knocked you out of grace. He tried keeping a tally of his sins, recounting each one when he prayed at night asking God’s forgiveness. Aside from the beer and cigarettes and using foul language, there were the times when Marie took him to the brink of pleasure beneath the flicker of the Jet Drive-In, only to withhold her love. The sins kept mounting, and after a while Bobby concluded that he was too weak to stop them. I’m just not worthy, he told himself.
Grandma Cora could see right through the dirty window of his soul. She even called him out for going to the movies once, saying, “What if Jesus came back while you were in that place?” He knew the answer, for it haunted him: empty sidewalks, cars without drivers, the plague of locusts with the faces of men. The great eye of heaven closing over the earth like a scroll. They’d taught him all about the Rapture.
He strove for salvation. When the preacher invoked the old story that everyone knew, how Billy and Suzy slipped out of church one night to go dancing instead of hitting the altar, and how they crashed and died on the way home and went to hell—well, Bobby was right up front, getting straight with the Lord.
Bobby was weak, and the fact that Ronnie’s father was the pastor at First Assembly had worked like spiritual subterfuge. As soon as Bobby began to doubt his faith, Ronnie had appeared and led him into rebellion. Sinning with the preacher’s boy not only seemed admissible, but it was fun.
“Hey, you know why it’s a sin to screw while standing up?” Ronnie asked.
They were in his GTO, speeding home from a youth rally in Lamesa and drinking beers from the trunk.
“No, why?”
“It might lead to dancing.”
They flung their empties into the dark while Zappa screeched over the eight-track and faded into the plains. The gas flares out in the fields appeared like watchmen at their posts, on guard against those larger worldly fires. But their protection was not sufficient, and the problems of the world found their way past.
In April 1968, Preston was drafted for the war in Vietnam.
At the time, he and his wife, Linda, were living in a garage apartment on Twenty-third Street in Odessa. For two years, Preston had been trying to find his niche: first as a pipeliner, then a brief spell as a welder’s helper. For a while he operated a forklift unloading boxcars, but the position was only temporary. He was out looking for another job when Linda opened the mailbox and saw the letter from the Selective Service System. “Uncle Sam Wants You,” it said in big bold letters. She held it in her hand and wept.
The letter on the table, in addition to sending him off to fight someplace he could not picture in his mind, would also keep him unemployed. The government had classified him 1-A, fit for imminent service, rendering him untouchable. After he spent two weeks looking for a job, nobody would hire him.
His aunt Allie’s new husband, Tom Henson, worked on a well-service unit based out of Odessa. When Tom heard about Preston, he called his boss and got him on a crew that serviced pump jacks. For three months Preston drove around with Tom, saying little as the dust boiled up in the cab. His mind was nine thousand mile away, running through the dark jungles of his future.
4
Frances moves right …
For Frances, life was entering its third chapter: Scottsdale, children, domesticity. When the judge gave Tommy custody of his two girls, part of the deal was that Frances had to stay home and care for them. She’d accepted this deal mainly so they’d be safe, but she also enjoyed being a mother to them and her own two girls. It was all she could do to try and right the wrong that had been done to her as a child.
Taking care of four girls was real work, and Frances ran the household according to a tight schedule. Each morning she got the girls out of bed and into the bathroom to get dressed, then tried to cook a real breakfast of eggs and bacon and pancakes. Once the house was empty she did her exercises: thirty toe touches and a few simple calisthenics (into her nineties, she would still be able to do splits). She showered, put on makeup, and if she had to leave the house to run an errand, she put on a pair of heels and a cute dress and styled her hair just so. Later, she tackled the usual mountain of laundry before the girls returned for lunch (the school was just across the street). In the afternoons she helped with homework and projects, and once the supper plates were cleared, she bathed the girls, scrubbed their heads, and set their hair into curlers. This was the routine, and time flew past.
Her one rule was that the family ate breakfast together every morning, and mostly they did. Those days, Tommy was often on the road and didn’t come home until late. He and his salesmen were always out looking for new territory to claim, driving into towns such as Ajo and Eloy and going door-to-door, their customers mainly women like Frances who answered the bell at noon. If you’d asked her ten years ago what she’d be doing now, “the wife of a vacuum cleaner salesman” would be the absolute last thing she’d have told you. But Tommy loved it, and he made more money selling Kirbys than he ever had as a musician.
She had to admit she pined for the music now and then, the excitement of the life. Dancing all night until her legs ached, the long bus rides with the Texas Playboys, and how the songs seemed to change from town to town as if they were living things, independent of the players. Most of all, though, she missed how much they used to laugh. It was strange, really, to think of herself now with those people—Bob Wills and Billy Jack, Ernest Tubb and the others. She could still see Hank Williams shooting dice on the floor of the tour bus as it rolled through the Valley, along with the note he gave to her that night in San Jose. She hadn’t heard from Bob or Billy Jack in years. She still saw Hank Thompson whenever he toured through Phoenix, but that made Tommy jealous. Sometimes it felt as if the music had happened in a previous life and there was no way of going back. And what she had in this life was a responsibility to her girls and her husband.
In the early sixties, she found all the talk about women’s lib annoying. When writer Betty Friedan came out with The Feminine Mystique and got everyone in a hissy about the “problem that has no name,” it just set Frances off.
To her, staying home was part of the fifty-fifty deal. Tommy worked his butt off selling Kirbys and she kept the house, cared for the kids. God knows she didn’t want it the other way around. If being a homemaker was a woman’s role, then fine. She wasn’t having an existential crisis about it, and she certainly wasn’t whining like Friedan and these so-called feminists in the news.
Frances liked to listen to talk radio while she cleaned the lunch dishes and finished chores. At twelve fifteen she tuned into John Sage’s call-in show on KWBY, where the discussion was always politics. She’d always considered herself patriotic—she’d led the war bond drive at National Biscuit Company in San Francisco—but she’d never voted in an election and didn’t associate with any one party. But in the early fifties she became angry with President Harry Truman and the Democrats for bungling Korea, how they left it wide open for the communists to have their way, then let the United Nations tie our hands while our boys died by the thousands. The war became personal when it sucked in Tommy and Leamon and upended their lives.
So in 1952, when General Eisenhower, the most trusted man in America, declared in his campaign speech, “I shall go to Korea” and end the fiasco, Frances became a Republican. She’d veered to the right ever since, especially in the new decade, with America coming apart at the seams.
Around 1962, she started calling into John Sage’s show and picking fights. Not real fights, of course. Sage’s program worked like a public forum where people called in and debated one another. Frances liked skewering the liberals, and even Sage himself, a gadfly who relished the back and forth. Arguing was something Frances was good at—plus she found it fun to sit in her kitchen amid a pile of ironing and feel her heart race in battle.
She set her crosshairs on feminists and left-leaning Republicans. But what made her blood boil were the civil rights protesters and everyone else b
ad-mouthing the South. After Kennedy was killed and Johnson—a Texan, of all things—started pushing the Civil Rights Act and welfare for all, she couldn’t just sit in her house anymore and talk on the radio.
It’s not that she didn’t support rights for black people. They had a right to vote, be treated fairly, and not live in fear. But like many Americans, even Johnson himself, she was horrified by their marches and riots that began to play out in 1963 and 1964. The rioting was pure insubordination, she felt, a blade into the fabric of the country, and it was terrifying to watch it on television. What’s more, she hated the way people painted all Southerners as racists and bigots. These were hardworking folks, she would argue, most of whom had never done a thing in their lives to harm a person of color. And now their towns and neighborhoods were in chaos and their businesses ruined—all because outsiders came in and egged people on, outsiders whose own northern cities were no better to blacks than anywhere else.
Later, when LBJ rolled out his “war on poverty,” it struck her as nothing but a big pity party sponsored by the government. Poor me—it was the new cry of the republic. Never mind that as a young girl in Big Spring, she’d stood in that same welfare line herself, and that check had kept her family from starving.
In early 1964 she began attending meetings of the Scottsdale Republican Women and was surprised to find that many of them recognized her voice from the radio, or had read her letters to the newspaper. Like Frances, most of the ladies identified as conservatives, having distinguished themselves from the more centrist members of the party who, at the time, were in step behind New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom they regarded as an East Coast elitist. The conservatives were a wily faction, still very much on the margins. Their ranks comprised radical elements such as the old America First isolationists, John Birchers, and McCarthyites, in addition to a growing number of Republicans who feared the country was swinging liberal for good.
