Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  This region, this hill, once served as the gateway to Texas, a pocket of the promised land, the untamed West. Through it passed Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, Thomas Jefferson Rusk and J. Pinckney Henderson, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, the dreamers and adventurers, the ambitious and daring, the restless, rambling horde, pioneers all. Many left signs tacked to their doors back home in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Maryland. Scrawled in large hand-printed letters, they read, “G.T.T.” (Gone to Texas).2

  The pioneers came in crude boats down the rivers of the North or in canoes up the winding passage of the Sabine River at the eastern boundary of Texas. They came over land in rattling wooden wagons trailing a cloud of thick yellow dust across the center of America. After crossing the river on ferry boats, they fanned out in every direction—cutting timber, clearing woods, plowing up the earth, building cabins, and founding small villages at each spot along the trail with a captivating view or reliable source of water or certain peculiarity that reminded them of the homes they left behind.

  They came into the wilderness belonging to Mexico, not intending to leave the American dream behind them on the Louisiana side of the Sabine, but determined to push it forward into a rich new frontier. Just a few short decades would lapse before a new flag of stars and stripes flew over the vast land of the new state of Texas.

  Heading north out of the old mission town of Nacogdoches, the pioneers’ road reaches hill country. It rises weakly up one side of a low ridge and then descends lazily through wooded ravines and vine-choked hollows. Along the highest points, vistas open on broad expanses of lowlands sweeping away toward a distant plateau. Here lies the upper extreme of a forested area known as the Big Thicket. The great hardwood forest begins to give way to patches of pine, the countryside rolling beneath the cover of mixed timber. In the spring, the whole land is shades of chartreuse flecked with purplish-pink redbud trees, stark white dogwoods, and lavender wisteria. In the summer, a deep, luscious green overcomes all. The drier fall brings dusty tints to the green. Autumn colors come late, the bright red and yellow briefly painting the hills before turning them russet brown. Even in winter, bands of dark green remain where the pines stand slender at the base of the hills or bunched in thick colonies along their summits.

  Students on the buses opened some of the windows, welcoming the springlike coda to what had been a harsh winter. In mid-January, a sleet storm swept across parts of Rusk County, including Overton and New London. Ice grew thick on the trees, bending the smallest until they touched the ground. In ramshackle homes not built for harsh winters, children huddled close to their fireplaces, their fronts burning, their backs freezing. The chill reached inside, as a string of twenty-one January days passed without a glimpse of the sun. On the 22nd day, the clouds split at noon, and the sun shone for scant minutes. On February 2, snow fell for about an hour.3

  Helen Smoot, a seventeen-year-old senior at New London, wrote a poem about the surprise snowfall. After the sky cleared as the sun went down, she watched the moon rise. On the ground outside her window the snow reflected “like a thousand tiny diamonds.”4

  Cold remained beyond its season, with sleet and snow in the Texas panhandle and near freezing temperatures in East Texas, until the warm spell on March 18. The good weather reminded the children of festivals to come. Each year since Pleasant Hill became a cemetery, the church grounds served as the location of a festive summer picnic that drew hundreds of people from all the nearby communities. The adults used the event to perform maintenance chores throughout the cemetery—plucking weeds from around headstones, mowing, raking up leaves and fallen tree branches, restoring order and sanctity to the grounds. The children played among the trees, picked wildflowers, frolicked across the cemetery with careful and respectful steps as their parents and other adults had instructed, though with a litheness of spirit that governs the physics of childhood on a bright summer day.

  As the last bus passed on the way to the New London school, dew still glistened on blades of grass in the cemetery. Although Pleasant Hill Cemetery had been in use for eighty-six years, relatively few graves were scattered about the generous portion of land that Captain Smith had donated. The landscape looked more like a green meadow than a graveyard.

  6

  American Dreams

  Lemmie Butler and Carroll Evans frequently said good morning from their adjacent porches and often chatted while strolling the short distance from their homes on Teachers’ Row to their jobs in the high school.

  The pair of teachers and their wives, Mary Butler and Mildred Evans, grew close during their years as next-door neighbors. The couples were both in their mid- to late twenties. Lemmie taught industrial arts and science in the school’s shop, sharing with students his fondness for tinkering, carpentry, and the beauty of precision. Whenever he left his house, whether to go to work or church or to run an errand, Butler carried with him his prized pocket watch. He cherished it, both as an intricate machine and a family heirloom.

  Carroll taught high school science. Mildred Evans was a teacher in the new grammar school located two hundred yards from the high school, on the downward side of a gentle slope.

  Lemmie typically went outside early to get a sense of the weather so he would know how to dress. He likely saw the Evanses’ little black dog curled up on the porch next door. All the homes along Teachers’ Row were modest dwellings—cracker-box houses that previously sat on oil leases around the area, shelter for roughnecks and their families. Such houses were built by the thousands during the early years of the boom. Later, many of them were sold at a bargain price to people willing to jack them up off their foundations, load them on trailers, and transport them to different locations. Moving buildings became a side industry to the oil boom.

  Most people tried their best to let nothing go to waste in those times. They didn’t have to look far beyond their own doorsteps to see the gaunt faces of those in desperate need.

  During the early part of the Great Depression—after the stock market crashed in 1929 and the jobless rate began to soar across the United States—the future understandably looked bleak to many Americans.

  A caseworker for the California State Unemployment Commission jotted notes from a conversation with an octogenarian who was seeking relief in 1932. The old man told the caseworker, “Years ago Horace Greeley made a statement, ‘Young man, go West and grow up with the country.’ Were he living today, he would make the statement, ‘Go West, young man, and drown yourself in the Pacific Ocean.’”1

  Between 1930 and 1932 hundreds of national banks failed and thousands of state banks went broke. Their failures erased futures, wiped out savings, and devastated farmers who depended on loans to seed their fields each spring. Lives tumbled. Americans bought far fewer electric appliances. Furniture sales plummeted. Many families gave up their telephones to cut expenses. Restaurant business and jewelry sales plunged. By early 1933 banks and mortgage companies were repossessing an estimated thousand homes a day. The suicide rate jumped to an all-time high.2

  When people on a sidewalk in New York City spotted a man outside a window high up on a skyscraper one day, a rumor spread quickly that another stockbroker was about to jump. A crowd of several thousand gathered before it came to light that the supposed jumper was actually a window washer.3

  When John Maynard Keynes was asked if there had ever been anything like the Depression, the renowned economist replied, “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted four hundred years.”4

  As the economy hit bottom, nearly one in four Americans couldn’t find a job. The unemployment rate soared even higher in some cities.

  At least twenty-nine Americans starved to death in 1933. In 1934 the official count of starvation deaths rose to 110 nationally; most of this number were children.5 Hunger accounted for substantially more deaths than reported, especially in Southern states. The cash crops that supported the farming communities of East Texas—like the hamlets where Carroll Evans’s
and Mildred Jones’s families lived—shriveled up well before the Depression hit Main Street USA. The boll weevil, cotton blight, and cattle tick fever made hard times a way of life for many Texans early in the twentieth century.

  Even so, it was as good a time as any to fall in love. Carroll and Mildred didn’t worry much about bankers and brokers running amuck on Wall Street. They invested in each other. Their romance was intoxicating and their dreams were vivid, built from scratch.

  Carroll Evans borrowed a hundred dollars to start college at Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville. Charlie Goodman, a family friend, took the money from his Bible and gave it to Carroll. The teenager from Spring Prairie, a village north of Houston, promised to repay the loan from his first teaching job.6

  Mildred was born and raised in Laneville, a hamlet twelve miles south of Henderson. As a little girl on her family’s plot, she churned butter, collected eggs from the hen house, and scrubbed the smoky globes of her home’s oil lamps. Her brother Luther, her best friend, died when he was twelve and she was ten. Mildred turned to education to try to fill the space he’d left.

  Laneville had three churches—Southern Baptist, Missionary Baptist, and Methodist—four little stores, a telephone office, and a cotton gin across the road from the school. The school was a two-story structure with a belfry. Mildred and other students in grades one through ten took turns pulling the rope that rang the bell for the start of classes, lunchtime, and dismissal.

  Carroll fell for Mildred the first time he saw her. She was standing with two other girls on the steps of a building at Sam Houston State Teachers College. “I picked out the middle-sized one to be my girl,” Carroll liked to quip with a wink toward Mildred.

  Their commonality stretched from their upbringing in rural parts of Texas to the future they both wanted as teachers. Both came from families with seven children. Carroll’s study of agriculture and science was leavened with a passion for sports, particularly football, which he wanted one day to coach. Mildred’s ambition, which arose when she was in elementary school, focused on teaching elementary-age children.

  Whereas Mildred was reserved, quiet, and introspective, her husband romped through each day like a broncobuster itching for his next adventure. From the time he was a teenager, Carroll’s sense of humor bordered on light-hearted havoc. Late one night he and a buddy returned to the Evanses’ home after dropping off their dates. Relatives visiting for a family reunion were sleeping on pallets throughout the house. Seizing the opportunity, Carroll and his friend grabbed a harness from the barn and ran through the house, slapping the harness and yelling, “Whoa! Whoa!” Nearly everyone in the house jumped up and dashed out into the night, screaming their lungs out. Neighbors came running to see if the house had caught fire.

  Grandma Evans, who was hard of hearing, came out last, waddling onto the porch. “Do some of the children have colic?” she ventured.

  Mildred and Carroll married on August 21, 1930, barely a year into the Depression. Mildred was eighteen and Carroll was twenty-one. In the fall of 1931 they landed jobs at a school in Pennington, Trinity County.

  They bought a used Buick and took a trip to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. The smoking old Buick later transported the young lovers all the way to Niagara Falls. Carroll had to jack up the car twelve times between Texas and New York to fix flat tires.7

  They later bought a new Chevrolet with a radio. Because they couldn’t afford the luxury of a radio at home, they would park the car outside their bedroom window with the radio playing. But the Depression deepened, and in 1932 the school in Pennington ran out of cash.

  The East Texas oil boom rescued them. “People were just about starved to death,” Mildred said. “If it hadn’t been for the oil fields some of them would have starved to death.”

  Carroll was hired in 1933 as a coach and teacher at New London High School. “Not only did he coach everything, but he drove a bus and would take all of the football boys home after practice,” Mildred said. “And not only that, they came over to the house every Saturday and washed their football uniforms in my washing machine.”

  The boys loved Carroll—and who wouldn’t, Mildred added—because he took a genuine interest in their lives. Even though he was grown, Carroll was no less of a ham. To prove to his students he was in top form, the coach let the strongest of them punch him in the stomach any time they felt a need to hit somebody. Carroll never flinched. And he still had tricks up his sleeve. Once he hid a wooden washboard beneath his shirt and dared one of his athletes to slam him in the stomach with a sledgehammer.

  “I’m not going to do that. I might hurt you,” the student said.

  “Go ahead,” the coach insisted.

  After he took a full swing, the boy’s face screwed into an alarmed grimace. It sounded as if he’d cracked every rib in the coach’s body.

  Carroll and Mildred bought their first home, a small two-room house at the edge of the campus, in New London.

  “New London was a wonderful place to be,” Mildred said.

  Boxhead and Troy Duran, the senior high principal, became fishing partners. The Shaws—Chesley and Leila—welcomed the new teachers, though Chesley and Boxhead Evans would clash over spending for the athletic program. Evans saw a school flush with cash, and opportunities for luxuries such as lights around the football field and twelve basketballs to allow more rapid drills. Shaw saw frivolities. More often than not, Evans won out.

  “Mrs. Shaw? A very retiring lady,” Mildred Evans recalled many years later. “Bess Truman reminded me of her. You know, Mr. Shaw was a little itty-bitty go-getter, like Harry Truman. Mrs. Shaw was a very retiring, quiet little woman. Well, not very little. She was kinda large.”

  Carroll and Mildred eventually saved enough money to invest in a side business with his father—the Tip-Top Tourist Court in Belton, Texas—to tap into the growing market of car travel and motor hotels. Keeping a dozen cabins in operable condition was more than his father could handle alone, so Carroll frequently traveled to Belton on weekends to help with upkeep.

  Carroll’s last class on this Thursday ended at 2:30. If all went smoothly today, he figured he could be ready to strike out for Belton before the sun went down.

  7

  Wildcats’ Pep Rally

  “Let us pray now,” Reverend Robert L. Jackson, pastor of the London Methodist Church, said in a clear voice that carried through a sound system out across the high school auditorium.

  Sunshine streamed from tall windows into the building. Students bowed their heads and listened, or at least appeared to, while the preacher asked the Maker to bless them and be their constant guide through this day. Jackson thanked the Almighty for the blessings already bestowed on the school, its students and teachers, the people and communities of East Texas, and the United States of America. The preacher was well known for his flowery, upbeat sermons. He was a zestful booster for all London Wildcat activities.

  Jackson frequently served as quasi-official school chaplain at assemblies in the auditorium and sporting events on the field and in the gym. If no other minister was appointed or volunteered to do an invocation or benediction, Jackson suddenly appeared on stage with a warm smile and lifted hand. This Thursday morning’s event was not a full assembly, but a rally of many of the students who were taking part in the interscholastic contests. Jackson and school officials wanted to get in a last-minute dose of inspiration.

  “London students, we are for you!” the preacher exclaimed, raising a fist for emphasis.1

  An American flag stood on the right side of the broad stage, and a Texas flag occupied the left. The colors in the flags—red, white, and blue in both Old Glory and the Lone Star banner—blazed against the majestic backdrop of the auditorium’s sapphire stage curtains.

  Superintendent Chesley Shaw and Junior High Principal Felton Waggoner spoke briefly, ramping up the students’ spirits. On this day, the chief focus must be preparing to excel in the contests, Shaw said. As a student at the old Lo
ndon School in the 1880s and 1890s, Shaw himself participated in the annual games, and the experience helped him succeed in life, he told them. The athletic events in those times were held in a wide bed of sand piled in the middle of the Henderson town square, around which men on horses and families in mule-drawn wagons cheered on contenders from their various schools.2 Nowadays, the contests were much more sophisticated.

  Six championship trophies, 80 pennants, and 150 ribbons awaited the top finishers of the games in Henderson, the county seat, always the site of the final events of the Interscholastic League competition. A ball tournament, tennis playoff, and one-act play contests had taken place Tuesday. Today’s matches included typing and shorthand. Athletic events and literary competitions were set for Friday and Saturday.3

  New London Senior High Principal Troy Duran traveled to Henderson that morning, and there he and Henderson High School Principal Earl Adams measured off the staging area on the football field for track and field events.

  Reverend Jackson gazed across the auditorium, into the faces of so many children. He would carry the memory of that moment for the rest of his life. “They saw no storm clouds ahead,” he later wrote.4

  Alvin Gerdes’s thoughts circled an arena of sports topics, from techniques he needed to perfect in tomorrow’s javelin throw—in practice, he had hurled the javelin farther than last year’s first-place finisher—to the exhilarating and increasingly likely possibility of going to college on an athletic scholarship.5 As long as he stayed healthy, Alvin could choose between several good schools and also whether to play football or baseball. During the past season as a halfback for the London Wildcats, Gerdes led his team to a district championship. Tall, trim, powerfully built, and quick as a jackrabbit, he was a threat to score on just about any play. He passed, kicked, and carried the ball with equal skill. It usually took more than one tackler to bring him down.