Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  After the dust settles slowly downward, the grunts and groans subside, and the striped-shirted official sorts through the sprawling pile of bodies, an announcer on the public address system calls the play:

  “Gerdes carries for twelve. First down Wildcats!”

  A burst of applause and wild cheering comes from one side of the grandstand, while the opposite side hoots and boos. The teams huddle. They break with a clap of hands and form lines opposing each other. A lanky, freckle-faced quarterback, standing directly behind the center, calls the signal. One, two, hut! The pigskin snaps into his hands. Two quick steps backward. He hands the ball to one back who deftly switches it to Gerdes. Gerdes secures it, sprinting in a reverse sweep away from the flow of runners. The stiff-arm comes up, wham! A big boy in a grass-stained red jersey and worn leather helmet tumbles down. Clumps of sod and grass fly away from the runner’s cleats. He gallops. Another quick stiff-arm. Wham! Another big boy in a red jersey hits the ground. Then a collision of bodies near the sidelines raises a cloud of yellow dust. A shrill whistle pierces the crisp October air. Blood glistens. The announcer, truly excited now, calls the play:

  “Number 47 Alvin Gerdes for a spectacular carry of twenty-two yards! What speed! That boy’s faster than greased lightning! First down London Wildcats!”

  New London cheerleaders pipe in from the sidelines: “Cigarettes, cigarettes, rolled in cotton, the Gaston Red Devils sure are rotten!” 6

  The Wildcat band, resplendent in blue and gold caps and capes, rushes into a drum-and-bugle fight song to prep the team for the next play.

  Gaston’s fifty-member pep squad, outfitted in maroon gabardine belted jackets with three rows of gold braid on front and on each sleeve, join the Red Devil cheerleaders in an urgent chorus: “Locomotive, locomotive, steam, steam, steam! Pull together, pull together, team, team, team!” 7

  Cheers rise high into the big Texas sky and then fade as the dust settles once more and the ritual closes on another Friday afternoon. 8

  Gerdes gained local fame with game-winning scores in the closing seconds of critical matches. Many of the Wildcats’ fans felt the star likely could have made the difference in the bidistrict championship game, which London had lost to the Center Rough Riders in December.

  Gerdes, yelling encouragement to his teammates until his throat was hoarse, had been forced to watch the game from the bench, as the Wildcats and Rough Riders battled back and forth across a muddy gridiron. When it seemed London might score, Alvin jumped up and cheered, only to receive a painful reminder of why he wasn’t playing. Two weeks before, when pushing through the winning touchdown in the district championship game against the Gaston Red Devils, a Gaston defender plowed into Gerdes. Gerdes’s strength and momentum carried him into the end zone, but his shoulder began throbbing from a deep-tissue injury in his upper chest. Playing in pain, he finished the game, but it turned out to be his last of the season.9

  If Gerdes’s injury wasn’t enough to alert Texas football fans that boys playing the brutal sport needed thicker pads and headgear—helmets were made from cowhide and had no face protection—that alarm was sounded from another football field at Terrell, a town east of Dallas. On the same day Gerdes was injured, an eighteen-year-old member of the Crandall High School football team received a fatal head injury during a game against Terrell. Thomas Curtis Lowe, knocked unconscious, died one week later of a massive brain hemorrhage.10 Lowe’s death shocked the state and delivered to the students of New London an unwelcome lesson in their mortality.

  Nursing his shoulder, Alvin Gerdes watched his team lose the bidistrict championship to the Center Rough Riders, 6 to 0.11

  Gerdes’s parents didn’t have the money to send their children to college. John Gerdes, a German immigrant, had driven trucks for a living in the West Texas oil fields near Crane in the late 1920s and early 1930s; and his wife, Mary, a native Texan, took in laundry to help support the family.12 Their children—Ruby, the oldest, then Alvin and their sixteen-year-old brother Allen—were born in Texas. The family migrated to New London soon after the East Texas oil boom gained steam.

  Gerdes’s injury healed quickly. By January 1937 he had joined the basketball team and again displayed his athletic heroics to the cheers of his many local fans.13 An eighteen-year-old senior, he would graduate from high school in May, and college football scouts were already courting him. Alvin Gerdes was nearly certain he wanted to accept a football scholarship. The highlights of his life had occurred on the gridiron. Sometimes he replayed them from memory, scene by scene, a motion picture of himself and his teammates in action.

  Except when it rained and turned the contest into a muddy scrum, the fields were always a little dusty.

  After the pep rally, Reverend Jackson dropped by the superintendent’s office to let the secretary know that he was returning to the school in the afternoon. Jackson needed help on a mailing he was preparing, and several students volunteered to do some typing for the minister, using the project for practice on the keyboard. In case anybody was looking for him, Jackson said, he would be in the typing room from around 3:00 until school let out at 3:30 p.m.

  8

  Farmer’s Boy

  Like all his fifth-grade classmates that day, Bill Thompson was restless for school to be out for the weekend. Bill and his friends, in fact, already were counting down the days until summer vacation. Judging by this day’s warmth, winter had finally passed.1

  The past summer had been one of the best, though it was one of the hottest summers on record across the United States.2 Bill and his friends spent much of their free time swimming, splashing, and clowning in local streams. They discovered their ideal swimming hole on Caney Creek, a smooth stream about a mile from the farm where Bill and his family lived.

  As his buddies set off down the road raising a cloud of dust behind their bicycles, Bill would climb astride his pet calf, Tony, and prod him toward woods lining the creek. The born-and-bred country boy had faith his animal would get him to the water ahead of the others. The calf was better in bushy terrain, while the bikers had to stay on the road and a path through the woods. Bill named his calf Tony after the horse ridden by Tom Mix, the most popular hero in Western movies at the time.

  It was a summer rich in those qualities that make life thrilling when you are a boy and free for a season from the rigors and containment of a classroom. The landscape was a luscious green and smelled of honeysuckle and wildflowers. The sky was clear most days—so wide and blue the beauty and enormity of it just stopped your thoughts and washed away petty annoyances like stickers in the grass and mosquitoes buzzing near your ears. The days were sultry but filled with rare adventures for Bill and his best friends, Joe Busby, Leo Warren, and Randall Rodgers. The boys carried firecrackers and cherry bombs, gleaned from stockpiles left over from the Fourth of July, in the pockets of their jeans. They liked putting a firecracker inside a tin can and packing it into the sandy soil before lighting the fuse. The explosion shot the can, a wobbling, spinning rocket, high into the air.

  Bill had three sisters and a brother. Another brother, Oren, had died of diphtheria at age two, shortly before Bill was born. Alvin and Bonnie Thompson, his parents, felt harrowing grief over the loss of their child, but Bill’s arrival a few months later helped dispel some of the sorrow. The timing of his birth put him in a special category with his parents. He’d taken the place of a brother he never knew.

  His older sisters teased him about being pampered by his mom and dad. Nadine, the oldest, told Bill she had one hip lower than the other because she lugged him around so much as a baby.

  Bill was born on May 2, 1924, in the same farmhouse where his father had been born in 1893. Paint never touched the house’s exterior. It was roomy enough: living room, kitchen, dining room, and three bedrooms with two beds each where the children slept. A screened porch extended across the front of the house.

  Alvin Thompson inherited a hundred acres or so from his father, William Thompson, a prominent local poli
tician and farmer. William, known as Uncle Billy throughout the region, had migrated from his native Georgia to Texas after the Civil War, looking for fertile soil to till. He and his wife, Sarah, a Mississippian, acquired a spread of good cotton and corn land near a community called Jacobs in north-central Rusk County. Uncle Billy’s neighbors held his work ethic and judgment in such esteem that many encouraged him to run for the county board of commissioners. As a commissioner, his main job would be making sure the county’s dirt roads remained passable, a daunting task during rainy spells but vital for farming communities. The roads led to churches, stores, cotton gins, railroad stations, and the county courthouse in Henderson, and provided the essential links for transporting farm goods to market. In 1900, the year William Thompson was elected commissioner, all the roads in the county were just dirt lanes, widened, cleared, and smoothed enough to be useful. The roads were fine for mules pulling wagons, even when downpours turned them into sloppy bogs. When one of the few motorized vehicles out and about at that time sank to its axles in the mud, farmers made a little side money by using their mules to pull the cars out of the muck.

  Bill Thompson’s grandfather served as a commissioner until about 1915, when he retired from politics at sixty-eight and began parceling land among his six children. William “Uncle Billy” Thompson died in February 1922, two years before Bill was born. Even so, Bill grew up feeling his prominent grandfather’s presence. On a mantel in the Thompson home, William Thompson stared from a framed photograph taken of him when he was in his sixties; he looked distinguished and rather pensive with a silver, walrus-style mustache, white shirt, charcoal coat, and black bowtie. He came across as the kind of man who won more battles than he lost, yet a glint of tenderness showed in his bold eyes.

  Alvin Thompson enjoyed a few successful years farming his part of the land until the Depression hit in 1929. Fortunately, he got a job working in a new state program trying to eradicate the infamous Texas cattle tick that spread a deadly fever in livestock. As an enforcement officer for the program, he rode a horse to all the farms and ranches in the area to make sure neighbors and strangers alike were dipping their herds in a solution to kill the ticks. The job didn’t endear Alvin to those Texans who felt the government should stay out of their business, but the work paid.

  An amiable man, Alvin Thompson remained generally well liked in the community. He felt inclined to follow his father’s political instincts and decided to run for the commission post his father had held for fifteen years. He lost two attempts to win the post by slim margins. Though the defeats stung, his children remember no bitterness in the man.

  Alvin’s laid-back nature translated to leniency with his children. Their mother, more particular and structured, served as their disciplinarian. Conservative in values and liberal with a switch, she ran the house.

  Bonnie Thompson roused the family early each Sunday morning for services at the Baptist church in Grandview, between New London and Henderson. Alvin would cut the hair of whoever was waiting on the porch that morning—his skill with a pair of scissors meant there was always someone—while Bonnie dressed Bill in a shirt and tie or, when the weather turned cold, a manly little suit.

  The year he started first grade Bill gave his parents a terrible scare. He fell gravely ill with diphtheria, the same dreaded respiratory disease that had killed Oren Thompson. A doctor in Henderson and his mother at home gradually nursed him back to health, although he missed so much school he had to start first grade again the next year.

  After talk started about prospectors drilling for oil around the London community, Alvin Thompson put forth a plan to swap his sizable farm, farmhouse and all, for a seventeen-acre parcel with a shack on it near London. The owner thought it was a great trade and was ready to sign the papers before Alvin told Bonnie about the deal. She reacted angrily and said she wasn’t about to abandon the farm for a ramshackle home on a patch of dead clay. The two bickered, Bonnie’s conservatism versus Alvin’s speculation. Bonnie won. Sort of. By the end of that next year, the oil boom was on, and at one time there were seventeen productive wells on the scabby seventeen acres Alvin Thompson failed to buy.

  Alvin never mentioned it again, even after his job with the state ended and he found himself looking for work. He took a job selling cars at a new Oldsmobile dealership in Henderson. His friendly nature boosted his sales. As a perk, he got to drive a new Olds as a demonstrator. The family’s own car was put in storage in the barn, jacked up on blocks to keep the tires from rotting.

  There was a reminder in the house, however, of what might have been. Alvin Thompson had a souvenir he brought home after witnessing Dad Joiner’s well hit pay dirt. It was a Coca-Cola bottle filled with crude oil that shot up out of the ground when Daisy Bradford No. 3 first tapped the field that soon became known as the Black Giant.

  The Thompson family and several thousand other local residents went to the well site on the morning Joiner anticipated he would strike oil. Bill was six. His father drove their car across a wide, bumpy field to the drilling rig. Although it was early autumn, the land remained white with unpicked cotton. The farmer figured on quick riches from oil and just left the crop in the field. He and the landowners around him had never seen oil rig operations, with their churning machinery, towering derricks, and spinning drill stems carving through the black unknown beneath them. The lives they’d known paled in the derrick’s shadow; the farmwork they’d performed began to seem quaint, even naïve, to some of them. The stem bore ever deeper, and the anticipation welled into a festival to honor what might come. Around the derrick, the entrepreneurs had already begun work, setting up stands to sell hamburgers and cold drinks to the crowds who gathered daily to watch the crew of roughnecks.

  The boom arrived as a sound to Bill Thompson and the rest who stood on that piney knoll on October 3, 1930. A low rumble grew beneath them, its volume rising toward an explosive roar. The ground shook.

  9

  The Black Giant

  The crowd of onlookers eagerly waiting to see if Joiner’s gamble was finally going to pay off stood at nearly five thousand on the morning of October 3, 1930. Mud pumped up from the rig had been streaked with oil since early September.

  “Joiner was glassy-eyed with flatigue and strain,” according to one de-scription.1 He was seventy years old and in declining health.

  A teenager named Jim Miller, Daisy Bradford’s nephew, sold sandwiches and iced soft drinks from a makeshift stand in a clump of trees. Vendors, busy as opening day at the county fair, hawked popcorn, candy, and balloons. A couple of bootleggers meandered among the throng of people, peddling pint jars of white lightning. All morning and into the afternoon, spectators plodded toward the clearing on horses and in buggies, wagons, cars, and trucks that trailed clouds of yellow dust from every direction. The throng swelled to nearly ten thousand.2 Many in the crowd had some stake in the well.

  Joiner’s financing plan involved selling $25 certificates that gave the purchaser a miniscule interest in the project and a share of the syndicate that owned mineral rights on five hundred acres surrounding the well. Joiner peddled the certificates to everybody he met. For groceries, drilling supplies, and other needs, he signed scraps of paper that were pledged against “future production” at the well. “Dad [Joiner] issued so much scrip for supplies and services that storekeepers and customers alike circulated it as real money,” wrote oil-field historian Ruth Sheldon Knowles.3

  By this time, Joiner was so near to being flat broke that his drilling crew was burning brush and old tires to fuel the rig’s boiler. The odor of burning rubber wafted across the clearing. “The poorest of poor boy operations,” wrote historians Roger and Diana Olien. “His rig was a dilapidated affair composed of various secondhand parts and worn machinery.”4

  Late that afternoon, the prospectors lowered into the hole a “swabbing” device made of steel and rubber. The contraption created suction at the bottom. The crew brought up more sand and mud, but now it was streaked heav
ily with oil. Deep down, a gurgle vibrated up into the boards and pipes of the rig.

  “Douse the boiler!” the driller shouted.

  The crowd grew hushed for a moment as the ground began to tremble, and a faint rumble grew louder and louder until it became a deafening roar. Somebody shouted wildly, “Put out all the cigarettes!”

  A silky, black spout breached the wellhead and touched sunlight for the first time in sixty-five million years. It crashed skyward, bellowing, dwarfing the massive timbers of the derrick. Its colossal, unleashed pressure felt to Joiner like a freight train steaming past inches in front of his face. Trembling from the inside out as the earth quaked, Joiner looked up and could hardly believe his eyes. The thunderous fountain rose over the crown block at the top of the derrick and spread into a widening black canopy that came down as a sticky warm rain. One of the drilling crew, wild with excitement, drew his pistol and fired several shots into the sky, risking an explosion from the sparks, before bystanders wrested the gun from him.5 Rafe Kangerga, a Henderson businessman, tapped the shoulder of the woman next to him and politely inquired, “Could that be oil?”6

  The crowd erupted with joyous shouts and wild laughter, tears streaking down some of the faces, as Joiner’s grand scheme became an awesome reality.

  Men tossed their hats in the air. One man gleefully ran under the spray and took a shower. Children painted their faces with oil. Marshall Cox snapped a picture of his children, Perry Lee and Bobbie Kate, with the spouting derrick as a backdrop.7