Texas by James A. Michener
‘Do you know what that means? Four years of high school in some place far distant for each man, with three of them having one year beyond that. The oldest man was married, had two children and had played for an Oklahoma college. Now he had four more years with us. Ten years in all and still in high school.’
‘I never read that story,’ Rusk said, ‘and as you know, my father was crazy about Larkin football.’
‘There was good reason you didn’t read it. Someone warned your father about my story before I finished it, and he came to me one night: “Son, you’re not going to print that pack of lies, are you?” I showed him my documentation, and he brushed it aside: “Son, would you pee on your mother’s grave? To befoul Texas football is the same thing.” He grabbed my story and tore it up, my notes too. And next day the editor of the Larkin Defender called and said: “Mr. Rusk has recommended you highly for a job on our paper.” I’ve never left.’
He smiled at Ransom Rusk, then said: ‘Other sportswriters didn’t have the same high regard for the welfare of the game. During the year of our second championship, maybe the best high school team Texas ever produced, a cynical writer on a Dallas newspaper did a famous column in which he wrote: “My All-Texas high school team for this year is the Larkin Fighting Antelopes, because each player on that team comes from a different town in Texas and is the state’s best in his position.” I never stooped to cheap shots like that.
‘But certain fundamental facts must be remembered if you’re searching for the true Texas character. The population of Larkin in those days after the oil boom had retreated to its natural level, leaving just a little boost, thirty-six hundred. But when the Antelopes played at home in the golden years, forty-two hundred attended each game, and when they played at some nearby bitter rival like Ranger, Cisco, Breckenridge or Jacksboro, nineteen hundred of our thirty-six hundred would travel to the other town.
‘It was mass mania. Nothing in life was bigger than Friday football, and when lights made it possible to play at night, even more people could attend and the field became a kind of cathedral under the stars. Now it was Friday Night Football, as grand an invention as man has made, with the entire community meeting for spiritual warmth.
‘A storekeeper who wasn’t a hundred percent behind the team, his business would go bust. A bank would have to close shop if its manager wasn’t at every game, and putting up money on the side to pay for uniforms, and paying for training tables and other goodies. Every man in town had to root for the Antelopes, or else. And that still applies throughout this state.’
‘It sounds to me,’ said Miss Cobb, ‘like the birth of the macho image. A lot of grown men playing like boys and no women allowed.’
‘Ah, now there’s where you make your great mistake, ma’am! Because the genius of Texas football was that early on, it realized it must also involve the girls. So in Larkin we started the cheerleader tradition, and the drill team, and the rifle exhibition, and the baton twirlers, and the marchers in their fluffy uniforms. On a good Friday night now a big high school may have two hundred boys doing something, what with the squad and the band, but it’ll have three hundred pretty girls in one guise or another. So girls play almost as important a role as the boys. Otherwise, the spectacle might have lost its grip on the public.’
Like all Texas football coaches and sportswriters, Pepper aspired to be the perfect gentleman, and now he smiled at Miss Cobb: ‘You were right on one thing, though, ma’am. Football does carry a strong macho image. One of the reasons why Texans distrust Mexicans, or even despise them at times, they can’t play football. Quite pitiful, really. Put them on a horse, they can swagger. But the one game that matters, they can’t play.’
‘Aren’t you stressing the values rather strongly, Mr. Hatfield?’
‘Not at all! Texans identify honest values quickly. They can’t be fooled, not for long. That’s why seventy-eight percent of our high school administrators are ex-football coaches.’
‘That may account for the sad condition of Texas education,’ Miss Cobb said.
‘Wait a minute! Back up! School boards hire football coaches to be their administrators because they know that anyone connected with football has his head screwed on right. He understands the important priorities, and he isn’t going to be befuddled by poetry and algebra and all that. He knows that if he can get his students involved in a good football program, girls and boys alike, the other things will take care of themselves.’
Miss Cobb had a penetrating question: ‘I read that last year Texas colleges graduated five hundred football coaches and only two people qualified to teach calculus. Is that the balance you recommend?’
‘For many Texas boys high school football will be the biggest, noblest thing they’ll ever experience. Calculus teachers you can hire from those colleges in Massachusetts.’
He was especially ingenious in outlining the symbiotic relationship between oil and football: ‘Never underestimate the importance of oil. That’s where the extra money came from. Great teams like Breckenridge and Larkin and Ranger were fanatically supported by oilmen. Odessa Permian, too, in a way. You see, each stresses the big gamble. If you’re in oil, you wildcat and lose everything. If you’re that first Larkin team, you go up against Waco and lose eighty-three to nothing. You don’t give a damn. You come back with another try. Oilmen and football heroes were made for each other.
‘But there was another aspect, equally strong. An oil millionaire in a place like Larkin had damned little to spend his money on. No opera, no theater, no museums, no interest in books, and when you’ve had one Cadillac you’ve had them all. What was left? The high school football team. You cannot imagine how possessive the oilmen of Ranger and Breckenridge and Larkin became over their football teams. Most of them hadn’t gone to college, so they didn’t become agitated over SMU or A&M. The high school team was all they had. And they supported it—boy, did they support it! I know high school teams right now that have a head coach and ten assistants. Yes, a coach for tight ends, one for wide ends. Two coaches for interior linemen, offensive and defensive. Quarterback, running backs, linebacker, defensive backs, a coach for each. Special-teams coach, kicking coach. The four top Texas high school teams could lick the bottom fifty percent of college teams up north.’
The highlight of his comments came toward the end of the afternoon, when he said, with his eyes half closed: ‘I can see them now, those legions of immortal boys who got their lives started on the right track through Friday night football. They were enabled to go on to college, and some to big money in the pros, and there wasn’t a hophead or a drunk or a bum among them: Sammy Baugh, Davey O’Brien, Big John Kimbrough, Doak Walker, Don Meredith, Kyle Rote, Earl Campbell. And add the two who were famed only in high school, they may have been the best of the bunch —Boody Johnson of Waco, and Kenny Hall, the Sugar Land Express.’
His eyes misted over. He was an old man now, but he could recall each critical game he had attended, each golden boy whose exploits he had described as if they had been fighting not on the football fields of Texas but at the gates of Troy or on the plains of Megiddo.
‘Thank you, Mr. Hatfield,’ Miss Cobb said in closing. ‘We needed to be reminded of the values you represent. You see, I was sent north to school.’
‘Ma’am, you missed the heart of Texas.’
IN THE FOUR DECADES FOLLOWING THE LARKIN ANTELOPES’ LAST football championship, 1928-1968, that little oil town witnessed many changes, as did the state. In World War II, Texas fighting men performed with customary valor: one native son, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was leading the Allied armies to victory in Europe while another, Chester W. Nimitz, was doing the same with the fleet in the Pacific; and still another, Ira Eaker, was sending his Eighth Air Force planes to devastate Nazi military production. One tough little Texas G.I., Audie Murphy, was so eager to get into combat that he lied about his age, and won so many medals that he leaned forward when he walked.
Equally important was the emergence of Texas
This provincialism denied Texas the voice in national affairs to which it was entitled. But now a trio of ornery, capable, arm-twisting Democratic politicians came on the scene, to become three of the most capable public servants our nation has had. In 1931, Cactus Jack Garner became Speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington, and soon after, a powerful Vice-President. In 1940, Sam Rayburn became one of the most effective Speakers of the House, a job he held, with two short breaks, till his death in 1961. And tall, gregarious and able Lyndon Johnson became a congressman, later, majority leader of the Senate, then Vice-President and, finally, on 22 November 1963, in an airplane standing on Love Field in Dallas, the thirty-sixth President of the United States.
Coincident with these accomplishments in war and politics, Texas surged to the fore in another aspect of American life, which sometimes seemed to have equal importance. Motion pictures of striking originality and power began to depict life in Texas in such a compelling way that the grandeur and the power of the state had to be recognized. Audiences by the millions swarmed to see movies like Giant, The Alamo, and the various John Wayne cowboy epics, especially the excellent Red River. Other good westerns involved Texas in no specific way but did help keep alive the legend: Cimarron (1931), Stagecoach (1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and the film of his which Wayne preferred above all others, The Searchers (1956). Even in faraway Italy, the ‘spaghetti western’ created an alluring vision of the West, and Texas reaped the benefit. The state was seen as heroic, colorful and authentic. Its men were tall, its women beautiful, its Longhorns compelling. Even its Mexican villains displayed uniqueness, if not charm, and each year the legend grew.
Of course, there were disadvantages. Many thoughtful people in other parts of the nation began to resent this emphasis on Texas and saw the state as a haven for broken-down cowboys, rustlers and prairie misfits, men who treated Indians, Mexicans and women with contempt. Jokes about Texas braggadocio became popular, one of the most imaginative concerning the Connecticut river expert who was hired by Dallas to determine whether the Trinity River could be deepened so as to give the city shipping access to the sea. ‘Very simple,’ the engineer said. ‘Dig a canal from Dallas to the Gulf, and if you characters can suck half as hard as you blow, you’ll have a river here in no time.’
Thousands of Americans developed a love-hate relationship with the state, with the love predominating, and starting in the mid-sixties, citizens in what Texans called ‘the less favored parts of our nation’ began to drift toward Texas, attracted by the myth, the availability of good jobs, the pleasant winter climate and the relaxed pattern of life. Men wrote to friends back in Minnesota: ‘Down here I can wear the same outfit winter and summer.’
To appreciate the various ways in which the magnetic attraction of Texas could be exerted, it is necessary to understand the related cases of Ben Talbot and Eloy Múzquiz. Neither was born in Texas, yet each came to treasure it as a home he did not wish to leave.
Talbot was tall and thin, a reticent man born in northern Vermont close to the Canadian border, and since his father had served for many years as a U. S. Border Patrol officer checking the movement of Canadians south from Montreal, he, too, decided to apply to the service after graduating from the University of Vermont in 1944. Instead, the son was tapped by Selective Service for the army and sent to the South Pacific, where on steaming Bougainville up the Slot from Guadalcanal he vowed that if he got out alive, he would never again live in a hot climate—‘Vermont for me!’—and on sweltering nights, lying beneath his mosquito net bathed in sweat, he thought of his father’s cold assignment along the Canadian border.
When he returned to the States he found that his military duty in a hardship post had given him so many credits that the Immigration and Naturalization Service was almost forced to accept him, but after he had been sworn in, with his father watching in approval, Talbot Senior told his son: ‘Ben, work hard in the Spanish school, master the language, and serve your obligatory stretch along the Mexican border. We all had to learn Spanish and do our tour down there. But do everything you can, pull every trick in the book to get assigned back here for your permanent duty.’
‘I intend to.’
The Spanish teacher in the academy despaired of ever teaching Talbot a word of that mellifluous language, for his flat Vermont drawl caused him to pronounce every word in a high, nasal wail, with equal emphasis on each syllable; mañana came out mah-nah-nah—no tilde—as if each group of letters was personally repugnant, and he pronounced longer words like fortaleza as if the syllables were a chain of connected boxcars bumping slowly down a track.
‘Candidate Talbot,’ the instructor pleaded, ‘don’t you ever sing words, when your heart is joyous?’ and he replied: ‘I sing hymns. Words I speak.’ But because of his studious mastery of vocabulary and his skill in putting those words together in proper sentences, his teacher had to concede: ‘Talbot, you speak Spanish perfectly, but it isn’t Spanish.’
‘They’ll understand,’ Ben countered, and when he reached his indoctrination assignment at El Paso and began apprehending illegal Mexican aliens trying to sneak into the country, the wetbacks did understand when he interrogated them, for he spoke very slowly, like a machine running down, and enunciated each of his Vermont-style syllables clearly. Older officers would listen in amazement to the sounds which came from his lips and watch with sly grins as the Mexican listening to them gazed in wonder. But slowly, after about his third question, a light would suffuse the Mexican face as the alien realized that the tall man with the severe frown was speaking Spanish. Often the captive would gush out answers in relief at having solved the mystery, so that Talbot proved quite effective. At the end of his training his superior reported: ‘Ben looks so stiff and forbidding and speaks such horrible Spanish that he starts by terrifying the men he interrogates. But when they see the sympathy in his eyes and listen to the slow, careful way he pronounces each syllable, I think they feel sorry for him. At any rate, he gets better results than most.’
His avowed plan of doing well along the border so that he might return to the more pleasant duty along the Canadian frontier received its first slight tremor when he was assigned to the duty station at Las Cruces, up the line in New Mexico. He had been there only a few weeks when he realized that he wanted rather strongly to be back in El Paso: That’s where the real work goes on. He was not homesick for the place, and certainly not for the food or the heat, but he did miss the teeming vitality of that bilingual town, with Ciudad Juárez across the river, and he must have conveyed his feelings to his superiors, because after six months of chasing illegals through the brush of New Mexico he was reassigned to El Paso, and there began the long years of his service.
His childhood days in the Vermont woods had enabled him to master the tricks of tracking, and to him the traces of all animals, including man, told a clear story. He could look at a dry riverbank around El Paso and determine how many Mexicans had made it across during the night, their approximate ages by the patterns of their shoes, whether he was seeing the signs of a group or
He never abused a Mexican he captured. Calling them all Juan, which he pronounced as if it were Jew-wahn, he talked with them patiently, offered them coffee or a drink of cold water and shared his sandwiches, explaining in his oxlike Spanish that they would not be mistreated but that they must be sent back home. Of course, once they were back across the Rio Grande, they would probably turn around and come north again. That was understood by all.
Nothing deterred them, not the clever detective work of Border Patrol Officer Talbot, nor the formal checkpoints along the highways, nor the surveillance airplanes that flew overhead, nor the dangers involved in running across a rocky yard and jumping onto a moving Southern Pacific freight train headed east. They came alone, in pairs, in well-organized groups of eighteen or twenty and in casual hundreds. They were part of that endless chain of Mexican peasants who left their homeland in search of employment in a more affluent country. How many crossed the river illegally? Thousands upon thousands. How many were caught? Perhaps only ten or fifteen percent. But if dedicated men like Ben Talbot had not been working diligently since the Border Patrol was first established in 1924, the flood northward would have been three times as great.
In early 1960, Talbot sent a well-reasoned report to his superiors stating that in his opinion more than two million illegal Mexican aliens had crept into the United States in the preceding decade and that there appeared to be no diminution of the flood: ‘The pressures which send them north—poverty, the cruel indifference of their government, the mal-distribution of wealth in a wealthy country, and the awful pressures of population growth which both church and government encourage—show no signs of being brought under control, so we must expect an unending continuation of the present inflow and must begin to study what it will mean when the southern part of Texas becomes a de facto Hispanic enclave.’ He ended his report with two revealing paragraphs: