Generations and Other True Stories (27 page)

“It's the cotton,” says Sunny Martinez, who's taping a hand-lettered sign to the door of his 1954 Chevy pickup. “This is our way of celebrating the cotton harvest.”

“Vote for Sunny's Ugliest Truck,” his sign says. His truck
is
ugly. An unclassifiable green in color, not washed or waxed for forty years. “But it still runs beautiful,” he says.

Mr. Martinez and his truck are waiting in line, waiting their turn to join the parade. If noise and confusion are a gauge, half the ninety-five hundred residents of this West Texas town, it seems, will march down the street. But a big crowd is standing along the route down Broadway, too, waiting to cheer. “Isn't it a beautiful day?” Mr. Martinez says.

He has lived in Brownfield forty of his sixty years. “Brownfield is getting better and better,” he says. “Brownfield is better than any other town I have surveyed.”

Everything has turned out beautiful, it seems, for the Brownfield Harvest Festival and Terry County Fair, one of dozens of such festivals that Texans have thrown throughout October, celebrating the harvest of everything from peanuts in Aubrey and Whitesboro and Grapeland to yams in Gilmer and rice in Winnie and Katy and Bay City. In Cameron, they celebrate pumpkins. In Center, poultry.

In Brownfield and throughout the Texas South Plains—the largest agricultural area in one of the largest agricultural states—it's cotton that's celebrated, as Mr. Martinez says. Although the town received its name from an early settler, it could as easily have been named for the flat brown fields that surround it to the horizon and beyond, full of cotton ready for the picker. And grain sorghum. Also cattle. Corn. And, yes, peanuts. But mainly cotton, the region's big cash crop.

“The Fabulous Fifties” is the theme of this year's whoop-de-do, and most of the float-builders have come up with pretty much the same idea—the old malt shop with soda fountain and jukebox playing do-wop songs. On each, smiling, waving, is one of the candidates for harvest queen: Patricia Thomas, sponsored by the Optimist Club; Stacy Flores, by Amigos Travajando Unidos; Cara Burran, by the Noon Lions; Misty Day, by the Evening Lions; April Moore, by Rotary.

Interspersed among the floats are pickup loads of cheerleaders, trailers full of 4-H Clubbers, Girl Scouts, the trucks of the Brownfield Electric Department and the Fire Department, cop cars with sirens wailing, fancy motorcycles, the latest thing in cotton pickers, the district governor of the Lions, beautifully restored Fords and Chevys driven by members of the Nifty Fifties Car Club and the Lubbock Mustang Club, Sunny Martinez's ugly truck, a few horseback riders, and enough tractors for an Aggie funeral procession.

“Our festival is pretty much your typical homemade small-town affair,” says Rodney Keeton, president of the Chamber of Commerce. “Everybody in the community pitches in. Everybody comes. Everybody has a good time.”

The parade leads the crowd down to Coleman Park, just beyond the fringe of downtown, where all the civic and church groups of Brownfield have set up booths—nearly one hundred of them—to sell homemade food and soft drinks (no beer, Terry being a dry county), crafts, and the chance to play games and win prizes.

The booths surround the American Legion Amphitheater, where a stream of local singers—both solo and in groups—takes the stage throughout the day. Some are professional in a small way, some semipro, most thoroughly amateur, their earnestness compensating for lack of finesse.

“About two weeks before, people start calling and telling us they want to entertain,” says Ann Hearn, festival chairwoman and entertainment coordinator. “Everybody just likes to show off their talent. A lot of them don't get an opportunity to do that very often.”

Across the way and up the hill at the National Guard Armory, the Terry County Fair—a separate but related event—is under way.

“The Harvest Festival is one of the big fund-raisers every year for the service clubs and the Chamber of Commerce,” says Greg Dellinger, president of the Terry County Fair Association. “We tie the fair in with it. They started the fair in 1904, and when World War II came around in the ‘40s, they shut it down for a while, and it stayed shut down until about 1973. Then they started it up again, and it's been going strong ever since.”

In the huge, barnlike building, large tables are laden with more than three thousand entries in baking, canning, quilting, arts and crafts, floral arrangements, and antiques. Samples of all the winning crops of Terry County are on display: cotton, several kinds of beans, hay, pumpkins, walnuts, peanuts, pecans, peas, cantaloupes, cucumbers, honeydew melons, watermelons, okra, onions, jalapeno and bell peppers, tomatoes, turnips.

More than twelve hundred ribbons were awarded this year. “It's for everybody in the county,” Mr. Dellinger says. “We're an agricultural community, and this is a celebration of what we do. Every year, it seems to get bigger and bigger.”

Except for an annual five hundred dollar grant from the Terry County Commissioners Court, the fair is self-supporting. “It doesn't hurt that the staff sergeant in charge of this building happened to go to high school with my son,” Mr. Dellinger says.

Outside, the antique tractor pull—an event added to the fair just last year—is beginning. One by one, the old tractors—some of them nearly sixty years old, many as beautifully restored as the old Fords and Chevys in the parade—are hitched to a weighted sled. As the tractor pulls the sled, the huge weight slowly shifts forward, making the sled harder and harder to pull until the tractor can go no farther. The tractor in each class that pulls the sled farthest is the winner. The audience is almost entirely men and teen-age boys, clad in gimme caps and jeans, admiring the old machines as some men admire fine horses.

On the other side of the armory, at the pet show, the crowd is smaller, almost entirely women and small children.

“You never know how many pets will show up,” says Edreann Jones, one of the fair volunteers. “Sometimes we only have two. We had a dog and a turkey one year.”

This year, five dogs and a goat are entered. Every one is awarded a blue ribbon.

Peanut, the goat, wins “most original pet”; Princess, a Chihuahua, is “shiniest pet”; Coco, a scruffy puppy with “mutt” written all over him, wins “friendliest pet”; Noel, a toy dachshund, is “longest pet”; Daisy and Perky, toy poodles, are “fluffiest” and “curliest” pets respectively.

The Fowler children—Stephanie, Louis, and Jordan—smother Coco with hugs. Coco, as the “friendliest” pet should, turns into one big wag from nose to tail.

“He's two months old,” says Leslie, the Fowler mother. “We got him from the SPCA. He's going to be a fine dog.”

As the afternoon shadows lengthen, kids get cranky, mothers herd them home for naps, crafts exhibitors start packing their unsold wares, food booths run out of things. The Harvest Festival is winding down. But one last duty remains: The queen must be crowned.

Since April, when the civic clubs named them candidates, the five girls have looked forward to this moment. They've performed in a talent show. They've helped build, then ridden on, their floats. They and their families and sponsors have sold tickets relentlessly.

Now they've marched to the stage dressed in beautiful gowns and new hairdos, escorted by bathed and curried boyfriends. And the winner is…

Cara Burran, sponsored by the Noon Lions.

Miss Burran puts hands to face in the traditional I-can't-believe-it's-me way. Rodney Keeton places the crown on her head. Snapshot cameras flash. Camcorders turn. The other contestants continue smiling, some through tears.

“She worked so hard,” says Gail Burran, the queen's mother. “The club worked so hard. We worked on the float daily for a month. The whole town pulled together. That's how Brownfield is.”

October 1994

From time immemorial, people have believed that water can cure whatever ails you—if it smells and tastes foul enough and deals in a purgative way with your bowels. In recent times, the regulations of the Federal Food and Drug Administration have dampened the enthusiasm of this belief in this country, but it still has its adherents
.

In the past, Texas was blessed with a number of mineral water health spas, but none other as magnificent as Mineral Wells, which now stands as a monument to a wacky time in America's medical history
.

Crazy Water Days

This is the story as they still tell it around Mineral Wells:

It all started in 1877, when James Lynch sold his farm near Denison, hitched a team of oxen to his wagon, and headed west with his wife, Armanda, their nine kids, and fifty head of livestock. They were in search of a higher and drier clime because the whole family, the story goes, was feeling poorly. Tired, listless, feverish. Kind of malarial, you know. No spizerinctum at all. Armanda's rheumatism had been acting up something fierce. Sometimes she couldn't raise her hands to her head. And James was nigh as rheumatic as Armanda, stiff and creaky even for a man of his age, which was fifty, and way too skinny.

Leaving behind the dank, heavy air of the Red River bottoms seemed the thing to do. Go west to some unknown spot where the air was drier, where a body's joints could function with greater ease and the kids could grow up strong.

They wandered out beyond the Brazos River with no apparent destination in mind, turned back eastward when they heard rumors of Comanche raiders, had one ox collapse and die after a rough recrossing of the Brazos, had the other ox get struck by lightning while Mr. Lynch and his boys were skinning the first one, and wound up in a pretty little valley in the hills of Palo Pinto County on Christmas Eve.

They built a fire, cooked their Yuletide dinner, and decided they liked the place. The ground looked fertile. There was plenty of wood about. The scenery was nice. Besides, the rigors of their journey were debilitating the ailing Armanda and the remaining oxen. So for $240, Mr. Lynch bought eighty acres from the Franco-Texan Land Co., which owned a big swatch of that part of Texas, and settled down.

Trouble was, the Lynch place didn't have any water on it. Mr. Lynch and his boys dug down forty-one feet and still didn't find any, so they had to haul water from the Brazos, four miles away.

Then in July of 1880, a fellow named Johnny Adams was traveling through the country with a well-drilling outfit. Mr. Lynch traded him a yoke of oxen to drill a well. One of the Lynch boys, Charley, who was about eighteen at the time, claimed many years later that he was the first to draw a bucket of water from it.

“It tasted funny and everybody was afraid to drink much of it, because they thought it might be poison,” Charley would tell a historian. “But after sampling, we found it did not harm us. Mother was suffering from rheumatism, and after drinking the water for some time she was not bothered with it anymore.”

The Lynch children, following their mother's example, drank the water and perked up. And father James, reluctant at first, finally joined in the imbibitions, got rid of his rheumatism, and started putting on weight.

As news of the rejuvenated Lynch family spread across the countryside, neighbors began arriving to try the water for their own ailments. Within a month, strangers were showing up, too, and were more than willing to pay the nickel a quart that Mr. Lynch now was charging for the water.

“There are several hundred people there for the benefit of their health,” J.H. Baker of Palo Pinto wrote in his diary a few weeks after Charley raised the first bucket. Mr. Baker had sent his own wife and children to the well. In February 1881, they were still there, living in a tent, apparently growing healthier by the day. During one of his periodic visits with them Mr. Baker wrote, “It seems that the waters here are performing wonderful cures of cancer, neuralgia, nervousness, rheumatism, and other various ills that the human flesh is heir to.”

Soon a town was growing up. James Lynch had taken to calling himself “Judge” and would be its first mayor. The town would acquire a name: Mineral Wells.

“Selling water! Whoa! What a business it was!” says Ron Walker, the present owner of the Crazy Well and the Crazy Hotel in the city that embraces the word “crazy” with pride.

Uncle Billy Wiggins was the one who drilled the Crazy Well at what's now the corner of First avenue and Fourth street. That was in 1881. He was among the first of the entrepreneurs who flocked to Mineral Wells after the Lynches and bought land and drilled, hoping to strike miracle water. Uncle Billy did.

How his well got its name depends on whom you ask. The simplest version says a woman suffering with a “nervous breakdown” came to the well. She hung around for weeks, imbibing copious amounts of the elixir, resting under the shade trees. The pupils at the nearby school took to calling her the “crazy woman,” and when she finally departed, apparently whole and healthy again, Uncle Billy's well became known as the “Crazy Woman Well,” and then simply as the “Crazy Well.” It's the well that made Mineral Wells worldwide famous.

It's still there, under a steel plate that covers a square hole in the sidewalk near the Crazy Hotel. Asked nicely, its owner, Mr. Walker, will raise the plate and let you look at it. “There it is,” he says. “First it was just a hole in the ground, then they built a pavilion, then they built the first hotel, which burned down, and then they built this hotel, which is fireproof. And everything else just grew up around the water in this well. Bathing in it, drinking it, rubbing it.”

The “crazy woman” might have been “cured” by the substantial amount of lithium contained in the water of the Crazy Well. The chemical, which was found in several but not all the one hundred or so wells that eventually were drilled in Mineral Wells, is used even today to regulate the moods of manic-depressive patients.

Hundreds others who came to Mineral Wells in a sickly condition testified that they were cured of cancer, rheumatism, arthritis, neuritis, addictions to alcohol and cocaine and morphine, high and low blood pressure, goiter, St. Vitus' dance, gout, diabetes, Bright's disease, female complaints, various stomach disorders, dropsy, malaria, insomnia, and any number of other ailments, simply by drinking the water and bathing in it for periods of weeks or months. And, in that prescientific age of medicine, the doctors who sent their patients to “take the waters” were equally lavish in their praise.