Generations and Other True Stories (5 page)

Brother Bloys died at age seventy in 1917 and was buried in Fort Davis. Two years later, a tall granite monument to his memory was erected in Skillman Grove. It stands beside the tabernacle.

Andrew Prude led the singing at the first meeting in 1890. This year, his grandson, John Robert Prude, donated the new reading room where campers go to read the Bible and the newspapers or to use the telephone.

“I did this to honor Grandmother and Grandfather and Daddy,” Mr. Prude says. “With all the generations together, our family has accumulated three hundred years of perfect attendance at Bloys Camp Meeting. The place has been such a blessing to our family that I had to do something for those who made this heritage possible for me.”

“Heritage” and “tradition” come up often in camp-meeting conversations, for the meeting is woven so tightly into the fabric of many families' lives that to be absent is as unthinkable for them as it is for Estelle Bloys Fawcett.

“I love a story that my mother tells about my grandmother,” says Ann Espy Duncan, “that they were living in New Mexico, and my grandmother had to miss camp meeting. Mother says my grandmother would go down in the cellar at nine o'clock, at eleven o'clock, at three o'clock, and at eight o'clock and cry, because that's when the services were. I think that's the only camp meeting my mother has ever missed. My dad has
never
missed, and he's eighty-four.”

Despite her living for the past twenty-four years in Richardson, Texas, almost five hundred miles from Skillman Grove, Mrs. Duncan has never missed a meeting, either. Her husband, Jim, who like his wife grew up in a Davis Mountains ranching family, has missed only twice, while he was in the army. “He said Christmas and camp meeting time were the hardest times,” Mrs. Duncan says. “He knew exactly what was going on, but he couldn't be part of it.” Their daughters represent the fifth generation of Mrs. Duncan's family to make the pilgrimage. “I feel like everybody is family out here,” she says.

In Mrs. Duncan's case—and many others—almost everyone
is
family, for a lot of courting has been done at Bloys over the past century. “Besides the Espys and the Duncans, I'm kin to all the Evanses and all the Prudes,” Mrs. Duncan says. “My gosh. It's mind-boggling.”

Fritz Kahl's wife, Georgie Lee, whose grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. W.T. Jones, were among the original forty-seven worshipers in 1890, tries to count her relatives at this year's session:

“Let's see, there's about twenty over there,” she says, pointing to a neighboring cabin. “And then Jan and her boys are coming. That would be…There's twelve in our family here. Then Alice's family. There's Alice and Bryant and Michelle and Bud, and they have six kids, so that's thirty-two. Then there's Holly and Rick and their five. And there's Amy and Stormy. That's forty-one. Then there's Ruthie and Bryant and their two. That's forty-five. And there's Sargie Ruth and Rue, that's forty-seven…. Mamaw Jones was a Jones before she married a Jones. She had a brother, Ed Jones, that married a Means, and they have a daughter, Mary. And she usually brings a grandchild or two. That's all on the Jones side. Then on the Espy side…Oh, there are at least one hundred of my relatives here. We count the Pages as kinfolks, too. They're from Eldorado. Papaw Espy and Mrs. Page were cousins….”

Keeping in touch with kin is a big reason Gail Cinelli, one of Mr. and Mrs. Kahl's daughters, journeys from Yarmouth, Maine, for the meeting each year. “It's a good chance to see a lot of family and to stay connected with my roots,” she says, “and for my husband—who grew up in Detroit—and my children to get a sense of our heritage and our traditions and what life is like in West Texas.”

Children roam the campground in packs, roping each other, pitching washers, whittling, climbing trees and the mountain behind the camp. At night, their flashlights flicker among the oaks like lightning bugs. Their cries pierce the night until the 11:00 p.m. hush hour. “It's wonderful to be a kid out here,” Mrs. Cinelli says. “There's a special connection with cousins that happens at camp meeting that they'll have all their lives. That's why the kids want to come—to see their cousins and climb the mountain and go through the bat cave. I like to sit on the porch and talk, and watch the kids climb this tree that's been here forever and that I climbed when I was a kid.”

There are few long pauses in the between-services porch visiting at Bloys, few long gazes into distance. Just talk, talk, talk of families, of the events of the past year, and—as always in the ranch country—the weather, which is so dry this year that Limpia Creek has ceased to flow and lightning is setting fires in the mountains.

“Lord,” prays a rancher saying noontime grace at one of the cook camps, “we thank you for the rain you're going to give us.”

It's a faith to which Brother Bloys might have said, “Amen.”

August 1994

Herbert L. Kokernot, Jr., succeeded his father as the owner of the 06, one of the largest ranches in Jeff Davis and Brewster counties, and his family had—and still has—a number of financial interests elsewhere. Naturally, people trying to raise money for good causes often put the touch on him, and—if the cause was really a good one—he never turned them down. He was one of the most generous and most modest philanthropists in all of West Texas. It would be hard to overestimate the good that he did during his long life
.

But to the kids growing up in the Davis Mountains and the Big Bend during the 1940s and '50s, Mr. Kokernot's most important contribution was Kokernot Field and the baseball games that were played there
.

Herbert Kokernot, Satchel Paige, and Me

The first major league baseball games I saw were in, of all places, Alpine, a small, beautiful cowboy town tucked into the mountains of Far West Texas. Look at a map of Texas, over on the left-hand side, in that broad arm of the state that juts between Mexico and New Mexico. Now look at the part of that arm that seems to sag into Mexico. That's the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, and that's where you'll find Alpine. And you'll notice that there isn't much around Alpine for miles—a few tiny towns, a few roads connecting them. Nothing else but mountains and desert.

In the early 1950s, the region was much more isolated than it is now. The interstate highway system hadn't been built. There was no television because the video waves couldn't get over the mountains. KVLF, “The Voice of the Last Frontier,” was the only radio station. Alpine and the other little towns—Fort Davis, Marfa, Marathon, Presidio, Sanderson—resembled the towns in the Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies of the time. The people who lived in the towns dressed much like the people in those movies, but not as fancy.

In those days, the major leagues stopped just west of the Mississippi River. The Cardinals and the Browns of St. Louis were the westernmost big league teams. But we kids in the Big Bend, closer to the Mexican frontier than to any American city, considered them our “home boys.” Somewhere in the dim North, we knew, dwelt the White Sox and the Cubs, and eastward were the Reds. The other teams inhabited darkest Yankeeland, a country we could hardly imagine.

Still, we didn't feel as isolated as we were, for a big league game came to us every day via KVLF on the Liberty Baseball Network. Announcer Gordon McLendon, unbeknownst to us, wasn't even at the ballpark. He was in the basement of a hotel in Dallas, reading play-by-play accounts of the games off of a ticker tape and re-creating them. But his studio sound effects were so vivid and his voice was so filled with drama that his broadcasts were at least as exciting as those by Red Barber and Harry Carey and the other announcers who were really watching the games.

On the Liberty Baseball Network, the crack of the bat was as crisp as a rifle shot, the roar of the crowd was as overwhelming as a tidal wave, and Musial, Robinson, DiMaggio, and Feller stood as tall as McLendon's voice and our imaginations could make them—taller than any mortal stands now or ever will again.

Gordon McLendon made baseball fans out of us, way out there in the wilderness, and prepared us for Herbert Kokernot, who was more important to the kids of Far West Texas in the early ‘50s than Santa Claus could ever hope to be.

Mr. Kokernot was a rich rancher who loved baseball. But baseball teams were as scarce in our country as opera companies. So Mr. Kokernot assembled a bunch of high school coaches, college kids, gas pump jockeys, and ranch hands and organized a semiprofessional team. He named them the Alpine Cowboys and pitted them against any foe he could find—Air Force teams from Texas bases, the House of David (a touring team from an odd religious institution), and other community semipros such as the Big Lake Oilers. Anybody who had a bus and could find Alpine was on the schedule.

He built a baseball stadium in Alpine and named it Kokernot Field. It was modeled after Chicago's Wrigley Field, which was then the classiest park in the major leagues. Some of the major leaguers who later came there said Mr. Kokernot's field, with its high stone walls decorated with iron baseballs and his “06” cattle brand, was superior to any of the big-time arenas.

In those days, a lot of the major league teams held their spring training camps in California and Arizona. When their camps ended, they traveled back to the East by train. And every year, Mr. Kokernot somehow—perhaps by standing on the tracks and waving—would persuade a couple of the teams to stop in Alpine and play a game on his field.

Christmas was nothing compared to this. Schools from Odessa to near El Paso—two hundred miles from Alpine—would declare a holiday and fill their buses with boys and a few girls, each happily toting a dollar bill for pop and peanuts, and a fielder's glove to capture the official major league foul ball that was bound to fall into it. Our buses moved along the narrow highways like yellow insects following some inexplicable migratory urge, headed toward the biggest day of the year, always sunny, always noisy, always perfect.

Mr. Kokernot also made sure that the Cubs, the White Sox, the Browns, and the Pirates didn't dismiss our day as just another exhibition game in another tank town. He offered incentives—a hundred dollars to the pitchers for each man they struck out, fifty dollars to the fielders for each put-out, a thousand dollars for every home run. This was in the days before major leaguers became millionaires, and Mr. Kokernot's incentives were big money even to them. So they always played their best.

I witnessed three of those games. I have memories of them all. Nellie Fox of the Cubs, I remember, carried the biggest chaw of tobacco in his jaw that I had ever seen. I remember Ralph Kiner, the great home run hitter of the Pirates, muffing an easy fly in the outfield. It just bounced out of his glove and some of the people in the crowd booed. I thought they were edging close to blasphemy, booing a major leaguer.

The images of those games blend and change in my mind like the glass chips in a kaleidoscope. I don't recall the scores of any of them or who won, but it doesn't matter. What mattered then—and still matters to me now—is that a kid from one of the most isolated spots in North America saw some of his heroes up close, face to face, and they were real. Men who had been demigods, known to me only in the dramatic recitals of Gordon McLendon and as pictures in sports magazines, their glorious deeds performed far, far away in a land I had never seen, had come to Alpine and shown me that they were flesh and blood.

The greatest player of them all was Satchel Paige.

In 1951, the year I saw him, Paige was pitching for the St. Louis Browns, the worst team in the majors. They were pitiful, the perennial doormat of the American League. Since the Browns were so bad, their owner, Bill Veeck, who's generally considered the greatest showman in the history of baseball, was resorting to outlandish measures to attract fans to their games. They were written up in
The Sporting News
and the sports magazines, and we read about them even out where we were.

But I recall only two: Eddie Gaedel, the midget whom Veeck hired to lead off his batting order (he walked in his only plate appearance and was replaced by a pinch runner), and Satchel Paige.

Paige in 1951 was either forty-five or fifty-one years old, depending on which of two disputed birth dates is correct. But we didn't know that. We just knew he was old, very old, because Bill Veeck kept telling everybody that he was ancient, a Methuselah in a baseball uniform. And he was colorful.

For instance, Paige had given all his pitches nicknames. He threw a changeup that he called a “two-hump blooper,” and a medium fast ball named “Little Tom,” and a hard fast ball called “Long Tom,” and a pitch called the “hesitation pitch” that nobody else threw. And he always was saying wise, funny things relating to his age, such as his classic: “Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

The sportswriters loved him. Whenever Paige took the mound, Gordon McLendon always had a funny Satchel story or two to pass on to us, gathered around our radios. We kids came to regard him as a sort of wise, funny Uncle Remus of baseball, a clown that Bill Veeck had invented to put a few bodies into his empty ballpark.

We didn't know Paige was one of the greatest pitchers in the history of the game. We had never heard of the Negro Leagues. We didn't know about the decades that Paige had spent pitching for the Birmingham Black Barons, the Nashville Elite Giants, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Kansas City Monarchs, and a half-dozen other teams whose games were never re-created on the Liberty Baseball Network. We didn't know that he had toured with the great Dizzy Dean after the 1934 season and won four of the six games they pitched against each other. We didn't know that after Joe DiMaggio faced him in an exhibition game in 1935, Joltin' Joe had called him “the best I've ever faced, and the fastest.” We didn't know that after Jackie Robinson cracked the color line in 1945 and later became the first black man to play in the majors, Paige already had been a hidden star for almost twenty years.