No Ordinary Joes (6 page)

He often ran home from school, mainly just to burn off some of his considerable energy. At 5 feet 7 inches and a wiry 130 pounds, he was hardly an imposing presence, but was very athletic, and not one to back down from a fight. In his freshman year at Lubbock High, he’d won the regional championship in the 880, traveling all the way to Guymon, Oklahoma, to win the finals, a victory he dismissed as no big deal. This year he also wanted to go out for the wrestling team.

He got good grades, too, mostly As and Bs. But the only class he really liked was band. He liked practicing his trombone, mostly playing compositions by John Philip Sousa or religious songs. But he understood the reality that earning money would most likely have to be a higher priority than sports and band practice. He knew his dad was supposed to send $8 a month in support but rarely did. Occasionally, his mom took in ironing, but she didn’t look for a steady job, partly because her brothers didn’t think women should work. To bring in money over the summer, Tim had mowed lawns, worked at an ice-skating rink, and caddied at Glen Lakes Country Club for his Uncle Ben.

If there was anyone Tim looked up to it was Uncle Ben, the successful founder of Trinity Universal Insurance. Ben had bought stock in a little start-up beverage company in Dallas called Dr. Pepper and watched his investment grow into a fortune. Tim loved riding with him in his shiny new car to the country club and spending holidays with him at his resort house on Lake Texahoma. It made him think that someday he too could be a wealthy insurance man. That was the dream.

Breathing hard when he arrived back at the apartment, he opened the door and stepped inside. With no air conditioner, it was hotter inside than out. His mom stood near an open window, a fan positioned to blow on her. She was ironing someone else’s clothes, sweat beading on her forehead. Tim studied her for a moment and knew what his decision had to be. The next day he found a job delivering the
Dallas Evening News
after school. There’d be no more track.

* * *

In the summer of 1941, not even Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak could distract Americans from the threat of war. German troops had occupied Paris, and Hitler had reneged on his nonaggression pact with Russia. In secret military discussions over command and strategy, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and their British counterparts concluded that Germany was the predominant member of the Axis powers, so if America entered the war, the Atlantic and Europe would be considered the decisive theaters. Any future American military effort would be concentrated there, and operations of U.S. forces in other theaters, such as the Pacific, would be secondary. Part of this reasoning was that Germany’s offensive capabilities were greater, and that its superior technology had the potential to develop a secret weapon that could destroy its enemies.

Tim wasn’t as concerned about the threat of war as he was about getting an occasional date and making money on his new job selling soda pop at the Wednesday night wrestling matches. On a good night he could make as much as 75 cents, not to mention getting to see legendary wrestlers such as Silent Hubert, Strangler Lewis, Danny McShane, and Sailor Tex Watkins. He knew the matches were fixed (he’d seen the capsules of blood in the dressing room), and yet he liked watching anyway. But it was the money that was important; he liked being able to help out his mom with the rent. She was anxious by nature, always expecting the worst, and he was the opposite, constantly assuring her that things would be okay. He considered it his duty to keep her spirits up.

In the fall of 1941, soon after Tim started his senior year at Sunset High, Byron came to visit from Lubbock. Despite having lived on opposite sides of the state for three years, they were still great friends. Byron liked not just Tim’s sense of humor and intrepid approach to life but also his compassion, like the way he treated Sidney Segal back in junior high. Sidney, a small, plump Jewish kid, was everyone’s favorite target, and he rarely made it down the hall without getting punched in the shoulder or being called “kike” or “Jew boy.” He attached himself to Tim, most likely because Tim was outgoing and friendly to everyone. Sidney soon became
his shadow, following him everywhere. Tim accepted the role of Sidney’s protector. He had taken to heart what he’d heard Reverend Truitt preach about a person’s true calling being “to lend a helping hand.” When Tim moved to Dallas, nobody was sadder to see him leave than Sidney.

Seeing Tim for the first time in a couple of years, Byron noticed a change. On the surface, Tim was still full of spunk, bragging about getting paddled in band class for acting out. But now he was less directed, more intense, a bit of a loose cannon. It was almost as if he’d grown a chip on his shoulder. Not that they talked about it. In Texas, circa 1941, best buddies didn’t talk about their feelings.

Byron talked about joining the Navy. The idea appealed to Tim, too. He was tired of working four jobs, and he reasoned that in the Navy he would make better money and could send most of it home to help his mom. If there was a war, he figured he’d be safer on a ship in the middle of the ocean than in a muddy foxhole.

The only possible wrinkle was getting his mother’s permission, since he was only seventeen. To his surprise, she gave it, figuring he was probably going to drop out of school anyway. The next day Tim walked across town to the recruiting depot, took his physical exam, and signed up. The day after that, he marched into the office at Sunset High and dropped out. The fact that he was still several months short of graduation didn’t bother him; he could finish after he had served his time. A steady income was more important.

On November 1, 1941, still not shaving daily, Tim kissed his tearful mother good-bye and boarded a train for boot camp in San Diego, California. On that same day, halfway across the world, six of the newest and largest Japanese aircraft carriers, carrying 423 combat planes, were assembling in Tankan Bay in the Kurile Islands, ready to set sail for Pearl Harbor.

A
t the age of two, Gordy Cox was playing behind his house in Wayne, Alberta, with his older brother, Larry. They started chasing one of the family’s new colts, and Gordy got too close. The colt kicked him, nailing him in the left eye, shattering the bone just below the eyebrow and knocking him cold. Larry ran to get their mother, Nellie, who scooped up Gordy, put him in the family’s buggy, and drove ten miles to the nearest doctor. But the doctor was gone, and the closest town was Drumheller, another ten miles over rough, inhospitable terrain, too treacherous for a horse and buggy and an unconscious child.

Now frantic, Nellie found two railroad men who volunteered to help. They led her to a flat-bedded railroad platform car powered by a pump handle. With Nellie cradling Gordy in her lap, the two men pumped all the way to Drumheller, then escorted them to the doctor, who stitched the wound and applied ice to relieve the swelling. Gordy remained in a coma for the next two days.

Eventually, the injury healed. But in the months and years to come, Gordy struggled with his vision, especially close up. Reading was difficult, and he was always behind in school. He flunked the first grade.

“Gordy’s a little slow,” his mom would explain. “He got kicked by a horse.”

* * *

Things always came tough for Gordy. Born at his grandparents’ remote farmhouse on the Canadian prairie on June 23, 1923, Gordy was two months old before his parents hitched up the horse and buggy and drove into town to register his birth. They put down the wrong date.

He was still an infant when they scraped together $100 for a down payment on a plot of farmland ten miles south of Wayne. The land seemed like a good buy—there was a spring and two lakes, a barn, and an old log structure to shelter the family’s dozen pigs, workhorses, cows, turkeys, and chickens during the frigid winters. The house was another matter: it had no electricity, refrigerator, or indoor plumbing. Nor were there any tractors or combines to do the farming; all the work was done with horses. And there was no market nearby. Everything was homegrown—bread, vegetables, meat. Milk came from their cows.

Gordy always tagged along behind Larry, the most daring of the four Cox brothers, the one who always rode his horse at a full gallop. His two younger brothers, Willie and Don, were talkative and adventuresome. Gordy was the only one who wasn’t a daredevil. He was shy and afraid of just about everything. When visitors came to the house, he hid under the dining room table. At school, he wouldn’t meet the teachers’ eyes, and on the playground he walked away from confrontations.

To get to school, three miles away, Gordy rode with Larry on a family horse, holding on for dear life as Larry did his best to scare him, flying through fields at full speed. Sometimes on the way home, Larry detoured by the Two Bar Ranch, daring Gordy to try riding one of the owner’s sheep. He told him that was how all the great rodeo cowboys at the Calgary Stampede had gotten started.

Eventually, Gordy asked for a horse of his own. “There’s a Depression on, son,” his father told him. “There’s no money.”

A few weeks later, a man stopped by the farm trying to sell a little white pony that was half Shetland. Gordy’s father offered the man ten bushels of oats in trade, and he accepted. Gordy named the horse Weasel because he liked watching weasels on the farm sneak up behind jackrabbits and
kill them. Weasel had previously been a workhorse, pulling coal cars in the mines; he had an ornery streak that made it tough on Gordy at first. Short-winded from his work in the mines, he had a bad habit of ducking sideways and sending Gordy flying whenever he got tired. After a while, Gordy figured out Weasel’s tricks and they got along fine. He rode him to school almost every day, stabling him in the barn the school kept for the kids’ horses. At lunch he came out and fed him half his sandwich. During the winter, he hitched him to a sleigh and rode across the snow-covered fields. In the spring, he rode him to the south slope of the hill behind the house. Weasel would graze on the grass, and Gordy would stretch out on his back in a field of crocuses and daydream, the clouds billowing across the sky.

At the age of ten, Gordy decided he had to have a violin. Never mind that he’d never played one, or that his parents had no money. As luck would have it, his mother spotted a contest in a magazine—anybody selling $10 worth of Gold Medal garden seed could win a new violin.

The odds were against him. First, he’d have to write away to get the seeds—no easy task for Gordy—and then he’d have to sell them. It was 1933, smack-dab in the middle of the Depression, and the neighbors who might be his customers were also struggling to get by. Not to mention that some of them lived twenty miles away, and the Coxes had no car. Still, his mother encouraged him to try.

Nellie Cox was the spiritual backbone of the family. Not that she was religious. Occasionally she read the Bible, but going to church was never part of the family routine. Besides, the nearest church was a dusty ten-mile ride away. Nellie preferred spending what little spare time she had reading to her four boys, often from the classics. She’d only completed the eighth grade, but everyone knew how smart she was. Whenever the teacher at the children’s school was sick, she stepped in to substitute. At home, she never stopped working—she baked bread three times a week, boiled water collected in rain barrels behind the house on the wood-fired stove for washing and baths, cleaned the family’s clothes on a scrub board, sewed clothes,
darned socks, canned vegetables, made butter, nursed wounds. And she did it all with no electricity, refrigeration, or running water. She loved to ride her horse, Dexter, and once every six months she hitched him up to the buggy to make a trip into Wayne to buy supplies.

With his mother’s help, Gordy sent away for a full order of seeds, and then he set out on Weasel to sell them. He was gone all day, traveling round-trip fifty miles. Not many people had the cash on hand to pay him. “I can come back,” he offered. Two weeks later, he rode back to collect. Some had the money, others didn’t. Steadily, he neared his goal.

If and when he earned his violin, he didn’t aspire to play in a symphony, or even a school orchestra. He just wanted to be able to accompany his mother, who loved to sing at family gatherings. Those were always special times—aunts, uncles, and cousins singing, playing the fiddle, reading poetry, dancing. It didn’t matter that Gordy had two left feet on the dance floor.

He was, however, good at getting his chores done around the farm. He and his brothers were not yet teenagers, but they were expected to shoulder their share of the workload. Gordy milked the cows morning and night, shoveled hay, carried water from the well to the house, and hauled wood.

It took three months, but he finally sold his full order of seeds and collected the money from the neighbors. He sent it all in, and a month later his shiny new violin arrived in the mail. Now all he had to do was learn to play it.

Gordy’s dad, Julian, nicknamed Shorty, was a slender 5 feet 7 inches. He was a man of few words but a hardworking farmer, out in the fields from dawn to dusk, fighting a losing battle against the Depression and falling wheat prices. A drought added to the struggle, wiping out his entire crop. He replanted it, but a wicked wind lifted the soil off the seed grains and they blew away. The wind blew the dust so hard that Nellie had to light lamps in the house in the middle of the day. Dirt blew in under the doors and through the window frames. She stuffed rags in the cracks, but still the
dust swirled inside. In winter snow blew into the house. Outside, snowdrifts piled so high around the barn and corral that Gordy rode Weasel right over the tops of the fences.

To provide food for his family, Julian took a job working in the Red Deer Coal Mine in Wayne, ten miles from the farm. He hoped it would be temporary, but in the meantime he moved the family into town. All six of them lived in a one-room shack with no electricity, running water, heat, or even an outhouse. Nellie hung a sheet across the room to divide the space and cooked atop a coal-fueled heating stove. It was Gordy’s job to walk the railroad tracks with a bucket every day and pick up lumps of coal that had fallen off the trains.