The Time of My Life (3 page)

But the county races—sheriff, judge, clerk, and treasurer—those were the offices we understood and dealt with in the courthouse on the square. And competition for them was as intense and bitterly personal as only small-town politics can be, sometimes creat ing ill feeling that would divide the county into factions for years.

As the night drifted its unhurried way, the arrival of the ballot boxes from Limpia or the X Ranch or New Town or Valentine would be greeted with cheers and the honking of automobile horns and a surge of the crowd to the blackboard as the count was tallied beside the names of the candidates.

It didn't take long to count the votes. There were only three or four hundred of them. And if an election official didn't develop car trouble on the long mountain road from Valentine or the X, the voters could go to bed early, knowing who won; the winners could sleep the sweet sleep of the triumphant, and the losers would rail against the Fates or scheme toward another year.

Nobody outside the borders of Jeff Davis County knew or cared what happened there, and so far as I know, no candidate ever elected there has pursued a political career even as far as Austin. Certainly none has been mighty or counseled the mighty. But those cool summer evenings are still my mind's picture of democracy in action.

I would like to think that it is better now, with Cronkite and Severeid and Moyers and Brinkley and Chancellor and Reasoner and Walters and their legions feeding it to us blow-by-blow in our darkened rooms, telling us who won before the votes are counted. But even in Jeff Davis County nobody can lean through the car window and argue with them.

I think we have lost something in the trade.

November, 1976

His Town Is His Monument

I
N MY
MOST
VIVID
memory of Barry Scobee, he is scrambling up the steep slope of Dolores Mountain, outside Fort Davis, Texas, to take a panoramic picture of the town with the ancient camera he is cradling with such care.

I was only seventeen years old that day, but it never occurred to me that he was almost seventy. I would have been surprised if he had told me, for I had known him most of my life and he never seemed to change. The source of his youth and energy, I assumed, was inexhaustible.

During that climb, he was teaching me the rudimerits of journalism, as always. I had landed a job as a “stringer” correspondent for the
El Paso Times
, selling the news of Fort Davis for fifteen cents a column inch.

Although I thrilled at being paid to write—the first step in a career that I knew would lead eventually to the Pulitzer and the Nobel—my monthly paycheck seldom would have reached the two-figure range without Mr. Scobee. Not much that was news to Fort Davis was news to El Paso, you see. But Mr. Scobee taught me that not all the news happened yesterday or today.

On the day of my first visit to his small, cluttered office in the Jeff Davis County courthouse to ask his help, it had rained—a rare and joyous occurrence there. The scent of the water mingled with the scent of the pines outside his window and the musty odor of old newsprint in the little room to produce a perfume whose cool, lazy sweetness still lingers in my mind.

He began talking and pulling out yellowing scrap-books—stacks of them—full of a half-century of his own work as a writer, most of it as a “stringer” for various West Texas newspapers. The story of our small, out-of-the-way spot on the globe suddenly surrounded me—his voice and his clippings about the Union and Confederate soldiers who had served at the Old Fort, of the Indians they fought, of the land barons and cowboys and missionaries and teamsters and good and bad women who settled at that high, beautiful spot on the Overland Trail, and of their loves and struggles and deaths.

Many of the characters preserved in the five books and two thousand or more newspaper and magazine articles that he had written were still living. And he retraced his steps with me, introducing me to the past lives of early cattlemen J. W. Merrill and Uncle Billy Kingston, Indian fighter Anton Agerman, the Apache orphan Selso, Chisholm Trail drover Tom Granger, and many others whom I had known only as the town's old people. Their stories, which they were delighted to tell again, were news—or entertainment—in El Paso, and won me a place as a real
Times
re porter two weeks after I finished Fort Davis High School. The success of his “pupil,” as he called me, pleased Mr. Scobee.

“Look at it, Bryan,” he said on the crest of Dolores Mountain. He waved his arms across the limitless expanse of blue Davis Mountain peaks and flats and the trees and houses of the town. “Is there any place else to go but heaven?”

Not for him. He had settled in Fort Davis permanently in the 1920s, after a career as a farm hand, soldier, surveyor, lumberjack, hotel manager, merchant seaman, and, most recently, San Antonio news paperman.

He stayed because that was where he wanted to be. He served the town for decades as justice of the peace, county Democratic chairman, weatherman, secretary of the Masonic Lodge, unofficial one-man chamber of commerce, parole officer, chief lobbyist for the creation of the Davis Mountains State Park, McDonald Observatory, and Fort Davis National Historic Site, and, of course, chronicler of its past and present.

None of his jobs paid much money. Most didn't pay any. But he didn't care. “At all the funerals I've attended,” he used to say, “I never saw a coffin with saddlebags.”

His reward was in doing what he loved to do in the place where he loved to be, and in the love that the people of that place held for him. The fiftieth anniversary of his marriage was a community celebration. He was one of only six Americans to be named an honorary ranger by the National Park Service, be cause of his efforts to preserve and restore Old Fort Davis. His brother newspapermen referred to him in his later years as “Mr. Fort Davis,” a title he laughed off but secretly cherished. And in 1965 the State of Texas named a peak on the edge of his town Barry Scobee Mountain.

The man and the town were so much a part of each other that to think of one without the other is as impossible for me as imagining Mount Rushmore without its faces. But the
Alpine Avalanche
says that Barry Scobee died last month, and I'm trying to believe it.

He was only ninety-one years old—too short a life for such a man.

April, 1977

A Boy of Summer Grows Older

S
UMMER
IS
COMING
to the Metroplex Saturday, officially. At 3:05
P
.
M
. (O glorious hour! O bodacious day!) a man in blue in Arlington will call, “Play ball!” and the shiny new season will begin, officially.

I await that day, that hour, as Capistrano awaits the swallows. Is there order in the universe? Is God in His heaven? Is all—is anything—right with the world? Until 3:05
P
.
M
. Saturday, I live on faith alone. But when the first Ranger pitch is pitched—against the sublime New York Yankees, at that—the senses will replace the will, and I will know. Yes, there is summer. Yes, there are beer and peanuts. Yes, people still know the divinely ordained purpose of the sun. Rave of groundhogs and crocuses, if you will. The glory time arrives with baseball.

A man of forty summers can't embrace the season with the innocent joy he has known in the past, perhaps, for the shadow of his mortality looms in the background of his pleasure. The glory of the day re calls the glory of other first days of other seasons and sets him counting how long ago they were….

The first major league baseball games I saw were in, of all places, Alpine, Texas, a small, beautiful mountain town across broad deserts from even minor league cities. In those days the distances were even greater, for the teams we considered our “home boys” were the Cardinals and the Browns of Saint Louis, then the westernmost outpost of the major leagues. Somewhere in the dim north were the White Sox and the Cubs, we knew, and eastward were the Reds. The others inhabited darkest Yankeeland.

We weren't deprived. They all had come to us via the Liberty Baseball Network and the voice of a Dallas broadcaster named Gordon McLendon, who (unbeknownst to us) read play-by-play accounts of the games off a ticker tape and re-created them for the radio audience in the hinterlands with studio sound effects and a voice so filled with drama that Shakespeare would have applauded him, standing.

On the Liberty Baseball Network the crack of the bat was a rifle shot, the roar of the crowd was 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 had prepared us for Herbert Kokernot, who did more for kids growing up in West Texas in the early Fifties than Santa Claus ever could.

Mr. Kokernot is a rich rancher who loves baseball, and baseball teams were about as scarce in West Texas then—and again now, thanks to TV—as opera companies. So Mr. Kokernot assembled a bunch of high school coaches, college kids, gas pump jockeys, and ranch hands, organized a semiprofessional team out of them, named them the Alpine Cowboys, and pitted them against any foe he could find—Air Force teams from Lackland and Goodfellow, the House of David, other semipros such as the Big Lake Oilers, anybody who had a bus and could find Alpine.

Then he built himself a baseball stadium and named it Kokernot Field. It was modeled after Chicago's Wrigley Field, then the classiest park in the major leagues. Some major leaguers even said that Mr. Kokernot's field, with its high stone walls decorated with steel baseballs and the rancher's 06 cattle brand, was superior to any of the big-time arenas. And they knew, because they played there.

Baseball teams traveled by train then, and Mr. Kokernot somehow (maybe by standing on the track and waving) would persuade a couple of big-league teams to stop in Alpine on their way back east from their California spring training camps.

Christmas was nothing compared to it. Schools from Odessa almost to El Paso would declare a holiday and fill their buses with boys, each happily burdened with a dollar bill for pop and peanuts and a fielder's glove with which he expected to capture an official major-league foul ball. Our buses moved along the narrow highways like yellow insects caught in some inexplicable migratory urge, headed toward Al pine and 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, the Pirates didn't dismiss our day as just another exhibition game in another tank town. He offered incentives—one hundred dollars to the pitcher for each man he struck out, fifty dollars to the fielders for each put-out, a thousand dollars per home run. That was big money, even for major leaguers, in those days, and our heroes always gave their all.

I witnessed three of those games. Nellie Fox had the biggest chaw I've ever seen. Satchel Paige—an aging black man with twice the regulation number of joints and angles to his body and a windmill windup that seemed to consume whole minutes—struck out every man he faced in his two or three innings. An easy fly bounced out of Ralph Kiner's glove. The images blend and change in my memory like the glass chips in a kaleidoscope, and I don't remember who won any of them.

It doesn't matter. It was heaven, and the right people were there. And I'll drink a toast to Mr. McLendon, to Mr. Kokernot, to them all, on Saturday, when summer comes.

April, 1978

How It Was, Is, and Will Be

M
EXICANS
AND
TEXANS
have lived side by side for a long time, sometimes nastily, sometimes cordially. Texans used to be Mexicans, and now a lot of Mexicans are Texans, and the Rio Grande has always been the place where friends, relatives, and enemies from both sides get together to talk, drink beer, and fight.

Left alone, Mexicans and Texans have always been able to settle their own disputes and problems, some times over a little spilled blood, sometimes not. And they've always thought of their problems as family problems, meaning they're nobody else's business.

Lately, though, Mexicans and Texans have become a topic of conversation in Washington and other places Up North. That bothers me, because when Yankees start talking about the border, it usually means things are about to get gummed up.

I think the labor unions were the first to take up Mexicans as a topic of conversation this time. That was when Big Labor noticed it was competing with brown people with no union buttons for a lot of jobs Up North. Wetbacks—or “undocumented aliens” as they're called in government nicey-nice—had been working in Texas and the rest of the Southwest for a century, but it was when they went Up North that they became a National Problem.

They were a problem because they were Taking Jobs Away From Americans, it was said. But the people who employed them said no, they were taking jobs that Americans didn't want, and if the Mexicans didn't do them, nobody would. Besides, the employers said, the Mexicans delivered a day's work for a day's pay, and they liked that.

Texans had never seen Mexicans as much of a problem. The problem was the feds. Sometimes the feds would want the Mexicans to apply for a card which said it was okay with the government for Mexicans to work in Texas from time to time, for a little while. Some wetbacks would get the cards and become
braceros
, and others wouldn't bother with the cards and would remain wetbacks. Most of their employers didn't care whether they had cards or not.

Then the government decided it didn't want Mexicans working here anymore, so it took away the cards, believing this would keep the Mexicans in Mexico. But the Mexicans still needed jobs, and Texas still needed laborers, and both kept getting what they wanted.

Without the cards, though, the Mexicans were outlaws. They had to keep a sharp eye out for the Border Patrol. The people who employed them were not outlaws, since it wasn't illegal to hire a Mexican, but only illegal for a Mexican to have a job.