Going Home to Arlington

by Gary Cartwright

February 1974

(Page 2 of 3)

The only blacks you ever saw rode in wagons or pushed tamale carts or carried tubs of laundry on their heads. They lived not along the railroad tracks—the rich people lived along the railroad tracks—but in a small pocket of dirt streets and tarpaper shacks on the north side, a few blocks west of North Side School. Even now, with a population estimated at more than 110,000, there probably aren't 1500 blacks in Arlington. Jackie Ray Brown, my best friend in high school, now a newsman at Channel 5 in Fort Worth, recently reminded me that all us soda jerks at Terry's were under standing orders to serve blacks in cones, not dishes, or paper cups, not Coke glasses. There was no rule about blacks sitting at one of the three marbletop tables, but I never saw one sit down.

"It never occurred to me to not accept all those things," Jack Brown told me.

"Me neither. Where did they go to school?"

"I don't know to this day," he said. "But they sure as hell didn't go with us."

That's one thing I found out when I visited Arlington in November: what happened to all the black kids. They bused them to Fort Worth. Arlington did build a black grade school called Booker T. Washington, but they built it in 1954, the year that the Supreme Court determined that separate wasn't equal.

"Remember the Guinea?" Jack Brown asked. "My God, if we did that today we'd be arrested. Armed robbery, pure and simple. I don't care if they were toy guns." The Guinea, let it be mentioned, was a caped and masked avenger whose daring once prevented the hijacking of Purvis' Variety. The Guinea was also known to drop from tree limbs and wave down approaching vehicles with a pair of ladies panties. The Guinea was okay.

In our Arlington, Jack Brown's and mine, it could be said that if the Guinea didn't exist it would be necessary to create him. Nothing ever changed. The routine seemed hopelessly permanent. Oh, Hopalong Cassidy came to town one time to sell War Bonds (Marshall Morton fairly freaked him out), and there was that summer they ripped out the old Abram Street Interurban tracks to melt down for the war effort. They sold Savings Stamps in the hallways at South Side, and Kathleen Bradford always bought a dollar's worth. I always ordered one 10 cent stamp, but never got up enough nerve to ask my folks for a dime. Someone had to eat that 10 cent stamp. I hope it was Mrs. Crow.

"Up until we were sophomores in high school," Jack Brown reminded me, "the people you knew, the people you went to school with, were people you had always gone to school with."

"What happened?," I asked Jack Brown.

"I think it started in the late Forties, when Chance Vought moved from some place in Connecticut to Grand Prairie."

"Ah, yes," I said. "The Yankee invasion. Suddenly there were new people, people who talked funny, who acted funny, whose fat, overdressed mamas rode around town on motorscooters."

"And all their girls put out," Jackie laughed.

"Every blessed one of them! Or that's what we thought."

There were forces at work we never dreamed of. One was geography: Arlington was located in the dead center of what the advertising men now refer to as the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Another was Tommy Vandergriff, son of Hooker Vandergriff, the local Chevy dealer, far and away the wealthiest man in town. It was years before my dad quit damning Hooker Vandergriff for selling Firestone tires below dealer's cost. All the same my dad and mama both supported Hooker's son Tommy when he ran for mayor in 1951. Tommy was only 25 at the time. The Boy Mayor, they called him.

"I'm about as native as you can get in Arlington," Tommy Vandergriff is telling me. "Back in 1936 my dad had a Chevrolet franchise in CarroIIton in Dallas County. He was partners with my grandfather, an old blacksmith who ran out of horses to shoe in 1926 and decided to go into another form of transportation. In 1937, Dad decided that Arlington would some day be the center of what I now call the 100-Mile Long City, and that's how our family happened to move to Arlington."

Vandergriff is now in his 12th term as mayor of Arlington—there is a campaign sign at city hall that proclaims VANDERGRIFF FOREVER (Or So It Seems). Tommy is a one-man show, operating out of his paneled office at the Chevy shop, running the city out of his pocket, a generous, serious toybulldog of a man on a high energy trip. There is hardly a blade of grass or a patch of concrete in Arlington that does not bear the Vandergriff stamp. The hospital, the high school band hall, Lake Arlington, Seven Seas, even the General Motors assembly plant literally owe their existence to the Vandergriff family. It would not be stretching the story to say that Arlington owes its 1952 state football championship to Tommy Vandergriff, because he is the man who bailed a key segment of the team out of jail one Halloween night after the boys burned down Old Man Lehrer's shack while roasting a rabbit. The players worked off that debt the following summer at the Chevy shop. I don't know what ever happened to old man Lehrer. I guess he went somewhere else to die.

The thing you notice first about Tommy Vandergriff is his manner of speech—Tiffany's baritone. As a boy, he had a bad speech impediment so his dad sent him off to USC to study speech. Tommy's ambition was always to be a disk jockey, and that's what he was doing in Los Angeles when a happy accident turned him home again. Tommy and this other fellow were competing for a key job as a newscaster and much to Tommy's surprise the other fellow got the job. "The other fellow seemed to have so little talent," Tommy says. "If anyone like that could beat me out I figured I better come back to Texas and be the boss' son. The other fellow's name, by the way, was Chet Huntley." So now Tommy talks like, well, nearly like Chet Huntley.

Until Arlington opened its third (a fourth will open next year) high school, Tommy was always the keynote speaker at every pep rally and the public address announcer at all football games. He still does the P.A. for college games, but politics and geography no longer permit him a voice in partisan high school affairs. I call attention to his voice because it had a lot to do with selling Arlington. When I say Arlington has disappeared I mean my Arlington: Tommy Vandergriff talked it to death. I don't condemn him; but it is sad all the same.

Given its geography the miracle of Arlington was inevitable: what Tommy Vandergriff did was bring it about in the least amount of time with the highest degree of forethought. When GM decided to locate in Arlington in 1952, Vandergriff was already coordinating such diversified projects as the Great Southwest Industrial District (a 6000-acre industrial park where the Waggoner ranch used to be), the Fort Worth-Dallas Turnpike, Arlington Stadium, Lake Arlington, the new regional airport, not to mention utilities and city services sufficient to handle a population that would leap from 7500 to 44,000 to 111,000 in two decades.

"GM's decision to move here gave us our leg up," Vandergriff says. "It opened doors I couldn't get in before. Suddenly we were on the map. We had a calling card.

"Now I know that growth is a dirty word in some minds, but it doesn't have to be, not if it is planned properly. We have a lot of square miles [more than 90] in which to grow, more square miles than inside the San Francisco city limits. It's a matter pure and simple of controlling density.

"A balanced community is the key to being a great city. We don't want to be just an industrial community, although we have on our tax list one of the highest percentages of industrial-related firms of any city in Texas. We don't want to be just a tourist town, although with Six Flags, Seven Seas, the stadium and so forth we are one of the leading tourist centers in the whole nation. We don't want to be just a commercial center, although with two major shopping malls we have great drawing power. We don't want to be just a college town, although UTA is a great college. We don't want to be just a residential city, although that's our strongest suit. We want to be all these things. We must move forward on all fronts.

"Arlington today," he told me, "is a far better place to live than the town you and I grew up in. There sure weren't any doctors back then, were there? There was no hospital—now we have one of the finest medical centers in the country. The library you remember wasn't worthy of the name. Our new library would do justice to a city much larger than ours, and we already have three branch libraries and approval for a fourth. When you lived here there was only one park and hardly any recreational facilities. Now there are nearly 40 parks."

"Why did you guys tear down the old mineral well?" I asked suddenly.

"We're going to put it back," he said, smiling as though he had anticipated the question. "Right where it used to be. The old downtown area will be our new Civic Center Mall."

"Will the mineral well look the same as it did?"

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