Going Home to Arlington

by Gary Cartwright

February 1974

(Page 3 of 3)

"We'll keep some of the old flavor," he said, and we both laughed at his choice of words.

"NOT FARE WELL, BUT FARE forward, voyagers." Eliot wrote that. "The memory is a treacherous companion." I wrote that. I wrote it while winding along Randol Mill Road in the direction of the old Waggoner Ranch which of course wouldn't be there, but then Randol Mill Road used to be a buffalo trail, a corridor where the Tonkawas hunted, and now both the buffalo and the Tonkawas were gone, vanished without a trace. The Tonkawas were cannibals, not ritualistic cannibals, not psalm singers; no, they ate the flesh of rival tribes cooked in a stew with corn, red peppers, squash and potatoes. This was a practical arrangement and a concession to survival. If a member of a rival tribe wandered into Tonkawa territory, it would be like a pig coming up and knocking on your door when you were half out of your mind with hunger.

IWhere the Waggoners once ran cattle and a few thoroughbred horses there stands now the incredible Great Southwest Industrial District. It is projected that by 1980 the GSID will encompass 1000 companies employing more than 100,000 people. There is very little smoke-stack industry out here; it's mostly neat, modern office buildings, warehouses and computer banks.

Immediately to the east of GSID is the Six Flags entertainment complex which is expanding almost as rapidly as the industrial district. Already on the drawing board are plans for the Gold Coast, a 4¹/2-acre artificial lake with a wave-making machine which is supposed to create ideal surfing conditions, and The Way, a 100,000-square foot structure designed by Dallas stage designer Peter Wolf and described as a "multi-sensory journey through the time of Christ." They say a pilgrim will be able to walk with Jesus and feel the cobblestones, smell the flowers of Gethsemane, experience the hard, dry desert air, watch gathering storm clouds, and perhaps enjoy a Jesusburger while listening to the Sermon on the Mount.

The city of Arlington has a $35 million investment in the stadium (home of the Texas Rangers) and in Seven Seas, which I had assumed would be the world's snazziest aquarium. I was mistaken. There are roughly ten vending machines for every fish at Seven Seas. There are a few sea lions, some sharks, some doves, some flamingos and cranes, and the mandatory killer whale, but at its heart Seven Seas is merely a shopping mall for trinkets and junk food, a pleasant, brightly-painted place where the family can stroll among artificial rocks listening to a cafeteria organist play "Bye Bye, Blackbird." It is a strained exercise in plastic heritage.

Not all the tax payers are happy with Arlington's $35 million venture into the entertainment industry.

"IT'S AN OUTRAGE," SAYS TOM Sutherland, a professor of English at UTA. "The worst part is not the cost, it's the image, that never-never land where a person is not allowed to get his hands on the real thing. If the city wanted to do something, why didn't they build a place where a boy could catch a fish? Why didn't they build a place where you could ride a horse or even walk? There's no place left to walk, much less ride a horse.

"They're making it easier and easier to travel," says Frank Gilstrap, the young [31] lawyer son of UTA Athletic Director Chena Gilstrap, "but what good is it when the place you're going is identical to the place you left? A great example is the Waggoner Ranch. I mean it was real. Like downtown Arlington was real, an authentic turn-of-the-century Texas town. What do they do? They plow it under, replace it with plastic, and charge $6.50 to get in."

We were sitting in Tom Sutherland's beautifully cluttered living room, sipping whiskey and lamenting the loss of a sense of place. Earlier I had driven over to South Side school which sits abandoned now on a piece of land the owner is holding for speculation. Knee-high brown grass covered the playground where Jerry Harvey's gang fought and won the Great Rubbergun Wars of the Forties. A loose board nailed over the window of the elusive girls' rest room rattled in the wind. The twin concrete fountains sat where they had always sat, but no children came to drink.

So I had taken a hollow trip into nostalgia. It didn't bother me, because the feeling was no simple nightmare where you see yourself running in place and diminishing, not an unfulfilled longing for overturned ice cream wagons and redeeming Disney finishes. No, it was like tumbling outward into zero gravity, a feeling of never was. Though our family hadn't lived in Arlington for more than a decade and a half, they brought my old Granny and later my dad back here to bury them, feeling, I guess, that if there was such a place as home, this was it. My mom bought herself a burial plot, too, right next to dad. Damn if I will be buried in Arlington: I'd rather be buried in a mason jar. And yet when I walked back to my car, over ground packed by thousands of eager, busy feet, my own included, there was still something about it, something abiding; something that could not be talked to death.

"We're sophisticated people," I said. "We know that what is is, and what was can not be destroyed. But what is this lamenting?"

"We've caught ourselves in the limited interpretations of the evils of institutions," Tom Sutherland told me. "What we thought we wanted to tear down only needed revising. We thought we were in a political revolution, but it turned out to be technological. Men like Tommy Vandergriff confuse size, physical growth, with quality of life. There is a paradox about size. Size suffocates."

For no good reason I thought of Mr. Ewing (not his real name), a pious and self-righteous man, a pillar of the community, a deacon in the First Baptist Church. They caught him shacked up with a local car hop and in a few hours everyone in Arlington had heard of his indiscretion f1nd he was ruined. So he did the honorable thing; he killed himself. Could there ever be another Mr. Ewing in Arlington? No, even piety and self-righteousness could not exist in a vacuum. For that matter, could there ever be another Marshall Morton? Hell, if they didn't lock him up they would surely run him over.

A COLD NOVEMBER WIND HAD thrashed all color from the sky and an early dark was settling over Mesquite Street when I found the home of Duncan and EIsie Robinson, newly painted but right where it had always been.

Duncan has taught English and journalism at the college since he moved here in 1928. He was head of the English department for 16 years, and although they've semi-retired him he is still the senior member of the UTA faculty, a gentle, thoughtful, remarkably human man, a story teller who can live in the past and not mistake it.

"We're not all that aware of the changes," Elsie told me. "We still live in the old Arlington. Of course it has got to the point where we have to lock our doors now, but in many ways this is still a fine place to live. There are a lot of young people who care. Some good artists have moved here, and there are several galleries. The college is a better place than it was."

"We miss Mrs. Doug's Hamburger and Beer Emporium," Duncan smiled. " And the little personal service grocery stores like Kelly-Sawyer."

"Smokey Kelly's door was always open on Sunday morning," Elsie said. "In December he would always have a bowl of egg nog on the counter, and the old timers would come and hang around. Every single morning Smokey drove to Fort Worth and brought back the freshest meat and vegetables. If there was something you wanted, a special kind of cookies or blackberries or lettuce, he would drive all over Fort Worth until he found it."

We talked for a long time: about prize pigs at the State Fair; and the time some NTAC cadets dive bombed the bonfire at JTAC (John Tarleton Agricultural College, the arch-rival from Stephenville); and how JTAC cadets downed the NTAC plane with a piece of fire wood and took the enemy prisoner; and how they had never built a memorial to the many NTAC cadets killed in the Battle of the Bulge (including two former cadet colonels); and of Uncle Dutch King who drove an ice wagon and kept accounts in his head, got elected justice of the peace by claiming that Lee's surrender was illegal, and parked his ice wagon on the T&P tracks because, bygod, he'd been getting out of the way of that train all his life and it was time to reverse roles.

And of Dr. Jack Maxwell, the indomitable dentist who used to dance around his chair, singing, "I'm a ringtailed tooter from the farm"; and how I. T. Summerhill from the college came in one time and found Dr. Maxwell's dog Blackie in the chair getting his teeth cleaned; and how Dr. Maxwell lost a customer when he told Professor Summerhill: "Get out of here, big boy. This black dog is ahead of you." And of the books we had intended to write but hadn't yet found the time.

And on and on like that until it was time to go.

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