February 1974
Going Home to Arlington
I COULD ALREADY SMELL LILLARD'S hog farm.
At the crest of the hill we would be able to see the roof of Top O' the Hill Terrace, that mysterious, long abandoned casino with its iron gates, secret tunnels and disappearing decor. That's where we had our senior class party. On the opposite side of town on the edge of the old Waggoner spread would be the ruin of Arlington Downs, to my knowledge the only thoroughbred horse track in Texas history. Whatever else Arlington had going for it, it had geography.
The three of us were riding crowded in the cab of the pickup truck that actor Cliff Robertson had conned from Ford while he was freewheeling around North Texas scouting locations for the movie J. W. Coop, a film that Robertson would produce, direct, star in, and, finally, claim to have written; it was the story of a cowboy who returns home to Arlington after doing 15 years in the Big Rodeo at Huntsville. Bud Shrake, who co-wrote the script with me, was driving, I was in the middle, and Robertson was on the passenger side, talking a blue streak.
For the moment, however, I was directing, feeling that unique coming-home rush, watching the Cross Timbers flatten into black patches, indulging in a free stream of memories as the institutions of my youth flowed in review.
My plan was this: we'd run Death Crossing, then head out Davis Drive and turn back on South Cooper, past the University of Texas at Arlington (Arlington State, we called it, and before that North Texas Agricultural College and before that Grubbs Vocational. Arlington has been a college town since 1895.) Then we'd drive past the old high school, past the old Cooper mansion, east on Abram along the path of the long-dead Interurban trolley that once connected Fort Worth and Dallas, past the fine old homes deliberately constructed so that the gentry of those easier times could watch the Interurban from their front porches and the T&P Special from their back porches.
We'd hang a left on Center at the Western Auto. Then we would see it, what we drove all this way to see—the mineral well. It would be there in the exact center of Center and Main in downtown Arlington, a chalk-white Hansel and Gretel cottage buttressed by the heads of four lions, which were equipped with four drinking fountains used only when the college cadet corps was initiating freshmen. They dug the well in 1892 as a public water supply, but the water was so foul that even the horses refused to drink it.
When they used the water to dampen the dusty streets, a white crystal formed and that's how the city serendipitously discovered it had drilled into the same strata that put Mineral Wells on the resort map. Somehow, the mineral water industry never took off in Arlington; perhaps Mineral Wells had more than enough to supply world demands. No one in Arlington thought of the mineral well as a water supply, but rather as a landmark, a place, something that was there, and presumably would be there forever. It was a place where old men gathered and chewed tobacco and cussed Eleanor Roosevelt and played moon and watched the world go around.
The town—town meant downtown, a place that hadn't changed much since the turn of the century—the town radiated out from the mineral well like points of a compass:
Terry's Drug, where we sat on the Coke box under a sluggish overhead fan waiting for the Rainbow Girls to get out...Coulter's Drug with its fading photographs of Arlington Downs in its glory, and the fat Persian cat who hopped among the perfume bottles without incident...Mac's Cafe where Harold Saxton tried and failed to eat three dozen scrambled eggs...the bowling alley where I stacked pins for 10 cents a line...Purvis' Variety where the Guinea and his Friends made justice ring...the bank, the Texan, the Aggie, the gas company, Rockeyfel1er's Hamburgers, Albert's Pool Hall, the feed store...and past the feed store a grove of trees signifying what trees always signify, that sanity prevails. I remembered wide downtown streets where cars parked slant-in to the curbs or parallel in the middle. And I remembered high curbs where you could still see iron rings used to hitch horses.
"It's just up ahead," I told them. "Take a left at the Western Auto."
"What Western Auto?"
"There used to be a Western Auto...just about where that bulldozer is sitting. Never mind. I'll take you to city hall. Barney the horsetoothed janitor will fix us a mayonnaise sandwich and let us slide down the fire pole. Then we'll look up Marshall Morton and go to the movies."
"Who is Marshall Morton?" Robertson asked.
"Why the village idiot, of course. He's...I don't know, 35, 36, this beautiful, willing, shriveled little man who wears two cap guns and a hat and a badge. You can usually find him directing traffic around the mineral well or at the bus station helping people with their luggage or over at the college getting himself fondled by coeds. You ought to see his collection of girls' pictures. He's sort of the town mascot. He performs at halftime at all the football games, running from end zone to end zone firing his pistols."
"A highly respected member of the community, I take it," Shrake said.
"Precisely."
Later, when I thought back on it, I realized that Marshall Morton was dead and they had razed the mineral well years ago, 1952 in fact, a year after I graduated from high school. My mind had played me a trick. But now my eyes and my heart were playing tricks. My town wasn't there. You could still see the hollow shells of what had been the bank and drug stores and the pool hall, but they were gone, life was gone. Broken bricks and glass littered the wide sidewalks. And at the end of the street the grove of trees was a parking lot.
"Some location," Robertson said.
"What was that village idiot's name again?" Shrake asked.
"I don't know," I said. Most of what I know about the town I grew up in, the town where I lived from the first grade at South Side School through one year of junior college, I learned in November when I returned to do this story. Arlington started as a railroad and five cotton gins. By the time I moved there about 1940 the gins were tin ruins, their windows long broken out by other generations of boys with rocks. They say that old Hugh Smith shut down the last of those five gins rather than submit to new government regulations. If industry means payroll, the main industry in Arlington was the college. There was also an iron works and a can company where my old Granny worked as a stamp press operator. I can still see her walking down the railroad tracks with her wrinkled paper bag, glad to be working.
Not counting the college, there were three schools: South Side, North Side and Arlington High. There were teachers like Mrs. Crow, eternal guardian of the second grade, who checked every student's hair, teeth and fingernails every school day, summarily printing the names of those who failed to pass muster in The Pig Pen at the upper lefthand corner of the blackboard. There is no humiliation like sitting all day in the second grade looking at your name printed in Mrs. Crow's shaky hand next to the unmistakable form of a white pig.
That first year my dad operated a Firestone store in the same block as Terry's Drug and the gas company, but the war was coming, things were changing, and when his business partner, his own father, refused to put another $500 into the business they came and padlocked the door. My dad worked out the rest of his life in aircraft plants in Grand Prairie and Fort Worth. My mom once worked as a window dresser at Sanger's in Dallas, and what she remembers about Arlington is the window display at Purvis' Variety: a gigantic washtub full of pink panties.
But when you grew up in Arlington you did not question. Boundaries were places of honor. Stillness was a virtue. The social scale went from the Lions' Club to the Wednesday Noon Bridge Club. The pool hall, the domino parlor, Mrs. Doug's Cafe, Smokey Kelly's grocery, Mac's Cafe—those places were where the men and older boys hung out on Saturday; and on Sunday everybody went to one of the three Protestant churches situated within a few blocks of each other on the fringe of downtown. I guess the Baptist Church burning to the ground while the city council and the fire chief met across the street to map plans for Fire Prevention Week is about the most spectacular thing I ever saw in Arlington, rivaled only by watching Marshall Morton fire his cap guns at the screen of the old Aggie theatre and shout: "Watch out, Hoppy, he's behind you!"
