Who’s Number One in the Permian Basin?
For generations Midland and Odessa have been going at it out in West Texas. Now, at last, someone has noticed.
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It was my misfortune as a teenager in the mid-1940s to live in Midland while harboring Odessa preferences in my soul, my character, and my heritage. I loved the wild clashes and random clamors of “Sintown”—Odessa’s aggressive definition of itself—while despising Midland’s controlled bloodless efficiency and organized civic bustle: what sensitive poor boy truly believes he belongs in a communal entity advertising itself as “Headquarters City of the Vast Permian Basin Empire”? Odessa might break my jaw, sure, but Midland, with its socio-economic snobberies, automatic exclusions, and reflexive acquisitive instincts, seemed a threat to break my spirit. I thought it a pretentious place, one excessively concerned with form and appearance, one full of fake camaraderie and gimlet-eyed hustlers bent on getting the buck. When I read Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, I was astonished to learn that its self-winding promoters and glad-handing exploiters had done their business in Minnesota rather than Midland.
One of the grand ironies reposed in the barbs of the Odessa High School Bronchos when they administered our annual Thanksgiving Day gridiron thumpings; in so many words they taunted us as rich boys, spoiled sissybritches, and gluttons of privilege—never mind that more than half of Midland’s Bulldogs were South Side have-nots whose fathers roughnecked in the oil patch or night-watched and maybe broke wind at the table. Our civic boosters having done their jobs too well, the Odessa kids took us for Highland Park swells. The image was there, you see, and our proletariat adversaries—whose town, after all, had been named by foreign-born railroad workers for a town in Russia!—zinged us with the vigor of Marxists come to redistribute the wealth. Their savagery was intimidating: we sissybritches Headquarters-City-of-the-Vast-Permian-Basin-Empire boys lost to Sintown by 20 to 7 and 48 to 0 in my time; only by joining the Army before my senior season did I avoid the record 55-0 plastering of 1946. High school football was, I think, a legitimate cultural and psychological measuring stick of that time and that place: many of us concluded that Odessa was, indeed, the rawer and the tougher community.
Neither of these now are particularly “warm” towns—though Odessa, in day-to-day living, may come closer to giving that impression. As in an earlier time, Odessa is looser, more informal, more rollicking, more old-shoe and howdy-do. But you must remember that we are dealing in relative terms: we are talking, essentially, about two nervous and up-tight communities that continue to respond to their shaping heritages. Midland hung a horse thief from a courthouse tree at the turn of the century; juries in each town have voted people eligible for the electric chair. Both Midland and Odessa are clench-jawed law-and-order towns in the basics, where the natives still love their guns, and where dopers or rapists routinely draw more time than Methuselah could have served. Visiting longhairs continue to receive funny looks in polite society and need only enter the rowdier beer joints to assure their butt-stompings. The angry Old Testament God is not dead in the Permian Basin; indeed, He remains healthy and able to extract His vengeances.
Going back, for me, is like coming out on the other side of a Time Machine: it could be 1960 again, or maybe the mid-1950s. Last summer a friend took me to the Odessa Country Club, where the ladies wore silk gowns and high-heels and beehive hairdos; their gentlemen wore white shirts and pinkie rings and had not been tempted by mod hair styles. A middle-aged lady wearing a corsage pumped the organ while her slick-haired, mustachioed partner squeezed an accordion. The crowd sang along: of blue moons and of bicycles built for two and of goodnights to Irene. For a little while one might believe that Eisenhower lived, that Gable was back and Garson had him, that TCU might beat Texas.
Politically, this is bedrock conservative territory with the nut wing among Rightists well-represented. Midland is striped-pants Republican, going for Tom Dewey in 1948, and it elected local Republicans long before Odessa, with its “yellow dog Democrat” instincts. Midland so loved Richard Nixon that one almost felt relief when encountering a Scoop Jackson—or even a George Wallace—Democrat. Odessa once selected General Edwin Walker over John Connally for governor, and always treated Ralph Yarborough as if he carried a social disease. When the John Birch Society discovered that Ike and John Foster Dulles might be leaders of the Internal Communist Conspiracy, it found hundreds of ready West Texas converts: the president of the Odessa Jaycees, indeed, became a paid Birch recruiter; “Impeach Earl Warren” bumper stickers for years out-numbered Jesus messages. When I visited an Odessa bookstore in the late 1960s, while on a promotion tour, the Birchers posted a lady who wrote down all the dangerous things I said. Periodically, in both Midland and Odessa, vigilantes attempt to pluck Hemingway, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, and other dangerous or trashy writers from the library shelves.
“But it’s better now,” a late-thirtyish Odessa merchant insisted. We were drinking a pair of Golden Scotch Mists, in the Golden Rooster Club, high atop The Inn of the Golden West—and looking down on miles and miles of Flat Brown. He said, “You don’t have all that hate and suspicion of the McCarthy years or when the Birchers ran wild. You know, for a while out here it looked like the kook element might take over the school boards and city hall. But they raised so much silly hell and made so many improbable charges that it scared folks. And it was the responsible businessmen who banded together to stop ‘em. We told folks, ‘Hell, you can’t have disruptive forces in charge of things.’” Still, the West Texas version of moderation leaves something to be desired. Students of the new (1973) University of Texas of the Permian Basin at Odessa are still complaining of authorities censoring their school paper and firing its editor in 1974. One hears of battles breaking out in the public schools over the vital matter of proper Dress Codes, and occasional patriots picket visiting speakers harboring loose ideas. Maybe the fundamentalists have had to fire and fall back, but they’re still in there sniping.
Such natural conservative reflexes as were handed down by the region’s original settlers (independent, isolationist critters willing to risk a raw country in exchange for individual opportunities) have been reinforced, and continue to be reinforced, by the one-note drummings of what Harry Truman called “the one-party press.” Of course, the safely monopolistic newspapers in each city fail to run the risks of the early-day pioneers—hell, they don’t even run the risks of that competitive Free Enterprise system they so doggedly recommend to the rest of us—as they preach against meddling Feds, Godless Reds, labor unions, and government spending or sapping taxations at all levels.
The chain-owned Odessa American (a product of Freedom Newspapers, with headquarters in Orange County, California) is the more blunt and strident; the home-owned Midland Reporter-Telegram tends to pussyfoot or hem and haw. In essence, however, they serve the same masters. KOSA-TV, Odessa—the CBS outlet—has a long history of Tory owners and managers who have protectively offered sitcom reruns or old movies whenever they found network documentaries excessively Leftist; KMID-TV, Midland, the NBC affiliate, is less sensitive to such menaces. You could fry in the sun, however, if you waited on a corner until any of the media outlets decided to probe or explore poverty, racism, institutional injustices, or otherwise critically examine their bailiwicks. In this, however, they probably are guilty of little more neglect than the Texas norm: city reporters may rake a little muck in Houston or Dallas, but in Amarillo and Abilene—or in Lufkin or Lubbock—you will not find much dirt disturbed unless the wind does it.
When Midland was a windmill town, in the late 1880s, its town boosters and Texas and Pacific railroad officials made a decision that may still haunt it: they refused to seek government emergency aid, while others did, during a disastrous two-year drought that starved cattle herds and dried up water holes. “But Midland’s citizens had sunk everything they had in the future,” John Howard Griffin wrote in his Land of the High Sky, “ and [they] did not want the rest of the world to know the true situation. While the land lay parched, the people underplayed the disaster.” This inherited inclination not to face reality and to soft-pedal shortcomings or failures, accounts in some measure for Midland’s having been out-stripped by Odessa in recent years. Midland’s civic leaders and community dads, in effect, proved short-sighted. They put all their economic eggs in one basket, depending on a white-collar and professional work force, and they built skyscrapers and housing developments as if the merry boom never would end. By the mid-1960s, however, as oil production lost its potential for dizzy quick profits due to restricted allowables and world market conditions, many independent operators went under; the major oil companies retrenched by first trimming their white-collar fat. Midland lost in each case; the companies which did not close their local operations pared them to the bone, transferring their main forces to Tulsa or Houston or elsewhere. Suddenly, Midland had 1700 surplus dwellings on its hands and many semi-empty skyscrapers. The population, which had grown to 67,000 in 1960, slipped back to 58,000 despite a high local birth rate. People lost their jobs at the Chamber of Commerce, civic leaders dreamed of “renovating” downtown, billboards were posted on the outskirts calling attention to Midland’s “good business climate.” Nothing much happened.
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